Unbelievable! This is what i read in the New York Times this morning:
BERLIN — Now added to the list of banned performance-enhancing substances for female distance runners: men. The world governing body for track and field [IAAF] decided in late August that records in women’s road racing will count only if they are set in women’s-only events
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The Beech Street Bulldogs fight to the finish. Bee and Frankie easily handed Cho her first loss this weekend in a tough fought victory. Poor Cho. Too many squirrels around to stay focused on the game.
It is Sept 1 and that means alot of things!
*School starts! We will have a big 3rd and 1st grader this year!
*MSU students are back – so watch out for those crazy college kids!
*Football season starts (Go Irish!)!
*The Marquette marathon is here (yah!) and we will also get to dip our feet into Lake Superior, the only Great Lake that we haven’t been to as a family!
*And we can post our monthly progress towards our run to Spokane!
August was a fun running month, giving us another 198 miles. This is probably our last high mileage month of the year with the Marquette and Chicago marathons around the corner. We are also at 1599 miles on the year!! 412 to go! We are just 4 miles shy of Bozeman Montana! August just saw lots of miles around east lansing/lansing. The flooding took out the river trail for a while, but beautiful running on the northern tier trail and through the hay fields made up for that! Being morning runners we certainly notice the differences in morning sunrise and temps. We started the month with the sun creeping over the horizon at 6am (sunrise at 6:30), and now it does not creep over till much closer to 7 (with sunrise officially at 7:03). That means some change up in running routes. However the trade off is OK as morning temps are around 52, which is perfect running weather. Got to love September!
Our route took us from Hysham to Bozeman. We passed through Billings, MT along the way. We had to laugh when we saw that the marathon this weekend should give us the mileage to get to through Bozeman and onto Manhattan, MT of all places. Not the Manhattan we are used to, but not a bad place to hang out for a week as we find our legs again. Had to laugh at the town’s home page, as they feature “their skyline“. We’ve actually never been in Montana in real life and would like to trek through one day – maybe next summer.
Lets go fly a kite
Up to the highest height
Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere
Up where the air is clear
Oh, let’s go fly a kite!
The girls love to sing this song. haha. Here we are at the park this weekend. It was not too windy, so you had to keep running to keep the kites up, but we sure had fun! The one of Frankie is in the backyard. She got up early yesterday and immediately ran outside in her nightgown to the backyard to fly her kite again! Sorry its blurry – she was moving too fast!
We were at the children’s garden on Saturday and the Eyeball Plants (Acmella oleracea) were in fantastic bloom! They are also known as the “toothache” plant because if you eat the flower, it is a natural analgesic. It also causes the production of excess saliva. Scott thought that they looked delicious, so he ate one. He had a fun time spitting all of that saliva! The flower is supposed to also have some antifungal and antibacterial qualities. Scott said it kind of tingled.
We had such a fun time yesterday having sack races at hannah center field. Im not sure what inspired it, but we grabbed a bunch of pillow cases and headed over on a cool michigan summer evening. No one was at the field, so we had it all to ourselves. We laughed so hard trying to get up after falling. Im only posting pictures of Bee and Frankie!!
Frankie lost her first baby tooth! The excitement kept building all week as it got wigglier and wigglier. We tried tying a string to it to attach it to a door knob. Frankie wanted to go through with it, but Bee stopped her as she thought it would hurt too much. Frankie must have eaten 10 apples to get that thing to come out. Funny thing is that it fell out this morning while eating cream of wheat.
Here are a few pictures from this morning and also from earlier in the week when frankie was eating apples trying to get the tooth to come out, and, of course, Bee offering advice on just how to wiggle the tooth!
>We went to the outdoor aquatic center in east lansing. they have a diving pool in the deep end and Bee and Frankie had a ton of fun doing silly jumps off of it!
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We went to the Lugnuts baseball game last night. They are the minor league team here in lansing. Bee brought her mitt to try to catch a foul ball. Doesn’t she look cute?
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For sale by owner. East Lansing Schools, that is. Seriously. OK maybe its just a few buildings and not the whole district. But when a district like East Lansing can’t make ends meet, you know there is something serious going on with education funding. The cuts to funding might be more stomach-able if they were fair. But, with the debt-ceiling deal struck over the weekend that cuts spending without raising revenues, one has to question how fair it really is.
I read in the New York Times on Thursday that “If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” This was a quote in an article about sales of luxury goods that further stated: “Even with the economy in a funk and many Americans pulling back on spending, the rich are again buying designer clothing, luxury cars and about anything that catches their fancy. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price…”
Seriously, who notices? How many pairs of designer shoes does it take to support a child in public school? If the expenditure per pupil in East Lansing schools is $5,749, then 6.7 pairs of shoes.