The following smiles are brought to you by Back to School

Nobody does family like M's family does family

One of the events on our summer calendar was a reunion of M’s mom’s side of the family, held in the Tidy Farm Town where M’s mom’s family is from and where M spent some of her formative years, into her moody adolescence. They don’t have these reunions often - the last one was when M was pregnant with the twins, who will turn 6 this fall. And considering the amount of work that goes into them it is amazing they have them at all. But they do the work: months of emailing until every meal is accounted for, figuring out who will bring what, put the food out and clean up. Activities are planned and tents are rented. Fields are mowed, tires inflated, wood chopped, balloons are hung. And then all sixty-something of us arrive. Although there are a lot of activities there is also ample time and space to sit and talk, catch up on lives, gawk at kids growth and ponder the aging of the aunts, uncles and ourselves. The age range this time was two to 101.

Now don’t misunderstand – I love my family and cherish the opportunity to get together with them, which happens much less often than M’s family does. We’ve never had a reunion with cousins and aunts and uncles. But M’s family is different. Consider the first time I met M’s family:

M decided to introduce me to her family at the weekend of celebrations for her dad’s retirement. He had been a pastor at the same church for 15 years or so and his retirement was a pretty big deal. Four of M’s five siblings came, with spouses and kids. The church had special services and a giant potluck. Someone loaned M’s family a large house where we could share meals and play ping-pong.

I am not the church-going type, or to put it another way, I’m Jewish. So when I found myself dressed up and sitting in a pew with all of M’s family except her dad, who was of course up front, I thought it was kind of novel. My extremely limited church experience had never included a Mennonite service so it was interesting to see the lack of ornamentation in the church. It was amazing when they sang and the entire congregation sang in strong four part harmony. And then the special presentations for M’s dad began, with skits and rememberances and it was all very new and quite moving. And then I looked down the pew at M’s family. And they were all sobbing. Every last one of them including the in-laws. A tissue box kept going from lap to lap, up and down the row.

I had known M about four months at that point, which means we were two months from engagement and nine from marriage. And this kind of open display of emotion was not something my family ever engaged in. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did nothing but sit there and keep listening, figuring this would be over soon and all the sobbing would end.

After the service and lunch we gathered at the ping-pong house and the whole family sat down and one by one talked about what they were doing these days and how that was and what they were feeling and, sure enough, everybody was gushing all over again. This level of unabashed emotion was absolutely not something I had ever experienced in my own family and as I sat there with my future in-laws I was elated and terrified. I’m still not completely used to this aspect of being with them.

And of course, there was no beer. So as noted above, very different from my family.

So there we were heading off to see M’s extended family. Things started well, leaving the house only about a half hour later than we planned. The mountains start about twenty minutes from our driveway, which is where M’s lead-foot began to fight with her thriftiness and the thriftiness won, aided by the $4 a gallon gas. This meant that M (who does most of the driving on our trips) drove uncharacteristically slowly through the mountains. This also meant the risk of carsickness was dramatically reduced, and we made it through the mountains with some groaning and complaining (from both car and children) but no puking or blown hoses.

At our first stop to let the kids out and pee, I also got a cup of coffee at a fast-food joint. Walking back to the van I was about to ask M if she had brought much cash when she asked me, slightly panicked, if I’d seen her purse:
“Yes,” I said, “in the hat and glove boxes by the front door before we left.”
“Did you put it in the car?” she asked.
“Um, should I have?”
“Well, did YOU bring any money or a cell phone?”
At that moment I realized I had just spent 33% of the cash we had with us on a small cup of weak coffee.
“Don’t worry, I brought the checkbook” which I fished out of my backpack to find it had - one – check left in it. We also had one credit card with us so we weren’t really any worse off than our parents were in all the family trips we’d ever been on when we were kids. But since we are way too cheap to actually get a cash advance from our credit card we opted to sponge off family whenever we needed cash. Which in these modern times is seldom.

We got there eventually. The first night M’s family stayed at a motel together which gave us an opportunity to – yes – sit around and share again, as a big group. The kids also got to swim in the pool. The next morning we moved to M’s Uncle C and Aunt G’s house. Uncle C is a retired plumber. When they first retired they did what a lot of formerly hard-working retirees do, which is they bought a giant motor-home and drove it around with a car flopping along behind it. But they got tired of this pretty quickly and decided that retirement was for the birds so they went to their church and asked for something to do and were promptly sent to a small village in Guatemala to build schools and dorms and they’ve been doing that, eight or ten months a year, for years now. I look forward to retirement to putter and ride my bike but I guess they aren’t putterers.

That weekend in the Tidy Farm Town the Amish and Old-Order Mennonites were having a big flea market and sale for charity so we got to see a lot of those folks walking around and enjoying the weather and company. They don't like to have their pictures taken but their horses don't seem to mind.

Nor do their buggies.

Back at Uncle C and Aunt G's place;

Camp is being set up (no that's not our Westy, but it is our tent in the foreground and some of our clothes on the line), and;

Catch is being played, and;

Uncle C has started cooking on his elevated fire, which is something he learned in Guatemala. Under the fire, in the box, is wet dirt. This way he can cook over an open fire without having to bend over. Some of us were sure this contraption would burn to the ground before the weekend was over.

It was working fine when we left.

Of course, there were two more fires. The firepit is in the back, for recreational purposes, and the steaming cauldron in the front for hot water. And if you are wondering what we did with the water from the steaming cauldron, we mixed it with the cold running water from the sink mounted on a fence.

Have I mentioned Uncle C is a retired plumber?

This is where the recalcitrant blogger apologizes...

... but does not promise this won't happen again. He shamelessly throws in some cute pictures of his kids having fun......on one of the many trips and adventures (some of which he even remembered to bring the camera to) they have had this summer. I am sorry. I will try to do better.

But now I have to go back to sleep.

Why We Live Here - #3

Strawberries.

And not just that they grow around here but that they grow 21 steps from our front door.

And not just that they grow 21 steps from our door but that M's mom planted them.

And not just that M's mom planted them but she comes over and picks and prepares them (M helps too) so we can eat them at all hours and in all forms.

Oh and don't forget the peas, too. Mmmm.

Weekend Wrap-up

Weekends around here are always a bit chaotic. But it’s a familiar chaos that we’ve grown to, if not love, at least appreciate. But this past weekend was more. Chaotic. Than usual.

First, I thought I’d check out the surplus sale that one of our local universities has every year. I figured I’d get there 15 or so minutes early to be ahead of the crowd, which actually put me about halfway in the eventual ½ mile line waiting to get in. I was hoping to pick up some bikes cheap but by the time I found the bikes someone had already swooped in and picked up everything interesting. Oh well, I only had about 20 minutes there anyways because then it was on to….

Soccer Fest. We survived it. Barely. Older Boy had 3 games, each about 25 minutes long, at 8:30, 11:00 and 11:30. I brought all the kids with me so for most of the time they sweated, got sunburned, whined and waited in lines to get in or on the huge inflatable slides and bouncy rooms that were set up in strategic places around the edges of the soccer fields. I also lost the Girl, too, when she, apparently, got out of one of the bouncy rooms about 5 feet from where I was standing (and had been for hours) and inexplicably wandered off in the wrong direction. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which was probably part of the problem. I didn’t see her wander off, of course; it probably happened when I was trying to find the boys who were off either waiting in line for or in other bouncy rooms. So I’m craning my neck to see which of the zillions of kids in their gaudy polyester soccer jerseys is mine, and by the way, what color t-shirt did Younger Boy have on and where is that Girl? By the time I concluded that the Girl was really lost the boys were both in their bouncy rooms so I couldn’t set off to find her until they emerged. They weren’t impressed with me or the situation.
“Boys, your sister is lost and we’ve got to look for her.”
Older Boy – “Is it time for my next game?”
“No, its time for us to try to find your sister.”
OB – “I don’t want to go look for her.”
Younger Boy – “Yeah, the lines are really short here, you go look Daddy.”
“No, we are ALL going to stay together and shout your sister’s name until we find her or we collapse from heat exhaustion.”
OB – “It’s not FAIR! We didn’t lose her, you did!”
YB – “Can I have a hotdog?”
We found her, eventually. She saw us from a distance, squinted, came back towards us until she was about 10 feet from us and then, of course, burst into tears. When she finally calmed down enough to sob out some words she asked,
“Daddy, why did you get lost? I was trying to find you!”
Then we ate hotdogs and later….

I went to the mega home center to get a new screen door to replace the one the kids tore off the hinges by going in and out, singly, NEVER together, one billion times. Taking it out of the van and wrestling into the garage I noticed that the bad smell in the garage that I’d been denying for some time could no longer be denied….

So I traced it back to one corner and concluded it must be coming from the old sewing machine I got at a thrift store last year that had never smelled before. I opened it up and it sure smelled bad but maybe it wasn’t the machine itself but one of the garbage bags of clothes underneath and around it that I was supposed to have put up in the loft, um, ages ago. Yep, one of those bags was pretty smelly. As I gingerly pushed aside some clothes in the bag I saw fur, so I screamed and ran to find M of course.
“M, I think I found the source of the smell in the garage. There’s FUR in one of the bags of clothes”
“Fur?”
“Yeah, like some animal crawled in there and died or something. Come and take a look.”
“What kind of animal? What did you do with it?”
“A DEAD animal and I didn’t do anything with it. I don’t want to touch it.”
“ “
“ “
“Well at least drag the bag out of the garage so it doesn’t stink it up anymore. Which bag was it?”
“I think it said Girl 6-7.”
“Aw man, those were GOOD hand-me-downs.”
So I dragged it out to the driveway and left it because it was getting late and I’d already spent too much time obsessing over ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ that day.

The next morning when M went out to get the paper she confirmed that there was something dead in there alright and now there were flies. And she was preaching in a couple of hours so what were we going to do with it? The kids weren’t up and we hadn’t had coffee yet so we figured, what the heck, lets get this over with. We went outside in our pajamas and I dug a hole and then dumped the bag of clothes into a pile on the ground. I gingerly pulled clothes off the pile until M reported seeing the fur.
“So what do I do now?”
“BURY IT!”
Some people set aside special clothes to be buried in but this little possum was buried with girls size 7 pants and two shirts. R.I.P. stinky little fellow. And speaking of stinky little fellows….

Younger Boy has finally shed his training wheels and can ride a two wheeler. In the rain. With no shirt on.

Happy Airplane Day

On the Wednesday before Memorial Day 2001 we got a call from the agency we were working with to adopt a baby from Korea. We had done all the paperwork, background checks, inspections and notarizing and were expecting our boy to travel in July or August. They called to tell us he had passed his physical and was cleared to travel earlier then expected. This was great news! When might he arrive? Saturday. Umm, like in 3 days? We were not quite prepared, emotionally or otherwise. But we got the room painted, the crib assembled, house cleaned and got a friend to drive us to and from Dulles airport for the delivery. On Saturday morning, 7 years ago today we got our ride to the airport where 20 or so friends and family met us, along with another expectant family, someone from the adoption agency, all the other people who had reason to meet the Korean Air flight from Seoul and the other 10,000 people who are flowing in and out of Dulles at any moment. We waited, dazed, tired, excited for the arrival to be called and then the first people to come through the doors. When he left Korea the day before he was 4 months old to the day. The family that brought him over were some of the last people to come through immigration and customs that morning. But there, amid the “white zone is for loading and unloading…” and “unattended baggage will be confiscated and subject to…” announcements and all the rest of the airport hubbub we became parents. And this guy became our son. Happy airplane day 2008.

(Note cashmere romper. That is about as sensible a baby gift as a Porsche or a crackpipe. He wore it twice, for a total of 180 minutes. Thanks Heather!)

Yell and Spell

Hollered between the living room and the kitchen:

"What does a-u-r-r-y mean?"
"Aurry?"
"No! H-u-r-r-y"
"Oh, hurry, like what we always say to you when we're trying to go somewhere."
"What does L-a-u-r-a mean?"
"Laura, like Nesha's mommy."
"What does c-a-u-g-h-t mean?"
"Caught."
"No! C-a-u-G-h-t!"
"Right, caught, like 'I caught your cold'."
"Well that doesn't make much sense."
Welcome to the English language, sweetheart.