Consumed by tennis

It seems like lately our whole family has been consumed by tennis. From March 9-21 we were very involved in the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Ca. It's really quite fun but VERY consuming. Madelyn, Spencer and I all participate as ball kids or coordinator. Emily's choir works a concession stand in the stadium so she volunteers there. Everyone else comes and watches. Alec, our good friend from Finland, came and stayed with us during the tournament and we really enjoyed having him. Madelyn and Spencer were both invited back to work the final weekend this year and they were both happy about that. Madelyn got to be Rafael Nadal's towel girl on more than one occasion and  both she and Spencer got lots of autographs from high ranked players. I got to work stadium for the first time and my teams did well. They're all really great kids to work with and it's fun to see them year after year. Some of them come from far away and some are local kids. This year I had one girl nearly pass out while on court. She collapsed and myself and another person caught her before she was completely out. The chair stopped play and sent someone over to help. She apparantly hadn't eaten anything that  morning yet and that was the cause of her collapse. I made her take 2 bites of a banana and kept her out for a while. Her mother showed up soon thereafter and took it from there. I later told my other teams that if they ever felt sick on court to just sit down. I don't want anyone to hurt themselves by falling over and hitting their head or knocking teeth out. YIKES! That would be bad. We had some real fun stuff happen. Alec knows Jarkko Nieminen who is a player and Teemu Selanne who is a hockey player. They're all finnish. Anyway, so Teemu and his wife, Sirpa, came out and watched Jarkko's match with Alec, Rich and Spencer. I requested to work that court for the day so I was there with Madelyn on my team. It was great fun. Later, Jarkko was playing Blake on stadium and we had regular tickets given to us by Alec from Jarkko. Now the best part of this is that we could cheer. when you're in uniform you can't cheer for either player. So that night we were in normal clothes so we cheered very loudly! Alec taught us how to say "good" in finnish so we would yell that out whenever possible. People gave us ugly looks. Especially because Jarkko was playing an American. We were the only ones cheering for Jarkko in the stadium. It was fun. We were loud!

Collin has been doing great and we 're thinking that he will probably get transferred this coming Monday. He will be notified on Saturday if he does get transferred. He said that there has been a lot of rain lately and that he and his comp got stuck in the mud in front of a members house. It took quite a while to get out but eventually they did. All is well with our family and hope all is well with you and yours.