The Cheering Section

This weekend Baby Charlie and I headed down to DC to cheer on Carlos with the house and my brother in the Marine Corps marathon. We all - brother, Carlos, and baby & I had varying levels of success. After a successful sighting at 17 miles, Soogy, Wallis, Charlie and I attempted to make it to somewhere in the 20+ mile range to cheer on Nathan. We knew he would need it given that he somehow forgot to train for the marathon...(shockingly similar to the last two years - one of which ended up with him in the medical tent). In our enthusiasm we ended up following what we thought was the race route....but there were suspiciously fewer and fewer people cheering. We were merging onto the bridge across to Virginia as were the runners, but there was one important thing separating us: a large divider. In fact we were merging onto highway traffic - not the path with all the runners. The bugaboo stroller is a decent ride, but wasn't going to stand a chance in the fast lane so we had to solicit help to lift the stroller - with baby Wallis inside and all the absurd mounts of baby gear one ends up leaving the house with latched on - over a divide and into the middle of the race. There we were - stuck on an seemingly endless bridge of unsightly concrete going to Northern Virginia (itself rather unsightly) surrounded by thousands of runners. No one else was dumb enough to cheer there so we were literally IN the race - there were participants walking next to us, we'd get passed by runners and then pass them as they stopped to stretch or vomit over the bridge (nice!). I felt like we should have had our own race numbers. At first baby Charlie loved it, but the bridge was way too boring for him and he fell asleep. It worked out well as we caught Nathan at mile 24 and was able to give him a coca-cola. He said he was in a bad way, but he looked fine and was still ahead of the women dressed in a tutu and the superman guy who actually ran 26 miles in a cape (did he think it would help?).

Back at the house front Carlos and my dad worked on the basement's kitchen cabinets in preparation for a big inspection this week. As you can see from Carlos' hair in the picture - he has been lacking a shower and using drywall dust as hair gel. Luckily now there is electricity and a functioning toilet. Though he did say to my dad as he was leaving at 10:30pm - "Are you sure you don't want to pee in the drain for old time's sake?" It was the baby's and my first night staying at the house which was scary, but ended up being fun. Baby Charlie was especially reluctant to leave and signified his displeasure with a really juicy number two in his diaper.

The really fun part of the weekend was carving pumpkins with the SAISers. I am pretty impressed by our work - though I did decapitate a star, one eye on Obama is missing and I think that Palin got a nose job. But overall I think they rock.