Spring in the Air

The mild winter is drawing to a close. The kids are coming around to the sad reality that we will only have one snow day this year. At least we get next week off for spring break. My allergies are getting a head start already. I think this is the first time I've seen buttercups bloom before the crocus, and I'm almost positive I've never seen the pear and dogwood trees start to bud and bloom this early.

PRE-REGISTRATION. I mentioned a few weeks ago that it's time to register Jenna for her freshman classes. Jenna gave up her dreams of having a bakery long ago, but she has really given a lot of thought to both teaching and nursing.

Signing up for high school classes at East Robertson today is a lot different than it was when I was in school. There are so many choices now. (The choices I had for electives as a freshman were Typing, Agriculture, and Home Economics. The typing classes were on typewriters, not computers.) Nowadays the kids do something similar to declaring a major in collage. Jenna decided to pursue two programs of study for her electives, one geared toward health science and another focusing on children and families. If she sticks with this all four years she'll have a rigorous high school curriculum.

TENNIS. Jenna has also decided to try out for the tennis team. She's never played tennis before, but I think the coach was looking for potential without having to fight bad habits.

Jenna practices every afternoon after school now. This will be a big adjustment for the boys as well as Mom and Aunt Mar since Jenna won't be riding the bus home from school for several weeks. The team plays something like 15 matches in the 5 weeks after spring break. We don’t know if Jenna will get to play since the team is large and she’s a new player, but she might if East faces another large team.

END OF BASKETBALL. Our basketball season is officially over. The boys didn't pull off a winning season, but their last game was a good match. Jenna's team, on the other hand, won a hard fought final game. It was a good way to end her Upward career.

OFF TO THE RACES. We've had another round of pine car races this year. It started a a couple of weeks ago (Wednesday the 22nd) with our Awana Grand Prix. We had about 70 kids racing that night. Nate said he got 8th place in this race. We had several technical difficulties so I was just glad to survive the night.

The next race was the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby a couple of Mondays ago (the 27th). The guy who had supplied the track for several years is no longer part of the pack (his son aged out) so I brought our track from church. I was able to iron out all the technical problems by this race and it went very smoothly. We had about 40 cars race that night.

The boys made different cars for this race. Nate's car got 2nd place. Ben wanted a formula one style car and I got a little close next to one of the axle slots. Just before we checked his car in we noticed the wood had split near one of the rear wheels causing it to pull to one side. We repaired it, but the area was very week. His car wound up getting 10th place. I thought this was a respectable finish considering what happened.

Last Saturday was the county-wide RA race. We took our track on the road again for this race and had 110-120 racers. The boys’ Awana cars were used in this race. Neither of the boys’ cars placed in the top eight for the run off race.

Joe