Month: May 2013

It was a very musical weekend. Vince had his violin recital this Sunday – Kelly, his music teacher found this beautiful space in the Strathmore Mansion which was very reasonably priced and looked fantastic. Jeremy’s dad, Bob, came down to visit for less than 24 hours to see Vince play. Vince is not an enthusiastic violin student. Every three minutes he asks when he’s allowed to quit violin. It’s tiring for all of us. He was playing so raggedly the last lesson before the recital that Kelly decided that he needed to come to her house every day after school to play. So everyday after school, he walked over to Kelly’s house (which in and of itself was a feat because he has to cross a major street with a traffic light) and played for 30 or 45 minutes. And you could totally tell the extra work paid off at the recital.

We were all so pleased, none more than Vince himself who allowed himself for a moment to feel proud of his accomplishment. Even mentioning that he might be willing to join a local youth orchestra in the fall. We’ll see.

It just happened that some of Bob’s collegues were playing at the Hungarian Embassy on Monday night so I invited Kelly out to dinner to thank her for all her extra help for Vince and to see these amazing musicians play.

This is the regular morning dog walking crew. Maxi, Ruby and Lizzie.

Hey Lizzie, where did you go?

Lizzie’s human, Sharon, moved away this week.  Lizzie is still in the neighborhood, but now our schedules are totally off and I’m afraid there won’t be much walking together anymore.  We need to find some new walking partners.

I’ve been trying since the beginning of the year to get to the middle of the normal range for my BMI, which is (to me) an incredibly small weight of 123 pounds. I have not weighed that little since Edda was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome over 7 years ago now. And that was not the healthiest way to lose weight – I basically stopped eating due to all the stress around me. Around Thanksgiving of last year, I weighed 140 which made my pants just too tight and I coincidentally started taking a nutrition class as a pre-req for nursing school which was amazing and made me want to eat better and feed the family kale and liver. Anyways, with all the running and the eating well, I’m down to about 131 which is great, I never weighed this little and felt happy at the same time. I’ve really never been in better shape in my life than I am now.

I’d still like to lose another 5-7 pounds, but about a month ago, after running 10 miles in the Cherry Blossom, I’ve just started eating so much! And so many sweets. And once I start, it’s hard to stop eating a lot. Also I’m running a lot training for the half marathon, so I’m just constantly hungry. I just have to remind myself to eat more veggies and lean meats and not something like a pear tart I just had 15 minutes ago.

OK! OK, so maybe someday we can take Edda hiking in the Rockies. We’ve come up with a chariot design for her wheelchair and we have to find a good old wheelchair to convert to a mountain hiking machine.

Did I mention that I’m training for a half marathon? Somehow in the past year or so, I’ve become a pretty serious running. Serious meaning that I get up at 5:30 am to go running at 5:45 am in the cold and dark of winter. I can only do this because I have a good pal a few houses down and we get each other up and going. Anyways, we started to do some neighborhood races, 5Ks and then 10Ks and finally a few weeks ago, the Cherry Blossom 10 miler.

We walked not a single step of this crazy race and we did well considering that for the few weeks before the race, I had gotten really sick and basically stopped running for three weeks. So since we did so well at the 10 miler and it’s only another 3 miles to do the half marathon, we are training for it now. We’ll do it in a few weeks.