This year, Jane decided to join the swim team.
In our family, just engaging in sports is an automatic win.
She made friends. She had fun. She overcame her stage fright to be able to compete.
The Olympic Committee will not be calling.
It was a success.
This past weekend, Emily went to her District speech meet in Spearfish, SD. This time of year, she heads out almost every weekend for speech meets. They left after school, which meant they would get there late. There was some snow on the roads, so I was a little bit on edge. But what happened wasn't at all what we expected.
Right about the time we got home from work, we got a call from Emily. The bus she was on had been pulled over. The driver failed his sobriety test.
I wanted so badly to just go get her. But I knew I couldn't. Because that would just be teaching her to be afraid. So we waited.
We waited three hours until a new driver arrived and the bus got on its way.
We waited until the wee hours of the morning when we finally got the news that the bus had arrived in Spearfish.
And then, for the next 4 days we talked two or three times a day on the phone. We heard about how the driver had been swerving so dramatically, that another driver (God bless them!) had called the Highway Patrol. We read the articles about how the driver blew double the legal limit (quadruple for a CDL) several hours after the incident. We heard about how he had two bottles of vodka on the bus and about how he was mixing it with soda and drinking it WHILE driving.
The kids were shaken. Some of them displayed false bravado, trying to defend the driver's actions. Plenty of them had driven drunk themselves. Some of them were afraid to get back on the bus. All of them were affected. None of them qualified for the National meet.
On the trip home, Emily called wherever she could get cell service. In rural South Dakota and Wyoming, this wasn't often. She was nervous. We were nervous.
It was nearly midnight before the bus finally pulled into the school parking lot. I've never been so grateful to see a big yellow bus in all my life.
Emily is already working with the Goshen County attorney's office to issue a statement. She wants to do something about what happened.
We're doing our best to encourage her to participate in the judicial process while not becoming obsessed or fearful about what happened. It's a tough balance but we'll get there. In the meantime, I'm just glad she's home.
There's a chance we are getting too set in our traditions here. But we all love the traditions, so here we go:
The girls are getting better at decorating Jesus' birthday cake. It was also very tasty.
Both the kids are officially teenagers now.
It's an interesting phase of life.
Now, every time either of the kids have a birthday, we're all keenly aware that we are inching closer to their independence.
For this birthday, she got an adult bike. Let's hope she is more responsible with this one than the last one. .
Last year, COVID put a damper on Thanksgiving. So this year, we were determined to get together. Plans were made to gather at my parents' house, despite the fact that they are on their mission in London. Everything seemed to be coming together until a few days before Thanksgiving, when Emily got sick. Two anxious days and a negative PCR test later, we breathed a sigh of relief and carried on with our Thanksgiving plans.
I was really bad this year at getting pictures. This is literally the only picture I have of Thanksgiving:
Jane's always loved animals. But Winter was special.
From the minute she first saw Dolphin Tale, she wanted to meet Winter. In 2018, her dream came true.
Halloween gets a little less exciting the older the kids get. This year was especially un-exciting because it snowed.
But Emily got to go to a party and Jane still went trick-or-treating, accompanied by Emily for a short bout.
Emily is Robin from Stranger Things. Jane is her favorite character from Animal Crossing, a sheep named Dom.
