Happy Friday!! I hope your having a wonderful day so far. It’s gorgeous (and cold!) here in Springfield, and I’m loving it!

Right after work today, Nick, Mac, and I will load up and head out to St. Louis for a weekend at Nick’s parents house. I’m very excited! Though the anticipation is making this work day go by rather slowly… oh well. It’s already half over. 🙂

Backing up a bit to yesterday, I had a little more work to do in my kitchen before all my goodies would be ready to take along for the weekend. Frosting the sugar cookies was the final thing on my baking agenda!

Plain sugar cookies with vanilla frosting = Nick’s father’s favorite! Mark is an easy man to please (his bday is 4 days after mine), and I had a wonderful time licking all the extra frosting off the spoon.

I used a simple Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie mix, so they aren’t fancy but still delicious! And I actually ended up eating tons of the leftover frosting right before I went to teach 6:45 pm Jazzercise. Smart idea? Probably not. But I managed to make it through class without getting sick. 🙂

I also whipped up a batch of chocolate chip and pecan cookies for the rest of Nick’s family to enjoy. They aren’t into the plain sugar cookies as much as Mark is.

These are like little pieces of heaven, people. Seriously.

I found semi-sweet baking chips in a Halloween variety to make these extra festive!

And I obviously did not frost these. The chocolate chips were enough addition!

I now have 2 dozen cookies and a BIG bowl of the Halloween Chex Mix that I posted yesterday to take along for the weekend. Nick’s mom always complain that my treats are unhealthy and that I need to bring along some of my healthy food. But that’s no fun! Birthday weekends are meant for splurging, so splurge we will. A lot.

Morning Run

In lieu of me having to change up my half marathon schedule, I had a crosstraining day yesterday and taught 2 classes. So that made today my shorter run day! Yay for not having to run as far! 😛

I woke up early to the coldest morning we’ve had so far: 30° F! Woah! I bundled up in my best running layers, including a cozy ear warmer and gloves, and headed out on a 45 minute run. I tried to make today’s run a tempo run, but the cold held me back just a bit. My perfect race pace would be between a 8:00-8:10 minute mile, but this morning’s pace was 8:28 overall. I was a little faster than my run on Wednesday morning, but still not at my best. That cold air makes it hard to breath!

I made it to 5.1 miles in 43:30 and was more than ready to be back home. Today’s run was difficult to say the least. I was struggling to pick up my feet and almost tripped myself a few times. This was probably a mix of being tired and eating so much sugar all week. I’m still not feeling my best from eating so many sweets in the midst of all my baking/cooking for the weekend, so I’ll be ready for a ‘sweets detox’ starting Sunday night when we make it home!

I hope you all have a great weekend and can enjoy the beautiful weather! I’m not sure when I’ll have time to check in, but I’m sure I’ll have lots of fun times to share – talk to you then!