Welcome to #iPPP! Sarah at The Sunday Spill and I want to see your funny, your yummy, your heartfelt, your favorite phone photos of the week. All you need is a blog post containing at least one photo from any phone camera. Link up below!

My expectations were probably too high. My daughter is not quite six, after all. But, we regularly run laps around the yard, and she routinely beats me and her brother in races, wherever.

So, when I saw that there was a Girls on the Run 5K taking place not far from our home, I signed her, my mom, and I up almost immediately. I knew there would be a lot of young girls in the race, and thought it would be fun for us to do it together.

Saturday morning came, and we drove to the Topeka YWCA. We even had our cheering squad (Erv stayed home with his grandpa)….don’t they look excited?

I wanted to make sure that she knew that we would go her pace, whether she wanted to walk or run, but that it was very important that we just keep going. We couldn’t stop, or we’d be stuck somewhere on the trail. We were going to finish, because we had no choice.

Three generations!

We started off at the back, and I think she may have been a little embarrassed. She held onto grandma’s hand, as I tried to convince her to jog a little, just to the stop sign! How about to the corner?!

No. No running. “My feet hurt. I can’t go anymore. I want to stop.”

I was frustrated. We had a cop car right behind us, as the “tail” of the race, and as soon as we went from the road to a sidewalk, that one cop car turned into three policemen on bicycles. Right. Behind. Us.

Oh, but we weren’t last the entire way! For a small part of it, we were next to last.

Our cheering squad apparently got pretty bored, waiting for us.

But, we kept on walking. We didn’t let the bicycle police behind us unnerve us (much), even when the policeman on a motorcycle joined them. My mom is a master of distraction, and while I continued to be…yes, a little aggravated at my daughter for her whining, she made us all laugh and try to forget that we still had a mile to go, or one more block, or just around this bend.

By the end, I had gone from grumpy to proud. I was proud of my girl, who was the youngest child (not in a stroller) in the race. Maybe she could have run a little more, whined a little less. But when we (FINALLY) got to the finish line, wouldn’t you know that there were a lot of people still there, waiting to cheer her on.

All in all, it was a good day.  She was the only one of us three that got a medal at the finish line (that’s what happens when all of the attention is on you), and she’ll be showing it off to her kindergarten teacher tomorrow at school. She says she had fun, and really wanted me to give her some of my medals from previous races. I told her she had to earn them, thankyouverymuch.

She was pooped, but a trooper. And yes, those are streaks in my mom’s hair….somehow we two adults got stripes sprayed in, but not the kids.

<div align="center"><a href="http://www.gfunkified.com" title="GFunkified"><img src="http://mamamash.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/ippp-polaroid-125-x-125.jpg" alt="GFunkified" style="border:none;" /></a></div>