Spring has Sprung

03/29/07

The full blush of spring has overtaken the Brazos Valley, making me feel lazy and romantic. I don't want to rush away from the Dutch irises in the front bed to hunker down at the office with a set of reports or blue book exams. I don't want to stop long enough at my computer to update Erin's website when I could just as easily wander out and see what message the heart-shaped leaves unfurling shyly on the red bud tree have for me.


Solution: Do the update while I'm teaching.

My students are beaving away at their midterm exam, so the computer has beckoned me over for a short interlude. The benefit? I don't accidentally fall asleep while proctoring the test, and readers don't get stuck with last week's news.

Not that I have that much to offer. Erin is handling the added schedule pressure of playing soccer and softball simultaneously. Her first softball game was pretty even, and the girls looked like they had a passing familiarity with a ball and glove. The second game was a slaughter, with Erin's team barely able to bat around the order before the game ended. Personally, Erin is on much more solid ground with fundamentals of soccer than softball. She played second base last game and understood the concept of covering the bag on throw downs (which she did pretty well). The problem arose on potential doubles, where she so intrepidly kept her eye on the runner rounding first that she would have been beaned from behind had any of her teammates had the sense or ability to throw the ball in from the outfield. She did make one of the only put outs for her team (besides strike outs) when she fielded a grounder and successfully made the throw. It was one of the few highlights on a very short reel.

I wish I could tell you that Erin's ears had improved mightily from the round of Omnicef. She'll finish the course tomorrow, and she still feels like she has a banana in her ear. Hopefully, the ENT doctor will get a handle on it during our visit in the morning. In the meantime, we'll stop by the dentist after school. Maybe she has done such a lousy job brushing that the plaque build up has overflowed into her ear canal.

Davis got the news that his time trials last Saturday were fast enough to put him on Will Rice's Beer/Bike team. He told me he did the "Willie smile" for thirty minutes after his race and for thirty more minutes after he was named to the team. Here is a picture of the "Willie smile."

It's Davis's imitation of Willie where he draws his lips tightly back so his teeth show and then pastes on a big smile. They both look simultaneously ecstatic and ferocious when they do it.

Keep us all in your prayers over the next week. Erin, Nico, and I will leave for Houston Tuesday evening for an all-day scanfest on Wednesday. We sure would like to see stable or improved pictures this time. Davis has Maundy Thursdsay and Good Friday off from school, so we will drag him back with us so the Easter bunny will know where to find him. For my part, I'm going to try and be as brave as Elizabeth Edwards, who doesn't want cancer to keep her from doing anything this week that she could or would have done last week. The Buenger's won't be prisoners to cancer either.