With a second round of head colds hitting during the thick of this busy season, I am keeping a nostril or two above water, but just barely. I didn't proofread this post because it seemed too tiring, so here's a raw edit of our week:
Monday I picked up groceries, went to the chiropractor and mowed the lawn. This time I refined my mowing technique and managed to mow the whole almost 3 acres in 2.5 hours! Still, that took up almost half of the school day and rattled my skeleton. Partway through mowing, I was wishing that my chiropractor appointment had been after I mowed the lumpy lawn!
Monday after cross country practice I almost forgot to take the girls to piano lessons, but we made it in time...without dinner first, sadly.
Tuesday I did some laundry and cleaning inside the house, made dinner, played the piano, and took it a bit easier to recover from Monday. I enlarged one line of my piano music because the notes were so crammed together I was having a hard time reading the leger lines and fingerings. That took a while to figure out.
After Tuesday's cross country practice, I had just under an hour at home to shower and eat dinner before heading to the church for a Relief Society activity. I was so tired, I confess I did not want to go at all! I brought Rose who had agreed to help with childcare. She ended up just hanging out with her friend because nobody brought any babies. It was a nice low key activity that didn't require too much energy though, and even though we stayed to help clean up, we were home a few minutes before 9pm.
Wednesday was a cross country workout day, so after I dropped Amber off at school in the morning, I went to the bike path to try the workout for myself. I was feeling heavy and tired and while I was warming up, I existentially wondered why I was doing this workout at all! But I did it and it wasn't that bad. When I got home, I sprayed 2 gallons of weed killer onto our gravel driveway to combat the latest invasion. Right after cross country practice, Jeff went to his classroom for parent teacher conferences while I dragged all 3 kids to two of Jay's classes for conferences--his chemistry teacher was giving out 20 bonus points for conference attendance, and I needed to sign something in Jay's orchestra class. There was a line of people waiting at the chemistry classroom and we ended up staying at the high school for over an hour, just to do TWO conferences! We were all perishing with hunger, and both Jay and Rose were dealing with knee pain after cross country practice. On Wednesday night, I started a batch of apple butter in the crock pot.
On Thursday morning, our house smelled like cinnamon, apples, and cloves and it felt like fall! I got out our leaf garland but couldn't figure out where to put it in our new house and kind of put that project on hold, leaving the garland on the family room floor for the rest of the week. Rose and I left cross country practice 20 minutes early on Thursday and drove 45 minutes to Yakima to Ted Brown Music store l, where Rose was finally able to try the other cheaper cello that was half the price of the cello she tried a few weeks ago. She played the same song on both cellos, and it was an easy decision: the more expensive cello was easily more than twice as good as the cheaper one. I had spent a solid 45 minutes crunching numbers and calling the music store earlier that day, so I knew what would work for us payment-wise. So we bought the cello with a 12 month payment plan and drove straight home! In the vary, we ate leftover pasta and fresh tomatoes with meatballs that I packed for our dinner. Rose has her very own cello! She played it for us when we got home and she sounds good!
Jay and I left home at 6:15am Friday morning and drove 45 minutes to West Richland to see our physical therapist Daniel Hernandez about Jay's hurt knee. Daniel confirmed that Jay's knee has a tendon issue, likely caused by growing fast and imbalanced muscle strength. He gave Jay 2 strengthening exercises to do. Daniel also checked Jay's ankle, which Jay rolled at the cross country meet last week. Daniel watched Jay run on the treadmill and taped his ankle, then gave him an ankle strengthening exercise. All of it was so helpful! It was comforting to know that Jay isn't horribly injured and that all he needs to do is keep strengthening his weak points.
Even after a roundtrip 90 minute drive, Jay was only half an hour late to school on Friday morning. After dropping Jay off at school, I went to the grocery store to pick up PBJ supplies for the weekend's cross country meet. Then I picked up Rose from school and took her to the chiropractor to have her knee checked--she hadn't been able to run for 4 days. Her knee was actually out of place, and once it was back in, she felt better. During my busy morning of taking my wounded runner children to various knee maintenance appointments, Amber went to school with Jeff and sat in his classroom for half an hour waiting for her school to open the gate, while Jeff gave his students a French quiz. Amber walked from Jeff's classroom at the high school half a mile down the street to her elementary school. Somehow we got everyone where they needed to be on Friday morning.
On Friday afternoon, Jeff and Jay started coming down with the second wave of this fall's head cold. Rose and Amber had been sniffly all week, and I finally felt good running on Thursday for the first time in 2 weeks. So if course it was time for round two! After cross country practice, Jay stayed home while the rest of us drove 20 minutes to Jeff's parents' house in Grandview to celebrate Grampa Dan's 70th birthday with cake.
Saturday was the Wenatchee Cross Country Invitational. We left our house at 6am, and got home to our house at 6:30pm. The day included 5 hours roundtrip on a school bus. We coached and cheered our runners in 8 races.
Amber ran the 7th grade 1.55 mile race. She was the first kid from Sunnyside to finish the 7th grade race, outkicking a boy from our team to finish in a time of 15:04. We joked that 4th grade Amber was our fastest 7th grader.
Rose ran the 8th grade 1.55 mile race in 11:27, finishing in 11th place. She wanted to get in the top ten so badly so she could win a coveted Top Ten t-shirt like she did at this meet last year, but she was 11 seconds from 10th place. Rose was in tears again at the finish, so I spent some time hugging her and pep talking her, while also telling her it was ok to be disappointed. She ran 10 seconds faster than she did last year at this meet, which after a week of hardly any running at all due to her knee issue, was impressive! Cross country meets are fraught with emotions when high hopes and goals aren't met.
Jay started the 10 grade boys 5k race and was cruising, on track to run in the 18 minute range for the 3.1 mile race, but a little past the halfway point, he stopped and walked back to the tent. I saw it happen from afar, and made my way over to find Jay. His knee started hurting more and more during the race and he was worried about it, and didn't know if he should keep running through the pain. He hated running through the pain last week, so he stopped this time. He was very sad and disappointed. For the second time that day, I hugged a sweaty kid and dug deep to find words of comfort. The hard part is, Jay's knee issue isn't something that will go away quickly and it's not something that will break or get worse; it's just going to hurt more when he races. So hopefully he can figure out how to work with that!
It is heartbreaking to see my sweet kids work hard and then be disappointed! Running can be both euphoric and brutal. The highs and lows are intense. Throughout the day at the meet, I rode that emotional rollercoaster with so many of the kids on our team--hugging one weepy girl and helping her through disappointment. Hugging and celebrating with another teary-eyed girl who reached a long time goal. Fist bumping a confused and surprised boy who broke 18 minutes for the first time and didn't know it. Explaining how we train through our September meets so we can peak in October, and that's why the kids' legs didn't feel fresh today. Our high school team this year is full of more kids than we've ever had before who want to be there and who care, and I am learning that with an increase in caring comes an increase in emotions at meets! It's intense!
Right after the last high school race was the community and coaches' 5k race. For some reason, Jeff and I toed that starting line and ran that race. No warmup, no cooldown, just a brutal beating on a very well-trampled mushy grass cross country course at the end of a very long day. At the starting line, Jeff and I were joking with the other coaches, listing all of our excuses for why this race was going to be rough. I wore my ducky running shorts and top for fun, and soon started to feel a head cold descend during the race in the form of oxygen-flow-interrupting drainage down my throat. Jeff and I both gutted it out and clawed our way to second place male and female finishes, but it wasn't pretty and we were inordinately tired afterwards. Jeff ran an 18:02 and I ran a 23:18.
Right after our race, we sat through the meet awards as our hips and legs slowly seized up, then packed up our 4 shade tents and other gear and lugged it all back to the bus. We made a brief dinner stop before we left Wenatchee. The 2.5 hour bus ride home was endless. Amber forgot her electronic device at home and had to make due with books, crocheting, and sleeping on both bus rides. I was way less sad about that than she was, haha.
Head colds, new cello, knee issues, and long bus rides: another week of September is done.
1 comment:
What an BUSY week! No wonder you are exhausted! (though you still managed to come up with a super-clever title for your post!) I especially liked the before and after photos of the “kitchen trash & dishes situation”!
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