Sunday, April 1, 2018

Easter Weekend Fun and Running

We spent the weekend down at Ryan's parents house with his sister, brother-in-law and their two kiddos. It is always a bit crazy when we all get together but we always have fun! This weekend was no exception :)

Things got a little crazy in the living room on Friday night with the boys playing, so Sam took a break in the kitchen to read ;)

The Easter Bunny was set to arrive a day early due to travel schedules, so before bed on Friday, the kids wrote him a note and left out some snacks :)

Letter to the Easter Bunny - so cute!

In classic Danielle style, I neglected to bring Sam's easter basket, as I knew Irene had bought baskets for all the kids. Of course, Meghan brought the boys HUGE baskets and stuck everything inside. Sam was left with an adorable basket from Irene and all our little extras in a brown paper bag :) Can you say ghetto? 😂😂

Needless to say, everyone was excited for Easter, so we were up early for egg hunting and a big breakfast.
Egg hunting!

Eggs collected :)

Reading to Cam 💕

Then to get out some energy, we headed out into the sunshine for some running and scooting around the block!

Scooting!

Still some big snowbanks but otherwise, a beautiful spring day!

Having fun

Focused :)

While the kids were occupied with lunch, Ryan and I headed out for a run. It was a beautiful blue sky day, if a bit breezy, and we enjoyed a nice road road out through the marshes. I was super excited to hear peepers in the swampy areas along the roadways and to see a patch of snowdrops blooming in the woods. Spring!!! 🌷🌷 (7.1 miles)

High tide in the Newburyport marshes

 We capped off the day with dinner out at Agave. Yum!

Margherita for the win :)

Cousins 💗

This morning, Ryan and I headed over to Bradley Palmer for a trail run. We had expected to find snow on the trails, so had on our screwshoes. We found almost no snow, and very little mud. Pretty much dry ground everywhere. Ahhh. That was really nice.

Dry trails!

However, I will admit that my stomach was not feeling great due to last night's mexican food, and I was also sort of cranky to find that pretty much everywhere except the meadow was covered in blowdowns and debris. I mean, everywhere. I have never seen such debris on these trails before. It was insane. 

Pretty much the view for most of today's run. Lots of blowdowns and me struggling to keep up 😁😁

Yup, it was bad...

It was bad enough that we crossed the river and headed over into Willowdale to see if it was any better over there. Of course, it was not 😂, especially on the double-track old carriage roads, although it did seem that some of the singletrack might have been cleared by the bikers, so that was nice. Still, there was a lot of stopping and walking over and around things. And the crazy amount of trees down got us a bit confused a few times, which did mean that we ran some new to us singletrack and managed to come out on a golf course we never knew existed 😄 I'm totally not calling it an ideal trail run, however, it was a really nice morning and it was great to run with Ryan and to be on trails that were not snow and ice covered. Spring had not quite arrived in most of the woods yet, but there were still pretty views to be had...

Along the pond

...and we did find some greenery and skunk cabbage coming up along the streams. 

Things are greening!

We spotted this big old toad and a woodcock. Other than that the woods were quiet.

Willowdale running

In the end, even on a day where I might not be feeling my best, I'm still grateful to get to be out running in the woods for a few hours on a Sunday morning with my best friend 💗 (13.0 miles)

And I'm very happy to finish up March with a solid month of running, and 530.6 miles for the first three months of the year. It feels good to have been able to consistently put in decent time and miles through the winter months and I'm looking forward to keeping it up as we head into spring!


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