Sam and Jamie

A quick primer on rock climbing competitions: during the season, Jane and Mary have to climb in two local comps to qualify for Regionals. Local comps are fairly laid back: basically, the kids have three hours to climb. They can climb as many routes (“problems”) as they want; the different problems are scored by difficulty, and the kids top three scores count.

Then they have Regionals. (In fact, Jane had her Regional competition on Saturday, and Mary on Sunday.) In Regionals, all of the kids climb three problems. They have five minutes to climb, one minute of transition, and five minutes of rest. During their rest, they sit with their backs to the wall. Other than a brief preview before the competition starts, they don’t get to figure out how to get to the top until their roped in, the seconds counting down.

And they get one shot. They climb until (a) they reach the top, (b) they fall off, or (c) time runs out. And they’re scored based on the highest point they get to. The top ten kids from each age division move on to the next level, Divisionals. Jane got 5th in her group, and Mary 9th in hers. Which means we’ll be in Minnesota next month.

If you’re interested, you can watch each of their sport climbs: Continue Reading »

Apparently, babies can start eating solid food at four months. And, at Miles’s last appointment, our pediatrician encouraged us to start as soon as we felt like it. (He also recommended skipping rice cereal and moving straight to oatmeal. So we did.)

As I got the cameras and food set up, Jamie put Miles in the high chair. And, though it was interesting for a minute, after that he was not a fan.

Continue Reading »

Our kitchen faucet has leaked basically since we bought our place. So we decided to upgrade and, a month ago, a new sink and a new faucet magically arrived by UPS. And last night, a friend generously came over to help me replace the old sink with the new one. Continue Reading »