Allison – Page 5 – Terry Family Shenanigans

Horses, Gymnastics, and Baseballs

We switched Emilee to a new barn for her riding lessons in March. She seems to be really liking the new place. She has been progressing a lot. For the school talent show at the end of the year she asked me to take a video of her at her riding lesson to show for the talent show.

Emilee also played volleyball again this Spring. She asked to do it and was excited to go to practices and games. For all other sports besides horse riding we have had to make her ‘just try it’ and she has been very glad when it is over. She did great this season, her last game she served the maximum times (5) and scored then they have to give the ball to the other team. She was pretty excited about that.

Allison had her AAU gymnastics meet in Manhattan Kansas. She did really well. The team ended up qualifying to go to the National AAU meet in Illinois in July. She is pretty excited about it. Ryan and I are happy for her that she enjoys gymnastics and she is doing well at it and continuing to improve.

https://youtube.com/shorts/4zZTG2EJAEI

https://youtube.com/shorts/-m4L6Av-82M

Matthew just finished up his Freshman year on the baseball team. He was a really good bat this season. He played mostly 2nd or short when he was on defense. He did a good job and his coach seemed pleased with him. There last game of the season was rained out which was a bummer. He is looking forward to his season with his club team over the Summer.

There was a YM basketball tournament for our Stake. The boys all had a great time. Matthew loved it. Our ward had two teams. The team Matthew was on ended up making it to the final game and winning the tournament. Matthew was given the MVP award for giving all out effort all the time. They even let them cut the net down which was pretty fun for them.

I have some talented children. I love watching all my kids in their activities. I am glad they are taking the opportunities to improve themselves and work hard at something they enjoy.

Conversations with Allison

Allison: I took a kiwi to school today for my snack.

Mom: That is a healthy snack. Was is hard to eat?

Allison: No, I got a plastic knife from the cafeteria to cut it when I ate it. I didn’t want it to get smashed in my backpack so I carried it around in my hand all morning.

Mom: (silently grateful she had the foresight to not take a real knife no school) Maybe next time cut it up first then you can leave it in a container in your locker or backpack. (Already know she is going to tell me she doesn’t care about “doing it the easy way”)

Allison: I don’t care if I have to cut it at school. People kept asking me what it was. Who doesn’t know what a kiwi is?! I put it on my desk in science and I had a bunch of people convinced it was a baby coconut. Then Mr. Hines comes over and tells everyone, “That is a kiwi, baby coconuts are not a thing. It has a sticker on it that says KIWI.” Then he walked off.

Mom: So now everyone knows what a kiwi is.

Allison: No. When he walked away, I told them kiwi is Spanish for baby coconut. Pretty sure at least three people believed me

Mom: 🤦🏻‍♀️

Another day…

Allison: Mom, do you know what a walk up song is? Like in baseball when the batter walks up he picks the song?

Mom: Yes, I know what a walk up song is.

Allison: Well, they don’t have those in gymnastics so I decided I wanted one for when I walk into my classes at school. The past couple days I have played one for most of my classes when I walk in.

Mom: Oh…ok. So what song do play?

Allison: The Imperial March. Darth Vadar’s theme song.

Then proceeds to laugh her head off.🤦‍♀️

This next picture is from a while ago, I came across it in my pictures the other day. Allison is known to leave various types of notes on her door depending on her mood. I will leave it up to the reader to guess her mood for this one.

A New Friend

Allison has been lobbying for a friend for Peanut for the last year or so. She has done lots of research on why they need a friend and pleaded her case many times. She even wrote a report titled, Why We Should Get Another Guinea Pig, and sent it to Ryan. A few weeks ago she got lucky and the stars aligned when she asked an we had a moment of weakness so we went to the store and she picked out a friend for Peanut.

He is a cute little bugger. Over the course of a week he had many names but she finally settled on Milo. He was only a few months old so he is pretty small. Peanut seemed to like him right away. They got along pretty well from the start. It has been about a month since we got him and they are buddies for life now. Now Emilee thinks she needs one too.

April Fools

We all survived Allison’s favorite day of the year without to much damage. She pulled a few pranks on everyone but Matthew seemed to be the focus of most of her pranks.

She did the usual tape over the faucets, saran wrap across doorways, and creepy pictures strategically placed around the house to startle you when you least expect it.

Matthew said he woke up to Allison sneaking around his room at 4 in the morning. He didn’t care enough to worry to much about it then. When he turned his fan on and confetti flew everywhere he thought that was it. When he got to school he turned on his laptop and found this waiting for him.

She is a funny girl. I know I am forgetting a few of her pranks too. A few days later, I was cleaning out the fridge and found one that she attempted but then forgot about. I was grateful that she at least put the stapler in a bag first before submerging it in Jello.

Allison The Busy Bee

Allison has had a lot going on this month. She just finished a big project for school and did the presentation. They did a wax museum and she presented the gymnast Gabby Douglas. This was the same project I helped edit. She did a great job presenting and making her poster.

She went to the zoo with the McDonald family a bit ago. Lori sent me some cute pictures.

This last picture made me smile. This is a very Allison thing to do. We went to the dentist the other morning and while we were waiting for her to go back I looked down at her leg and noticed she had turned to of the moles on her leg into a smiley face.

Our church has a Bishop Youth Discussion (BYD) about once a month for the teenagers in the ward. They have different topics each month. This past month was the first one that Allison and Matthew had gone to together. They leader guiding the discussion had several of the youth come up front. He told each of them to write something down on a piece of paper that someone else would have to do. Of course they all wrote down something silly or embarrassing for whoever ended up with their paper to do. Allison was one of the kids selected and on her paper she wrote, “Confess your love to Matthew Terry.” Once everyone had written something down, their papers were collected and they read a scripture. Neither one of my stinkers can remember what the scripture was but the message was-treat people the way you want to be treated and don’t ask others to do things that you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself. The leader then returned each of the notes to the person that had written it and told them they got to do whatever they had put on it. Honestly, I couldn’t have picked a much better object lesson for Allison to participate it. Someone recorded it for me and sent me the video. I will admit it brought me some smug satisfaction. Allison (and Matthew) were good sports.

We Work Better Separately

Allison was given the assignment of writing a paper on Gabby Douglas for school. In class they switched papers and peer edited it for each other. They were given a specific form with items to check and give feed back on the paper they edited. Allison was sick this week and wasn’t able to get her paper edited, so her teacher suggested she have a parent edit it and fill out the review form. Ryan was out of town so she asked if I would edit it for her. In hind sight I should have had Matthew do it but I wasn’t smart enough to come up with that at the time. Allison has a lot of amazing strengths and talents. She is a very smart girl. She has been working really hard on her moodiness and responding to emotions on the same level as the person she is talking with (instead of always responding with a 10).

In general we have been getting along a lot better. So much better that I completely forgot that one of Allison’s many strengths is not taking constructive criticism well. Especially from her mother.

She left me in my room with her computer and the review sheet and I started editing. I followed the review sheet and highlighted, noted and marked whatever it told me to do. After about 5 minutes had passed Allison returned to get her paper. I told her I wasn’t done yet. She left and came back 5 minutes later. I still wasn’t done. She looked over my shoulder and asked what could be taking so long. When she saw that I had actually made edits to her paper (that she apparently thought was unimprovable) she show cased another one of her talents. She is pretty incredible at quick thinking and has a quick wit to match. Unfortunately, she sometimes uses this ability to ring someone up and down on a level that makes you feel like it was scripted for a movie if she feels wronged. Looking back now it was comical, at the time not so much. She was truly flabbergasted that I could have found anything wrong with her paper beyond an accidental grammar error. Allison also has an incredible way of pushing my buttons and one of my weaknesses is that I let her. We both started arguing and ended with me telling her to edit her own paper, her taking her computer and storming out and yelling, “All you had to do was put your name on the editing sheet-THAT IS IT- three seconds to do something and you screwed it all up!”

A few hours later she came and found me and with the enormous amount of grit and determination Allison has coursing through every cell in her body she swallowed her pride and told me, “I changed some of the things back and ignored most of your suggestions. BUT you actually did have some good corrections that I kept. Thank you for editing my paper. Oh, and sorry for yelling at you.”

I picked my jaw up off the floor and gave her a hug. Not to long ago this would have gone a totally different way and been dragged out for days. While I could have tweaked her apology a little, the fact that she apologized on her own without any prompting is a big step. Huge steps have been made.

Things That Made Me Smile

These two besties are just like sisters. Reese and Emilee were due within a few days of each other but Emilee came early so they are two weeks apart. They have been besties since then. They went to pre-school together but are in different school districts. They see each other at church and church activities and take riding lessons together and squeeze in as much play time as they can in between. They both love horses and talk about them for hours when they play. They both have similar interests in clothes (they grab the first thing they touch in the drawer regardless of if it matches or not) hairstyles (brush it just long enough to get it in a pony tail) and sense of adventure (they always climb, run, jump or fling themselves in, up, or down whatever they can). They are both the youngest and are often left hanging out together on Friday or Saturday nights while everyone else is off doing things with friends and their parents go out to dinner together. They are easy to have together and fun to watch. This picture is from the other day when they were at our house and decided they would practice putting ponytails in each others hair.

Allison has a very witty sense of humor that catches me off guard sometimes. She loves to make people laugh when she isn’t being a grump she is fun to joke around with. A few months ago I got a little to attached to a stupid farm game on my phone. The kids took notice and gave me a hard time about spending my time on something else besides them. Allison is also a very crafty and artistic person. She started making funny stories or pictures with stick figures. I am not very artistically gifted so I was impressed at how funny and detailed she could be with just stick figure drawings. One morning I found this funny little picture left for me next to my sink in the bathroom. It made me chuckle.

As mentioned a little earlier in this post, Emilee doesn’t concern herself to much with looks when getting dressed. Her first priority is comfort. Last week she attempted to add a functionality component to her Sunday outfit. Luckily her dad caught her before getting to church. When he asked her why she was wearing what she was wearing, she logically explained, “I put my clothes on that I want to wear after church under my church clothes so I can change faster when I get home.” When the look on her dads face looked like it was heading towards “I don’t think so” she quickly added, “And it keeps me warm.” He told her to trade her socks and pants for tights and get in the car to go.

Emilee is making the blog a lot this week. Another quirk of Emilee’s is her love of popcorn. Emilee is a ridiculously picky eater and has a HUGE sweet tooth so popcorn is one of her more healthy choices of snack. It also falls into the category of easy and fast for her to make by herself. Over time her love of popcorn has gotten to the point that she will eat nothing else if we don’t monitor or limit her popcorn intake. She eats all of the popcorn too, kernels included. I don’t know how she hasn’t cracked half her teeth chomping the un-popped corn. This popcorn trait is inherited from her dad. He likes his burned, she will eat it burned but prefers it not. Anyway, I digress. Most days when Ryan gets home Emilee has done her chores and home work and whatever else she needs to get done so she has popped herself a bag of popcorn and is sitting down to enjoy it while watching a show. He of course wants to have some and reaches for a handful. She turns into the equivalent of a dog that has possessive food issues. It got to the point that it was causing contentions between the two of them and we had to talk with Emilee about realizing there is plenty of popcorn to share. So far she doesn’t agree there is enough. So, the other day we were watching a movie together. Emilee popped some popcorn and came to snuggle me. A bit into the movie I told her thanks for sharing her popcorn with me and she was doing a good job at sharing. We continued watching and eating. I happened to glance over and realized that Emilee had been mining our popcorn the whole time! She had taken out all the butter pieces and put them in a separate pile on the other side of me so she could eat them after she ate what she left in the bowl ‘to share’ with me. Little stinker!

March Madness Gymnastic Meet

Allison had her second to last meet for this season, this month. She had her best meet yet! She placed first in her division on bar and floor, second on vault, third on beam. She won 1st place All Around for her division.

It was really fun to watch her and see her excitement at doing well. She puts a lot of time and effort into gymnastics and it is fun to see her enjoying it. She has one last meet at the end of this month. It is in Manhattan Kansas and it is a big event with multiple areas for each event happening at the same time. She is pretty excited.

Firsts

In our church the year you turn twelve you graduate primary and move to the youth program. Allison started Young Women’s. Each class has a presidency to help plan and run the activities. She is the secretary for her class right now. Allison loves growing up and being in charge of things so she is loving it. Most of their activities are on Tuesday night and she has gymnastics that night, so for now she won’t be able to go to a lot of them. She is still enjoying planning and going to the ones that aren’t on Tuesday’s.

The year they turn twelve is also the year they are old enough to go to the temple and do baptisms. She was able to go for the first time last week. It is fun to see her growing up and getting more responsibilities.

Matthew is turning 16 this year so he moves up to the Priest Quorum in our church. That means one of his new responsibilities is to bless the sacrament on Sunday. He did it for the first time a few weeks ago and his dad and grandpa did it with him. It was cool to see three generations blessing the sacrament together.

Tag: Allison