Category Archives: daughters

Basketball Thoughts

As I walked into the gym tonight for H’s basketball game, I just had to smile. The echo of bouncing balls, the smell of popcorn from the concession stand, the music blaring for the pre-game warm-up…I love it! Of all the sports and activities my daughter has participated in through the years, soccer, softball, track, cross-country, tennis, basketball, dance, theatre-basketball is my favorite. I love the physicality of basketball; the speed, the strength, the coordination, the teamwork, and the game. Watching H play basketball through the years is one of my favorite things to do.

She started playing in First Grade. I remember the coach of her little WNSL team sat the parents down at the beginning of the season and said, “These girls might be our future high school basketball team!” That was a stretch I must say. We were lucky if those girls made a basket, much less a basket in our own goal. Half the time they went the wrong direction. Dribbling didn’t exist for them back then. There were 20 girls on the team that year. As the years went by, more and more girls dropped out, and by the time they were in high school there were four left. But through the years, for H, basketball was the one sport she stuck with. One by one the other activities and sports were dropped to make room for the time commitment of basketball.

H transferred to a new school in High School, so she started all over with a new group of girls. It was a great way to transition to a new school. She had four seniors who were great role models and took her under their wings which made the change much easier. She became very close with most of the team, and even wrote a blog post about her new family.

“My Second Family
Being a part of the Basketball team at school is possibly one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. I did not only improve as a player, but I also made a second family. 17 sisters and 3 moms to be exact. The girls on my team were not only so sweet to me when I was new to the team, but immediately included me in everything. I never felt left out because I was the newbie. I have found that I’ve made a personal bond with each of the players in a different way. They are all incredible athletes and incredible people too. It wasn’t hard to swoop in and be a part of the team since we are almost ALWAYS together. Literally, I’ve spent around 315 hours with them this year. This does not include nights and weekends or trips that we take or the summer team camps or tryouts, but just practices. We have only a few more weeks in the season, and though I may have some more free time after school, I will really miss all of my sisters.”

It was all good.

This year has been a little bit different. The seniors who were mentors for H have graduated and moved on, and she’s struggling with the academic pressures of 10th grade, and the time commitment of basketball. Unless you play a fall or spring sport, basketball is a year round commitment. Weight room, private coaching, AAU, and the team practices and games pretty much take up all H’s time. Dance, theatre, rock climbing, volunteering are all things she wants to do but has no time.

J complains about the long weekends we don’t get to take because of basketball games, the tournaments over the holidays, and the long hours away from us because of school and practices, but regardless, we love watching her play. And as I walked into the gym tonight, and I had that familiar happy feeling, I wonder if the reason H has played basketball all these years, more and more exclusively, was because she always wants to please us. Did she continue to play because we were so excited about her playing? Did she give up soccer, tennis, dancing, and track because we complained about the practices and games more for those activities than basketball? As parents, do we subconsciously lead our kids into the activities we wanted to do when we were young?

As far as the future goes, time will tell. I don’t think H regrets the years she spent playing basketball. She learned a lot about herself, her limits, her abilities, and her strengths. Whether she thinks it was all worth it, that remains to be seen. We will support her 100% no matter what she decides. But for now, we are going to enjoy every minute of every game.

The Winter Formal

I’m at a loss on how to start a post after two months of no writing…do I give excuses about how busy I’ve been, a synopsis of what I’ve been up to, or just ignore it and jump right in? Hmmmmm…I think I’ll just jump right in.

January in our house is a much calmer month than any other month of the year. Yes, school has started back, and yes, basketball season is in full force (2-3 games per week, which means 4-6 games of JV and Varsity), but H’s school has three weeks of “winterim”, which means no regular classes or homework. The 11th and 12th graders have three week internships off campus (sometimes overseas), and the 9th and 10th graders stay on campus and sign up for special interest classes. H is taking “Music from the 60’s”, “Designing Women going Green” (green architecture), and “Extra Extra Read all about it” (writing the winterim version of their school newspaper). What a difference this makes! She has very little homework, a couple of quizzes, and she is taking classes of her choosing that she is genuinely interested in.

The biggest dilemma we have this month is Winter Formal…her all girl’s school has a winter dance at the beginning of February, and they have to come up with “dates”. Not a problem if you’re “going out” with someone, but most of her friends and classmates don’t have a special someone to invite. So the scrambling begins in December to ask someone who…

  • 1. Won’t get the wrong idea (i.e. think it means more than it does)
  • 2. Will be fun to have along with their friends (not too shy),
  • 3. Won’t be too clingy, (so they can talk to their girlfriends),
  • 4. Will look good in pictures (hopefully tall enough so they can wear heels),
  • 5. Will say “yes” (it’s awful if you ask someone who says “no”)
  • 6. Isn’t already on someone else’s ‘list’ (another classmate wanted to ask him and gets mad that you did first)
  • 7. Isn’t someone’s “ex” (even though they’re not together anymore she has permanent ‘dibs’)

After many, many text messages to her friends, she decided on the perfect boy to ask. He fit all the prerequisites (especially #2 and #4), although #7 was a little questionable, but the “ex” is the one who introduced them, so she asked, he said he’d be happy to go and it’s on.

The next hurdle is THE GROUP. The actual dance is two hours long, so you have dinner before and after-parties afterward. So they divide up in smaller groups to get together beforehand for pictures, then dinner, then the dance, then the after-party. Finding the right “group” is crucial. You want to be with your girlfriends, but if their dates don’t know each other, it’s very awkward. And there’s always the group that just seems to keep getting bigger, so they have to limit the size, and invariably someone gets left out. It’s a situation just fraught with drama. She has a little less than four weeks until the dance…no group plans are definite…so I’m sure there will be more to the story. Until then…

Driving Away

Almost since the day my daughter was born, I’ve been watching her leave. Every time it happens, I get this heavy, empty feeling in my heart. The first time was when her grandparents in Florida took her for a few days while J and I went on a long weekend trip when she was 16 months old. For the first day or two that we were gone, we were consumed with missing her. We took pictures with us, and even took a video tape of her so that we could watch “H.. movies” while we were gone. I’ll never forget the day we came home and my in-laws brought her back to us. I ran up to her with my arms outstretched…she looked at me, and burrowed her head into her grandma’s chest. My mother-in-law still relishes the feeling that gave her, but I still feel the pain and guilt that it took 4 days for my daughter to be more comfortable with my mother-in-law than with me.

I kept her close by for several months after that. Then, I enrolled her in one day a week of preschool. She was 2 years old, and loved every minute of it. I think being an only child meant she loved anything she did that involved other kids. I could never just leave her there, though. I would drop her off, and stand there for a few minutes waiting for her to cry, or beg me not to go, but my social butterfly daughter would always run off, without even looking over her shoulder. So I would go out to the car, and then promptly go back in to the “Observation room”…a little closet with a one way mirror that I could look through to watch her play.

Then, as the years went by, there were more occasions for her to leave me…dance lessons, kindergarten, sleepovers, summer camp, etc. It was never easy to watch her go, but as the years went by, I learned to live with it. But nothing, I mean NOTHING, prepared me for this morning.

There will be more occasions in the future for her to leave: college, work, travel, marriage, etc. It will always hurt watching her go. But I know that she has wonderful life experiences to look forward to. I will pray for her safety and her happiness. But I guess we have to let go. A little bit.

Top Ten Reasons why I haven’t posted lately

It’s 6:30 a..m…my favorite time of day. My family is still sleeping and I have an hour or two to eat my toast, catch up on emails, read the paper, and today I decided to face the horror of (DUM DUM DUM) the unwritten blog post. It’s been so long since I’ve written anything that I feel like I’ve forgotten why I started doing it in the first place. I’ve even put a lot of thought into just shutting it down, and starting all over with a different kind of blog, one that might be a little less A.D.D. (all over the place), and a little more narrow in topic. But that would never work for me, because I never know what is going to motivate me to sit down and write.

This morning, after I finished breakfast, fed the dog, checked facebook, read my emails, and looked up Colorado College for H (who is in 10th grade and beginning to think about colleges), I looked up at the bookmark toolbar on my mac and winced as I clicked on this blog. Yep, it’s been almost two months since I wrote anything. So in essence, I’m probably starting all over anyway. But I’m still going to write about my life, because that’s what I know (and that’s what my mom wants to read).

We’re in Lake Toxaway this weekend for fall break, and I think it’s as good a time as any to make excuses for why I haven’t posted, and to start writing again, because to be honest, I write for me. No ads, no promotions for products that I keep getting asked to review (so please stop asking me!), just a place for me to talk about life with a teenage daughter, a husband who is my best friend, my girlfriends (yesssss!), and my dog.

There are a lot of reasons for not writing, but here are the top 10:

10. We had H’s Sweet 16 party last month with her best friend…lots of planning for a party with 115 of their closest friends. In H’s words…”Best night of my life!” And as a mother, those four words made it all worthwhile.



9. I started taking bioidentical hormones this summer, which have made me feel like a new woman! I’m sleeping all night long for the first time in years. So I’m feeling so much more energetic during the day, but the wee hours of the morning, when I used to write, are now spent sleeping.

8. I’m chairing two committees at H’s new school. Last year when H was in her first year at the school, I tried to volunteer so that I could meet other moms, but they didn’t need me! Strangely, at this school, they have so many uber-moms that volunteer, the positions get taken pretty quickly. At her old school, there were just a handful of moms who had time to volunteer, so a few of us did all the work and we were always looking for warm bodies to help.

7. J turned 50 this month, so two weeks after H’s “Sweet 16”, we had a 50th birthday party for him. More party plannning, and a house full of family from out of town.

6. I made two slideshows, one for H’s party and one for J’s. Shouldn’t have taken me the bazillion hours it ended up taking, but I had so much fun looking at all the old photos it took five times longer.

5. Between H’s party and J’s party, we went on a cruise to New England and Canada to see the fall colors.

4. Now that H is back in school, her schedule is unbelievably busy. Fall basketball double headers, workouts three days a week, open gym two days a week, driver’s ed every saturday, and her social life whenever she can squeeze it in. Not to mention her schoolwork. She’s in 10th grade, and two of her classes use college textbooks, she has homework until 11 or 12 every night. I know it’s not MY schedule, but I’m still shuttling her back and forth between all of this, as well as trying to calm her down when she’s overwhelmed, which is quite often. She now has her driver’s license, so now she’s shuttling me around (which is another blog post altogether).

3. Even though J’s birthday party was last week, we’re also planning a long weekend next weekend in North Carolina with some close friends. This is J’s favorite place in the world, and he wanted to celebrate in an intimate way with our friends.

2. My 15 year old nephew just spent three days in Pediatric Intensive Care at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital for some weird reaction to flu symptoms. He was sick for a few days, fever wouldn’t come down, throwing up like crazy, so my sister-in-law took him to the ER to get some fluids. When they couldn’t get his fever to come down they transferred him to Vanderbilt and when he got there, his blood pressure dropped to 47/20, and his kidneys shut down. All the blood tests have come back negative, so they have no idea what caused it all. He’s better now, and came home yesterday with a pick line to continue his IV antibiotics, but he gave us all quite a scare.

But the number one reason I haven’t written anything, is that I feel so inadequate compared to some of my favorite blog writers, like these:

Busy Dad’s Blog
La Belle Saison
Mrs. Fussypants
Suburban Turmoil

But what is up with the blogs that suddenly have pop up ads all over the place??? Come on guys, that is so annoying. I know you have zillions of readers and make some money from the ads you have, but POP-UPS? They’ve got to go.

Anyway…there are my excuses. I promise I’m going to do better. I enjoy writing when I do it, so I am going to JUST DO IT. So please, the few readers I had before the sabbatical..please come back!

Driving with a Learner’s Permit

I pulled up to the gym to pick H up from basketball. She had been up until midnight the night before, cramming for two tests that she had that day. Then, after school she had an hour workout with the D1 trainers, lifting weights and sprinting outside, then an hour with the “Dr. Dish” working on her shooting. She was red faced and looked absolutely exhausted.

“Can I drive home?” (She has her permit, and ALWAYS wants to drive home)

“You look so tired, why don’t you just let me drive you.”

“No, I promise, I’m fine.”

So I got out and walked around to the passenger seat. The side that has no brake pedal, even though I stomp on it whenever she’s driving. It drives her crazy. There’s also no steering wheel. It’s a problem when you’re a control freak mom who is trying her hardest to let go a little bit. But nonetheless, I think she needs all the practice she can get, so she drives me around a lot.

Usually I can’t help but coach her through the whole thing.

“Slow down!”
“Pull out a little bit more!”
“Look both ways.”
“Don’t turn so soon.”
“Look out!!!!”

But she actually does fine. She’s very conscientious, remembers all the rules of the road, and if anything, she’s too careful.

So we make the 3 mile drive home. When we turned onto the road 1/2 a mile from our house, I looked down for a minute to check my email. I looked up a few seconds later, and as we went around a curve the car kept going straight.

“H…., H…., H…., WATCH OUT!!!”

And she swerved the car back onto the road, apologizing over and over again. She immediately pulled over and started crying.

“What just happened?”

“I DON’T KNOW”, she sobbed.

We sat there for a few minutes while she calmed down.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“I DON’T KNOW”, she said. “I don’t think so. I just kind of zoned out.”

So in my most gentle, motherly voice, I asked her what she thought could have happened if I hadn’t been there.

“I could have hit a mailbox, or a telephone pole.”

I said, “Or, what about a small child walking down the road?”

And with that, she became absolutely hysterical. We sat there for awhile, and I told her stories-including how I pulled over and took a nap once when I was driving home from UT, until she calmed down enough to tell me that she didn’t want to drive the rest of the way home. We switched places, and drove home in silence.

The good news…She didn’t hit anything (or anyone), and she still wanted to drive the next day.

And most important…I think she’ll think twice about getting behind the wheel when she’s tired.

Meeting the boyfriend’s Mom…and the Matzah song

Interesting weekend. 

Saturday night we had reservations around the piano at Whitfield’s…(our favorite Nashville neighborhood restaurant).  It’s pretty cool, they set the piano for 7 people, and you can eat there while John plays all your favorite Sinatra/New York, New York/ dinner music.  He’s actually pretty incredible.  Has a wonderful soothing voice, and plays great piano.  The NC final four game was on behind the bar, right next to us, so we didn’t miss anything.  We had invited two other couples to join us, and decided to invite H’s boyfriend’s mom to come, too.  We had met her once or twice, and she seemed like a lovely person, and since H and boyfriend (R.) were going to a school function and then the movies, we thought it would be a good time to get to know her a little better.

It’s so weird to even say “H’s boyfriend”…because when they’re in 9th grade, don’t drive, and go to separate single-sex schools, I don’t know if “boyfriend” is a really accurate description.  But it’s pretty cute.  They text every day, empathize with each other about various sports workouts/practices or homework, talk about music, etc.  H goes to school, concentrates on her school work,  doesn’t obsess about what she wears to school or how her hair looks during the week, and on the weekends, she gets gussied up and maybe gets to see him for a few hours.   I think I like this better than when they do start driving.

We were right, his mom was delightful.  She’s very pretty, and very outgoing, and of course, LOVES her sons.  She has three, and it’s great to hear her talk about them, because they’re all very close.  H and I like the fact that R. is close to his mom.  She shared a few things with us about his feelings about having a girlfriend and it was very sweet.  I wish I could just put all these feelings in a little box and keep it just like this.  The reality is that they’re young, inexperienced and naive, so there are lots of heartbreaks and disappointments in their future.  But for now, it’s really fun to see.

Dinner at Whitfield’s was great, as always.  Narvil Wilson was there (his son is our favorite “waiter extraordinaire”) celebrating his birthday, and he got up and sang a little song he wrote a few years back recorded by Ronnie Milsap, I think…”The most beautiful girl in the world”.  Then the hostess, Ann Marie, also sang a beautiful song.  She was in the top 36 of American Idol this year, but didn’t make it to the top 12.  Their mistake.  She was Fabulous!

Only in Nashville, I guess.

Happy Pesach to all my friends, and in case you have leftover Matzah, here are some ideas…

My daughter’s recent blog post-or how to make your Mom cry!

My daughter has a blog. She doesn’t write often, but she started it on one of our trips when she had access to a computer and nothing else to do. While I was out of town last weekend she sent me a text that asking me to look at her most recent post. Here it is:

Maternal Dependency
I do not know how I could live without my mother. She edits my papers, packs my bags, makes my plans, cooks my meals, and reminds me of all my responsibilities. She keeps me going on the right track. I thank her for it as much as I can because I know she won’t be there forever. I’m heading off to college in just 3 1/2 years. Okay, so I do have a little while longer with her. But at some point I’m to have to learn how to be self sufficient. My love and dependency for my mother is so large that when she leaves us for only a few days, I do not only miss her, but am completely lost without her. She ends up having to make lists so not only me, but my dad will know everything that we need to do. She holds the little strings to control every move our family makes. What this made me realize is that most families are very similar to our same situation. Women may be known to be the stay-at-home mom, and it makes them look like the typical female who needs the man to put food on the table. The truth of the matter is, the men wouldn’t know how to put the food on the table if the women didn’t tell them how. Most women know that they can work and support their family if needed, but they are making a sacrifice for their children. Each one of them is strong for making such a bold choice and devoting their life to a loved one. I plan to make myself a very strong woman and work just as hard as any other man out there and be able to support myself. But when it comes time to settle down, I will have pride in making the decision, if need be, to stay at home.

Now that’s some mighty fine writing, my friends!

Teenage girls, boys, and DRAMA…Part 2

It was bound to happen. Putting 105 girls in one age group together, and no matter how wonderful the setting is, there will be DRAMA.

H is still very glad she made the change to this school. The opportunities for girls, the comraderie, the class participation, class offerings, extracurricular choices, and the abundance of girls to hang out with are all still good. She’s been rolling along, staying super busy, meeting a few new girls and gradually getting included in some of the outings, so far so good. But as I mentioned in the previous post, the Winter Formal is coming up, and she is having to step outside of her comfort zone if she wants to have a “date” to the dance.

She got over the initial problem of her friend wanting to invite the same boy. The friend changed her mind and gave her blessing, so all was good there. Then she just had to decide when to invite him. Not too early (looks desperate), and not too late (he might get invited by someone else). Then she had to decide how to invite him (text message, instant message or gasp! an actual phone call?)

So this week, she asked me to sit with her while she called him. (Never mind that I was shocked,amazed and happy that she asked me to witness it). You have to understand, that for her to call a boy was a major step into the unknown. I don’t think she has ever actually initiated a text message, much less a phone call. So the call was made, he picked up and she asked him…almost as much in person (in these days of texting) as if they were face to face. He said “Yes”, and she got off the phone so fast it was as if it was burning her skin! Whew. The smile of relief on her face said it all.

So, the next day she floated into school, only to enter the den of gossip. Evidently this boy was a popular choice. He went to lower school with a bunch of girls who have been at H’s school (together) for four or five years. So you know, those cliques are well established and exclusive. One girl in particular was horrified that H had asked this boy, mainly because she was planning on asking him herself. And she let everyone in close vicinity to her know it. She thought it was “weird” and “wrong” that H had asked him…how dare she? She didn’t even know him very well! H wasn’t close to this girl, but now the girl won’t even look at H in the hallway.

This was very upsetting to H. She’d never been the subject of so much hateful gossip. And it was made even worse by the drama of the “group”.

The GROUP is almost as important as the DATE. They never go to the dance as a couple, it’s always as a group. And the makeup of the group is very important. The girls all get together at someone’s house to get dressed together, then the boys and their parents come over to take pictures. Who is in the pictures is crucial…plus, the boys should know some of the other boys, so they’re not uncomfortable.

This didn’t seem to be a problem for H at first. Her friends were inviting his friends, so they were all going to be in her group. They just had to decide who else to invite. That whole situation became another point of contention. Someone wanted to be in the group, someone else didn’t want them to be, and H was stuck in the middle. She didn’t want to exclude anyone, but she didn’t want the others to be uncomfortable. All this combined gave H stomachaches, and she just didn’t want to even talk about it.

Time makes everything better. The girl who was angry that H had invited the boy was told by one of her friends that she shouldn’t be mad, H didn’t know she was planning on inviting him, blah, blah, blah…that died down. The group sorted itself out, so as of now, with the dance four weeks away, everything is copacetic.

But you know, four weeks is a long time. I’m sure more drama is coming. And with four years of high school, it won’t be over for a long time.

Teenage girls, boys, and DRAMA

When H was in 5th grade, one of the boys in her class “asked her out”. Of course, in 5th grade, they don’t go anywhere. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to them talk.

“Well, Brandi was going out with Billy, but then he broke up with her and started going out with Anne”, or “John asked me out, but I really like George, so I said No.”

Well, when the boy (who she has known since preschool) “asked her out”, she wasn’t sure she was “ready”. So she explained that to him. He decided he would wait until she was ready. So at every birthday party or play practice for the next few weeks, he would pout in the corner, because he was sad. All H’s friends told her she was breaking his heart, so she relented and said “yes”.

Suddenly, her buddy, who up until this moment was a friend she was very comfortable around, became her “boyfriend” and they stopped talking. “Everything changed,” she said, and wished aloud that she could go back to the way it was before. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the day, after the middle school assembly, that he grabbed her hand and held it for the entire 25 foot walk from the auditorium to their classroom. She was embarrassed, uncomfortable, and decided that she needed to break up with him.

A few weeks later, a boy she’d had a crush on since 3rd grade (who had transferred to another school), “asked her out”. He actually had the guts to call her on the phone (our house phone, since she didn’t have a cell phone yet), and ask her if she would go out. The funny thing was, they didn’t speak before that, nor did they speak after that. But she was “going out with him”. She found out through a friend a couple of weeks later that he was “breaking up with her”. I don’t know if she’s spoken to him since.

So, with that vast amount of experience under her belt, she decided she was “not going to date boys anymore”. She said, “When I date boys, everything changes, so I would rather just be friends.”

That worked great for a couple of years. She played basketball, ran track, and hung out with her girlfriends, so she didn’t really have time for boys. Then, in 7th and 8th grade, to her dismay, all her girlfriends started getting interested in boys. She kept up her mantra of “not dating”, and counseled her friends through their various crushes. I think that if she had not gone to the same school for Kindergarten through 8th grade, boys might have interested her a little bit earlier, but in her mind, the boys at her school were like her brothers, and did not interest her in the slightest.

Fast forward to high school. New school, new faces, and boys are entering the equation. Only one problem (in her mind, not ours!). She’s at an all-girl’s school, and playing basketball, so she’s at school from 7:30 a.m.-6 p.m. every day (unless there’s a game, which puts her there until 7:30-8:00). Not a lot of time to get out and meet the boys. All fine, except there is a winter formal at her school, and the girls have to find dates.

After school started last fall, they began having freshman “mixers”. H would get together with a few girls to get dressed, and go en masse to the party. When I would ask how it went, she always said, “great”, but she never mentioned meeting anyone. Until the last party before the holidays. One of the boys she had met at the homecoming dance asked for her phone number. So they began texting. She was toying with the idea of asking him, but had never done anything like that, and didn’t really know how she was going to do it, when one of her new friends asked who she was going to invite. She told her she was thinking about this boy, and the friend said, “ooohhhh”, and looked disappointed. H asked who she was going to invite and she said she was thinking about the same boy.

So H said, “Oh, no, you go ahead and invite him. Seriously. I don’t want a boy to come between our friendship. I’ll probably just invite someone from my old school.”

And she came home and cried.

She didn’t want to invite any of her old friends, she really wanted to invite this boy. Never mind that the dance was three months away.

“Who knows who you’ll meet between now and then,” I said.

“No one,” she said, “it’s winter break, and then basketball, so there’s NO ONE!”

Enter DRAMA into our lives.

I will say that this issue has been resolved, but I’m going to have to finish writing it tomorrow. It’s late, and part of my new Year’s Resolution is to get off the computer at a decent hour and spend time with my hubby.

More tomorrow. TTFN!

15th Birthday Trip

I just realized it’s been two weeks without a post.   Last weekend we took H and two of her friends to Florida to my in-law’s for Labor Day weekend.   It’s actually a repeat of last year, when H decided she’d rather do this than have a big party.  She had so much fun she decided to do it again.  Makes it much easier on the parental units.  All we have to do is cough up the money for plane tickets and a couple of dinners.  They pretty much entertain themselves.  Well, it doesn’t hurt that Grandma and Papa live in a community with golf, tennis, swimming, beach club, and most important (when you’re 14 and 15) GOLF CARTS.  Combine two golf carts with three teenagers and a closed golf course, and it’s like their own private amusement park.  The only thing missing…boys.  At least in this community, there were no boys under retirement age, so it was very relaxing for J and I.  Something tells me when these girls start driving real cars and want more social interaction, this trip might not hold as much interest for them.  But for now, we enjoyed the weekend.

Since I don’t have permission to post the beautiful faces of these girls, here’s a non-identifying photo of them taking a golf lesson. 

And here’s the image I see in my head when I look at H’s face: