Life Wall

 Ultra busy weeks are exhausting and crazy, but the true test comes the week after, when we have to keep going and doing and being, with less fuel in the tank and less sleep in the bank. And even though this week wasn't quite as busy as last week, it was still very full. I hit a "life wall" this week, wherein I could only hold one or two of the balls at a time in my juggling act of housework, yardwork, personal work, coaching work, and family work. 

During coaching seasons I am extremely organized at home so I can have the freedom and peace of mind to be away during afternoon/evening coaching hours. I make detailed meal plans and cook dinner in the morning. As much as my deep-seated need for the calm of a clean house allows, I set time limits for housework to make time for personal work/play, like piano, Duolingo, and nonfiction reading. I exercise. I research and create track practice plans and laboriously do meet entries. I drag my busy family together to sit around the dinner table whenever possible (twice this past week). I summon nigh invisible vestiges of energy to initiate family scripture time. This week all of these simultaneous functions fritzed out and no matter how much I tried, the life-structure all of these daily activities creates crumbled.

2 Visitors and 5 Track Meets

The past nine days have been our busiest of the entire school year! We hosted two home high school track meets--one JV, one varsity. On the same day as our home JV track meet, the elite track high schoolers went to a different, more competitive track meet in Pasco. A few days later, on the same day as the home varsity track meet, we had our first middle school track meet of the season (in Toppenish, a tiny town half an hour away). To cap off the intensity, yesterday (April 20th), Jeff took a van of elite kids from the high school track team to a huge meet 3 hours away in Snohomish, on the west side of the state. He left our house at 6am and got home 17.5 hours later, at 11:30pm Saturday night. Somehow we still love track, probably because of the great kids we get to coach. 

Spring Break #2

 After my sisters and their kids left on April 1st, we still had a full week of spring break ahead of us. We told the kids last week was the fun vacation part of spring break, and this week was the work and chores part of spring break. We spent the week going to track practice and doing yardwork and/or housework every day. It was nothing fancy, but we made progress on our yard! Jay mowed the lawn twice. It started growing lusciously after several heavy rainfalls, and the landscapers told us that the best way to control the dandelions and other weeds was to "mow religiously." Jay took that counsel to heart and listened to a Saturday session of General Conference while mowing the yard. 

Spring Break visitors!

We had our first overnight visitors in our new house! My sister Emily lives in Missouri, and her kids' spring break has always been several weeks apart from ours. When the kids were little, we would just pull them out of elementary school for a nice long cousin visit. But when they got older, that didn't work anymore and it had been 4 years since our last springtime sister/cousin visit. This year, the two spring breaks overlapped by three days, so we made a visit happen! My older sister and her four kids stayed at our house from Sunday, March 24th to Monday, April 1st. My youngest sister Melody, along with sweet 3 month old baby Dahlia and fluffy Pancha the dog joined us for the sister time for most of the week too! Even Mel's husband Braxton made an appearance for the last few days on his way home from a business trip.