Celebrate

Today our same neighbors who did the Easter Egg

Hunt for the neighborhood planned a

Schools Out Carnival...

complete with face painting, games,

cotton candy, shave ice, water slide, bounce house, prizes and more.
Ame and some of the young ladies got to help with the games
AND do most of the face painting. They were LOVING
being IN CHARGE!

Nalu was content most of the time IN the

stroller, as long I kept the cups holders stocked with popcorn

(oh yeah, something else this fun carnival provided).

We just seem REALLY lucky and GRATEFUL

to live in such an AWESOME neighborhood!

The only negative about this carnival

was the weather didn't cooperate to well.

It was WINDY and cloudy.

Thank goodness only a few sprinkles

and the temps were still pretty warm,

so it wasn't too bad.

We all still had a BLAST!!

Dirty Dash 2011

Saturday 8 of my friends and I did the Dirty Dash.

It was a 5K obstacle course through the mud, up in Midway.

Ame decided she wanted to come watch her mom

get REALLY muddy, cheer me on and be the photographer.

A couple of the girls families came, so Ame got

to help babysit as well.

The weather was perfect! Slightly overcast,

but sunny at times and in the mid 70's.

Here we all are: (left to right)
Nancy, Shannon, Jessica, Amy H,

Me, Lindsey, Amy S, Katie, and Amber.

The arches behind us is the the starting line.

Here's how the course was from the get go...muddy to our ankles.
I thought if THIS is how the whole thing is I don't know if
I am going to enjoy this much. PLus I felt like my shoes were
going to come off if I ran too fast?!

None of us knew quite what to expect, since we hadn't done it before.

It was a lot of UP hill, with obstacle along the way, such

as stacked haybails or walls to climb over, each with big amounts of

mud before and after, tires to run through, and a few others

I can't quite remember. SPrinklers of course to spray us

and to keep the course wet. The WHOLE trail wasn't muddy, but LOTS

of it was. My feet felt soo gross, and by the end they were just filled with

rocks and felt like 50 lbs.

We laughed A LOT! Mostly at some particular runners and their

outfits, especially the girl doing it solo in her thong swimsuit.

Yes there were all kinds of costumes!
We were spread out throughout the race, going at different paces.

I mostly ran with 2 other girls, but we waited for the rest of our group

to slide down the blow up slide at the end and then go through this...

to the finish line.

You could pretty much get as dirty as you wanted.

We were dirty, but not real bad and decided at the

end we needed to be MUCH more MUddy, so

we made some slides and dives

and turned out like this...

Afterwards we had 2 choices for trying to clean off-

(both outside community showers)

FREEZING cold fire hydrant water

OR pay $3 for a warm, trickle of a shower.

Some of us chose to pay for warmth, which

consisted of getting a warm/cold powerwash first,

then stand in another LONG line, and shiver

for what felt like FOREVER to then TRY to get

the majority of the mud off, while crowds of

people gawked and wondered why we were

all shivering like crazy, because

NOT wet it was really quite pleasant outside.

The we got to change our clothes in a big tent with

tons of other naked ladies. Ame was my towel holder,

as I tried to be somewhat modest.

Even knowing the end result of fingers turning

purple and having mud caked everywhere,

we are already making plans for next year!!

We know our group is going to get much

bigger next time, as many others

who were reluctant about the idea, now

see and hear stories about what a blast

we had and want to join us next time.

Gettin' dirty sure is fun!!