English: “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Things I am thankful for:
Yep, today has been one of those days. It all started on Monday. Cricket and Thumper started a new daycare on Monday and as I was talking with their new babysitter for a minute before I left, one of the other kids came running up and wrapped herself around the woman’s legs. The poor girl’s eyes were goopy and crusty and generally icky-looking. Of course, that’s if you looked closely, which I didn’t until the babysitter, we’ll call her Melanie, mentioned it. “Oh, don’t worry about Kimmy’s eyes,” she said. “She’s had this eye infection since she was born and no one knows what it is, but her parents are gonna take her back to the doctor and get it checked out. It’s not contagious; we’ve never had a problem with other kids getting sick.”
Okay, I thought, unconvinced. Cricket has his mother’s immune system. What in the world does that mean, you ask? It means that I catch everything and since we have four kids, all of whom are in school and/or daycare, it means we are exposed to a metric crap-ton of germs in this house. If the kids come down with something, it’s only a matter of time before I catch whatever it is they have.
That’s right, I’ve finished Chapter 7! I plan to get a good start on Chapter 8 tomorrow, assuming I don’t have to spend all day in Convenient Care with Cricket, who seems to have a nasty eye infection thanks to a little girl at his new daycare. He seems particularly susceptible to eye infections; this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Hopefully it’ll clear up quicker than last time, though.
Anyway, here’s a snippet from Chapter 7. Happy weekend!
“Don’t worry, my dear,” Narok said, offering his arm and bestowing on Luta one of his most winning smiles as Ramila disappeared into the crowd. “I could never abandon a lady as lovely as yourself to the cruelty of solitude. Shall we take a turn about the room?”
Luta glowed under the warmth of his praise. “That is exceedingly kind of you, good sir, but surely there are others with whom you would rather spend your time?”
“Nonsense! What could be finer than the company of a beautiful woman?”
She hid her smile behind her fan, but the sound of her laughter bubbled up from behind it. “If you keep complimenting me like that, Maru Doon, I fear I may not be able to leave the room. I will have no choice but to stay here and listen to you forever.”
He laughed, though he sensed she was only half-joking. “That would not be altogether bad, would it?”
“Maru Doon, what are you talking about?” Luta’s smile faded; the mirth was now gone from her voice.
“You know your place, my dear, and I find that quality singularly pleasing in a woman, especially one of your caliber,” he said evasively. “I find that knowledge of one’s duty and one’s place in society can make an otherwise ordinary person remarkably attractive, don’t you?”
Luta nodded, desperately hoping he didn’t think her ordinary. “I am nothing, sir, if not devoted to my duties as a woman and a citizen of our great kingdom. I think you will not find me ordinary.”
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
One day in 1202 a boy named Jack told a legend to Trey in 1995. A little boy named Steve disappeared on Halloween night, trick or treating. A ***** took him. The legend says that he was found the next morning DEAD! One person knows what took him and that person is Tom Smith. So Trey died of fright.
If you want to know what took him it will cost 5 bucks.
Note: I’ve been advised that the thing that took him was a ghost, but the author wanted to get people excited about the story, so he crossed out the word ghost and replaced it with a shaded box. Nine years old and already a writer after my own heart.
Bubbles brought the preceding story home from school a week or so back. He had written it for a project and set it rather unceremoniously on my desk in a pile with everything else from his Friday Folder. I was tickled to see one of his stories because it seems like they all end up at his dad’s house. His teachers have been telling me for years now that he is very creative and that they love reading his stories, which naturally makes me extremely proud. As a matter of fact, his teacher invited me to speak to their class at his last conference when she found out that I write.
I love the way he ended his tale. It reminds me of many of the things I wrote as a youngster. I only hope that his love of storytelling will stay with him as he grows up.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
I said in my post yesterday that twenty-four was a banner year, but twenty-five ranked right up there with it. We spent the better part of the year planning the wedding and the honeymoon, getting details worked out and being generally happy and excited and everything else that is good. At Easter, I was confirmed in Seymour’s church after completing the RCIA program. That was one of the biggest decisions we had made thus far in our life together; his family is devoutly Catholic and mine is Presbyterian. My family didn’t seem very happy about my decision to convert, but it’s not like I was changing religions or something. I simply changed my denomination. After all, Catholics and Protestants do worship the same God, do believe in the same afterlife, do read more or less the same Bible. It’s not like I joined a cult or something.
My first year of college was an eventful year in more ways than I had ever anticipated. I was the only kid in my class who dreaded high school graduation; though I was excited about the new opportunities I would have in college, I was terrified of leaving my friends behind and starting over. A few people from my school went to the same college I chose to attend and, as a private college, it was much smaller than the state universities so the class sizes were comparable to what I’d experienced in high school.
It used to be that at age sixteen, you could get your driver’s license and hit the road, but when I was a teenager, Iowa passed a graduated licensure law. What it amounted to was that at sixteen, assuming you had passed driver’s ed when you were fourteen and then passed your driving test down at the DMV, you would be granted a restricted license. You were not allowed to drive between the hours of midnight and six a.m. You would receive your full (unrestricted) license at seventeen, assuming that you hadn’t been involved in any accidents or received any speeding tickets or anything during the preceding year.
What does all this have to do with a post about the age of eighteen? Well, when I was twelve, my dad stopped driving and sold our car. He’d been suffering from seizures (which had been misdiagnosed for years as TIAs and weren’t correctly diagnosed for many more years) that would cause him to lose his vision sometimes, so he voluntarily gave up driving.
Yesterday I took a day off from most social media, with the exception of a Facebook post (I heart The Princess Bride!) and a couple of Twitter updates. Partly I was trying to get caught up on what I’d missed Friday and Saturday, but mostly I was spending a lovely rainy day with family. I had a productive day, even if it wasn’t exactly productive in all the ways I had hoped it would be.
But! That was yesterday, not when I was fourteen. That’s the age we’re up to, as I recall. Fourteen, what a year. I was still living with my aunt the first part of that year, but that fall I started high school. Once again I’d gone from the top of the heap to the bottom of the totem pole. But with an awesome circle of friends, I was sure it would be a fantastic four years.
Mommy’s big little boy
Photo by Kay Kauffman
Suddenly I’m reminded of those old Iowa State commercials, the ones that asked what you wanted to do with your four years. Or maybe they asked how you wanted to spend them. That might have been it. Tomcat and I saw one once when he was four and he looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I want my four years to last forever so I can stay your little boy.”
Ah, thirteen, that magical age that most parents dread. And with good reason – the teen years are notorious for being way worse than the terrible two or troublesome threes ever dreamed of being. My teen years were every bit as dramatic as any soap opera, and I’m sure everyone can relate.
An avid diarist, I read back through some of them once some years ago and realized that a.) as a teen, I was truly awful and b.) if my kids are anything like me, my uppance will come. All my teenage entries were generally some sort of variation on the theme, “Blah blah blah my life is awful blah blah blah everything sucks blah blah blah no one likes me blah blah blah I am undateable blah blah blah my life is over.”
Naturally, being a teenager, there was a whole lot more swearing in there. There were even some pictures cut out of magazines and taped in for posterity and late-night drooling. There were also the requisite doodles of hearts and boys’ names.
I’ve been trying to get a bunch of things done today, so I’ve been ignoring my computer. When I finally took a few minutes to check my email, I noticed I had a new one from my aunt with some information about where I could view my cousin’s wedding pictures online (I posted a few of them back in July when I wrote about the wedding – you can read that post here).
I just finished looking at the pictures. They were awesome! Aaron Borchers did their wedding photography and he did an absolutely fabulous job. But that’s not what this post is about. As I was looking through the pictures, one member of the wedding party stood out to me (and no, I don’t mean the bride, though she was gorgeous, or the groom, who looked quite dashing in his tux).
More memories from the year I turned twelve are this-a-way! Follow me!
Suddenly they all died. The end. 