Chuck Norris Has Got Nothin' On Me

It occurred to me over the weekend that at this time last year I was handing in my final Master's Degree project and putting the finishing touches on my half marathon training. My half birthday was last week, which means I turned thirty more than six months ago. And I started to feel a little down on myself. I mean, I basically went all Chuck Norris on the last year of my twenties, what with finishing my degree and running two half marathons (and obviously a ton of other cool stuff that I can't seem to remember right now). Since then, though, it's been kind of a random assortment of crafting and baking (thank you, Pinterest) and just sort of living life - all in a really great, non-martial-artsy kind of way.

But just as I began to think that thirty had gotten the best of me, I remembered that I'm doing something that even that silly Chuck Norris couldn't, that my thirtieth year (Or is it my thirty-first? That math is confusing...) is going to blow most others out of the water because of one small (well, about the size of an apple right now) reason.

The Arends clan will become a family of four in early October - and this little girl will  be a big sister!

So while it's true I haven't been logging the miles on the treadmill (thank you very much, morning all-day sickness) or writing any thesis papers, I suppose I can cut myself a little slack. There is a tiny person growing inside me, after all.

Even Chuck Norris has to take a break sometimes, right?

Yo, Adrian! I Did It!

I am happy to report that despite pouring down rain, forgetting my time chip in the hotel room, and a couple of huge hills that would not quit, I can now check "half marathon" off my list. And someone out there must have been sending me happy thoughts, because right as I was reaching my limit, about mile ten, guess what song a group of high school football players decided to blare through their speakers? That's right - the Rocky theme song.

Looking chipper, before the face off with the mountain hill.

Rocky is my idol!

I'm in there somewhere, trying not to puke.

I accomplished my goal of finishing, and of running the whole time, and I am proud to report that I beat the winner of the full marathon by two whole minutes. They didn't call me Lightning Leslie in high school for nothing, you know. (Full disclosure - one of my other, probably much more realistic, nicknames was Slower than Shit Schrock. Pfffft.)

Something else awesome that happened this week? I handed in my final Master's Degree project. I do believe that it's time for a nap little celebrating, but I'll settle right now for some warmer weather and more time for trips to the park and snuggles with Anna. You would think that with all my free time I would be able to get around to all the things I neglected when I was furiously working on my project. Like that weird smell coming from the kitchen sink, or the mounds of empty wine bottles and old newspapers that need to be taken to the recycling center. But instead, I've taken this week to start a couple of new knitting projects and catch up on 30 Rock. 

I do have a plan to get all that stuff done, but more on that later. For now, I'm going to be knitting, purling, laughing, and snuggling. And I just might be wearing these while I'm at it...

Back to Life, Back to Reality

It seems as though I've been neglecting this poor little blog, and for all five of you who actually read it, I apologize.  Anna and I had a busy week basking in the Florida sun, and it's taken me longer than I thought it would to get back into the swing of things at home.  Throw in a Master's project and a lost hour from Daylight Savings Time, and blog writing just went right out the window.

Here's a little bit of catch up...

Anna survived her first plane ride.  I admit that I was totally nervous, but she did much better than I expected.  My days of enjoying plane rides while scouring the pages of trashy gossip magazines and Sky Mall catalogs and chomping on airline peanuts might be over, but my child did not scream the entire flight nor did I need to brave the airplane bathroom to change a diaper.  I consider that a big, fat win.

Who, me?  Cause trouble?  Never!  Now, pass me that Sky Mall catalog...

Our week in Florida with Kristin and Drew was awesome.  We ate yummy food, road tripped it down to the Florida Keys, and took Anna to the beach for the first time.  I also managed to squeeze in an eleven mile run and a brunch with some old high school friends I hadn't seen in seven or eight years.  The only thing missing was Mike, who was stuck at home working.  We missed him like crazy, and I think I began to realize just how important to my sanity having him by my side is.  Yes, I was with my parents and sister and brother-in-law, and they were all more than willing to chase Anna around and keep her from chewing on electric cords occupied, but there's no substitute for our number one guy.

Anna and her favorite Auntie

You want me to put my feet in the water?
Oh, hell, to the no!

There were a couple of times during the week that I couldn't help but feel like I was in high school again.  My parents, sister, and I spent so much time down in Florida, being back there brought on a whole flood of memories.  With Mike at home in Michigan, and Drew busy training, we had a few afternoons with the original Schrock clan, plus one cute little addition.  We went on bike rides, and visited a few of our favorite places, we even got Slurpees one afternoon.  It was kind of neat to be a foursome again, and it got me thinking about all the memories Mike and I will be able to make with our own family.

Back home, my pathetic attempt at a tan is already fading, the coconut-y smell of sunscreen has been washed out of all our clothes, and I think I finally got the last of the sand out of the diaper bag.  Reality has been calling, and after a couple of weeks of sending him straight to voicemail, it's time to pick up the phone.  And that's ok.  Because, as it turns out, reality is actually a pretty cool dude.

LeVar Burton is One Cool Dude

I'm all in research paper mode over here, and I really should be working, not blogging.  (Special shout out to my in-laws for taking Anna for the night!)  But I came across a few statistics yesterday that are blowing my mind.

Did you know that the amount of time 15-24-year-olds spend per day voluntarily reading (not including school work) was found to be between seven and ten minutes?  And did you know that the same age group spends two to two and a half hours per day watching television?  People, that is crazy!!  This study (done by the National Endowment for the Arts) also found that people who do read have all kinds of awesome advantages in life - they have better paying jobs, they are more culturally aware, and they are even more likely to perform volunteer or charity work.

One of the biggest things I struggled with as an English teacher was the fact that so many of my students claimed to hate reading.  They would literally be throwing hissy fits and whining every day when I announced it was silent reading time.  To me, this was the absolute best part of the day.  I get to read?  For twenty minutes?  And no one's gonna bother me?  Sweet!  Dragging them to the library was a hot mess, too - usually involving the kids scraping the bottom of their book bags or lockers to find the books they had checked out the week before (and had probably been there the entire time, untouched) and a whole bunch of moaning and groaning.  I just did not get it.

If loving you is wrong, LeVar, I don't wanna be right.

They say the best way to encourage your kids to read is to model the behavior yourself, and Anna is going to have an advantage there.  Her grandparents are all readers, and I don't think I would have survived the first year of her life without my Kindle.  (Seriously, if you are a nursing mama - Best. Invention. Ever. Thanks, Mike!).  Even Mike has been a bit of a book worm lately, which makes me happy in ways you will never know.  He's ordering books left and right from Amazon.com and even staying up late at night to finish chapters.  By his own admission, he read a total of ZERO books before we met.  This is a direct quote from lunch today: "I remember this one time, when I was twelve, and I was reading a book.  I think it was about a dog named Scout.  But I didn't finish it."  I would like to think that my nerdy, book-loving self played some part in his new-found hobby, but it could just be the fact that his ADD has calmed down a bit and he can sit still long enough to actually read - and he found something that interested him.

Either way, I can't wait until Anna sees books as more than chew toys, when we can explore the worlds of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl together, and discover all the awesomeness that is the library.  And if she doesn't enjoy reading as much as I do, that's okay, too.  I'll just run away with LeVar Burton and live happily ever after with my Kindle.

Everywhere I Was Going I Was Running

I'm feeling a little bit like Forrest Gump lately.  Running.  A lot.  Literally, and figuratively.

I've talked about turning thirty and trying accomplish some stuff and checking things off my bucket list, and one of the biggest is finishing my Master's Degree.  I was supposed to have completed it back in December, but what with having a baby and living in South Carolina and all, it was sort of tricky to accomplish.  I worked with my adviser down at Wayne State and successfully received an extension and what I thought was a good idea of what my final project would entail.  I even convinced them to let me do it as an independent study so I wouldn't have to trek to downtown Detroit once a week.  I met with my professor in October and we discussed my ideas and she sent me on my way with a few samples of other students' projects.

Now, I won't bore you with all the exact details, but basically I am creating lesson plans for a tenth-grade class for an entire year based on five different novels.  The sample projects I was given were both around 275 pages, but I've taken classes with this professor before and kind of know what she's looking for, so I wasn't too freaked out.  Besides, according to my adviser and my new extension, I had until May of 2012 to get it all completed.  Easy peasy.

My professor and I have been corresponding by mail.  She's big on the letter writing and not so big on the emailing, so every couple of weeks I get a letter from her on yellow legal pad paper written in cursive, just like you learned to do in elementary school.  I'm not even sure she has an email address, which is actually kind of ironic, considering I'm doing my project on the impact of the Internet and social networking on the young adult novel.  Anyways, I sent her a rough draft of the first section of my project last week, a research paper that, when completed, will total about twenty pages.  When I say rough, I mean rough.  Eight pages is what I think I sent, and I'm all patting myself on the back, because, after all, I still have over a year to finish.

Three days later, a large manila envelope is waiting for me in my mailbox.  Wow, I think, that was fast. And as I read her eight-page letter, I come to a horrifying realization.  Somewhere in this little pen pal situation we have going on there has been what we call a failure to communicate.  Because she's somewhat concerned about my progress.  Because I'm a little behind the other students working on their projects.  Because I'm supposed to have the whole entire project finished by the end April.  As in, this April.  As in, oh shit.

After a minor meltdown involving half a bag of Dove dark chocolates and quite a few tears, I managed to pull myself together.  I spoke to my professor and she was totally confident that I could catch up and get it all done.  I'm not sure she knows that I haven't even read four of the five novels I'm creating lesson plans for, but that's besides the point.  My mom's going to come up one day this week, and my in laws will be taking Anna another day, and I'm gonna rock those twenty pages out and be finished with the first part before we head to Florida. 

Like a lot of things in life, I think finishing this project is going to be much less horrible that I think it will.  It's been kind of looming in front of me ever since I started the program, and I've been dreading it  And I was having a mini crisis thinking I was going to have to finish it all in two months.  But now that I've had some time to think about it, I'm kind of excited to get it done.  Yeah, the next couple of months I might not be able to spend quite so much time knitting or surfing the internet or laying around eating bon-bons, but at the end of it all I will have a Master's Degree.  This might sound super dorky, but I've found myself kind of enjoying it, because I'm actually thinking about something besides how many servings of vegetables Anna's eaten or how many times she's pooped. 

I know this post is getting long, and I promise I'm going to wrap it up soon.  Along with all the figurative running around I've been doing trying to get this project going, I've also been doing a lot of actual running.  I looked at my training calendar yesterday and realized I'm five weeks into it - about a third of the way.  And I have to admit, that much like my project, even though I was totally dreading all this running and training, I'm finding that I'm liking it.  I look forward to those long runs, because it means that I get out of my house and suck fresh air into my lungs and have some time to just be.  A half marathon doesn't seem nearly as scary as it did a few months ago, and I think it's kind of appropriate that right around the time I will be finishing my Master's Degree I will also be heading to Cincinnati to complete the race - The Flying Pig Half Marathon. 

Take that, bucket list!