summer

it is thursday...school has been out for a whole week now and I am loving it!

 I feel like this is the time of year when I am most ME. I have all of the general life responsibilities to deal with (except going to work every day), but I get this piece of the year with it's wide open expanses of time to focus on things I value and it is wonderful! 

the windows and french doors stay open until dark as I start the massive dig into to all the projects that got postponed until summer... the front yard, the back yard, the garage, cleaning, tossing, reading, art projects and creating, new music downloaded on the ipod, immersion into BBC news and what is going on politically around the world, while I make sure the sand is swept out daily from treks to the beach. I plan summer sports camps, summer trips to "pass places" like Disneyland, Legoland and the Long Beach Aquarium and play dates with new friends and old friends. We eat ice cream cones, grilled hot dogs, steaks, teriyaki chicken, fresh strawberries, nectarines, corn, zucchini, pineapple and watermelon. The bikes are in the front yard most of the day, along with the water guns, basketball and dump trucks. Childhood... trying to keep the memories good so when Kaden looks back he remembers the great moments of fun!

the days are long, but the weeks will go by much too fast! Gotta soak it all in!

16 things about me

16 things you may or may not know about me:

1. My mom made all of my clothes until I was in Junior high, including my 1976 bicentenial celebration outfit that was based on clothes worn in 1776.

2. The first concert I went to was Dan Fogelberg's Innocent Age concert. Love the pensive folk music artist types.

3. My first teaching job was in the inner city where we regularly had gangs jumping the fence chasing other gangs and a 3rd grade girl in my class, dressed in a party dress brought an (unloaded) handgun to school for  "share time" one morning.

4. I love really high end chocolates, but cheap licorice.

5. I have been to 25 different countries in the last 15 years.

6. I have this compulsive need to finish a novel once I start it and will happily stay up till 3:00 am finishing a book I began at 9:00pm.

7. My dad qualified for Mensa, had a dual-major in geology-geophysics with an engineering physics minor, graduated magna sum laude with a BS.... but I graduated with a higher degree (a master's degree). (Not that I am claiming to be smarter, I'm just saying...)

8. The first book I read was Dick and Jane, at 4, because my grandmother, Elizabeth Rider Montgomery wrote it.

9. Lima beans make me itch.

10. I wish I could be a time traveler, but since it is not yet possible, I read to travel to times I can't visit.

11. I sing my son to sleep every night.

12. When I was a kid bought my mom Andy Williams album "Moonriver" for her birthday because I wanted it.

13. I am still in touch with my best friend from 3rd, 4th and 5th grade, Jeanine Surber Egner.

14. I still haven't met the man of my dreams, but I haven't given up hope God will bring him along.

15.  I think Childhood Magic should be encouraged and preserved through books, experiences and wonder for as long as possible.

16. The Chronicles of Narnia remain some of my favorite books of all time, followed by books by  Madeleine Engles, Orson Scott Card,  and Jody Piccoult. 

Somewhere over the rainbow

looking through the photos I have actually imported into my new (as of September) computer and I saw this one. 

LOVE this photo. It was taken in Colorado this summer out in front of Cascade Lodge, the place where "the friday night group" as we refer to ourselves, spent a week. (35 people..19 kids...all in one place...you imagine it!)

It rained, plans for the day were postponed, we all sat around and ended up having a day of conversations, talking about what we'd been learning as believers, sharing books: Jody Picoult's My Sister"s Keeper and The Shack, listening to ipods, making string bracelets, and brownies... 

then it appeared... this amazing double rainbow that spanned the horizon. There in the middle of nowhere in the Colorado mountains, without anything manmade to obstruct it's view...these two rainbows. The whole place was stilled.

As I looked out and saw Kaden standing there in awe, these words that I have sung to him every single night for the past two years (except in Decembers when I sing him to sleep with traditional Christmas carols)came to mind:

"Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue. And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true". 

Kaden and the promises God has given me with rainbows were all brought together in that perfect moment, surrounded by friends that are still connected 20 years  after we were all in a Friday night Bible Study. God has been good.

thankful for a family of 2

Before I go to bed tonight I want to spend a few minutes  remembering where I was two years ago. Two years ago I had just said goodbye to this little boy Aleksandr Sergeeivich Izmailov, aka Sasha. I had spent four days with him in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. From New Year's Day until Jan. 4th I was spending hours of the day at his orphange, using my rusty Russian skills to talk to his caretakers: Nina, Luba, etc., going for walks, playing with him and others in the orphanage who would soon be adopted. Soaking it all in. This 3, almost 4 year old boy would be my son. He had dreamt of me the night before I came.

Even now I can remember the swirl of impressions and emotions that had me SO off balance. I had met this tender, fiesty little soul who was to become my son. How do you forge that bond of parenthood in a moment? Like true love of all kinds, it was first a commitment and promise to love him, no matter what... but time with him, learning who he was, in another language, in a foreign place, was simply emotional. I had waited for two years in the adoption process and now here he was, Sasha...soon to become Kaden Aleksandr. This rare gift from God....entrusted to me. I can remember staying up late talking with Teri, my closest friend, who had traveled there with me, about my questions, and fears, and all the what-ifs. Yet in the end, after waving goodbye to that face in the window of the orphanage, I knew I could never leave him behind, he was meant to be my son.

Two years ago today Teri and I were sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Paris looking back on all our impressions with the distance of time and place. Enjoying the magic of foreign travel, yet trying to order all the images we had collected from Bishkek. It seems like it was yesterday, yet at the same time I can hardly remember life before K. We haven't been apart for even a night in the past two years. He is currently the small world I watch constantly and have had to keep all the satellites orbiting around.

and now he is sleeping, snoring slightly in his Christmas jammies and new cast on his arm, one of his cats, Pushkin, draped over his sleeping body. He's home, happy, still a tender soul, yet very fiesty, and growing so much. The journey has been more than slightly rocky, but oh so worth it in the end.

we are a family of two.

fresh start

a new year... although it is a somewhat artificial start to life, it allows me the illusion of possibilities, of hope, of writing on a blank page, starting anew with people, habits, intentions, etc. Somehow every January I reach into the new year thinking I will not be held back by apathy, fatigue, commitments, procrastination, stuff... the things that capture my hope and vitality on a daily basis. The new calendar year, like the new academic year bring possibility. In a world that can weigh me down with the pain, heartache and fear... today I see hope and a chance for joy.

like C. S. Lewis I long for a year where I am surprised by joy!