Turkey Time Part 2

Turkey Time Part 2 covers a two day span: Wednesday and Thursday, November 23-24. Late on Tuesday night, I got a phone call from my sister Mel. They were planning on driving the 3 hours from Seattle to our house on Wednesday evening, but their car broke down on Tuesday night! They had to get it towed to a shop and were awaiting a diagnosis. Late Wednesday afternoon, the mechanic's verdict finally came back, declaring the problem to be a dead alternator. Mel and Braxton would not be coming for Thanksgiving after all. Suddenly we had a lot more food than expected! The girls helped me make two more pumpkin cheesecakes on Wednesday, and we were planning on prepping Thanksgiving feast number two on Thursday! We did it anyways, but just had way more leftovers than we really wanted. Eating the same turkey and gravy dinner every night for a full week got pretty old, at least for me.

Turkey Time Part 1

We celebrated Thanksgiving for an entire week. We ran two turkey trots and cooked two turkeys. This post is about the first turkey trot and the first turkey, from Saturday, November 19th to Tuesday, November 22nd. My friend Tina is a high school teacher (we've served together in several church callings for the past five years, and she's currently our Relief Society president, with me as a counselor). Tina's high school leadership class organized a fundraiser turkey trot for the Saturday before Thanksgiving, so naturally we ran. I mean, a local running event that the White family is NOT in charge of? You'd better believe we'll be there! 

The Ambaptism

Happy sigh. Sunday was a good day. We had Amber's baptism at 1pm, and she was such a joyful ball of energy. We had just enough time to go home for a quick lunch after regular Sunday church before we went back to the church building to get ready for Amber's baptism. I helped Amber change into her white jumpsuit in the mother's lounge, which has the door to the baptismal font in it. Amber had never been in the mother's lounge before (in her memory), and she enjoyed trying out all three rocking chairs after she changed her clothes. Then we went out to the primary room to take a few pictures and say hi to the friends and family who came. Amber zipped around the room like a ping pong ball. She was so cute and excited! 

Amber got baptized!

Amber was baptized today! It was a sweet beautiful special joyful moment. I will write more about it soon. For now, here are a few preview pictures of our sweet spunky 8 year old being her natural free-spirited self. We are currently working on reading a kids version of the Book of Mormon together, and before her baptism I wanted some pictures of her holding the Book of Mormon. We had a five-minute front-yard cell-phone photo shoot on Friday, November 11th. After a brief standing pose, Amber was done with boring stand-still-and-smile tradition. She marched over to our rope swing and gave me some of my favorite ever Amber pictures as I chased her back and forth with my phone, taking pictures while she swung. I sure love my Amby girl. She has filled my life to the brim since before she was born.

36

November fourth: I turned 36 the same day Amber turned 8. Every year I journey a little farther on my quest to find the balance between motherly sacrifice and the necessity of carving out space for myself. This birthday was no exception. I tried my best to find a different day for Amber's birthday party, but there was no other time that worked. Hosting a birthday party for Amber on my birthday was something I did not want to do. It seemed like the recipe for a bad birthday for me. But I dug deeper (again) and hosted a birthday party for my daughter on my birthday anyways--not in a martyr give-till-I-shrivel-up-and-die way, but with the attitude that "I can share, give, and make my birthday good too all at once." In the process, I learned another useful lesson: a day is rarely all good or all bad. I realized that compressing any day into a good day/bad day binary is recipe for dissatisfaction, so I decided to pay attention to making parts of my birthday good, even if the entire day couldn't be all "good" or Shaina-centered. This was my approach to my shared birthday this year. Carve out time for good moments amidst the chaos! There's a life lesson in there somewhere.

Ambirthday: 8 years old

Amber turned 8 this week! We did all of the celebrating on her actual birthday--Friday, November 4th. In the morning before school, she opened gifts from her family. She brought a treat to share with her class at school. After school, we had 8 kids over for her birthday party with birthday dinner and donut cake. It was a very full intense day of celebrating our Amber!

Three Spoonfuls of Sugar

The week of Halloween is also known as SUGAR OVERLOAD week, wherein I must exert myself to stop projecting my own digestive needs onto my children. They eat so much more sugar than I could ever stomach, and I get an odd sort of referred pain as a result. 

Low maintenance Halloween costumes: a strawberry, a teacher, a tree, a teenager, and a witch. Confession: I recently purchased my first selfie stick. It converts into a tripod AND has a removable Bluetooth remote camera trigger, so it is pretty much going to take my family photography to the next level. I actually prefer to use it as a tripod rather than holding the awkward selfie stick out like I did for this picture.

District Meet & Year Five

Our district cross country meet was on Thursday, October 27th, at Franklin Park in Yakima (a 50 minute bus ride away). I left home a little before noon and was gone for 10 hours doing the necessary coach work. Jay, Rose, and Amber got a ride home from school with their Grama Leslie, and then they lived it up watching many cartoons and videogames all afternoon, with Eggo waffles and sausage patties for dinner. I didn't like leaving my kids behind, but I did like not splitting my brain between mom-mode and coach-mode at the meet. However, the older my three kids get, coach-mode and mom-mode seem to merge closer and closer together.

Packed Week

The middle school cross country season ended last week, but high school cross country is still going full steam ahead, along with what feels like everything else as well. We are in the thick of such a full busy happy tiring time right now. Our week was packed to the brim! Pretty much everything happens after 3pm too, which makes for a rather intense final five hours of each day. This post is a day-by-day breakdown of our week, with corresponding pictures under each day.

Monday was cross country practice, followed by Rose and Amber's piano lessons. We also squeezed in a trip to the library to pick up a book I had on hold and Pepe's Bakery for fresh donuts. Since we're nearing the end of the high school cross country season, practices are shorter to get the team's legs ready for the big district meet this coming week. So we had time to burn between cross country practice and piano lessons. Once we had our donuts, we went to Denny Blaine Park around the corner from Pepe's to eat the sweet treats. Denny Blaine Park is possibly the most underwhelming of parks. It is one tiny city block, with minimal everything. But it's a perfect place to park and let off steam because it's between the piano teacher's house and Pepe's Baker. We've stopped at Denny Blaine Park many times.

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:

Spa Day, Race Day

Another week has come and gone. As coaches, Jeff and I have entered the "hang in there" phase of the high school cross country season, where we are physically and mentally drained--still happy with coaching and excited for our runners to improve, but also very tired from the rigorous schedule we've been keeping for the past almost two months. The season will be over in less than three weeks! (Four weeks if someone qualifies for state.) We can do this! We love our team.

One of the things that gets progressively harder as cross country season progresses is spending quality family time. Jeff and I get so worn out (and our kids do too), that when we're all home together in evenings after practice or on Sundays, all we want to do is veg. Lounge. Relax. Not think or interact or exert ourselves. Thankfully cross country season is only ten weeks of this intensity, but I still feel a little bad that most of our at-home time is spent draped around the house like a bunch of blobs. So I was proud of myself for exerting myself a little on Friday when my kids and I had some free time at home together.

Courage & Conference

 Once again, our week was dominated by cross country season, with a few new extras sprinkled in. Jeff had a bout of what we assumed is long-covid relapse, since his symptoms of nausea and elevated heart rate were the same as what he experienced last spring. This caused him to miss one day of cross country practice as well as our cross country meet on Saturday, which meant his assistant coach (hi!) took charge. 

It is always daunting for me to face 30 teenagers with my not-loud voice, so I used our starter's microphone and portable speaker to amplify my voice at practice. It worked wonders, and my voice actually echoed off of a nearby building at the park during practice! I felt so powerful, and practice went relatively well even without Jeff's presence. 

 

This little headset and around-the-neck speaker were powerful!