March 1st

Wow! I has been a long time. I am just always so busy that I haven't stopped and written an entry in this. I keep thinking I'll write when I have more time. Clearly, that could be years. I am still working two to three days a week at the kids school, which is great. I really like the staff and love being around the children. The only problem has been that the kids have been sick so often this winter that I seem to either be at home with a sick child, which means I cannot get anything done, or I am at work and cannot get my personal things done. I race around when I can getting as much done as I possibly can. Brayden started on his L League team a while ago. I volunteered to be the Team Mom for his team. I have done it before for my older kids when they were younger. I did it for two reasons. The first is that I know from past experience that the snacks the kids are given for baseball are usually garbage. I remember my kids being given cans of soda and chips after games when they were five and six years old. I don't let my kids have either of those and really don't want them associating garbage food with sports. The other reason I volunteered was so Brayden could see me doing something for him and his team. I quickly found out that MANY THINGS have been added to the list that the Team Mom has to do. Get boys last names put on uniforms, price and buy team banner, price and buy pails for dug outs, give and collect photo envelopes, buy cases of soda and bring to Opening Day, organize boys for photo day, organize things for Opening Day parade, go to Team Parent Meeting, plan one or two pizza parties during season, plan end of season party, buy plaques for coaches...it's a lot. Oh, and here is the funny thing. Did you see ANYTHING about SNACKS on that list? No, because the coaches wife (who actually is very nice and thought she was being helpful) decided it was too much work to do all of that AND be in charge of snacks SO SHE ASSIGNED IT TO SOMEONE ELSE! When I found out I told her that that was one big reason I wanted to be Team Mom in the first place to make sure the kids were given healthy snacks. She and the woman next to her said, "Well, wouldn't cokes and bags of chips be good?" She wasn't kidding. Doesn't EVERYONE know about childhood obesity and feeding you kids healthy things? I then talked to the woman who was assigned the job of organizing snacks and talked to her about asking moms to bring healthy snacks like granola bars, sliced fruit, trail mix...She said, "Hmm, if you don't want them to get soda and chips, how about sodas and cookies?" I was pretty bummed since I know the reasons they are doing it are because garbage food is cheap, easy to store and makes the kids happy while food like sliced oranges may take more time, can't be cut too far ahead of time and may cost more. She wound up not telling the parents what to bring for snack, which means it probably will not be anything but stuff I can't let my kids have. What a bummer to end the games with not letting my son eat the snack. My thought is that why not feed them healthy things while they are young, they will be around more and more unhealthy things as they grow up. I should also say, I had to be hyper aware of this when my older kids were younger because my son had a weight problem since he was pretty young and I have always had to watch what he ate. But even though none of my younger ones have that problem I still try and feed them well. We don't eat as well as I would like, but I don't let them have soda, fast food, chips...
Anyway, baseball has taken some time. Our first game is this Saturday, which will be fun. I also signed Brayden up for basketball, which is also going on now. I am not really sure why I did that. Being on two sports at once is a bad idea. Actually I did it because a friend of mine talked about signing her son up and I thought it would be fun for them to play together since it only lasts for about seven weeks and they only play once a week. I just signed Brayden up for a swim team. WHAT? Okay, but it doesn't start until May and only overlaps baseball season by a couple of weeks. Swimming is such a great sport. My older kids were on a swim team for six years and both are really good swimmers. Unfortunately, the coach asked me to sign him up for swim team practice early since he is a new swimmer in order for him to be ready to be on the team. When do they meet? Mon, Wed and Fri from 5:30-6:30. He has baseball practice at that time on Weds and basketball at that time on Fridays. Great. I have yet to figure that one out. It's only for a month though. I just have to remember that we are doing these to teach him about sports, get exercise and to have fun.
We went on a trip up to Northern Cal to visit some of Ray's friends, his mother, and Dakota. One of Ray's friends has a son who is only 12 hours older than Brayden. We see them about two or three times a year and they really have fun together. It was a hectic trip because of traveling with three little ones, but we had a lot of fun. We dropped Colton off and he stayed with Dakota for a couple of days. We visited Berkeley with all of the kids and Ray's mom, who went there years ago. We got together with friends several times while we were there too. The kids were great. Poor Brookelyn started crying on the way up and said her ear hurt. She had told me that the day before but when I asked her to show me where she pointed to the outside of her ear so I let it go. When I reached back to feel her forehead, she was burning up. She cried for an hour or so after we gave her pain medicine. Suddenly she stopped crying and started laughing and acting loopy. She and Sasha were laughing and being silly for the last two hours of the trip. I think they were beyond exhausted. We got into town at 2:30 am and all three little ones were awake. Unfortunately, they were up early the next day (Sasha was up at 6:00 am) which was painful for Ray and I. They were really well behaved the whole weekend though, which was amazing for how little sleep they got. The trip home went well too.
One really fun thing was that on Saturday night several of us went out for awhile and left the kids with a babysitter. One of the couples has two young children and asked up to bring our kids there. Their babysitter is 25 and they really like her and she said it would be fine. Five kids between 22 months and five years old. We were gone from 5:00 pm to 10:30. We called a couple of times to see how it was going. When we came home all of the kids were asleep around the house. It was pretty amazing. We normally wouldn't have left them for that long in a new setting, but we were going to a funeral and a gathering of friends and family afterwards. We can't leave them with Ray's mom, they are too much for her to handle.