I have been actively trying to not hate winter this year. Usually I spend winter wishing it away waiting on spring to come. I am trying to find ways to love winter and enjoy the moment we are in.
Cannon and Humphry don’t mind cuddle weather.
We spent our evening working on our bike and scooter skills.
Any evening that it’s not bitter cold or covered in snow you will find us outside!
What do you do to love winter?
As I grapple with a persistent injury and dreams not realized this post by Sara Hall brought back some hope. Not all journeys are smooth and direct. Keep hoping, and I hope your dreams come true too!
We often overlook that we live so close to a magical National Park. It is my goal to spend way more time there this summer (We love our parks pass).
We have been to RMNP many time but never taken the time to get a stamp in our passports so we stopped in at the visitors center.
We went to the Bear Lake Corridor.
We weren’t really prepared for a long hike as this wasn’t our original intention but we explored around Bear Lake and had an amazing time.
The lake is frozen over so it’s fun to run around on.
We do have all wheel drive and snow tired but the roads were easy to drive on regardless.
A little deposit in my attempt to like winter more….
Just a reminder (to myself) how important outside time is even in the winter when it’s harder.
I loved this article:
https://childmind.org/article/why-kids-need-to-spend-time-in-nature/
I spent my day still trying to deal with a very tender knee….hoping to get well enough to enjoy time exercising again soon!
W also broke out some heart for fun Valentine’s breakfasts.
And finally we are getting some family game nights (candy land) I have been dreaming of the time when we can all sit down around a table and enjoy board games. Emmy is finally old enough to play along and Cannon is super into it. I love it.
What is something that you are looking forward to?
We had a pretty typical winter day.
We spent the morning at one of our favorite playgrounds. It was a little cold and grey but these kids have fun no matter what.
We broke out some of our fun Valentine’s Day snacks (there will be many)
In the afternoon Cannon had school and then we hit up the library, it’s time to refresh our book nook!
We have been talking a lot about skiing and how we are bad Coloradans because we don’t currently ski. We are thinking that we should all start ski lessons and learn together. I ran across this article about how you can build skiing into your training.
Do you ski? If you have kids do they ski?
If I am honest the treadmill is not just a winter survival tool. We are lucky to own a treadmill that lives in our basement, and it helps get the miles in . All times of year the treadmill is often the best bet for getting my run in.
I have a few tricks to make treadmill time more enjoyable and fight boredom.
I save shows or movies that I really want to see for the treadmill, it’s especially satisfying to binge watch something so I know I have something to look forward to watching. Bonus points if it’s something that Cory doesn’t like to watch. At home we have a TV in the basement gym, at the gym I borrow one of the kids’ tablets, I worry about breaking my iPad especially since I use it for work, the Fire Tablets have big cases around them and are under warranty.
For longer workouts I keep my favorite snacks with me, like gatorade that are hard to carry with my while running outside.
Last and most important I play games with the treadmill to keep things interesting. Our treadmill at home has incline and decline so I will move it up and down to keep my legs engaged. When I have an easy run planned but mentally I am having a hard time I will change up the speed and it makes the time go by way faster.
One of my favorites is a progression run. I start off really easy then speed the treadmill up .1 MPH each minute (or so, doesn’t have to be perfect) until I am running comfortably hard, then I start over and do it again until my cool down. I also like to one minute hard, 1 minute easy or strides at the end to flush my legs out.
Here are some GREAT treadmill workouts if you are looking for a strength workout or speed work:
This 3-2-1 workout is great, this one and many more HERE.
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Do you love or hate the treadmill?
Any fun tips for making it work?
Happy Running!
I was very excited when we met our goal of 1000 hours outside last year! It was an audacious goal and well worth it.
The 1000 Hours Outside movement really spoke to me and they have many great resources:
https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/
While getting outside can look different for everyone I wanted to share what we did in 2021 that helped up reach our goal:
2. We traveled a lot (for us). We spent over 70 nights away from home in 2021, at least 55 of those in our RV. When we are traveling we spend most of the day outside exploring where ever we are visiting. I am not sure that we will be able to keep up this level of travel, but I hope so, we love experiencing the world with our kids.
3. We counted everything! Dinner in the backyard, trips to the playground, a day in Disneyland, time at walking to school….all of it. It didn’t have to be a long hike in nature to count. In the summer we spent almost every morning in our back yard while it was still cool.
4. We allowed for seasonal shifts.
If we broke down the year evenly we would have needed at least 84 hours outside each month. In January 2021 we only logged 42 hours. I wasn’t worried about the deficit knowing that spring, summer and fall would be much easier to be outside. Our month with the most time outside was September with 158 hours outside followed by May with 129 hours. Even summer can be difficult to be outside all day when it’s blazing hot in the afternoon. The shoulder seasons and trips banked us the most outdoor hours.
5. We tracked our time but didn’t sweat the details.
I logged our time outside on a simple spreadsheet and just did my best to be accurate(ish) I didn’t use a timer and mostly rounded to whole numbers. I didn’t subtract 5 minutes here or there for bathroom trips inside or add outside time for walking into a store. We didn’t count time in the car driving to places we would spend time outside or camping sites. Our total could truly be hours less or more but that’s not important to me it was just a fun thing to work towards together.
The 1000 Hours Outside website has other ways to track your time outside if spreadsheets aren’t your jam.
I am loving setting up our occasions bin for each holiday this year. It’s so nice to just be able to grab fun, festive items to celebrate each season. This idea originated from Shakira, she has such cute ideas!
These bins are so fun to put together. All of the items are found easily at places like Home Good, Target, Amazon or Etsy.
This is only the third bin we have put together and I am excited to see what an entire year looks like.
We have plans to make bins for these occasions:
We love these little extras, it makes meals and snacks so much more fun!
Since we are not currently needing to quarantine we made our way out to one of our favorite playgrounds.
It’s extra sweet because this playground was closed for a very long time and it’s a good one.
We did some more preschool at home.
We started doing home preschool with Cannon back when he was quarantined from school in the fall. He loved doing it so much that he asked me to move Emmy’s school time from when he was in school to the morning so he can do it with us.
So far January has been snowy and a little quarantiney.
We have been spending more time inside than I would like (Big goals to spend even more time outside this year) But I am not too worried about it too much as we spend much more time outside in the spring/summer/fall.
We did some home preschool and some experiments from Kiwi Co.
We shoveled snow….
And made snow angels.
We played
Oh and built snowmen.
So I guess we did spend some time outside. Still looking forward to mornings with coffee on the deck, meals outside and sunny weekends in the mountains.