It's the 2018-2019 school year. Shelby is in 9th grade and has merged into public school from private catholic school. She made the 9th grade volleyball A team and was enrolled in all pre-AP classes. It was like a kid in a candy store for the first time ever. She came from a strict catholic school with 12 kids in her class to a 9th grade class of 1000 students. She also managed to convince me to let her join FFA and show a goat. So everyday began by stopping at the ag barn to feed Rambo and then getting to practice at 5am. Then she would have a full day of classes, then more practice and/or games after school and then back to the barn to feed and work Rambo.
I can't find any pics of Brody from this semester of school, but in 2018-2019 he's in 7th grade at McAdams and he's on the football A team.
At the end of the Fall semester an athletic trainer at the high school noticed Shelby's eyes looking "off". He sent her home thinking she had a migraine and the lights were bothering her. The next day she wasn't any better and he called me and asked if she had recently hit her head. I explained that she just had her first team practice for her club volleyball travel team but I didn't recall her diving for balls or getting hit. I pointed out that she did collide with a teammate at a school game in October. He went and pulled the records from that game and saw that she did in fact have a collision with a teammate and she hit her head. A concussion assessment was NOT done. She continued to play the rest of the game. She played the rest of the season. And then started club ball. This. Was. Bad. He told me that he just did a concussion assessment on Shelby and she indeed had a concussion and here it was 6 weeks later from the time she hit her head. From there I had to take her to the ER and then from there we were referred to a sports medicine concussion therapy program. LONG story short, this ended her volleyball season. She had to resign from her club team. Her concussion was so severe because she had continued to play without rest that she was basically just re-injuring herself over and over. She had to go to weekly physical and cognitive therapy. The school was not very accommodating with her doctors orders when it came to tests and assignments. I ended up pulling Shelby from school at the end of 1st semester of 9th grade.
Over the Christmas break the family took a trip to chain-o-lakes. I think it's called something else now but it was a great time to unwind and relax and decompress. We had a lot of things to figure out.
