Michael's birthday

Michael's 14 years old.  Check out his jersey number (same number as his dad's during high school)!  He celebrated with multiple sleep overs with friends, a few meals out, and a day in Lexington at Sky Zone with his friend-since-age-3, Stephen.  Of course they played basketball at Sky Zone, but a fancier version than usual.  I thought Michael was wearing his new bright orange play shoes but then how odd that Stephen was wearing the exact same shoes; Steven explained that those are the mandatory socks that everyone at Sky Zone has to wear. He does love his new orange sneakers, though; thanks for those of you who gave him birthday money to buy them!

For at least the fifth year in a row, Michael selected an Oreo ice cream cake for his birthday.  And something was very, very funny (I was probably telling one of my hilarious jokes when this photo was taken).

Michael continues playing organized basketball.  His select team won another championship.  He attended basketball individual player camp last week and was one of three campers awarded all-around best Camper of the Week - wow. 

Happy birthday, wonderful son.

May

School is out!  Alarms have been turned off!  Life is slower.  Breakfast is occasionally missed.  The dogs almost always have someone at home with them. 

Elizabeth has begun piano lessons.  She'll be learning both classical and popular music.  During the summer, she has a lesson once every two weeks.  During the school year, she'll have one lesson each week. We love hearing her play, although the dogs make mournful noises when she hits high notes, so she reserves those songs for when Steven and I are walking the dogs 30 minutes each evening.

Michael attended team basketball camp - 10 games against teams from around the state in three days.  Michael was unbelievable - he averaged just over 20 points per game.  Here's a clip of him making a buzzer shot.

We still love eat-out Friday. Here we are in Cheddar's parking lot this past weekend.  Steven's long arms make excellent selfies.

I get to have longer than usual lunches with friends.  Do you know these two people?

And we celebrated Memorial Day in Shelbyville.

May happenings

 

Elizabeth is fifteen!  How is that possible?  We loved celebrating her birthday with her - and she loved celebrating at Mi Casita with Emily, who spent the night!  :)

I'm pretty sure that was the first time she was allowed to have a sleepover on a school night.  But now that she's oh so wise and mature at age 15, we let her.

And she got up earlier the next morning than she has in the past 4 years, so how shocked we all were!  Steven and I experienced many heart-pulling memories as we looked through 15 years' of May photos to print for a card collage, which Michael helped create.  It's super huge, as is our love for Elizabeth.

Matthew graduated from Georgetown College this weekend - he told me he was feeling relief more than any other emotion!  He'll be moving to Lexington this fall to pursue certification as a personal trainer.  His major is Kinesiology & Health Studies.  It was nice to get to see Steven's side of the family this weekend. 

I loved receiving this puzzle for my birthday and last week loved the annual UK grad school reunion with Robin, Monica, and Mark.

Happy Mother's Day to all you amazing mothers out there.

Wonderful weekend

We were so excited to have two visitors from California stop by Friday night!  SOOO great to see Sam and Bennett - I got to pick them up from the airport and then they stopped by our house to see the others on Turtle Point, including Zoe (who really took to Bennett) and Niki (who liked smelling Sam).  We reminisced about the amazing beach house trip in California two summers ago as well as the day trip to Half Moon Bay last summer, which involved "freezing cold water but was soo fun!", according to Sam.  Bennett and Sam got to drive in style for the next 15 hours, as they borrowed Steven's Lexus.

Saturday Michael had a basketball tournament in Berea.  His team went
undefeated and won the championship.  Jeff Shepherd (UK player from the 1990's) coached one of the teams we played and soundly defeated.  Michael had awesome games all day, including 17 points in the second one (final score: 58-22; there's 2:52 left in the picture because that's how long it was until the next game started).  This is particularly noteworthy because his coach used a platoon system, so Michael was in the game only about 18 minutes with the clock running the entire time (except for time outs).  I know this because Steven and I kept the clock and scoreboard all day. In other words, all three of us were working hard! 

Las Vegas

 Las Vegas is quite the scene, as anyone who has been there will tell you.  I had the HAPPIEST time with Mary at the Western Political Science Association conference.  We rocked our paper presentation: The moderator described our paper as "intriguing, well-organized, important, informative" then said, "and now for the compliment section...." and then gave us all kinds of additional positive feedback!  He was not so kind to the other professor on our panel, oops for her.  We kicked it with our presentation; Mary and I have very similar presentation styles (read: fascinatingly engaging).

Besides all of the awesome networking and the learning one does at a conference, we also got to do a few things strictly LV.  Cirque de Soleil has been on my bucket list (I had only 3 things on it; now there are 2) since I started showing a DVD segment related to how they recruit, select, train, and evaluate employees in my Industrial-Organizational class about ten years ago.  Mary was able to score tickets for the Michael Jackson version of CdeS.  She was a bit concerned that it would make me too sad, but I was sooo happy to be there, not sad at all.  We didn't have to wait in line to get in, and we made friends with a valet along the way.

Other activities: We posed with weird people dressed up in smelly costumes and toured many of the famed hotels along the north strip.  Caesar's Palace is ridiculously huge and full of decorations based on the Roman era.  Our room was awesome with two separate bathrooms and a long hallway.  We ate food we would not be able to get anywhere else and saw the famous M&M wall at the M&M store/museum.  The only bummer was UK losing, but we proudly wore our stylish Wildcats shirts anyway and consoled ourselves (mostly me) with frozen yogurt (actually, Mary didn't get any).

This trip will be a highlight for me for at least five years.  And Mary and I are already planning on how to expand our research so we can present at the international Lilly conference this fall!  We are a formidable research team!  Yeah Mary and Karyn!!!

Al fresco dining, anyone?

You can see why there has been no school and no work for the McKenzie family this past week!  Even Steven got the chance to opt out of work for a couple of days.

What do people do when they are snowed in?  A 2000-piece puzzle, of course.  Actually, we did that puzzle over Christmas break but I forgot to post it earlier, so I thought I'd sneak it in now, clever person I am.

National History Day presentations finally arrived.  Michael chose not to enter the competitive part, although if you saw his poster, you know he'd have advanced to the next round.  100% confident of that.


In science, Michael and his group created a beautiful, efficient marble roller coaster.  All three class trials worked!  He brought it home and Elizabeth and I liked picking out (and eating) candy that we thought would work during the videotaping for the blog, as marbles were really heavy and thus made the trial last only 1 second.  Check out the video Michael and Steven made with catchy background music.  Cherry candies make the trials last 3 seconds - you're welcome!

Zoe continues to do what she does best - hang out in front of the pantry awaiting treats.

Niki and Michael are showing you the paper chain that counts down the days until I get to go to LAS!!!

And here's Elizabeth!!!