411 The Walters Bunch

  We took L shopping for her birthday. We hung out on the benches while we waited for her. I can't believe that 3/4 of my kids are now adults! While I LOVED raising them and enjoyed every picked flower and loving note they gave me (I have a whole wonderful box of them) I am also excited about what life has in store for us in the coming years. It will be different for sure, but I look forward to it even though I miss the bedtime stories and couch snuggles from their little kid days. Since A had to work, L wanted to have lunch by A's work so she could celebrate with her. The hardest part of our lives has been the past 6 months. L has put us through a lot and while we did enjoy celebrating her birthday with her and had several glimpses of  the old her throughout the last 6 months, overall she didn't want to get better and you can't help someone who doesn't want help. Having her here was unfair to my other two kids still at home. They have been nothing but stellar human...

So proud! They worked really hard and it was great to see them get a reward for it. This year everyone one of our club teams (except the freshman team) won gold! This is a huge accomplishment not just because it's hard to win gold, but because it's extra hard for our team. We don't have a home gym so we rely on churches to allow us some practice time and on using the court that one of our teammates has at their house. Yes, some of our teammates are very well to do and do in fact have their own basketball court inside their house, right next to the movie room, complete with water fountains, but having the entire team over for practices all the time would be asking a little too much so we use them as an emergency back up if the church isn't available. We also don't have access to a gym with weights so therefore most of our players don't really spend anytime in the gym lifting weights, which means most of our team is on the smaller side so being able to compete wit...

  T had fun with Grandpa! His sole mission is to beat Grandpa at Madden one day....this was NOT that day!🤣 We have had a crazy busy week trying to get everything done we need to get done before we leave, plus L had a set back this week so we also had to deal with that. It's only Tuesday, but this feels like the LONGEST week! We attended the annual banquet that D's work has every year. We thought we were just getting a dinner out, but to our surprise D won an award! We weren't expecting that, but it was a fun surprise. He works hard and it's nice when it's recognized. However, the pics of the guys who have been there 15+ years seriously needs to be updated! There was one guy who's pic had crazy amounts of hair and when he went up there he was pretty much grey and bald! D's wasn't too much better, but it least it still obviously resembled him. They had a nice buffet with turkey, potatoes, and cobbler. Since I had to eat Gluten Free and wasn't sure wha...

  Obviously, now that my kids are all pretty much grown Valentine's isn't as big of deal to them. However, in keeping with tradition, not to mention the fact T still wanted out of school for the day, we still had a mini party.  I told them that this year I wasn't going to get them any candy, normally I get balloons and special treat for each of them, but this year I just wasn't feeling it so I decided I would buy them all pizza (a treat since I rarely allow pizza) and I had some little Bundt cakes to celebrate with. They all said they were fine with that. L doesn't really do sweets, A doesn't like chocolate, and T doesn't like truffles, but they all like pizza. We took the day off and fortunately didn't have any basketball related stuff. No practice, no games, a rare no basketball day. We watched a movie, played some minute to win it games, and just basically enjoyed a nice low key day.  I remember the old days when they were little and we would all make...

  All teams have to have a prayer beforehand. The weather this year at State was FANTASTIC! The site was huge so I was able to do my exercise videos in the morning behind the trailer and D could do his stuff in front of the trailer. Once again, even though the weather was nice this time, it was mostly empty so we had plenty of bandwidth to stream our shows. T only had one game most days so we weren't living at the tournament site, which for your sanity is a good thing. For those of you who haven't had the experience of going to a tournament, let me paint you a picture. The venue for tournaments usually has between 8-10 full basketball courts. There will be games about every hour on the hour on EVERY single court. Each court will have at least one scoreboard that not only gives you the score, but will buzz at the end of each quarter, timeout, and half time. It will also track team fouls and, if super fancy, individual fouls. A shot clock is not utilized until college so there is...

She is growing so fast 🐈 After our horrendous show at the district tournament last week, our JV B team started thinking that they were better than our JV A team and challenged our A team to a scrimmage. We took them up on that and soundly put them in their place with some humble pie. We didn't even play our starters the whole time and one boy, who usually doesn't do anything more than warm the bench at game time, played two full quarters. Honestly, I was impressed with him because I had never even him get sweaty before since he almost never plays. The final score without us even going all out was 61-32. However, the next day T started not feeling well and as it turns out half our team caught the flu and only 5 people were well enough to play our last game, which meant no subs and 3 of the five that showed up are on the second string and don't play a lot of game time. They lost, but only by 12, which considering everything I thought that was pretty good. T is feeling better...

  We used our time between games for a little shopping. I made T walk behind me so I wasn't downwind. He did NOT smell good. He says that helps when people try to guard him😂 This week we had two practices and a total of four games. This is the worst our team has ever played at ANY tournament! I am not sure exactly what the problem was. I think it was just a combination of factors. It's not like the boys didn't play well. We played some of the most physical games we've played all season. I think the combination of injuries, illnesses, and players that are hurt so bad they can't play anymore just wore on us. The first of our games we only had 7 players and since 5 play at one time, there was basically no subs. They hung in that game for about 2.5 quarters and then just started to collapse and get sloppy from being tired. When you play really good teams, the tiniest mistake, such as a not 100% perfect pass, can IMMEDIATELY get turned on you and you lose points, or mor...