Down in the Cruisers' Cemetery...

...that's where your team's gonna get buried!

The kiddos uniformly agree that the Cruisers cheer could be improved. The lyrics are bad and the chant is far too long, but we musn't let it color our perspective.

The Castle Rock Cruisers rec summer swim team boasted three Crawfords this season - Eve hadn't joined their ranks since the summer of her 9th birthday - and though she's at most of the meets anyway and might as well put on a suit, it was a very full, very exhausting experience for the lot of us. 'Good' bordering on 'Glorious', but challenging. 

 Capturing the essence of these sisters - Eve is the Little Mother, the one who's not slightly overweight and unravelled by details. She also doesn't spend the majority of her time mentally preventing herself from physically throttling other spectators. The Mother, in short, who knows what to say to a nervous swimmer.

 Gracie's season was a success, for sure, though she was discouraged somewhat at not qualifying to swim at either Championships or All-Stars, as she did last summer (Championships requires that you place within the top 12 swimmers in any event at a Preliminary meet, and All-Stars requires that you swim an event in a set time at least once over the course of the season). Last year, at the ripe old age of 6, it was easier to qualify - once you hit that 7-8 girls' bracket, however, the sheer number of other swimmers rises exponentially, and it's just plain hard. But she improved so steadily and surely, we're just so proud of her.

 Backstroking Queen. My favorite swim moment for her occurrs at the neighborhood pool we seem to spend every afternoon enjoying - during the safety breaks, instead of joining the others in gorging on whatever we have handy in the cooler, she chooses to lap swim along with the adults, just for practice.

 Shaney-bo-Baney found himself on the lower end of his age bracket as well, so we were thrilled when he clawed his way to the Championships and earned an All-Star time in Backstroke. Every year he claims this is his last Cruiser season and that he'll just concentrate on the year-round Rock team, but every year he's back with the promise of underwater success...he'll be in prime position next year to repeat the award-winning magic of last season, so I fully expect him to be back in action.

 GoShaneGoShaneGoShaneGoShaneGoShane...

 The consistently butt-kicking 9-10 Boys Free Relay Team: James, Noah, Shane and Kenobi. Nope. Not a typo. His name's Kenobi, after your favorite Jedi. And mine, by the way.

 The maestro. Best memory: seeing him glide to the swimmer on either end of the lane to shake their hand...sportsmanship wasn't necessarily lacking before, it just never occurred to him to acknowledge someone he has either beaten or been beaten by. Lots of growth for the little man.

 Eve finally committed to doubling-up on her swimming commitments - not the biggest fan of the early-morning Cruiser workouts, but then, none of us are. The main pull for swimming rec is to reaffirm to yourself that 'Yup, I'm pretty dang good.' While club swim doesn't involve the sheer numbers of teams and participants as football and basketball, a healthy swim community exists in Colorado, and the long and short-course meets are filled with literally hundreds of swimmers per age group, which makes it common for you to whoop 'Yes! 24th in Freestyle!" 'Sweet! 14th in Back!" Cracking the Top 10 is a Herculean accomplishment, reserved for the hard-core kids who are eyeing Olympic trials and whatnot, a la local Missy Franklin, whom we hope kicks some tail in London.

 Rec swim also boasts a LOT of swimmers, but the best swimmers in any summer league spend their entire year swimming for another club, so by the time you hit Championships and All-Stars, it's just a mini state meet, with the added bonus of your placing in the Top 10 or even Top 5 consistently...the pleasure of leap-frogging the higher ordinal numbers is immense. Eve's here pictured with the Girls 11-12 Free Relay Team: Eve, Katie, Kelly and Grace, who forced all to eat their bubbles every time they crossed the platform.

 Eve made All-Star times in every event available to do so, as well as Championships for Free, Back and 200 IM (you can only swim 3 events at any one meet) and did beautifully, bringing home enough blue ribbons to wallpaper a room.

 For Rock, the long-course meets have been scattered this year...the team arranged a developmental meet with our neighbors just to the south in northern Colorado Springs, Peak Swim. You can't imagine the luxury of a nearly open deck, not packed to the hilt with tents and chairs and spectators - it's politically incorrect and I know it, but any swim meet can double as an ADD Convention: I truly don't get why everyone feels compelled to wander. Constantly. They bring these tents and chairs and line the deck, preventing free views for all, and refuse to sit in them for even a minute. Biggest summer pet peeve. And, for the love of all that's holy: if you're not watching your swimmer, could you kindly back away from the pool's perimeter? Maybe so one of the other 603 swimmers' families could catch a glimpse of their own offspring? I probably wasn't using my inside voice for that.

 Just to get unobstructed photos of your swimmer is what I imagine attending a swim meet in the Celestial Kingdom would be like. And don't think for a second that there won't be swim meets there. Just don't.

Fly isn't her natural or best stroke, but always makes for a fun picture.

 The best part of any meet: the crap. In this case, Ring Pops for earning a best time.

 Swim meets are, by and large, a HUGE time suck. I don't deny it. And due to the nature of our kids' strengths, combined with our unique talent for saying 'Yes' when all other families say 'No' (i.e., 'Sure, we'll swim the last leg of that last relay', 'Sure, we'll time the last half of the meet') we're always on hand from warm-ups to tear down, so spending 6-7 hours at a meet isn't unusual...it would bother some. But it's just family time for us; lots of time for kissing and wrestling and talking and chasing and, yes, bothering.

So we put a cap on it. Worth it, every summer. 

Where is there a Boy to Whom the Call of the Wild Does not Appeal?

Why, thank you, our ever-revered Lord Baden-Powell. I loves me the Cub Scouting program. I love that my boys participate, I love that the church adopts it as its official activity arm for its boys, I love that I've been asked to serve in its ranks and provide just a smidge of its magic for these kiddos. But there's the practical, dirt-encrusted underbelly required with scouting that gets harder and harder for me the older I get. It's depressing.
Another session of Pioneer Trails Cub day camp at Polson's Ranch...I hate to say it, but I must: there are a great many things in life that I once found fun and entertaining, or, at the very least, not nearly so difficult or annoying as I see to find them these days: I'd like to blame it on the thyroid, so I will. But normally, I enjoy, in a large way, the day camp experience. This year, not so much.  But not because of the company: I mean, look at those fellas! And they were amazingly easy: if you're going to herd cats for 7 hours, these are the cats you'd choose, hands down.

 The camp organizers like to stick with the program, with the usual result: the stations that aren't as much fun as others are consistently not as much fun as others. Such as Scouting Skills. Here, they made rope from twine. Which was a Disneyland ride compared to what they endured in Nature.

 Archery always rocks, though.

 And BB guns. The genius this year was having a first-come, first-serve sling-shot station, as well as a Sasparilla Saloon (root beer for 5 cents a cup) to while away your waiting time for either arrows or guns, and that, my friends, was a bit of a god-send on the 103-degree day I attended.

 As was the water.

 Ty attended 11-year-old Scout Camp with the saintly Brother Pierce and assorted other petty criminals from the Sons of Helaman Patrol, as can be readily discerned in this photo.

 The camp was held on the Bastian family's property just south of us...it's quite the spread, given the fact tht they have their own stream and lake. I mean, right? Owing your own tributary? That's impressive.

 Can you conceive of owning this kind of space, wherein  you could host a few stakes' worth of 11-year-old scout troops and not even notice that they're there? Love the Bastians, just love 'em.

 Ty and Landon. Being handsome, killing time.

Breakfasting. I'll probably be amending this blog entry, once Matt gets home (he actually attended and has some idea as to activities enjoyed and funny stories with which to caption.)

Dance Little Sister

 Recital 2012...holy cow.

On the day Kids Dance scheduled it's spring recital 'Out to Sea', all we had going was a swim meet in Grand Junction for Eve, which Matt would attend, a morning swim meet for Grace and Shane for the Cruisers, and two baseball games, scheduled for 2 p.m., exactly when Gracie was to take the stage. Many helpful parents and buckets of sweat later, we scraped our weary selves into Rock Canyon High School's gymnasium, makeup mostly intact, ready to dance.

 The tap routine was set to Adele's 'Rolling in the Deep', which lent such a spirit of maturity and gravitas to the proceedings that it nearly overswhelmed my darling girl each week as I picked her up from practice...it was a burden of cool that the girls could shoulder only in the recital experience.

 Oh, the sass! The soul! The swagger!

 The ballet number was choreographed to 'Under Water', a lovely but otherwise nondescript piece of music I'm not sure I would recognize if I heard it again. But the girls danced beautifully...she was so proud, particularly performing for her skeleton crew of Crawfords: mom, Aunt Diane, Grandma K, and the Crawford grandparents. We soaked up our applause, accepted our flowers, took our bows, made small talk with the appreciative hordes, then headed home in a wicked downpour to retrieve wet and dirty ballplayers and consume celebratory meal at Red Robin. Happy days, these.

Glove is a Many Splendored Thing

 To reiterate...Baseball 2012 was little on the shaky side. Our first e-mail came from the coach, who stated that he was our coach 'because no parents stepped up to take over.' So, great. A bunch of deadbeats who are going to be coached by a gruding parent. But it got even better: Billy Lyons, our Lions' coach, is a 22-year-old employee of the Rec Center who was assigned to us because of our deadbeat status - we were so deadbeat, we didn't even reach grudging level.

Matt served as Assistant because of his commitment to Ty's team, and there was no shortage of parents who 'didn't have time to coach', who nevertheless attended every practice and from the sidelines insisted they knew how to run a practice and would often tell the coaches what they should be teaching. Two coaches, surrounded by boys who can't follow directions, stop telling their teammates how much they suck, or be considered, by any criteria, universally familiar with the concept that you run to first before you run to second, and yet they should be learning learning hand signals on day one. So good times, right from the get-go.

Shane did well at first and catcher...when coach handed him his end-of-season trophy, he mentioned that Shane was the most knowledgeable about baseball, which he comes by naturally, living in this house. The other boys, for the most part, had never played baseball before, which is neither here nor there in the face of the fact that all but two of them had never played on ANY team sport before, which was glaringly obvious given their trouble learning sportsmanship, courtesy, appropriate language, respect, support, accountability, and the many other character traits to be gleaned from such endeavors. Good ballplayers, actually, but in the face of attitude, it didn't seem to account for much.

 In the spirit of not dwelling on the negativity...Shane ran and caught, but batting was nonexistent, for just about everybody: it's the first year of kid pitch, so if you didn't get hit, you were walked. Most innings were called by runs scored, not by outs. But once you made contact, there were many in-the-park doubles and triples and RBIs - football scores, just about every week.

So proud of Shaney, who really hung in there, and consistently attended practice and games, given the utter lack of joy involved in the endeavor this time around. It was hard for him to have kids arguing over the use of gear in the dugout, the kids who wouldn't shake his encouraging hand after they struck out, etc. And incredibly proud that he unequivocally states for the record that he'll absolutely be back for next season, just as long as we take care not to sign him up with the same teammates.

 Happy, happy, joy, joy.

 You can't go wrong with a first base coach of this level of ability and experience.

Ever-attentive, on the prowl, on the move.

It's a Cowhide Joyride!

 It's perfectly acceptable to steal a catchphrase from Dan Patrick to caption one's blog. My attorney will not be taking letters from your attorney on this subject.

So baseball 2012 was a bit of a disappointment for both Crawford boys...the Sox had lost several pitchers, and seemed to regress some in the field and behind the plate, BUT...Ty was able to move to top pitcher in the roster (the difference in his confidence and ability over that of last season was amazing from his perspsective, and just plain addicting to watch from ours), and with Matt as head coach, the Sox had a good, clean, fun-filled, though not particularly successful, season.

 Ty always has the steady bat...he excels in the contact hit, right where it's least expected. The league as a whole had trouble with fielding, but he's so razor sharp on the base running, it didn't really matter whether or not they had gotten their mitts on those hits or not.

 Truly, building on his base running skills honed in last fall's Hawks league, Ty functions as his own base running coach. Lightning quick.

 And some of the fellas are a little hesitant to lead off of 2nd, in the highly improbable event that someone would throw the ball to the baseman and he'd actually catch it (that sounds absolutely below the belt, but after seeing a few games it's universally true, they've all got, at age 11, what my dad would lovingly call 'Stone Hands'). Ty's halfway to third by the time the ball leaves the pitchers' mitt.

 These boys, for the most part, have been together since 2nd grade or so, and those that were new arrivals were welcomed in seamlessly...love what one of the dads told me, when Matt was at an away swim meet with Eve during the game when Ty managed to strike out 6 batters in two innings... I joked that Ty's performance was aided by the absence of his domineering coach, and Mike said: 'Yeah, 'domineering'. Caring, kind, communicative, supportive, concerned, for sure. Domineering, no. A yeller he is not.'

 The first of 5 game balls awarded for either Offensive or Defensive Player of the game...

Coach Crawford travelling again (Mississippi in July. You know you're jealous), so Coach Craig and Coach Chris (an old schoolmate of mine from Aurora Hinkley, whom, coincindentally, played baseball on the varsity team I managed) got to do the trophy honors. As I said, not the best season ever (though they did manage a stunning upset in round 1 of the playoffs), but Ty's got his sights set on the future, where he hopes to rejoin Coach Mike and his Hawks fall ball team, and will try out for the AAA Rockers team, which will be a year-round commitment. By now, we're used to that. And Ty CANNOT WAIT. All baseball, all the time. That's my boy.

End O' Year Festivities and Whatnot

 Imagine our great relief when the month of May did not race by at breakneck speed...May is always ridiculously over-scheduled with year-end festivities. Not that we were bored. Just not ridiculously over-scheduled with year-end festivities, just moderately over-scheduled with year-end festivities. Witness: Grace's third Kidstage production of the year, 'The Infamous Shoe Gang,' wherein she starred ast Rachel, a member of the aforementioned shoe gang who steals shoes from Imelda Marcos/Kardashian-caliber shoe hoarders in order to give the homeless the gift of footwear. A Robin Hood-type role, if you will. A feelgood take on theft.

 The spring piano recital. For which we always manage to be wildly unprepared until about a week prior, when we cram for it - perhaps not our best strategy. But then, our goal is not so much musical excellence, as, well, I'm not sure what to call our laissez-faire approach to practice, other than, perhaps, open-minded optimism that whatever we can devote to it will be all to the good. Shane, in particular, as a great musical ear, and tends to run on the perfectionistic side, which allows for a lot of alternation between blowing it off because it's too easy to shutting down because it's too hard. In process. And aren't we all.

 Eve rises to the occasion as only the oldest girl in the room can - she can sense, from a mile away, when littles will be looking to her to set the tone and the example for how 'the big kids' act, and she pulls it off without breaking a sweat, every time. She's a wonder, that darling girl of mine.

 Field Day. Grace's date was mercifully overcast, so much fun...this was our best shot of over-the-top exuberance, and kudos to me: hula-hoop shots are notoriously difficult. Mrs. Sweeney's 1st grade class boasts some serious personalities, but I'll tell ya what: they genuinely love each other: there's no drama when it comes time to choose a partner, they cheer for each other's teams in relays, they're just good, supportive little classmates. Hate to see that group break ranks for the next year. The boys' scheduled field day conflicted with...

 Eve's end-of-year-luau-themed bash, so I had to take a pass on following both of them around Bison Park's field, because, really, if you're having a co-ed party for 12- and 13-year-olds, you just can't leave them alone for 2 hours. I mean, you CAN, I suppose, but I can't. Just a bit cold and drizzly on that last day of 7th grade, which was unfortunate for many reasons, not least of which because the rest of the spring was abnormally warm, and who would even think that we couldn't use our slip'n slide and eat our weight in Otter Pops because of the temperatures?

 Just a guest sampling: I forget her name, Desi, and Phoebe. There were even cute boys.

 Parties have become somewhat cast aside this year, I have found. Which all works. The 1st graders gave us a lovely concert of patriotic music they've been rehearsing, followed by a breakfast. Here, Grace stands with Phoebe and Kaylin, two dear, sweet friends with whom she also spent the year in the Brownie troop. Happy memories with great girls. A mom can't ask for much more than that.

 Shane's parting shot for me to witness was his 'Business Builders' unit presentation. Mrs. Mann, who is, sadly, leaving Clear Sky this year, was such a tour de force teacher for this 3/4 combo split - I hate to call it 'advanced', but, for lack of a better term...I prefer to tell Shane it's for the kiddos whose brains work differently than can best be accommodated by a standard classroom. That seems to work. Anyhoo...their groups worked with a Castle Rock small business to create for them a product and business plan, and Shane's group was assigned to 'They Just Keep Growing', our favorite local consignment store. They always create a media presentation along with their projects throughout the year, and here, in the upper right, you can see S hane functioned as the supplier for this little operation.  

 The Annual Clap-Out to honor the students for sticking out another year - this was mere seconds before Grace completely lost her composure over leaving her peers and classroom...many, many teary-eyed kids and teachers filed out of those front doors that day, a testament, I think, to what goes on in an inspired classroom environment, despite the criticisms of education these days. What these people manage to do with limited resources and unlimited children to inspire and discipline and instruct has always been an awe-inspiring thing, bordering on sacred.

 And he's off to 4th grade, folks. It hardly seems possible. And Ty's about to be big man on campus: 6th grade. Oh, you wait your whole life for that, don't'cha?