2019 has been an eventful year for us. I moved into a new house. It's smaller and more manageable for me, and it's marginally closer to the kids' school and has more places of interest within walking distance. It also has a swimming pool, which will be fun for the kids as the weather gets warmer.
We also adopted our first dog in December. He is a black lab mix - some people tell me he looks like he has pit bull in him, some people say mastiff. All this to say that he is a big dog. His name is Scooby, which is not a name I love. Everyone tells me I can change it, but I don't know if I'll bother. He knows his name, and I don't know if I'm motivated enough to train him to learn a new one. Perhaps if I had more experience with dogs, I'd be up to the challenge. But I do find myself a little embarrassed when people ask me his name, so we'll see how it goes. He's a very sweet dog, though, and I'm happy that so far our first experience in canine ownership is going so well.
Violet is in 9 and in fourth grade this year. This year, she started taking taekwondo classes and has already advanced two belt colors to yellow. She has also expressed interest in taking aerials classes, but we're having a hard time finding space in our busy schedule. She continues to take tap and jazz dance classes. She is particularly good at tap dancing, which is fun to see. She also still loves her Girl Scout troop and has proven to be a surprisingly effective cookie salesperson over the past couple years.
One of my fondest hopes for the past year finally came true: she is finally interested in the Harry Potter series. I realize that my children are very different from one another, but reading Harry Potter is what finally turned Jack into a voracious reader. I don't see quite the same level of engrossment with Violet, but I do hope this is a stepping stone for her to start reading a little more content-rich books.
Jack is 13 and in seventh grade. It's a little unbelievable to me that I have a teenager. After growing out his hair for the past couple of years, he decided to cut it this past summer. I tried to not make too big a deal of his long hair, but I have to say that I think he looks so handsome with it shorter. He's grown several inches and is now taller than my mom and sister. He can't wait until he's taller than me, but I tell him that's likely a few years off.
As always, sports dominate his life (our lives). His baseball team went to Cooperstown over the summer, and Jack had a great tournament. He hit his first home run ever there and ended up hitting three for the week. He joined the high school baseball prep team for seventh graders and has done well enough that he has been called up a few times to play on the eighth grade team. It's so gratifying to me to see that he still loves baseball so much at a time when many of his peers who had once been so dominant are burning out. He seems to be peaking at the right time, and it's exciting to contemplate the future for him.
He also joined the high school basketball prep team, and he's having a lot of fun with it. His future in basketball is much more uncertain than baseball, but being on this team gives him his best shot to at least make a team his freshman year. It's likely that he has played his last competitive soccer game, but he was ready for it by the end of this last rec season. He also ran on his school's cross country team this year and is the fastest runner in the school.
Both of my kids have still not quite hit the terrible t(w)eens (knock wood!). There have been flashes of drama or moodiness here and there, but for the most part, they are still loving, respectful, and sweet. Violet in particular remains charmingly young for her age, although we are starting to have conversations about negotiating friendship drama, which I recall being an issue with Jack's female peers when they were her age. Jack is starting to look more like a teenager, with occasional blemishes on his face and the beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip. His voice has dropped a bit too, but I think it's likely to get even lower as he gets older.
Highlights from 2019:
- Moving into the new house
- Adopting Scooby
- Jack having an amazing tournament at Cooperstown. He ended up hitting 3 homeruns (the second highest total for his team), batting .600 (also the second highest on the team), and scored 12 runs (tied for highest on the team).
- Violet starting and excelling in taekwondo
- Jack joining his high school baseball and basketball prep teams. I'm particularly thrilled at how nice the kids and parents are on these teams. This is the peer group that comprises most of Jack's school friends. In my update last year, I sort of mourned the prospect of never getting to meet Jack's friends. Because of these teams, that is happily not the case, and it's been a blessing to get to know them this year.
- Jack's All-star baseball team won two banners this year and advanced to super regions (where they unfortunately lost two heartbreakers).
- Violet got glasses this year. It took awhile to get used to seeing them on her beautiful face, but she does look super cute in them.
Things to look forward to in 2020:
I'll be honest, we don't have a whole lot of big things planned for the upcoming year. The kids are both getting braces this week. Not surprisingly, they are not thrilled, but we may as well get it over with. Otherwise, I'm looking forward to seeing how the kids do in school and in their respective activities. But we don't have much planned in the way of trips or the like. It's sort of nice to be able to be a little flexible. If an opportunity to do something fun comes up, we will definitely consider it. But for now, I'm mostly looking forward to enjoying the kids and our wonderful life in our beautiful city.
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