When last we left the Baxter family they had just finished a major basement bathroom renovation. The good news is that in hindsight it was well worth the trouble. For whatever reason it quickly became the boys’ preferred place to shower. With a middle schooler showering before school every morning it really cuts down on the morning bathroom chaos in our upstairs bathroom.
Have I ever mentioned my love/hate relationship with our fish tank? We got it as a steal of a deal in 2018 fully stocked with a variety of colorful cichlids. Slowly they perished one at a time, mostly due to aggressive infighting and increased size. In the winter of 2022 I started fresh with a batch of tiny cichlids that were supposed to be all male to reduce fighting and hopefully extend their lifespans a bit. I still lost a few for one reason or another, but admittedly the fighting has been much less. Then this spring while cleaning the tank I noticed babies?!? I thought I had all boys and I thought different kinds of cichlids wouldn’t have much of an interest in cross breeding, but as they say, life finds a way. Most of the babies were probably eaten by the bigger fish before I discovered them, but these tiny two must have had superior hide and seek skills and managed to survive. Now we have two cross breeds of some sort. Based on how they look, my electric yellow has at least two children. Is the electric yellow the mom or the dad, I’ll never know. The good news at least is that for all the maintenance it takes, the tank is still very pretty and the rate of fish on fish violence has stayed low.
This ski season Jason with (or occasionally without) some combination of the boys got out for 25 ski days. Woof. I was super excited for the ski season when it started, but by the end I was good and ready for the to wrap it up. One thing I didn’t anticipate was how many of those days I would be left behind with at least one of the boys. Case in point, William didn’t ski at all in December due to having mono and by late in the season the boys weren’t super motivated to all go every time. This winter I was certainly a ski widow…with kids. Although I don’t ski, and don’t really have an interest in learning to ski in my 40’s, one tradition I did start was having a big fun meal prepared each evening when the skiers returned. On a few occasions Lee or Autumn even joined us for dinner after skiing with the boys. The boys were tired and hungry, warm food was appreciated, and it’s a tradition I hope to keep going as part of their “learning to ski” memories. During the season the boys got to ski with Jason, some school friends, Aunt Autumn, Grandpa Lee, and the California cousins. Someday we’ll add the Iowa cousins to the mix for some extra fun.
You know how you know you’re a serious ski family but also still frugal? When all your kids have ski passes for the season but you also have a car microwave to avoid buying overpriced ski lodge food. You read that right. Jason bought a large capacity battery a couple years back in case our power goes out and realized that if he bought a cheap-o microwave they could have hot meals for ski days. I wonder if anyone has noticed them microwaving corndogs and breakfast burritos in the resort parking lot and wondered what the heck they’re up to. Makes me laugh a little to myself.
I spent a good chunk of the early spring working on a sewing project for PTA. This year I sewed approximately 63 (but who’s counting) zipper pouches for teacher appreciation at our school. It was one of the largest sewing projects I’ve taken on to date inspired by our lacking PTA budget along with having just made zipper pouches for my co-workers at Christmastime. For a project of this size I haul my sewing machine and ironing board upstairs and it tends to take over the place for a bit. The office/sewing room downstairs can feel especially dark and cramped as a workspace in the winter. Is it terrible to admit that I already have one of the boy’s bedrooms picked out as a new craft room some day when we’re empty-nesters? It was a fun project but I don’t see myself sewing much more than cat bandanas until next Christmas.
As spring warmed up we got the yard ready for planting. This year we decided to retire the boys’ sandbox. It was well loved over the years, but as the boys get older it just wasn’t getting enough use to justify mowing around it all summer and rebuilding the lid for a third time. We decided to repurpose the frame into a new garden bed. We spent the better part of a couple days loading the sand into sandbags to empty the frame to be moved. Kudos to Jason who moved the majority of the sandbags to storage in the shade behind our shed. I was rather inconveniently dealing with a back problem this spring but it was a good project for Jason and the boys.
Once the sandbox was moved and the new garden dirt was delivered I was so excited to plant I could barely contain myself. Mid-April the dahlias went into the ground and we proceeded to have one of the coldest springs on record. It SNOWED mother’s day weekend. Total BS. My poor baby dahlias had frost cones, 2 layers of frost blankets, and heating light bulbs by the time the whole ordeal was over. Needless to say I was NOT impressed with the spring weather. A few had a little nip of frost but they all survived and got an early start.
Eventually it finally warmed up for real. Jason got a new lawnmower (really Will and Chris got a new lawnmower and they are now slowly in charge of more and more mowing). William and Chris also transitioned from winter skiing to spring rec soccer. Andrew still refuses to play soccer and we haven’t really pushed too hard (more on Andrew later). Unfortunately for all of us Chris had the world’s worst rec soccer coach this past year which caused us some undue stress. Jason rarely gets wound up about anything and the spring soccer situation was driving him moderately insane. Needless to say we were thankful when the spring soccer season finally ended. 
A note about Andrew. Andrew has struggled on and off in school but had a really rough spring. After a series of interventions that didn’t get the desired results, I don’t know if I was more excited for him to be done with 2nd grade than his teachers, but making it to summer brought a great deal of relief for all of us for one reason or another. He’s got a combination of anxious and stubborn behaviors going on that will serve him well some day, but makes conforming to the system of school very difficult. Our goal is to help him wrangle his skills towards being an international hostage negotiator rather than a the leader of a drug cartel. I could see him going into the trades and doing really well, but pushing a pencil around is VERY low on his priority list. One day at a time with this kid.
Cheers to summer break!