Not a real meeting

Yesterday I was in a class zoom meeting about how to identify/develop a theoretical framework when Phoebe wandered in. She was supposed to be otherwise occupied but...you know Phoebe. Would it have worked to lock my door? Perhaps—but she's a "pick-locker," as she says...so perhaps not. 

"Are you in a meeting?" she asked, tip-toeing over to my nightstand to take a drink from the water bottle that I keep there just for her so that she doesn't drink out of my water bottle. 

"I am."

"Is it a real meeting?" she asked. "Because I see puppies...so..."

One of my classmates had put some chihuahuas up as her background picture, so there were indeed puppies. 

"It is a real meeting," I told her. "Do you want to say hello?"

"No," she said...and then walked away to cause chaos elsewhere.

But now I'm pretty sure she thinks that I'm 100% hopping online to talk about puppies behind her back.

A crowded museum visit

Who has a family pass to the High Museum of Art and showed up on "Access for All" (free admission on the third Wednesday of the month) day? 

This family!

*****

But let me back up really quick...

Shin splints?

I've never had shin splints before.

I've heard about them plenty, but apparently my running form is so exquisite (lol) that I've never experienced them. 

Until this week when my left shin started hurting something terrible. 

I thought about my exercise routine and nothing really seemed off about it and I couldn't imagine that I would have developed shin splints from running the same way I always do (again—exquisite form...or something). So I decided to blame my trek across campus last week. 

I went to campus because I needed to go do some work in the book room and look at some papers in the special collections library. 

The walk from my office to the library is...quite the hike. 

And I wore a new pair of shoes that honestly had my feet quite miserable by the end—a mile to the library, a mile back from the library, and then walking to and from the car added another mile to the day. 

Clearly I had been doing some overcompensating as I was walking. 

Or something. 

Whatever the case, by Sunday afternoon my left shin—specifically—was killing me. Did my right shin hurt as well? I imagined that perhaps it did because my feet were still a little sore from their three-miles-in-new-shoes adventure on campus earlier. I spent a little time discretely massaging them while watching Benjamin's swim meet. 

And then I skipped my run on Monday because...my shins were still sore. 

But Monday was a bit of a crazy day because I accompanied Rachel to the doctor in the morning and then took Benjamin to the middle school in the afternoon (to see about how to perhaps get on the middle school swim team) and...I wore pants...so I didn't spend a lot of time looking at my legs (and didn't have a lot of time to look at my legs anyway).

It just hurt...boo hoo...life moves on. 

Into things

We have been reveling in not having to be up for swim practice early in the morning. But when I checked my phone at 10:30 and found that a bunch of swim team moms were meeting at the pool to play...did we go? Absolutely. 

We arrived at 11:00 and we played until 3:00 and saw so many of our friends. 

When we first arrived the O and Cu families were there. But the Cu family had to leave for haircuts and the O family decided they wanted to make it to the library for a puppet show this afternoon. I actually had that—quite tentatively—on my schedule as well and I asked the kids what they would rather do: wait for the M family to show up or go to the puppet show. They all voted to stay at the pool—with Phoebe gushing, "I'd rather see Miss Julie!" (the mom of the M family)—so that's what we did.

It turns out that staying at the pool was a good decision because the O family texted to say that the library programming for the day had been cancelled due to some maintenance issues. Plus soon after the M family showed up, the Cl family showed up as well. 

The kids had a blast...and only got a little bit sunburned (in spite of my forcing them out of the pool to reapply sunscreen). 

Here's Phoebe pretending to sleep in the fort Zoë helped her make after we got home:

And That's A Wrap: Benjamin's County Meet

Benjamin was awfully excited for the county swim meet this afternoon. I was both surprised—and not surprised—to look over and see his meet suit underneath his church clothes...

Zoë at the County Meet

After a somewhat terrible night (with Phoebe and rogue fire alarms and other adventures), we got up bright and early to head to Georgia Tech for Zoë's session of the county swim meet. Their facility is phenomenal—it probably helps that it was built specifically for the Olympics in 1996. So it was just fun to be there, even though our kids didn't quite end up making it in any individual events. Zoë was 56th in breaststroke (24.96, but 50th place—the cutoff for county—was only 24.49 and these kids didn't drop to 23.84 seconds until 44th place, so Zoë was really quite close making it!). As the fastest breaststroker on our team, though, she was pulled into the medley relay. She also swam on the freestyle relay.

Miriam on the organ at Christ Church

Here's a video I know Grandpa has been waiting for! 

When the girls were in England (with Grandpa and Darla) they toured around Oxford and Miriam got to play on the organ at Christ Church. Their guide, George, is helping her with the stops at times and told her she should apply to be an organ scholar there. She's been looking into it, but she'd need a number of AP examinations with a score of 5 to qualify (but—one down, right?) and she's not sure she wants to take that many AP exams...

Anyway, here she is playing one of her pieces (she's embarrassed about her playing here, but it's her first time on the organ and each organ has a different feel so it's understandable that she would make a few mistakes):

Butterflies and sunbeams

Today my friend Janelle brought over a bagful of vegetables from her parents' garden. I was grateful because our garden went to the birds (and the deer and the squash beetles) this year. I just couldn't keep up with it...like at all. 

Have I mentioned we've been sick?

Anyway, today we got fresh vegetables from the garden. I knew they were coming because Janelle had texted to ask if she could share. And the little kids knew she'd brought them because they are the ones who answered the door. But my big kids didn't know where they came from. 

"Yum," Rachel said, looking at the juicy tomatoes and thick cucumber slices. "Whose garden did these come from?"

"Janelle's," Alexander answered. 

"Well, technically they're from her parents' garden," I said. 

"Ah, our neighbour-in-laws," Rachel quickly (and wittily) responded. 

*****

Flooding

It was difficult for me to watch the news about High River's big flood back in 2013. 

The flooding in Texas has been absolutely gut-wrenching, with over 100 dead (including 27 children/counselors from a summer camp). To be fair, that flooding has been nothing short of catastrophic...it hurts my heart just to think about it.

Durham is flooding right now as well, and it's eerie to watch the news from there. 

We used to live at the red tag on the following map:

Our neighbourhood was called Eno Trace, and you can kind of see where the river...traces...Lazyriver Drive, the main road in our neighbourhood. We used to hike through the woods to get to River Forest Park (which my kids called the "Purple Slide Park"). There wasn't a great place to cross the river, but Old Farm Road Park is clearly right there as well (we would sometimes have soccer games there), just off Rippling Stream Road. Because of the river, though, we'd have to take Infinity down to Roxboro Road and then enter that neighbourhood. 

Linocutting for FHE

For FHE we put sick little Phoebe on the couch to watch a show and shut sick little Benjamin in his bedroom far away from everyone else (we even have a sign on the bathroom door saying "ONLY BENJAMIN" to remind everyone else to not use that bathroom so that we don't inadvertently share germs with him) and the rest of us did some rubber stamp carving/linocuts. 

The kids made all kinds of fun things—piano keys, a flower pot, a Lego hand, Miriam's music logo, some holly and berries—on rubber. I made a linocut of a person swimming butterfly. 

I broke it into two separate parts so that I could use multiple colours of ink. The top image in the picture below is one of the carvings—of a swim cap and a splash of water—and then the person's body is a separate carving. You can see that I didn't quite take out enough of the "noise" the first time I tried printing (because my goal is to leave room above the swimmer to write "Thank you!" or "Go team!" or whatever), so I took out some of that and tried again:

My blue was drying out by the time I finished flattening the image out a bit, so the water part didn't turn out so well, but I think it will work when I make official prints (because i won't stop to carve so much in the middle). 

I thought it turned out pretty well for my first attempt at layering my linocuts.

Unfortunately, we put both Andrew and Rachel to bed with fevers...here's hoping we can all pull out of this funk we're in by the end of the week...