6 month growler and a marathon!

Is it just me or does that title sound like our son is a beer?  Anywho!  We celebrated Jack's 6 month birthday in Chicago, where Matt and I ran in the Chicago Marathon!  This was a big deal, especially for me.  I signed up as motivation to lose the baby weight I was putting on and Matt wanted to get his first marathon under his belt before our schedules became too busy.  It's tough to train with a baby, and we couldn't have done it without living with my parents and having my mom watch Jack every Saturday.  Not only did I have to worry about running, I had to worry about Jack's feeding schedule.  I'm still exclusively breastfeeding and while I did pump some milk for when we were on really long runs I prefer not to bottle feed.  We timed our runs with that in mind.  Easy enough for training, but race day was another story!  My mom brought Jack down to the race start so I could nurse him as close to start time as possible (more for my sake than his!), then she had 2 bottles to give him while we were running.  About 30 minutes after I finished there I was, sitting in the grass with all the other runners nursing him again. 

Unfortunately, I didn't really account for the extra calories burned, so I started out the race pretty hungry.  Matt and I ran together for the first 13 or so, and then I had to tell him he could go on without me.  I was crashing big time and had to down a bunch of gels and pretzels to get my calorie intake up.  I walked a bit until I felt better and then went at it again, finishing in a SLOW 5:19....and didn't care one bit!  Matt did better with a 4:56.  It was a great weekend with my mom, sister Carrie, cousin Debbie and her husband Brian.  I'm proud to say that Matt now loves marathons and I reconfirmed my belief that marathons are not fun!  But hey, at least I lost all my baby weight! 

As for Jack at 6 months - he is cracking us up with his growl noises, he is reaching for objects while sitting and most the time falls on his face, he loves bath time with dad, and laughs and smiles all the time!  Love our boy!