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We love Spring.  For John and me, it's the busiest time of year because we are project-aholics.  We can hardly wait for the frost to disappear before we head outside to WORK!! Come to our house, and you'll see what we have done over the past five Springs.  Beautiful, huge garden beds, blooming with flowers throughout the seasons.  Cubic TONS of mulch spread.  The biggest residential pond we've seen.  A ginormous fire pit.  Trees, trees and more trees.  A brick patio. This year, we decided to make an official area for the puppies.  This involves bricking another patio AND walkway, installing a kennel AND a shed and fencing the area too.  Of course, it must be aesthetically pleasing, or it's a no-go for me. Last night, we headed out to spray paint the areas that need to be cleared.  The back hoe and the tractor were simultaneously working until 10:30 p.m.  Yes, the headlights were actually being used! Oh, and did I mentio...

So in the full TWO days Ive been home, despite my best efforts to not feel this way, I have started to really miss rowing. I'm not sure why, cause I don't miss the pain or the hard workouts or getting up at 6:15, but I miss something about it. Because I miss it, I've been reliving all my glorious moments of the year by retelling them all to Mommy, and of course in classic Mommy form, she insisted I write them down so I can remember them later. What follows will be my version of the Advent Calendar(: Kind of like 10 stories in 10 days (or maybe more if I come up with more) about my favorite things of Michigan Rowing. Since I can't really decide which experiences were better than others, they won't be in any particular order or in order of how much I liked them. They'll just be the cool moments of the year involving my first year of rowing. Enjoy!(:

I've learned a lot about perspective in the past few days.  Actually, I think I've been more reminded of things I knew about perspective. ______________________________ Spring is puppy season for us.  We generally have a litter of pups which we sell two months later.  We love this season.  We love the pups.  We love the hard work.  We love hearing back from owners. We have prided ourselves on the fact that we have never lost a pup, nor had any pups with health issues.  The vet can hardly believe it, and sometimes I think he actually looks for problems when we bring them in. Our oldest dog, Roxy, was due any day.  She started to go into labor on Wednesday morning.  I had to leave for Philadelphia at noon, so Hannie stayed with her the rest of the day.  Roxy ended up birthing 13 puppies--more than she's ever had--and we were concerned.  13 puppies is a lot for a mama dog to care for.  Making sure that they are all safe ...

There is no moral to this story.  No thoughtful insight.  I simply need to record it to remember it.  It's one of those moments where I think "man, I'm a pretty good mom sometimes". Yesterday, Johannah left for a HOBY Leadership Seminar in Philadelphia.  You can look back through the years of blogging to see the seminars that both Ethan and Mark attended.  I must admit, these seminars changed the boys' lives.  Seriously.  They came back confident and having a better idea of who they are and what they want to become. This year, the one for our region (Central PA HOBY) was already filled by the time I called, but I discovered that the PA East HOBY still had openings.  No problem--I drive to Philadelphia every week.  This will certainly be nothing new. So, last Wednesday, I took the girls to their lessons in Philadelphia.  It was the standard eight hours, round-trip. On Friday, we drove down to Philadelphia to catch Mark row at the ...

This Mother's Day involved no sleeping in.  No breakfast in bed.  No afternoon nap.  In the past, this would have been cause for extreme disappointment, but not this year.  I had only a few hours to spend with Mark (and everybody else), and I was going to make the most of it.  Turns out, it was the best Mother's day yet. As I wrote in the previous post, Mark surprised me for Mother's Day by coming home.  I can't begin to explain the sacrifice this was on his part.  His team didn't get back to Ann Arbor from the Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia until 7 a.m. on Sunday, after driving through the night.  None of the team had even showered.  Mark hopped in his car at the university, still in his unitard from the race, and left to come back to State College.  No stopping to change, no stopping for food, nothing. We were in our third hour of church when he walked in.  I had laid out different sets of "piecemeal" clothes at home.  ...

Finally, the Michigan Men's Rowing Team was coming to Pennsylvania.  All of their previous regattas had either been in Michigan, or further west in Indiana, or Wisconsin.  We were thrilled to think of finally seeing Markie-Boy row! The Dad Vail Regatta is the largest regatta in the world.   Over 3,500 rowers, and the boats were lined up for miles on the shores of the Delaware River.  Every combination of boats too--skulls (with one person), four men boats, eight men boats, boats with men and women, and Mark's boat, a "light weight eight".  Mark's category is actually very small, because there are very few rowers who can weigh in under 160 pounds since most rowers are well over 6' tall.  Every other rower in Mark's boat is 6' tall, or UNDER.  Mark is obviously the tallest at 6'5".  It took him two weeks of starving himself to get to 159 pounds (from 170).  He told us that minutes before the actual weigh-in, the scale said he was 160 pounds. ...

In our church, the young women have a program entitled "Personal Progress".  It's been around forever, seeing as it was part of the youth program when I was a teenager :-)  It is supposed to be the equivalent of scouting for boys. When Johannah first turned 12, and I realized that this program would be part of our lives, I was extremely disappointed.  In comparison to scouting, and the Eagle Scout rank, it seemed piddly.  In fact, Johannah wished that there was an actual equivalent program for her, since she had lived through her brothers earning their Eagle rank, and she wanted to participate in the same kind of programs. I personally didn't have much respect for the program because it hadn't played a large part in my life.  When deadlines were approaching, I would simply open the book, see what goals I could "fill in" for the past year and get things signed off. After seeing Johannah finish the program at the young age of 15 last week, I now feel...