October Sunshine

 October has been so warm this year! Usually by October the heat breaks and we ease into mellow 70 degree afternoons, but this year we've been sweating it out in 80+ degree heat at cross country practice for the entire season. The tomatoes in my tiny wild garden stayed stubbornly green well into October. The sweet scent of sun-ripened grapes growing in the fields behind our house hung thick in the warm air for longer than usual. The heat finally broke this week and yesterday was the first time all season that I have needed to wear long sleeves for a run.

October is when we start fulfilling our favorite traditions, both in our family and on our cross country team:

• Donuts: October is donut month in our family, so we make sure to get donuts at least once a week (which is not often enough for Amber's liking).
• Jeff gave his annual Donut Speech to our high school cross country team, and I brought donuts to practice. 
• We had our annual team affirmations walk, where instead of running at cross country practice, we go on a 2 mile walk, stopping every mile to give each other compliments.
• Fake leaves: at home, our orange fall leaf garland is lit and hung around the front room windows, adding an atmospheric autumnal flavor to our living space. Since we don't have a forest of deciduous trees around here to wow us with their colors, our leaf garland fills the void somewhat.
• Apple butter: since no source of free fresh local apples made itself known to me this year, I had to improvise to make our annual supply of apple butter. I cheated big time and bought unsweetened applesauce from the grocery store, dumped it into the crock pot, and made it into apple butter. Spoiler alert: it tastes amazing.
• Pumpkins: the kids haven't gotten their pumpkins yet, but I attended a Relief Society activity at church this week wherein we painted pumpkins, so we do have one happy orange pumpkin with a blue smiley face on it sitting on our kitchen table.
• And of course, cross country season is winding down (less than two weeks left--three weeks if someone makes it to the state meet). Our practices are shorter and the team is feeling fit and fast.
• The middle school cross country season ended on Thursday this week, with an exciting meet at the Gorge Amphitheater in the middle of nowhere central Washington.

Yay for October! It's exhausting and exhilarating!

I love October sunrises because they are so accessible: happening right when I want to wake up. I also love this view behind our house.

Jay and Rose are in the midst of massive foot growth. Jay started the school year in a men's 9.5, which we quickly realized was way too small, and in the two months since, he has grown to a size 11.5. Rose began the school year in a women's size 8.5 and now wears a size 10. Both Jay and Rose completely skipped an entire shoe size in the middle there. We bought an alarming number of running shoes in September. Now we have this collection of barely-used too-small running shoes that we have already started loaning out to kids on the high school team who forget their running shoes. (Seriously, at least one kid--usually more than one--forgets their running shoes almost every single day at practice. It is baffling.) I washed these three pairs of shoes in the washing machine and set them outside to dry, but we also have two other pairs of shoes that we purchased on sale in the sizes that Jay and Rose skipped. SO we have five pairs of spare shoes that nobody in our family fits. 

My ongoing hip and glute issue (that I've been rehabbing and seeing a chiropractor for every few weeks all year) flared up again last week, so I cut back on running. But the air was so appetizing and the landscape through the haze, I had to get OUT in it one morning this week. So I went on a gentle walk around the grapes behind our house and began catching up on the General Conference talks that I missed. 

My walk was an absolute Zen morning with crisp air, bright sunshine, and sweet grape scent, all with the soundtrack of inspired messages from church leaders playing in my ears.

Teenage donut carnage. I had to dig deep into the bakery displays at the grocery store to gather three dozen donuts for our cross country team donut speech. It took me at least ten minutes to load each donut into the boxes using the store-provided flimsy floaty little piece of plastic to pick them up, all while doing battle with the spring-loaded door of the bakery display case. The donuts disappeared in seriously less than 20 seconds. It was like a black hole. Jeff finished his "You are what you eat, so when things get hard, don't crumble like a pop tart, roll like a donut!" speech, I set the three boxes on the ground, then blinked, and the donuts were gone. The best part was, our team recognized the donut speech this year, and the minute Jeff said the words "pop tart," they all cheered because they knew it was donut time.

Amber wanted to wear her roller skates to school so badly one day, but I had to veto the idea.

My cheater-cheater-corner-cutter amazingly-easy-and-delicious partially-homemade apple butter! Will I still process free fresh apples in the future if and when they come to me? Prrrobablyyyy...but purchasing enough Motts applesauce to make a gallon of apple butter only cost me $16 sooooo it's going to be hard to choose all of that extra work if free apples show up in the future. Also of note, it's more expensive to buy enough grocery store apples to make a batch of apple butter than it is to buy the applesauce for it.

My happy painted Relief Society pumpkin. I had intense social gatherings on three nights this past week: Relief Society activity on Tuesday night, Relief Society presidency meeting on Wednesday night, and a cross country meet on Thursday night. Going out at night is not my thing at all, and socializing for hours on end for three consecutive nights drained my introvert well bone dry. I am still recovering three days later.

Jay and Rose got their school pictures back last week! (Amber's school hasn't taken pictures yet.)

Jay: 8th grade, age 13

Rose: 6th grade, age 11.5

Another molten golden October sunrise.

Pictures from the Moses Lake Invitational, hosted at the Gorge Amphitheater near George, WA:

The starting line was down by the stage. The middle school race was combined girls and boys, and it had over 200 kids running in it! We tossed Amber into the race for fun since it was only 1.5 miles. She's taller than some of the middle schoolers anyways. And faster.

Jay, jumping the hay bale!

Rose, gracefully leaping the hay bale.

And Amber! She didn't want to run the race at first, but I convinced her to go for it with three statements: no playing on a phone during the meet, you get to jump hay bales, and your mile time is faster than four of our middle schoolers. She was in after she heard that, and she even finished in front of all four of our middle schoolers that I told her she could beat.

Jay, cruising toward the final hills. This was kind of a mix between a road race, an adventure race, and a cross country race. We told the kids it was a fun course, not a fast course.

Having three kids in the same race was actually kind of a logistical puzzle, because the finish line was kind of far over across this long sloping hill from the rest of the course, so if we went over to watch the finish, we'd miss the middle part of the other kids' races. I settled for watching Jay and Rose climb the final hill from afar. It was a strenuous steep 100 foot climb up to the finish.

Grainy phone-zoomed picture of Rose running up the final hill!

Amber was getting kind of hot and discouraged by the end of her longest race ever. The look on her face in this picture says it all. I was worried she'd just stop running when she saw our team tent, and wander over there instead of finishing the race, but she held it together, walking and jogging and then sprinting it in to the finish.

The homestretch hill was a monster.

Jay fell and scraped his knee at one point during the race, and later he lost a shoe during the sprint up the final hill. He ran tough and finished this course 2 minutes faster than he ran it last year! He got 30th place out of 145 boys.

Rose ran strong and finished over 2 minutes faster than she ran this course last year. She got 14th place out of 59 girls. Not too shabby for a 6th grader racing 7th and 8th graders.

When I took this picture, I realized that this was probably the only time all three of my kids would be in the same cross country race together!

The White kids' official race results from the 1.5 mile race:

Jay 11:21 30th/145 boys

Rose 12:54 14th/59 girls (65th in boys race)

Amber 17:10 40th/59 girls (122nd in boys race)

A view of the starting line from behind.

As usual, I got choked up watching our girls team cheer on our last girl.

Gathering for a team picture.

Growling like our mascot the Grizzlies, haha. This is such a fun group of kids.

Least favorite part of this meet: the endless hike up up up the huge hill and across the venue allll the way out to the field where the school buses parked. It was at least a third of a mile, probably more, and we were lugging all of our heavy canopy tents and gear. Whew.

Jeff, the last one to leave after chatting with his buddies the other head cross country coaches. Twice during this meet, Jeff received enormous compliments: one of the parents of some kids on our team told us "You have the best team culture of the whole high school, and I want my kids to do all of your sports." And the Moses Lake high school head cross country coach told Jeff "I love what you are doing. It is working." As Jeff told me later, "I know what we're doing is good, but it sure is nice to hear it from parents and other coaches." Jeff has worked so hard to create the positive family of a team culture that we have, and it really is working. During the awards at the meet, Sunnyside kids cheered the loudest and it really reminded me how far we've come.

Right when the heat broke, my tomatoes suddenly turned RED and boy are they sweet juicy bites of heaven. Rose and Amber helped me pick this gallon colander full of tomatoes in about five minutes.

Saturday, October 15th was our first Saturday without a cross country meet in six weeks, and it was decadent.  Jay went on a youth temple trip in the morning. Jeff and I had a short cross country practice first thing in the morning, and then totally vegged for the rest of the day. I read, ate, napped, and watched a show. That's pretty much it. Oh, and admired the various art projects, sculptures, creations, and hula hooping my daughters showed me periodically throughout the day.

Playdough sculptures.

Amber, "all pinked up" ready for church today. I mean, pink skinny jeans are basically like really thick pink leggings, right? We went with it.

How cute is this little French phrase? Our family has been doing Duolingo French lessons every night after dinner this month, and Amber gets super frustrated with the impossible French spelling. So she wrote down the correct spelling so she could get the answer right next time it came up. 

C'est un chien. It's a dog!