Thanksgiving 2023

 Thanksgiving with the White Family! Journal entry excerpts:

Thursday, November 22nd: Exhausted. Utterly. Between 7:45am and 1:45pm the only time I sat down was on the toilet. We had our 17th Annual White Family Turkey Trot this morning. 27 people came! It was a fun easygoing run, although Jeff pushed it and ran an 18:40 5k. I managed a 23:47 with no warmup and on dead legs (36 hours after a 10x400m workout and after more than 2 days straight of moving/packing/lifting on my feet all day). Basically, I had no spring in my step.

THE MOVE

We moved into our new house! There were still some missing pieces inside the house, but school let out for the entire week of Thanksgiving this year and since we had that extra time to pack up and move, we took it. We needed it! The workers were still finishing up some items on Monday, so our moving day was Tuesday, November 21st. I did my best to pack beforehand, but we weren't certain we'd be able to move for sure until the day before, so I didn't go too crazy. This renovation process has been so unpredictable! More than once we've thought things would be done at a certain time, only to have dates extended yet again. So I couldn't bring myself to begin packing until I knew for sure we could actually move. Our tiny rental house did not have space for us to live around piles of boxes-- it was living space or boxes. Here are a few journal entries to round out the story:

Seattle and Boise

Over the weekend, our family was all over the place. Jeff took the kids to Boise for the Nike Northwest Regional Cross Country Meet, and I went to Seattle for my sister's baby shower. The Nike meet in Boise was an optional post-season non-school-sponsored meet, so parents were in charge of driving their kids the 5 hours to Boise and any coaches went as parents. So it was perfectly acceptable for me to miss this meet, even though I did experience a good amount of FOMO (fear of missing out) while I was in Seattle. Thankfully Nike had a super sophisticated timing setup which recorded every runner's times at every kilometer and posted them to a live stream online. While I was at the baby shower on Saturday, I had my phone out and one eye on the results as they popped up on the screen. Jeff, Jay, Rose, and Amber left for Boise at 7am on Friday morning (Nov 10th--there was no school that day due to Veteran's Day).

A beautiful autumnal street near my sister's house in Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

Birthdays and State

November 4th was Amber's 9th birthday, my 37th birthday, and the state cross country meet. We did our best to help Amber feel celebrated and special while sharing her birthday with her mother and the state cross country meet. I did MY best to help myself feel celebrated while sharing my birthday with my daughter and the state cross country meet. Doing our best was the theme of the day. Our boys cross country team did their best with what the day gave them at the state meet, which included rain, a slick muddy course, injuries, inexperience, and sickness. We finished 16th out of 16 teams, but Andrew Garcia, our number one runner, finished in 11th place and got All State honors, a personal recruitment invitation from the Gonzaga University cross country coach, and a sweet medal. All in the cold pouring rain. 

The October Finish Line

The last week of October careened towards Halloween. Here are some journal clips and anecdotes:

Monday, October 23rd: Amber as she was browsing our bookshelf: "I love getting lost into reading. Because everything is so peaceful and I'm so focused on something."

Pepe's for donuts after practice one day!