My Life Appears to Me…

My life appears to me as a series of color snapshots stored in the memory bank of my mind. When I was four years old, after a very long car trip, I arrived at my new home to find that my father had gone into the woods and cut down a tiny evergreen tree and affixed pieces of bubblegum to it with string. I’m sure he could not know at the time that this small gesture would be a brilliant color snapshot I have carried in my mind and heart for my entire life.

Not all of my snapshots are brilliant color, some of them are black and white and still others are underexposed and so that they fade altogether after a time. My gentle, loving father was also an active alcoholic for my entire childhood. More later…

A Very Merry Christmas from Our House to Yours.

I just spent the last hour trying to create the perfect Christmas card and had nothing but technical difficulties so I just decided to write a Christmas photo blog. So here goes…this year was eventful as is our entire life. Tony and I became foster parents in January which brought our household numbers up to 6 kids and 2 adults. It was crazy but so are we so it all worked out. Our foster daughters went on to greener pastures in a new foster home with their brother in June and we keep in touch.  We also endured “snowmageddon” last year. It just never seemed to be done snowing. We cranked up the wood stove, baked cookies, drank tea and gained weight.

Before we knew it spring was springing along and though the ground hog did not see his shadow the snow did eventually melt. Honestly it did seem like the winter and early spring flew by, or maybe we really were just stuck in the house and couldn’t do that much. Anna was finishing up at community college, working as a life guard and applying to University and Mia had decided to follow her older sisters lead and begin at community college in the  fall instead of returning to public high school.

In April we had the good fortune to have Tony’s nephew James for a visit due to the fallout from the Volcano blowing ash all around the globe. He was in DC for a conference and got stuck, so he came to stay with us for a few days before traveling on to visit in New York City. It was fun seeing him and having him stay with us.

In June we joined our extended family and had a much needed vacation to our favorite humble but wonderful location, First Landing State Park.

Sadly, Anna did not get to go on vacation with us this year because she did her first archeology field school at Stratford Landing with University of Mary Washington and though she got very dirty, burned and cut she definitely decided this is what she wants to do for a living. I knew giving her that spoon years ago to dig in the back yard was a good idea. Also in May, Anna was accepted to University of Virginia where she has just finished her first semester. She is very excited about studying anthropology and if you’re not careful she will analyze all your behavior and compare you to Cro-Magnon.

dig site from above

Mia went off and became a life guard, opened her first bank account and bounced her first check all in one summer. In August, Mia also became a college student at the ripe old age of 15. She had had enough of public school and decided to give community college a try. She just finished up Drawing 1 and History of Western Civilization. She is still learning how to manage her time but is doing spectacularly well. Mia accompanied me and my good friend in early October to Kiptopeke State Park where we camped and got to see a bird banding as well as all the many birds that funnel through that area at that time of the year. We had a blast.

Mia also dug out a large box of old cameras that belonged to my dad and has a new passion, film photography. Many of the cameras still work and she has gotten some fantastic shots. It is rather expensive but she is earning her own money now so I am delighted she is using them.

Back in August I started a Master Naturalist course which met weekly. It was great fun for me and I learned tons about nature which is very helpful for my job.

It is hard for me to believe Jenna just celebrated her 14th birthday, it just seems like yesterday that she was an itty bitty girl. She is often my companion when I go canoeing or hiking and we’ve had some great times outdoors together.

We were very happy to welcome Tony’s niece Kate and her husband John to our fair city as well. John was in DC on business and Kate joined him and they spent a couple of days with us. We really enjoyed their visit certainly hope they decide to return again someday.

Last but definitely not least Sara who is 11 is full of life and energy at all times. She seems to never stop, except when she falls asleep. Sara got a guitar for her 11th birthday and has learned several songs already. She is happy to be homeschooling again and is diligent about getting her work done each day so she can hang out with her BFF, Rebecca.

In December Tony celebrated his 53rd birthday. I reminded him about the good news that in only two more years he can get a senior discount. He was not amused. We did have a nice party.  He continues to slave away unselfishly and make a horrible and ungodly commute day in and out, so the rest of us can enjoy our fantastic life. He is my hero.

I know I surely have missed the most important details as they are the tiny things that happen each day but at least I’ve covered some info to keep anyone who is interested up to date. I hope you all are well and will contact us and come for a visit if you are able.

God bless you all and do have a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year.

Choices

Lately, I’ve been ever so grateful that I pulled my kids back out of school. Our life is so much more peaceful and relaxing now that we follow our own schedule. We had family visiting from Ireland last week and we took three days off. The weather was really nice today so we hiked for over an hour at the reservoir with the dog. We have started book clubs, been to the US Capitol, visited Charlottesville, been camping, and seen Othello at The American Shakespeare Center. This is all in just the first five weeks of being home too. I’ve also noticed that when the kids are able to sleep later they are so much happier.  They seem to just be following their natural rhythms.

Originally I didn’t begin this post to talk about my kids though, I have been thinking back on my life as a whole and the many choices and decisions I’ve made. I am profoundly grateful that I have been able to choose the way I live my life. I have lived life intentionally. I traveled and then went to college getting a BS in Education from Temple University, I traveled some more and studied some more and then I married Tony and we settled down in the fair state of Virginia where we had four amazing daughters in just over eight years.

Before my first daughter was born I was teaching school and thought like so many others I would find “good day care” for her. I needed to work, first of all because we needed the income and second of all, I had done all that studying for something and I wanted to teach. After Anna was born one of the most upsetting things I have ever had to do in my life thus far, was leave her with a babysitter when she was only three months old. It is still a painful memory. My co-workers told me I would get used to it. I never did.

I will never forget the day after I gave my notice at work that I took Anna to the playground on a week day morning and pushed her on the swing. It was the absolute most liberating experience of my life apart from giving birth to her. I can honestly say, I was joyful. I had made the decision to leave my cherished career for another  cherished career, raising my own children.  I remember meeting women who saw me with my young children telling me, “you’re lucky to be able to stay home”. I told them it was a choice I made and that they could make the same choice. I was also poor, this was not an exaggeration, we had barely enough to pay our bills.  It was well worth it to me and I will never regret this decision, even though we had to live very simply. I feel very sad for people who feel trapped in their lives, stuck doing things they do not really want to do. Early on, it dawned on me that I wasn’t living for the weekends but living each day for whatever if might bring. Certainly not every thing in my life is a joy, far from it and I do now have a job again out of the home. My job, however, is one that I enjoy enough to make it seem like it is not work at all. To what do I owe this good fortune? Many things but in good part to actually making the choices to make this all possible.  I hope each of my daughters will also feel they have choices they can make as well and that each of them will live their lives intentionally too.

On Fostering

I have lots of ideas rolling around in my head at the moment. What I mainly wanted to write about for therapeutic reasons was taking in my foster kids. On January 22, 2010 my husband and I became foster parents to two sisters, ages 10 and 15. We had originally met the girls through our own children, back in October.  There is much I can not or will not say, but suffice it to say, the girls did not have the basic necessities and much beyond that.  I found myself thinking of them regularly and wondering if they were okay and knowing they were not.  I was even having trouble sleeping at night. I am a praying person. I prayed. I prayed hard. I asked other people to pray. For weeks it seemed like nothing would ever change for these kids. I didn’t lose faith, I just kept praying. I prayed that God would keep this family together too, because they are a family and in my mind that is sacred.  I prayed that if that wasn’t possible that the kids would be placed where they could get the basic needs met and be safe.  Finally, and this definitely should have been my first step, I surrendered.  I went happily, merrily along my daily path of being a mom to four busy girls and a helper mom to three other kids.

Out of the blue I received a call from social services asking if we would consider being foster parents to the kids. In life, there are some decisions that are really hard to make, this was a no brainer. Tony and had already decided we would if the opportunity arose. Now although decisions are easy to make does not make them easy to do and that is where we are now. Never have I felt as incompetent as I have in the last weeks of my life. I seem to be faced with a hundred decisions before I even get dressed each day. Just getting all these kids to school each day, even though they ride the bus, is a task and almost every day one or the other of them will ask for a ride.  The energy that six girls can produce in a smallish house is phenomenal. Four teenage girls can be really loud. Come to think of it two ten-year old girls can be rather loud themselves. Put the two groups  together and well… this is one rockin household. Back to the decisions, it’s one thing to make decisions for your own flesh and blood but quite another to make them for a non family member who is living as a family member. It can be tough and I must answer to social services also. Added to the decision making, is the planning and organizing of eight people and all their activities. I also have a part time job. Needless to say, I don’t get much time to sit around. I do still take time for myself, but not much.

By the grace of God, and I do mean this quite literally, I am doing well. I just wish I knew how to manage my time more efficiently. I constantly am having to figure out how to be in two places at once. Managing the schedule of eight people is a real challenge. Beyond that, I wish I had the wisdom of Solomon to make the decisions I have to make without having to worry so much about it, but then I guess that is what parenting really is all about, a lot of fumbling around to do your best. One thing useful I did learn from my mandatory foster parenting classes is to listen more and lecture less. A simple strategy which seems to be very effective so far. Hopefully I can continue to drop the lecturing and be a better listener and hugger as well.

Blizzard!

I am presently snowed in with a bunch of kids, two dogs and a husband recovering from shingles. I did make a trade though, a couple of teens were sent to a friend’s house, so they are snowed in there.

My daughter had her 13th birthday party last night and though we knew this was coming I did not want to cancel the party as it is rare for her to be able to celebrate on the actual date of her birthday. Two of the girls came without coats and only one came with boots, and one actually showed up in a tank top, so it was a bit of a scramble to try and suit them all up to go play in the snow. The house is covered in dripping winter apparel. Thank goodness I’m not a neat freak.  Fortunately I have plenty of food. We have been eating and drinking lots of hot drinks but what a better way to spend the winter weather.

This is about the most snow I remember since we had a major storm in 1996 and because of the winds it is being called a Blizzard. We have about a foot and it is still coming down an inch an hour and isn’t supposed to stop until midnight. I think I’m gonna have these kids a while. So far so good. Most of the hysterical giggling and screaming was over once they settled in to watch a movie and right now, they are actually being quiet. I am not planning to get out of my pajamas. I wish I could shop online for Christmas presents but I think they would not get here by Christmas, especially due to the heavy snow. So like the dogs, I think I’ll curl up in a blanket and take a nap.

What Homeschoolers Do All Day.

In all fairness, my kids reminded me that they do this stuff when their school work is finished, but in all seriousness, I think “play is a child’s work” as good old Dr. Spock of 1950′s baby and child care fame once said. Frankly, I’m glad my kids have time and plenty of it to mess around and act silly. This is important to me.

I’m up on my soapbox so feel free to depart if you don’t want to hear a rant, but… Kids do not have time to just be kids anymore. Their lives are so micromanaged with activity from long hours sitting in school, to dance lessons, to gymnastics, to soccer, to swim team, to scouts, to god awful mindless, useless homework, to so many, many other things.

Many kids are woken up in the wee hours of the morning to be carted off to day care and are not picked up until dinner time. Heck they might as well put on the suit and tie and carry their little brief cases, they work just as hard as the hardest working office worker.

While Clarinet Hero is not going to get my kids a good grade on a standardized test or even help them with a future career, it does allow them the freedom to just be creative. I once read that  a number of polymaths or people who are geniouses in more than one area and had been interviewed, all stated that they had lots of time to just sit and think as children. None of my kids are geniouses but they do at least have time to get themselves bored and thus figure out how to get creative.  This is a good thing, I think. Enjoy.

Huggles for Puggles

Much has happened around our household since Christmas has come and gone. We have added a new family member. Tula has joined us from a rescue shelter near our home. Tula is a puggle, a puggle with a pedigree no less. Her mother was a lovely beagle named Sweet Little Resee and her father a handsome pug names Pugsley Faust. Such a dignified beginning but in the end she was dropped off at a rescue as many dogs are after their initial cuteness wears off. After having her here for the last ten days, I have a feeling I know why. This dog is bursting with energy but then so is our house. She seems to fit in well and though she must be watched at all hours there are four eager girls to do just this. So far we have taught her to sit, go down and to stay for a treat. She comes to her new name most of the time and best of all she gets along with our old rescue girl, Emmy. Emmy seems to tolerate Tula and has even played with her a couple of times when we had some nice weather. It will be a looong time before we’ll be able to leave her unsupervised but if memory serves me right it took about two years for us to leave Emmy unsupervised as well.

Merry Christmas 2008 Friends and Family

December 11, 2008

Greetings Friends and Family,

We are all well and surviving the financial crunch. We’ve been cutting back for years so it isn’t much different for us. I did go back to work very part time last February for my local Parks and Recreation department as the Nature Education Assistant. I adore my job which involves things I love. It is rather challenging though to fit all my responsibilities in but I manage, mostly by having a messy house a good bit of the time.

Anna, now 16, and learning to drive is constantly on the go with her classes at Community College which she started this year after acing their entrance exam. She is also working part time as a life guard in a senior community. She is learning to play guitar and constantly helping out in the community where needed. Mia, now 14, is not learning to drive but choosing new hair styles AND colors regularly. Both Mia and Anna became vegetarian earlier this year. Mia loves all things animal and would like to help in this area in the future. She is hoping to raise a rescue puppy soon. Mia is also very musical and plays just about anything she can get her hands on.

Jenna who will turn 12 in a few days is rather happy go lucky and is not ready to change her hair color, yet anyway…Thank goodness. She loves to play computer games and read and is getting better and better at violin. She has made a number of new friends this year as she has joined her older sisters at youth group. Sara, still in the single digits, at 9 is doing well and loves so many things it’s hard to list them all. She has a very best friend who she sees several times a week. I almost feel I have five daughters but who’s counting? Sara has begun playing clarinet and in less than six months has been promoted out of the beginning band. Sara loves to talk and will have an opinion on most any subject, gee I wonder where she gets that trait from?

Tony is slogging away as he has for the last ten years commuting into DC so we can have the lovely life we live. We are ever grateful for his job and the security it brings. He also has begun training at our church to become a Stephen Minister which is a lay ministry program to help people in crisis. Mostly, he’s learning how to be a good listener which frankly I think he already was. I still volunteer with my jail ministry and hope to go back for a weekend in February.

We would love to hear from all of you and wish you a truly happy and healthy new year. May God richly bless you!

Love,

Tony, Mimi, Anna, Mia, Jenna, and Sara

It’s a Jungle Out There

I don’t have much time these days to get my thoughts together in a coherent way but I thought at least I could post some photos of my organic garden. Let me just say that when I planted it back in May I thought I didn’t really have enough in it. For weeks it looked kind of sparse. Well in June I got back from the beach and decided it just wasn’t taking off. It hadn’t had enough water and had weeds taking over. I spent the day weeding and watered it a few times. BUT… the biggest thing I did was that after weeding and watering I covered it with cow manure and compost. That was the magic key I guess, that and some great thunderstorms. I have a jungle in my yard now. One of my plants is over four fee tall.

The most amazing thing is that much of what is growing I didn’t plant, at least not on purpose. I have a number of things that came out of the compost I threw down. I have butternut squash and pumpkins growing and another squash type thing that I’m not sure what it is yet. I’ll have to see what comes up. Hopefully it is some acorn squash which I love. Anyway I have so many zucchini that I’m giving them away left and right. They are really delicious too.

Following is a recipe I invented to use the zucchini I have. Take a large baking dish and layer the following:

zucchini cut in 1/4 inch rounds, salt and pepper to taste, Italian seasoning, olive oil, large bread crumbs (I make these by toasting whole wheat bread and cutting it into small squares),  generous amounts of olive oil sprinkled on, and mozzarella cheese, I do this in two layers and then bake at 375 degrees for about 30-40 minutes. I cover it with foil. It is delicious.

We have also made chocolate zucchini cake. I won’t post the recipe but you can find a number of them by googling it. It is fantastic. I had guests over and they couldn’t believe it was full of zucchini. I half the sugar used in the cake and add a half a cup of chocolate chips. Yum!

I admit that due to the overwhelming number of squashes they are squashing out the tomatoes but it is kind of fun to see thing appear almost over night in the garden. I hear it must be the cow manure. Experienced gardeners call it black gold. I have also found that the zucchini literally grow over night. I can check the garden in the morning and find a couple that are too small to pick and then come back the next morning and they haver grown larger than I am supposed to let them.??

I will end with a couple more photos but they are about a week old and the garden has grown even more since and the tiny pumpkin is getting much bigger.  Happy gardening.

Mimi

Finally the Final Saga

Geez, where does the time go? Thank goodness for all the photos and yes, even my blog as the trip seems farther and farther away. In one way I left the best for last but that was only by chance and I may have to borrow a photo or two as I was driving and did not stop to take any photos, though I wish I had now. We took the long way home driving 25 miles around the rim of the Grand Canyon which was breath taking. I kept yelling look over to the left, look straight ahead, on the right! The kids must have thought I’d lost it. By this time they were really tired and I hate to admit this publicly, they were watching a movie, that’s also why I was doing the yelling, I couldn’t possibly be watching all this beauty by myself.

We then entered the massive Navajo Indian Reservation which starts in northern Arizona and goes on right into Colorado if I remember correctly. The landscape began to change and before I realized it we were in a strange land. It was like nothing I had ever imagined, never mind seen. The landscape was red and rocky where giant rocks and cliffs jutted up out of the earth. We drove by Monument Valley with its famous Mitten Rocks and other amazing rock formations. We did not go the route directly through Monument Valley as we were heading to Colorado and not into Utah but we had plenty to see along the way.
I could not believe the stark beauty that surrounded us and it went on and on. Sprinkled along the red earth were the trailers of the Navajo people, some which seemed to literally be in the middle of nowhere with not a neighbor in site. I had learned that the Navajo traditionally are not farmers but keep animals, sheep, and horses and other livestock. It must be quite the life out there in the desert.

We passed through Tuba City, Arizona which had deep meaning for me and for the United States, especially during in World War II. Tuba City was the home to the famous Navajo code talkers. It was not much to drive through, probably took us less than five minutes but I was happy I knew something important about their history.

I have to admit I said a little prayer that we would not have car trouble and thank goodness we did not. It would have been a long wait in the desert if we would have, with no place to pull over. There just isn’t a whole lot out there. We stopped in an outpost of a casino, some stores and pulled up in the parking lot to have our picnic and it was so windy I could barely assemble the sandwiches and than one after another stray dogs began to come to the car looking for food. Several bitches obviously with hidden litters of pups. I felt horrible for them and threw a few scraps which surprisingly they did not fight over but in the end I got back in the car fearing they might get a little too familiar.

By the end of the day we arrived at our next to last destination, Cortez, Colorado where we would spend two nights so we could visit Mesa Verde National Park. I had heard about this place while in Albuquerque and could not resist a visit even though we had not originally planned it. It was hands down my favorite location because of the beauty and the archeology all wrapped into one. We drove about 30 minutes out of Cortez to get to Mesa Verde and climbed a mountain which offered us spectacular views. Sadly a couple of years ago they had some rather drastic forest fires which burned most of the trees so the landscape is full of black sticks.

Because of the value of the archeology the park rangers try and suppress the fires which are a natural and important part of the ecosystem so that every now and again they get one that wipes them all out, like this one. It will take about 75 years for the trees to grow back but the landscape is still gorgeous.

I had some thoughts recently in this little brain of mine which seemed kind of ironic, the thoughts not that I had them. I find it rather hard to fathom that the people who built the homes into the cliffs at Mesa Verde did so as stone age people, they did not have any metal or even a wheel to speak of, not to mention that they lived in a desert with little water. The only  domesticated animals they had were dogs and turkeys. The ironic thought I had was how with absolutely NO technology they built houses that are still standing 800 years later while we so called “modern people” with all manner of tools and technology build houses that we’ll be lucky to have standing through a good storm.

It was an amazing feeling to walk through their wonderful structures and see how they lived and worshiped. Ttheir kivas (small places of worship) are still being used today by Native peoples today. Just getting to the sites was an effort in itself, even with the wooden ladders added to help us climb up and down. They didn’t bother with that but just climbed right up and down the rocks. In the museum there we did get to see a pair of small crutches, apparently they missed step on occasion. The artifacts tell them much about the people but walking through their homes I could almost imagine them there with us, perhaps they were in spirit.

Cliff Homes of the ancient Anasazi people

The Cliff Palace

not an easy climb to reach the cliff homes

Walking into The Cliff Palace

Kiva for religious ceremonies, still in use

1000 year old wooden beams, that's some good construction

From recent fire, nature's way to start over