Taylor's Last Days of Elementary School

Taylor is getting ready to start 6th grade in a few weeks.  I am so not ready for middle school.  She is a mixed up ball of excitement and nerves all at once.  At the end of her 5th grade year she had a few big events that I wanted to share with you.

For the second half of the year she joined the choir and right at the end of the school year they had a small choir performance and even played a few musical instruments for the parents.

 They had practiced really hard and did a great job.  It was fun to watch her perform with her friends.

 The school had a small promotion ceremony for all 5th graders moving up to 6th grade.  It was the end of their elementary school years.  Unfortunately, Russ was traveling and he wasn't able to attend.

Her principal is giving her the certificate, her teacher is behind the podium.

Acting silly with her teacher.

With her 2 best friends from 5th grade.

Holding her promotion certificate and her rose.

And at the beginning of July she turned 11. 

She asked for a large stuffed animal.  I think we did a good job finding one.  Poor Russ had to lug this huge bear through the subways.  I really wish I had gotten a picture of that.

 She is getting so big and growing up so fast.  I am so proud of the young lady she is becoming. 
I can't believe this kid is getting ready to go to middle school.

Her first day of Kindergarten.

Happy 14th Anniversary!

Yesterday Russ and I celebrated our 14th anniversary.  We don't really do very much in the way of anniversary celebrating except dinner together.  Since Russ buys me gifts pretty often for no reason and he is very hard to buy for, we just decide to spend the evening together and call it good.  (I know, I am such a romantic.)

So we got a little dressed up and headed out to a Bulgarian restaurant.  Now, you may be wondering what Bulgarian food is.  I had no idea until last night.  This restaurant was recommended to us by some friends and so we decided to try it out.  After our meal last night I will tell you that visiting Bulgaria is now very high on my list of places to vacation, just so that I can eat more of the food.  It was delicious!  We were so busy eating that we didn't take very many pictures of our food, but Russ quick snapped this picture of our appetizer.

 Those are tomatoes stuffed with a vegetable cream cheese.  So good!  Our dinner was just as delicious.   In my defense about being on the phone during our anniversary dinner, we were talking about a specific subject and had a question that my friend could answer so I sent her a quick text.  I was only on my phone for about 2 minutes during dinner.  Of course, that is when he decided to take the picture.

After dinner we walked around the area right outside of base for a little bit before we went to a pie restaurant for dessert.

A whole glass case filled with deliciousness.

Waiting for our pies.

 I LOVE fruit pies and this place makes them awesome.  I had a hard time deciding what I wanted so we ordered a few different things.

So I will leave you to wonder, did I eat all of that myself or did we share it?  Those of you that know me well will really not be sure as many of you have seen me pack quite a bit of food away.

One last kissing picture in front of the pie case.

Happy 14th anniversary to the love of my life.  There is no other person I would rather share this adventure of life with than you.  I love you more today than I did on August 14, 1999 when I said "I Do". 

Color Me Rad

A few years ago I heard about a 5k run called Color Me Rad.  It was a fun run where you were coated in colors through the run and ended the run colored from head to toe.  From the pictures I saw it looked like a ton of fun and I added it to my "bucket list".

About 4 months ago I was very excited to read that Color Me Rad was coming to Seoul and was even more excited to when I realized it was going to take place during the weeks that Sam and Maddie were here visiting us. 

This was a huge run, by far the biggest I have ever been involved in.  There were over 15,000 runners, but it was incredibly organized.  They had us divided into different starting times so it spaced people out a little bit. While you were waiting for your run time they had fun music playing, a DJ keeping things moving and tons of places to get your picture taken.  Included with your registration fee is a white t-shirt, some florescent sunglasses and a tattoo.  We bought some extra color to dump on each other and "RAD" headbands for all of us to wear.  Check out how clean we are in these pictures-

The girls doing some pre-run stretching.

At the start they count you down then as you run past the starting line they dump a bunch of powdered color on you.  From what I read the "color" is actually colored corn starch so it it completely non-toxic which is good because it was everywhere by the time we were done.

We ran through the Olympic Complex and if you remember from a previous post I am a huge Olympics fan.  Maddie and I both thought it was totally awesome to be running where Olympic runners have one time run. 

This was a complete fun run.  You didn't run it for a personal record, they didn't even have a clock there and many people walked the entire thing.  We even saw a bunch of Koreans laying down along the course resting.  While we didn't lay down, we did take our time and took lots of fun pictures along the way.

They had color stations that you would run through and they would completely coat you with color.  The first one was orange.

Coming out of the first color station we were starting to look very colorful.

They were completely posing in this picture as runners because at this point we were pretty much walking.  Look at Lucy.

We bought a few extra color packets and during the run I decided that those packets were mine to dump on the kids (and Russ) at any time during the run that I wanted to.  I probably had to much fun dumping color on them when they weren't expecting it.

Next came the blue station.

Lucy is spitting blue color out of her mouth.

In the background of this picture I am dumping color on one of the kids.

We stopped to take another self portrait after we had been colored a few times. 

 Running past the Olympic stadium.

 They had 4 color stations, but we missed taking pictures at one of them.  The last one was yellow.

Check out the guy dumping yellow on the girls as we tried to take a picture. 

They stopped for a rest in the yellow.

By the time we finished the run we were completely covered in color.

We went to the run with some friends there and met up with them at the finish line.

They had more music at the end and they would count you down and everyone would throw color up in the air. 

I ran up the ramp behind all the people and snapped a few pictures to give an idea how many people were at this event.

It is easy to distinguish the clean people that hadn't started yet from the people that were done with the run.

As Americans we always attract attention on the subways but the stares went to a whole new level when we looked like this-

We had a great time doing this run. There is another one coming in September and we plan to participate in that one as well.