Personal Best

For P.E. we're always thinking up games and things that we can use our timer for. Yesterday at a park a few blocks from home we came up with a new one. The playground is circular and surrounded by a concrete ledge (you can see it in this photo). We took turns running around it and using our watches to see how fast we could make it around. The runner had to do their best to stay on the concrete, not the grass, but there was no penalty for slipping.

I made it in 25 seconds. Danya started out at 43 seconds and worked her way down to 26 seconds! Gloria's fastest time was 31 seconds. I forget Daniel's time but he was the fastest by a long shot. He always is. That boy was built for speed. We try to encourage the kids that these sorts of games aren't about competition. The fun part is beating your own record.

We saw a little boy at Walmart today who was about a year older than Kevin. His mom was chasing him into the McDonald's there and wrestling a candy bar out of his hands. He must have weighed nearly as much as Gloria. It was sad and awful to watch. I think that ruining a child's health like that should be criminal. I've never read about a case yet of extreme child obesity that wasn't the parents' fault. Some people might read our blog and see pictures of us eating out with our kids and assume that we never feed them healthy foods. On the contrary, even when we eat out we teach the kids how to make healthy food choices. We very carefully look at the nutritional info on our groceries picking things that are low fat, lower calorie, high fiber, etc. We've had total strangers come up to us when we're out somewhere and compliment our kids on their healthy food choices. To paraphrase the bible, "All foods are acceptible, but not everything is beneficial."