I am so proud of Breanna! Earlier this year, she announced that she'd be running the Omaha Marathon on September 25th, and she immediately started training for it. Every day, she and her running partner, Adam, ran neighborhoods, parks, and lakes, all in an effort to be ready to run 26.2 miles on race day.

About a month away from the day of the marathon, her knees started giving her trouble, and after many arguments with herself, she finally decided to shoot for the half-marathon instead. It was a hard decision for her to make, but one I'm very relieved she went with, considering she's only got one pair of knees, and she's awfully young to begin a life of troubles with them.

The longest she had ever run was 10 miles on the beach in California, and other than that, her college and work schedule had only allowed her about 3-5 miles per day, if that. Needless to say, she was very nervous on the day of the race, worried  she wouldn't be able to run the entire distance. Heaven forbid she should walk!

We arrived downtown at 5:30 am so they could pick up their race packets and get warmed up… Here we are, standing in line. No, not for the race packets, but for the portable toilets!

Adam took advantage of the waiting to stretch… it was a chilly 40 degrees out, so everyone was probably pretty stiff…

This is Mike's "Don't you dare cut in line" look…

(Just kidding. I have no idea what he was looking at. All I know is he hadn't had any sleep for 24 hours, thanks to his work schedule.)

In the front are the professional runners in uniform. I have no idea where Adam and Bre disappeared to, but the line goes pretty much back to that second set of traffic lights waaaay in the back…

After the runners took off, Mike and I headed to a nearby restaurant for breakfast, waiting until we thought Adam and Bre would be approaching the finish line, and then we headed over there.

I wasn't prepared for Adam to suddenly appear, but there he was! He finished his half marathon in about an hour and 50 minutes or so…

A huge congratulations to you, Adam! Well done!

As Adam headed toward his finish line, Mike and I started anxiously looking for Bre. We waited and looked… then waited and looked some more. Mike started pacing, nervous that Bre had twisted her ankle or passed out somewhere. Or worse yet: that she had started walking. (We had tried convincing her that there was no shame in walking, but she was hearing none of that!)

And then I saw her bright pink Nike shorts. 🙂 "Mike! There she is!" I yelled, bc he had walked a little way away from me.  But of course, he'd already seen her, and she'd spotted him, a big smile on her face…

I heard him yell, "GO BRE! GO! YOU'RE ALMOST THERE!" and I started yelling the same thing, while also trying to get pictures…

I wanted to cry, bc it was then that I realized I was so afraid for her that she wouldn't finish. It meant so much to her to reach her goal, and I knew she'd had a lot of difficulty with training for it, so to see her come down the line with a smile on her face and a look of such satisfaction filled me with so much happiness…

It was at this point that I ran as fast as my legs would carry me to try to beat her to the finish line, cutting through hundreds of people. I wanted to get pictures of her crossing, but the way had been blocked off to us, so I stood where I could and got a few blurry ones (thanks to my having a near heart-attack from running so hard).

As soon as she realized that she was so close to the finish line, her head popped up and she took off at a sprint…

GO GO GO, BRE!!!

Her official time was exactly 2:05:00! She placed 490th out of 1,362 runners, and in her age group (20-24) she was 104/202. I was so very, very proud of my girl.

Here's Adam, with his medal.. he was quite ready to go back home and hit the sack…

(My favorite picture of the day…)

Believe it or not, they both said they wouldn't mind doing it again next year.  😉

Congratulations, Adam and Bre!

And I have to add: Bre didn't walk a single step for the entire 13.1 miles. 😉

A few weeks ago I decided to finally start going through all of Mike's parents' belongings that have been stored in our basement for the past year. I had avoided this enormous undertaking for a long time bc it involved sorting through literally thousands of photos and removing what seemed like hundreds of them from old picture frames.

But I did it. I sat down in the basement, turned on the tv for some company, and started opening boxes.

And boxes.

And boxes.

And that's when I came across the most fascinating photos. Mike's dad, Jimmy, had kept many of his relatives' photos from what appeared to be the very late 1800's and early 1900's, and I found myself wondering over them, desperately wishing I'd known they existed before Jimmy's passing. Old photographs never cease to bring me great curiosity, and I'm sad that I could have known who was in these photos, if I'd only thought to ask.

But how do you ask someone, "So… do you have any photos from the turn of the century that you could show me?" I suppose you ask them just like that.. if you think of it. Most of the time, however, I was busy trying to think of ways to get Mike's mother, Frieda, to talk about her childhood – one that was spent growing up during World War II in Germany. It never occurred to me that my father in-law, born in the great state of Texas, would have just as interesting of a childhood.

So I'm left with these old black-and-white photographs, filled with people who are linked to our family somehow. I took a few photos of them when I was in the basement, so I could share them with you – just in case you like old photos as much as I do. 🙂

First, I'll show you one of Jimmy as a baby, and those are his shoes. I think he's one of the most beautiful baby boys I've ever seen…

His mother's name was Jewel, and she died when Jimmy was a small boy. His grandmother, Viola, helped raise him.

Here he is when he was about 10 years old or so…

These are photos of people I can only guess at.. I can see resemblances between so many of them, and it was fun trying to guess at who belonged to whom…

I thought they made a handsome couple…

These were some of my favorites – especially that old school photo. All of the children were shoe-less and dusty, and the most interesting part was the mix of ages; there looked to be older teenagers mixed in with the youngsters. The slate that the boy in the middle is holding reads "Sycamore 4-9-30.. W.E. Faith.. J.N..Miss Fewell (Tewell?)."

I thought the woman below had interesting features.. perhaps she's the mother or aunt of the woman in the photo with her husband – the "handsome couple" photograph above; after all, they have the same wide-set eyes and cheekbones…

There were several other old photos, but there were also a lot of them from the 50's, as this one appears to be. Wouldn't you love to know what these ladies were laughing about? I imagine they were being very boisterous, and the fourth person in the room – no doubt laughing along with them – wanted to snap a photo to remember the hilarity of that afternoon – or to show them how silly they were being!

I hope you enjoyed looking at these photos as much as I did. I plan on taking them all out of the box Jimmy had stored them in and putting them into an album, in the best order I can guess at.

Join us next time, as we explore the 1970's – and answer the burning question: was Mike, in fact, the first person ever to wear the now-popular Justin Bieber hair-do?

P.S. After showing her this photo, I later overheard Sophie saying to one of her friends, "You should have seen my dad when he was our age: he was hot."