Bob, Lisa, Spencer, & Kaitlyn getting ready to race.
This week was pretty packed full. Monday-Wednesday Spencer and I continued our training for the triathlon, but on Thursday we gave ourselves a day off, so our bodies could take a break before the actual race on Saturday.
Tim spent the beginning of the week working on his homework as usual. He only has one week left of this semester. It has gone by pretty quickly.
Tim also tried something pretty crazy this week. He did a juicing diet. I guess the purpose of the diet is to reboot your system, but it's also good for weight loss. Basically, during the duration of the diet he's not allowed to eat any solid food. He drinks water and vegetable and fruit juices. He juiced all his fruits and veggies himself. He'd been wanting to give it a try, so he figured he better do it before we went back up to Alaska to the land of no fresh produce. He juiced for 5 days. I couldn't believe how well he did. He even came to the table at dinner times just to converse with the family. I thought that would be great torture, but he handled it really well. Good news is, in the 5 days he juiced he lost 13 pounds. He will gain some of those back as he goes back to eating regular food again, but hopefully he'll only gain 3 or 4 pounds back.
I think I mentioned before that this summer I'm trying to take advantage of being close to a temple. My goal is to go once a week while it's close and accessible. I never made it last week, so I made sure to go twice this week. I went once with my mother early Tuesday morning and then went with Spencer on Thursday evening. I think I appreciated having the temple nearby when I lived in Idaho, but now that the nearest temple is an $800 plane ticket away from my home I REALLY appreciate it. After a couple months of not being able to go to the temple you definitely begin to miss it.
This week I worked hard on some adoption things. For those of you who are unfamiliar with adoption agencies, most cost between $25,000 - $40,000 per adoption. LDS family services however costs between $4,000 - $10,000. The big difference is most agencies search for you and do quite a bit of marketing specifically for the adoptive couples. LDS family services does almost nothing, so it's really left up to the couple. I feel like Tim and I have done a fairly good job of marketing ourselves, but this week I had an epiphany. You saw our completed paper profile on our post from last week. We spent hours and hours trying to make it just right (until finally we realized it was never going to be just right and it was time just to print it). After pouring in all those hours of work I wanted to be able to utilize it a little more. So, I thought, if this profile can go in the binder in the Seattle office, why can't it go in the binder in the other LDSFS offices as well? So Tuesday I called every single LDSFS office in the United States. In case you were wondering, there are 65 offices. Several of them said they had no use for paper profiles, but several others told us to send some their way. I spent quite a bit of time at the copy shop getting nearly 100 profiles printed up. I spent time addressing and stuffing 30 envelopes and finally got them mailed out. I know that binders don't get looked at too often, because the internet is so popular now, but I feel really good about getting this tangible information out there across the United States. I even created a spreadsheet of what each office told me so that other adoptive couples can use it in the future. Hopefully that will save some other people the trouble of making 65 separate phone calls.
Tim and I have also been working on a project "how to invest our money". If any of you have any mutual funds that you are particularly fond of (or not fond of) we would love to hear your opinion. We're pretty excited though to be a little fiscally proactive.
Friday afternoon, Spencer, Tim, and I headed to South Weber to my sister Lisa's house. Spencer, Bob, Lisa, and I went for a 12 mile bike ride and then went to get our race packets and body markings in preparation for the race the next day. We left the house on Saturday morning at 6:00 am to head to Stansbury. The race was much smaller than the one I did last year. I only have one other triathlon to compare it to, so I'm not sure how normal it was or not. I think there weren't much more than 200 people there. Once you start dividing 200 people into Sprint and Olympic categories and then further into Male, Female, and Relay categories, it starts getting pretty small. It gets really small when you further divide it into age categories.
Bob wasn't able to actually do the race. He's been sick for over a week and was though it was well enough to do this race until he had swam about 1/4 of a mile and just couldn't breath at all. On the bright side of things he got to cheer us on and I know it helped me bike/run faster. Lisa raced in the Olympic and got 6th female overall. There was quite a bit of mix-up with the awards, so we're not sure yet if she got 1st or 2nd in your age division. Either way she did well. Spencer got 2nd in his age division and I got 3rd in mine. I was also the 12th female overall. I definitely was expecting to place. I just wanted to improve on my previous time: which I did. I shaved 15 minutes off my race time from last year. This course was different and probably easier, but I still was pretty happy with my race time. Last year I did the side stroke on the entire swim, this year I did the front crawl on almost the entire swim. Last year I walked part of the run, this year I ran the whole run. So, I have no complaints. It was a good day. I also thought it was cool that 3 Hart siblings raced and 3 Hart siblings placed in their age divisions.
Tim came to be our support team and photographer. He got to sit around and wait for us to start racing, then sit around and wait for us to race, and then sit around and wait for the awards. I'm sure there's more exciting things for him to do, but he's a good sport. It's fun to have lots of pictures of the race too. Can't complain about having a husband you loves taking pictures.
Click here to see pictures from the race.
Saturday evening, Tim and I went to Scott and Sharon Wadman's for dinner. Scott is Tim's cousin. It was lots of fun to see them and their kids. They have really cute kids and they are both so good with them. Before we knew it, it was past 9:00 pm. I'm sure they were ready for us to leave, so their kids could wind down at get ready for bed.
Today we drove back to Rexburg. We made sure to get home in time for church. Spencer had to teach Sunday School. My sister, Carmen, and her three girls are at my parent's house too, so we want to have some time to hang out with them as well.
Tim spent the beginning of the week working on his homework as usual. He only has one week left of this semester. It has gone by pretty quickly.
Tim also tried something pretty crazy this week. He did a juicing diet. I guess the purpose of the diet is to reboot your system, but it's also good for weight loss. Basically, during the duration of the diet he's not allowed to eat any solid food. He drinks water and vegetable and fruit juices. He juiced all his fruits and veggies himself. He'd been wanting to give it a try, so he figured he better do it before we went back up to Alaska to the land of no fresh produce. He juiced for 5 days. I couldn't believe how well he did. He even came to the table at dinner times just to converse with the family. I thought that would be great torture, but he handled it really well. Good news is, in the 5 days he juiced he lost 13 pounds. He will gain some of those back as he goes back to eating regular food again, but hopefully he'll only gain 3 or 4 pounds back.
I think I mentioned before that this summer I'm trying to take advantage of being close to a temple. My goal is to go once a week while it's close and accessible. I never made it last week, so I made sure to go twice this week. I went once with my mother early Tuesday morning and then went with Spencer on Thursday evening. I think I appreciated having the temple nearby when I lived in Idaho, but now that the nearest temple is an $800 plane ticket away from my home I REALLY appreciate it. After a couple months of not being able to go to the temple you definitely begin to miss it.
This week I worked hard on some adoption things. For those of you who are unfamiliar with adoption agencies, most cost between $25,000 - $40,000 per adoption. LDS family services however costs between $4,000 - $10,000. The big difference is most agencies search for you and do quite a bit of marketing specifically for the adoptive couples. LDS family services does almost nothing, so it's really left up to the couple. I feel like Tim and I have done a fairly good job of marketing ourselves, but this week I had an epiphany. You saw our completed paper profile on our post from last week. We spent hours and hours trying to make it just right (until finally we realized it was never going to be just right and it was time just to print it). After pouring in all those hours of work I wanted to be able to utilize it a little more. So, I thought, if this profile can go in the binder in the Seattle office, why can't it go in the binder in the other LDSFS offices as well? So Tuesday I called every single LDSFS office in the United States. In case you were wondering, there are 65 offices. Several of them said they had no use for paper profiles, but several others told us to send some their way. I spent quite a bit of time at the copy shop getting nearly 100 profiles printed up. I spent time addressing and stuffing 30 envelopes and finally got them mailed out. I know that binders don't get looked at too often, because the internet is so popular now, but I feel really good about getting this tangible information out there across the United States. I even created a spreadsheet of what each office told me so that other adoptive couples can use it in the future. Hopefully that will save some other people the trouble of making 65 separate phone calls.
Tim and I have also been working on a project "how to invest our money". If any of you have any mutual funds that you are particularly fond of (or not fond of) we would love to hear your opinion. We're pretty excited though to be a little fiscally proactive.
Friday afternoon, Spencer, Tim, and I headed to South Weber to my sister Lisa's house. Spencer, Bob, Lisa, and I went for a 12 mile bike ride and then went to get our race packets and body markings in preparation for the race the next day. We left the house on Saturday morning at 6:00 am to head to Stansbury. The race was much smaller than the one I did last year. I only have one other triathlon to compare it to, so I'm not sure how normal it was or not. I think there weren't much more than 200 people there. Once you start dividing 200 people into Sprint and Olympic categories and then further into Male, Female, and Relay categories, it starts getting pretty small. It gets really small when you further divide it into age categories.
Bob wasn't able to actually do the race. He's been sick for over a week and was though it was well enough to do this race until he had swam about 1/4 of a mile and just couldn't breath at all. On the bright side of things he got to cheer us on and I know it helped me bike/run faster. Lisa raced in the Olympic and got 6th female overall. There was quite a bit of mix-up with the awards, so we're not sure yet if she got 1st or 2nd in your age division. Either way she did well. Spencer got 2nd in his age division and I got 3rd in mine. I was also the 12th female overall. I definitely was expecting to place. I just wanted to improve on my previous time: which I did. I shaved 15 minutes off my race time from last year. This course was different and probably easier, but I still was pretty happy with my race time. Last year I did the side stroke on the entire swim, this year I did the front crawl on almost the entire swim. Last year I walked part of the run, this year I ran the whole run. So, I have no complaints. It was a good day. I also thought it was cool that 3 Hart siblings raced and 3 Hart siblings placed in their age divisions.
Tim came to be our support team and photographer. He got to sit around and wait for us to start racing, then sit around and wait for us to race, and then sit around and wait for the awards. I'm sure there's more exciting things for him to do, but he's a good sport. It's fun to have lots of pictures of the race too. Can't complain about having a husband you loves taking pictures.
Click here to see pictures from the race.
Saturday evening, Tim and I went to Scott and Sharon Wadman's for dinner. Scott is Tim's cousin. It was lots of fun to see them and their kids. They have really cute kids and they are both so good with them. Before we knew it, it was past 9:00 pm. I'm sure they were ready for us to leave, so their kids could wind down at get ready for bed.
Today we drove back to Rexburg. We made sure to get home in time for church. Spencer had to teach Sunday School. My sister, Carmen, and her three girls are at my parent's house too, so we want to have some time to hang out with them as well.
