Coxsackievirus is…

February 5th, 2010

…why McKenna has been so incredibly miserable for the last 4 days, why we have gotten virtually no sleep, why she has been nearly inconsolable, why she wouldn’t eat (except for non-stop nursing), and why she had a fever of well over 103. Evidently it gave her ulcers on her tonsils because she has the hand/foot/mouth disease syndrome of the virus. But tonight she is clearly on the mend, and I have high hopes that we will see her back to her normal, sassy, spunky, silly, and sweet self again very soon! Read all about the nastiness here. It is interesting though, because for as sick as she has been and as difficult as it has made life for us, I realized that if they offered a vaccine for this virus I would not get it, even having gone through it. Just like we aren’t vaxing for all the other common childhood illnesses (chickenpox, rotovirus, MMR, to name just a few) because (for one thing) we see illness and pathology as a normal, albeit sucky, part of life. This experience has really just reaffirmed my convictions, and hopefully strengthened McKenna’s immune system function that much more.

While she was sick one of the only things that we have been able to do to help her stay calm is watch some select videos. We have the Sesame Street Old School 1974-1979 video, which she absolutely loves, and she has really enjoyed Winnie the Pooh (thanks goes to LW for Winnie the Pooh as well as many other videos in our collection). We started to watch Aladdin but quickly realized that she is a little young for that movie. However it enticed tRoy so much that as I write this he is watching the first part that he missed, and that is on his insistence since I wanted to just pick up where we left off. Boys! *insert eye roll here*

I’m just one week away from racing the bike and run legs of Mt Taylor with Coach Ilg. Today I ran stadium repeats and a track workout. The stadium repeats made me feel dizzy and made my legs shake. I don’t remember that happening in the past…I’m getting so soft. Ah well, tis the way things are! I may be soft, but I can be woken up every 30-45 minutes all night long to breastfeed a crying and sick baby and not completely fall apart at the seams. So I guess I’m just tough and soft in different ways than I used to be!

One Year Later…

January 26th, 2010

One year ago I posted a short mention that the High Altitude Training Center was closing. Here we are one year later and things have gone from bad to worse for the running community of Flagstaff, specifically, and the entire community of Flagstaff, in a more general sense. Below is a letter I recently received from Mike Smith, an outstanding runner, running coach, organizer and coach of Altius (a local running club), and all around good guy:

Friends of TEAM ALTIUS,

Greetings from Mike Smith. Most of you I know and have had the pleasure of working with, for those of you who are on our listserve who I have not met, I am one of the coaches of TEAM ALTIUS and have been operating it since we began with the Center for High Altitude Training in December, 2006. We’ve built a running club that I am very proud of and has been a tremendous asset to those that have participated. The name of the game is community, and if anything ALTIUS was a place for people to come together to share in their enjoyment of running. Thank you for your interest in our club.

Today was the day when you were to receive an email (sadly, already written, currently saved in my drafts folder) announcing the start of our 2010, coming together after a hiatus, with new and exciting changes, new offerings, renewed spirit, making way for an even better running club. Since December we have been working on meeting the insurance requirements issued by NAU Risk Management to allow access to the 300m indoor track housed in the Skydome. This facility is crucial for not only TEAM ALTIUS, but in an equally urgent cause, the access needed by the elite athletes that call Flagstaff home. After being very optimistic about meeting these incredibly difficult requirements, the underwriters from our outside provider have denied our certificate: access to the Skydome is not available for runners.
This means TEAM ALTIUS continues it’s indefinite hold on practices, and this means that our local elites are denied entry and use of a facility. On a large level, I personally believe that our proud claim, that I was once proud to make of Flagstaff being the best place on earth to run, is not true.
Consider the following:
-We proudly claim that our city is home to handfuls of Olympians and aspiring Olympians, yet these people have to sneak into facilities and hop fences to high school tracks?
-We claim a hospitable devotion to struggling athletes and a community behind them and their cause, but we SHUT DOWN, without a fight, the the US Olympic Training Site, one of only ten in the United States?
-When we speak of running in Flagstaff we use the word “community”, but our local running club is shut out of a facility that sits empty otherwise?
-Did you know that our city has three BRAND NEW high school tracks in Flagstaff, as well as one of the only indoor 300m tracks in the western United States, yet NOT ONE of these tracks are available to runners in this community? Imagine 4 swimming pools in Flagstaff and Michael Phelps having to sneak into them because he wasn’t allowed. And then imagine us at the same time saying with a straight face “Flagstaff, AZ: home of Michael Phelps!”

These things bother me because we CAN be as great as we say we want to be. I have listened to our city, the university, our community leaders, and our businesses talk about the economical impact (millions), and community support behind fostering the kind of environment which they claim to foster. Some of these people have the ability to greatly affect these matters. When it comes to the progress, there is much talk and little walk. Personally, those of us that are in this for the runners keep pressing on but days like today come and I want to tell athletes to go somewhere else! Go somewhere where you are welcomes and supported. I want to tell my running club what they really represent when they proudly say “Flagstaff, AZ” as their hometown.

We are exactly one year since the closure of the Center for High Altitude Training. I hope people are now understanding the crucial need filled by that operation and those that devoted themselves to it. In this time since it’s closure, I have encouraged people to play nice, follow the rules, wait and see, and always have hope. However, these methods are not working. Action is required, and I propose that the time has come to make noise. Based on what I have seen in the past 365 days, the fight won’t be a short one, and I don’t think we’ll get answers we like, but that doesn’t mean we should not fight.

Alert the press. Write a letter. Email John.Haeger@nau.edu every single day until you get a response. Forward this email to anyone and everyone. If you don’t like this, DO SOMETHING about it and don’t stop when they tell you to stop. Don’t be quiet when they tell you to be quiet.

To those of you who have been disappointed by the pause of your running club, I offer my sincere apology. TEAM ALTIUS is my love, I believe in it greatly and refuse to let it die. Riding this rollercoaster, much of which occurs behind the scenes, takes its toll. We’ve done our best to survive the rough waters since the closure of the Center and I just ask that you hang on a little longer, we will get there.

Thank you for your patience and support.

Mike Smith

Christmas Day in the Woods and Farts are Funny

January 5th, 2010

We honored the Winter Solstice in many ways this year, then on Christmas Day we continued to celebrate this special time of year by skiing out to spend the night at the Nature Conservancy cabin with 5 other friends. It is unoccupied in the winter, has no plumbing/water (but the composting toilet is nicer than our bathroom at home), has some solar electric, gas stove/oven in this huge kitchen, a wood burning stove in the main part of the cabin, and gas wall heaters in the two bedrooms. We were stoked! I carried McKenna on my back while Troy carried a 40 pound pack of gear and food. Blair cooked up a duck and we all contributed other dishes to the fabulous meal. I got in 3 ski runs up and down Fern Mountain, and McKenna peacefully slept through her first snowboarding run with Troy down Fern Mtn. She also slept most of the ski in and skin out. The girl seems to find skiing to be more peaceful than exhilarating. It was an awesome way to spend the holiday.

McKenna already knows that farts are funny. Whenever she hears herself or someone else fart, she pauses, then goes, “Heh heh,” and smiles. She even did that half asleep the other night.

She also just went through a huge language explosion. She now has about 25 words. Her little helium voice cracks us up.

I can see the light at the end of the teething tunnel! Really she is down to two canines that haven’t made appearances yet. Everything else (oh, besides her 2-year molars, but I’m hoping those are a ways away still) has at least broken through if not come fully in. Get ready to party!

Troy and I have both been getting in some fun skin-and-ski days. My mountain bikes are pretty much just getting lack-of-use flats hanging on the wall, but it is winter after all. Might as well enjoy the snow while it is here, right? I am mentally preparing myself to suffer greatly at the Mt Taylor Winter Quadrathlon where this year I will be on a pairs team with Steve Ilg. I’ll do the bike and run portions, he’ll tackle the ski and snowshoe portions. I personally witnessed Steve careening down Snowbowl the other day on his skate skis. He is the only person I know crazy enough to try that. Woohoo!

Holidays

December 5th, 2009

A little late, but here are some photos from Halloween:

Over Thanksgiving we went to the Phoenix Zoo with Grandma Jane, cousins Aidan and Maya, and Uncle Mike. This was in the squirrel monkey exhibit:

And here is McKenna the Large Animal Proctologist:

It’s not too much of a coincidence that she is pointing in both those photos…she does that a lot!

This is a beautiful picture taken by Melissa Dunstan:

Now we are doing some simple preparations for our Solstice Celebration. We have up our Solstice lights to help light the long winter nights, I’m making a Yule wreath out of trimmings from the forest, and we’ll be burning the Yule log in our fireplace while drinking mead. Well, since it is unlikely that I can find any mead to buy, we’ll probably just get some sweet wine. Maybe next year I’ll try to make it at home. Here’s to looking forward to the days getting long again!

Thelma and Louise

October 23rd, 2009

aka McKenna and Dahlia
aka Partners in Crime

Sweeter Every Day

October 15th, 2009

My little girl gets sweeter every day. Now her “you’re killing me” sweet thing is going and getting a book off her shelf, bringing it to me, and crawling up in to my lap so I can read to her. It melts my heart. Here she is kissing her teddy bear:

kissing teddy bear

Every day she shows exponential mental development too. We see it in the way she responds to what we say, how she stops and concentrates hard to “answer” questions we pose to her (”where is Snoopy?” “where is the little teddy bear?”), the way she runs to the bathroom when I ask if she wants to try to use the potty, and then puts the TP in the toilet although I’ve never told her that is where it goes, and even closes the lid on her potty when I tell her to say byebye to it. Ordinary things? Sure. Except when you see the growth and changes in her every day, and realize just how intensely she must be observing us in order to learn these things since very few of them are things we have told her directly.

I am so grateful for every nap I’ve ever held and nursed her through; for every time I’ve responded lovingly and patiently to her cries; for not rushing her through her infancy, babyhood, and now toddlerhood, and all the dependency that naturally comes with these early years; for respecting her as a sensitive and creative human; for being able to snuggle her in close to me at night. You can never get back these impressionable and developmental times, and I don’t want to miss a second or waste an hour or use harsh techniques to make her conform to society’s idea of who she “should” be or what she “should” be doing (or what kind of parent I should be for that matter).

One of her favorite things to do is play “find the fingers” in the couch cushions:

find the fingers

Another is to try on all of our hats, backwards and sideways, and then gesture, “TaDa!”:

mama's hat

Fall is my favorite season, and although we are still getting some beautiful and warm days, we are also getting a few chillier ones:

Compare how that hat fits her now to last winter when she was about 4 months old:

Troy and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary the other day. Come Thanksgiving, we’ll have been together for 10. And we are still getting better every year.