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. 

Middle School Track week 1

 Week one is done! My second season as head middle school track coach began on Monday, March 18th. I learned a lot last year and I'm doing my best to apply it to my team this year. In the first week of practice, we had no concussions, no broken bones, and no faceplants. Nobody even needed a bandaid until Friday, and that was a minor scrape. 44 kids signed up for my middle school track team, but only 31 have showed up total, and only 23 came on thr first day of practice. I was underwhelmed by the numbers because last year we had 39 kids who came relatively consistently. But small groups are easier to manage, so I can't complain! 

Sunshine

The week started out chilly and windy, but mellowed out into several back-to-back glorious 60-70 degree sunny days. We basked, and then got a bit overheated and thirsty at the high school track meet on Saturday because we weren't used to all of that sunshine and warmth--by Saturday afternoon it was 76 degrees! 

On Monday, we signed all of the last papers to close on our house! It was definitely backwards because we moved into the house 3 months ago, but since we were purchasing the house from my parents, that's just how the timeline worked out. We feel so humbled by and grateful for this house, especially for the large portion of its value that was a gift from my parents. Our mortgage is exactly what we can afford, but it does not cover the entire value of the house. Hence the immense gratitude at the gift!

Three concerts and a meet

 While looking through the small handful of pictures I took this week today, I felt a little pang of nostalgia. We are out of the "cute" stage. Jay, Rose, and Amber are growing up more and more, and I can't just snap cute pictures of them playing, eating, and sleeping anymore. It made me miss having endless opportunities to take and treasure up pictures of my younger children. I realized yet again that we really are out of the little kid stage. I don't miss messes and diapers and crying AT ALL. But even though I will always think my kids are cute, this teenage phase is less photographically cute and therefore I take less pictures in general each week. I'm not sure where I was going with these musings, but those are my thoughts right now.

Track, Glasses, Dahlia

High school track practice began this week. Even though track did mostly take over our life, we did have a few other things happen too.

• High school track practice started with spectacular spring weather: hail on day one. 
• I went to high school track practices all week long to help sort the new kids into event groups. It was fun, but also yucky uncomfy weather. I did get to see a whole bunch of our dear cross country kids at the beginning of practice each day, which was a highlight. Love those kids.
• Amber got glasses! Rose got new glasses frames, and now they almost match.
• We went to Burger King with Grampa Dan and Grama Leslie on Thursday to have whopper hamburgers for dinner in memorial of Great Grandpa White (he loved whoppers).
• Trying to learn hard piano songs reminded me yet again that in spite of all my practicing, I am a very basic unskilled unlearned piano player at best.
• 15-20 mph WIND attacked us every day at track practice. At home, we staked down our trampoline so it wouldn't blow away.
• Jeff hosted a high school track team time trial on Saturday in the WIND, setting up the complicated automatic timing system in just 90 minutes. Jay ran a 1600 PR of 5:42! I was the clerk, reading out names and lane assignments for all of the races. We were only at the track for 4 hours, but it was exhausting!
• During the time trial, my important high school athletics key fell out of my pocket, and I didn't notice it was gone until I got home. With the help of a few slightly desperate prayers, I went back to the track and miraculously found it a few hours later. 
• We drove to and from Seattle on Sunday, March 3rd for our sweet niece/cousin Dahlia's baby blessing! Starting at 6am, we did the 3 hour drive, stayed in Seattle for 5.5 hours, and then drove home 3 hours. (Bonus points to Jeff for driving the entire way!) It was a special day to gather with family to celebrate a new baby. Everyone loved taking turns holding Dahlia. HAPPY family day. I was so glad to be there for it.

Springy Projects

We lucked out with a very spring-y third week of February. Even though we tried our best not to get our hopes up for a mild-weather upcoming track season, by the end of a 55-65 degree week with hardly any wind and at least two days of sunshine, our hopes were high. High school track season starts tomorrow (February 26th) and the weather forecast shows four back-to-back days of 15-20mph sustained winds. Classic. Would it even be track season without volatile weather? Also, isn't talking about the weather supposed to be a total conversational snooze button? But I kind of like talking about the weather. It's comfortable and relatable--just like my favorite type of conversation. The weather also affects my existence drastically, so I can't help mentioning it!

Blind Voodoo plus two

Last weekend, Jeff and I went to the Nike Track and Field Coaching Clinic in Portland, Oregon. We rode in a school van with three other Sunnyside track coaches and stayed overnight on the school district's dime, just like last year. This was my second coaching conference and it was eye-opening to see how far I have come in my "coaching journey" in the past year. Last year at this time, I was a freshly hired, slightly overwhelmed, first-time head middle school track coach. I took frenzied notes at every clinic session I could attend at the conference. This year, I was able to think more critically and use my previous track season of experience to filter information from the conference into what would actually help me coach the team I have, in the town we live in. It was nice being less frenzied and more "seasoned," even if my head track and field coaching experience is only one 7 week season long. 

13 Roses

 Rose turned 13 on February 7th! I jokingly told her "now you're a real teenager instead of a fake one!" because Rose has seemed like a teenager for the past two years. She is almost 5'10'' and such a bright intelligent sweet human--she almost seems like more than a mere teenager. We love our Rose girl so much! Usually I ask my kids what they want for their birthday, but this year I artfully avoided talking about birthday gifts because we got Rose one big one: a new bed! She had been sleeping in the same twin sized bed with a footboard for years, and the taller she got, the more her feet pressed against the footboard. So Jeff and I found a queen sized mattress at Costco and a bed frame on Amazon, and even though we got excellent deals on both, this quickly became the most expensive kid-birthday of all time in our family! Rose is worth it. The middle child turning 13 needs an extra boost. Amber wanted to know if she was going to get a queen sized bed when SHE turned 13. I told her to wait and see.

Fog & Fam

The week of January 29th was full of fog so thick I may have strained an eyeball trying to drive. When I went running I could see more clearly without my glasses! One morning while driving Jay to seminary, I could only see two dashed yellow lines at a time on the road. TWO. It was maybe 10 feet of visibility. The fog was like cotton candy, but gray and cold and sad instead of pink and sweet and happy. We soldiered on into February anyways.

A "less-foggy" view during one of my three back-and-forth runs on the paved pathway behind our old house. The fog was too thick for pedestrians on the street, so I resorted to mind-numbing back-and-forth running on the pathway.