Chesed

On Wednesday Marilyn went to school for the very first time.  I called her that evening to see how her day went and our phone conversation went something like this:

Me:  How was school today?

Marilyn: It was fine.

Me: (thinking inside, ok?  is that all?)  After a few more prelimininary questions, I finally hit the right one.  “Then what happens when you go to your classroom?”

Marilyn: Well, see, you can do whatever you want to before the bell rings.  And then if you have any hot food in your lunch you have to take it downstairs before you go to your classroom.

Me: I see.  And did you have any hot food today?

Marilyn: No.

Me: (after a bit more rambling)  How did you feel when you got home?  Were you really tired or were you still feeling all excited?

Marilyn:  Um, I’m not really sure.

Me: I bet you’re going to feel tired tonight because you did so many new things in one day.

Marilyn: Yeah, I think I am tired and I think I have a little bit of a headache because I fell down two times today.

Me: Oh, no.  What were you playing? 

Marilyn: Ummmm, I think it was called prisoners team or something like that.  That game is so confusing.  It’s like, am I allowed to be on this team?

Later, in another conversation with her little sister, Rochelle, I sensed that, “awe-struck by my big sister who gets to do all these cool things” feeling.  “You know what?  Marilyn, they were playing a game [pause] at school [pause] and it was so confusing. [chuckle chuckle]”

Adam was completely upset after Rochelle left and described it all emphatically.  “No but see, Rochelle was supposed to be du wife and she just went to work wif me and I didn’t want her to.”  (They’d been playing w/ his tools, tool box, and tool belt out on the front porch). 

Me: You didn’t want her to go to work with you?

Adam: No, because see, she was du wife, and I would just go to work.

Me: (curious about his perception of my role)  So what was Rochelle supposed to do?

Adam: She was just supposed to walk around and see if everything is still ok.

Today was Cameron’s turn.  Innocent and co-operative as they look, I find babies to be a lot more difficult when it comes to getting great photos.  Their little arms flail and stretch, they must blink twice as much and squint a lot of the time.  Their smiles are oh-so-fleeting.  But no one can deny that soft baby skin and tiny features are just adorable.  I hope his mommy will be pleased.

And, oh, how I am still dreaming of that certain camera (and a better editing program for the computer).  Until then, at least I can have fun.

I’ve been wanting to stain the decking on our front porch ever since David Lee and I screwed it down last summer.  Last week I decided it was time to make it happen.  David Lee brought home sanders and smoothed out the roughest parts and I bought solid-color stain.  After four hours of kneeling on a blitzing hot deck Saturday, I was roughly three-fifths of the way done and out of stain.  It completely changed the look and I had the typical quandry while painting.  It happens every time.  Three boards into it I was all excited.  Wow!  What a difference!  I love this color.  Two hours into the game I was second-guessing myself, the color, the decision to paint and worried to bits that we’d just made a huge mistake. 

We kept Goldi in her kennel until the next morning so the porch had plenty of time to dry.  Monday I went to get more stain.  By the time I got home I realized we had a problem.  I really liked how the siding looked so much whiter on the side of the porch that was painted (as opposed to an orangey-glow on the side that wasn’t) and how the porch looked bigger and more inviting.  I did NOT like how you could see every spot Goldi had touched.  She likes to hang out under the front porch where she gets unbelievably covered with orange dirt.  There were paw prints the length of  the porch only, of course, you couldn’t see them where I hadn’t painted. 

Yesterday I finished staining the porch and barely noticed my sore knees.  (Perhaps that was due to the phone in my left hand.)  Two and a half hours later I stuck the brush in a can of gas, cleaned up the supplies and surveyed the porch.  Lovely and terrible.  Mom was right.  That orange dirt stains!  There is no such thing as just sweeping it off.  Grabbing a bucket, I scrounged around for the greased lightening and started scrubbing.  Slow going.  I sprayed Greased Lightening directly on the wet floor board.  Uh, oh.  Too strong for the stain.  More scrubbing. 

For the next hour, I scrubbed and thought unkind thoughts about Goldi.  I mean, I wanted that somewhat weathered, painted, Southern-porch look I see in magazines.  Dirty, tinged with orange … I don’t recall dreaming of that at all.  And mopping the porch floor, much less scrubbing it by hand, was not something I really wanted to add to the weekly cleaning list.  I thought maybe we could buy one of those door mats that says, “wipe yer paws” to put at the bottom of the steps; but that would mean teaching Goldi to read.  Training her to stay off the porch will be nearly as difficult.  Now what? 

Meanwhile, I think I’d better take a picture of the finished floor.  I’d rather wait until I get the siding washed off; but by then, I’ll probably be back down on my nearly-blistered knees, scrubbing.  And once again muttering to myself about orange dirt and a certain golden retriever.  If you’re thinking of investing, you may want to choose the company that makes greased lightening. 

I had the chance to photograph David Lee’s two nieces yesterday and today.  What fun….I’m discovering how much easier it is to take pictures of four and five year olds then babies!  At least they know how to follow directions and they stay in one place and can go longer than twenty minutes without having to be burped or diapered!  The girls did great and I can’t decide on the best ones (how unusual!) Here are a few of my favorite shots.

Adam wasn’t about to be completely left out so we had to change his clothes.  Rochelle and I both thought his tank top and shorts a bit incongruous with her white dress.  He resisted at first; but when he was dressed and ready to go he said, “yeah, this is a wedding!  I want flowers, too!”

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Onions……………..It could be the toppings I ordered for a luscious grilled chicken sandwich.  It could be some of the ingredients I’m prepping for one of those loaded-with-feta Greek salads the three of us relish ………………….or it could be loads and loads and loads of them ready to process.  And it was.  The first two “it could be’s” are definitely more fun.  But now I have 25 pints of pizza sauce, another five pints of salsa, & 4 quarts of tomato juice.  Last night at 9:30 with the tomato splatters all wiped off the cabinets and walls, clean counters, and a candle burning, I felt rather virtuous.  Mostly though, I felt grateful for a kind neighbor who gave us about half the tomatoes and for my incredible husband who picked up Chinese for supper and joined right in with the mess when he got home.  Next year, I hope the day will lend itself to starting the tomato part of it earlier than 2:00. 

Maybe it’s just because for three and a half years now all the babies in both our families have been blue and I am constantly surrounded by conversations about trucks, construction equipment, hammers, “work jobs,” being sixteen, and driving.  Maybe it’s because I’m female myself.  Maybe it’s because pink is still one of my favorite colors.  Maybe a lot of things ……. I still think girl babies are cuter.  Ok, so of course there are some very darling boy babies and probably some not so beautiful girl babies but speaking in general terms, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s more likely to ooh and aaah over a baby wrapped in pink. 

It’s not just limited to the babies themselves (in fact, I think, this is most of the problem).  Almost everything you can buy for a baby has usually three to four times the selection for girls as they do for boys.  Shoes, especially.  Hats, sweaters, jackets, and dress clothes run a close second.  It’s not that you can’t ever find something cute for boys, it’s just harder.  You have to wade past racks and stacks of girl things to find a small selection of boy items.

Speaking of darling girl babies, Christy and I had an awful lot of fun taking pictures and designing a birth announcement for Beth’s babies.

And moving on to toddlers and pre-schoolers, I think I prefer boys.  The differences between men and women are amazingly present early in life and IMNSHO, boys are much more straightforward.  When Adam has issues and get’s mad, he can change his attitude and move on unlike his (girl) friend who can be snippety all day if the morning starts out wrong.  When Adam is crying because he got hurt, I get a defiant, “I won’t tell you,” in answer to the question, “what’s wrong?”  Another friend who has a two-year-old daughter said she wails, “I don’t know.”  Maybe it’s just because opposites can complement.  Maybe it’s just because I hear boy conversations all day.  Maybe it’s because I’m prejudiced and think Adam is one of the cutest, wittiest, smartest three-year-old boys I’ve seen.  Maybe a lot of things.  I still love the way Adam is all boy! 

What do you think about the great boy girl debate?  If you could, would you choose the gender of your baby?

I took pictures of Adam the other day and, like usual, can’t decide which one of the 60 I like best.  About 50 of them are duds so to make that more accurate, which of the ten.  I think these are my three favorites.

Can you tell he’s a serious child?  Whenever we do a photo shoot, 2/3 of the pictures are sober.  And of the remaining 1/3, about half the grins are cheesy.  He tells everyone who asks that he is 16, he works for Edenali, and his name is David Lee.  If only he knew how much more fun it is to be three!

Today Christy and I were doing some final editing on our manuscript.  After hours of poring over double-spaced typewritten pages looking for previous red editing marks and making new ones, we were both getting tired of sitting and tired of thinking.  It took more and more effort to work and all we wanted was to stick the entire project in the microwave and get it finished.  While we may not have lived in the same area for the last five years, we’ve still both got the same strange sense of humor.  We got to a point of disagreement over punctuation.  Earlier in the afternoon it would have caused a five minute roadblock while Christy remembered the grammar rules and I declared my English teacher would have called it a comma splice.  By now we were too tired for that.  “Yeah, well, I’m always right.  Don’t worry about it.”  Christy said, just a little too quickly.  I didn’t mess around, “Except for when I am … and we differ.”  And both of us went into gales of belly laughter that gave us enough energy to keep going.  And to think I used to wonder why no one got my “jokes” around here.  (They still don’t.  I just gave up trying to be sarcastically funny except with my husband who can spar right back with the best of them.  Oh, I love him.)

It’s over.  The fellowship meetings.  And the antibiotics.  And hopefully the strep.  I feel like a bouncing Tigger again.  I must have shed at least 15 years in the time it took us to drive home from church.

Things went well overall.  We had crazy moments and cool, calm, collected moments.  The most hair-raising was definitely Saturday lunch.  We expected 150 people based on the numbers we’d tallied of people planning to come.  The planning committee came downstairs and said there were many, many more than that.  Somewhere over 200.  It turned out to be sort of like Jesus feeding the 5000.  We just kept dividing chicken halves into quarters as we fixed plates and when we finished there was more than one cooler full left.  Except that Jesus would have also had enough slush.  I really wanted some.  And neither would he have had to run next door to the bakeshop to get cakes and cupcakes to supplement the TX sheet cake.  And come to think of it, there are a lot of other dissimilarities, such as the condition of my nerves as the people filed downstairs to get their food.

From there on, things went much better.  Today at lunch we served 340 which was very nearly what we’d planned for.  The California Deluxe got dipped with tiny spoons and even so we had less than a pint left and barely five servings of guormet potatoes.  Everything else was comfortably perfect.  Perfect, that is, until Rodger found an entire roaster of Poor Men’s Steak that had been completely forgotten and was still merely bubbling away when the dishes were nearly done! 

The steering committee did an absolutely fantastic job of thinking about everything before hand and keeping things going everywhere smoothly and all at once throughout.  They were truly servants with eyes, hands, feet, and hearts.  I hear they had a de-briefing session this afternoon.  Ruth and I had our own 20 second debriefing session in the church parking lot just before leaving for home.  Most people would probably have termed it a scream.  And for those of you several states over experiencing gusts of wind this afternoon, I apologize.  It’s just that my sighs of relief are fairly large.

Ok, so the strep is back.  I’ve now been fighting it for two months.  I’m ok on antibiotics, not ok off.  I went in for my third culture now and they are concerned … as am I.  For any of you who know David Lee’s mom, strep was the culprit for the terrible, horrible illness that nearly caused her to lose her life and left her physically handicapped several years ago.  Adam is not a patient there but they swabbed him anyway and I registered him to save myself from having to travel downtown to the pediatrician’s office.  He’s positive, too.  So now after another $100 on broad-spectrum antibiotics for resistant strep, our cultures travel to the lab for sensitivity checks.  I am so tired it’s insane.  I must say it’s nice to find something.  The last two months I’ve convinced myself I’m utterly lazy.  I’m tired and unmotivated all the time.  Jobs I usually find energizing (like mowing lawn, sewing a dress) have looked huge and I couldn’t find the energy to do it.  I wondered if I somehow lost my ability to make myself work now that we’re in the house …… at least I know there must still be the real Michelle lurking somewhere and the jelly knees, prickly skin, heart palpitations, and hot flashes will go away again.  Adam stumps me.  HOW CAN HE SIMPLY NOT ACT SICK???????????????????  So the fellowship meetings are this weekend and right now it feels herculean to even think of doing laundry tomorrow much less make sure 350 people get lunch on Sunday.  And then when I think I have it bad, I stop and think about Beth.  Kelvin came down w/ the flu Tuesday night and by Wed noon he was really sick … cough, sore throat, fever, dizziness.  He went home.  Beth’s cousin, Anita, from MD came to be with her (PTL she decided to come for a few days).  Meanwhile, the hospital got full, Olivia got discharged, and Beth got bumped out.  So while Kelvin was home sick in bed, Beth and Anita had to leave with Olivia and stay at a motel overnight.  Veronica is also breastfeeding so Beth has to be around … but there is no room in the inn. Which means they started doing only tube feedings at night and then breast feeding during the day. Even so, Beth has to rest b/w feedings and there she sits trying to be comfortable in the waiting room for families of laboring women.  The latest news is that she is coming down w/ the same illness.  I’m worried.  And praying.