Fall back.

 Fall has been good to us. We went apple picking with friends.

 We ate apple pie and apple crisp and plain old apples for weeks following this little trip to the orchard.

Scott joined up with some friends to run the Ragnar Adirondacks Relay. It was an "ultra" team, so it consisted of six team members rather than the usual 12 (like the one I did at Ragnar Cape Cod). Scott ran three relay legs totaling 32+ miles. He experienced "hitting the wall," but came home hungry for more. He is planning on running a trail marathon in New York in May; I'll join him if my hip continues to cooperate. I ran my first speedwork since Labor Day this week. I felt out of breath and out of shape, but my hip is back up and running. Yea!

 In the anticipation of winter, we have been park-hopping and making the most of the (generally) mild weather.

 Perhaps the best thing to happen this fall is that my mom came to visit. There was a good deal on airline tickets, so she came. We didn't make huge plans because Bruce still had school, but it was nice to relax and talk to my mom all day and all night.

 The kids loved having Grandma around. Like the kids, she has lots of energy - and she slept very well at night!

 Bruce had one day off school, so we played all morning and then headed downtown to take a boat into the Atlantic to go looking for whales.

 It takes 45-60 minutes for the boat to travel to the bay where whales typically feed, so I brought a DVD player to keep Phoebe busy.

 She didn't last long enough to see whales. Thankfully, she was free.

 We saw a few humpback and fin whales. The coolest thing we saw was a humpback jump clear out of the water. Usually when the whales surface, you see their spout blow upward, their fin glide for a bit, and then their back arch and tail flap down into the water. The biologist on the boat said she couldn't remember the last time she saw a whale breach the water like that.

I'm glad we fit the whale watch in when we did. A few days later, Hurricane Sandy roughed up the waters (and land and air!) a bit. My mom ended up flying out ahead of the storm to avoid the inevitable delays afterward. Boston didn't get as much damage as anticipated; it was very windy and rainy on Monday (enough to cancel school) and some areas had power outages, but we stayed inside and were fine the whole time.