The Fresh Beat Band!

On Thursday, August 30th, these cutest little ladies went to their first concert!

The Fresh Beat Band came to The Toledo Zoo for a live performance in the amphitheater.  So fun!!!

Casey and I coincidentally heard about this concert on the same day back in April and immediately text each other with the same idea:  let's take the girls!!  So it became a plan as well as a birthday present for all three and we purchased tickets right away.  They'd only been selling for a short time and we were only able to get second to last row seats on the far right corner.  I almost didn't buy them until the customer behind me in line at the zoo's ticket counter said there are really no bad seats in the house.  So I took his word and bought them and it really was a great show and experience, even from a distance.  We could see the stage no problem and it didn't seem that far away.

Before the show, Casey and I got in line to check out t-shirts for our little groupies.  But when I saw that they were $25, I turned right around.  I was highly impressed with Sophie for acting so mature given her tantrum-filled age, after seeing her cousins both get one.  But I promised we'd do something special after the show instead.

Love how cute these two look waiting at the counter for the sales person to help us.

I don't think Soph really grasped what we were doing here or what we were about to see.  But boy did they hold her attention and awe when the Fresh Beat Band members came out singing!!  After each song, she'd ask me "are the Fresh Beat done singing their song?"  And I'd keep telling her "they're done singing that song, but they're going to sing a bunch more!"  P.S. - all the pictures from this night are from my iPhone.

Look at this crowd!  Thankfully, the immense heat of the day really didn't feel too bad this evening.  And it cooled as the time passed. 

The girls stood and danced and waved their arms.  :) 

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to believe that my sister and I were lucky enough to have these three beautiful girls just six weeks apart.  How lucky for them!  And how blessed are we?!?! 

A cool off break with some lemon ice. 

Entranced. 

P.S. - that's marker on her elbow.  Naturally. 

Dancing in the aisle. 

Such a fun date night with my girl before preschool begins for these ladies next week! 

Our "special treat" after the show was a stop at the Dairy Depot on Route 2 for some strawberry cheesecake ice cream.  Yum!  She was thoroughly satisfied with this.  :) 

Love you, baby girl!!! 

Another Cool Lunchbox Idea

I found a cool, new, food packing gadget that I wanted to share!  Originally, I came across these in a One Step Ahead catalog and contemplated ordering them immediately.  They were just so cool!  But I put it off because I didn't want to pay shipping and I really only intended to use them for picnicking in the park or at the zoo or whatever.  OSA was charging $6.95 for each of them.  (Side note:  that green thing in the back is not the same.  It's a sandwich-only container from Tupperware that runs 2 for $11.  Eek!  I got suckered into that at a party.  ;)

Anyway, I had to stop at Old Navy one day on my lunch break to return a clothing item that I'd purchased online and didn't want.  And low and behold... the cool, lunch cubes were for sale there of all places!!  For $5!!  With no shipping!!  (Duh.)  What luck for me!!  So I got one for each of the kids and we've used (and loved) them several times now for various outings.

I still plan to use the Planetbox's exclusively for school lunches.  There's just no comparison to them.  But if you were looking for something inexpensive and handy to pack lunches in, this is fantastic!  There could still be room for error (read: a big mess if opened incorrectly) with the youngest lunch packing set, and I found the bread on the sandwich to be just slightly dry by the time we ate, but overall, they're great!  And the kids LOVE them.

I'll show you the step-by-step fold up here.  It's not rocket science, but it's a very clever idea.  And just to clarify, the larger compartment where the sandwich and pretzels are does not have a divider.  The other side does.

There's a lid that snaps closed over the non-divided compartment.

And then you can fold that covered compartment right over the divided compartment.  Here's where the error could occur for little people.  If, when opening, they have the divided compartment on top and try to lift that side up, everything would fall out of the divided compartment.  But kids are quick learners.  And... it's not rocket science.

Once folded into a cube, there's an easy but sturdy latch that seals the whole things shut.  Then, as you can sorta see, our pretzels and half sandwich got all mixed together.  But the kids didn't care, and maybe you'd pack a whole sandwich for your child?

After purchasing from Old Navy, I then saw them at Meijer too!  They were clear at Meijer with colored latched/seals only and this particular style cube only cost $4 there.  Nice!  There's actually a whole line of different food storage items by this company.  On the One Step Ahead site, they're called KLIP IT, but on the latch of the container it says SYSTEMA.  They make cool salad with dressing containers, sandwich-only containers, cereal with separated milk (or could be yogurt with granola, etc) containers, etc. etc.  Check them out if you're looking for a lunch packing solution!

Warrior Dash!!

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "the craziest frickin' day of my life" (as they claim), but it was most definitely a really fun experience and one that I would like to do again!

A few months ago, my friend Nichole asked me to join her in the Warrior Dash in Logan, Ohio on June 3rd.  I'd never heard of it, but You Tube is very helpful and after watching a few videos, I decided it looked doable and fun.  Plus they raise money for St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  Win win.

Logan, Ohio is in/near Hocking Hills so it was a 3.5 hour drive down there... and back.  Ouch. 

We brought our oldest pair of tennis shoes, some eye black (to make us look intense - haha!), and spandex shorts to minimize the amount of dirt/mud that could make it's way into undesirable areas.

We also came up with a LOOOONG list of things we wish we'd brought such as gallon jugs of water for "cleaning" after the race, plastic bags for storing our mud-caked clothes, etc.  We discussed these things ahead of time at the starting line...  :)

The park we ran through was really beautiful... and contained a misleading amount of uphill running.  There were heats of runners every half hour all day Saturday AND Sunday!

The flames that shot up at the start of the race were ridiculous.  The heat could be felt even from where we were standing in line, which was towards the back.

LOTS of uphill running walking at the start!  The whole race was 3.5 miles and contained 13 obstacles including "barricade" jumps, a "catamaran" raft type thing that we had to swim to and climb over, a couple high walls that required rope climbing to get over, rope bridges, barbed wire to army crawl under, a teeter totter bridge (up and then down), mud slides for all the downhill "running" walking, etc.

These pictures below were all taken towards the end of the race because that's all Craig could capture.  (Oh, by the way, Craig and my brother Taylor came along for the fun factor just because Nichole and I are so cool...  Or, if I'm really being honest, because I asked Craig to take pictures and Taylor to keep Craig company.)  They are the last five obstacles.

In the first picture, we had just paused for a cup of water and were heading toward the next wall.  It had ropes on the side you can't see for us to climb to the top.

I'm in the black tank and Nichole's in the hot pink tee and we're not yet to the base of the wall.

Once at the top, we had to climb over and down the slats on the back side.

Waving like an idiot once I spotted Craig.

Small tunnels dug into the ground with wooden slats and barbed wire above them.  We had to crawl down and through, obviously.

Cargo net wall.  We had to climb up and over.  You can see Nichole at the top here.

Jogging towards the fire obstacle.

We had to leap over these flames.  It was really the only thing I was scared of and my jumps had major overkill in the height department because of that.  LOL  In reality, it didn't even feel remotely  hot or burning.  You could just see/feel the smoke.  Some runners were running straight through it without breaking stride so it's not really all that challenging/dangerous.  I just assumed it would be.  So go ahead and laugh at my jumping... but only if you don't think you would have done the same!

Final obstacle.  Craig didn't get the start of it nor the real image of the chute that it was.  But we basically had to crawl through this shallow mud bath.  There was barbed wire above us so we couldn't really stand up and we were basically just propelling ourselves by pushing the ground with our arms and leaving our legs straight out behind us.  Poor Nichole - I kicked my feet a few times like I was swimming and splashed some more muddy water on her face.  :(  So sorry!

All these pics are toward the end of the mud bath chute.  We were past the barbed wire and finally able to stand up.  :)

Of course, it was terribly slippery and we all slip-slided several times while trying to climb the gradual incline to the finish.

We got our finishing medals and posed for some muddy pictures!  ;-)  I didn't see this at the time, but it looks like a white wall in the background where runners slapped a muddy high-five after finishing.  Cool!

I'm really not sure what possessed me to have so many tongue-out pictures.  I got carried away with the hard-core warrior mentality.  ;)

Mud starting to dry on our hands and arms, making our skin look 80 years old.

Mud caked bodies and clothes.  From here, we headed to a pond to rinse off.  The pond smelled horrific and we felt totally disgusting after climbing out of it, but it was a start at getting the mud off our skin.

Taylor posing behind some goofy guys that wore capes and helmets for the race.  There were a LOT of crazy get-ups:  wrestling singlets, tutus (on guys and girls), capes, super bright colors, etc.

Our registration fee bought us:  a race, a t-shirt, a medal, this goofy Viking hat, and a beer at the finish.  It might have also included a chicken leg, but I can't remember.  That was a big food item there to keep with the theme of warriors.  :)

Taylor wore my hat while I was finishing the race.

Nichole and I decided to at least get our muddy t-shirts off in the changing tent (kicking ourselves for not bringing our change of clothes on the bus ride from where we parked to where the race took place... we ended up having to change in the huge grass "parking lot" between cars!) and put on our new warrior shirts.  So here we are with hats, shirts and medals.

Umm...

A glimpse of just a portion of the crowd that was in attendance just while we were there.

Taylor drank both Nichole's and my beers.  We volunteered them.  Ick.  Not a fan of beer.

Ohhhhh, it was a looooong ride home.  We managed to use a few wet wipes, a bit of bottled water and some towels that we did remember to get more of this nastiness off.  And then we washed hands, arms and faces in the bathroom at Chipotle when we stopped for dinner.  But mostly we still felt insanely gross for most of the ride.  NEVER been so grateful for a shower in all my life!!

Definitely planning to do this again.  Taylor and Craig want to do it.  My sister too!  It would be really fun to have a group!

And thank you, mom and dad, for keeping the kids for us all day and taking them to Lincoln's 2nd birthday party for us.  Bummed I had to miss that but really glad the kids got to go!