Of our three daughters, the two youngest participated in high school sports. The youngest, Bridget, is currently playing tennis and the other daughter played soccer in high school.

The beginning of the school year for high school sports starts in August. We recently had the annual meeting where parents are admonished to be good sports. This year, the athletic director showed a video about something else too.

It was about the tremendous impact parents have on whether their child will enjoy participating and competing in high school sports.

The eye opener was that there are a lot of parents who unwittingly create a tension between themselves and their children by doing these things:
1. Wanting their child to tell them all about the game, etc. Who did what and why. Teens don't like to rehash the event--they do that with their coach or teammates.
2. Coaching when you aren't the coach. Teens know more about the game than you realize and their coaches assuredly know more about it than you do.
3. Teens need to know that you approve of them no matter what happens during a game.

You know how it is. You're a mom and there never seems to be a spare minute for you to do what you want to do. Not what you need to do, but what you want to do -- Like read a book or be a couch potato and watch TV.

I sprained my ankle as I was about to take our dogs for their nightly walk. So now I am supposed to sit with the leg elevated, ice on it, etc.

This is actually easier to do at work than it is at home.

Our oldest daughters seemed to be directionally challenged until they got their driver's licenses. Their location acuity grew every day to the point that they gave me the directions for how to find an address.

We've always had hunting dogs as pets. They tend to have their noses to the ground and if they ever wandered too far on the scent of a rabbit or squirrel, they found their way home.

I know our Lab, Kipper, is very capable. Nose to the air or ground, she finds her way home.

Our cocker spaniel, Lilly, is not. While she uses her nose, she's also too easily distracted. Her hunt for a rabbit becomes chasing a chipmunk to racing after a robin. Eventually she's so mixed up. I've watched Lilly as she's realized she's in foreign territory. Lilly's suddenly erect and flinging her head back and forth as she tries to view some familiar sight. Lilly practically leaps into my arms when she realizes I'm a few feet away from her.

Our 14-year-old Bridget has a keen sense of smell. Luckily she's not directionally challenged and finds her way home and around town like she's been on her own for years.

Do your children, or child, follow you as you do some of the daily household tasks -- the laundry, cleaning up piles and cooking dinner?

How about when you go into the bathroom?

Do you place toys on the bath mat for the kids to play with as you jump into the shower so that you can listen to their chatter and periodically peep out a crack in the shower curtain to make all is still calm?

This stage of my life and theirs, thankfully, ended years ago.

However, it continued with our pets. As our youngest would follow me around, so would a line of large dog, small dog and cat.

The youngest child went to school, but large dog, small dog and cat continued the parade. The first time I tried shutting them out of the bathroom, the dogs whined and I could see the cat's paw reaching under the door like she was hoping to attach her self to something that would slip her under the bathroom door.

The old cat died first, so the parade line was shorter.

After the old, small dog died, the large dog, Kipper, was so sad and moping about that I took her everywhere with me.

The bathroom too. Not a good idea because it just reinforced for Kipper that she was entitled to all my space.

We got a puppy, Lilly, and she followed Kipper's lead.

Now, all these years later, I still have a parade which follows me around the house and whines if I shut the bathroom door without inviting my canine family.

We have three daughters. When my husband, Joe, and I were thinking about a name for the first, Kathryn, the actual meaning of the name didn't enter our thoughts. Kathryn, or Katie, was named for Joe's mother, an admirable woman.

The origin of the name is Greek and it means pure. It fits Katie so well. She's grown up to be a woman whose mind is not easily swayed by smooth talk or monetary gain. If she could, Katie would save the world from disease. She's in Africa doing her thesis research on the success of vaccinations in Jos, Nigeria.

Kirsten is our second daughter named for a pioneering relative who was greatly admired by her tiny community on Washington Island, at the tip of Door County.

"Kirsten" is the Norwegian variation of "follower of Christ." Kirsten is not the Bible-thumping follower of Christ, but rather in every essence of Christ's teachings, she's a follower of caring for the poor.

Kirsten went to college near San Francisco. She quickly decided that people begging on the street corners didn't need money. They needed food. Whenever she went into the city, she'd make sure to have a stash of fresh fruit, juice boxes or granola bars.

Now she's married and living in Bologna, Italy. There, she's an avid volunteer spirit who is trail blazing. Volunteering in Italy isn't a tradition as it is in other places in Europe.

For Bridget's name, Joe and I actually looked in a baby book to check on the meaning. Since there is a 10 year difference between Kirsten and Bridget, we thought the last addition to the family would need to be strong to contend with two older sisters.

Bridget is Irish (to honor more family heritage) and it means strong or strength. Bridget it was.

And she is a Bridget. A very strong-willed, won't take "no" for an answer child. I joke with Bridget that she ought to become an attorney because she can find a thread in any argument to keep it going until she wears me down and I say 'yes" just to get her to stop.

Another meaning of Bridget is "exalted one."

I could write another blog about how that meaning also fits our family princess.

Our oldest daughter, Katie, 26, has been in Africa since June working for the Carter Center in Jos, Nigeria. The Carter Center is a non-profit started by former President Jimmy Carter to address the global issues of poverty. The Center has a large contingent in African countries working on various medical issues. Katie is compiling the data for a new way of delivering vaccines to different populations.

She's not new to culture shock. She speaks Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Italian.

As a family we lived in Micronesia where electricty was never a certainty, flush toilets a novelty and rain a daily event.

One college year, she studied at the University of Madrid, Spain and then traveled by EruoRail to all the cities she could get to in four weeks. She traveled by herself.

Later she was a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova, a former Soviet block nation. It was a lot like Micronesia, only with Wisconsin weather.

In Jos, she has a driver -- a male to accompany her wherever she goes outside the Carter Center offices to do field work. From him, she's learned the local language.

He's also shared with her some of the basics of local driving protocol. Basically, there isn't any. Cars, bikes and motorcycles drive wherever they want to on the road and off the road. There's no stop signs. Drivers blast through interesections. The considerate ones give a warning toot on their horn.

We used to live in Maryland on the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. We were about 45 minutes car drive from either coast so when a hurricane was brewing and moved along the coast, we'd have some wet and wild weather. The people living in the cities along the ocean coast would evacuate inland which meant there would be a run on toilet paper, water, milk and bread.

If I hadn't been paying attention to the weather and went to the grocery store and couldn't find any of the above items, I knew a hurricane was brewing.

On the Pacific Ocean side, a hurricane is a typhoon. We became well acquainted with typhoons when we lived on a small island where Joe, my husband, worked for the U.S. National Health Service Corps. Our part of the Pacific was the breeding ground for typhoons.

Our first experience with a typhoon occurred when we went camping with some friends on a small barrier island along the reef that encircles Pohnpei, the island where we lived. Camping there entailed sleeping in tiny "Gilligan's Island" type huts.

The wind howled and the rain stung the skin. All of us spent most of our waking moments swimming, sitting and playing in the lagoon because the water was warmer than the air. The kids, all of them 5 years old and younger, were oblivious to the nasty weather swirling around us.

When there was a break in the downpour and Joe swore he saw patches of blue sky, all of us hopped in the boat and banged through the waves for two hours to get back to our island homes.

We had other memorable experiences with typhoons and then moved to Maryland where we learned about hurricanes.

The year of "The Perfect Storm" on Halloween of 1991 was our first hurricane. I was Trick-or-Treating with our girls and another friend and her kids. When branches began breaking off of trees and garbage cans were hurtling through the air, Eileen and I stopped at a store and bought each child a bag of candy and called it Trick-or-Treating.