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Brad defending in Club
Basketball.
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Doug plants and prepares for
his shot.
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Doug (second from right,
behind Riley Bigelow) sings with his class at the coffee house.
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All the kids from Torrey
Pines Christian Church at camp. Any questions about why Brad likes
Youth Group so much?
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Doug (walking, extreme right)
one of many kids at baseball clinic given by and at high school.
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The Bigelows, the Fabijanics,
and the Sherwoods vacation in Cabo San Lucas together.
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Keith and Kristi pause over
the swimming pool at their "all inclusivo" resort.
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Kristi, Brad, Doug, Nana, and
Keith at the Julian Pie Shop on our tour of San Diego.
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Ken, Brad, Doug, and Keith
watch the Superbowl with only a thin sheet of plastic and shudders
between them and the great outdoors.
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| Doug, Brad, and Uncle Ken
playing basketball on the neighbor's hoop. |
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| Ah,
January: an opportunity for a fresh start, resolutions for personal
improvement, and a new graphic design for the web pages. |
The
sport of the month is basketball. Brad is in his second "session"
of club basketball which is more expensive and competitive than
recreational basketball. They have a new coach this season, a
twenty year old not far removed from playing guard on the local high
school team. The team is still struggling against the better
competition, but they're having fun and the new coach has added a bit
of swagger to the attitude. I still can't get over having to pay
to see my son play, however.
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Doug is
playing in the rec league for his old baseball coach. His
philosophy is always to draft kids from Deer Canyon Elementary so they
all know each other, regardless of skill level. The assistant
coach is a dad from Y Indian Guides. So all in all, Doug is in
with a comfortable group of friends.
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| January
may be exclusively basketball, but next month baseball will start, so
there were "try outs" this month, and Keith and Doug were there.
Keith
did his annual volunteer work at Little League Try Outs day. By
age groups, the kids individually bat, run the bases, field grounders
and throw to first, and field fly balls and throw to second. All
while the coaches for a particular age group sit in beach chairs in the
outfield and take notes on their clip boards. Four or five adult
volunteers are required to feed pitching machines, bat grounders, catch
balls at the bases, and keep order in the dug out. |
Brad did not have to
try out: as he was drafted on to a Majors team last year as an 11 year
old, he is automatically still on that same team (even though they will
have a new coach). It was Doug's first try out experience,
however, because they don't make the players audition until they are a
mature 9 years old.
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| Next volunteer
opportunity: Little League Field Prep day, where Keith is annually
humiliated by his inadequate collection
of small rakes and medium shovels, fit only
for suburban lawns and not up to the manly task of repairing a baseball
diamond after a winter's discontent. |
Great Aunt Betty moved
out of her Assisted Living apartment, back to her home in San
Marcos. She was no longer independent enough to live there,
requiring too much staff attention. She now has a caregiver
living with her 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It has been a
rough transition back, not the least reason being the revolving door of
caregivers that the agency provides. We're hoping for consistency
as Betty moves into this new phase.
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| Doug sang at a coffee
house this month. Actually, it's not as avant garde as it
sounds. The district's music program consists of a guitar playing
troubadour traveling between schools and classes and teaching the kids
songs (classics like “This Land is Your Land” and “Sponge Bob Square
Pants”). A couple times during the school year, they play a
“concert” at a
local strip mall coffee house with a riser stage. Between secular folk
music in coffee houses and religious pieces at church, Doug is getting
a decent exposure to singing. |
| A late
breaking opportunity came for Brad to go on a church camp in the San
Bernadino Mountains (very near where he goes to summer church camp) for
the long Martin Luther King Jr weekend. Late breaking as in the
week before hand. In a move totally unaccustomed to the
horse-before-the-cart, plan-ahead-Sherwoods, his parents actually
acquiesced to his going on such short notice, and we set about faxing
applications and packing at the last minute. He was gone for
three days and nights, and of course loved every minute of it.
His Green Bay Packer “beanie” hat appears on various girls’ heads in
his pictures from the event, so he seems to be, uh, socializing well. |
While Brad was away at
Church Camp, Doug went to a half day Baseball Camp put on by the local
high school baseball team as a fund raiser. The high school
players ran the kids through 5 skills stations on the varsity
field. Doug had a good time, and he got a T-shirt to boot.
It's funny sometimes to see how he reacts when he is socially unsure of
himself. As the assembled kids broke up into teams and were
assigned (very cool) high school ball players as coaches for the day,
Doug hung back and wouldn't high five the coach or chant the slogans as
asked. On the other hand, it might have had something to do with
the (very uncool) father hanging around with the camera, trying hard to
embarrass him.
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The
day after Brad got
back from camp, Nana (Keith's mom) arrived. She came out to stay with
the kids while
Keith and Kristi went with two other couples on a parents only, no kids
vacation. She got to observe the daily routine Tuesday and
Wednesday, then the parents cut out Thursday morning, leaving her and
the boys to their own devices for 4 days. Of course everything
went fine, she even got the boys to their basketball practices and
games. She also got the unbargained for excitement of being the
adult at home when they poured the concrete for the new foundation.
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| Yes, Keith and Kristi
took a vacation to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with the Bigelows and
Fabijanics, whom you should recognize from Labor Day Camp
Outs past. This was our second trip to Cabo (the first was in
1991 and hardly counts for Kristi, who was pregnant with Brad at the
time) and our first trip any where with other couples while we all
abandoned our
children. The putative reason for the trip was that 5 of the 6 of
us had or would be celebrating our 40th birthdays in the few months
prior
or post (Gail is the baby in the group). More pictures and narrative of the trip are here.
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| Some big excitement
occurred in the week before leaving when Kristi
determined that the copy of her birth certificate that she had used to
travel back in 1991 wasn't sufficient in these post 9-11 days. In
the hours before our trip, her dad went to the Bloomington, IL,
registrar's office to get a new
certified copy and sent it to us over night in San Diego. Let's
hear it
for parents who don't move from the community in which you were born 40
years ago. |
When we returned from
Cabo but before Nana left, we spent a day in the car driving around San
Diego county surveying the damage from the fires three months
ago. We went on roads and saw pieces of the county we had never
seen before (like a big Indian Casino and little two lane roads that
you hear about on the traffic report when then blocked at rush
hour). We ended up in Julian, where we did our best to pump a
little money in the local economy we guessed was suffering from city
tourists not passing through since the vegetation had all burned away.
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The day after Nana
left, Uncle Ken made a surprise visit. He tried
to give us a week's notice, but we were out of the country! He
had business in Orange
County, so he called us a couple of days beforehand, testing the
welcome mat we had told him would always be out for him. He spent
4 days with us, two of which he spent commuting between San Diego and
the job site 100 miles of freeway to the north.
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| The Y Guide event for
the month for Keith and Doug was a Sunday afternoon in Balboa
park. They saw an IMAX film ("Australia"), spent time in the
truly superior Children's Science Museum, and, at Doug's urging, toured
the Botanical Gardens (he apparently learned to appreciate them on a
previous school field trip). They ate ice cream and enjoyed a
juggling show. We were the only representatives from our tribe, as the
Y had the audacity to schedule a father/son event opposite the NFL
playoffs... |
| One thing that
generally happens in January, but did not occur this year, was
Brad's belated birthday party. Yes, his birthday is in late
December, but the only way to have a birthday party is after the
holidays. |
The
Remodel:
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What did we manage to survive this month
during the house remodel?
This
month saw the removal by jackhammer of the old patio to make way
for the new foundation. Dancer did not find this a pleasant
process, as chiseling the old foundation at the corners of the house to
attach the new foundation was not only loud, it sent vibrations through
the floor that sent her barking and scratching at baseboards.
Nearly all of the action this month took place outside the confines of
the existing house. Keith would return home in the evening to a well
kept, organized house and have no idea what racket Kristi had to
endure. The good news is that Dancer and Craig the contractor get
along famously, so Kristi could leave the dog and escape the house when
she needed to.
The two major milestones this month were each witnessed by a visiting
family member: Keith's mom Jane got to see the concrete pour and Keith's
brother Ken got to see the lifting and installation of the 1600 pound steel beam that
will support the second floor.
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Links
Mentioned on this Page: |
You may have missed
these
links within the text above.
Labor Day camp out
with Bigelows and Fabijanics (Sept. 2003)
Kristi and Keith's
Cabo San Lucas Vacation
This
month's remodel progress
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Favorite
Computer Games: |
Brad: Sims Deluxe
Doug: Monopoly Tycoon |
They Said
It: |
| Doug, noticing Dad
reading a slip cover to a Beatles book in a book store: “Who are they,
the Monkees?” Douglas redeemed himself after this horrific gaff
by the deep understanding he showed over the next five minutes as we
discussed “real” bands and “fake” bands. While he considered the
Monkees to be a real band (they had a TV show after all), he knew
InSync and the Backstreet Boys were fake bands. |
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