Life After Cross-Country

If you have followed this blog at all in the past few years, the one thing you may have noticed is that from Mid August-mid November, I disappear.  Actually, my family notices this from time to time as well.  I coach cross-country in the fall and have found that if you have a successful team, then the season may be much longer then other sports.  In fact, the runners still have 2-3 more weeks depending on how they place at the pre-qualifier for Nationals; but because it is a Nike sponsored event, Vermont does not recognize it as part of our season, so we hand the workouts off to some of the parents and watch from afar.  Anyway, enough about cross-country---well almost- they just won the New England Regional High School Cross Country Championships yesterday! OK now I am done. 

I do actually manage to get some family time in during the fall and, no, that does not count the times little man is running along side me at a cross-county race.  Besides Halloween, fall walks, carving pumpkins, apple picking, running a half marathon(yes this is a normal activity in our family!) and other traditional fall activities, we had an entire house full of guests a few weeks ago.  One of my high school friends, her husband, and all 5 of their kids came to visit.  One might ask what you do with all of those people.  Actually that is an easy question: factory tours! Yep, there are about a million Vermont companies around here and many of them have factory tours that are free or pretty cheap.  We spent the day eating Ben and Jerry's ice cream, drinking apple cider, sampling cider doughnuts and watching glass blowers (yes you can take 6 children under the age of 10 into a glass studio and survive!).  We had a great (cheap) weekend with our friends. 

I also spent the Fall learning that sometimes my husband is a very intelligent man.  I was a little freaked out one day when I came home from a cross country race to find all of the leaves raked up before we had gotten the traditional, "jump in the leaves" photos out of the way for the year.  In the past year we moved our garden plot around since it's original location had no nutrients what so ever in the soil.  The area is still fenced in, and my wonderful husband had thrown the leaves into this area in hopes of them composting in the next year along with other things that we have yet to throw into this area because little man had made this into fall play area and is having way too much fun "jumping in the leaves."

I hope all of you have been enjoying the fall as much as we have!