5K Update

I have to take a minute to brag a bit about my husband; I hope you all don't mind! On Saturday, we participated in Bethel's Homecoming 5K race, and Eric accomplished the awesome feat of running over three miles in 21 minutes and 35 seconds! That's more than two minutes better than his time last year, and is a very competitive pace. I am so proud of him! Even though he's been really busy with research for his dissertation, he's gotten himself out of bed early in the morning several times a week to prepare his body to compete, and he did an amazing job! My father-in-law, Nate, also beat his time from last year and came in at a little over 26 minutes. (Not too shabby, Nate! Good job!)

I ended up walking the race, while pushing Ian half the time in his stroller. (I was walking with my mother-in-law, Pam, who pushed the stroller the other half of the time.) We finished in about 42 minutes and Ian had a great time. By the end of the race, he was clapping his hands and singing as we fast-walked to the finish line.

Eric and I have pretty much decided that we're going to try to find a 5K to run in every year, no matter where we end up. It's just such a fun way to keep in shape as a family and have some sort of measure for our health. We have so much fun participating in the race that it makes all the work and sweat leading up to it completely worth it!

gDiapers

Thanks to a suggestion from some friends, we've made a mini-revolution of diapering in our family! They're called gDiapers, and they're.....wait for it..... flushable!!! No more stinky poopy diapers in our trash cans, and no more filling up landfills with disposable diapers that will take at least 500 years to decompose! Apparently, conventional disposable diapers are the third largest contributors to landfills in the world and yet only five percent of the world's population uses them. Even though we were only using 30-40 disposable diapers per month (because we use cloth diapers during the day), that was still at least 360-400 diapers we as a family put out there in the last year alone. And to think that most diapering families use on average 2500 disposable diapers a year!

At any rate, after much consideration and research, we decided that the best thing for our family was to switch to gDiapers for at night and while travelling. And they really work well! They're kind of a hybrid between our cloth diapering technique and regular disposable diapers. They have cloth covers (gPants) with velcro fasteners, water-proof polyester snap-in liners, and environmentally-safe "pads" that get pressed into the liners, which are then either flushed or composted when dirty or wet. We've even been able to switch from using pins and plastic pants with our cloth diapers to using the gPants with a cloth liner instead of the flushable liner. This also makes potty training much easier since we can much more easily take off Ian's cloth diaper right at the toilet, without having to mess with pins and whatnot.
We've been fairly happy with the results, too. The gDiapers are really an ingenius invention that could possibly change diapering as we know it. They certainly changed our lives, and in the process, also made us more aware of our waste in general. I was reading in the book of Genesis some time ago, and in chapter 2, verse 15, it says, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." In the original Hebrew language, "work" has more of a meaning of "serve" and "take care" has more of a meaning of "protect." Adam's first job was to serve and protect the land that God gave him! How does this not apply to us, as well? This earth is a gift from God, and we are responsible for serving and protecting it as best as we are able. Therefore, we've become really convicted in this area about making sure we're not polluting the land with our trash, and have stepped up our recycling habits. Our next step will be working on a good compositing system so we can throw away even less waste. It's all a process, and I'm sure God has more steps to take us through!

October Update

As you can probably tell by the long blog hiatus, life has been pretty uneventful. We've been busy, of course, but nothing really exciting or interesting has happened lately.

Eric is plugging away at his dissertation and was able to run the first two subjects of Experiment Three for his thesis this past week. He feels really good about how things are going and thinks that, at this rate, he'll be able to accomplish his goal of finishing up by next spring. He's been working really hard at searching out potential job opportunities for us for when we leave Bloomington next summer and has found some intriguing possibilities.

I'm wrapping up the first fall session at the IEP, and the second session starts the week after next. Next week is our big "Week Seven", which is full of exams and whatnot, which means that my schedule gets upended and, hence, so does our family routine. Flexibility is the key!

Eric and I have been running a lot lately, getting our bodies ready to compete in the Bethel College Homecoming 5K race, which we also did last year. I think we'll both beat our times from last year, and hopefully make a dent in the standings. We've been enjoying this warmer weather -- it makes for nicer running in the morning -- but we're also ready for it to cool down so we can turn off our air conditioner and leave it off for awhile! 88 degress in October is ridiculous!

Ian is suffering from a nasty chest cold, which I think I contracted today. (Fun, fun!) He's got all four of his first molars in, and is working on a fifth. He's eating everything in sight and having a lot of fun being independantly mobile. Playing outside and "going bye-bye" are some of his favorite activities. He's also graduated to a "big boy" bed -- we took off the front of his crib and turned it into a daybed, with a little guard rail to keep him from falling out. He loves getting in and out of bed by himself, and does really well with going to sleep when he's supposed to. That kid loves his sleep -- thank goodness!

All in all, things are well with us.