It was a week of big steps:
Jay got his first PR of the year in the 1600m race on Thursday night! He shaved .60 of a second off his best time from last year, finishing in 5:17.90. A PR is a PR! I was sad I missed it--the meet was in Wenatchee on a weeknight, and I had to coach middle school track practice in Sunnyside at the same time so I couldn't make the 2.5 hour drive. (Plus I honestly don't drive to Wenatchee on a weeknight unless it's for the district meet.) But Jeff was there for Jay's PR! Jay ran 4 races in 48 hours this week: he ran the 1600m and 3200m on Thursday night, and then the 2k steeplechase and the 1600m on Saturday! It was his first time ever running the steeplechase, and I was impressed that he volunteered to give it a try because he is no hurdler. But he managed to hurdle at least a third of the barriers, and hand-vault-clamber over the rest of them in the five lap race, finishing in 8:11. It was so fun to watch, and I felt so proud of Jay for trying something so difficult and new!
With gentle persistent encouragement from many sides, Jay asked a girl to the church spring formal dance that our stake is putting on in a few weeks. Jay doesn't like dances and there's a track meet that same night, so he thought he had all kinds of plot armor to skip the formal dance. But my connections with the grape vine led me to encourage Jay to ask a girl to go as friends. They both run the same events on the same track team, so neither one will be offended if they have to arrive late to the dance after the meet, and now everyone in his friend group has a date to the dance so they can all go together as friends. Again, I felt so proud of Jay for doing something so difficult and new!
One more big step for Jay: on Friday, he took his driving test and passed! He said he felt pretty confident before the test, but he was still nervous. And he passed! Now he just has to wait till he turns 16 next month and then he will be my personal errand master, muahahaha. Things we don't tell our kids before they get their driver's licenses. After the test, Jay said "there's a driving experience that I haven't had yet: going to a drive thru window. Can we go to Taco Bell to celebrate?" I couldn't say no. So at 10:30am Jay drove through the Taco Bell drive thru and ordered a crunch wrap, which I had never even heard of, and ate it in the parking lot. Jay taught me that a crunch wrap is a soft shell taco with a hard shell taco inside. Basically, it's a burrito with tortilla chips inside. After that, Jay drove to school and I took the car home. This week had such a slew of big steps and milestones for Jay. We sure love our boy.
Amber got her new glasses and can see so much better now. The upgraded glasses included a much stronger prescription and nose grip: I convinced Amber to move away from the all-plastic frames to glasses with actual nose pieces on them. Her old plastic frame glasses were always halfway down her nose, and her new ones stay up so she can see all the time! I also sprung for the anti-glare lenses (why doesn't insurance cover anti-glare?) so Amber is set up for great vision.
Amber started making herself a triple decker peanut butter Nutella sandwich to pack in her lunch each day. My one condition was that she used more peanut butter than Nutella. Amber mowed 3/5 of our yard this week--her largest percentage yet. She is still waiting for me to get the correct amount of cash to pay her, and I have to confess, Amber with a regular, disposable income is formidable. Jay and Rose have been quite happy to have the help with the weekly mowing chore while they're busy pumping their energy reserves into track season. Amber came to cheer Jay on in his steeplechase race at the track meet on Saturday morning, and decided that she really wanted to run the steeplechase race when she gets to high school.
Rose dove even deeper into music this week. Along with the two hours of every school day that she spends in band and orchestra classes, plus her weekly 30 minute piano lesson and daily 15-20 minute piano practice, she also signed up to play three songs in the upcoming piano ensemble recital. I play one of the songs with her (along with two other pianists), and Amber is her partner for another song (along with 7 other kids), and the third song is with a group of 8 kids (2 kids per piano). The first rehearsal was on Saturday (April 26th). We went to Costco after Jay's track meet, drove the 45 minutes home, unloaded the groceries, and then went straight to the church for the rehearsal. With three different piano songs to play with different ensemble groups, Rose was rehearsing for a full hour on Saturday, spread out in 20 minute chunks across the afternoon. We went to the church in two trips, and spent nearly two hours there!
When we got home from the piano ensemble rehearsals, Rose and Amber kept the music flowing by messing around on our piano and then getting out Rose's cello and borrowing Jeff's trumpet. Even a joyful noise is still quite noisy, so I escaped to the back porch to admire sunset and the crop of tall white dandelion puffs that popped up all over Amber's freshly mowed lawn. They were mostly bald because it was super windy: a forest of six-inch stems peppering the grass.
Rose also practiced French braiding my hair two nights this week. She is improving!
Jeff: I didn't see a whole lot of Jeff this week, and I missed him every time he was gone! That's the problem with being married to your best friend; when he's gone I miss him! Haha. He didn't have to go to the JV track meet on Tuesday night, but he had a swim coaches' meeting right after track practice on Wednesday night 80 minutes away in Ellensburg. He got home around 8:30pm. On Thursday night he was at the league track meet in Wenatchee, 2.5 hours away. He and Jay got home at 10:30pm, I think--I was tired and it's hard to remember for sure. On Friday, Jeff had to wait around an extra hour after track practice to get the 15 passenger van keys so he could drive a load of our most elite high school track athletes to a big meet in Snohomish, on the west side of WA 3 hours away, on Saturday.
On Saturday morning, Jeff left at 5:15am for the Eason track meet in Snohomish, but returned 15 minutes later because the school transportation office hadn't given him a gate key to the van parking lot. They gave him the van key but no gate key! So he took our minivan to the meet, and left me his new electric car. Jeff didn't get home until midnight on Saturday night. His high school track team posted 122 PRs this week. Many kids got multiple PRs. It was an awesome week for the high school track team!
Shaina: I hardly even need to write about myself because this whole post is from my perspective so clearly I was THERE for it and that describes a large portion of my week, but I did things on my own this week too, amidst the busy family events. In the busy-ness of coaching my own middle school track team, supporting the high school team, getting my kids where they need to be, and supporting everyone in my family, it feels extra important, empowering, and GOOD to do things for myself too. I don't want to be too busy to support myself and get myself where I need to be too!
Piano is one of my big personal outlets right now: Somehow I managed to keep up with my goal to practice piano for five hours this week! My challenge goal is to play piano for 30 hours in the month of April, and somehow I am still on pace to reach that goal too! It is such a satisfying challenge to not only play the piano for an hour a day, but also to stretch myself and work on super hard songs.
Feeding my own personal exercise monster during busy coaching seasons is always a balancing act between saving energy for coaching but also stay fit and get in satisfying workouts. I had to take it a lot easier on the running this week (annoyingly), at first because my quads were so painfully sore from my amazing steep run up and down Lincoln Grade last Saturday, and then because my hip issue flared up again. This week I ran 3 times and did the elliptical machine once. I set up four weekly hip help PT sessions over the next month with Daniel Hernandez, to finally dig in and rehab my dysfunctional hips.
On Thursday, I lifted weights in the barn with my friends Danae and Liz. We have been lifting once a week for most of 2025, and it is such a fun friend time. I write us a workout on the white board and then we do the exercises. I teach them how to do any new exercises and tweak their form as needed for all lifts. It is an interesting blend of coaching and friend time. We are all very thankful for that time during the weekday together. Coaching middle schoolers tends to drain my cup a bit at times, coaching high schoolers fills it back up, and "coaching" my friends floods my cup past the brim. Coach life comes in many forms!
This week I also had three evenings with just me and 2-3 of my kids at home. It reminded me of the days a few years ago before I started coaching track, and when our kids were younger, when Jeff was gone so much at track meets while I was home, home, home all those nights with our kids. I'm glad I have a better balance of involvement with track now, which is only possible because our kids are older, but it was cozy to be home at night with my kids.
Work I did this week: meal planning, groceries, cooking, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms. I think I even dusted some too. I could have done more yardwork this week, but I did do some: I sprayed another two tanks (8 gallons) of Roundup on our driveway and yard border to keep the next wave of weeds at bay. I did some manual weed-whacking while waiting for the new spool of string for our weed eater to arrive. We keep ordering the wrong size spool! It is strangely difficult to match product numbers when the description assures us it'll fit our machine. And of course, I did all the planning and prep for middle school track practice and meet entries for our second meet that's coming up on Monday (seven weeks into our season we will finally have our second meet). I had to stretch my abilities to dig deeper into coaching hurdlers and tweaking block starts. While I do feel like a poser for teaching something I can't do, it is also quite fascinating to be able to teach kids how to do something that I can't do.
Saturday I went to Jay's track meet in the morning and then did a Tetris master job of loading $371 of Costco food into the hatchback of Jeff's little Nissan Leaf. When I took Rose to her first piano ensemble rehearsal, I didn't know if they needed me to play the secondo part with Rose. But I was mentally prepared to do it, so I did. It was a mother daughter duet: the other piano had a mother and daughter duo too! Us moms kept giving each other wild eyes like "what have we gotten ourselves into?" over the tops of our pianos, haha. I has been years since I was drilled and rehearsed by a conductor! It took some getting used to, and it was a bit nerve wracking because I haven't really been drilled too much on the piano ever. I always get nervous in the presence of musical professionals because my foundation of musical knowledge and rhythm is shaky and weak. The conductor kept trying to get us to count out loud while playing the piano and it made me play worse because it was so hard! Haha. We did sound much better by the end of our 20 minute rehearsal.
1 comment:
You are AMAZING!!!
Amazing coach, amazing wife, amazing mom, amazing friend, amazing pianist, amazing organizer, amazing weed-buster…..amazing SHAINAđź’—
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