where does the time go??

25 years ago, we got married.  Hardly seems possible that it was so long ago.  But it was. 

Clearly we were quite a bit younger.

It’s been quite the adventure and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 

 

Here’s to 25 more.  At least.  :)

hero

He ro  noun \ˈhir-(ˌ)ō\  plural –roes  A person, typically a man, noted for feats of courage, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his life.  (The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd College Edition.  © 1982)

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the word hero?  I know for most of us, there’s an immediate response.  For me?  Simple.  It’s people like our neighbor Bill, a police officer on a local force; our friends John and Susan, with their ministry to homeless men and their commitment to homeless single moms with children;  a whole group of dads we know who are firefighters; my brothers in law (Jim’s brothers—all 3 of them!), our nephew, my dad and grandfather, and our son, who have willingly served in the armed forces—those are the first people who come to mind. 

None of those people have sacrificed their lives to help others, and some of them have never even really put themselves at (serious) risk for others, but they all have another characteristic in common—they selflessly put others ahead of themselves.  They are willing to meet the needs of others, to take care of others, and not count the cost to themselves.  They willingly sacrifice things besides their lives:  creature comforts, financial gain, safety, peace and quiet.  They are, to a number, people whose lives exemplify qualities I would be proud to see in my own children.

It’s hard to help kids understand real heroes.  Real heroes don’t have superpowers like Spiderman or Superman.  Those are things most kids—boys especially!—find so attractive.  But even then, they can learn at an early age that superpowers are not the only important thing for a hero.  My little guys have a friend who is beginning to get it.  Collin is 5, and he’s enchanted with Superman.  He wears his Superman cape everywhere, and lives to wear his Superman shirt.  But Collin’s parents are very good at helping Collin understand that being a hero is more than just having special superpowers.  How do I know that Collin is getting it?  Well, he made this:

 

to let the world know that inside that house, there was a young man willing to make sacrifices on your behalf. And, if I know Collin, he’d do it quite happily for a cookie.  :)  

The thing is…most of us don’t do a very good job of training up our children, our boys, to believe that being a hero is something they can do.  Something they are capable of achieving.  In that regard, Collin is light years ahead of his peers.  That’s a good thing.  Way to go, Mom and Dad.  Keep up the good work.

And Collin?  If I ever need a hero, I promise you’ll be the first person I call!

apparently…

my garden…

has a new ‘friend.’

:(

it’s back….

Volleyball season, that is.  Today was the season opening jamboree.  I’d forgotten how crazy volleyball days can be!  School this morning…visit from my brother in law and his wife…make 13 meals for the team (and coach and bus driver.  I signed up for the 1st game, to get it over with)…get them to school in time to make the bus…dash back home to pack OUR dinner…head north to the jamboree (game time?  5pm.  Location?  30 miles north of us, THROUGH Seattle at rush hour.  Such fun!)…watch volleyball until 8pm…come back home and tuck tired boys into bed…clean kitchen from the mess of making 17 sack meals.

Whew!  1 down, 14 more to go.  Sadly, it’s ONLY 14 more this time, since Tori is a senior and this is the last year for high school volleyball at our house.  I will miss it!  It was fun to watch the new team work together.  They’ve got some kinks to work out, but they’ll get there! 

We enjoyed our visit with Uncle Jay and Aunt Christy today.  Or, perhaps more accurately, the boys liked meeting Uncle Jay and Aunt Christy and LOVED seeing Dixie and Dakota, their dogs.  Jay recently retired after 24 years in the Air Force, and they’re doing a bit of traveling before they settle into ‘civilian’ life.  It was so much fun to have them here!  Jim and I saw Jay just last year at Brent’s graduation from boot camp, but none of the rest of the family has seen them for 5 years.  That means Ryan was a baby, and they’ve never met Logan until this weekend.  The boys have new best friends, and we had such a wonderful time just catching up a bit.  It will be so nice to have them closer to us and able to come to family holiday celebrations!  No, Utah’s not that close, but it’s sure closer than North Dakota!!  Now, to get their son transferred out this direction…  Arkansas is just too far away.  :)

Family…fun…a visit from Emily…a promised visit from Brent…what a great way to start September!  Even if the whole “first day craziness” of volleyball snuck up on me this year.  I’m gonna enjoy this while it lasts, ‘cause I KNOW for sure I’ll miss it next year!

6 years ago…

…we got a VERY important phone call.  The caller let us know that the packet we’d been waiting for was in, and if we wanted to come pick it up we could.  Wanted to?  We’d been waiting for MONTHS for this information…we’d be on our way immediately.  Inside, we found these:

Referral pictures (and paperwork) for a baby born just 8 1/2 months before.  He looked so worried with his furrowed little brow!  We couldn’t wait to go get him.

We left about 7 weeks later, and brought home Ryan Joseph.  It’s been quite an adventure!  He’s a joy and a delight.  And now we only see that furrowed brow when he’s joking with us.  No more worried baby!

November 2005, 10 months old

 

May 2006, 16 months

 

Feb 2008, 3 years

January 2009, 4 years

January 2010, 5 years (yes, it’s the same shirt!  He doesn’t grow very fast…)

January 2011, 6 years.  (Same shirt. Again.  And it’s STILL in the drawer…)

Ryan, you are such a blessing!  It is quite an honor to be your parents.

I love my job! :)

aSometimes I think I’m the luckiest mom in the world.  I have the greatest children!  It’s a joy and a privilege to spend time with them.  I feel bad for moms whose greatest wish is for their children to get old enough to go to school, for summer to be over and school to start, for them to be old enough to take care of themselves.  Those moms are missing out!  I hear it all around me all the time, especially in the summer:  “I canNOT wait for school to be back in session.  I can not take another week of this child!”  It’s hard to go and sit at the park while the boys play contentedly and listen to the moms around me grumble.  But it’s also no surprise.  I mean, I wouldn’t want to spend days on end with some of their children either!  Good heavens.  Sadly, most of them don’t realize that they have no one to blame but themselves.

The last time we were at the park, I watched as two moms interacted with their children.  One mom had a boy, about 5, and a girl, about 3.  The girl was throwing sand.  The mom probably said 15 times “Please stop throwing sand.”  The little boy got in on the action, and there was sand flying everywhere.  By now the mom was  quite frazzled and the pitch of her voice had gone up an octave or two.  “Please. Stop. Throwing. Sand. Now.” she said.  They kept on.  She threatened to take away their toys.  The little boy threw them at her.  She stomped off, angry.  The situation continued to escalate.  Through it all, my twosome watched with huge eyes.  At one point, one of them looked at me and said, “Mom?  When is she going to DO something instead of just yelling?”  Wise child.  But then…he knows.  This mom doesn’t ask multiple times.  She doesn’t threaten.  She asks quietly and politely, and expects compliance.  She follows through immediately with consequences for inappropriate behavior.   And at 6, they are a delight to be around, and I can’t think of a single place I would be concerned about taking them.  Even the one who makes me crazy sometimes with his 1,000 questions and his short attention span and his sensory issues and his incessant need to be in the middle of everything and every conversation?  Yep.  He’s a delight to be around, and definitely knows how to behave.

The second mom had 3 young boys, probably 8, 5, and 2.  The 2 year old was being 2—pestering his big brothers as they played in the sand.  The 8 year old kept whining at him.  The mom told him 5 or 6 times that if he didn’t stop whining, they would go home.  (Her voice was incredibly whiny.)  He kept whining.  The 2 year old kept pushing his buttons.  You could see that it was deliberate…the look on his face was very clear.  He knew exactly what was going on.  The mom finally lost it, grabbed the 8 year old by his arm, and marched him off the beach, berating him for his display of attitude.  I kept wondering when she was going to realize that he was only mimicking what was being modeled for him. 

With children who behave like that, it’s no wonder that moms are thrilled to see summer vacation come to an end.  Even toddlers can be taught to obey.  It’s a matter of consistency.  Meaning what you say, and being willing to follow through with consequences if they choose to ‘blow you off.’  It’s hard.  It requires being willing to take action.  To be thoughtful.  And proactive.  It’s definitely not for everyone.  It is, after all, far simpler to gripe about how ‘busy’ and ‘active’ your children are.  To complain about the fact that they are in to ‘everything’ and you must spend every minute watching and chasing them.  Look in the mirror!!  You have trained them that way.  Have taught them that their behavior is acceptable.  They learn SO FAST that they don’t have to obey until Mom turns purple and there is smoke coming out her ears.  It’s hard to undo that teaching.

Frustrated, misbehaving children.  Frustrated, irritated, (angry?) moms.  Is it any wonder that scripture states clearly, in 2 different places, these verses?  Or that they go together??    It’s fairly clear if you read Ephesians 6:1-4 or Colossians 3:20-21.  They both say

Children, obey your parents…fathers, do not exasperate your children.

Why do children need to obey their parents?  Because learning to obey Mom and Dad is the precursor…and practice…for obeying God.  That’s the goal—obeying God!  So why aren’t parents supposed to exasperate their children?  Imagine how difficult it is to obey when parents don’t know what they want!!  Or at least don’t make their expectations clear.  Oy! 

Am I perfect?  Heavens NO!!  Are my children?  Absolutely not!! They misbehave.  I yell.  We have frustrating days.  We also have wonderful fun days, and it’s the greatest privilege in the world to be their mom.  And their teacher.  I love love LOVE having them home with me day in and day out.  Seeing them learn.  Watching them grow.  Someday they will go to school.  And I will be both happy and sad.  Happy, because I know that they will love it, and that they will be wonderful additions to a classroom.  And sad, because I will miss them terribly.

(Please note:  this is NOT directed at anyone in particular.  It is simply something I see over and over and over, and decided it was time to write about it.)

a lightbulb moment…and other stuff too

Or, an “Oh DUH!!” kind of afternoon.

Today I picked up hamburger.  40 pounds of hamburger.  I took 10 pounds, divided it into meal-sized portions and froze it.  I took another 10 pounds, browned it, then froze that in meal-sized portions.  I put 10 pounds in the fridge to deal with tomorrow.  And the last 10 pounds?  Well…I wanted to make it into hamburger patties to freeze so that I didn’t have to do the work later.  After thinking through a whole host of options to get it done—all of which were rejected as too much work!—it dawned on me:  Put the whole log in the freezer.  Freeze it for a couple of hours, til it’s mostly solid but not frozen through.  Put it on the cutting board, slice into burgers, and freeze the rest of the way.  Place in a plastic bag and voila!  ready to grill hamburgers, with no fuss and very little effort.

See?  Told you it was an “oh DUH!” afternoon.  :)

**********************************************************************

In other news, Logan is doing AWESOME at speech!  That boy works SO HARD!!  Today, he was putting out so much effort to complete the tasks before him that his whole body was shaking.  And he’s making progress.  A big piece of the focus is on core strength and building up his core so that he’s not perpetually compensating for his lack of strength.  Things like jumping on the trampoline, riding his bicycle, and chewing bubble gum (the hard stuff—hubba bubba bubble gum) are therapy exercises.  Fortunately, they’re fun to practice.  We’re seeing results, too.  Logan did 3 miles on his bike on a trail over the weekend.  He runs from our house to the park without stumbling or falling, and with a decent running form.  He’s mastered some of the ‘jaw strength’ exercises she wants him to learn.  The next step?  Developing lung capacity.  We talked about 2 options:  a specific whistle or a spirometer.  Logan’s eyes lit up at the suggestion of a spirometer and he said, “Grandpa has some!  I play with them at his house.”  Needless to say, a call was made to Grandpa this afternoon, and now we have a spirometer in our therapy box.  Logan spent the afternoon playing with it and the stopwatch on my phone.  It’s awesome when therapy is so much fun that he WANTS to play. 

School’s been much better the last 2 days, so I’m not feeling as desperate.  Fridays are low-key days on purpose, and we’re probably going to pick something fun to do when we’re done with our few things we have for school (Bible, reading, and science).  We’ve survived volleyball tryouts for Tori (varsity) and Jim (JV coach) and are looking forward to a nice weekend.  That’s a good place to be on a Thursday night.  :)

a lesson from the garden

Those came out of my garden yesterday.  Usually by now raspberries are long gone, but my bushes are still producing.  I’m picking about 2 dozen berries a day, but I think they’re almost totally gone now. It makes me a bit sad…this has been the best year ever for our berries!  These last berries have been the biggest, sweetest berries I’ve ever seen!!  Apparently, fertilizer, water, weeding, and patience are good for berry plants.  And children too. :)

I’ve thought a lot about this since the other day when I grumbled about school.  Maybe I’m pushing too hard.  Maybe my ‘tough to teach’ child needs less ‘fertilizer’ and ‘water’ and more patience!  He needs clear recognition that this is HIS time schedule, and while I do have some things I want to accomplish, it’s not only about meeting my goals or my dreams.   I need to remember that this is about making sure this little guy is properly equipped to be all that God has planned for him. 

I was stopped in my tracks yesterday as I read through Ecclesiastes 3.  Solomon is sharing his observations about time…

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain from their toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.  He has made everything beautiful in its time.  He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.  I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.  That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.

Wow!  Did you catch that?  “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”  Ummm…okay.  I can take a hint.  My time schedule on this is clearly not God’s!  He promises, though, to take this…this MESS…and make it beautiful!!    And how about that other part??  The part that says “I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live.  That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.”   Hmmm…am I finding satisfaction in all my toil?   Definitely not at the moment.  Guess it’s time for an attitude adjustment.

Today was a much better school day.  I made a few minor changes, and everyone was much happier.  Because of the raspberries, I’ve started considering something:  that the last of the crop is perhaps the sweetest because it is the most surprising, the most unexpected, the last tangible benefit of the time and effort.  And maybe…just maybe that applies at home, too.  This ‘last crop’ we’re raising, these little boys God has chosen to bless us with, are an opportunity for us to find satisfaction in the toil.  To learn and see and take to heart that only HE makes things beautiful.  And that He does it in HIS time.  Not mine.

Off to find satisfaction in the toil…and heaven knows there’s plenty of that!  :)

warning! Grumbly vent ahead…

Remind me again why I thought homeschooling a special needs child was a good idea?  I know the statistic that brought us here:  80% of deaf/hard of hearing children graduate from high school functionally illiterate.  We knew (thought!?!) we could do better than that.  Yeah, sure.  At the moment, I’m thinking that we’re well on the way to being one the 80%!!  It’s been ‘tear-your-hair-out!’ frustrating…and we’re only on day 2 of the school year.  sigh.

It’s not any one thing; instead, it’s the combination of issues that make it so:::challenging.  And it’s nearly impossible to separate out the pieces.  The lack of fine motor skills make worksheets hard.  The hearing and speech issues make oral work difficult.  The combination means staying focused on the ‘hard work’ is nigh unto impossible, even for 2 or 3 minutes.  (No, it’s not ADD or ADHD we don’t think.  The dr. agrees. )  We both strongly suspect there’s an overarching developmental delay that affects nearly everything.  We see it in a variety of things.  His drawings (VERY 3 year old-ish!) reflect it.  Many of his actions/reactions are much more ‘appropriate’ for a 3 year old.  His self control is approximately on par with a 3 year old.  He doesn’t tend to connect cause and effect.  Logical or natural consequences mean very little to him.  Every day is a challenge.  Adding school has made it harder.

This same child, though, the one who doesn’t connect cause and effect and has very little self control?  Well, he has the most amazing selective memory!  (It’s HIGHLY selective!!)  He cannot remember for 5 minutes to keep his hands off his sister’s things, but he can remember for 3 weeks snippets of a conversation Jim and I had about something not related to him.  And can recite that conversation almost verbatim!  Sure makes you watch your words carefully!!

I used to think we were fairly decent parents.  Now, though, we’re having to throw out everything we’ve ever learned in 22 years and start over.  Talk about humbling!  I just have to hang on to what I do know:  that the God who brought this child to us is the same God who loves us and is our strength.   At the moment, I am beyond grateful for His words in Lamentations 3:

“…this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:  Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him…”

Hanging on…

finally, some vacation pics

It’s been a strange couple of weeks.  We usually go to Blue Lake at the end of July, then jump right into August and the whole ‘back to school’ thing with both feet.  Not this year.  Our trip was a bit earlier than normal, and this year Jim took 3 weeks off instead of just 1.  We’ve been on the road a bit, and this week Jim’s been in Boise with Brent.  Monday, things return to ‘normal’ around here (whatever that means!)

In the meantime, here are Blue Lake pics:

 

Hailey wasn’t at Blue Lake this year; Emily was only there for a couple of days; Brent was in and out (and hates having his picture taken!); and Victoria spent most of her time floating on the lake.  I actually left my camera at the trailer much of the week, so this is all I’ve got.

Then last week we spent some time with Joel and Cathy, and did a day at Lincoln City.  The beach was glorious, and I spent more time enjoying the sunshine than I did taking pics.  But there are a few:

I love how Logan’s holding his shorts up out of the water in this pic!  The boys never even got wet!!

Ryan with his ‘best friend’…and Logan with Ryan’s ‘best friend’…

And some close ups that are pretty indicative of temperament:

Note the tear on Logan’s cheek.  It was because we wouldn’t let him out of the car in a busy parking lot.  Terrible parents!!  :)

Hailey was with us for this part of the trip, and she let the boys play with my camera.  One of them took this, and I like it! 

It’s fun to have her with us once in a while.  She generally works Saturdays, so this was an extra special weekend.