Over the Limit

I am still training for the marathon.  It is less than a month away.

Several weeks ago, I ran 16.5 miles and my knees REALLY did not like it!  I ended up walking the majority of the last two miles and I was very frustrated.  The following weekend, I decided to cut my long run down to 10 miles, just to give my knees a bit of a break.  That was working out great, until I pulled something in my lower left leg about 1.6 miles from the end of the run.  Gah.  I limped along, calling each family member in turn, to see if anyone was close enough to home to come and pick me up.  No one was even remotely close.  So, I limped on home for 1.6 miles.  I iced it all day, but it still took about a week before I was able to "run" again.  Now I am back to running, but I seem to have lost all ambition.  I should be running 20 miles by now (in my training schedule), but I don't seem to have the motivation to do more than 7 or 8 miles at a time.  :~/

Ah well.  I still plan to "run" the marathon in a few weeks.  My time on it will probably be terrible, but at least I'll be able to check it off the bucket list and go back to the kinds of workouts I enjoy doing!

I do enjoy running... for about an hour or less.  After that it just becomes WORK.  I'm not a marathoner, after all.  I need to stick to the 10K to Half Marathon distance.

I also enjoy riding my bike... when it isn't a race.

I can't wait to get back to swimming, too!  I've spent all this spring focused almost exclusively on running, with only one cross training workout per week.  I can't wait to just go back to swim/bike/run/kayak/weights... and doing them whenever I want!

But all of that isn't really what I wanted to talk about today.

Despite all my exercising, I haven't lost ANY weight.

I know it shouldn't matter.  My heart is healthy.  My body is healthy.  That is what should matter.

But I want a flat tummy.  I want the flab and fat gone.  Bottom line.

So, I have decided that I simply have to gain control of some kind over my diet.

Did you know that I gave up soda last November?  Okay, I admit, I drank one in Hawaii.  But I discovered that it tasted terrible!  Woah.  I used to LOVE the taste of Dr. Pepper!  Now it just tastes like bitter chemicals to me.  HURRAY!  I am actually really glad for that "cheat" soda, because before I drank it, I struggled with my willpower every time we ate out, because I was remembering that wonderful taste.  Now, it is super easy to go for a non-soda beverage, because I know soda won't taste good.

I thought giving up soda would be the magic bullet for weight loss.  People are always saying, "I gave up soda and dropped 20 lbs!"  Yeah, not me.

So.  It is time for a new challenge.  I feel like I have won the soda fight, and it is time for a new battle.

I am going to track my sugars.

That's it.  No calorie counting.  No worrying about ratios of proteins and carbs.  Just count those stinkin' sugars.

So far today I am up to 57 grams.  That is just breakfast (oatmeal w/butter, 1 tsp. of sugar, and cinnamon &  a glass of milk) and lunch (frozen burritos w/sour cream & salsa & a glass of milk).

How many sugar grams am I supposed to have in a day?

50-60 grams.

Well, sha-poopie.

I'm already at the limit at 3:00 in the afternoon.  That's without any treats, too.  Dinner will take me over.

This is gonna be a hard fight.

I can tell immediately that I'm gonna have to curb my milk addiction.  Milk has 12 grams per cup.  So, I'm gonna have to cut my portions in half, I think.

I'll let you know how it's going in a month or two.

Suicide

On a Sunday morning, one week after we got back from Hawaii, a classmate of Will's committed suicide.  Although Will and this boy were not best of friends, they were friendly and had known one another for years.  Will sat next to him in a couple of classes and thought of him as a really great guy.  A nice, friendly, smiling kid.  A well liked kid.  So his sudden and tragic death really shocked Will, and the entire community, for that matter.

We received official notification of his suicide from the school through e-mail only an hour or two after word had spread on Facebook and Twitter.  The school notification was to let parents know that the counselors at the school would be available all day on Monday for students who needed help with grieving and coming to terms with his death.  Will ended up spending the entire day in the counselor's office.  He just couldn't bring himself to go sit in class with his friend's empty seat right next to him.

Will really struggled with his emotions.  At home, his emotions switched from anger to love and endearment and back to anger all day long.  It hurt to see him so upset, and I worried about him.  

I also went through a surprising amount of really strong emotions, even though I had never met Will's friend.  I couldn't get his poor parents and siblings out of my mind.  I was close to tears for days.  I watched Will closely and wanted nothing more than to just hug him and love on him.  But, he is nearly 17, and doesn't appreciate a clingy mom.

The funeral was held on Wednesday.  Will asked for permission to leave school and attend the funeral, which I granted.  He seemed to be much more at peace after the funeral.  I wonder how often he thinks of his friend.  I worry about his mental health.  Is my own son at risk for suicide?  

The weird thing is, I am currently completing a suicide prevention course the district requires of me in order to renew my teaching license next month.  When I started the class a couple of months ago, I barely paid enough attention to take the quizes and check it off so I could move on with my recertification.  Suicide prevention isn't seen as a high priority for elementary teachers.  It is a secondary schools issue.  Now I am laser focused on everything presented and wonder if anything more could have been done to save the life of Will's friend.  

A month has gone by, and Will never speaks about it.  I know that it has left a mark on him, though, as it must have for all the students in the Junior class.  

Such a terrible waste of a beautiful, young life.

Hawaii

Okay.  Here I go at trying to do the promised updates.

First, Hawaii.

No, I will not load this post up with pictures.  Sorry.  If you were hoping for that, the pictures are on Facebook.  I've been frustrated at the fact that blogger has a limited capacity for pictures and every time I load a new one, it deletes an old one.  If you click on an old post of mine, you will see where the photos have been replaced with a black rectangle with a gray dash in it.  Thanks, Blogger, for destroying my blog.  I would have switched to a different platform by now... but let's face it, I'm struggling to find the time to blog, let alone transfer to a new site.

Anyways, back to Hawaii.

Bill and I flew out on the Monday after Easter.  It was Spring Break for Will and me.  That was critical to the timing.  Technically, our 20th anniversary has yet to happen (it's on May 8th... tomorrow!!), but there was no way I was going to take off during school and hope that Will would actually get himself to school for a week.  So, we went during a school holiday.  I felt horribly guilty about leaving the kids.  I wanted to take them with us, but there was no way we could afford to.  As it was, we stretched our resources to the limit just so we could go.  Besides, taking the kids along is a real anniversary kill-joy.  So, despite the guilt, we left the kids at home to fend for themselves.

That got some raised eyebrows from some of my coworkers and friends.  They thought I was nuts leaving two teens at home alone for a week.  But, hey, they are 19 and 16 (nearly 17).  They don't need a babysitter.  I was fairly confident they could handle themselves while I was gone.  And I was right.

This was the first time I have flown since prior to 9/11/01.  I know.  It really has been that long.  I have sent my kids off on adventures, but I have always traveled by car.  It's not that I was afraid to fly, but I don't have to travel for work, and it's just too darned expensive to fly for fun!  So, this was my first personal experience with the TSA security circus.

Flying has changed, but I thought the screening process was pretty non-intrusive and quick.  Maybe because I wasn't singled out?  Anyways, we were through security pretty fast and sitting down to a meal in the airport while waiting for our flight.  It was cheaper to eat in the airport than pay for a meal mid flight.  Oh, I will say this about security... on our flight home I packed a water bottle filled with sand into my carry on, not thinking anything of it.  It tripped security measures.  They had to pull it out, inspect it, pour some out onto litmus papers and test it with chemicals to make sure it wasn't, you know, bomb stuff, then send my carry on through the scanner again without the bottle... oi.  In the end, they gave it all back to me with a smile and wishes for a safe journey.  The whole thing was very friendly.  I'm sure they've had to test plenty of bottles of sand.  {rolling my eyes}

I spent the flight to Hawaii watching movies on the screen in the seat back in front of me.  Nice!  When we got to Hawaii, there was a glitch getting to the car rental place, due to poor communications.  But, we finally go there and picked up our RED Mustang convertible!  Bill hated it, but I enjoyed it very much!  Except I think the steering wheel gets in the way of seeing the speedometer.

Well, I'm not going to really give you a blow by blow of the entire week.  You'd fall asleep, and who really wants to read all about someone else's vacation?

I'll just say that it was sunny and wonderful and fun beyond all reason!  Life is lived at a much slower pace there.  We spent every waking moment outside, and even kept the sliding glass door of our room wide open all night long to enjoy the breezes and sounds of the surf.  We surfed and snorkeled, hiked, biked, ran, and sunbathed.  We did the traditional tourist stuff; Pearl Harbor, Hanauma Bay, Valley of Temples, and the Polynesian Cultural Center.  But we also did normal people stuff like grocery shopping for half our meals and jogging the local workout trails.  We were even given the locals discout (Kama aina discount)  once by a friendly server at an off-the-beaten-track hole-in-the-wall Jack In The Box.

Maybe it is because we just went through all the fuss of security at the airport, but I did notice the complete LACK of security at the resort.  We stayed at Turtle Bay Resort on the North Shore.  The lobby was open air and there were no locks to the stairwells or elevators.  However, despite that, I never felt it was a problem.  Turtle Bay Resort is on the North Shore of Oahu.  It is a rural setting.  So peaceful!  It really was the perfect place to get away and unwind.  I'd go back in a heartbeat.

The only black spot on our whole vacation happened only hours before we left the island.  We had checked out of the resort and finished touring the Byodo-In temple (the Buddhist temple in the Valley of Temples), but we still had a couple of hours to kill before heading to the airport.  Since there was a movie theater across the street from where we were, we decided to take in a show.  We were practically the only people in the theater, since it was a mid-day weekday showing.  When we came out of the theater, we discovered that someone has hit our rental car and drove away!  AURGH!  We called the police, the rental agency, and my insurance.  Everyone was very kind about it and even that stressful event didn't ruin my vacation.

Now we're home and I'm wishing I could live in Hawaii.  But, at least I only have a few weeks left before summer vacation begins here at home and I can fill my days with fun in the sun, homestyle!

And So It Goes...

Uh-huh.

I got too busy again, today.  But we had a great family dinner with both Helena and Will home!  {Happy, happy!}

Maybe tomorrow?

Sigh.

Too Much to Write About...

OK.  So I know I have neglected this thing something fierce.  I apologize.  There is lots to tell you, and I'm not going to be able to do everything justice in one post.  I think that's part of the problem.  If I don't get things recorded right away, they start stockpiling in my mind and it gets overwhelming thinking of all the things I need to write about.  I really haven't forgotten about writing, you see.  I am constantly composing posts in my head.  Unfortunately, most of those posts never happen because I am not in a position to actually write them in the moment.  So what you read on the blog is only a fraction of what gets composed in my head.  Then, if it piles up in my head, you don't get to read any of it because I get shut down by thinking of how much catching up I have to do.  And, the "catch up" posts are never as vivid and detail rich as the original composition in my head.  So, again, sorry about that!

What have you missed?

• Bill and I traveled to Oahu for a week to celebrate our 20th anniversary.  Lots of stories to tell you.  Awesome pictures will be posted to Facebook at some point... probably.

• As soon as we got back, Helena moved out and is now living with her best friend in a basement apartment two towns over.  I am super sad she is no longer my little girl and I miss her something fierce!

• On the same weekend Helena moved out, one of Will's classmates (and friend) committed suicide.  I did not know the boy, but man!  It made me so sad for his family and worried about my own son and his mental health.  I am exhausted from the roller coaster of emotions between joy on my anniversary trip, and grief the following week for the senseless loss of this young man.

• Will took the ACT for the first time back in March and got a FANTASTIC score!  We're super proud of his brains.

• We refinanced the house to a 10 year term with a rockstar interest rate.  It will save us tens of thousands of dollars without changing our monthly payment!  Yeah, baby!

• I am still training for the marathon, though it is painful and difficult.  Today's run was 16.5 miles.  I doubt I will ever do another marathon after crossing this one off my bucket list.  I am even considering removing the full Ironman from the bucket list simply because 26.2 miles of running is super hard on my knees.

• Will is off on another National Guard drill weekend.  He still plans to enlist on his 17th birthday.  I can feel how very little time I have left with him before he, too, moves out.  With Helena and Will both gone, the house feels WAY too quiet and empty.  I find myself wandering into their rooms and just standing there, feeling sad.

Each one of these things deserves its own post.  I will try to work my way through them tomorrow.  That should be a good Sunday activity, right?

And Then There Was Mud

MARCH IS HERE

!!!!

That means that Spring is on its way!  Hale-freaking-lujah!!!

We have been snow and ice bound for almost 3 months.  With the turn of the season was are finally starting to see the ground again.  It made it all the way up to 49* F yesterday and half of the snow in my yard is gone now...

... as is the ice on my driveway.

We have been driving and parking on 2-3" of solid ice all winter long.  Not a pretty sheet of ice, mind you.  An undulating hills-and-valleys kind of ice formed by car tires compressing all the snow.  The only bare patches were the spots the cars sit on.  So, when I backed into the driveway, I could tell I was in the correct spot when my car settled down into the depression formed in the ice.

Anyways, that ice is all but gone.

In its place is a puddly, boggy mess of gravel and mud.

Oh, hurray.

But, you know what?  I'LL TAKE IT!  I am just so thrilled to have the days above freezing!  In fact, I think I'm going to go for a run... OUTSIDE!  Ahhhhhhh.

Life's Mosaic

It has been a difficult few days.  It is not always fun to be the momma.  Sometimes you have to be brave enough to speak hard truths even though your children may hate you for it.  Hopefully, only temporary hate, though.  The hope is that they will see the love behind the words and find they are still able to love their momma despite it all.

I try to keep perspective when I am feeling down and despised by someone I love.  I try to remember that there are much worse things than having your child angry at you.  I have faced harder things.  Like the death of a loved one.  I will take my child's fierce anger over that anguish any day.

We have all had good days, even great days.  Days filled with laughter and sunlight and joy.  They are often unexpected gifts.  Just this past week I was doing who knows what upstairs and stopped just to listen to and enjoy the sound of two almost grown girls laughing together in the basement bathroom as they got ready to go out for the evening.  It reminded me of so many other laughing, fun moments I have had the privilege to be witness to as my children have grown.

Life is so full of brightness.  We sometimes forget that when we are struggling and down.  Hard times can leave us feeling that the darkness is all there is and we start to lose hope.  We can go for days, weeks, or even months or years struggling with dark and difficult times.  When that happens, we begin to wonder why God has forsaken us.  Why hasn't he answered our prayers?  Why do we suffer in the dark?

And then I thought of something.

I thought of the moments of my life like the pieces of a mosaic.  Each day of my life, each moment I live through, is a piece of that mosaic.  On the good and beautiful days, I am placing a brightly colored piece in the mosaic.  On hard or difficult days, I am placing a dark piece into the mosaic.  As I work, I can only see one small piece of the whole artwork.  Only one small portion of my life.  It is easy to loose perspective when that is the case. I can't tell you how many times I have told my students to step back and look at their work from a distance... to see the whole picture and gain a new perspective.

Such it is with our lives.  If we could see our lives through God's eyes... see the whole mosaic with all the light and dark pieces in their proper places... we would see a beautiful soul in the process of evolving into something wondrous and extraordinary.  A mosaic of only light pieces would be bland and uninteresting.  A mosaic of only dark pieces would be dreary and equally uninteresting.  But the patterning of light and dark... that makes the composition stronger.  And stunning to behold.

No one wants dark and difficult days.  No one wants trials or tribulations.  Yet, when looking back on them, we recognize their worth.  I am a stronger, more empathetic person for the darkness I have overcome.  I can serve and lift others who are struggling in similar ways.  I am who I am because of all the experiences I have lived through; not just the happy, easy moments.  In fact, it is actually the difficult times that refine character and make us stronger.

Am I asking for more dark pieces in the mosaic of my life?  Absolutely not!  But I recognize that there is a reason for the struggles, and a purpose and pattern to all we experience in this life.

Remember to step back from time to time and look at the bigger picture.

Seeing it can give you strength.

Trust Issues

Will and I went to Parent/Teacher conferences at the high school this afternoon.  Not much to report there.  We got in and out and on our way in just a little over an hour.  I was starving, so I decided we needed a Wendy's pit stop.  On our way there, Will made a comment that was the genesis of this post.

"I don't really like driving."  he said.

He went on to explain that he thought driving was a pretty poorly laid out means of transportation, with a high level of risk and too many opportunities for a bad ending.  The fact is that two massive metal contraptions pass within feet of one another at high rates of speed, filled with strangers who are trusting one another to not zig when they are supposed to zag.

I completely understand where my son is coming from on this, because I have always felt the same way.  I had a really hard time coming to terms with driving when I was a teen.  In fact, I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18 years old for that very reason.  I really didn't like driving.  I wasn't a bad driver (neither is Will), I just didn't like it.

After Will said that this afternoon, I remembered a Top Gear episode Helena was watching the other day.  One of the show's hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, had an opportunity to drive a specific car on a specific race track that he had already "driven" in a popular video game.  He was trying to see if he could drive it just as fast in real life as he had in the game.    He couldn't.   His analysis of why he was unable to recreate the same track times caught my attention.  He said that while he was racing around the track, his mind would suddenly think, 'what if a tire blew right .... now?'  or   'what if I lost traction going around this curve?'  Essentially, the whole time he was racing the car in real life, his mind was supplying him with every worst case scenario it could come up with, causing him to drive more conservatively than he had in the video game, where his brain KNEW there were no life-or-death consequences to his actions.  His conclusion was that race car drivers must not have much of an imagination, or a means of shutting it off.

That's Will's and my problem.  Too much imagination.  Both of our brains are supplying us with an instantaneous barrage of worst case scenarios every time another car passes us while driving.  It is also why I am such an absolutely ROTTEN passenger.  At least when I am driving, I do have control over one aspect of the whole dodgy experience.  When a passenger... I have absolutely NO CONTROL of any of the variables!  My mind goes into overdrive supplying me with all sorts of not so calming assessments of what might go wrong at any given moment.  Sometimes, truthfully, I just have to shut my eyes in order to remain calm while sitting in the passenger seat.

I really don't mind driving so much anymore.  I was able to reassure Will that it gets better with time and experience.  You learn to deaden your imagination a bit and trust the strangers around you ... sort of.





OK.  Maybe not the trusting strangers part.  I still expect anyone and everyone around me to pull a stupid stunt with their vehicle...

Late Teens

And, no, I am not referring to teens that are always late...

... oh, wait a minute.  Yes, I am.

The late teen years (16-19) are an incredible adventure... 

... for the teen.

For parents, the late teen years can be full of frustrations and expenses.  Expenses?  We have watched our car insurance double, our food and utility bills go up, and experienced sticker shock at gift giving times.  There are school fees and technology needs (no joke).  But the expenses are really just part of the experience of raising kids, and are manageable because we know they are temporary.  Soon enough the kids will leave home and the expenses will drop substantially.

No, the frustrations are the part I really want to talk about.  

Thinking back to when I was 16-19 years old, I still didn't really see my parents as individuals.  Not yet.  They were still MOM and DAD.  MOM and DAD had one function only.  To provide for us kids.  That meant they were supposed to feed us and clothe us, take us on vacations, pay for our stuff, and nag, pester, and harass us about school/church/chores.  In the meantime, it was my job to inform them of how outdated their view points were, how things were different now, and that they should just trust me and let me do whatever I wanted.  [Yeah, I never convinced them of any of that, by the way.]  By the time I was 19, I was pretty convinced I was all grown up.  I was "An Adult", who didn't need my parents telling me when to be home or what to do.

It wasn't until I was truly an adult (meaning I had moved away and was now fully supporting myself financially) that I started seeing my parents as individuals with needs and wants that really had NOTHING to do with their kids whatsoever!  Woah!  And I didn't empathize with my parents' struggles with teen aged kids until I had teens of my own.  So, I don't expect my kids to understand or empathize with me anytime soon.

Still, it would be nice.

Where is all of this rambling-ness going, you ask?

I just really, really want my daughter to be courteous and come home at a reasonable hour on weeknights.  Not stay out til midnight or later because she doesn't work until evening shift and can sleep in the next day.  Great for her, crappy for me.  I do have to go to work in the morning and would like to have a good night's sleep.

Just give her a curfew, you say?  Yeah.  Nineteen is a difficult age for that.  She feels she has a right to stay out as late as she wants.  And really, if she was living in an apartment with roommates, she could.  But she is not living in an apartment.  She is living at home.

She has told me to just go to bed and not wait up for her.  My response to that is simply that just because she is being selfish doesn't mean I am going to be selfish.  You see, I wait up because I love her.  I wait up to make sure I don't sleep right through a call for help.  I wait up to remind her that she is not an island.  Her actions do affect those around her who care about her.  

It is true that apartment living with roommates is much more "freeing".  But roommates don't wait up for you... because they don't love you.  It doesn't matter to them one way or the other if you make it back home again in one piece.  That sounds callous.  Of course, they'll care.  After the fact.  After something disastrous happens.  But they won't stay up waiting for a phone call that tells them you need help.  Someday, she'll have a spouse who will wait up for her, because he will love her and not want to go to bed until he knows she is home safe.  

I know she'll move out sometime soon, if only to feel that freedom of having no one care enough to wait up for her.  It feels so liberating, at first.  But, really, it can be incredibly lonely.  I remember living in an apartment with 5 other girls and feeling severely depressed and homesick because no one truly loved me in that apartment.  I didn't realize that was the reason for the homesickness, at the time.  I just knew I was miserable and lonely in a house full of other people.  

Until the day she moves out, it is my job to love her enough to want to wait up to see her safely home.  And care enough about her to hear about her adventures.

I just wish she could see me more as an individual who needs a good night sleep before I go to work and less like MOM who has outdated points of view.  I know she loves MOM.  I just wish that she loved Kate enough to come home early on weeknights.  

Running

I ran 6.6 miles, today.  That is 10% more distance that last Saturday.

Yup.  Marathon training has begun.

For the past several months, I have been doing what I guess could be called "maintenance" exercising.  Just trying to maintain a base level of fitness.  I have tried to exercise 4 or 5 days a week, mixing it up with running, cycling class, swimming, and some weights.  I have done this because I knew I'd be facing a tough marathon training regime starting in mid February.

And, here we are.

To train for a marathon, I have to build up the endurance to be able to keep my body moving for miles upon miles.  It is not something than can be done cold turkey.  Not without damaging your body.  The pounding of 26.2 miles can only be endured with a body that has been slowly toughened up for it.  At least, I hope it can be endured!  I have to tell you, this race scares me more than anything I have yet done.  Not even the half ironman scared me the way this running distance does.

So, every Saturday workout now becomes my "long run".  I have deleted the pool from my Saturday lineup (I'm sad about that) so that I can focus exclusively on piling the miles on.  Every Saturday will be a 10% increase from the previous week.  That is just a small enough increase each week to prevent injury (I hope).  Meanwhile, my weekday workouts will slowly build, too.

Actually, most of my weekday workouts will remain exactly the same.  But within a few weeks, my Wednesday run will start to build mileage, too.  It will stay at approximately 1/2 the distance of the Saturday long run.  So, when Saturday's run hits 10 miles, Wednesday's run will be 5 miles.  The rest of my week will stay the same.  Mondays are 30 minutes of sprints and 1 hour of pool.  Tuesdays are 1 hour cycle class and 30 min. arm weights.  Wednesday was 1 hour cycle class and 30 minute run, but that will change, now.  And Thursday is 60 minute intervals run.  Friday and Sunday are my rest days.

I can only hope that the weather decides to cooperate and bring an early spring so I'm not stuck running 10+ miles around and around the indoor track in a mind-numbingly endless loop.

Here's a cute track story for you...

This morning as I was running my miles on the track, there was a family also exercising on the track.  Their little boy looked to be about 4 years old.  I was the only endurance runner on the track, and he noticed me running past.  At one point, he was sitting with his big sister on the bench when he saw me approach.  He quickly jumped up and started racing me!  I matched his pace and he made it nearly one full lap of the track before he had to fall out of the race.  I gave him a big cheeky grin and a high five for racing me.  That did it!  He sat in wait for me and "raced" me at least 5 more times, each time getting a high five.  His momma and his grandmama both got a big kick out of it.  So did I!

Senior Registration - Part 2

Wednesday's registration went off without a single hiccup!  HOORAY!

I admit, I borrow trouble on a regular basis.  On Wednesday afternoon, I hurriedly shut down my classroom early in order to make sure I made it home in plenty of time to sign into class registration at exactly 3:00.  I worried that I'd be stuck in traffic, or that I'd get pulled over and ticketed (so I did NOT speed), or that some less than brilliant individual would unexpectedly pull their minivan in front of me, causing a crash (like that would ever happen...)

Thankfully, none of the above occurred and I arrived at home with almost 30 minutes to spare.

Why exactly 3:00, you ask?  Because that was the moment the registration portal opened... and classes fill up on a first come, first served basis.  If you aren't quick enough, the carefully designed schedule you and your child spent several days constructing could go up in smoke.  That happened to us one year.  I had troubles with signing in that put me 5 minutes behind the curve.  Only 5 minutes.  We were left scrambling to try and construct an acceptable schedule on the fly as classes literally got pulled out from under us right and left.  What a nightmare!

But not this time!  I was in and out and on my way in five minutes!  Of course, I only had to build half of a schedule.  Here it is...

A DAYS
A1  Seminary
A2  AP Calculus AB

B DAYS
B1  English 12
B2  Government/Citizenship (Sem 1) - Weight Training (Sem 2)

That's it!  Will has all his science requirements done.  In fact, he has all his math requirements done, too.  That calculus class is being taken as an elective.

I'm glad I was able to get in successfully, because 4 of the 5 classes I signed him up for were full only moments after I was done.  Weight training was the only one not filled.  That class will be mixed with younger kids.

Will is going to be done at the high school at 10:30 every morning.  That will give him time to come home and eat an early lunch before heading off to his afternoon class at Mountainland Applied Technology College.  I have not yet signed him up for that class, because I have to wait for the admissions to come available.  That won't be until sometime this summer.  But I have spoken to the secretary, gotten his demographics entered in their online system, and am setting up an appointment with the counselor there.  He will be in class at the college from 11:30 until 2:30 every day, learning all sorts of computery stuff.

I think he will be very happy.  All that time just focusing on computers.  Also, high school has not been a great time for him.  His "friends" have turned out to not be very great friends, after all, so I'm hoping he'll meet some new people over at the IT class.  It should be full of high school seniors from schools all over the valley who are all into computer stuff.

In the meantime, Will is still planning on joining the National Guard on his 17th birthday and spending this coming summer at basic training!  More on this later...

Senior Registration - Part 1

I can't believe it is here already!  It is registration time for Will's Senior year in high school.

My baby.

Ugh.  I know he'll hate me saying that.  After all, he's a lean 6'1"teenager, now.  He has big hands and big feet, and he has to practically fold himself in half just to hug me these days.

There is so much potential hanging around him that it is practically a vibrating force.  I can feel it.  He is thinking about and planning for the future.  More on that in another post sometime later, though...



Will has almost all his graduation requirements filled.  He still needs a senior English class, and the Government/Citizenship class that all seniors are required to take.  Other than that, he needs 5 elective credits.  So, just 6.5 credits stand between him and graduation.  And a schedule that has slots for 8 potential credits.

Here's the plan as it stands today...

He'll take Senior English and AP Calculus AB (first semester college calculus).  Both are full year classes.  He'll take Gov/Cit first semester, and weight training second semester.  And he'll take release time for seminary, which won't earn any credits, of course.  That will all be scheduled in his mornings.  The mornings net 3 credits for him.

In the afternoons, he'll leave the high school campus and travel over to the MATC (Mountainland Applied Technology College) campus at Thanksgiving Point for their Information Technology certification course all year.  In this course, he'll get a chance to certify in A+, Network+, Linux+, Security+, and a bunch of other stuff that means absolutely nothing to me and just looks like a bunch of letters strung together.

The Tech college and the high school have an agreement.  He can take the tech college class and receive high school credits!  Four of them, in fact.  And, the courses are tuition free to high school students!  This class normally has a $2,000 tuition fee, so it is really great that he can take it free while still in high school!  There is a lab fee of a couple hundred dollars, but I'll gladly pay that to give him a head start in a field he is interested in.

If we manage to build the schedule we have planned, it will give him 7 credits to finish high school.

High school registration was supposed to happen at 3:00 this afternoon, but the district is experiencing some network hardware malfunctions, so registration has been postponed to Wednesday.

So, Part 2 of this post will come later this week when we have successfully managed to get Will signed up for the classes he wants.

Stay tuned!