Color me Rad 2013!!!

Yay! I am finally able to post about another one of the BEST days of my life! Oh I have waited all week to share with you readers about this great day, but with our crazy life right now I have yet to have the chance. But before I start on my wonderful happy post, I have to update everyone on our family. We are officially moved out of that horrid house and away from that awful man, fully moved out by yesterday at 3:45 pm. Only an hour and fifteen minutes before we were supposed to, I was quite proud of us! It rained heavy all day yesterday too, so we moved most of our possessions in the storm. I had to bag every box we had packed so that things would not get ruined, it was SOOOOOOOOOOO much work lol! Wow... As if winning the case and removing us from his property wasn't enough for him, our landlord also felt the need to harass us all day yesterday by stalking us and driving around the house over and over again until we called the police on him. :( What a creep! I am so glad that we are finally done with him!

Saturday was seriously the most fun I have had in a while! For those of you that don't know, I volunteered for our town's Color me Rad 5k with my work. It has become a new tradition for me and some other workers to do, this is our second time volunteering! I will always promote volunteering and participate in volunteering, in my opinion its the best way to give back to the community! Donations require money or materials. You can volunteer even if you don't have any money! I try to volunteer at least once every few months, its an important part of my Buddhism training. My family does believe in karma and the so-called "karma bank," we try to create as much good karma in our karma bank as we can. Sounds silly now typing it out, but it is an important part of my training and I feel it does play a factor in our lives and in being all around better people. But I do also encourage everyone to volunteer themselves as much as possible. I know that the YMCA just loves volunteers and most other businesses do too. Ask around, or if possible, help at a 5k or marathon! They are also always looking for free help. Lastly, you can always volunteer at Good Will, the Salvation Army, almost any church or at any soup kitchen or homeless shelter. Let's all start giving back, it is such a wonderful feeling to do so!

Color me Rad is amazing. All the love and color they bring to each city is just phenomenal. I bet they could end all the wars with color bombs! I love being a part of this experience, it is truly healing to the soul, especially now with all the hate currently shoved into my family's life. I ate up every moment, every motivational speech, every hug I received. It is such an amazing experience! I started out helping set up the finish line and was able to enjoy the opening ceremony this year. Wow! My good work buddy Jaysun was the MC and he just rocked it so much! Got everybody moving and grooving and smiling! They had a Zumba dance off and a push up contest and a game of hide and go seek, you should have seen all theses adults having fun like elementary kids! Made me sooooooooo happy! After the opening ceremony, I headed down to the purple color bomb station to work with the Billings Bulls Hockey Team. That was a pretty cool experience! :) I used to adore the Bulls as a child, it was cool to work and have fun with them as an adult. I got just about as covered in color as I did last year lol, the Bulls and I may or may have not gotten into several color bomb fights ourselves... All in good fun lol!

I even found my Kelsie and DesiRae this year again too! At that point of the race though, we had almost ran out of color completely. So I cleverly improvised and turned our station into a physical activity station. I had the runners either army crawl or roll through our "Sea of Purple" to get colored! They loved it! I even got down and dirty with a few of the little kiddos, oh it was crazy fun! I also loved seeing all of my YMCA members and students. It was so cool too get color bomb hugs from all these students of mine! Makes me soooooo happy to be a teacher! One of my favorite things about teaching... :) After all the runners had passed through our station, I had to quickly run the 5k myself back up to the finish line to assist with the closing ceremony. I still hadn't seen my buddies Rachael or Kyra from last year's race, and I was determined to find them! I looked at each station and finally found Rachael at the orange station, the last color bomb station before the finish line! It was so awesome seeing her again! I love her so much! I love these photos we have together, they are all orange and I am the only purple lol! So funny, also like the orange mist that never seemed to fade out of the camera the whole time we took pictures!

The closing ceremony was just as beautiful as the opening ceremony. All the runners celebrated finishing the race with a huge dance party and color bombing session. Oh my word, most beautiful thing I have ever seen! All those different colors exploding at once? Wow! I wish that I could have participated more in the closing ceremony like I did in the opening ceremony, but I had to help with the clean up. As a whole clean up crew, we busted that whole area down in like two hours! Yeah boi! It was even fun cleaning up and breaking down their equipment, the Color me Rad staff is an awesome group of people! They are so funny and we were all constantly laughing, love it! It almost felt like we weren't even working! That is the best way to volunteer, enjoying your time and community. There was so much love and happiness there, even just within the volunteers! We were all so excited to be apart of such a phenomenal thing. It is magical, I can't fully explain it. I cannot wait for next year though! Next year, I am hoping that Aunt April, Aunt Ariel, Aunt Sam and Aunt Natalie will join us! All my lovely sisters together volunteering and having fun? Sounds like one of the BEST days to me!

Tune in tomorrow for Alan's Preschool Field Trip post, we went to Zoo Montana! He had a wonderful time with his classmates, barely even acted like Mommy and Anna were there lol! Anna enjoyed seeing all the animals and being the center of the preschoolers' attention lol. I thought that was especially funny because we were all at the zoo and the kids were more into Anna and her stroller then the animals! Silly kiddos. :) And if you liked this post or enjoy this blog, I ask you to click on the button below to vote for our blog on Top Baby Blogs. We are currently number 146, but I fondly remember the days when we were in the low 100s. ;) I would love to get back to that! Please vote! Thank you guys!