We had a lovely thanksgiving week which started with celebrating my mom’s 81st birthday on Monday night. My uncle Robert (my father’s youngest brother) and his family flew in from Houston for the week that day. I credit my uncle for reaching out to me earlier this year, we are usually not in touch with each other, but he indicated that he wanted to hang out with us some more (why don’t we have Thanksgiving together?) – hence the invitation to Thanksgiving, which I would have happily extended years prior if I had known they wanted to come! Sometimes I think people don’t want to hang out with me, so I’m bad at inviting people to do things with me unless they hit me over the head with – yes, I want to hang out with you. I suppose usually, for this birthday occasion, we would have gone to a nice DC restaurant as is my parents’ natural instinct, but as we are still figuring out our restaurant behavior post-covid, therefore, my parents wanted the party at the house. Besides us, there was Mike and Sofie and Ginny (our new-ish weekday caregiver) and her partner Felix. Lauren, my friend and chef/baker extraordinaire, catered the event.
I forgot to take photos of Lauren’s delicious and beautiful plated courses which was entirely my own fault, but I did manage to take a photo of the cake which was so beautiful and decadent (raspberry/lemon).
Here’s Lauren and my mom during the birthday singing.
I had bought flowers for my mother, but I forgot to give them to her before the party ended! It was lovely celebration and it kicked off a nice week of family time. My mother is amazing!
On Saturday night (previous to the birthday party) we had dinner with Julie, our strength coach – she worked with Jeremy last winter and now I’m going to latch on. I’m going to work with her through the winter on lifting, hoping to really get some upper body strength – something which I basically neglected during the hours and hours of running that I’ve been doing and can’t be ignored as I age. She is very excited and hopefully I’ll learn about strength programming. I essentially took a month off of any exercise after the marathon and I’m ready to start again. I fall into Julie’s area of expertise, which is middle aged women who want to get stronger. They’ll be a slight nutrition component as well. Jeremy is well into protein supplementation and various other things which I am open to, but I can’t hear it from him (as it all tastes bad), I need to hear it from someone outside the marriage. I gained a few pounds while training for the marathon which I’m not worried about, but I’d rather it be muscle and not fat. I also talked to Paul today to figure out what the next running goal is going to be – so interesting things to think about.
During the dinner with Julie, we talked about how Haverford made it to the D3 national cross country meet (which they have done for the past two decades or so) and I asked how MIT did and Jeremy scoffed – I don’t think MIT made it to nationals and then we checked and lo and behold, MIT is #1 and where is Haverford? oh yea, 13th.
