Things that have happened lately

This will come as no surprise but one of the more difficult things I have found with dealing with quintuplets is time.  I really don't have a lot of it.  Unfortunately, I also have a lot of things I am involved in.  Over the past few years, I have been in several bands (as a drummer), I have taken up triathlons, and lately, have begun some extensive work on fixing up our house. 

The house repairs needed to be done.  Quintuplets destroy things.  Anyone that has had us over for more than a few hours knows this. Our carpet (7 years old) is a complete disaster because we have had a bunch of kids running, walking, falling, and dropping stuff on it.  We replaced the lower level carpet with wood but the stairs were really bad so we decided to replace those with wood as well.  Because we are not rich, we are doing that ourselves which is a bit scary.

Here is what they looked like before:

Here is what it looks like now:

We are getting this stuff from Lowe's called Retrotread.  It looks fairly straightforward to do it except for that weird stair at the bottom.  I will have to do something special with that.  We will see how it goes...

With the triathlon stuff, I have been training fairly consistently and have found that it is a good motivation to keep in shape.  I lost about 15 pounds a few years ago and have not gained it back due to the triathlon stuff.  Feeling pretty good about myself, I decided earlier this week to have Riley, my 14 year old son, come with me to do a swim workout.  He is on a community club swim team and so we decided to follow one of his workouts.  First off, I am in pretty good shape but he completely smoked me in the pool.  It was humbling.  His workout was brutal.  It made me feel like the money we have put into having him (and all the other kids) do swim team was not wasted.

Something else that needed to be done was going and visiting family.  We recently went to Colorado and I decided to grow the beginnings of beard for the occasion:

Bears are itchy but totally appropriate in the mountains.  I got rid of it once the novelty wore off. 

Rachelle and I recently (yesterday) had our 17th anniversary.  We spent it eating hot dogs and pizza at Sam's Club with the kids:

1.50 hot dog and a drink.  Can't beat that. Don't worry though, we are still going to do something a little more anniversary appropriate.  We are hoping to go to Cheesecake Factory and use one of the 1 billion gift cars we haven't had time to use.  Should be a good time.