It's like this...

I was. Honest. I remember it quite clearly. Currently I have a 12 year old girl who reminds me a lot of me when I was her age. I had a boyfriend then and his name was Jesse. Jesse did some sweet things for me and once he even rode his ten-speed about 35 miles to a lake resort where my family had gone to camp that summer. Just to see me. So I remember what it's like to be that giddy 12 year old with a boy who is madly in love with you. My Alli is wonderful girl and it's no wonder that she's attracted the eye of some boys her own age. Her "boyfriend" Jaryd has given her flowers on Valentine's Day and other sweet things. I put the word boyfriend in parenthesis because they only see each other at school. And even while there, they don't sit together at lunch and he even had a friend give her the flowers he bought for her. So it's a kind of a sweet-middle-school kind of thing. She's only seen him outside of school twice--and both times I was t...

And we needed to do something good for our souls, so yesterday Lance and I surreptitiously packed a bag, grabbed our beach chair, some books and tippy toed out of the house before the children could stop us with hysterical "WHERE ARE YOU GOING AND WHY AREN'T YOU TAKING ME WITH YOU"'s. (Yes, that sentence makes fine grammatical sense to me, so hush) We really did sneak out. We ended up sitting here for few hours in the sunshine.... Ahhhh.....it was a slice of heaven and balm to our stressed out hearts. The sand was warm between my toes and the sun had just the right amount of warmth to it--not too blisteringly hot and not hiding behind any clouds. In fact it was perfect. See what I mean?======> After a few hours the wind showed up and we decided that we'd go for a drive and look around at other beaches and some neighborhoods there on Whidbey Island. Of course we crossed the Deception Pass Bridge first. I always get a case of the heebie jeebies doing ...

When I walked through the doors of Wonderland ten and a half years ago, I was carrying a tiny baby girl and a very heavy heart. I'd been told that my baby daughter probably wouldn't walk or talk because of her stroke. Coming to Wonderland was my defiant fist shaking in the face of such devastating news. The first person I talked to was Marilyn. Marilyn was the director of Wonderland, a birth to three therapy organization that helped disabled or delayed children to reach their maximum potential. She was a thin gray haired woman with big glasses and an even bigger heart. At a time when most medical professionals were counseling parents of disabled infants to place them in state run institutions, Marilyn was working with moms to form a loose knit group who cared for those the medical community deemed damaged and irreparable. If you go into a state run institution for the mentally handicapped these days you will find the adult disabled who were turned over to the state as infan...

I did it! Well, ok I had help. We got the back patio cleared off, took the weeds out from between the cement blocks, then pressure washed the whole thing. As I had my girls out there picking weeds from between the cement I had a flashback to my youth. I did the very same thing under the supervision of my mother. She'd give us knives and we'd dig and scrape and yank and make the patio weed free. Those weeds were so tough I wouldn't be a bit surprised to know that some of them were the very same ones I'd pulled as a child. Allison and Ashley were a big help to me. Chris even did s bit of the hard stuff before he left to hang with his friends. I was grateful for their help. After the poking and digging and yanking there was much sweeping to be done. My girls helped with that as well. I was determined to have a back yard barbecue if it killed me---or them. Ok, just me. After that was done, it was time to pressure wash. I've done something like this before,...

Last night my son....my only son....graduated from high school. Here he is with some friends after the ceremony was over. He was so excited, it was wonderful to see him like that. The day before his graduation we had a family/friends barbecue at my sister's house (thanks Julie!) for him and his cousin Cody, shown here. It was wonderful. Yesterday morning in church, I was sitting with him and I put my arm around his shoulders. He leaned his head down on my shoulder for the longest time and I remembered times in that very pew when he was a tow-headed toddler with the biggest blue eyes. I started to cry and he whispered in my ear, "Don't cry because it's over Mom, smile because it happened"

Have you noticed a decidedly unfriendly turn among drivers lately? I have. I'm one of those polite drivers who allow people to go in front of me when they're attempting to merge---even if they are idiots and are merging badly. I am nice. No, I am. I will allow someone to enter traffic from the driveway of a store parking lot if I see there is no hope of them making it out of there before breakfast the following day due to the amount of traffic behind me. I am nice. I don't expect much for my kindness. Just the wave. Is that too much to ask? You know the wave. The Thank-you-for-letting-me-in-wave. It's really not that hard to do and doesn't take much time or even muscle. Simply give a hand gesture--a nice one---that says thank you for allowing me to go. Three times yesterday I allowed someone to merge, to get in front of me. One lady who was attempting to get into my turn lane from two lanes over was also the recipient of my kind nature. I let her in. Sh...

Will Soon Be Graduating From High School This means, in some small measure, I have successfully managed to get him through 12 years of school and to the age of 18 alive. No small accomplishment, that. Today he called for a ride home after he rode the bus most of the way to our house. As it was about 90 degrees outside, I obliged. I'm a good mom, plus it got me out of a very hot house and into the sweet deliciousness of my air conditioned vehicle. My oldest and youngest daughters went along for the ride and they spotted The Boy before I did. "What's up with his pants?" Indeed. The operative word for his pants was up . He wears those extremely skinny jeans and he'd rolled them up to about knee level and he was walking towards us with a grimace on his face. He was in pain. You see, five hours earlier, in the throes of near heat exhaustion, he rolled the legs of his pants up and then his legs swelled up. He was unable to remove his own pants or roll down what he...

Today I stepped out of my nicely-chilled-to-perfection suburban and into...well, somewhere south of Heaven. It was hot. I was not happy. I'd been sitting my suburban, ac hitting me full blast in the face as I pondered how to get twenty students into my vehicle in order to teach them Spanish for the day. Alas, I was unable to come up with any way in which they would all fit--which is why I reluctantly turned the key off, opened the door and got hit with a blast furnace in the face. Ugh. As I walked across the courtyard to my classroom, I marveled at how different the very air feels when it's so warm. It's thicker somehow, but that's part and parcel of having so much humidity I suppose. So I taught Spanish today. In the middle of teaching, I reached for my half-empty water bottle and dumped it right down my shirt. You should have seen the looks on the student's faces. I never missed a beat and just kept on with what I was doing, ignoring the audible gasp and g...