skipping stones and exhaling

[photos are from past experiences since i didn't have any photos from the stories below. they are growing so fast!]

are you one of those parents who has a camera at-the-ready - snapping away at all those special moments, capturing those crazy faces and shared smiles between siblings, immortalizing moments that become the stuff of family legend? well i'm not! i wish i had a nickle for every time i said "i wish i had my camera with me," or "did you bring the camera?" i've even mentally designed a pair of glasses that have a sensor so that if you wink, they take a photo. i guess until i get those glasses created, i'll have to practice imprinting those priceless moments deep into my memory.

we had two evenings this week that were those kinds of times where you just hit the pause button and remember what is important. tuesday night we made a last-minute decision to get the boat wet. our summer has been so busy. we've only taken the boat out a handful of times. i always resist evening rides - the kids end up getting to bed so late and we're left with a pile of towels, dirty food containers, trash and a soggy cooler to clean up. but in the spirit of 'the last week of summer,' i pasted on a smile and agreed to go. every single time we get to the edge of the no wake zone and the throttle starts to inch up and the wind starts to blow my hair i wonder - what's wrong with me? why don't we do this more often? speeding into the sunset with the wind in your hair is the best therapy i know.

we motored over to a little beach with our picnic dinner. the boys swam while kyle and i explored the shore a bit and cleaned up dinner. for a moment, everything was perfect. i sat on a rock and watched the dark silhouettes of my boys giggling in the sunset and i nearly wept at the perfection - click.

of course it didn't remain perfect, there was pushing and arguing and back talk, but in their own way, those moments are perfect too aren't they? it means that our kids are normal - they're doing normal kid things. they are starting to spread their little wings within the safety of our love and support. our job is to provide the best instruction we can and a net. once they're flapping their wings, it's up to them.

fast forward to wednesday. we picked the boys up from camp and headed to a small city park on the lake. a weathered, soggy stump sticking up out of the water provided the perfect target at which to launch rocks, and rock abounded. shoes got closer and closer to the water, sinking into the saturated mud, so the shoes and socks came off, then the pants, then the shirts. there were giggles and squeals and tentative dips until they were fully wet. the sun was setting, a heron sat - maybe fishing, maybe resting, maybe just sitting, dragonflies dipped and spun and buzzed, the lake shimmered.

i hunted for perfect skipping stones while kyle skipped rock after rock across the glass surface of the lake, teaching the boys the technique to get the maximum number of skips. both boys plopped rock after rock into the water until - skip plop! "i did it!" shrieked ray. and he was off - skipping rock after rock.

watching their backs, the boys mimicking their dad, seeing the determination in their skinny little bodies, hearing their excitement, feeling their confidence burst - click.

as we wrapped up and got ready to head home, ray said "i did it mom. whistling, snapping and skipping. i've got skipping now."

"was that your summer list of goals, ray?"

"yes" snap.

"did you get them all?"

"well, almost. i'm still working on whistling."

i hope you met your summer goals as well. and if you didn't, i hope that you just keep working on them til you get them!

on meditation

i wrote this post some time ago and just ran across it as i was looking for something to spark creativity. meditation has been strongly on my mind lately and i was interested to read this post from over a year ago. try this type of walking/dishwashing/swimming/vacuuming meditation sometime. just listen.

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summer 2013

as i sit in the back yard, getting eaten by mosquitoes, watching my boys play (and nearly kill each other) in our plastic backyard pool, i ponder meditation. being the mother of 2 pre-school boys, meditation is a survival tool. i have a feeling that i'm going to need more than meditation in the years to come.

i have been trying meditation lately in several forms. getting up at 6 to get 20-30 minutes of meditation is not always realistic, so i've tried walking meditation, driving meditation, a few minutes of meditation in bed - whatever works.

i am not a pious meditator. as a matter of fact, i'm pretty terrible at meditation. my mind races constantly. i've been practicing meditation on and off for 13 years. you'd think that i'd be really good at it by now, but what i'm finally getting good at is softening around the fact that i'm not really good at it. i'm more forgiving of the constant chatter and list-making and post-writing during meditation.

during a recent dog walk, i decided to try a little walking meditation. this consisted of just listening - just focusing on all the sounds i heard during my walk. here's how it went.

my breathing
dog's nails clicking on the street
dog panting
man i'm out of shape. this feels good, i'm going to start doing this again 4-5 times a week. i will also go to the gym 4-5 times a week. i can go monday evenings and then to the noon zumba class on tuesdays and thursdays. then i can try to get in a noon class on friday or maybe a saturday morning pilates class. i've got to do something to get my body and mind back into shape.
oh yeah - birds, breath, dog panting
the soft pat of my sneakers on the pavement
when i get home, i need to make a grocery list. what are we going to eat for dinner this week? i know that i need eggs, milk, granola bars, coffee and yogurt.
oops! dogs barking
weed eater
my breath
bread, strawberries, bananas, 1/2 &1/2
soft breeze
lawn mower
car driving by
clicking
padding
panting
broccoli, potatoes - when am i going to get to the store? we've got soccer, then we need to read sometime during dinner, bath and bed. i guess i can go after bedtime. but crap! i have a call at 9.

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you get the picture. it's an imperfect process, awareness is half the battle. after nearly 8 months of being a single mom through the week, a harrowing move (where in the HECK did all this stuff come from??), and trying to get settled into a new place, meditation has fallen way too low on my priority list. i'm easing myself back into it.

i won't say that i always walk away feeling blissed out, but i walk away knowing that at least i'm trying.

christmas in july

i missed sending out a christmas letter this past christmas. kyle was working out of town, so i was an unexpected single mom most of the time; we were deep into house renovations and packing and planning a move. life was hectic - nervous breakdown type hectic! i had a friend of ours take these photos for us at tug's birthday party in january (yes, my children are barefoot in January - you gotta love the south!), with the intention of sending a late christmas/new year's/valentine's letter. well the crickets in your mailboxes tell the rest of that story!

so here are our christmas card photos - in july! isn't this better? now you can see the whole story and i don't have to pick just one photo. i bought these bouncy balls for our family as a christmas present, but broke them out at thanksgiving. they are fun fun fun! they come in all shapes and sizes and should be a staple in every family!

welcome back

welcome back! i've let this ground lie fallow to too long. now's the time for clearing out the weeds and working again to grow this community. i've written post after post in my brain and on my computer, to relaunch this blog and reconnect, but nothing seemed 'right.' so i'm just jumping back in - right in the middle.

these are my boys. my bright, funny, wide-open, adorable, exhausting boys! for so long, thru the fostering and adoption process, i could not post pictures of them. i could not even use their full names in a public forum. so this posting feels a bit clandestine. shh - don't tell!

in november we adopted. it's all final and legal now. they are stuck with us. they had been with us for so long, they were already ours and we theirs. we knew in august, when parental rights were terminated, that adoption was coming, so we didn't expect such a transformation in november. but finalizing the adoption brought a profound shift deep in the center of the earth. it was as if everything had settled deeply into place for the first time in 20 months. we all felt it. we were a family - come hell or high water!

i was guilty of immediately flooding facebook with 20 months worth of pictures, to share my loves with friends and family. we discussed the future without fear. we talked about what it meant to be a family. we talked about family lost and family gained. kyle and i were no longer afraid to imagine our boys growing up, becuase we will see them, know them, shape them as they grow. we exhaled for the first time since those scared little boys with hollow eyes timidly stepped across our threshold march 20, 2012.

welcome to our family.

4 years old

tugboat - 4 years old - January 16, 2014**

happy, happy birthday to my tugboat, my big ol’ man!

i don’t dare call you my baby, or my little man. you will quickly correct me and tell me you’re not a baby, you’re a big man. you’ve always had a special, engaging, unique personality, but this last year, you’ve blossomed in a way that I don’t think we expected. you are a talk, talk, talker when you are finally comfortable with someone. you reserve judgment at first, but once you’ve checked someone out thoroughly, they are in for it.

i love your stories and your imagination. you have developed your own way of compensating for the memories that you don’t have of a time before here. when ray talks about things he did before he came here, you tell us some fantastical story about your ‘grandfadder’ and what you did with him. onetime you told me that you and your grandfadder caught a shark and the shark bit you, so your grandfadder put a band-aid on it for you. you are so earnest when you tell the stories too. you are developing your imagination and trying to relate, so we listen with interest to what will come up next.

this past year has been one of giant-sized strides for you as far as growth and development. you are a completely different kid from the scared, angry 2-year-old who first graced my door.

you took gymnastics in the summer and didn’t seem terribly interested in doing much but running circles around the room, so we didn’t keep you in when fall session came around. you played soccer on the sharks and your dad was your coach. You didn’t always want to play but you were a trooper on a team full of criers! you kept running back and forth on that field and stuck it out. we were so proud of you! early in the year, you also played blast ball, which was a cluster. we’ll have to see what shakes out as your main interests. we’d love for baseball to be on the list, but I think soccer will also make the short list.

i cannot even begin to tell you the relief we felt on november 15 of 2013 when the adoption was finally final and we knew that we could exhale. the earth shifted and settled into place with a deeply satisfying clunk that reverberated through our hearts.

you are forever, tug. we are forever family. my heart flows deeply with gratitude and a ferocious love for you. happy birthday my boy.

love mama.

*pay no attention to the dying plant and garbage bag full of fort-making tools behind him!

**can anyone give advice on how to avoid 'possessed' eyes when taking a flash photo with an iphone?

unexpected blessings

oops - sorry little fish

i've had 4 or 5 posts swirling around in my head lately, but i need to share this past weekend first. we had a tough week last week - things didn't turn out as expected on multiple levels. topics for another post on expectations!

late in the week, k-daddy reminded me that we were supposed to camp with friends on saturday night. i stomped my internal foot and whined my internal whine and rolled my terrible eyes and gnashed my terrible teeth, but put a pleasantly surprised look on my face and said 'oh, i'd forgotten. glad you reminded me.' saturday rolled around and after swimming lessons, k-daddy fed the boys lunch and launched for the lake. he'd been out on friday to set everything up. mama stayed home to pack food, get a few groceries and meet the boys at the campsite.

when i arrived at camp, everything was so quiet. everyone but k-daddy was asleep, the lake lapped gently at our feet, the afternoon sun cast soothing shadows on the campsite and i was instantly able to exhale for the first time all week. ahhhh. i'm going to give you a moment to close your eyes and imagine sunshine dappling thru the trees, birds singing, water lapping gently, and the quiet quiet quite of the world except the sounds of ahhhh - leaves rustling in the breeze, something scuttling thru the underbrush. we were even inspired to whisper. we put the cold stuff in the cooler and left the rest to hustle about after everyone awoke. we sat at the water's edge and reverently watched a bird sitting on a post do nothing - for nearly 1/2 an hour. we didn't plan or lament or discuss schedules or budgets or parenting tips and tricks. we mostly just watched that bird and held hands.

the entire weekend was very healing for our family. it involved casual feasts spread across a battered picnic table, piles of potato chips, soccer, football, wading, catching fish with bare hands, building immunity with unwashed hands on peanut butter sandwiches, bugs, leaves, fedders, rocks, shells, bare feet, skinny bare chests, water guns and lots of giggles and kisses.

there would have even been cake, without reserve but alas, the cake didn't survive the wildlife. the first would-be cake thief arrived around 3AM. i heard the telltale shuffling and scuffling and heard the cake carrier as it tumbled off the table and onto the ground. shining my flashlight out of the tent, i saw the bold masked bandit hovering around the picnic table, running off only when a water bottle was launched his direction. the next morning, the cake was over taken by large black ants, who would have carried it off in one piece if not for the pesky cake carrier. so, cake may not be the best camping treat. oreos seemed to heal the hurt of losing the cake!

i almost forgot the best part of the trip, there wasn't enough room on the boat for everyone on sunday, so the 3 dads took the 5 life-jacketed kids out for a spin while mama martyred herself to a chair in the sun at the campsite. i'd nearly forgotten how lovely it is to simply sit and soak up the sun - positively addictive. i couldn't believe my luck as i propped my feet on a kid camp chair, slid down low in my seat and closed my eyes. talk about exhaling! i rejuvenated enough to exercise my mama 6th sense to get up and start lunch that was ready just as a boat full of hungry boys pulled back up to the bank.

 when have you truly exhaled lately?

healthy body healthy mind - chard

ok - looks like i took a 2 week savasana! i hope you practiced this sustaining pose at least once while i was away.

as i admired my lunch yesterday i started thinking about the food/fuel that we put into our bodies and how difficult it is to change those patterns once they are established. my 3 and 5 year old children have already established habits that are proving extremely difficult to break. imagine how difficult it is to make new habits at 42. my lunch yesterday was so beautiful, i tried to take a few photos of it for you, but they turned out terrible, so you will have to trust me on its beauty!

i heated a little olive oil on med-high heat and tossed in some chopped swiss chard. i only left it in a minute before removing it and tossing in some mushrooms and a few slices of smoked sausage (ok, the sausage wasn't the best choice but i was working with whatever wasn't frozen). when i got it all on the plate, the chard just made my mouth water - its deep green color with nearly purple veins running thru. it was amazingly delicious and is making my mouth water right now!

kyle and i have decided to go wheat free. kyle may go full 'paleo' but i have to pick my battles. i have a habit of going whole hog on some new thing for about a minute and then falling off the wagon almost immediately because it's too much change at once - budgeting, organization, food. so, my goal right now is to remove wheat from my diet (mostly). i've been reading quite a bit lately about wheat and its effects on the body. they are not good! i started this quest about a month and 1/2 ago. the first 3 weeks i did great and started feeling better almost immediately! i had more energy and i slept better. but i got tired and lazy and went back to what was familiar, so i'm back on the wagon now and plan to keep it up this time.

if you see me at The Diner with a big 'ole pancake on my plate, look the other way. i'm giving myself 1 meal/week to eat what i want. i don't have celiac disease, so a pancake won't send my digestive tract into the throes of distress, therefore i will enjoy a little splurge unless my body protests.

if you want to join me on this journey, i suggest that you read the book wheat belly by william davis.