Off to the Races!

It has been my practice this year to write one piece per month about everything we do within that time frame.  However, we have been so busy in May, I already need to write!  And I'm going to break it up a bit even so, because our trip to Virginia Beach is a piece in itself.

Ine's school year was wrapping up.  The seniors are done in May at her school, so she was finishing up her final projects, reports, etc. and she is now officially done with school, even though it's only May 15th.  She was able to do some swimming with her friend, Anne Tillery, after school thanks to the coach letting them use the pool during swimming lessons for other kids.  She has some non-academic activities to go to this week, and then graduates next week.  So hard to believe!  Yesterday, she cleaned out her locker and I picked her up after her only final exam (because she had A+ grades in almost all her classes, she was exempted from her finals!), and she was a bit sad.  She spent the afternoon going through her school papers before throwing them out--something she wouldn't dream of doing in Belgium, as there is some system where they can come back to you and ask to see all your work again and you have to produce it for the first 2 years after you graduate.  So she felt really nervous about throwing everything away here!

Anyway, as I say, it's been another busy month.  We ended April on a high note, and then were excited to have the DC Color in Motion 5K on May 2nd.  My friend Emily posted on Facebook that she was forming a team and anyone who wanted to join her should sign up.  They were having a promotion so I was able to get us a deep discount on the race, so I signed up and asked Ine if she wanted to join.  She was a little wishy washy about it, so I told her she was going.  My sister wound up signing up as well.

I knew I wanted us all to wear white shirts so we could really get colored up during the race.  We decided to make team shirts and Leah decided our team name would be "Team Victory," the reasoning behind this being "if we aren't Team Victory, everyone will think we're losers."  Well, OK then!  So Friday night, we got white shirts for everyone, iron on letters, and we made shirts with our names on the front and Team Victory on the back.  Leah went crazy with fabric markers and drew pictures on hers, and I had both girls sign their names on mine.  We were ready!

We picked Emily up at 7:30 and met my sister up at RFK Stadium, where the 5K was being held.  It was a very loosey goosey race--there was no timing, when you arrived, you just got a random number.  We picked up our race packets and we each got a packet of color and then we had to stand around for a while.

So we eventually broke into our color early.  Everyone was throwing color around and it was a really festive atmosphere, and we had fun throwing colored powder on each other, as well as getting sprinkled by others around us.  Leah became good at finding half used packets on the ground and we got colored with extras that way too.

Now what you need to understand is that Ine is a VERY tidy person.  She does not like chaos and disorder, she doesn't even like stacking dishes on top of each other for transport from the table to the sink.  Getting messy like this was almost torture for her at first.  This is just legitimately not her thing.  She also hates when she looks foolish and she seems convinced that people are watching her and judging her on what she does and how she looks all the time.  So this was really a situation where she felt she stood out and she was uncomfortable anyway.  But as you can see from the top picture to the bottom, she relaxed a great deal as we got messier and messier and as time went on.

So we have no idea about the time we did the run in.  There was no official time kept and no timing chips issued.  The point of it just seemed to be the fun we had. :)  As you went around, there were different coloring stations, which was super fun, and volunteers hurled color at you.  Leah quickly discovered that you would scoop it up off the ground and toss it at each other.  We had many color wars.  It was great!  Ine and my sister Judy took turns running with Leah and we just had an amazing time.

Leah in the blue station

Family photo at the end of a super fun run

We met back up with Emily at the end and Team Adorkable Me/Team Victory posed for a winning photo!

Afterwards, Judy took off to relieve her babysitter (our mom) and in a further effort to help Ine relax from being so self conscious, I decided we would all go out to lunch in our colors.  This was initially met with some protests, and everyone else brushed off as much of their color as they could, but I wore mine full on and endured the stares and giggles.  It was actually kind of fun to watch people's reactions.  Especially people who were looking and trying not to look.  Even better, we ate outside, so people on the street could look as well as people in the dining area.

The following day, Leah was involved in the Great Train Race here in Fredericksburg.  It was a 1 mile fun run and she had participated in the running club at school to get ready for it.  It was a really warm day, but they had a fair too, and we wandered through the fair until Leah's heat was ready to kick off.  She did the mile in 11 minutes or so, and I was so proud of her!  It was fun for us to all be there together and for me and Ine to cheer her on.  Happily, Ine got video of Leah's start and finish as well.

We also did a Mother's Day 5K this year.  I started work for United Methodist Family Services back in February as an admin assistant and they are trying to recruit foster families and boost our profile in the community.  Consequently, they co-sponsored a 5K for Mother's Day and our local office wanted to have a few faces in the crowd, so I signed the girls and myself up for it.  Leah announced she was going in the stroller, but when race time came, she wanted to run.  Ine said "I don't want to be last" and so I told them to go ahead and run without me, and they took off.  Happily, my boss was there with her camera and got some great pictures for me, as I sauntered slowly through the race myself.

I love the last picture in particular, as it's so sweet, Ine encouraging Leah to the finish line.  They are so sweet together.

In other news... Ine and I were talking about food one night and I mentioned that when I was in Germany, I had fallen in love with paprika chips.  She about died.  She loves paprika chips!  And happy news, they aren't German!  They're all over Belgium as well. So we quickly sent an email to her parents and asked them "Send us paprika chips!" and they made us a little care package full of paprika flavored goodies.  We haven't gotten into everything yet, but suffice it to say, they are just as delicious as I remember... As an aside, I remember when I was young and would go to Canada and everything was printed in French and English, how exotic that seemed to me.  Well, now I've got potato chip bags printed in Dutch and French.  My head might explode from the exoticness of it all!

Thanks, Hilde and Johan!  I am strongly considering sending a ransom note before the end of June that reads, "If you want your kid back, keep the paprika coming"...

We also have been spending our evenings finding fun things to do around town.  We often take a walk around the neighborhood, or down to get ice cream, or we take a drive somewhere.  One night we went into town and took pictures of flowers, had a bubble fight (a pitbull walking by really had fun with the bubbles, and we got lots of smiles from other passersby, because bubbles just make people happy!), and then went to Benny Vitale's for giant pieces of pizza.  It was an awesome night.

Ine took over photographing the flowers, as I am apparently bad at it

Ine's Belgian Vans are a source of pride, and now they have touched the sidewalks of Fredericksburg

Bubble war

Giant pizza! The Fredericksburg Slice

Leah and her friend Carly flank Ine at school lunch!

As I said, Ine finished school when she took her last (and only) final exam.  She is already pretty bored, so yesterday, I took her out walking with me and then we went to Leah's school and had lunch with Leah.  We have also had some fun coloring her hair.  We dyed it brown just before the prom, but between the sun and the pool, most of the color went away.  This week we decided to try red.  She loves it, and I think it looks great!

Ine holding court with the old men in Pratt Park during my daily walk with my friend Susan (in purple)

New hair color--I'm trying to convince her to cut it, but she is thus far refusing

And so the month of May moves forward, whether we want it to or not.  There have been a lot of tears already about the end coming, vows that the State Department can't make her leave, questions about the international implications of kidnapping... It is a tough time of year.  We still have really a lot of time together, 6 weeks, but that's really not a lot of time at the same time.  We don't want to spend it being unhappy, but we also have to acknowledge and work through our feelings about becoming separated.  We are spending almost all our free time together, which is nice, and having deep conversations about family, the future, and how much we are going to miss each other.  It is really affirming to have built such a great relationship with Ine, especially after a few months early on of not really knowing how she felt about anything.  We don't have to ask now, she is an opinion-expressing-machine, and I love it!!!

See ya in the next post!