Our firstborn son turned 15 on Tuesday! This birthday caught me a little off guard--when I started looking into driver's ed courses for Jay to take, he suddenly felt so incredibly old. Now that track season is over and there are only 3 more weeks left in the school year, that means that Jay's freshman year of high school is also almost over, which means that he only has 3 more years of high school left before he will be leaving home! Siff, my tiny baby.
It was another full-to-bursting week, with events on 5 out of 6 nights:
Monday, May 13th was the last middle school track meet of the season. Jeff hosted and timed the meet at the high school track. I coached during the meet and was a "ghost announcer" on the side, which meant I told the teenager with the microphone what to say and when to say it so kids knew when to report to the starting line for their races. During the meet I also ran interference between the teenage volunteers working at the meet and Jeff, who was busy doing battle with the automatic timing system. The timing system glitched several times and that along with inexperienced teenage helpers caused the meet schedule to bog down. The meet ended 90 minutes after we wanted it to, and Jeff and I didn't get home until 9pm. Our kids got rides home with kind friends earlier in the evening.
I was allergic to most of last week. Mother's day was on the horizon AND the week began with a 36+ hour windstorm that blew every allergen known to humankind up into my sinuses, wreaking a specific sort of itchy sneezy havoc. Then it got hot. Not the "we're used to 50 degrees so 75 feels uncomfortable" kind of hot. No, in the space of a few days, we jumped from 50 degrees and cloudy up to 90 degrees and sweaty. Silver lining: even though I was sneezing and feeling run down physically this week, Jeff started feeling so much better than he has in months! The longer he goes without getting Covid, the better he feels, and now that it's been over 5 months since his last infection, he is starting to have more normal autonomic functions again. He's pretty happy about it! I am too.
The last intense week of track season is behind us. April really came at us relentlessly, and now we have emerged into May, with only one high school meet per week from now on, and only one remaining middle school meet in the season. This week, however, we had three track meets. Technically there were four meets, but none of us had to go to the high school JV meet so I'm counting this as a three-meet-week, plus two days of high school parent teacher conferences that go until 7:30pm. Anyways, on Monday morning when I pulled out of the garage to drive Jay to seminary, I made the unpleasant discovery that we had yet another irrigation pipe leak. This time it drained into the low spot north of the barn on our driveway, creating Lake Jay for the second time this year. Jeff shut off the valve in question and I called the company that installed our system. A few days later, the lake in our driveway was mostly gone and the offending pipe was capped.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.