Where to start with Sherry this month?

Dear Family,

Where to start? Where to start? First off, although I fear change (especially new technologies), I’m really excited about our new family website! I’m sure it will only take me a month or two to figure out. Who knows, our little site and blog may become famous one day. Suzannah and I have often said there’s enough of our family stories/history to write a really good book someday. Someone just has to write it. J

Jared has started 1st grade and suddenly both and he and are disappointed in the number of hours left in the day. I wake him up at 6:30 and the bus takes him away at 7:30. Jared gets home about 2:45 and then we’ve got until 6:00 (dinner time) to fit in homework (which is thankfully very little), friends, “screen time” (this includes anything with a screen, ie watching TV, playing the Wii, computer games, etc), and time together. Jared gets in the tub for promptly at 7and we are saying goodnight by 8:00. The other day Jared told me, “It’s not fair. All we do is try to stay awake, try to stay awake, try to stay awake, sleep, try to stay awake, try to stay awake, try to stay awake, sleep. It never stops!” We told him that he gets to be awake for 14 hours a day and sleeps 10 hours. Which is more? Would he rather switch? Sometimes I wouldn’t mind a little switch.

First day of school

Just like last year, Jared is completely different than we were at school: he is popular! He has a lot of friends and is something of a ringleader on the playground. As far as we know he only uses his powers for good and for thwarting the plans of the “girls’ club” with which his “boys’ club” is always battling. Jared had the rather nefarious idea last week to infiltrate the girls’ club. His plan is to pretend to be in their club and then trick them by announcing he’s really in the boys’ club! It can’t possibly fail. He also has plans to sell rocks for $100 a rock to make money for the ice cream truck. That was a particularly fun conversation to hear between Jared and his friend, Josh:

Jared: “We should sell the big ones for $100!!!!!!” Josh: “Are you kidding? Nobody’s going to pay $100 for a rock.” Jared: “How much should we sell them for?” Josh: “I think we can ask $50 for the big rocks.”

Some friends and I were talking. How long do you think it will be before the girls “notice” the boys? About 2nd grade. And when do you think the boys will “notice” the girls? Probably around 9th grade. Hee hee. Jared actually loves playing with the girls too. There is only 1 girl Jared does not like right now. Her name is Michelle and she’s not only in Jared’s class but in our ward as well. The problem is Jared’s a real stickler for the rules. In fact, the report of the 1st day of school went exactly like last year. When asked how the 1st day was, he told me all his teacher’s rules. Anyway, Michelle sits at Jared’s “table”. In fact, her desk is right next to his. The teacher has the desks grouped together and 4 desks is a table with an assigned color. Tables can earn and lose points throughout the day. At the end of the week the table with the most points gets a prize for each student. Jared says his table will never win because “Michelle won’t stop singing while she works!” He’s tried to tell her not to sing (he really likes to boss), but she is immune to his “authority” and its driving him crazy! Michelle is a thorn in his side. J

Happy nightmares!

This week Jared found something equally cool and gross in our garage. It was a spider with hundreds of eggs and baby spiders hanging on to its back. Eww! Eww! I caught it. We had fun showing it off to Jared’s friends and the neighbors. If Jared wasn’t so attached, I’d have killed the thing. But I couldn’t do that. So we took her and her babies out to an empty field a couple miles away from our house and let her go.

My other baby (Kwigi) had an accident this week that resulted in the extraction of 3 teeth. You’ll remember (maybe) that Kwigi is an Italian Greyhound (fancy name for mini Greyhound) and VERY fast. Thursday night he was playing with his new best doggy friend, Lily, a chocolate lab/greyhound mix. She looks like a very lean lab and her hindquarters look just like Kwigi’s, only bigger. Kwigi was running to me at full speed when he crashed head-on into Lily’s side. He jammed his snout right into her side. Lilly barely noticed, but Kwigi yelped in pain and ran to me. When I picked him up he was gagging on blood that was falling out everywhere. I took him to the vet 1st thing the next morning. He’d fractured one tooth for sure and possibly 4 in total (you could see them sticking out the wrong ways). The vet operated and found 3 fractured teeth and a few bone fragments deep in the gums that he had to extract. You can’t tell Kwigi’s missing any teeth unless you lift up his gums. He’s missing 2 of the top teeth just like the song, “all I want for Christmas are my two front teeth……………”

Ryan is still consumed with going through resumes and interviewing people at OC Tanner. If you know any programmers or anyone in the computer field, OC Tanner is hiring a lot of software engineers at the moment. Ryan likes interviewing people. He comes home with fun stories of people with ridiculous resumes. He called one guy to come in for an interview (he had a great resume) and the guy replied, “what company is this? Hmmmm, I don’t remember applying there. Oh well.” When asked if he’d like to come in for an interview he said, “I dunno. I’ve already got an interview with another company. I don’t think I should be interviewing anywhere else.” Ryan also interviewed a guy from BYU who he really liked, but who wasn’t quite qualified enough. Ryan was disappointed. It really is more than your job skills. You want to hire someone you can stand to work with day in and day out.

Assessing the first soccer game

Another soccer season has started and he’s coaching Jared’s team again. Everyone who’s playing again came back and everyone wanted to stay with “the Keller’s”. Ryan didn’t realize what a great job he’d done coaching the boys and that was really great to see. They have 3 new boys on the team and everyone has blended really well. This year you can tell the boys understand a lot more and Ryan has been giving them all kinds of drills at practice. They won their first game and just lost yesterday’s game (their 2nd). Ryan was so mad! He didn’t let the boys see. But he was mad b/c a) he hates losing and b) the other coach wouldn’t stop his boys from shoving our boys and trapping the ball and was in general not very nice to work with. Then to top it off BYU lost the Texas game and Ryan went to bed very depressed. Our uniforms this year are orange—Ryan chose it for sentimental reasons. His team growing up (that his dad coached) was The Orange Crush. The parents loved that name and we all kind of hoped the boys would go for that name (we threw it in the mix), but the boys saw nothing cool in that name. They gave their own ideas and this fall our team is The Orange Fire Dragons. (Last year we were the Green Dragons.) But this year our uniforms have flames on the sleeves!

I’m coaching again. Just a small thing. The local Fleet Feet running store has a few training programs. This fall I’m coaching their No Boundaries 5k program. So it’s a lot of fun. This was our 1st week. We only meet on Saturdays to run as a group. The rest of the week the runners follow the workout plan and check in with me via email. I’m allowed to tweak the program for individual needs. For example, the program is intended for people who want to learn to run and be able to run a 5k (the Turkey Trot is the target race). But I have a guy who’s doing the program with his wife. This man does triathlons and wants to improve his running. So he sent me the triathlon program is using and I’ve changed the weekly workouts to better match his fitness level and to blend in with his triathlon training. Saturday I had a lady with lots and LOTS of questions. She played basketball in HS (she was really good too) and has had knee problems ever since. She also travels a lot for work. She can hike and hike for hours, but can’t manage to run more than a mile without stopping. Actually, Saturday we ran 1.5 miles as a group and everyone made it without stopping and they were all amazed that they could do that.

I decided to join our ward choir, against my better judgment. The choir director is very good though. They say she can help anyone sound better. Our ward has a miniscule choir that barely sings. All we do are rest hymns every Sunday and our bishop sent out a plea to everyone to please help us build a choir for our ward. He said he didn’t care if you could sing or not. I thought of the stories of Grandma Joy’s choir and all these other churches out there that have big choirs and realized our ward really would be enriched if it had a regular choir. When Sis. Larcher (the director) said she needs bodies I thought, I’ve got one of those. Why not? I went to my 1st practice last Sunday and really liked it. Sis. Larcher is amazing. She can sing all the parts and play the piano beautifully (the pianist wasn’t there). I thought it would be like singing hymns. I can read music because I played the violin. But it turns out choir music is very confusing to look at and follow. There’s all these different parts and it turns out the piano isn’t playing the melody at all. It’s playing an accompaniment that you don’t really follow. I’m an alto and to make it even harder there’s only one other alto there. So I’m listening to the other alto on my left while the sopranos are singing something different on my right. Meanwhile the men are behind me singing two different parts. The words are the same sometimes, but the notes never are. It’d be easier to be in an orchestra.

The bald eagle

Last month Connie paid us a visit. She was here to take lessons on making soaps and lotions (she’s starting her own business). Her best friend works at Hogle Zoo and we got to go for free. We let Jared invite a friend so he’d have more fun and so Connie and I could have more fun too. Krissy, Connie’s friend, works with the birds and does the bird show. We went to the show and after the show she took us backstage. We got to see all the birds from the show up close and Jared and Dominick got to hold one of the doves. Jared says he got to hold Pidove (a Pokemon, he’s really into Pokemon) and thought it was really cool. We also had our picture taken with the bald eagle. Initially Jared wasn’t interested in that (fear of the bird). But when he saw Dominick do it he decided he “wanted” to too. Turns out a bald eagle is even more intimidating than Aunt Carole’s horses.

Best get going. Today we are going to Bountiful to commemorate two things: Ryan’s dad’s birthday was last Thursday and Grandma moved out Friday. She’s putting on a farewell BBQ at the park (the house being completely empty now). Aunt Carole was nice enough to let me help clean the house Friday. I got to see Grandma, Aunt Tanya, and Aunt Susan too. As I went around the house I thought of all the happy family memories I have there. I thought I’d be sad, but when I thought of all our fun there and the new family with 4 kids moving in, I realized that family is going to build a lot of happy memories there too. Aunt Carole told me the kids were so excited when they saw the water fountain and said, “we have our own drinking fountain!!” You know, when we saw Aunt Carole’s house in Heber when it was finished, Ryan saw her water fountain and asked, “what is it with your family and water fountains????”

Our best and our love to all of you.

Love,
Sherry, Ryan, Jared, and Kwigi