The Coombs Family

For Shelby's first birthday we decided to get family pictures by our wedding photographer Randy Kepple. I love the pictures he takes and I figured it was time to leave it to the professional to get it done right. Here are a few of my favorites.

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...

Our family vacation to Sun River was exactly what we needed. I was able to run almost every day and I ended up with about 40 miles that week. Caleb and Shelby would ride the bike next to me and keep me company. We saw a lot of deer, duck, and other animals everywhere we went. I over ate and over slept, two of my favorite things. We stayed as long as we could and already want to go back again. Shelby LOVES the water. We never realized she was part fish. Now we know. The Hanson's came too and Shelby and Cooper became fast friends. Shelby was so glad to have another little person there to share toys with. Cooper was even nice enough to pee on her in the tub one night. That's a first for her. On one of our bike rides we stopped for some photos. We went to the falls to check them out, but soon realized the bike and trailer would not go on the trail, so we had to come back. Caleb tied flies on Sunday. It rained, and we didn't mind at all. I did a puzzle and Shelby ran around and ...

Last time I wrote Shelby was taking a few steps here and there and taking her time. Now she is pretty sure she's ready to start running with me. She walks everywhere and does not want to be picked up anymore and held because it slows her down and she wants to explore the world. It's so much fun watching her learn to balance, turn around, step on different types of flooring, wear shoes and go up and down hills. She has scratched up knees and hands, but it doesn't seem to slow the desire to walk. We tried to make her stop picking all the flowers and just smile for a picture. It didn't work very well. She was pretty pumped about picking the flowers and handing them to us. Now if I could just teach her to load the dishwasher, fold laundry and vacuum.

So much is going on in our house right now and I just haven't had the time to blog lately. What's new with us? I'll start with Shelby. Shelby is starting to walk now. She takes 1-2 steps pretty regularly, but won't venture out beyond that for now. Fine with me! I'm hoping she will stick to crawling a little bit longer before I have to worry about her walking. Caleb on the other hand is working with her in the evenings trying to get her to take more steps. She is eating all sorts of fun foods with summer here. Lots of fresh fruit and veggies from our friends gardens. She eats better than we do. Caleb has one more week of summer school and then he is off to Utah for a week. We will miss him dearly but he hasn't seen his family for awhile and will enjoy the trip. He's trying to convince me to let him fix his motorcycle, but he's not winning that battle yet. He took it apart and it's more damaged than he thought, which means more time and money to fix th...

We have taken Shelby to the beach a few times but the weather was never nice enough to let her play in the water. She was timid in the beginning and then we could not get her out of the water. She would cry if you picked her up or took her away from it. She also did not want to be held and wanted to crawl around in sand all day.