Happy Birthday to ME!

Today embarks on the last year of my 20s! Nothing extremely special happening, but I'm fine with that. We'll have cake & ice cream. We're going to go shopping for a new swimsuit for me- we have a lot of summer plans that require one and I don't have one that fits anymore! And the rest of the day Ian's at work and I'm at home with the kids like a typical day. Mother's Day wasn't anything extraordinary either, but it was perfect for me. Ian took care of the kids so I could get some baking done, some cleaning, and some running. It was all I wanted!

Yesterday I had another long run to complete and it was really hard because I've missed some long runs lately- yesterday's was 16 miles! Ian was great taking care of the kids so I could focus on running for a little over 3 hours. It felt so good to get it done. The marathon training is going well. I don't know if I'll ever do another marathon though- I don't like the strict routine with so many miles to get done on such-and-such a day. And while I realize that I CAN do long distances, I prefer the shorter ones. I think I'd like to try increasing my speed for 5ks and see how well I do at that. But I am still looking forward to this marathon- it will be a lot of fun and something to remember!

Ian and I also set May aside to experiment with our diets. We were going to do the whole month completely vegan, but it was a lot harder than I thought. Since Ian works all day he needs breakfast and lunch options that are quick & easy and don't require any cooking or assembling. Unfortunately, ALL food that is processed and packaged like that include eggs or milk in some form. So because options were just too low, we decided to do vegan for half the month and just vegetarian for the other half. We took our blood pressure & weighed ourselves before the month started and at the end of our vegan point- we'll also do it after the vegetarian and after we go back to our "regular" diets. It's actually pretty amazing what we accomplished just in 2 weeks. Ian lowered his systolic blood pressure by 6 points and his diastolic by 1. His resting heart rate went down by 20!!! And he even lost 2.5 pounds! My systolic went down by 10 points, my diastolic actually went up by 1 and I lost 3.5 pounds! I don't know my resting heart rate yet because when we measured it at the Walmart blood pressure machine it said it was 90- but I had just finished running 16 miles 30 minutes before and so it was still high. But I'm sure my resting heart rate went down too. I knew that eating animal products have a major toll on your heart/blood, but it was amazing to see the effects of just 2 weeks of not consuming any animal products. Vegan is still just too hard for me, but I will continue to be a vegetarian. I keep trying small bites of eggs, chicken, etc. and they just don't taste good anymore- they've lost their appeal. And I feel so much healthier without them that I really can't justify eating them!

Anyway, I have a bunch of pictures to post, but I haven't put them on my computer yet. Sometime later today or tomorrow I'll do it and post them all on here- I have a lot of cute ones! :)