Holy cow!

Mac's birthday week continued!

Sorry I didn't get this post up as expected on Wednesday. Work has been super crazy and doesn't leave for a lot of free time. So I am trying to play catch up tonight and get the rest of these Mac posts up. I plan on making two posts today, so I hope you enjoy!

For some reason Mac has started noticing cows recently. He goes crazy when he sees them and loves to find them. I wonder if it has anyting to do with their dark color, but whenever we pass horses or other animals, he doesn't get as excited. Strange. We do pass a lot of fields with cows here in Texas, but its usually not daylight when we are driving. I decided to take a video of him acting crazy on our way home from Louisiana this weekend.  We took a detour through Lake Charles due to construction and chaos and while on the backroads we passed lots of fields with cows. His reaction was not quite what either of us had expected. 

Mac was so excited to see the cows, he wanted to get a better view and dove into Matt's lap while driving. Neither of us expected that, and realized it wasn't very safe, so now I will have to make sure I have both hands on him or just point out the cows on my side of the car.

Texas Reds 5k

Since Matt and I are getting ready for the Crescent City Classic 10K in New Orleans, I thought I would make a little post about the race we did back in the fall. Matt, my mother in law and I ran/walked a 5K in downtown Bryan. It was part of the Texas Reds Steak & Grape Festival. Matt and I have gone every year to the festival to try out the steaks and sample the local Texas wineries. They close down Main street and a few others surrounding and have bands, games, vendors, and all kinds of goodies. We invited Matt's parents and his nieces and nephew to come on up and enjoy the festival this year with us. This past year I was really intent on getting into shape and being healthy, so when I saw that one of my best friends Lori @ Our Little Angel, had ran an entire 5K, I knew that I wanted to try to do it too. Not to mention our good friends Scarlett and Damon are always doing races with their kiddos. So Matt and I started running a month or so before the festival with the hopes of being able to run the entire race. We tried really hard to be disciplined and reach our goals, but the most we could ever run was 2 miles. We were just hoping on race day that we would get the extra adrenaline pump needed that would take us to the end. Matt had a lil more of that pump than I did and finished before me. We ran a good 2 miles together before I finally told him to leave me behind and go for it. I felt like I was reenacting the scene from the Titanic or something. After a couple of "are you sure's?", he finally left me in the dust, and I continued run/walking the rest of the way. We unfortunately left my mother in law behind at the beginning of the race, but little did we know she was right behind us the entire time, what a rock star. My time was 34.55, which is OK. I know that I pushed myself as much as I could at the time.  Matt finished in 31:52 and my rocking MIL finished in 35:06, see I told you she was right behind me. When I crossed the finish line, Matt was waiting for me, cheering me on. It was awesome. We turned back around to wait for Mrs. Pat, and next thing we knew she was calling us from behind, she had already crossed. I have to boast and tell you that she won first place in her age division. I won't tell you what that was, because she would kill me, but I think that is an Excellent accomplishment (and no she was not the only person in her age group!).

(Post race picture. Man, my face is swollen and red from running.)

Here are a few pictures of the streets when we picked up our t shirts and bib numbers. They were getting ready for the festival to start that night.

Matt and I picking up our stuff!

 One of the most important things about the race was that it was to raise money for the local Cancer research center. They asked for you to put names of people you knew who had beaten cancer or had fallen to it, so at one of my Business Women's meetings, I was able to put a few names of people I knew on there. It was neat that they framed it and gave it to the research center. 

Later that night we all went back and had a great time at the festival, I will have to post more pictures from that soon!

What goals are you trying to reach this year? Are you planning on running a race? Let me know some things you hope to achieve this year. 

Merry Christmas to all ....

Merry Christmas to all ....and to all a late Christmas card. What? Christmas card? Yes, since I shared with you yesterday our gift tags and I am months behind on my posting, I thought I should at least post our Christmas card from this year. Now that we have a furbaby as a part of our family, I love getting our family portraits made for Christmas. This year I grabbed our good friend Kevin, and we all headed over to downtown Bryan to take pictures for our card. In our area, downtown Bryan is the place to take any pictures really, at any given saturday, you will find no less than five photographers down there. In fact, while taking our pictures, I believe I saw at least three, not counting us. We went around 4:30, since it is winter and things get dark early. Luckily, while we were out there, the hotel and theater's lights came on, so they are nice and bright for our picture. Mac did very well, considering how much there was going on. Cars were passing, people were walking by and his little attention span was really being tested. We had his leash clipped to his collar on the back, which was covered by his scarf, and then we ran the leash down his back, with our foot at the end, so that he couldn't run away, or get very far. We had quite a few takes, adjusting our posing, posture and smiles :) so we really appreciated Kevin being patient with us. Here are a few photos from the session. 

I got our cards printed at MPIX.com and here are a few options I was looking at: 

And here is the one we ended up using: 

(sorry the scan copy is really bad, I'll have to redo it tonight)

Do you like it?