Double Triple Threat

Last week might have been the busiest week of my adult life: 

• Monday: housework, track practice, kids piano lessons, grocery store, 6th grade beginner band event for Rose, I had to submit middle school track meet entries online, and parent teacher conferences till 7:45pm for Jeff. 
• Tuesday was our "easy day" of the week: demanding physical therapy appointment for me, housework, cooking, track prep and practice, and nothing else! We had dinner together as a family for the first and only time all week on Tuesday.

The Steep Hill

When I was eleven years old, my family moved into a house in the middle of the woods in west Tennessee. Our driveway was a half-mile long bumpy gravel road with a steep hill in the middle. Plumbing the depths of our creativity, my siblings and I named it The Steep Hill. It wasn't a particularly long hill, but it was steep enough to steal my breath both ways: going up and coming down. Us kids squealed as our stomachs dropped when we drove down the hill in the family mini van. It took me months to get my courage up enough to ride my bike down The Steep Hill. Riding a horse down the steep hill was next-level stuff. I huffed and puffed some of my first daily runs up that hill. 

The Steep Hill is a vivid childhood memory of challenge, courage, and stomach dropping speed. When I looked back at my week, it reminded me of The Steep Hill of my childhood. Every day this week had a Steep Hill of a different variety, and each one tested a different aspect of my mettle.

The First Middle School Track Meet

Another week of April, another track-centric week. This week was different, though, because on Monday, April 17th, after four full weeks of practice, we finally had our first middle school meet of the season! It was also my first track meet as head coach! It went relatively well. From the time I left home to the time I got back home was just over 6 hours, so not too shabby. The actual meet went from 4pm-7pm. Not too bad, although it did get colder than I expected it to. I had two jackets and a coat on by the time I got home, and I was still freezing. The team was cute, wide eyed, and enthusiastic about being at a real track meet. I did a LOT of explaining and question-answering and heat sheet-shuffling to get kids where they needed to be. At the meet, I lived off of peanut butter pretzels and a granola bar and had reheated pasta when I got home at 8pm. 

Track-Centric Week

It is a very track-centric time for us--not anything new for mid-April, but definitely busy busy busy! The first week back from spring break always hits a bit harder than I'd like, but we made it through with minimal fallout. It was just a super busy week! How about some journal excerpts to sum it up: 

Monday, April 10th: Time is marching along. How are we already a third of the way through April? Spring break is over, and it's the homestretch of both the track season and the school year. We still have 5 weeks of track left, but still. It was a bit of a shock to the system, getting back into the routine today. Track practice felt jumbled because I wrote down everyone's uniform sizes while taking roll, and then I talked to close to half of the team individually again, about which events they want to do. All of those 1-on-1 conversations left too many kids at loose ends. It had to be done, but I still didn't like it. Anyways... my next track project is to rearrange the training groups. Also, prep a pre-meet day practice routine. And then upload and enter kids into their events for our first meet, which is a week from today! Also, organize and hand out uniforms.

Hosting and Clerking

Saturday, April 15th was the first home track meet of the high school season. It was the 2nd Annual Crowe Classic JV Invitational, which Jeff started in memory of Dustin Crowe, the former Sunnyside High School head track coach who passed away a year and a half ago at age 41 from aggressive brain cancer. It was a great event in his name. Jeff was the meet host, announcer, and timer (normally there are 3 separate people for those jobs, but we had nobody to spare). Jeff volunteered me as tribute to be the head clerk. I didn't even know exactly what that job entailed, but I was willing to help. The night before the meet, Jeff told me "the clerk is the person with the clipboard telling runners were to go." It sounded simple enough. When I arrived at the meet, Jeff sent me to the infield with directions to "get the volunteers going." Whatever that meant! I knew Jeff was working on at least 15 different things at the same time and he wasn't trying to be difficult, so I tried my best to be helpful with no information.

Queen Anne

 A few weeks ago, my sister Mel and brother-in-law Braxton bought a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. We we planned to visit them during spring break. Their new townhouse is a 2 hour 50 minute drive from our house in Sunnyside, so it seemed doable to go for a one day visit. Jeff was pretty worn out from all of the coaching and house planning that we did all week, so I encouraged him to stay home for a low-key rest day while I took the kids to Seattle. It was a benevolent wifely sacrifice to do six hours of driving by myself, but it was worth it for Jeff to catch up on rest and for me to see my sister! 

Spring Break at Home

Spring break was only a week ago, but it already feels like a distant speck in the rearview mirror. As a teacher-family, we are always on the school schedule, and once spring break ends, we enter the long, almost unbroken 2 month homestretch of the school year. It is also the "meat" of track season, which ramps up the intensity of that homestretch! Before I go on about all of THAT, let's drift back in time a few days to the blissful week of semi-relaxation we enjoyed during spring break during the first week of April.

I went to a chiropractor appointment and a physical therapy appointment during spring break. Jeff and I also coached a combined middle school-high school track practice at 10am every weekday morning of spring break, so it wasn't all complete relaxation. 

We made a family goal/plan to play a game or do an activity together every single day of spring break, and it was just right for our needs and energy levels. Family time is always at a premium during track season, so it felt extra special and decadent to just BE together in a leisurely way, playing silly games or doing other activities. 

The canals are full and life is returning to our valley. Yay for springtime!

The House Across the Street

We're moving across the street! Yes. After renting our skinny little house for almost six years, we have taken the plunge back into home ownership once more. When we sold our house in Grandview and moved to Sunnyside six years ago, we thought we'd rent for a year while looking for a house to buy. When we bought that mythical house, it would be our last move--the place we'd live forevermore. Over the next year, two things happened at the same time: none of the houses for sale were right for us, and we fell in love with our little rented corner of countryside. Over the next few years, we came to love living right next to the canal more and more, with the sweeping vistas and bucolic peace of the Yakima Valley. We didn't want to move back into town. But country houses out on our gorgeous road are notoriously out of our price range, so we continued to rent our little house and share that one bathroom with the whole family, and we were happy. 

Marched

 March has marched away already. Here are a few excerpts from my journal at the end of March:

Monday, March 27th: Today was a good day. I felt way more at ease all day before track practice than I did last week. I didn't feel like I was overly preoccupied with the upcoming track practice, and I was able to have a much more normal day at home. It felt good to have some room to breathe. Tomorrow I may even try making bread for the first time in a few weeks! 

The running game I invented for track practice today WORKED! It was fun, the kids were engaged, and they ran more than if I had just told them to jog for 15 minutes. I put them in their 3 training groups and gave each group a baton. The groups had to run in a line, with the last person running up to the front of the line and the front runner passing the baton to the person coming up from the back. They could only walk on curves of the track, and the challenge was to see how many baton passes each group could get. I joined in with the girls group and ran with them. Everyone was happy, and the running time passed quickly for them. Success! I feel so happy and satisfied that my idea worked. 

Middle School Track and Field, Week 1

Good news: I survived the first week of practice as middle school head track coach! It was a lot--it was good, but it was a lot. While my five years of experience as a high school assistant cross country coach were immensely helpful, I quickly learned that being an actual Head Coach is very different from assistant coaching. Being in charge, the decision maker, attendance taker, practice planner, workout writer, and the MC of every practice takes a lot of preparation, wits, brainpower, courage, and raw energy. But I did it, and it was fun! Using my mini voice amplifier was key.

Music, Sunshine, Projects

The week began on Sunday with my brother Brad's annual March Madness email. Every year Brad writes an ode to March Madness and invites the extended family to create NCAA basketball brackets and join the family competition in a private group online. I am not a basketball person. This year I felt especially uninspired to fill out a 60+ team bracket--my mental capacities were already maxed out by the impending track season and my Relief Society responsibilities. Jeff felt similarly. He said "I'll sit out of the Brown Family March Madness Throwdown this year if you do!" And I fell even more in love with him. Sweet freedom! Not wanting to impose our own anti-basketball-ness onto our children, we gave them the option to join the family competition with brackets of their own. Jay and Amber decided to do it. So on Sunday night, they chose screen names, made their picks, and locked in their brackets, representing the White family in the competition. After the first round of the tournament, AmberQueen was in first place out of the entire extended family! 

On Sunday night, we played a family game of our most competitive current favorite card game: Cover Your Assets (the game involves stealing money cards from each other). It is worth noting because Amber did not cry at the end when she lost! Jay defeated all of us soundly, and we took a family selfie to commemorate the evening. I took so few pictures last week, and I LOVE my photo memories from past years so much that I was determined to take more pictures this week.

Haircuts, Volcanoes, Track, PT,

The clock is ticking down toward the first day of middle school track season. Tick tock, tick tock. Even when I'm not actively making plans and lists and spreadsheets about track practice, that clock is ticking and the gears are turning in the back of my brain. It wakes me up before dawn frequently, demanding that my brain Figure Out More Details Immediately. The incessant mental ticking also makes me feel extra busy, like a time crunch--get as much done as possible before the time is up! It is maddening. I just want the season to start already so I can stop wondering, prepping, and worrying about it! We have one more week to wait. In the meantime, I try to limit myself to an hour or two of track prep per day and I am doing my best to also take some total mental break time each day where I don't let myself think about anything. K-dramas to the rescue! Some days this week I only managed to watch a few uninterrupted minutes of an episode, but it was still a necessary break.