Beginning Again

Coaching a high school sport is kind of like caring for a newborn baby. It's always on my mind, and it seems like all I talk about, to the point of mental fatigue and boredom. Even when I'm actively trying NOT to talk about it, my brain is thinking about it in the background. When is the next practice? What are we doing at practice? Will I run with the team or stand on the sidelines? How much should I push the runners when they're tired? What if someone gets injured? What's the weather forecast for 3pm? What number of layers is sufficient for that temperature and wind combo? What if I freeze? It's an endless cycle, and cross country has been pretty much endless this 2020-2021 schoolyear. Endless, but full of beginnings:

Wintry Week

The wintry week began on President's Day, with several inches of fresh snow to shovel. Journal excerpts:

Monday, February 15th: Brace yourself for whiny Shaina again: why does it feel like a personal insult when my family needs me to point out every scrap of food, paper, sock, and other junk that needs to be picked up??? Arg, I get so annoyed that telling them "clean up the family room" does nothing.  Even better, there were three crusty hot chocolate mugs in the sink tonight, and I told the kids to rinse them out. They all claimed "I didn't use any of those," even though they are the only ones who had hot chocolate today!! I turned into lecture-angry mom at that point. Because CLEANING A HOUSE DOESN'T MEAN LEAVING BEHIND EVERYTHING YOU CANT REMEMBER TOUCHING.

Drifting

The temperature steadily dropped during the second week of February, and the forecast for President's Day/Valentine's Day weekend first mentioned snow, then jumped straight to Winter Storm Advisory. Just like it does on this exact weekend nearly every year. Jeff and I prefer to be on our yearly date trip to far off lands of sunshine and pastry when these annual blizzards hit, but alas, the pandemic is still flourishing, denying our many European travel dreams. The sudden retreat back to hard frosty winter hit me hard. I was a cranky sun-deprived grump off and on for the entire 4 day weekend. I would get grumpy, feel bad about it, force myself to cheer up (not an authentic way to be cheerful) for a little while before the effort exhausted me and I sank back into frigid blues. The problem with inconsistent winter weather is that I get all soft when the sun shines, and that sunny softness makes it nigh impossible to handle more hard cloudy cold. We got about five inches of snow and it lingered all week, melting incrementally every day.

January BOOKS

This year I want to try sharing the books I read monthly rather than posting one long overwhelming list at the end of the year. That way I can talk more about my recent reads, because I love talking about books and ideas and stories! My January books report is already a little late, but better late than never!

I read 19 books in January 2021. A dash (-) in front of the title means I listened to the audiobook. It doesn't officially matter whether it was an audiobook or printed book, but I always like to know which was which.

The Lost Roomba

Before school last Tuesday, the girls helped quickly tidy up so I could set the Roomba robot vacuum loose on our way out the door. When I got home 45 minutes later, I heard the Roomba (affectionately named Roombaby) still moving around up above while I switched a load of laundry over to the dryer in the basement. When I came upstairs, though, I was met with silence. The Roomba was gone! 

It was nowhere to be found. It was nowhere to be heard. Since Jay's bedroom door was closed and my bedroom is up a few stairs, only 500 square feet were available for it to roam. Our house is not big enough to lose a large round robot, but I couldn't find my Roombaby anywhere! I triple checked all of the rooms: the computer room, bathroom, girls' bedroom, kitchen, and family room. The Roomba was officially lost! I kept walking pointlessly around and around our  house, baffled by its disappearance. 

Back-and-forth

It took me a while to recover from the busy bustle-y rigors of Monday, February 1st, but I managed to capture some of it in a slightly disjointed journal entry to help with details for this post. These are the types of everyday runarounds that seem to get lost, so every now and then I try to write one down, even though it is honestly SO BORING to write after living it. HAH. 

Monday morning was bustling and busy. Once I filled out the girl's health attestation forms and hung them around their necks, we were ready to head to school. The first stop was Amber's school. During the five minute drive to her school, Jeff called and asked if I could bring his webcam to school (he brought it home to use for church yesterday and forgot to bring it back to school--our ward has now invested in its own webcam). I told Jeff we had 25 minutes between dropping Amber off and Rose's drop-off time, so we could go back home and get the webcam for him. 

A Springy Start to February

SUNSHINE is not usually a defining characteristic of February in the Yakima Valley, so when the first ten days of the month were gorgeously drenched in mellow sweet sunshine, we felt especially grateful for the reprieve from the dark cold tragedy of winter. I have a bit of a backlog of day-to-day moments that never made it to the blog. Alone, they seemed short and insignificant, but together they seem massive. So, here's another wordy Shaina blog post. 

Cowiche Canyon Rohan Run

On Tuesday, Feb 2nd, when an inescapable, much-delayed errand took me to Yakima, I decided to make the most of doing boring errands on one of my infrequent "free days" with kids in school. I went on a run in Cowiche Canyon! It was my first trail run of the year, my first trail run in four months, and it was good to be back. Even though Cowiche Canyon is not exactly breathtaking, being outside away from nefarious bloodthirsty country guard dogs, bulging roaring apple trucks, and civilization in general, soothed my soul. Finding and absorbing that nature-wise stillness from the rocks, views, hills, and trees is one of the top reasons I love trail running.

Double Digits for Rose

Rose turned ten yesterday! She was so excited:

January Clips

A few journal clips from the past week:

Sunday, January 24: Before church, Jay came into the kitchen all dressed in his khakis, white shirt, and self-tied necktie. "Are there any fashion laws that I'm breaking?" he asked. I laughed and told him "nope, you look good." 

Monday, January 25: When I picked up Amber from school today, I resisted asking the classic "how was your day?" while we walked to the van because she often doesn't want to answer or seems uninterested in elaborating about her day right away, and I was trying to give her a break. When we were halfway to the van though, she said "aren't you going to ask me how my day was?" So I asked, and she told me all about it.

A work in progress

We are all works in progress! It's uncomfortable! Most of the time we adults do a good job of putting on a competent front, and in many areas we are actually competent. The reality is, however, that nobody has everything figured out. We are all constantly changing, learning, and growing every day, and even though growth can be uncomfortable, our potential for growth is an encouraging fact. We can learn and change and make changes! One of the topics I have been working to learn more about is structural racism and how to pull it down to create equality for people of all colors.

"We have to learn and fight at the same time. Because people have been waiting far too long for their chance to live as equals in this society." --Ijeoma Oluo

Green Exercise

For the past week I have been listening to The Joy of Movement by Kelly McGonigal on audiobook. It talks about all kinds of fascinating psychological intricacies of exercise and other forms of movement. Basically, it's my kind of book! Maybe it's confirmation bias, but the book explains many different exercise phenomenons that I have personally experienced, from the runner's high to the joys of moving my body outdoors. The book defines green exercise as exercise performed in nature. The psychological benefit of exercise is vastly increased when it is done in nature. I prefer to exercise on a mountain trail, but country living does provide other ways to access green exercise. That's my intro to another post about my endeavors to coach, run, and bike while healing an ankle injury.