Jack Plays Tennis, But You'll Just Have to Take My Word

Jack decided to sign up for tennis this year. New school, new sport! We were so excited for him, and so proud!

Here he is in yellow alongside his doubles partner, Matthew Morse, who happens to be a very good friend, and also a 6th grader.

Matthew came to visit Jack while he was in the hospital in St. Louis in July. A really nice kid!

Ok, not the best photographic shot. This is between points or something and they're just casually walking at the end of the court. But there is another match's ball whizzing into the screen. Maybe we'll see some real sports action in these pictures?!!

Oh, okay, so I caught this one when it was Matthew's serve.

Let's go, Matthew!

Here they are playing the other Edwardsville Middle School, Liberty vs. Lincoln. That's some hot competition going on! Rival schools, you know!

[The day following this, they played Triad Middle School. Sorry, no pictures. ]

Ball boy, Sam, ready to run cross-court to retrieve runaway tennis balls. In his cowboy boots.

Hey, this one is a good enough picture you can actually see the pink stuff all over his shirt front.

My bet's on popsicles, but who really knows?

Oh, man, again, not such a good picture. C'mon, where's Jack??

He's who we came to see!

Scootch over, Matthew, please.

Dear Blogger,

You seriously need to fire Ms. Photographer if this is the best she can do.

Into the sun? Geez! How amatuer.

Maybe we can work with this shot a little?

Now, can you see him? He's holding the tennis ball. He has a racquet!

It's Jack playing tennis!

Jackson, my tennis man, you did great for your first tennis season!

You can't help it that your mom has no camera skillz.

And I might add, a videographer she aint.

But still, check out this serve!.

Thinking of Days Past and The Present

July 13, 1996

It's easy for me to remember my Top 5 Days ever. This was one. I'll even go so far to say this is the number one. Because if it didn't happen first, I would not have had Top Day numbers 2-5.

Gary and I were extremely happy that day and have been most of the days since then actually. I have only a few Saddest Days Ever and that's not bad out of nearly 42 years. I realize how fortunate I am to be able to say that.

Our outdoor July wedding. We were both so proud to have our very best friends standing with us. We didn't need four, six, eight attendants each to have our wedding.

I vividly remember a panic-induced, teary 2 a.m. phone call from me in my townhouse in Centralia to Gary in his apartment in St. Charles, Missouri, just days after our engagement with me sobbing "but this Bride's magazine has this list of fifty things you have to to do one year/six-months in advance of your perfect wedding and we have less than three months--we can't get married!"

And Gary's calm reply was: "Diane, all we have to have to get married is each other, a license, a ring, a preacher, and two witnesses."

Witnesses, easy. The two best friends, Candi and Dale, covered that. We were lucky that we also had all our families and friends at our wedding, but it didn't have to be a big showy affair with an array of bridesmaids in bad dresses. Having our two best friends standing next to us that day was all we wanted.

But we did manage to add in some extra beyond the necessities, and one of those was having a flower girl. This cutie pie is Julia Maria Hayward, the daughter of my best friend forever,

Candice Paige Caraker Hayward.

Which brings me to my number one saddest day ever.

Dec. 2 , 1996
The day Candi died. My best friend. Gone forever.

It took me so long to actually hear it and then to believe it. A congenital heart condition that no one had any idea existed in her. A seemingly healthy woman suddenly dead at age 40.

And she left behind her own husband, Doug, imagine her soulmate like Gary is to me, and her three young children, Julia, Mason, and Susannah. Could anything in life be more sad?


But yesterday was a happy day. My kids got to meet Candi and Doug's kids out for a quick lunch at Applebee's as Julia, the little flower girl all grown up, was here considering SIU-E for college.

So, I got to chat with and hug Doug and his beautiful girls, and even though her name was mentioned only a couple of times, the whole time I was thinking of my BFF and what a fun, cool girl she was. The Xenia girl and the girl from Cobden. Maybe it was our po-dunk beginnings? Whatever, we just clicked together.

From the first day we met in college with her huge, bright shiny-penny permed hair to our wildly fun Current River camping trips to going to see each others' newborn babies to briefly working together as school psychologists in the same office, she made my world so much more special.

It was fun to see her two girls.

I could tell there's a fun-loving, goofy streak there, too.

Doug

Susannah, 13

Julia, 17

Mason, 15 years old, didn't get to come since he had to play goalie for his soccer team that day, and this was the best I could do for a picture of him. Thanks, Facebook.

He was actually at our wedding, also. And Susannah, too. Little fetus that she was under her mama's peach dress.

Candi, miss you and love you forever, girl.

Gills GO GO GO GO

Here are the three racers the morning of the Edwardsville Rte 66 10K. Karen scraped ice off her windshield that morning of 10/10/09.



Diane, age 41
Karen, age 53 (that's what Gary said!)
Gary, age 42

It's Gary Gar and the Spunky Bunch!

And the last sighting of the world's worst sweat pants that ended up in the Walgreen's Dumpster at the start of the race. Yippee! Diane's wish come true. Bye-bye, you bad gray things from 1990, including big oil spot stain and elastic bottomed legs. Bye-bye!




And then SURPRISE! Ross shows up. He came to watch his mom cross the finish line! What a sweet son!

Not sure who actually is in this picture that we might know, but this is the finish line at the Edwardsville Library, some 6.2 miles from the starting line.

The race involved old cobble/brick streets, modern city streets, and paved trail through the Watershed (wetlands) area and woods, some hills but mostly flat.

Here's the cheering section at the finish, minus Grandma who is behind the camera. That's who we have to thank for the fine photos. Thank you! And thanks for getting all these kiddos up and out into the cold morning when I know they didn't make it easy.

And the first of the Gills to cross the line was Gary. He placed second in his age group and met his personal goal, bettering his time from last year. I admit I have no memory for numbers so I will guesstimate his time was 47 minutes. I think that is about right. Pesky details!

And then came this character crossing the line. Who? Ross, is that you? You were only here to watch!

Not spontaneously pop into the race at the last minute with no preparation. And totally beat the two girls who'd diligently trained for 5 weeks! With an awesome time of, again sorta somewhere, around 1 hour!

Then here comes Karen crossing the line. Karen, who I was referring to as Racehorse that day.
She was kickin' it! Her time was, like, 1:03.

And here comes clean-up girl a couple of minutes later, definitely later than her goal, but at least still running. The legs just didn't have the mojo that day for some reason, despite some new rockin' tunes on the iPod, including Miserlou by Dick Dale and Turning Japanese by The Vapors.

Hey, we did it!! This looks like it could be a before picture, we look so unaffected.

Well, but then there's this that I call an action shot. Ross losing his lunch? Before breakfast even?

Gary was the sole contender for the Open Eyes award.

Ok, take 2. Better this time!

The family involvement was superb even though we were missing some key members this go 'round. But I doubt if we are done with this race thing. Let's do it again!

My Kate Gosselin Hair

I would never ever dreamed that I would have this hair.

Here's Reese Witherspoon with Kate hair and we can dream that.

Shoot, let's even picture Angelina with it.

But me? No! no! no!

The front is ok. I can live with that. In fact, it was pretty much the do I already had, minus a few inches.

But this? This is a shaved, stubbly (so gross, I know) neck, clippered and "stacked up" as my beauty girl called it. I think it's just jacked up.

But I am rejoicing that I don't have the spiky fringe that's on top of the classic Kate 'do.

If she'd gone that far, I would have just had to shave it all off.

As it is, I am just saying, "C'mon, grow, hair, grow!"

Grant's Words

4th Grade Science Test Question

Suppose something in your food chain is destroyed. Tell what its loss might mean to other living things in the forest.

Grant: If the sun was destroyed, the grass would die. Then the deer would have no food and die. So my dad couldn't hunt them for meat. If I didn't have deer meat, then I wouldn't be happy.

Full credit.

Us Lately

As you might have seen, Sam has been to the apple farm with his preschool class. If you didn't already know that, you'll see more pictures from that day on my big flub up posts from earlier this week when I thought I knew what I was doing...

Here is the famous tiger bike right before its retirement this past weekend. Sam didn't need the training wheels for the past two years, but we couldn't convince him of that. He is begging to have the training wheels put onto his new bike so it doesn't fall over when he parks it. Why don't these little kid bikes come with kick stands? That's my question.

Caroline had her school's Fall Festival last Saturday and came home looking like this. On purpose. After waiting in a line for 45 minutes to get this tiger face.

This is it after one night's sleeping on it.

She enjoys a rainbow of barrettes.

She also went to the school's Wacky Hospital and got her arm cut up in a "car wreck." Sam wanted to do this, but kinda freaked out once he got in. There was blood everywhere. Fake blood but still... This was a very tame injury compared to most of the kids'.

Here's Grant doing his bike thing. Mr. Safety always wears his helmet. Good kid!


Jack's City Museum field trip was last Friday. I chaperoned.

These kids should have had on helmets at that place.

But it is so fun! Dangerous but fun!

The latest with Gary:


G= Growing

W= Wiry

G= Goatee

GRRR, the end!

For Those About to Rock...

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Actually, I just had to get your attention with that awesome AC/DC title...

For those about to check out the latest Gills-A-GoGo in this backwards order way it goes, I will fill you in now that I found I could view photos from Sam's prechool site and directly send them to this blog and oh-so-cool, I thought! But now I don't know how to move them, relocate them, group them, whatever, so each picture was posted as a new entry. So as you scroll down in that backwards kind of way, maybe it'll all make sense.

And I left in the Click here to view these pictures larger link below each picture but I am doubtful that it works since I think you have to be an invited/approved member of the preschool class website. But just in case you can, I left it.

Happy Fall Y'All!

Sam Makes Us Proud at Preschool

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Sam at School

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Sam and his co-hort Josh dominating the other preschool kids.