Graduation

My youngest cousin graduated from high school yesterday!  On Friday, I picked up my oldest daughter and son from school a little early and we headed out on a road trip to VA (my younger daughter had softball stuff for her summer league).  We had a nice weekend full of graduation fun, complete with lots of food, family, cornhole, balderdash, swimming, and hot tub time!  

My cousin and my daughter.  Yes, he really is about a foot and a half taller than she is!

Cake!

Brothers

Gorgeous view from their house.  Well, minus the guy rocking a dress shirt, dress socks, gym shorts, and vans. ;)

Race for the Cure

My girls and I participated in our second annual Race for the Cure yesterday.  I had, unfortunately, not been training as much as I should have for the race.  I had done a little jogging here and there, but not nearly as much as I had before last year's race. Both girls stayed with me for the first 1.5 miles, then my older daughter took a short break to walk (I think her training consisted of one jogging trip around the neighborhood a couple of weeks ago...)  My younger daughter, who could have finished WAY faster, decided to jog with me at my pace.  We ended up finishing up with a time of 34:10.  Looking back at last year's time for this race, I still beat it by 41 seconds, but was quite a bit slower than the 5k from last June. I do not claim to be a runner by any means, but it feels good to have been able to make it through three 5k's now without any walking. :)

Lots of Softball!

Let me start by saying I'm a little behind getting this posted as the season wrapped up a week and a half ago, but better late than never! :)

My daughter finally got to pitch on her school softball team.  She played her first season of rec softball 2 summers ago and just took up pitching last summer.  Earlier this year, she began taking private pitching lessons.  She has improved so much in such a short time (especially considering most of the other players on her team have been playing since they were very young)!  Her coach finally decided to watch her pitch again in practice and was really impressed with her improvement even from the beginning of the season.  He let her pitch, first, in a scrimmage against the 8th graders - which they won by a lot, btw.  Here is a picture of her in action during that:


Then, the next game, he let her pitch a couple of innings and she did really well!  She made a couple of really good plays after the pitch by snagging the ball and getting it to 1st for what would have been an out (both times!) had the girl at 1st caught the ball.  The coach had switched some players around and the girl usually on 1st was not on - she would have definitely caught them both. They were literally right to her. Here is a video of one of those plays:

Watch it in HD here.

And a few pics from throughout the season:
 
 
 
 


She is still taking private lessons every week and is continuing to improve!  She will be playing on a league this summer that is somewhere between the skill levels of rec and travel and hopefully will play travel soon!

Bike Ride

Went on a nice outing with my little man this evening.  We hopped on our bikes and rode 2.5 miles into town to go to Whit's.  I tried to sneak a picture of him without him knowing, but he caught me. :) Here he is enjoying his yummy cone.

We had a good time, that is, until we got about a mile from home and he decided his bike "is not fast enough" and he started walking his bike.  Um, yeeeeeah, not sure of the logic behind that one...