Their World

 

“Does Leo go to Calypso’s Island?”  she asked.

It was as if she was speaking a foreign language.  “What?”  I asked in return.

“Does Leo go to Calypso’s Island?”  she asked again, still the same question which still meant less than nothing to me.  But then she changed it the third time, “Dad, does Leo go to Calypso’s Island?” 

“What on earth are you talking about???” I asked her.  And she told me it was something about the book “The Mark of Athena,” which she was reading and she knew Russ had read.

 

It was interesting in that moment to see the thought processes happening in my head.  “I should read the rest of those Percy Jackson books.  I really should.  He’s read them, and several of the kids have, and I’m totally on the outside of this world and these conversations.  I should read them.”

But another thought crept into my brain, slowly around the edges as these frantic need-to-be-a-part-of-this thoughts were occupying the center.  And this other thought, this calm and relaxed thought, said, “Don’t.” 

“Don’t read it.  Let it be their thing.  His and hers.  His and theirs.  Let them have a place of connection that is theirs alone.  Resist the impulse to need to be everywhere.  To be everything.”

 

And so I won’t.  I have plenty of books to read, after all.  Instead I will smile when I hear them talking what seems like gibberish to me.  And I will be delighted.

Overheard at the dinner table

One morning last month a couple of industrious birds built a nest right by our back door.  The eggs must have hatched while we were on vacation, because we could tell when we got back and worked out in the yard that they were very worried every time we were out there.  They would perch in various places around the yard chirping, but would never go back up to their nest.

Rachel (who of all my children still at home is most interested in my cameras) stalked them from inside the house to get some pictures of the little birds and the parent birds.

I hadn’t realized what great pictures she got—she was persistent! Every time she would watch the “birdlets” (that’s what we called them) she would give us an update on how they seemed to be doing, what they sounded like, and how the parents seemed to be doing.

Tonight she came to the dinner table looking down.  She explained that she hadn’t seen the birds at all today, and so they must have learned to fly and left the nest.

I agreed that if they had learned to fly, the parent birds might have decided that there were better places to hang out than right by our busy back door.

And then Josh said, “We’d probably better go ahead and have a bird funeral, just in case.  And we can name them Pecky 2, Pecky 3, and Pecky 4—you know, the best friends we never knew!” 

The kids laughed and laughed and we talked about them burying that poor dead bird years ago.  How is that 4 years can be so long ago??

Family Night Fun

We had a great (though slightly ADD) family night lesson on what it does and does not mean if we say we “know the church is true.”  (Part of our series of family night lessons on controversial church topics.)  After the lesson Josh went to work on the computer and Russ & I played Ticket to Ride with the triplets.  I have to say that they are old enough now that playing with 5 people and the American expansion pack is pretty much like a full out brawl.  I was completely blocked out of one of my cities within the first few moves.  Jenna, we discovered, is completely a game pessimist.  She was sure that every move anyone else made was going to ruin her game.   And Russ—well this was a side of Russ we rarely see.  He spent most of the game growling!  Rachel could have ended the game before anyone else was done, but she was kind and let us all finish.  What a crazy game!

Choosing Oregon

About 2 years before we moved to Oregon my cousin’s husband’s job changed policies and they had to relocate from a moderately rural area on the outskirts of Atlanta to the San Diego area.  She has been one that has commented on my blog over the last two years with real understanding of how painful it has been.

I just read on her blog that her husband has taken a new job and they are moving to South Carolina.  I was astonished.  Stunned, even.  South Carolina?!?  Land of huge cockroaches and humidity and fireflies and honeysuckle.  Wherever she is in South Carolina, it can’t be too long from the warm beach—which sounds just like paradise to me.

Earlier this year I found out that one of our Durham friends had gotten a new job and after only a year away was moving back to North Carolina, to a city about 2 hours further south.  Let’s be honest—I was consumed with envy.

And yet…

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After we got back from our spring break in Utah this year my younger kids started doing a lot of “living in Oregon” grumbling.  Which is unusual for them because they have had so many good experiences living here.  Now you may think this grumbling is because they’re picking up on my vibe, but I’m very careful to keep my vibe out of their sight.  They know the move has been difficult for me (they would have to be unconscious to have missed that one) but I really have worked to be positive around them about living in Oregon.  I do my working-through-difficult-feelings here or with my friends, but not within earshot of them.

Anyway, I started to be concerned about the grumbling and decided for the end of the school year to assign a 5 paragraph essay on “why living in Oregon is a good thing.”   And do you know what, by the time the essays were all the way done (which I hate to admit was a few days after school was done) their attitudes had changed and the grumbling had slowed down or stopped.

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When we were in Durham I got asked frequently how the kids were doing, or variations on that theme.  And what I said comes back to me in this moment, the moment when I learn that someone else is lucky enough to be moving back to the southeast. 

I loved living in Durham.  I LOVED living in Durham.  I will cherish our time there for the rest of my life.  But Oregon is great for my kids.  They are happy here.  They have so many opportunities here that they never could have had in North Carolina.  They have friends who live only blocks away and a youth program that is big and thriving.  They can take classes at the schools and will get to go to released-time seminary.  I love seeing them having all of these great experiences—experiences I never expected that we would be able to provide for them. 

It’s interesting to have this dichotomy.  This is such a terrific place for our kids, while it’s still not what I would have chosen.  But because of how good it is for our kids, now I would choose it.  Even though I’ll be (figuratively) waving goodbye to my cousin while holding a sign that says “totally jealous” with my other hand.

Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine

One night we were sitting at the big table in the beach house playing The Game of Things.  (An excellent and always hilarious game—we highly recommend it.)  The format is easy and always funny.  The reader reads a prompt that starts “Things that…” and then it continues with something like “you shouldn’t do in a cemetary,”  or “you shouldn’t say to your boss,” or “will keep you out of heaven.”  And on and on.  I’m sure you get the idea.  Then you try to guess who wrote each answer.  One of the interesting things about this type of game is that themes develop over the course of a game.  We’re still laughing about the time that everyone’s answers included some variation of Dick Cheney shooting someone.  Or the time the good answers included Lindsay Lohan and/or (probably and!) viagra.

I can’t remember what the first prompt was that night, but someone’s answer was “Can’t help loving that man of mine.”  It was repeated over and over again in different variations for the rest of the night.  The highlight was probably when Mahon (who was trying to figure out if he knew who had written a particular answer) asked Jason, “Jason, are you ‘Loving that man of mine?’”  Awesome moment.

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I was just looking through some pictures from the beach this year that I hadn’t looked at before.  In the middle of a group shot with everyone doing their own version of crazy, I saw this:

And when I saw it, I promise you I thought, oh yes.  That is who he is.  Sweet.  Cute.  Slightly mischievous.  And that is exactly how I feel about him.  Entertained.  Amused.  Delighted.  Because I really can’t help loving that man of mine.

It doesn’t always feel that way, of course.  Life gets in the way so much of the time and and we feel more business than bliss.  But then we have a moment like this long weekend, where we end up getting to do a lot of things together.  We talked and laughed and planned and dug bamboo.  It was a great two days, and I felt exactly the way that picture shows me looking at him.  Can’t help it, you know. 

Overheard at the Dinner Table

The kids were talking tonight about what kind of pet they will get when Josh leaves on his mission.  (I made a limited promise a few months ago about this.)  Though I’ve only promised one or two types of pets, they were throwing around all sorts of ideas including a bearded lizard or a ferret.  (Neither one on the short list.) 

Josh suggested: I know just what you can get them, a group of pets that will both entertain and teach them about the circle of life.  You get them a pair of fancy mice, and then you get them a snake.  Let the mice breed and have babies.  Then you feed one of the babies every week to the snake…

At this point a great uproar broke out around the table, the rest of the children insisting that they would never feed their mice to a snake/that they hate snakes/that they really want a ferret/bearded dragon.  Chaos. 

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The best part about it?  The best part is that I’m noticing that sometimes now I don’t have to insist that the kids all stay at the dinner table for a while after they’re done eating as I have for years now.  Sometimes I notice that they’re just…staying…

Free Range Kids

Several years ago I read the book “Free Range Kids.”  I was already sort of a free range type mom, but this book solidified and intensified my desire to provide my kids this kind of life—a life where they felt that the world was safe enough to explore without me hovering behind them at every step of the way.

Oregon has been a great place for this—the kids have often gone over to hang out with their friends at the local elementary school that is in our neighborhood—where sometimes they do things I’m not too happy about when I see the pictures later.  (I found this picture on my phone after one trip to the school.)  They also have gone on long walks and Jared goes frequently to a small skate park about a mile and a half away. 

This year when we were making travel plans to go to NC to the beach, Olivia’s mom asked if Rachel & Jenna could stay longer with their family.  Cindy Lynn and Jason each spent a month in Utah the summer they were 15; traveling on their own, armed with a cell phone and directions and phone numbers to call in case of an emergency.  The girls aren’t quite 14 but I figured that traveling together would make up the age and maturity difference.

I knew that Olivia’s mom would take them to their gate, but on our flight out to NC we taught them the different steps of the rest of the flight process—how to find your flight info on the monitors, how to find your gate, how to read the map of the airport terminal.  We looked up online to see what food places were available in the terminal they’d be flying into in Las Vegas.  We activated an old phone and got some cash.  We told them that we thought they would have a great time and that they would be *just fine* traveling without us. 

And then we left them in NC and flew home.

The boys and I flew the exact same itinerary on Wednesday so I knew that they’d be landing in Las Vegas right at 9 this morning.  Sure enough, within a few minutes my cell phone was buzzing with text messages reporting that the flight was long, boring, and uneventful.  Apparently the highlight was the little snack packs of cookies and finding out that one of the drink service options was hot chocolate.  (How did I not know this?  That would have been most excellent at 7AM the other morning!)  Pretty soon I received this picture, a permanent record of their adult-less trip through the Las Vegas airport.

 

I’m happy to have them back here with us.  But I’m even happier that they’ve had this experience—that they’ve done something bold and grown up and that they’ve lived to tell about it.  I hope that it makes them feel like they are going to be just fine in the world, that it is not too scary of a place.  Because, after all, they flew home from North Carolina by themselves!

(I think Russ needs a refresher course on focusing the camera before taking the picture.)