Train A Child...

Yesterday Lynn and the girls came to my house for lunch. I had brought home a couple new volleyballs from Molton--they are really light and soft, so little kids can play volleyball and not hurt their arms. Olivia liked them a lot. I think I see a future volleyball player!

I went in for a haircut yesterday, and planned to not do anything too funky because i'm in the play. Well, they had just gotten a bunch of new colors, and Leanne really wanted to try them out on me. She offered me free color that will fade out in a week or so, and I said yet. So now I have blue and purple stripes. I think I liked the pink better, but this is fun also.

The New Colleen

I have now lost over 30 pounds, which is very exciting. In celebration, I went to JC Penny's and bought a sundress. I managed to get into a size 10!!! I haven't worn that size since very early in high school. I am almost out of training sessions now, but I am planning to continue working out, and maintain at this level. Here I am modeling my new dress on my parent's from porch.

Shoes for Women of the Midwest

High Performance Camp

Last weekend we had the Iowa High Performance volleyball camp in NE Iowa in Fayette. We had an interesting time getting there, as this was the same weekend the waters crested in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City (just south of Fayette) and they had severe flooding. We had to call a local coach, who drove around and found the one open road to Fayette. On the way there we stopped in Independence to see if the roads really were flooded...they were.
Since I was the one taking the pictures, I am not actually IN any of the camp pictures, but here are a couple samples of what we did. Aside from actually playing volleyball, the girls played "Chicken on a Hill" for a cool down. We added a new move called "Milk the Cow," and they thought it was pretty funny. We also did an outdoor grass session, as it stopped raining long enough that the grass was dry and we could play.
Here's the whole group from camp. Hey, who's the yahoo that left their camera bag in the middle of the shot?!? It wasn't me!

Fire of Brazil!

While in Atlanta we ate supper at a restaurant called "Fire of Brazil." After you get your fill at the salad bar, you flip a little card on your table over to green, and the gauchos come around with giant hunks of meat on swords, and slice some off for you. They had about 15 different kinds of meat. My favorite was the leg of lamb (what I am eagerly grabbing above) and the chicken wrapped in bacon. I don't usually eat a lot of meat, so I think I got about a month's worth of meat in that one meal.
We also got a couple free desserts. We got a chocolate mousse cake, and also this lovely peach melba ice cream served in a coconut.
Here's our Noisy Crickets volleyball team. We had never played together before arriving at nationals, so it took us a couple games to really do well. We were competitive with every team that we played, but didn't win very many matches. But we did have a lot of fun, and we might try to play together in a tournament next year.
Robin made little signs in support of us!
Here is a lovely picture of us in action. I don't usually play middle hitter (I am a setter!), but I had to do it a bit at this tournament. You can see why I don't play it in this picture--there is a huge hole in the block! Colleen didn't close!! But don't worry, our defensive person in the backrow is in exactly the right place to dig that ball up...