We're Having a Fall Break!

Hooray!  It's our annual Fall Break from school.  Jimmy is off for the week, and we are all so excited to have a little bit of down time.  We have completed 45 days of school so far this year. My goal is to complete 180, so we are about a quarter of the way through.

Today we began our day by running 10 miles!  I ran my 10 on the treadmill (it's really not as bad it sounds!), and Jimmy took Olivia, Julie, and Clay to meet three friends to run in town.  The children are training for the St. Jude Half Marathon, and Jimmy and I are still running more and more miles each week in preparation for the St. Jude Marathon.  By the way, I will NOT be running another marathon anytime soon.  I hope to meet my goal time of having a 4 in my finish time (as in any time under 4 hours, 59 minutes), and then I am going to take a little break from long runs.  I think I want to try the Insanity workouts again, but this time do the workouts just like they are prescribed.  60 days of Insanity only, without supplementing the workouts with runs.

After running, we went to our mall's food court for lunch.  Yum!  Then Jimmy took Leah, Sam, and Clay to run some errands and then go home while Olivia, Julie, and I went shopping for the girls a new Sunday dress.  After HOURS of shopping at several stores, I have concluded that modest, stylish dresses for young girls are not in style nor available!  We finally found each of them one dress, but it took hours!  I also did a little bit of Christmas shopping for Leah, and we went to Hobby Lobby for the girls to buy supplies for their gift-making.

Jimmy and the children he had with him visited an elderly man from our church family today while we were shopping.  He had just put his wife in the nursing home today, so I hope that their visit cheered him up.  Mr. Neaves mentioned that he wanted some bacon, so Jimmy went to town and picked him up some....and also bought bacon and the other items needed for us to have BLTs for supper!  When we got home from our shopping, Julie and I prepared the sandwiches, and they were delicious!  Unhealthy food can taste so good sometimes!

The rest of our week includes two last cross country practices, each one with a fun theme or activity.  Tomorrow's practice is Shaving Cream Fun (in which I will NOT participate), and Thursday's practice is Crazy Hair and Sock Day (in which I MAY participate).  Our official cross country season for Fall 2011 concludes Saturday with our end of the year pizza party.  I hope to have pictures from all three occasions, and I plan to blog a little bit about each event.

Also this week I plan to go through each child's clothes and weed out what no longer fits, what is out of season, and go through the hand-me-downs and fall/winter clothes in storage. I also need to clean out my closet!

For this week's marathon training, I have to run a total of 45 miles.  This week's long run is 20 miles, which I will be running with Jimmy, Lynn, Kelly, Esther, and Heather.  I could never run this distance alone!

Thursday night we are having some dear friends of ours over for dinner, and Friday I plan to take dinner to Season (one of Jimmy's first cousins that lives here in town) in honor of the birth of her first baby.  He is one week old today!

Hopefully tomorrow I will blog all about our recent experience at the National Homeschool Cross Country Championship.  We drove over 800 miles this past weekend to Springfield, Missouri, and back for this event.  We took many, many pictures, and it was a memorable trip.

I think that's about all I have planned for the week.....in addition to some housecleaning, laundry and catching up on the ironing.

I am glad to have a Fall Break!