The Coombs Family

How quickly time goes by. Shelby had her first birthday party. My friend and I made her a little birthday hat and a shirt for eating her cake. Here we are before the party began. My friend Stephanie made her cakes and they were so cute, and delicious! She has a blog: the cake lady. Check her out, she does amazing work. We didn't have time to start singing to Shelby before she reached out and grabbed her cake. She was ready for this moment. The more of a mess she made, the more fun it became The floor was starting to get covered in cake. I even got some on me. It soon became a book party. Shelby loves to read, and she was in heaven. Thank you to everyone who helped make her day so special.

I decided to try running another full marathon for the second time in my life. The first time I nearly killed myself by the end. I ran it too fast and I could hardly walk for a week. I swore to myself that I would NEVER run another full marathon again. 26.2 miles is kind of far, right? Two years later, what do I do? I signed up for it again. It's like child birth, the longer you wait between, the easier it sounds. I ran the marathon this year with two of my co-workers Bill and Claudia. We had been training for months. Bill was on my Cascade Lakes Relay team and my Hood to Coast relay team this summer. Claudia and I have run together for years now and she is always very fast and pushes me more than I could ever do on my own. The weather was perfect this year. We allowed ourselves to stop for bathroom breaks (all four because of me), pictures, changed our socks, drank as much water as we could stomach, and we will finished in 4 hours and 38 minutes. Here are some pictures that captur