Feeling sentimental

Today I feel sentimental.

Over the last week, I've been tackling deep-cleaning and de-junking projects around the house that have been on that internal, always in the back of my mind, racking-me-with-guilt-and-unrest "to-do" list for a long, long time. You know the one?

Like I cleaned out, vacuumed, and scrubbed the inside of the car. And it only took 3 hours. Let's just say it was a little overdue. There was a little of Christmas, our MAW trip to Florida, stuff piled up from bouncing back and forth between home-hospital-and babysitters for months, random socks pulled off by kids on car rides, lots of crumbs, wrappers, and a random assortment of toys all rolled into one gigantic mess inside.

I cleaned out our bedroom closet. I found a box I'd forgotten about shoved way, way in the back marked "post-baby clothes" that I packed up when I was pregnant with Lily to make room for maternity clothes. It was like Christmas - a whole new wardrobe! :)

I "helped" Elena clean her room (again), finally got to the bottom of the laundry hampers, cleaned the toilet, mopped the kitchen floor with Lysol (on my hands and knees - not just spot cleaning), updated our 72 hour kits, and put up Elena's "Make A Wish shelf" in her room. It's been a productive few days here at our house.

Today I have been working on deep cleaning our room. It is the catch-all room of the house and for months and months (or maybe years...) there have been piles of this and that sitting in various corners. In one corner has sat untouched for a year and a half three bags of colorguard paraphernalia from my teaching days. For the four years I taught, they took up most of the trunk and half of the backseat of the car. My car spewed colorguard constantly: bags of supplies - extra endcaps, tape, CD's, first-aid kits, etc., practice flags, a boom box, notebook after notebook filled with rolls, blank forms, contact information, account summaries, costume catalogs, and a menagerie of other colorguard related things. For several months after I stopped teaching, the trunk still kept the three bags I had consolidated everything down to right after I was done. And finally we reclaimed the car for our family's daily life and the three bags came inside and went in the corner of our room behind our door. And there they have sat, endlessly on my "to-do" list until today.

Going through the bags has made me really sentimental. Those were challenging, but overwhelmingly wonderful days. Teaching was hard work - I had some successes and many failures, the work I did was sometimes unappreciated, and I put in innumerable hours with little pay in return. But I didn't do it for the money - I did it because I loved it. I love colorguard, I loved the creative outlet, I loved the great people I worked with, I loved the continued learning, growth, and self-awareness that came with such a field, and I loved getting to have an impact on my students lives. I really hope life settles down again someday and I can teach again - when the time is right, I would love that.

Along with the inevitable mostly empty rolls of electrical tape, pencils, pins, and CD's, in the bags I've come across letters my girls wrote to me, handouts from competition days with poems and quotes on them, photos, my rifle gloves, a magnet a very little Elena pilfered from the band office refrigerator and must have dropped in my bag (when I'd go in and enter grades, she would play in the office next to me - one of her favorite activities was pulling all the magnets off of the refrigerator), spiral notebooks filled with sketches of winterguard drill, scribbled out schedules for practice, "to-do" lists, measurements, quotes I liked, practice buddy lists, and bits of teaching advice or new technique and exercises I learned at a clinic.

The timing is just right for feeling extra sentimental, too because:

1. the last batch of girls I coached are graduating in a couple of weeks (crazy!) and

2. last weekend, I went to the wedding reception of my first captain at Lone Peak, Nicole, who later became my assistant coach. She was gorgeous and so happy she was glowing. It was really neat to see that big event in her life after all these years of watching her grow from a high school student into a beautiful, confident woman. At her reception, I also met up with another of my assistant coaches, Tara and her growing family- it was such a fun reunion.

As I was going through the bags, I also found a couple of videos of past shows. For your viewing pleasure, here is the 2009 winterguard show, "Skin". (Pretty ironic that we did a show about a girl with cancer, no? Cancer seemed like the most impossible thing in the world back then.)