Christmas 2023

Christmas was only 6 days ago and somehow it already feels so distant! I think that means we thoroughly enjoyed our week off from the school day routine. We didn't go anywhere or do anything out of the ordinary beyond continuing to get our new house in order and daily swim practices. I love that we don't have to GO and DO anything particularly special to have a wonderful, restorative, luxurious time on a school break.

Christmas Break Week 1

Christmas break came early this year! School was out for the entire week before Christmas, starting Monday, December 18th. We felt lucky to have the full week to ourselves in our new house. To use our time wisely and avoid completely vegging the week away, we implemented a loose structure:

• Sleep in or have morning screen time until 8:30am; must eat breakfast by 8:30am. 
• 8:30-9:30am: work around the house! We did unpacking, cleaning, and other projects around the house every morning.
• 9:30am: Amber and Jeff do a workout together in the barn.
• 10am: Jeff, Jay, and Rose get ready for swim practice.
• 10:30am-12pm: swim practice for Jeff, Jay, and Rose, and together time for Amber and Shaina.
• 12-2pm: lunch, complete unfinished morning work, and rest/quiet time.
• 2pm-4:30pm: screen time.
• 4:30pm-5:30pm: everyone prep and eat dinner.
• Evening: we had family scripture more than 50% of the nights, and we watched one disc of the Lord of the Rings series per night on 4 of the nights. Jay declared that Lord of the Rings has elves in it, so it's a Christmas movie. I declared that we had to at least match our movie watching nights with nights where we remembered to have family scripture 50/50.

We followed this framework for the most part, and it worked great. It was a simple but good week, and we got a lot done around the house while also feeling like we were resting from our regular school day routine. 

Repairs and Races

 Our week was kind of a grind on all sides. Jeff and Jay had lots of swim practices and a weeknight swim meet waaay out in Wenatchee. Jeff, Jay, Rose, and Amber all had five days of school. Jay had four days of early morning seminary. At home, I fielded a nearly endless parade of workers bent on finishing the last odds and ends of our house. Wednesday was the craziest, when we had a dozen different guys tromping in and out of the house for various reasons: 1 plumber, 3 electricians, 2 HVAC guys, 3 carpenters, 1 foreman, and 2 delivery guys. It was loud and our floors were covered in dirt tracked in. I found myself obsessively sweeping and vacuuming the floor twice in a three day span. 

Second Swim Meet

Jay's first ever high school swim meet was last week waaay out in Moses Lake, WA, so I couldn't go watch. This week's swim meet was in Yakima, a mere 45 minute drive from home, so Rose, Amber, and I were able to go see Jay swim. The girls and I went to Costco before the swim meet. We got a big rug and some winter boots and a coat for Amber and all kinds of foods. It was a lot. Rose was a huge help with  unloading the cart into the trunk. Then we went to the swim meet! 

Christmas Tree Week 2023

Part I: Cutting the Tree

The day after Thanksgiving, on Friday, November 24th, we got our Christmas tree from the mountains. We were all exhausted from the move and from Thanksgiving, but we made the 80 minute drive to get our Christmas tree on Black Friday out of pure tradition. It was cold (22°) in White Pass but not snowy. We found a nice a tall tree for our new house! It was actually one of our quicker tree-hunting expeditions. It took four of us to team-carry the tree down the steep steep hill to the clearing. Only Jeff in the front of our tree-carrying line could see anything, so it was like a blind trust walk through the forest with tree branches whipping our faces, tripping over logs and slipping downhill, all while carrying a 20 foot Christmas tree. 

Thanksgiving 2023

 Thanksgiving with the White Family! Journal entry excerpts:

Thursday, November 22nd: Exhausted. Utterly. Between 7:45am and 1:45pm the only time I sat down was on the toilet. We had our 17th Annual White Family Turkey Trot this morning. 27 people came! It was a fun easygoing run, although Jeff pushed it and ran an 18:40 5k. I managed a 23:47 with no warmup and on dead legs (36 hours after a 10x400m workout and after more than 2 days straight of moving/packing/lifting on my feet all day). Basically, I had no spring in my step.

THE MOVE

We moved into our new house! There were still some missing pieces inside the house, but school let out for the entire week of Thanksgiving this year and since we had that extra time to pack up and move, we took it. We needed it! The workers were still finishing up some items on Monday, so our moving day was Tuesday, November 21st. I did my best to pack beforehand, but we weren't certain we'd be able to move for sure until the day before, so I didn't go too crazy. This renovation process has been so unpredictable! More than once we've thought things would be done at a certain time, only to have dates extended yet again. So I couldn't bring myself to begin packing until I knew for sure we could actually move. Our tiny rental house did not have space for us to live around piles of boxes-- it was living space or boxes. Here are a few journal entries to round out the story:

Seattle and Boise

Over the weekend, our family was all over the place. Jeff took the kids to Boise for the Nike Northwest Regional Cross Country Meet, and I went to Seattle for my sister's baby shower. The Nike meet in Boise was an optional post-season non-school-sponsored meet, so parents were in charge of driving their kids the 5 hours to Boise and any coaches went as parents. So it was perfectly acceptable for me to miss this meet, even though I did experience a good amount of FOMO (fear of missing out) while I was in Seattle. Thankfully Nike had a super sophisticated timing setup which recorded every runner's times at every kilometer and posted them to a live stream online. While I was at the baby shower on Saturday, I had my phone out and one eye on the results as they popped up on the screen. Jeff, Jay, Rose, and Amber left for Boise at 7am on Friday morning (Nov 10th--there was no school that day due to Veteran's Day).

A beautiful autumnal street near my sister's house in Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle.

Birthdays and State

November 4th was Amber's 9th birthday, my 37th birthday, and the state cross country meet. We did our best to help Amber feel celebrated and special while sharing her birthday with her mother and the state cross country meet. I did MY best to help myself feel celebrated while sharing my birthday with my daughter and the state cross country meet. Doing our best was the theme of the day. Our boys cross country team did their best with what the day gave them at the state meet, which included rain, a slick muddy course, injuries, inexperience, and sickness. We finished 16th out of 16 teams, but Andrew Garcia, our number one runner, finished in 11th place and got All State honors, a personal recruitment invitation from the Gonzaga University cross country coach, and a sweet medal. All in the cold pouring rain. 

The October Finish Line

The last week of October careened towards Halloween. Here are some journal clips and anecdotes:

Monday, October 23rd: Amber as she was browsing our bookshelf: "I love getting lost into reading. Because everything is so peaceful and I'm so focused on something."

Pepe's for donuts after practice one day! 

Cross Country District Championship

Thursday, October 26th in Wenatchee, WA was The Big Day. Jay was hoping to break 20 minutes in the 5k for the first time in the JV race. Our boys varsity team was hoping to qualify for the state meet as a team for the first time in 29 years. Spoiler alert: it all happened! The district meet is my favorite meet to be a coach. SO MANY emotions! It surprises me every year how much I grow to love the kids on our team over the course of a season. Each season is a little different with group dynamics, and this year we had such a fun core group on our team. The varsity boys were a delightful mix of playful and dedicated, the JV boys were exploring their abilities in exciting ways, and the sweet girls courageously worked toward their goals every single day.

Go Jay!

Building and Banquet

Last Sunday night, we visited our new house and saw the newly built closet shelving, the designs of which I had chosen and approved a few days previously. One problem: I didn't like the shelves in the master closet! And I was the one who designed/requested them! I had a pit in my stomach all Sunday night. What have I done? What's the point in a custom home renovation if I don't even know what I want? And this whole situation was so incredibly first-world-problem-ish, I almost just let the closet issue go. It was such an insignificant minuscule speck of a not-even-problem to fixate on in this world full of actual turmoil. Still, on Monday morning, I woke up at 3am with my brain in puzzle solving mode. After two hours lying awake in bed, I had cracked the closet code and had a new plan all figured out for the master closet.