Toothless Maddie, a band concert, and field events...

Several weeks ago, Maddie lost her top front tooth. It had been wiggly for quite awhile when one morning after breakfast Maddie and I were talking and she yelled, "Where's my tooth!?" Turns out she had swallowed it along with a bite of bagel. So long tooth. She looks pretty darn cute with that big gap.


Slowly but surely life is beginning its return to normalcy. Several weeks ago, Kate had her first band concert in a long time. The school used the gym rather than the auditorium so all family could attend and spread out. They did a great job!

Kate played in the middle school jazz band in addition to concert band. She would get up early once, sometimes twice a week, and catch the 6 a.m. bus for Dysart to get to early morning practice. Only a handful of kids play in jazz band and they each got to perform a solo. I loved hearing it all! And as a former band student myself, I'm proud to have Kate play an instrument. CJ started the flute this year. And Natalie has started tooting around on my clarinet. Craft Family Band is in the works!


We encouraged (okay, forced) Kate to go out for track so she could pick up some speed for basketball. Well in true smart girl fashion, Kate decided to focus on field events instead of running. Turns out she is pretty dang good at discus and shot put. She finished first place in disc at every track meet except for the conference meet. While she threw really well at conference, there was a couple of other girls that must have eaten all the Wheaties that morning because they threw PRs and snuck past Kate. While she was understandably disappointed, Kate did throw her own PR in shot and finished 2nd in that event at conference - the highest she's ever finished in shot. We are proud of her for working hard at something completely new to her.


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

October things...

Image
It has not been the easiest October on record. Kate had a couple of hospital visits to Rochester but she is somewhat better at the moment. She continues with chemotherapy and has not been back to school for quite some time but she is doing her best to set aside time for online school work between naps, loving on cats, and hanging out with her family. I was able to get the girls to visit their great grandma in western Iowa a few weeks back. Here's Claudia shortly after arriving at great grandma's house. She is very into jewelry and lots of it. Grandma had several questions for her about the number of bracelets and thankfully Claudia loves talking about them. Many she has made, some were gifted to her...it's a lovely hodgepodge of middle school girl goodies. Clearly the girls and I were blessed with height genes from relatives not named great grandma. We spent time relaxing, taking four wheeler rides, eating candy and we also received a visit from my aunt and uncle. Aunt Deb ...
Read more

March Madness 2024...

Let's talk brackets. I love a good competition. I love to win. But when I don't win I can typically move on quite quickly from a loss (unless we are specifically talking about Big Six Swim Offs, but I digress.) We have a family group on ESPN for the men's NCAA basketball tournament and it's "high stakes" with no entry fee, a chocolate rabbit for the winner and most importantly bragging rights. While I've never won, nor have I ever been close to winning, I thought I'd share my rationale for my picks through the first round of play. You should not follow this advice but if you so choose to, don't blame me when you too lose out to a cat with it's own bracket. East Region UConn 1 v Stetson 16: This is a silly way to start because it's a 16 v a 1 seed and clearly we know the very likely outcome of this game. But if I could, I'd choose Stetson cologne over a Huskie dog because Huskies kind of scare me a little. Regardless I am going with the ...
Read more

The dark day of June 27th...

 June 12, 2023 We typically don't share a lot of updates about Kate's health, primarily because she wants to remain "a normal teenager." However, we still get asked how Kate is doing and I started thinking maybe it's okay to share updates now and again. Most people care about her and our family, some others could maybe be labeled as "tragedy junkies," but I'm going to operate under the assumption that most people have the best of intentions.  Today is June 12th and we are quickly approaching the dreaded dark day of June 27th. Have you watched, "Gilmore Girls?" It's a witty, comforting television show from the early 2000's. In it one of the main characters has what is dubbed, "a dark day." This is a day the character dreads each year and in response he goes into hiding from the world with no communication. Well for Kate, and the rest of us to some degree, the dark day of the year is June 27th and that date is closing in on ...
Read more