Kate's Second Word, Unsweet Tea, and a Fitness Tip

OK, it MAY be her second word, but Kate started saying "dada" this week. Kelley heard it first. Of course, I didn't believe it because she has been making the "b" sound for a while, but never the "d" sound. She starts off by mouthing "dada" silently. Then she whispers it. Finally, she says it out loud. It's like she's warming up, practicing, and then presenting what she just practiced!

I say that it MAY be her second word because she jabbers a lot of stuff, much of it in a whisper. She repeats something over and over when she's playing or making a mess that sounds like, "I'll try, I'll try, I'll try."

Regardless, I'm happy that she's saying "dada." Maybe one day soon she'll know what it means!

Unrelated, here are a couple videos of Kate to enhance the enjoyment of this post.

A. Kate's in what I call "Discovery/Destroyer" mode. Since she can crawl now, she's trying to figure out what EVERYTHING does. But in the process, she's really making some messes and it won't be long before something gets destroyed.

B. A girl after my own heart. Kate's getting a taste of unsweet tea from Diane. She's been sipping it like this for a couple weeks, and she still grimaces as if she's tasted a lemon. This wasn't her first sip at this time, so her grimace is less severe but still noticeable. More on unsweet tea after the videos.

Only in the south do you have to call it UNSWEET tea. It's better known as, TEA. Don't get me wrong, I love sweet tea. I wish it had zero calories. It took me over a year to ween myself off sweet tea and I did it by mixing sweet and unsweet. Over time, I reduced the amount of sweet and eventually I was content to drink it STRAIGHT UNSWEET. That was in 2003-2004, and I haven't PURPOSEFULLY drank sweet tea since. When you think you're drinking unsweet and it's actually sweet, it's DISGUSTING. Occasionally when I get breakfast at a drive thru, I'll mistakenly be given sweet tea. I find out when it's too late to go back, and usually, it's on my weekly golf trip with my former pastor, Charles Owens. He lives more than 2.5 hours away from us, but we meet somewhere weekly for golf that requires each of us to drive a minimum of 1.5 hours. That's my weekly time to eat a BAD breakfast - a biscuit from Bojangles, Chic Fil A, etc. I eat the SAME THING for breakfast all the other days - a pack of maple and brown sugar oatmeal mixed with an equal amount of plain oatmeal.

Why did I switch to unsweet? I'm not a diabetic, but I am a fitness freak. I like to eat and although I'm careful, I eat till I'm full. The greatest single way for Americans to reduce their daily caloric intake is to STOP DRINKING CALORIES! It's easy to consume 500, 1000, or MORE calories per day just in beverages. A 12oz Coke has 140 calories. A 12oz Mountain Dew has 170 calories. A 12oz orange soda has over 200 calories. Sweet Tea is impossible to rate because everyone makes it with different amounts of sugar. This was part of my dissertation, "A Fitness Model For Pastors."

When I stopped drinking calories, I lost some weight, but more importantly, reduced my waistline and bodyfat considerably - without changing ANYTHING ELSE. For me, it's water, unsweet tea, or diet soda, which I drink sparingly nowadays. One exception is that when I have a softball game, I'll take a low-calorie version Gatorade.

Kate is in the 100th percentile for height, and @ the 80th percentile for weight. Her birth mother is @5'9" and her birth father is 6'3". She's not going to be a small girl like her mom (Kelley is 5'1" and under 100lbs). We're going to give her every opportunity to eat and drink SMART so that she doesn't have to consume herself with her size/weight. Fortunately, she loves being outside so far, and she has active parents who love sports. You may see her on ESPN someday!

Kate and The Boys

(I didn't start this intending to write so much about our dogs. If you're in a hurry, scroll to the last paragraph and the pictures at the bottom.)

Before we had Kate, we had two boys: Max and Cooper, our yellow Labs. Max was born March 6, 2009, and Cooper was born October 6, 2009, so Max is 7 months older.

Max is smaller at 80 pounds, but what he "lacks" in size, he makes up for in speed, endurance, and overall athleticism. He'll run with MAXIMUM effort as long as I'll throw a ball for him to chase. When he's tired, he'll come back to me and lie down a few feet away with the ball between his paws, as if to say, "Give me a minute, Kev." Even so, if I throw another ball, he'll take off after it. (FYI, I give him a minute to rest.) Kelley's parents live on a lake and their dock is about 5-6 feet above the water during the summer months (9,10+ feet in the winter, and the drop doesn't bother the boys at all). Both dogs love going there and jumping off the dock chasing tennis balls. If I don't throw a ball for a while, Max jumps in chasing nothing.

Cooper is bigger at 105 pounds, bigger in every way: head, height, width, paws, tail . . .

But don't let his bigger size fool you. At least for a few sprints, he's about as fast as Max. The first few ball tosses (I throw one ball for each dog), Cooper is the first to the balls as often as Max. He doesn't have Max's endurance, though. When Cooper gets tired, he plods along after the ball. He always gets it, but he lets me know he's in no hurry. He's still athletic, though. He's a leaper. I love to lead him with long throws that bounce right in front of him. He leaps up like A.J. Green and snatches the ball out of the air, all in full stride. And it makes me feel like Tim Tebow - hey, don't laugh, Tebow is excellent at the deep ball!

We discovered Cooper's leaping ability the night we brought him home. When Max was little, we could put him on a chair or ottoman in the living room and he'd stay because he was scared to jump off. Cooper jumped off instantly, fearlessly.

Cooper's fearlessness and leaping ability proved to be a real pain for us as he lived in our laundry room for the first couple months. It was winter and we didn't want him outside in the cold. The baby gate that kept Max where we wanted him was no match for Cooper. We discovered this one night when we heard the sound of glass breaking. At first I thought someone was breaking in, but it was just Cooper. He'd leaped the baby gate and was destroying a glass ornament off the Christmas tree. I had to raise the baby gate so high that we couldn't step over it, and then block the open space at the bottom with my 60 lb and 55 lb dumbbells. One of Cooper's first sentences was, "YOU CANNOT CONTAIN ME!!!" (Our dogs talk to us, by the way, and each has his own unique sound. Cooper, being younger, speaks slower, isn't great with grammar, and struggles with bigger words. I could give you plenty of examples, but this is supposed to be a blog about KATE and the boys.)

I'm almost finished bragging about Cooper and trying to convince you that he's not a big slob. At the lake, Max launches himself off the dock for DISTANCE. He'd be a natural for that dog distance diving competition you may have seen on ESPN. Cooper couldn't care less about distance; he goes for HEIGHT. It's so funny. Max barely makes a splash when he lands because he's more or less skiing across the top of the water when he lands. Cooper leaps up as high as possible, and as you know, what comes up must come down. And he comes down with a mammoth SPLOOSH! When he rises back to the surface, THEN he takes off for the ball. Because he's so big and strong, he's a faster swimmer than Max. His big paws move a lot of water.

Being WATER DOGS, it's particularly funny that Cooper can't stand water from a hose. Without a lake in our yard, the next best thing for Max is the water hose. He jumps through the stream, "eats" it, and becomes a soaking wet mess. Meanwhile, Cooper stands behind whoever has the hose. If you come close to pointing it in his direction, he circles back behind you, saying, "I don't like getting squirted wif wah-der, y'all!"

To each other, Max generally acts like a wimp and Cooper acts like the boss. To anyone who attempts to walk in our yard, Max is the GREAT DEFENDER while Cooper invites them in to play. Everybody says, "It's that little one I'm worried about." To us, Cooper is the loving one, and Max is the hyper one. So, with their contrasting expressions, we've wondered how they'd be with Kate. We've had her around them since we brought her home and they've been pretty gentle - the harshest thing was a few aggressive licks we couldn't avoid. Yesterday I found out how they're going to be with her. I had her in the gym with me, nowhere near the door. The dogs usually lie just outside the door watching me. Kate crawled to them, and I cautiously started taking pictures. Here's what happened (Max has red collar, Cooper has black collar):

The Masters - (If I were in a tourn. pool)

This is one of my favorite weeks of the entire year, all because of sports. The NCAA Final Four finishes this week. As a Tar Heel basketball fan, it's been a fun week for me over the years for that reason alone. Major League Baseball starts and now there's something on TV I like just about every night between now and October. And the Masters is this week. It's the best golf tournament of the year. I got to go in 2002, the opening round. I saw Phil Mickelson chip in for birdie from way off the green on No. 11. I'll probably never get to go back, so that was a great day - and it didn't cost me a cent. If my wife loved me, she'd figure out a way to get us tickets to a future Masters TOURNAMENT (NOT PRACTICE) round one year.

I heard about a Masters pool yesterday where you pick one of the three favorites:

1. Tiger Woods

2. Rory McIlroy

3. Phil Mickelson

and then you pick any 6 other players. I didn't hear how the winner of the pool was determined, but the simple way is to add up the final score of your 7 players and the lowest total score wins.

Here's who I'd pick:

1. Phil Mickelson - because he's my favorite golfer. Can't stand Tiger Woods. I've never heard of an athlete as selfish, arrogant, (you can keep filling in blanks) as that punk. Rory McIlroy is pretty arrogant himself, but not to the Tiger level. It was a pleasure watching him blow the Masters on the back 9 last year.

2. My six picks from the rest of the field:

Bubba Watson - he's my next favorite golfer, and because of how he's boldly proclaimed Jesus the past couple years, I'd probably rather he win than Phil. I don't "tweet" but I do have a Twitter account and I keep up with what Bubba says. He and his wife just adopted a 1-month old boy. Go Bubba.

Keegan Bradley - This is his first Masters and there hasn't been a Masters rookie winner since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979, so it's not likely. But he's playing well and he did win the last major.

Lee Westwood - He's played well at Augusta in the past and seems to always be on the leaderboard at majors.

Luke Donald - The current number 1 player in the world (whatever that means). He'll win a major sooner or later b/c he's too good not to.

Adam Scott - Too good never to have won a major. Almost won last year.

Bill Haas - Had to pick a seventh guy. He won in a playoff over Mickelson and Bradley earlier this year.

If you're a golf fan, who would you pick?