Facing Up to It

  

 

 

 

 

Aren't we radishing, er, ravishing?

Hometown 4th of July Parade

In the seven summers we lived in White Salmon, the 4th of July festivities were always pretty lackluster. Our little town has a Spring Fest in May and I always wondered if following that up with something else 5 weeks later was just too much for the community to handle. For whatever reasons, the pancake breakfasts, parades, outdoor concerts, and fireworks had to be found in other nearby towns.

2012: Enter the Air Force Band and some highly-motivated citizens, and you get a great little parade and a fantastic afternoon in the park.

I'm not sure how it all started, but when word got around that the Air Force Band would be in the Gorge, somebody got them booked for a march through White Salmon and a concert in the park. Then probably those same somebodies started spreading the word that veterans and kids could be in the parade behind the band.  We jumped right on that and had lots of fun getting our "floats" decorated and ourselves costumed.

Adah went the patriotic route and joined about ten other kids--some of them friends from school--in one of the bike groups.

Maggie decided to go as Cupcake the Clown.  She's pretty adorable, eh?

She worked the crowd with her candy and a flower that sprayed water.  My kids were pretty excited about throwing candy, since that's their favorite part of attending parades. (I need to get them to a real parade with big floats and marching bands.)

Gunnar, Holly, and I were the pirates. I think we may have had the only true float (I can call it that, right?) in the parade. Most everyone else was on foot, bike, or classic car.

Don't you love it? Damon was in charge of the sail. I made the ship's body and the anchor.

Here are a bunch of our friends that were all watching the parade together: 

The final stretch of the parade route was uphill and Adah decided to walk it. I don't blame her. . .

I had to call in my support staff to pull the wagon up that final hill.

When the parade was over, I ran home and gathered our picnic foods and then rejoined the rest of the family at the park where we enjoyed the Air Force Band playing great music, including some of our favorite John Philip Sousa marches, of course.

Later on we joined the friends (from the photo above) for a barbecue and some fireworks. Add that all on top of the pancake breakfast at the church that had started our day, and we had a fabulously fun and full Fourth of July!

White Salmon Backyard Half

On June 16, Damon ran the White Salmon Backyard Half, a 13.1-mile race through the hills above White Salmon. It's sponsored by the Columbia Gorge Running Club and other sponsors, and the last few years became a fundraiser for the self-funded high school cross country team.

After Damon's 50k Badger Mountain Challenge run at the end of March, a half-marathon seemed like it would be a cinch. 

Damon was reluctant to be photographed before the start of the race.  All pre-race concentration, this guy. ha!

Our neighbor, Jim, was a bit more of a poser for the camera.  After frequently encountering each other during their morning jogs and talking lots of smack over the fence, the two of them bet a Gatorade on the race. Loser had to buy winner a Gatorade. (Who won? you ask. Keep reading. . . .)

Here's about half of the field getting lined up to go. Damon gave me an encouraging thumbs up while Jim was pointing at himself (indicating he would be the winner, I believe).

Setting off to run up into those hills:  Damon is the runner furthest to the left. You can see Jim's orange shirt in the center.

Two hours and 46 minutes later, he came in running! And well before Jim, I must say. 

Exhausted. Hail the winner of the Gatorade! The day turned out to be the hottest one of the year, up to that point. The heat and the steep course took its toll; Damon expected a faster time and declared that it was more than half as hard as the 50k he ran.

Meanwhile...we were also having a yard sale at our house that day!

I'd been saving up stuff since about January when we'd really gone through toys and books and things in the post-Christmas glut.  I knew we had a bunch of stuff, but not quite enough to have a full-on garage sale of our own.  When the young women at church announced they needed a place to host the sale they were hoping to have as a fundraiser for their girls camp, I volunteered our centrally-located, in-town driveway, as long as I could sell some of my own stuff.  It worked perfectly, since I was able to leave the house with the leaders and young women in charge of the sale while I went off to the park to cheer on Damon. And, we made over $200 that day! (The young women did even better!)

Badger Mountain Challenge, or 50K Krazy

I'm long-overdue in posting this major event from March. I didn't have any photos and since I usually look at my photos to help me reconstruct memories and then write posts, it wasn't until I got photos courtesy of my mother-in-law that I was finally able to toot Damon's horn for him.

Sometime last fall or winter, Damon's brother Justin (seen below on the left) convinced Damon to join him for a 50k race in the Tri-Cities area (3 hours east of White Salmon), the Badger Mountain Challenge.  50k people! I did not accidentally add a zero in there. That's about 31 miles. Damon has NEVER run a marathon in his life. I wondered how he would train through the winter for this end-of-March run, but he proved me wrong by setting out in the dark on snowy roads and getting in late-night or early-morning runs.

Damon's parents came up from California and Justin flew in from Colorado for the weekend of the big run. We all drove to Richland where the 6 of us stayed with some friends while the other McMillans checked into a hotel. Then, up early on Saturday morning, we dropped off the runners and wished them well as they set off into the drizzly gray dawn. (The kids were actually all still asleep back at our friends' house.)

 

Mid-day and mid-race, we camped out at an aid station until both Justin and Damon (separated by a bit of time) came chugging through.  They were past the halfway point by then, but I was still praying Damon would make it through the rest of the course. He had been plagued by a knee injury from some snowy playground play back in January, and I didn't want him to cause any permanent damage by pushing himself too far. The trail went up and down mountains and was much rougher than he anticipated--lots of rocks on the trail.

 

 

We missed Justin's arrival at the finish line while we were eating a late lunch. He was just too darn fast.  We made it in time for Damon's finish, and I about started crying when I saw him come over the top of the hill and begin to make his way down the final descent and into the park where we were waiting. I was so proud of his major accomplishment--and that he was still running!

 

Hurrah!! Finishers!!

 

End Note: One advantage of blogging about this so late is that I can share a little story from last weekend. We've moved recently and so are meeting new people. I happened to tell someone about Damon's 50k in the course of a conversation about a very interesting book I'm reading about long-distance running (Born to Run). The next time I had a conversation with this person we were at a swimming pool and I mentioned the 1.1 mile Cross-Channel Swim across the Columbia River that I did last year.  This person now thinks that Damon and I are some kind of extreme sport enthusiast super-achievers.  ha ha! So much for first impressions. If I only he knew us better. I think we may be due to disappoint.

Return of the Blogger

Hello to all my loyal readers.  Are there any of you?  Well, if you've been waiting for some blogging from me, hopefully you know the reason behind my absence from "the Hood" these last months: we moved.

We moved to California for Damon to start a new job.  I spent most of the summer anticipating a possible move (and not talking about it), traveling with Damon for an interview or holding down the fort while he traveled for an interview, looking at schools and real estate online, praying about what to do, deciding what to do, finally talking about it with everyone, cleaning and fixing the house to put it on the market, and then packing packing packing--that last part while Damon was off starting his new job. The last month has been spent unpacking, organizing, finding my way around to schools, stores, parks, church, and all the other places I've needed to go. I hope you can see that time and energy for blogging have been sparse.

In the middle of all of this, we did squeeze in some final fun in and around our home and even a trip to Canada to visit my parents. We've also made our first trip to the beach here in CA. So, stay tuned and eventually I'll get caught up and share photos of all our fun, the kiddos, and our new place.  I've already got many photos queued up and ready for posting, so hopefully it won't be long.

p.s. Can I still call it "Views of the Hood"? Mt. Hood isn't right outside anymore.

Sisters

I have three brothers and no sisters. I'm glad my girls have each other. It's fun to watch.

Holly and Adah cuddling in the morning

Maggie and Holly telling secrets with their "telephone"

Now, here's a great set of photos: The three girls were "cleaning" the bowl when I made some frosting. I thought it was so cute to see the three of them standing together licking away.

Then, I just couldn't resist these individual shots. You can see that Holly has a bit of frosting around her mouth, and even on her shirt--understandable for a two-year-old.

Adah is nine, and she managed to keep her face completely clean! Truly, no napkins were harmed in the making of this photograph.

And then, there's Maggie. She had a stripe of chocolate down her chin.  Food on her face--and her clothes and her fingers--after eating is pretty typical, even if it's not a messy spatula. Really, at any given meal, our seven-year-old will be messier than the four-year-old and just as messy as the two-year-old. We don't know how she does it. It can be exasperating, but we'll keep her anyway.

I love these girls!

Paper Airplane Precision (?)

Damon had a great idea for a Family Home Evening activity.

Everyone in the family made a paper airplane (some of us helped littler people make theirs).

Damon put a line of tape down on the carpet then set up a play tunnel as a target.

Then, in turn, we each had 60 seconds to see how many times we could throw our airplane into the tunnel. It was a crazy 60 seconds of trying to take aim, throwing, then quickly running to retrieve your plane, return to the line, and start again.

 

It was really fun!



 

Holly was great entertainment. She knew what she had to do. . . sort of. She kept holding her airplane backwards. But she ran after it and was gasping and breathing quickly in an excited and hurried way, since she knew she was supposed to be hurrying.  Too funny.

 

Check out these action shots:

 

 

Here you can see a better view of the tunnel target:

 

 

Get a load of the concentration on that one (or is it a grimace as I see my airplane veering to the side of the tunnel?) My first one went right in, perfectly, but after that it got much worse.

 

If I remember correctly, Adah was the grand winner of the first round, getting her airplane into the tunnel a whopping 4 or 5 times. (It's harder than it looks, folks.)  Damon did even better on the second round.  Still, for the record, I'd like to say that MY plane flew the most gracefully. Just not accurately. : )

We'll definitely be repeating this fun family night activity.