The posts I would have wrote

Beautiful beautiful summer, why are you slipping away so fast?

The posts I was going to write this summer were along the lines of

"A whole summer ahead to spend with three of my favorite people"

"A beautiful wedding joyful and special that united Becky and Dave"

"The stubborn daughter who refuses to participate in organized activities"

"Hours and hours planning for a Grecian dream trip."

"Canning 101: my attempts to be a pioneer woman"

"Talking - voted overrated by my two year old."

"Ditching Direct TV and switching to "Ropegoo" (Roku) the best choice ever according to Asher."

"Boxes and boxes of hickory wood flooring arrived. I cheered while Walter sighed."

"Mom is dreading the start of school more than the kids."

These posts almost made it into this blog, but the summer continues to escape from us and I have adopted the spirit of lazy summer mornings.  I'll be back when the muse inspires, but until then, I'll rest knowing our summer has at least been captured in headline titles.

Let the celebration begin!

Let the celebration begin, this is wedding weekend!

Becky and Dave will be getting married and we will celebrate at the castle in just a couple of short days!!

My little sister getting married.

No she's not a little girl leaving the house early, she is a grown woman who has accomplished and experienced many things in life on her own.  My maid of honor speech is written, but I've found I just can't brag on my sister as much as I would like with out it sounding like well, bragging.  But Becky and this gift of marriage deserves celebrating for all that it is.

If you average out her moves, Becky has moved every year since graduating high school.  She has traveled around the world.  Lived in several different countries for months at a time. Succeeded in getting her masters degree.  Taught countless students  More importantly she has been the kind of teacher who really cares. The kind who comes to your house and takes you shopping for underwear when no one else can.

She has led small groups of college students.  I'm talking about really leading. Leading that invests hours into preparing, praying, and making all of these sweet things that make you feel special.

She has been the aunt who comes to all of my kid's celebrations and the sister who has been the representative of family to me for many years.

Becky is an amazing woman and Dave is an extremely lucky man.  After praying with fervency and tears I have not committed to many other requests, I am beyond joyful to celebrate God's blessing of marriage on Becky and Dave.

And we are ready to celebrate!  Amelie has perfected her dance moves. There is the "Twister Twister,"  "Grasshopper twister hop," and several others "written" in her book of dances.  The boys' suits are altered and packed in plastic garment bags.  Rewards have been bought for the three kiddos to claim if when they make it down the aisle successfully.

My toes are pretty, Walter is prepped for helping the kids to pull this off  I think we are ready.

Let the celebration begin!

The "Sick" Game

This isn't the post I wanted to write today.  I have a great one in the works about Asher and his latest accomplishment.  But for today I'm feeling guilty enough that I need to write and sort out my parenting battle of the day.

I'm the wicked stepmother today. Amelie is assigned to stay in her room today because she is "sick."  Mysteriously she has no symptoms but a stomach that needed a yogurt stick and more mysteriously her sickness cleared up after swimming lessons were scheduled to start.

We've been battling her involvement in swim lessons for a week and a half.  When we at the pool but not in lessons, she is a fish.  Entire head under the water, kicking up a storm, attempting back floats.  But when we arrive at the pool for lessons, she becomes a girl terrified of the water.
"Too young for lessons."
"Scared to get my knees wet."
"Need to blow my nose."
That kind of girl.  We are the family. I am the mom who drags a screaming girl from beach chair to waters edge twenty times in twenty minutes.  Asa is the boy stuck in the beach chair slats screaming for his mama while mama tries to settle daughter in the water.  And topping it off yesterday, Asher was that boy who managed to stub his foot on the concrete at just the right angle causing blood to gush out of his toe.

Oh yes. We are that family. And today I am that mom who let her daughter stay home "sick."

I battled my intense desire to stay home and not be embarrassed at the pool again and my fierce stand that my daughter will not be a quitter.

My pride tugged on by a dramatic daughter won today and so today we stayed home playing the sick game.

It's a game because I'm convinced she is not sick and I believe she also realizes its all a big story.  But yet she is spending the day content with her room confinement as I grow more and more scared of how easily I can play this evil step mother thing out. More and more good ideas to make the day miserable pop into my head as the day goes along.

When she seemed too eager about the idea of me bringing lunch up to her bedroom on a special tray.  I changed plans to seat her at the kitchen table far away from Asa so she "doesn't get him sick."

And so we spend the day. Me having to pull out more and more stops to make the day awful while not really sure what parenting lesson I'm accomplishing through her room confinement.  And my girl singing and playing with the ponies and kitties in her room.

As the day goes on, I'm more convinced she possesses this genetic stubbornness that refuses to budge.

The game of me treating her as sick and her accepting the confinement of being sick plays on and this mommy knows she has to win!

Just so no one thinks I actually am an evil step mother, and to ease my increasingly guilty heart, I'll share a picture of my girl and me from a happier day.

Goodbye to The Office

The Office opening music switches my brain into an escape mode.  Those notes calm my spirit with the relief I imagine a drug addict gets from that initial inhalation. 

A bit of an extreme comparison?

Maybe, but The Office came into my life when I needed escape and for a while it was my drug of choice.  I became acquainted with Jim, Pam, Michael, Dwight, and the rest of the gang while walking through dark days of losing babies.  In those long evenings after we put Asher to bed, the hours until I could go to bed seemed to last forever.  

And so Walter introduced me to what he pitched as an American version of a popular British show about an office.  I worked in an office, I got the humor of the cubicle life so we let ourselves get hooked. 

We watched The Office in our upstairs home office next to P.Rick, the adorable hedgehog.  Walter sat in the rolling office chair and I lounged on our nursery chair which had been moved into the office simply so we could watch The Office on our computer.  In those old fashioned days, we only had a desktop and couldn't stream Internet to our tv.  That was the tv that required a risk of electrocution if you wanted to turn it on because the power button had broken off and we had to stick a finger in to reach that little on-off button.  

Ah yes, The Office has been part of us for a long time.  Back then I could easily relate to the drudgery felt by returning to an enclosed office space surrounded by people with all kinds of idiosyncrasies   Of course I was the only normal one in those cubes.  I compared Michael Scott to previous bosses I had endured (of course I am not referring to Bill or Jon) and loved the parody of a life I knew well.

Laughing out loud felt so good.  Somehow the show made me laugh out loud even after Michael Scott left and even when it reverted to low humor.  It was that absence of my laughing that may have cued Walter in to my awake (or not awake) status.  We learned how to watch tv together through our years of watching The Office.  

I will quietly admit here that I sometimes struggle to stay awake through tv shows.  Over the years and depending on his mood, Walter has taken a variety of approaches to this idiosyncrasy of mine. If he is feeling sweet, he will gently rub my arm and remind me to wake up.  But the most common strategy of his is to pause the show and wait until I protest.  If I quickly cry out he knows I'm  awake.  If the pause lasts for longer than 10 seconds without hearing from me he knows it's time to turn the show off.  

At times his strategy turned vindictive when he gave me a brief warning that he planned to delete the show as soon as it was over. This warning was explained as an opportunity for me to watch and not miss out later. It still seems rather cruel though because before the last words of the show are spoken, he has quickly stopped the action and deleted it - hoping to teach me a lesson that I better stay awake or speak up.  Yes, The Office has been part of the evolution of our marriage and how we interact with each other.  

It's a show that now joins Seinfeld as somehow holding a special place in my heart like a childhood and college friend.  Someone who I connected with at a deeper level but for whatever reason the connection has changed and time has marched us into different places.

Emotionally I am in a different state than when we first needed the shot of humor The Office gave us.   P.Rick is no longer around to watch with us, we have upgraded to a tv free of electrocution risk, and we now sit together on a couch. 

Along with Jim and Pam we had babies, learned to work through our marriage, and have come to this point where it is time to move on and say goodbye to The Office.

Thanks for the guaranteed laughs.

The courting sneeze

"Aachoo"
Walter covered his mouth and nose, held up his hand and sneezed.  The walls didn't shake and I didn't jump. Our conversation continued as I thanked him for not letting loose with a full-blown bellowing sneeze. 

In that loving moment, he named it his "courting sneeze."  This sneeze is the one he used regularly until a year or so into our marriage.  Now he uses the unrestrained free for all "AACHOO" that you would imagine comes from a bear.  I jump, shudder, and hold on to objects so they don't fall to the ground.

Ok, so they aren't really that loud or terrifying, but there is definitely a difference between the courting sneeze and the 10-year married sneeze. 

My brother and sister and Walter's sister are all engaged and preparing to be married in the next six months. At the same time Walter and I are preparing to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. 

Since I'm not the one thinking about the wedding every second of the day and I am looking forward to showers, seeing family, and celebrating these great joys I've had more time to think about their marriages. I can't think of a lot of wise advice to give. Life has been too busy to analyze what makes it work. Not much advice other than the practicalities of what life is actually like once the courting sneezes are gone.

Our courting time was amazing. 
Our wedding was beautiful. 

When we got home from the honeymoon and settled into White Place, I thought the work was done. The wedding stresses were behind us, we had picked out and were settling into our new home and I was ready for the blissful married life to begin.

Many parts of our married life have been blissful, but many parts of this married life have been about adjusting to things like the disappearance of the courting sneeze. Sometimes I miss that sweetness, the formality, the politeness, the cautiousness.  That time was special but it was for a season. 

While I have nostalgic thoughts about the attention and wooing of the dating and engagement period of our relationship, there is much security and comfort in the love of the 10-year married stage.

I love our comfortable routines, his steady strength, a growing relationship history, timeless and tireless emotional support, and I love that we can share in the mundaneness of things like diapering and bathing kids.

I now live with and love the man who relegates the courting sneeze to special sweet flashbacks of a time past.

I embrace the Walter who feels comfortable enough to share with me the 10 year married sneeze.

And I guess I will hold on to my head as I brace for what the 20, 30, 40, 50... year married sneezes will be like!
 

Happy Birthday Asa!

We put Asa's highchair in the attic this weekend.  The mornings of wheeling my little guy over to the counter for breakfast have passed and now it's his birthday.  Proof that he's not my baby, but he is two. 
 Two means he can climb up onto the barstool without needing "Asa's stool" anymore.  He can find his way outside by himself and gets lost in the joy of sifting in the dirt.  And in his mind, two means he no longer needs to drink from a sippy cup.

We celebrated Asa with plenty of "rawrs", trucks, and a dinosaur cake. His excitement reached a level so high I must say it had to have been the best day of his life. 

Screeches of "ruck!" and even more "rawrs" came out of the mouth of my little boy who usually refuses to speak. He forgot himself and literally jumped up and around.


I love the excitement of two.
I love my Buddy Boo.
Happy Birthday Asa!

Thoughts on Boston

I used to be a runner. Two times I crossed the finish line of the Chicago Marathon. Both times I ran slow.  Slower than the 4:09:44 time shown on the finish line clock of the Boston Marathon that I keep seeing over and over in the news pictures.  The finishing time of around 4 hours means the elite winners had long ago crossed that line and were likely relaxing in hotel rooms relishing in their victories. Runners crossing the line at four hours of the Boston Marathon were not the professional athletes, but the moms, office workers, programmers, the average person who was completing an extraordinary accomplishment.  To run Boston is a dream, an aspiration, a category of elite to admire.

So when I watch the videos of the horrible events of yesterday I see very ordinary runners who were fulfilling their dreams and as the running cliche goes, it was the victory lap to all of the grueling training they had completed.  Not only were the runners fulfilling their dreams, but their families and supporters were completing their part.  They also sacrificed to help their runner loved ones live out their goals.

Something so aspirational turned absolutely tragic.

At this point of not knowing who or why or maybe even what I just feel anger.  Anger and a bit of defiance. 

Do you feel like me sometimes in a big crowd?  When I go to a big mall, stadium, or really any event where a large number of people are gathered I now fight back the thoughts of terror attacks, bombs, and crazed shooters.  These fears are exactly the ones the perpetrators want us to be filled with.  I imagine a big agenda item for a terrorist is to create terror. To create a sense of uncertainty and cause people to live with a spirit of underlying fear and maybe even to make that fear so overwhelming that people change their behavior - stop attending concerts, stop pursuing an education, stop gathering together, stop crossing finish lines in essence to stop life and hunker down at home.

The organizer of the Boston Marathon was interviewed on the news last night.  The words of his interview stick with me and remind me today that we must continue to pursue life if not simply to defy those who attempt to make us change our lives because of fear.

The interviewer asked if the Boston Marathon would be run again next year and the director described how the marathon has now run for 117 years.  This has taken the race through 2 World Wars, through the years immediately after 9/11.  While not being oblivious to the changes of the world, this race symbolizes life and pursuit of dreams that continue even in the middle of tragedy.

Will the Boston Marathon be run again next year the interviewer asked?  Fred Treseler responded, "I am quite sure there will be a Boston Marathon next year. But for certain the Boston Marathon has been changed forever."

Changed forever?
Yes.

Changed towards a spirit of determination to pursue dreams in spite of even more opposition.
Changed to defy those who attempt to take away life.
Changed to prove evil can not win and Good will be what crosses the finish line as the winner.