sara skates

Spring is happy when…

the sun is owt

The best thing about Spring is…

its byoodfl

Spring is a…

erat thine (with the g’s written backwards like e’s)

I just adore this phase of literacy learning!

He’s 7.  Seven years ago today, I got really sick and Toby was born.  I have a 10 year old and a 7 year old.  And amidst all the celebration (which there is much of) there are also some poignant bittersweet moments.

Toby while waiting for his bus this morning "Awww, I just want to fit in.  Mom, I just want to fit in, and I have several palsy, and I want to fit in.  How come i have several palsy?  I don’t feel lucky".  (We tell him occasionally that we feel really lucky to have him.)  I respond in the only way I can – "Tobes, I know it’s hard.  It’s hard to be different.  But you’re a really cool SEVEN year old boy, you’re smart and cute and charming."  He resists, but then as the bus rolls up he tells me to tell the bus driver that he’s a statue, not Toby – as he poses statue-like in his walker – which makes the bus staff and me and him giggle hysterically.

After he left, Hannah breaks down into sobs of unhappiness with a litany of things wrong in her life.  She and we forgot to coordinate bringing treats to her classroom this year and Toby got to bring treats (honestly, when questioned, she admitted that most kids did not bring stuff in to share in 4th grade); he got a present on her birthday last year and that makes her sad; fractions are hard; etc.  She has been a mess in the last few days – growing up is hard.  Especially when your mom strangely likes math and uses it in her daily work life and math is incomprehensible to you.

So while sending them off on their respective school busses this morning, all I wanted to do was scoop them up and crawl into the big bed and play games and eat popcorn with them all day.  Terry’s doing ok, it’s a difficult anniversary for her (as she says, I tried to die on her 7 years ago, very un-nice of me).  They had cupcakes for breakfast though and we’ll have cake and presents and family time tonight – and a party on Sunday – and it’s almost incomprehensible that he’s 7.  And she’s 10. 

Make them stop growing, please!

Siiiigggghhhh. I have
oodles of blog fodder, but a serious lack of time. A few more weeks and we’ll be through the
last of our annual holiday/celebration fest – it seems non-stop between about
Halloween and Toby’s birthday at the end of March.

Hannah turned 10 on Sunday Ten! How did that happen?? She had 7 friends come over Saturday
afternoon around 2:00 pm. We took them
all to the Science Museum, where there was much fun and shrieking (particularly
in the submarine ride simulator – on the second ride through, I warned others
in line to take the other car – as the gaggle of girls was likely to be LOUD –
they thanked us profusely). Then, they
stayed the night – some slumbering occurred but not a lot. Most of them left between 9 and 10 am – the
announced departure time – except for one whose mom called her daughter to
relay a message – she’d be by to pick up her daughter at 2:00 pm, as she was
going shopping. ???? What is up with these people? She didn’t come until five minutes to
three. Holy heck. I didn’t realize Terry hadn’t talked to the
mom – if I had, I would have been on the phone with her at 10:05 a.m. saying we had
plans and she needed to come pick up her kid. 

Toby did try to engineer a trade of birthdays – he told
Hannah that HE was born on the 18^th, and she on the 27^th. (I later told her to tell him that heck, he
was born 3.5 months early – so just think – his birthday SHOULD actually be
months away from now, not 10 days after hers). And
now he covets everything she received as a gift – top of the list is a
Webkin. (Hearing him say it is pretty
funny – he keeps mixing up that word with the name of our local supermarkets –
Wegmans.) As near as I can tell, Webkins
are similar to Nintendogs or Tamagotchis – with a twist.  You get a plush animal, and a code that you
use to “adopt” a virtual animal online – you take care of the online version
daily, play games, earn points, clean up their poop, spend virtual money, etc. Though, Toby covets everything where he has
seen any form of marketing, so this is just the latest. He’s persistant. Wonder where he gets that trait from.

There has been some stashbusting knitting progress – with a few
roadblocks thrown in for good measure. Barney the wool-eating dog extracted my current stockinette socks in
progress (easy conference etc. project) from their bag, and then
extracted three size 2 bamboo needles from it with minimal sock damage (a few
pulled stitches at the ladder points between the needles), and chomped the
toothpick needles into smaller toothpicks. I emailed my tale of woe to the company, and guess what?? They are replacing them. Chances are, they’ll arrive more quickly than
the time it’ll take me to to get to a store to replace them. Anyway, sock one is nearing the toe. And much to my surprise, the dog did not eat the
sock.

I have also sorted out gauge issues on a long-stalled pair
of socks – in a spiral rib pattern. That’s not as much of a brainless project (the 2*2 rib shifts over a
stitch every 2 rows), so progress is slow.

But the funnest knitting news was teaching Hannah’s Girl
Scout troop how to knit the other night. They had made knitting needles at a previous meeting, and I showed up
with a big bag of yarn – they all picked a skein and we got going. They’re knitting a garter stitch square to
become a beanie baby blanket. While the
squares were not done during that hour, they all did really well, and the very
next morning, Hannah whipped it out while waiting for her school bus. It was really fun to see a whole group of
them get going – with their personalities shining through in their knitting –
some loosey goosey, some tight and consistent, some in between. Anyway – it was cool. And an excellent stash-busting effort on my
part – 8 skeins gone in one night.

Skating – has been busy (really busy). Two and a half weeks ago, we traveled to west of Boston for Adult Eastern
Sectionals. We stayed with Cate and Rhys
on the way there (and back), and had the pleasure of not only playing with them
and their kids, but also Kristin – who is doing fabulously in this last stretch
of med school. While near Boston, we stayed with friends of ours Sue and Linda, and their two kids – it was so great to
reconnect with them. I lived in Boston for 11 years, Terry
grew up in the area, we all go way back. It was a wild weekend – we just sort of folded back into their lives.  They are living in a different place than before (we have been gone from the
Boston area for 11 years after all), but there are all these shadows of our
Boston years in their house, and these little moments of insight about how our
lives are still intertwined. At one
point, Linda was grinding coffee beans, and she quipped “Big noise kitties!”
and then turned to us and laughed “hey, where did I get THAT from?!”  I used to say that whenever I started the
coffee grinder – we had (and still have) an extremely skittish cat ROFL. Since I cut coffee out of my diet a few years
ago, I had forgotten about that.

The whole 4 days was a great dose of time with friends who
live far away, and a reminder of how folks stay with us even when life changes
so that contact changes too.

Skating too went great. I competed in two events – Champ Gold Freestyle, and Gold/Masters
Interp. I am grossly out of my league at
this new level for medal contention, but I was quite happy with my skates. I still need to work on projecting enjoying
the whole “look at me!” experience of competing – but bit by bit it’s getting
better. I landed most of what I wanted
to land – the first axel went off without a hitch, I fell twice in the warmup
on axel/loop attempts so that turned into a second axel without a combination
jump but I didn’t fall, and spins were ok. I competed again this weekend at my club’s every-other-year event (the
Genesee Invitational) – a low-key event with me and a friend of mine and no one
else – it was great, we both treated it “just like practice, without other
skaters to dodge during a run-through.” Christine skated a great program – her first competition in two years,
and a new month-old program to boot. Mine went fine too – my main goals this time were to improve the
presentation part – and I think I suceeded. My other friend Christine said a few times “Hey – I saw your neck!” –
meaning, my head was up and I wasn’t “turtling”. One of the judges chatted with me a few times
after my events – Mrs. Matthews has judged my tests since my return to skating
as an adult, and liked what she saw. 

In
addition to the freestyle, I entered a standard track pre-juvenile/juvenile
“footwork” event, and and adult interp event. The footwork I skated to a 1:10 cut of music from the Boston
Typewriter Orchestra. Three other kids
were in the event, including one I skate with often – he was APPALLED to be
skating against me! Everyone skated
well, though the first kid had some music problems and was relieved when they
got her CD working finally. The interp
event was my pots and pans program – I
am finally settling into hamming it up and feeling more comfortable with that
program too. It’s one where my costume
is utterly ridiculous (I am in fact bedecked in pots and pans), but it works
really well.

Work is going well – the third quarter has started and my
overload course is off and running. I am
late on writing my annual self-appraisal, but mostly that’s because pesky work
things keep getting in the way. I’ll be
doing some conference travel over the next few months, including a trip to

Orlando!!!!

with my grant
students for a presentation at the SAS Global Forum (SAS nerds in
abundance). I’m working on convincing
Terry that the kids would survive a few nights with a sitter and that she
should come with me – if we can get the sitters coordinated, that might
happen.

I’m sure there’s more but this will do for now.  I’m polishing this while Hannah is in her diving class – she has moved up to "Sparks 3" which means she goes twice a week rather than once.  She still has no interest in competing in diving meets though   I love watching her learn skills like this – where you figure out what your body is doing and how to make it do what you want it to do.  The upper level diving stuff is absolutely astounding – skating has a lot of rotation but it’s all in one plane.  Divers can rotate in all three planes at once.