Growth Tables

Our little crabapple tree beside the garage at the end of the driveway...so pretty in bloom this time of year.  The week has flown by so quickly!  Thursday found us at the Indianapolis Museum of Art for our monthly art tour gig with the teenage homeschoolers in our group.  Shelley is really getting into blogging as when we finished, she said, "I call dibs on the posting about the IMA today on the blogs!"  And a fine job she did of it, too...if you want to check it out, visit Shelley at http://insomnimom.blogspot.com/ for Thursday, April 26th.  That night Matt sang at a dinner for the Prince and Princess of Yugoslavia which was interesting and fun for him.  Interesting because, since Yugoslavia is no longer a country in its own right, he was singing the Serbian National Anthem, the U.S. National Anthem, and Back Home Again in Indiana.  Fun because Matt dearly loves to sing at special gigs like this.

Friday we spent seven hours in testing...bone scans, CAT scans, etc. for Matt's recurring painful back...which we thought was probably due to growing so quickly in the past few months, but turns out to be a chronic condition treatable by therapy and a back brace (and restrictions on the butterfly and breaststroke in swimming...aren't we lucky that Matt's two state competitive swims are the backstroke and freestyle?).  Whew...a mother always worries, so this was good news for Mark and I to hear at the end of the day...you just never know, and I tend to be the worrisome type anyway when it comes to my boys.

We are rejoicing in warm weather and shorts season!  Normally this is something we always rejoice in after long cold dreary winters (I am definitely not a winter-loving kind of gal), however, this year we have additional reasons to rejoice.  For the past four months, with Matthew's growth spurt, each and every month we have had to have the pants rehemmed and we are now out of any extra room to expand lengthwise in all his pants.  At 14, he is a little over six feet tall and still growing.  I am thinking shorts are the way to go from here on out until the snow flies again.  We went clothes shopping today (best to do it while Alex is out of town at scout camp as Alex has not experienced said growth spurt, thus making it unnecessary to score an entire new wardrobe..."it's just not fair that Matt grows so tall all the time and outgrows everything each year").  Matt's swimming shoulders don't help the shirt size situation either...mediums fit elsewhere, but those shoulders finally breathed a big sigh of "ahhh" when he tried on the large size.  As I was sitting outside the changing room, I had a new appreciation for the parents of all the tall people I have known...and being tall myself, I tended to outgrow things each year also.  When the boys were six and we were perusing the closets to see what fit and what did not, Alex, who has always been small and slow to grow, said, "Mom, I am NOT wearing this (in his hand he had a really cute blue shirt with a big green frog on it...one that Matt had worn at age 3).  NO self-respecting six year old would be caught dead in this, even if it does fit me, Mom!"  I had to agree...what was darling at three, certainly was not acceptable at six.  In the pursuing years, I have tried to cut Alex a few deals here and there so that he can get some new things each season also...even though he can usually wear the same size for three years running.  It is, after all, a small thing to ensure a bit of peace and respect in this regard.