Matching Tracksuits

fun in fours

growing

Finishing Up

Wednesday 29 January 2020

The Girl has some new furniture. She asked me to help; I did, for a while. But I resisted as well. Not because I wanted to do something else. I thought that at her age, she might get more out of doing a lot of it herself — a sense of accomplishment is a valuable feeling.

Tonight, she worked on the drawers to her desk. In fact, she completed them. And the rest of the desk, as a matter of fact.

I did what I do probably too much: I photographed the event. As she gets older, the Girl is less thrilled with my photographic attention.

Which, given this generation’s obsession with selfies, strikes me as a little odd.

New Furniture

Monday 27 January 2020

L wanted new furniture in her room. Truth be told, she’d outgrown a lot of what she already had, so it was a need rather than a want — surprising, I know.

So Saturday, the Girl and the Boy hopped into the van (we still haven’t sold it) one last time and headed to their favorite Sweedish store.

Procedures

Tuesday 21 January 2020

The Boy decided he wanted to have a snack. "I want a burrito," he declared.

He still had to take his medicine, though.

Dalton Day 1

Saturday 18 January 2020

A somewhat frustrating day for the girls: they lost their first match in straight sets to a team from Chattanooga wearing red. The reds hit well, made few mistakes, and powered through our girls in back-to-back sets. They won the first set 25-14 and then came back from something like 13-7 to win the second set 25-23.

The girls played two other teams, beating them both. Our second game was against the DiamondT Spikerz. We beat them fairly convincingly in straight sets, 25-19 and 25-22.

The final team our girls beat was the Volley One team. They won one set against the Chattanooga Reds, who'd beaten us the first match. Our girls demolished them -- and they'd won one set against the team that demolished us.

After playing three games, the girls scored the final game. It was against the Diamond Ts and the Chattanooga Reds.  The DiamondTs, whom we'd beaten in straight sets, crushed the Reds 25-19 in the first set and demolished them 25-14 in the second.

The team that we beat in straight sets beat the only team that beat us in straight sets in straight sets.

"We were so annoyed," L said of it.

In the end, the Reds did the same thing against the DiamondTs that we'd done against the Reds: they beat themselves.

Watching these girls play shows me again and again how important that mental game is, how it's often more important than the physical game.

Rainy, Sick, and Slow Saturday: Three Pictures

Saturday 11 January 2020

Picture One: The Medicine

The Girl has been fighting a sinus and ear infection for some time now; K has now come down with something as well. As such, they’ve amassed quite a little medicine collection: antibiotics, probiotics, decongestants, cough suppressants from the pharmacological side of things; oils, teas, syrups, and nose irrigators from the holistic side of things.

It’s all covered, literally and figuratively.

Picture Two: The Game

The Boy has grown crazy about Pokemon lately. He decided he wanted to buy a deck for himself and another for L using his final Christmas gift money.

“She’s going to teach me how to battle for real!” he declared. The way he’s been playing has been, shall we say, improvisational. The Girl knows how to play; she promised to teach him.

At $20 a deck, it’s quite the investment. I was hesitant to let him go through with it, but two things stopped me: first, it is, after all, his money. He needs to learn how to spend it wisely, so I gave advice, made suggestions, but in the end left it up to him. Second, I thought that if this gave them something to do together, just the two of them, it would be worth more than that $40 for the two decks. So we bought them while we were out today.

At first, he was terribly upset because we couldn’t find the decks. When we found them, there was only one. “But we checked on the computer and they said they had them!” he wailed, about to have a little panic attack there in the toy section. “They lied!” I tried to explain to him that just because they found them on the Walmart site doesn’t mean they have them in that particular store. I pulled up the site on my phone and showed him. In the end, though, he took the disappointment rather well.

As we were checking out, though, he decided to look in the checkout aisles. “They have them there, sometimes.” Sure enough, after we’d checked out, he found some, so we grabbed them and went to the nearest checkout, which was a self-checkout. Which I don’t like. Why should the store get free labor from me? Still, if the other checkouts all have long lines, I’ll go ahead to the self-checkout.

The gentleman in front of us was a prime illustration of the slow South. He picked up each item, turned it about in his hand to confirm where the bar code was, scanned it, placed it in a bag, took the individual bag with one item to his buggy, placed it carefully in the buggy, moving other bags as necessary to get everything just so, then repeated it. He looked to be in his mid-fifties so I couldn’t salve my impatience thinking, “Well, here’s this sweet old man, still clinging to his independence…” Of course, I really don’t know the guy’s story — there are any number of reasons why he moved so very slowly and deliberately. But it’s symptomatic of what I see as a slow Southern mentality. Don’t rush. For anything.

When the light turns green at an intersection, for example, most drivers don’t respond immediately. They wait, even to take their foot off the brake. Sometimes two or three seconds. Sometimes five. Sometimes ten. They creep into the intersection and take what seems like an eternity to get up to the speed limit, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even get to the speed limit: they often drive five, even ten miles an hour below it.

Anyway…

After dinner, the instruction began. And the first game didn’t go so well.

“Go easy on him!” I mouthed to L when she wasn’t looking.

“I did!” she mouthed in reply.

Picture Three: Rain

I spent about four hours working on end-of-the-quarter grades today. When lunch rolled around, I didn’t even have 1,000 steps. By the time shopping and dinner was over, I had just over 5,000.

“After I put the Boy to bed,” I said to Clover, “we’re going on a long walk.”

And then the rain started again.

Looking Down

Friday 10 January 2020

The call came in at 3:30, when I had fifteen minutes left of my day. Kids were milling about, waiting for their parents to pick them up or to head off to after-school. I looked at my phone to see that it was from Nowy Sacz. I thought perhaps it could be Babcia, perhaps Wojek D. It was, however, neither of them. Instead, it was Pani M, my former landlady in Lipnica and the closest I'd had to a Polish mother until I actually got one (-in-law).

She'd called to thank us for the Christmas card we'd sent, which the family had received only this week. We got to talking for a while, and she asked about the family.

"L looks like she's getting very tall," she said.

"She's taller than her mother now," I said. We'd learned that when she went to the doctor this week. Five feet eight inches -- one inch taller than K.

"How tall?" she asked. Knowing imperial measurements would be meaningless to Pani M, I Googled it quickly. 

"172," I replied.

"Oh, that is tall."

In the evening, I was standing across from L as K helped her prepare her nightly medicine regimen, and I realized I was looking straight ahead as I looked right into her eyes. Straight ahead. We were only about five feet apart. And it hit me: we're almost there physically. That little bundle of pink that we could hold in a single arm thirteen years ago is now almost fully physically grown.

Today's Photo, Completely Unrelated

I reworked a few photos from our Grand Canyon trip. This is one of my favorites.

Rock Hill Tournament, Day 2

Sunday 05 January 2020

The girls had been putzing around. Sure, they'd won a couple of matches, and they'd lost one to a team that seemed to them, I'm sure, unbeatable. Still, even on the games they'd won, they'd made a bunch of silly mistakes. It just so happened that the other team made more. They played like beginners.

Not today.

This morning, they played their first game of the day, and it was business as usual. A few balls fell in the middle of two or three players because of a lack of communication and initiative. They flubbed a number of serves. They knocked some received serves off at angles that would have left Euclid scratching his head. They played like beginners. Still.

Then came time for their second match, and from the moment the other team began warming up, I began worrying. They were hitting very well, and digging those hits effectively. Their serves were sharp.

"Starting match 2," I texted K. "Gonna be a tough one."

They came out and transformed into a group of girls who knew what they were doing, who could dig hits like never before, hit like never before, block like never before -- in short, play like never before.

"They have never played this well," I texted.

They took the first game 25-21; they lost the second game 21-25. The third game (to 15 only) they were up 11-8 and then slipped up and let the other team tie it. The coach called a time out. Immediately afterward, the opponents scored two more. They only had two more points to score; our girls had to score double that. Coach called another timeout.

L went up to serve. One down. Two down. Three. Four -- they'd won!

I can't remember I've seen nine girls (one girl, unfortunately, went home sick earlier in the day) so very happy.

That win put them in the semifinals, where they faced a team of roughly the same strength as the one they'd just defeated. I thought, "We can do this -- we can make it to the finals." But unfortunately, the girls had just run out of gas by that time. They started making some of their old silly mistakes again. They were just worn out, and L, who's been battling a cold all week, confided in me on the way home, "I felt like I was going to throw up that whole last game."

"And yet you stuck it out, for the team."

"Yeah, I guess." A typical L reply.

So what did they learn this weekend? I think the coach put it best: "You girls learned how to win." That's easier said than done: it takes a lot of confidence to face a team you think will beat you and stare them down, then beat them down. And when things are falling apart, it takes a lot to keep pushing, even when the loss starts to look inevitable.

L, for her weekend of effort, got to sleep the whole way home, got freshly made rosół for dinner, and a 7:15 self-imposed bedtime.

In two weeks, we do it again...

The Dog and the Game

Friday 27 December 2019

The kids played with the dog a bit this afternoon -- a good thing, because the pup, when neglected, pouts. And a pouting pup does things like dig massive holes in the backyard, run uncontrollably once inside, bark incessantly inside or out.

Afterward, another evening over the board. This time, possibly the most luck I've ever experienced in the silly game. Everything with buildings on it -- I owned. I made my own son cry when he landed on New York Avenue with a hotel and had to pay $1,000. He literally fell into the floor and began sobbing.

"Buddy, calm down. It's just a game. I'm lucky this time." No help. Then I had an idea: "If you can pull yourself together, I'll give you a surprise." I was planning on giving everything I had to him and letting him finish L off, but her turn was right after mine and she landed on Tennessee Avenue (See that? It also had a hotel.) and had to pay $950 one turn after she'd paid me something like $600. She had nothing left: she gave me her little bit of cash and all her remaining property with a pout and said, "You win."

Boxing Day 2019

Thursday 26 December 2019

I’ve never really been a fan of Monopoly. After about the age of ten or eleven, I determine that there was too much chance involved, and I just found it frustrating. I never played it after that.

As an adult, though, I’ve come to recognize that there is a fair amount of chance in life that just sucks money from one’s bank account. Medical emergencies, car repairs, accidents, home issues, and the like — all unplanned, all expenses.

When the Girl got Monopoly for Christmas this year, I knew I’d end up playing it with the kids. I didn’t realize how much fun it could be as an adult who can simply look at it as a game that is a fairly accurate reflection of the frustrations of adulthood and, more importantly, as a game that can provide lessons to kids and time together as a family.

We played twice today. The first time, it was just the kids and I. It only took a moment for me to realize the value for a seven-year-old. He had to read, to count money, and occasionally make change.

L dominated us, and the Boy was hemorrhaging cash to a degree that he declared he was going to quit. We talked him down, but then K returned home and we set about to preparing and eating dinner.

Afterward, the kids wanted to play again, so we sat down as a family and began. I had a little strategy in mind that I wanted to test: quality, not quantity. I bought a bunch of properties quickly, then traded at exorbitant cost to myself three or four properties for the final street to make the orange set:

  • New York Avenue
  • Tennessee Avenue
  • St. James Place

I then set about to building them up to two houses each as quickly as possible. The result: I was getting a couple of hundred bucks every few cycles of the board.

The Boy took a similar route: he ended up with all the railroads and soon was rolling in money.

Poor K was getting hit left and right: bad luck with Community Chest/Chance cards, bad luck with the dice (she must have landed on the luxury tax four or five times), and soon she was down to little cash and few unmortgaged properties.

Then I bought one more house for each of my properties and drawing $550-$600 from every poor player who landed on one of them. K finally landed on one, and it just about wiped her out.

Her reaction: she laughed. Our reaction: we laughed with her.

On our walk this evening, then, we were able to help E see that the most important thing in a game like that is just to have fun. “It’s just a game!”

Tuesday

Tuesday 22 October 2019

Today’s the last day of the first quarter. It’s been the same as every year: I feel like the first quarter is dragging and suddenly, we have a couple of weeks left. Once that feeling of the year speeding by settles in, I feel like the year goes by in a blink. We’re in that period of work-break-work-break that always makes the first semester seem shorter than the second. In a few days, we have two days for fall break. Then we have three weeks before Thanksgiving. That’s followed by another three weeks before Christmas. And then a few more breaks in January and February before everything dries up and we’re all dying for any kind of break at all. March and April seem endless. And it’s just October and I’m already thinking about the end of the year...

That means the Girl's birthday is approaching -- officially a teenager, with all the joys and challenges (i.e., challenges to authority) that entails. And all the changes in relationships that entails -- the pulling away that I know is coming, is already manifesting itself, that I worry is something I'm doing wrong while simultaneously reassuring myself that it's normal behavior for this age, that I acted like that at this age, that my parents and I survived it as will the Girl, K, and I (and E -- don't forget about the effect it has on him) will live through it.

Still, I find myself thinking, "How can it be ten years ago that she looked like this? It just feels like a couple..."