Moved

No, I have not given up writing and posting photos and I have not fallen off the planet - during November and December we sold the 1500 sq ft house we owned for 7 years and moved into a 750 sq ft duplex a mile down the road.  We didn't widely publicize our move because one of the several reasons for selling our house was because of rumors that Joel's division at work was being sold or closed, but the official announcement about selling his division has now been made and thankfully we don't expect for him to need to start job hunting.

I made a website for our house to help market the property (t was a challenging photography project for me, and I was rather pleased with how it turned out!  I think good real estate photography is actually pretty challenging, at least for my level of ability.  You can see it by clicking HERE), and that project helped me emotionally detach from the house early on and view it more as merchandise we were trying to market.  Even so, it has been a challenging mixture of emotions, fatigue, stress, and anticipation.  I am a perfectionist, so showing the house 3-4 times a week meant I was cleaning and staging the house 3-4 times a week.  We have been downsizing our possessions through donations, garage sales, craigslist, and gifts.  This is a wonderfully freeing experience overall, but is still confusingly painful as I relinquish ownership of things that I am accustomed to having around me though I know I will be happy without them.  Prepping the house for sale, maintaining it, and preparing to move have consumed much of my time and energy over the last few months, so I have felt torn between the time needed for housekeeping and time with the girls and time for private quiet and grief processing even more that average.

The distraction of selling the house has also helped me appreciate how much writing the blog has helped me process my experiences and feelings.  I do not consider myself a writer (outside of the scientific papers I produced in school) and have never taken to journaling.  I am an extrovert, and so I have found it immensely valuable to have friends around me (meaning both locally in town and here through my online sputterings) who want me to be honest about what I am thinking, feeling, and experiencing.  I think that is why writing the blog is more effective for me than private journaling - for me the public nature of the blog holds me more accountable to being honest, whereas in a private journal I am more apt to play games with myself and become frustrated.

We moved a week before Christmas and settled in just in time to travel east to be Joel's family over Christmas.  It was a delightful week with his family.  Being in a completely different setting with so many other people to make decisions helped me slowly let go of the stress and pressures that had built up over the last few months.  Plus, one of my Christmas presents from Joel was that he was mostly in charge of the girls for the week, which took some getting used to and was quite nice!  Sorry, no Christmas photo collections - I decided to leave my camera at home and just enjoy the time without the distraction of my lens.

We are now home and happily settling in to our new living space.  The whole transition itself was very smooth for Joel and me, the girls, and even our three cats (except for maybe Tabitha, our outdoor cat, who is still being transitioned in and out of the garage).  I'll sure I'll be getting the camera out again soon an posting more regularly.

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!

All Saints' Day

I spent a lot of time talking to the girls this year about why we choose not to celebrate our culture's typical Halloween.  They were incredibly intrigued with all the decorations and costumes, and eventually all the candy being marketed on every aisle.  They dress up so often anyway, and are certainly not deprived of treats, so they understood that they were not missing out on those aspects.  The big reason that we talked about is that, to us, it does not treat death appropriately.  This idea came up a lot because for some reason the decorations in the grocery store and around town seemed especially focused on death and gore.

Death has been a frequent topic for us this year, so it was natural to continue our conversations about what death means, how we feel about it, and how we remember those who have died.  On one hand, as Christians, we can laugh at "death" because it has no hold on us.  On the other hand, life and death are sacred and we believe they should be respected and honored.  

That led us to talking about All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day - Halloween comes from "All Hallows' Eve;" the eve of "All Hallows' Day," or All Saints' Day.  November 1 and 2 are the days on which the western church remembers those who have died in the faith.  My prayer book of the Daily Offices reminded me earlier this week that "although popular thinking tends to honor only the canonized saints, scripture names all Christians as 'Saints'," so I was already reflecting upon that when Elsa asked me if we could celebrate All Saints' Day.  I remember one of the churches I attended in the past lighting candles and remembering all those in the congregation and their relatives who had died that year, but beyond that I had no other framework on which to base a celebration, so we made one up!

We decided to have candles, a picture of each person we were remembering and thanking God for, flowers, prayer, singing, and apple pie (Elsa's request)!

Elsa wanted to draw a picture of each person we were remembering, and she picked a flower especially for each one from our garden.  We remembered Oliver:

My grandfather Myron, who died a week before Oliver,

Krupa, a little girl in India that I knew and loved who died about a month before Oliver:

and Mister Rogers, who did not die this year, but Elsa wanted to remember him too:

She set it all up - and even though she looks somber in these pictures she really enjoyed the whole evening - she was just concentrating!

We talked about what we remembered about and learned from each one.  We sang "For All the Saints" with a congregation on YouTube (during which Elsa danced and joined in for the "Allelulia"s).  We watched an episode of Mister Rogers.  We offered thanksgiving to God for those we miss and prayed the All Saints' Day collect from the Book of Common Prayer, and then ate apple pie (sorry, no photo of the pie, but it was yummy!).

I cried some when we prayed and sang, and thanked God for a new family tradition, especially one developed by my five year old!

Oliver-Krupa Memorial Fund

When I mentioned Krupa in the previous post about All Saints' Day, I realized that I forgot to finish and publish this post explaining what we chose to do with Oliver's memorial funds.  Better late than never, so here it is, and it will explain more why Krupa was and is dear to me.

To those who we knew send a gift, we thanked them with a note that read as follows:

"Thank you for donating to Margham in honor of Oliver Michael Dunham. Margham is a non-profit mission organization that supports local pastors, churches, and orphanages in India, and was started by Oliver's grandfather, Darrell Dunham. A few weeks before Oliver died, a young girl who lived in a Margham orphanage named Krupa died from complications from AIDS. We have decided to use the gifts from Oliver's memorial to create a special “Oliver-Krupa” fund that will be set aside and used for special and emergency medical needs of the children in the Margham orphanages. We feel so blessed to have had access to so many medical resources as we cared for Oliver, and your gift will be used to help underprivileged Indian children in medical emergencies or with serious medical conditions. Thank you so much. To learn more about Margham please visit www.margham.org."

I remember Krupa as a quiet but bright child who loved to dance and lead singing during the daily worship at the children's home.  I know her "family" at the children's home miss her dearly, but, together with them, I look forward to dancing with her one day before our Lord's throne.

 (Krupa is in the light yellow dress in the front row)

Mopping

How to mop the dining room:  

1. Select and wear favorite tiara.  Or even just the one that fits you best.

2. Select and wear coordinating fancy dress-up shoes.  They make a satisfying "clip-clop" on the tile.

3. Make sure you have everything you need in your handbag.

4. Wear your sunglasses, so then if you miss a spot you can't tell.

5. Move so fast that you give the appearance of working really hard.

Vicarious farm life

There is a part of me that loves wearing tall rubber boots and mucking about with farm animals.  A bigger part of me enjoys letting someone else get up before dawn to milk the cows and feed the chickens.

We've been getting our milk fresh from a small local ranch for several years now, and the girls and I wear our boots and live vicariously through our friend who does all the real, daily, hard work to run the place. Recently one of the mama cows wouldn't keep her baby, so they've been bottle feeding the calf, and the girls were delighted to help.

 

The mama cows are not quite as interesting, but there is one that is often more curious and friendly.

A few weeks ago Elsa commented thoughtfully, after spending a few quiet moments observing the pigs, that "pigs have such busy lives.  They sleep and eat and get in the water and lie down and get up and snort and run around and smell each other!  They are so busy!"  Sheesh, their routine makes my day look lazy!

Among the dogs and cats at "our" farm is an obnoxiously friendly cat that has been named "Annoying" by the grown-ups and who is the delight of every child that visits.  He even got smuggled home with one of them and had to be driven back!  Elsa loves it when he jumps in our car, but thankfully we've caught him each time!

And when we have had our fill of throwing acorns to the pigs and Nora stepping in fresh cow paddies, we drive the 15 minutes back to our house in town, take off our boots, and are thankful those who do get up in the morning to do the milking.

What happened at the Pumpkin Patch

The girls have been bouncing off the walls more than usual lately, so I was just as excited a they were to find that the pumpkin patch we went to this year has a HAY JUMP!!!  This is nothing incredibly special or organized, just a pile of hay and some bales to jump off from.  And it was FREE!  and Mommy didn't fuss, because it wasn't the furniture!

Nora and Elsa both discovered new skills that day - Nora finally figured out how to join the family in making not only a funny face, but a DIFFERENT funny face in each photo:

Well, I'll give her credit for trying in that last one.  And Elsa figured out how to whistle!  All on her own!

The best part (for me) was that she was so happy about it that she actually gave me a REAL smile!  She is a pro at those fake five-year-old photo smiles, so that was pretty exciting for me.  Joel is rather proud of her whistle and has been helping her try to do different notes and tunes.

Kitty love

Tabitha Twitchit is a very, very happy cat.  She purrs and paws the ground every time she just even sees us, and when we pay attention to her, which we do regularly, she flops down and rolls and stretches to make sure we've scratched and petted every spot.  She especially loves rolling on the rocks (I think it's like a big back scratch) and having her belly rubbed, and Elsa is happy to oblige her at every opportunity.