Other things besides the yard...

So, absolutely NO progress has been made on the yard in the last 2 weeks except what God has been growing with the plants that we planted and that He's been watering, and watering, and watering.... haha.    I'm thankful for the rain, but I'm really happy to see the sunshine today.  :)

So I just thought I'd share a couple of pictures of the girls and things going on with them.

Mackenzie is finished with her sophomore year, exams are over, and she's enjoying a week at the beach with friends.  (no, I'm not jealous at all... ha)  School is going great and she's actually ahead enough of schedule that she has plans to graduate a semester early...  December of 2014!   College is just flying by and I find it so difficult to keep up with!  The picture above is from her last Wind Ensemble concert.  (a happy occasion for her, sad for me as I see her years in this kind of music environment come to an end)  She's going to be mostly too busy for the next couple of years to keep that committment going and it was ceasing to be fun for her.  Andrew was very sweet to bring her flowers - not to mention that he kept me company during the concert!  :)

Speaking of busy, she was recently elected President of her service club, Phi Kappa Sigma.  She's really excited about that.  But with that and her apprenticeship and trying to graduate early, she decided to drop the RA job for next year.  This seems to have been the year of realizing that you really can't do it all... haha.

Well, in a few days she'll be home for a week and then it's back to Nashville for the summer to continue her apprenticeship with Tusculum Church of Christ...  she's excited about the summer and really getting to dive in more with the youth group there.  I, of course, am realizing that the days of having her home with us for any length of time have come to an end...  it's hard when that really settles in.  :`(

And as Anna nears the end of HER sophomore year (which cannot come soon enough - ha!), she is also probably coming near the end of her gymnastics career.  We're not quite sure of the future yet, but this past competition season was plagued with injuries that made things difficult.  One of the highlights, though, was her 2nd place finish on her floor routine at the Alabama State Meet.  And that came despite the fact that her music didn't start right and she had to start over -- and then, right in the middle of her routine which was going beautifully, her music skipped several times throwing off the choreography of the routine -- but she just kept on going through it and still scored a 9.300 on her routine - missing first place by just a 10th of a point.  I was mad at the music mishap but very proud of how Anna handled it!! :)   Her team overall finished 5th in the state.  Of course you'd always like that to be higher, but it was better than they thought they were going to do, so it was a nice victory for these girls who work so hard.  :)   Anyways, after an MRI last week, we just got a diagnosis from her orthopedist yesterday of 'microfractures in her scaphoid bone' that apparently have been the culprit in a nagging thumb injury that has hurt her all season long.  So now she has to rest and stop pounding that bone for a while and let it heal...  then we'll see where to go from there.

And another nice milestone, she finally got her braces off!!  Yay!!

 

 

Well, I guess that's the latest from here.  I have a quote I've been pondering that won't leave me alone, but I'll save that for another post...  :)