Sports weekends

It's the busiest time of year for Stephen with sports.  It's the high school swim season which means they'll swim 5 days a week after school for 2.5 hours plus 3 days a week in the mornings for an hour.  Add that to 3 nights a week of a 3 hour club practice and you end up with an exhausted boy.  But he made it through all four years of high school keeping this crazy schedule.  We are really proud of his commitment.  So many of the boys have either quit swim or not continued through club.  It hasn't been a picnic, but he did it!

Nikki is happy to be back to club soccer.  High school season ended up being an odd year for her.  She started on the JV team and was fine with it.  She got to start and play almost the entire games.  Mid-season they pulled her up to Varsity after having filled in a few games for some of the Varsity girls that had been in DC for the inauguration.  She was happy to get pulled up, but wasn't sure how the girls on Varsity felt about it and also felt badly for leaving her teammates on JV.  But in the end, she was happy with the training she got being on the Varsity squad and getting some playtime at the higher level.

Now though, she's happy to be back at club and ready to get that team up to a higher level.  They had their first tournament last weekend and though they missed getting to the finals by 2 points, it was good to see them play again.

This was a Varsity high school game.












And Ali has been busily growing in leaps and bounds in volleyball.  She started the team as the only girl that hadn't played club volleyball.  She couldn't get a serve over and didn't get very much play time.  She was frustrated but knew if she worked hard, she could catch up with the other girls.  So she has been going to practice 3 times a week for 2-3 hours each and doing a private lesson once a week.  And after only a few months, her serves are great!  Her hitting at the net, has been really good too.  So she was moved into center position and gets more play time.  I'm so happy that she's seeing her hard work pay off.

Ali going up for a block

So even though we've been really busy rushing from one sport to another, it's been great watching the growth and determination of all three of our great kids!

Photo Book Update

We received our 2013 photo book in the mail yesterday!  My first thought was that it was a lot smaller than I though it would be.  I had to add so many pages as I was designing it.  So I thought it was going to be this massive book.  Turns out 93 pages of a photo book is quite small.  If I opt to continue these, I know now that I can safely do 200 pages without it seeming too big.  Wish I would've known that.

As for the quality, I am very happy with it.  There were a few photos I was concerned about the quality and I was right.  They turned out not to be the best.  But the rest look amazing.  I really like being able to size photos so easily.  I can make them odd sizes and bigger or smaller.  Overall I think I do like the old fashioned scrapbook look better, but for the ease and cost I may continue with the photo books for now.  Plus they take up much less space!