Kids Marathon

One of the highlights of the athletic calender for the fitness community in Middle TN is the CM Marathon. Kids in the region can participate thru their schools and YMCAs in what is called the kids marathon. In the five weeks proceeding the adult race, they run a mile a day for 25 days and then on the night before the real marathon, they get to run their final mile by school grade along the route of the real marathon to the finish line and get a finishing medal, etc...


JA participated this year and here is some action footage

Spring Time in 10ac

A River Runs Thru It


Wishful Thinking


Red Popcorn Popping


People Who Live in Glass Houses

...and again

JP scored two goals in this game. They won this game easily. So they are back above 0.500. Need to get it all together for the upcoming playoffs.

A Missed Opportunity...

He shoots, he scores.

JP's team fell behind 4-1 to a rival school in a blazing fast opening half of soccer.

They seem to be unable to come up with a good defensive scheme to match a blitzkrieg offensive scheme being used by the better schools that utilize fast strikers being fed the ball on crosses from the wing with the strikers simply outrunning the full backs and leading to open shots on goal.

Late in the second half, the Birds were at least able to get the ball upfield, and when the ball got deflected from a bit of a scrum, Jonathan was able to get in mighty boot that cleared the defenders and went through the outstretched goalie for a nice goal.

They scored again shortly after and it was a race against time.

Unfortunately they were not able to score again and they lost 4-3.

(At least they didn't miss miss 4 straight free throws to lose the national championship.
Although of course it was ten years ago yesterday that we were 5 minutes from glory and couldn't find quite enough in the tank to hold on...still that season was one of my greatest memories of our time in Utah. Sadly I'm submitting an application for a position at UK. Not sure how I can live with myself.)

Sleep Science

I was sitting in a required department seminar where the speaker started talking about one of the largest medical concerns of parents with autistic kids is that the child's sleep is really messed up, which of course puts even more strain on the parents. She then talked about how similar this was to kids with epilepsy. Of course my ears pricked up at this. She talked about how these kids are sleep resistant, take a long time (1-2 hrs) to go to sleep, often wake up in the night with some anxiety, wake early in the morning, and just generally have a difficult time with sleep. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that ME's strange sleep habits (she is fully awake and actively running around the house as I write at 10:30 pm, and often wakes up once or twice in the middle of the night and then tries to sneak into our bedroom around 5 am) were related to her epilepsy.

The lecturer talked quite a bit about their studies using sleep behavioral therapy rather than using drugs to treat sleep disorders in these kids. We have not done a very good job of keeping constant bedtime routines, which apparently is extremely important. I am going to try to get more info from her to see what we can do.

More soccer

JP's middle school soccer team has won their last two games, both 5-0. One was against his old middle school. This last game he moved to midfielder and saw more playing time and got more touches. I will try to post some video soon.

New Dresses

AM has been using the serger and her sewing machine to turn out some new dresses. The green dress is a farewell present for the little girl. Their family moved this week.