Oh, wow. Has it seriously been two weeks since I’ve blogged?! I don’t count the last post as a real post since I was just figuring out how to post blogs from a phone (which is a formatting nightmare, if you want to know the honest truth) and since I was honing my skills as a two-finger phone typist. Has it been worth the savings to get rid of the internet? Has it made our lives simpler or more complicated? Are we really going to survive without it?!

In other news, we had an earthquake in Oklahoma. Yes, you read that right. It was a 5.6, and while I have no idea if that’s big or not, I can tell you that I felt it. I was half asleep when our bedroom door started shaking, and in my grogginess, I assumed it was the girls, somehow unable to push open an already halfway opened door. I went to let them in only to find no one standing outside and to hear Wes shout, “An earthquake! An earthquake!” (And reminiscent of the last earthquake we experienced, circa springtime 2007, Emma was the only one truly upset by any of this. This time, she started crying in her room while we rushed in to comfort her, which was infinitely preferable to the last time when she began doing flips in the womb where there was just no way to comfort her at all. Hooray for Emma being on the outside!)

All this said, we’re not supposed to have earthquakes here, are we? I heard people at church talking about how it must be the end of the world, but I’m sticking by my theory that Earth is kinda old and people haven’t been great to it and these things just happen. I told Wes if this is the beginning of the really bad stuff, he has to win the lottery to go Terra Nova, where we’ll take our chances with dinosaurs and the slightly insane/not-quite-right dictator that goes along with it. (Have you seen this show? We watch it on our phones – thank you, Hulu – and while I’m not quite sure I would recognize any of the actors in anything else since their faces are grainy blurs in that kindof format and I have no idea what they actually look like, I can assure you that I am completely hooked.)

Our world has been shaken in another way recently. Wes found an app that counts calories. (Oh, you know where this is going.) We’ve been disturbed by how we gain three pounds with every high mileage run we do. We couldn’t figure it out until we were honest with ourselves and admitted that we consume about three times the calories we burn off, thanks to the wonders of the Chinese buffet restaurant. (Spicy chicken, you have won my heart.) No wonder we’re not sporting the super thin style of serious long distance runners! Wes downloaded the app to his phone, and after a day of hearing him grumble and complain, I told him to put it on my phone, too, because misery loves itself some good company. I read a book called “Made to Crave” a few months ago, and honestly, I thought the author was a little extreme in the way she saw food, but the grumpier I get over not getting to drink as many Cokes as I would like to, the more I’m inclined to believe her when she suggests that I just might love Coke more than I love Jesus. Ouch. And while my inclination is to do a crash diet kind of fix and call myself healthy, I know it’s good and right for me right now to change the way I see food and learn how to make better choices. I have a love-hate relationship with the calorie counter already because it’s no fun to log everything I eat, but wow – it’s been a great way to learn what really healthy portion control and nutritional value looks like. Of course, the best part about the whole thing is that it emails Wes my weight gain and weight loss and vice versa. Oh, wait, did I say that was the best part? It is right now while we’re managing some self-control, but the day will come when the calorie counter tells him that I’m eating too many of the candy corn pumpkins and the leftover Halloween candy (only the stuff the girls don’t like, of course) and tells me that he went for the big breakfast at McD’s when he said he was just going for coffee. And that? Will NOT be good. In the meantime, we’re bonding over our incredulity that one glazed donut is three hundred calories (aaaahhhh!!!) and that we were once able to put away a half a dozen each (AAAAAHHHH!!!!) without even thinking about it. You do the math. CRRRRAAAZY.

Oh, and I could still put away half a dozen donuts on my own. Easily. So, don’t go sending any Krispy Kreme gift cards to me. (Unless you really, really want to.)

On a subject that ties into that one (running cancels out donuts, donuts cancel out running, calories out, calories in, etc, etc), we’re still running. Even eight months after we started this whole running thing, I still marvel at this simple statement – WE’RE STILL RUNNING. I noted the other day that I wasn’t sore at all after our last half-marathon, having grown accustomed to that mileage over the past couple of months. I should have kept my big mouth shut because our running schedule heard my prideful boasting and raised the bar. Our weekday runs are now what our long weekend runs once were, and our weekend runs are long enough that I have trouble figuring out a route around our relatively small town. So many miles!

The girls have been passing a fever back and forth to one another here lately. It seems like every time I write a blog post, they’ve just gotten over an illness or are in the middle of one. What can I say? They’re germy, germy girls. I keep thinking to myself that this is the worst one we’ve ever had, but I think they were dealing with the same thing last year at this time. One minute, they’ll be up and running around, totally fine, and the next, they’re falling asleep at the dinner table, burning up hot. I’m hoping that it passes soon. Very, very soon.

Because if it doesn’t, I’m seriously going to need a donut.

And if you’ve read this far – good for you! Here’s Em’s pre-K picture to reward your perseverance.