February Things

It’s February 23^rd and currently 71 degrees outside. Wait, did we move back to Florida without me realizing? Nope – just an unusually warm winter here in the southeast. Not going to lie, I’m sort of loving it. You can still wear pants and long sleeves and not be too hot, but you’re not freezing every time you step out the door. Although, I think we’re all holding our breath for what the summer may bring.

Our recent excitement has revolved around where Logan is going to go to Kindergarten next fall.  If you think it’s as easy as walking to your neighborhood school you would be wrong. Here in NC there are all sorts of trip wires and booby traps to get through. 2+ years ago we specifically moved into a neighborhood with a great school. Then as he got closer to Kindergarten, we started considering trying to get him into a ‘magnet’ school (public school but with a special focus). There are several different types of magnet schools in our area, and it’s a lottery to get in, but the different groups in order they select from are based on 3 different criteria.  The criteria is mostly around if you already live in an area with a high performing school that is at or above capacity (yes to both of those for us). Since he has been going to a Spanish immersion daycare for the past 3.5 years, we thought it would be great to have him continue with that and hopefully he really will grow up to be bilingual.  So we put our name in the hat for a dual language magnet school, that is not at all close to our house. If he didn’t get in there, we would apply for the year round elementary school near our house and if that fell through, he’d be at his base school (both of these schools are rated very high).  We found out last Thursday that he DID in fact get into the magnet/Spanish immersion school – YAY!!!! And crap, that is going to be lots of driving. But we’ll make it work. We both believe it will be a great skill to know both English and Spanish.

So if you followed that closely enough, you’ll realize that we moved to get into a good school district, that he’s not going to, but the reason he got into the magnet program was because of where we moved to. So. Weird.

Switching gears - here’s my favorite picture from earlier this year of me and Carrie passing the baton at the Occoneechee Speedway Relay.

Training has been going great, mostly due to this girl who keeps it fun and pushes me all the time. Like throwing my paddles across the pool deck so I can’t use them (they are a bit of my baby blankie), only to have our friend trip on them while walking out of the locker room. Woops.

And while we’re here, let’s talk about swimming. I’m in my happy place – many things have converged to form a perfect swimming set up (for me). My company has a great pool on site so Marty and I can now swim for free. They keep it a touch warm (which I LOVE) and I can meet the aforementioned paddle thrower at the completely civilized time of 6:30am and get in a solid 3K before picking up breakfast at one of our cafeteria’s and getting to my office just after 8am. Years of getting up at 5:15am with a bad attitude because I then had to jump into a freezing pool seem like a distant memory.