Fire Station

We work out with quite a few firefighters at our gym and have become good friends with them. Bryce likes fire trucks, like most little boys, so he loves to talk to the firefighters, especially Erik. A week or two ago, Erik said that we could bring the boys to the fire station to check out the truck sometime. So yesterday afternoon, we took the boys there. They were so excited to go and they loved everything they got to see and do.





Erik showed the boys some of the big hoses and one of them responded that they have squirt bottles at home. So Erik got out his squirt bottle and let the boys spray it. It sprayed some sort of chemical foam.





Then Erik got out one of the ladders and let the boys climb it.





He went around the outside of the truck, showing them all of the tools and letting them get their hands on them. Here they are testing out a hydraulic spreader.







Neither of the boys wanted to try on his big fire coat or boots but they both did like trying on the helmets.









Next they sat in the front of the truck.











Then Erik pulled the truck out so they could spray some water from the hose.







And of course he had to turn on the lights and the boys ran around the truck, checking them all out.





Then we got to ride in the fire truck. Three firefighters accompanied us and we just did a quick spin around the neighborhood.



Firefighters use headsets to talk to each other in the truck.





Erik showed us around the rest of the fire station and we saw the kitchen, living room, bedrooms, bathrooms, workout room, lockers, etc. But that was boring in comparison so we quickly ended up back in the garage. We also checked out the two ambulances but the boys were more interested in the fire truck.

Halloween 2011

On Halloween night, we have a tradition of going over to Chris and Lacy's house to order pizza, let the boys play, and go trick or treating. It is a blast and we all look forward to it. Kelly and I didn't dress up for trick or treating but we wanted to get a family picture of our costumes. We wore these costumes to HalloWOD at CrossFit Aledo the week before. Kelly was a steak, I was a fried egg, and together, we were Paleo. Ha ha. I actually made my egg costume myself for $8 and was proud of how it turned out. The boys both wanted to be astronauts and I found great deals on ebay so I got them matching costumes.



Lacy took almost all of these pictures. Between the two of us, we have 5 boys between the ages of 4 and 3 months so we know that the best way to get a genuine smile for a picture is to yell potty talk words or pretend to vomit. Thank you, Lacy, for taking these pictures for me, I love them!









Josiah was a ninja, Luke was a fire fighter, and this picture is missing Baby Elijah, who was a jalepeno pepper.



Our little spider monkey. He's 2 and a half years old but his legs apparently don't work half the time and he demands to be carried everywhere.





Happy because he's eating Skittles.



The two oldest boys had a blast trick or treating and would run up to doors and knock and say "we're here! we're here!" Bryce and Luke had fun getting the candy but weren't as into the trick or treating itself, seeing as how they had to be carried around and were always last to get to the door.



The one picture that I took that turned out pretty cute.





Josiah proudly told us all that he didn't get scared because "ninjas don't get scared". The highlight of the night was when Josiah and Cason went up to a door and a huge 6 foot tall figure had motion detectors on it. When they got close, it lit up and the head started moving and making noises. Both boys jumped back but they didn't run away. They stared at it for a minute while all the adults had a good laugh. We finally told them to go knock on the door and they cautiously walked past the figure and knocked to get their candy.

Pumpkin Patch

October is a favorite month for Kelly and I. The weather is tolerable after a long, hot summer, football is on TV, our anniversary is in October, the holiday season of Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas is upon us, and the pumpkin patches open up. In early October, we headed out to the same pumpkin patch we've been going to since Cason was 3 months old. I think Kelly and I were more excited than the kids. They really just wanted to grab a few pumpkins and leave and we could have done that at any grocery store. Instead, we drug them around the pumpkin patch, forced them to go on the hay ride, and tried to entice them into playing on all the cute stuff around the farm. We weren't very successful in getting them to play so we ended up just letting them pick out some pumpkins and calling it a day.



I tried to get a decent picture of the boys together and as you can see, I failed.



Sumo deadlift pumpkin pulls.



On the hay ride that the boys pretended to not enjoy.



Out of all the pumpkins at the patch, they wanted the tiny ones.





Cason acted like he was having no fun at all until he spied some Little Einsteins cutouts.

Tough Mudder

October 11th was our anniversary so we decided to sign up for the Tough Mudder with friends for that weekend. The Tough Mudder is an 11 mile race with obstacles. We signed up before I broke my arm but it was expensive so of course I was going to still do it and do as many obstacles as I could with one arm. Kelly's mom came down for the weekend to watch the boys and Kelly and I headed to Austin on Friday afternoon. On Friday night, we camped out with friends. Saturday we headed to the course and started our race around noon. Here's a quick shot of Kelly and I right before we started.



These pictures are bad quality because I downloaded them from facebook but they can give you an idea of some of the obstacles. This one was called Mount Everest and we had to run up the incline and grab the ledge.



Crawling under barbed wire was the first obstacle and it got us nice and muddy.



Meagan, Rob, and myself pretty early in the race. Meagan's dad came to take pictures and he took hundreds.



This one was fun. We had to climb up the back side of that wall and then jump into the muddy pond and swim across. That's me in the middle of the water.



Carrying a log for a 1/4 mile or so. Kind of dumb.



This was a stretch of having to climb up muddy hills and then slide down into a pit of mud. Over and over and over again.



The group we ran with. Most of us are from the gym and then Meagan's brother and his friend.



Those were just a few of the obstacles. We also had to scale 9-10 foot walls, dive into an ice cold pond and go under water, swim under barrels in a pond filled with dead fish, walk across a balance beam suspended over a 20 foot drop into water, crawl across sharp rocks under barbed wire, climb over hay bales, and run through an electroshock thing with 10,000 volts of electricity just to name a few. I was able to do every obstacle except for the monkey bars. It was fun but the obstacles weren't that hard. Our friends, who have done the same Tough Mudder course before, told us it took them just over 2.5 hours last time. So we had 2.5-3 hours in mind. Well the obstacles got pretty backed up and we had to wait in line for several of them and there were just tons of people around most of the time so it ended up taking closer to 5 hours to finish. By the end, we were tired and hungry. So it was a good thing Kelly and I had planned on visiting The Salt Lick that night.

The Salt Lick was featured on an episode of Man vs Food and we had been wanting to try it ever since. It is an awesome BBQ place on the west side of Austin. Here is the open meat pit inside the restaurant. Kelly got the all you can eat platter and I got the pulled beef sandwich. The food was really great, best BBQ we've had down here.



On Sunday morning, we had to head back to Fort Worth, but not before stopping at another Man vs Food locale, Round Rock Donuts.



I wanted a small cream filled chocolate bismark. Kelly wanted the Texas sized glazed donut they were famous for. My bismark was incredible. The Texas sized glazed was pretty good but they only glazed the top so we just kind of picked the top off and tossed the bottom. We brought back some sprinkle donuts for the boys.



We had a great weekend away, thanks Grandma for watching the boys for us!

Blogging hiatus

It's been a long time since I posted anything so I'll try to sum up our last few months and get caught up. Cason no longer naps and I have physical therapy to do twice a day so I find myself with less time to do things like blog.

August 13th, was one of the highlights of my summer. We had the Life AsRx Tour at the Dallas Convention Center. It was a big CrossFit competition that drew athletes from all over Texas and Oklahoma. Kelly and I were on a team with Cesa, James, and Amy. There were three wods and Kelly, Cesa, and I did the 2nd wod that consisted of box jumps, double unders, and handstand push ups. We crushed that wod, it was so fun. Our team did well enough to make it to the 4th and final wod. We ended up placing 10th out of 50-60 teams in the end.





A few days later on Aug 17th, we were finding our max height box jump at the gym. I had a plyo box with a bunch of weights stacked on top of it, like we usually do. I broke my record and got 42.75 inches and threw one more 10 pound plate on top to see if I could get another inch or so. On my final jump, I got my toes up on the top but the plates shifted so I fell straight back and caught myself with my left hand. I shattered my radius in several pieces and dislocated my ulna. 8 hours later, I had surgery and my wonderful surgeon placed a metal plate and 8 pins in my wrist. I had to take 2 weeks off from working out and then I was back in the gym 5 days a week. My coach programs modified wods for me. It has now been almost three months and I can do deadlifts, pull ups, push ups with pain, rowing with two arms again, and 15 pounds in my left hand for things like thrusters, bench press, push press, etc. Looking forward to the coming month where I won't have to scale and can get back to normal wods.









That pretty much sums up August. September was full of working out, physical therapy, Cason started school, etc. Nothing too exciting.