A Little Bit Obsessive?

As I've mentioned, the school year is winding down.  Not too many more days before the kids are home for the summer and my battery-recharging time during the day becomes curtailed severely.  Got the belt test out of the way, at least: going to be harder to get to daytime martial arts classes during the summer, for sure.  I've also been looking at the geocache map, trying to figure out what I want to try to find before summer and what will just have to wait till fall, the patience of smaller children (and my tolerance for putting them in higher-terrain situations) being rather limited.

Earlier in the week my usual caching partner hit 2000 finds, which is a big deal.  To mark the milestone we drove about 60 miles each way so we could bag the oldest cache in the state, which involved a hike up a decent-sized mountain in pouring rain but at least we found the blasted thing.  After the fact, I was reminded of an section of my cache map that's been bugging me.  Perhaps you can guess why (see below.)

The smiley faces represent caches I've found (and this area is actually surrounded by a much larger sea of smiley faces.)  The blue dot is one I haven't yet found because on my previous trips to the area I didn't meet the requirements for logging it.  Requirements for these 'unknown' caches can vary widely, but this particular one requires you to have previously found ten of the oldest fifteen geocaches in the state before you can claim it.  Being the rule-following sort that I am, on previous trips I just bypassed the spot, but after bagging the oldest cache I went back to the list to see how many other oldies I had.  Of the top fifteen, I had five.  Several days of targeted effort later, I now have nine.  Will hopefully bag the tenth on Monday, knock this blue dot off the map on Tuesday, and then not be annoyed every time I look at this section of map anymore.  Or maybe I should just take up knitting!!





    

The Dichotomy Is Alive And Well

My kids can't wait for summer vacation...less than two weeks to go. I, on the other hand, know that I'm in for it with all three home all summer. The cooking, the cleaning, the refereeing...oy vey.  Battening down the hatches and praying for patience already!!  

Nothing To Worry About. Except Maybe Flooding.

So, after all my stressing about the belt test, it turned out to be much easier than I'd expected, certainly much easier than the last one.  The difference?  Last time my friend J and I were the low belts testing (the higher belts included one guy testing for Black) whereas this time we were the high belts testing and the group was much smaller.  It was still almost two and a half hours long, but the bagwork and sparring elements were minimal and the boardbreaking pretty straightforward.  I wasn't even breathing hard at the end of it, although I was disgustingly hot and had gone through almost half a gallon of ice water.  An unexpected boon and I have to remember that this test was way easier than the norm will be when I'm preparing for the next one, but I'll take it.  At any rate, I earned one of these (below) fair and square.

I have a belt rack for all my old belts; it hangs on the wall in our office and it's always satisfying to add one to it.  Put the Red belt on there yesterday after the test--this is what it looks like now.

  
Annoyingly, this rack isn't quite big enough...wasn't thinking when I ordered it, apparently.  Guess I'm going to have to stay at Black if I ever get there, since this one only has room for my current Senior Red belt plus Brown and Senior Brown (Black comes next.)  Oh well.

On another note, I logged onto Facebook yesterday morning and saw the following post from a grad school friend who lives in Houston.  Her house was filled with water up to the top of the first-floor wainscoting in the recent floods there, as background info.

Calling all Houston Friends: We need hands hauling stuff out of our house and to the curb. If you can come today, that would be amazing. Our address is XXXX and we'll be there from 9:30am until 9:30pm. Be forewarned, the floodwater included a LOT of sewage so if you're in any way immunocompromised you need to stay away. If you can bring hand soap, bleach, bleach wipes & dishwashing liquid it would be very helpful. Folks have been driving by with food donations and we have a bunch of water. Come party in poop-land!

That actually helped my stress levels a lot.  No matter HOW bad my test was going to be, the day was not going to include cleaning a house that had been inundated with poop-filled water!  As a dose of perspective, it was a whopper.  




 

Yeah, This Mama Was Crying Like A Baby

So, my boy?  The one who hasn't been able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat this spring?  TWO beautiful hits tonight, one run, and not one single strikeout.  Just about fell off the bleachers cheering after the first hit, much to the amusement of the other parents around me.  I did okay until the end of the game, but then the coach awarded him the game ball in the postgame huddle and that was all she wrote for me.  Cue the waterworks behind the dugout.  I could care less if the team wins or loses (they did win, for the record) but that poor kid has been trying so hard all season and not giving up and it made me SO happy to see things finally coming together for him.  Love that coach, too.  He's been nothing but supportive and encouraging all season.

Was talking to another mom after the game.  Her son is a year older than mine but had some of the same batting problems last year.  The kid didn't have a hit the *entire* season.  His last game, they were playing another team from our town, and he struck out in his last at-bat.  The coaches of the two teams looked at each other, and the opposing coach told his pitcher to keep the pitches coming, that they were going to keep throwing to that kid until he got a hit no matter HOW many pitches it took.  He did, the kid finally connected with the ball, and both teams lined up along the fences and cheered for him!  Wish I'd been there to see it...that is what youth sports should be all about.

The Final Countdown

Three days till my Senior Red taekwondo belt test. Saturday, 11AM start.  For perspective, in a system where White is belt #1 and Black is belt #12, I'm testing for belt #9.  Getting up there now.  

The primary goal between now and then is not to get hurt!  Went to class tonight, will go again in the morning to review, but then that's it. Won't be learning anything new at this stage of the game, that's for sure.  Fitness is about as good as it's going to get, I know my stuff about as well as I'm going to know it, now it's just time to relax and power through.  Should be a tough 2-2.5 hours but I can do this.  

My usual instructor taught the class tonight, but she won't be there Saturday. She pulled me aside at the end of class for a few last words of advice.  After reminding me to relax and breathe, she told me to make a point of not paying any attention at all to Thing One, who will be testing with me but for a lower belt.  As the mother of two black belts herself, she knows how easy it is to worry too much about how your child is doing at a test to the detriment of your own concentration!  I'll do my best on that, anyway.  He's 11 and eminently capable of handling this.  Thing Two was supposed to test with us as well but had a soccer tournament conflict, thankfully.  He's only 9 and I'm just as happy for him to stick with the lower-stress testing format for a while yet.  He earned his new belt last night--he did a fabulous job and I was so proud watching him.  That kid has come SUCH a long way in the past few years.  

And in the grand scheme of things, all of this is such small potatoes that I'm almost ashamed of having it taking up so much of my thoughts this week!  Close friends from my Houston days are being evacuated from their homes because of flooding as I type...the pictures are terrible.  Floods, drought, riots, wars...little Ms. Buttercup here needs to pull up her socks and get on with it.  As she will, of course.

'Night...

Well, I'll Be

Was out in the driveway with Thing Two and Petunia earlier.  As we rounded the corner by the front sidewalk, we heard a very loud cawing sound out of the blue, sort of like a crow or raven's call but not quite right for that.  I craned my neck to see what sort of bird was on the garage roof, but seeing none up there, mentally shrugged my shoulders and went on about my business.

A few minutes later, I was back outside hanging the flag on the front porch when I heard the noise again.  It startled the heck out of me.  I turned and saw a tiny rickety baby deer standing in the strip of shrubbery between the house and front walk!  I had no idea deer even *made* noise, let alone noise that loud at such a young age.  I backed away carefully so as not to scare it further, ducked into the house and came back out with my phone.  I didn't want to get too close to it, but did manage to get the pic below using the zoom.

Not the best shot in the world for obvious reasons, but you can see the deer's hind end (the white tail) and hind leg right by the solar light in the middle of the picture.  It's actually looking over its shoulder  back out toward me, but you can't see that in the pic.

As a side note for those who don't happen to live in deer-infested rural areas as we do, it is very common this time of year to see unattended fawns.  The mother deer leave them where they are born during the day for the first few days until they are strong enough to keep up with the mother as she forages, returning for them in the early evening.  As a mother myself, this bothered me a lot when we first moved here (what halfway decent mom leaves her baby alone all day????) but this appears to just be how it's done.  Nature red in tooth and claw and all that. The fawns generally stay still and quiet until she returns--like I said, I've never heard one 'yell' to defend itself before!  This one was actually sheltered, too, which was very considerate of the mother...probably half a dozen times now I've woken up in the morning to discover a brand new fawn bedded down smack in the middle of my front lawn!  The first time that happened I checked on it through my front window all day long, but it never moved...at dusk the mother came back and it was gone.  I'm no fan of deer, between the ticks they carry, the devastation they wreak on my garden and the crashes they cause by suddenly dashing onto the road, but I *hate* to see the babies left alone and defenseless.  Hypocrisy?


 

It's Official

We will soon have not one, not two, but THREE children playing travel soccer.  As in, one more child than there are parents and cars: this will make for some fun weekend scheduling.  The boys were already old hands at this--they're going into their fifth and third years respectively with this club--and courtesy of the tryouts last week, we now know that Petunia will be joining them come fall.  We surely don't need any more craziness, but it also isn't fair to penalize the youngest because she has busy and talented older siblings...she deserves her fair shot too.

As always, the issue boils down to how we distribute a limited amount of after-school activity time equitably between three children while also making sure that they have downtime and time to get their schoolwork done.  Anybody have a magic wand I can borrow??