Basketball champions!

Kendra played another session of basketball with the same team. It's a great group of kids with wonderful coaches!! Last fall when they started it was pretty painful to watch but very very entertaining. After having kids play at the high school level you tend to forget where they started out. It was amazing to see the transformation a couple of months made. Suddenly it actually started to look like a real basketball game. Last session I think they may have won one game. This time around they really started working together and had improved so much that they finished the season undefeated. In Kendra's words...."we went from first losers to first place winners!!" They were all very excited when they won that last game ensuring them the championship!

Leavenworth Tournament

Ashley's club volleyball team decided to do one overnight tournament this season up in Leavenworth. If we had to go anywhere overnight Leavenworth was as good a place as any. Not too far away and very pretty place to spend the weekend. Brandi had a tournament the same day in Burbank so Bob and Tyler stayed home to go to Burbank with Brandi.  Ashley, Kendra and I headed up to Leavenworth. We left about 1:00 the day before because we wanted to have a little time to enjoy ourselves. We figured if we were going to spend that much money on a hotel room we might as well enjoy it! The entire team and the coach all stayed at the icicle inn. A very nice hotel. We got up there about 3:30, checked into the hotel, then Ashley headed up town with Haley and Kendra and I went to Safeway and got a few groceries. We met up with several team mates up town and browsed the stores for a short while. A very short while, since much to Ashley's dismay I would rather get a root canal than browse through little nicknack tourist stores. Or any stores for that matter! We headed back to the hotel where the girls hopped in the pool for a little while. It was Haley Tuttle's 16th birthday while we were there so the girls threw together a little surprise birthday dinner for her that night. They had a great time!

Hit by the yuck bug!

Well we got slapped hard by the yuck bug this past week. Ashley was supposed to sing in church last Sunday and of course she came down with a miserable cold about midweek. By the weekend it wasn't gone as she had hoped but instead had gotten worse so no singing for her! Monday I got a text from Kendra's teacher asking if they could give Kendra a cough drop because she hadn't stopped coughing all morning. The  next day I kept her home but she seemed to be getting better so Wednesday I shipped her back to school. Wednesday night Tyler came home and his eyes just looked funny. By that night he was miserable, coughing and coughing. I went to pick Brandi up from track practice Wednesday afternoon and she hardly had any voice left. Thursday morning Tyler's asthma kicked in so for the first time since last May we had to give him at treatment. We were so hopeful that he was about past that chapter in his life!
So now it's Thursday. Ashley seems to be fully recovered and is back at school. Kendra is about 75% on her way so she's back to school as well. Brandi woke up with a bright red shiney face, glassy eyes and stressing out about all the stuff she absolutely could not miss at school today. A quick phone call to Lolli assured Brandi that she would be able to make up the MAPS testing and everything else could just wait, so she went back to bed.

Tyler had to have a treatment this morning....we had a couple scary hours when we weren't sure if we were going to be able to get on top of it or not but thankfully for now the crisis has been averted!

Bob has also been feeling pretty crummy all week. I had a bit of a cold for a couple of days but nothing too serious. Hopefully that was it for me and I won't get it to the extent that everybody else has been!!

Club Volleyball

Club Volleyball......sigh...now may not be a great time to blog about club volleyball because we are on extreme volleyball burnout at the moment! This is Ashleys second year for club volleyball so we knew what we were getting into. But man, throw two girls into the mix and it gets a little complicated at times. Brandi begged to be able to play this year too and of course we caved and allowed them both to play. Tryouts and practice started in December but the actual tournament season started in January. We had several weekends where Bob and I had to divide and conquer! The thing about club volleyball is it's not just a game or two, or a simple couple hour tournament, it's a very loooong drawn out affair. A typical tournament day starts out with us having to leave home anywhere between 5:30-6:30 in the morning.  We return home anywhere between 5:30-9:00pm That means a whole days worth of food needs to be packed up for every member of the family. Tyler & Kendra have to sit in a gym for hours and hours....although to be honest they both handle it very very well! The club season lasts from January-March and consists of about 6-8 tournaments EACH. That's a lot of weekends gone! And don't get me wrong, I LOVE watching them play! It does get a little hard though when there's always so much stuff to be done at home and a very limited amount of time that Bob has to help with that. There have been a couple of times when the tournaments were a couple of hours away so we would pack up the camper and head up the night before and spend the night sleeping in the school parking lot. This coming weekend Ashley has a tournament in Leavenworth and Brandi a tournament in Burbank. Burbank is an hour east of home and Leavenworth 3 hours west! Because Ashley has to be there by 7am we will be heading up the night before and getting a hotel. Bob will stay home and bring Brandi to her tournament in Burbank. So while that's all a lot of fun, it's also all a lot of expense!! The girls are very good though about pitching in to make it happen. They knew going into this that it would be a huge sacrifice for the rest of the family when it came to both money and time so they are pitching in to help cover the costs. It is a great experience and they do have a lot of fun but I don't know how many years we would continue to do it. At some point you have to pick and choose and between school sports, jobs, homework and raising sheep for fairs it stretches things a little thin. One of the dads on Ashleys team has been great about taking pics so I have some of hers. I'll have to ask around though to see if I can get some from Brandi's team!

Going up for the block!

Good thing Coach Taylor knows how to fix ratty hair!

Seems like Ashley & the coaches are always laughing about something

Serving up the ace!

Not sure what she just did here but it must have been good!

The Groeneveld mouth....

Yep. We have a family of big mouths around here. In every single sense of the word. Except for me. We all know I may have the ability to yell a lot but I have a pathetically small mouth. The dentist uses child size tools for my mouth and even that doesn't always work. Fortunately (or unfortunately...depending on how you look at it I guess) everyone else around here seems to have gotten those dominant Groeneveld genes and have rather larger than average traps!

Obviously a lesson on table manners wouldn't hurt around here either....

Don't know what's scarier...the size of those spoons or Ashley's crazy eyes!

yep, no problem.

The large mouth wouldn't be such an issue but the unfortunate reality is....they also inherited Bob's above average lung power. And they wonder why I prefer wine instead of milk with my dinner!

Go big or go home....

So last year we were finally convinced to give the 4-H/FFA showing thing a chance...and look where that got us! The sheep business is going strong. So much so that we had to double up this year. Once again, still a work in progress but we decided to build another identical shed to the last one, double up the size of the pen and give the critters a little more room. Brandi & Lauryn joined 4-H this year so they got sheep to show too....suddenly what looked like lots of room last year began to seem a little cramped.

The Sheep have arrived for another season!

Tyler & Kendra supervising the proceedings!

He's practicing for his government job one day!

A few more details to complete on the new shelter and a coat of paint.....one or two more weekends and hopefully it will be complete.

The little back pasture area was becoming over run with goatheads so Bob tilled it all under and we're hoping to reseed it again soon.