June ends too soon

 I can't believe the end of June is right around the corner. Since I haven't managed to sit down and update this all month, I'm again throwing up some photos to represent the events of the month.

June was a month of parties. It began with our twenty-second wedding anniversary. We celebrated by helping friends from the east coast host a west coast retirement party. They used to live here and came out for a visit and to organize the Wear Blue: Run to Remember mile at the Rock and Roll Marathon. So the beach bonfire was followed up with a very early morning of volunteering to hold flags during the marathon.  We also were hosting our oldest son's girlfriend, who came out a couple days after her return from a semester in Ireland to cheer him up from his recovery from ACL surgery.

The next weekend we hosted a twelfth birthday party with a cooking competition theme that was inspired by our daughter's love for the Great British Baking show.  It also made buying gifts easy: a big mixing bowl (a good size for making bread that I have always wanted), a new pyrex measuring cup (oh, mine just shattered not too long ago!), an apple slicer (I've always desired one but couldn't justify the drawer space), and wait are those new measuring cups and silicone spatulas in cute colors! Perfect! Just what she wanted/I needed!

It was nice to give the newly minted twelve-year-old some attention because the following week was devoted to promotion/graduation activities.  We've attended a variety of end of the year awards ceremonies and celebrations, but the actual end of the school year was until June 14th. My parents arrived on the 12th, and celebrated our son's promotion from middle school to high school the next day, which happened to be the warmest of the year.  That event had a lot of pomp and circumstance, but the ceremoniousness was interrupted first by the fainting of a middle school student cameraman, and then by watching two or three light-headed choir members being led retching from the risers on the football field to the sidelines. Then during a long, predictable speech about working hard and having a good attitude by the superintendent, a couple seagulls swooped down to the field to clean up the mess. It was good entertainment.

The next night was the high school graduation for our third son. The emotion wasn't quite as high this time, but I still caught myself feeling sentimental and nostalgic for the years that went by so quickly, especially as I pulled out old photos from albums (which also made me miss prints).  The high school graduation, even though it is an hour longer than the middle school one, was much more fun. The speeches were better, the students threw beach balls and blew bubbles and cheered anytime someone said "Class of 2018," and some random kids were mock kung fu fighting on the far side of the track for added entertainment.  The final perk: the ceremony was held at 7 pm, so we got to watch a glorious sunset over the football field. 

Both of these celebrations were followed with dessert fests. We hosted a graduation open house for my son's friends and dropped in on a couple of other students' parties, but having my parents here made the events feel more like celebrations, too.  It always helps to have family to celebrate with.

In addition to these momentous occasions, we've had a half a dozen going away parties (we only hosted one last weekend, aloha themed, for about 30 people). It is PCS season, and again this year, we are staying put instead of leaving. This year it seems like my whole group of good friends is  leaving - four families from our friend group, the family we've been stationed with three times, friends down the street we have over to dinner, my daughter's best friend, the women I have coffee with to talk about teenagers, my one other friend with a big family who was my partner in organizing our pre-school co-op. . . . It's a sad time for me. It's easier to be the one going sometimes.  My daughter was crying big, gulping sobs the morning her best friend left - which happened to be from our driveway where they had spent the night in their RV.  I know we'll see them, and probably some of the other families, too, again, but it means readjusting what next year will look like --- which will happen anyway as we send another kid off to college.

More decisions and celebrations to come...

  

The almost 9th-grader (in the jacket he picked out).

High school sunset 

Almost graduate with grandparents

Celebrating!

Concert in the park

The cap illustration - future home

A much needed familiy getaway to Mount Palomar for some vitamin N

The baby betta fish are growing! 

New hand-me-down bike trailer

Midsummer sunset

Requiem

We’ve had a couple weeks of high festivity: spirit week, a carnival, birthday parties, a trip to a corn maze, trick or treating. In between trick-or-treating Sunday and the school's Halloween carnival last Saturday, I think the kids each have consumed at least a gallon of high fructose corn syrup. Add to the loot collected at those celebrations, goodie bags from classmates and the neighbors handed out during the week and three birthday parties Saturday. One of my six year old's favorite treats was a little plastic vial full of pink corn syrup with a gummy worm inside. Good thing we had a dentist appointment on Monday.

Since our neighborhood doesn’t have many kids – and has that seedy factor - we trick-or-treated on base with some friends. The mom of this family is from Bogota, and they had us over for a Columbian soup called ajiaco.  I made pan de muerta, my nod to the holy days, with the last bits of Moroccan saffron we had brought back from Spain a few years ago.

The base housing community was one big block party: kids ran from house to house without fear of cars, but several families really got into the fright factor. One had an inflatable haunted house and a party in the driveway with scary adult clowns and zombies. Another family had converted the garage into a gory laboratory. Lawns were dotted with skeletons and tombstones and glow in the dark cobwebs. It seems as if the south likes to celebrate Halloween big. Or maybe it’s getting this big everywhere. When a sexy pirate wench walked up to school Friday to pick up her kids, I had to figure maybe the mardi gras mindset down here has seeped into the fall festivities.

The fall festival fundraiser for the kids’ school last weekend also had a Southern feel. Each class ran a couple carnival game booths, and the booth that had the best décor won a prize. Some booths decked out their tents with the traditional skeletons and spiders, but others glammed up with tulle and glitter everywhere. Kids dressed up for the costume contest, and my 10 year old won a $30 gift card to Walmart for his mime costume. The jr high CYO manned the haunted house in one half of the parish hall, while in the other half, parents shopped at the silent auction and kids’ art sale and decorated pumpkin sale. There was a cash raffle, a live auction, a dunk tank, a raffle to get out of bingo duty, a bake sale – all the popular school fundraisers rolled into one glorious sugarhigh event.

Meanwhile, the Methodist Church across the street had their fall festival on the same day – an alternative to Halloween? Maybe they didn’t realize that our school was celebrating the same day, or maybe they hoped to lure in some of our overflow. But theirs was a much smaller event – only a few game booths and food.

And a tractor pulled hay ride.

Monday morning we found out that a twelve year old boy jumped off the hay wagon and fell under the tractor. He was killed almost immediately. He was the son of the pastor. One version of the story has the pastor as the driver of the tractor. Apparently, the emergency vehicles all arrived while the festivities continued uninterrupted at our carnival.

My imagination keeps returning to this event. I can’t quite work out how the boy fell and where he was and what his body looked like when they pulled him out from under the wheels. Saturday afternoon I saw a kitten hit by a car scuttle to the side of the street, and I keep trying to make up an alternative ending to the story of this boy, who was the same age as my second son.  Maybe he could have rolled away or laid still between the wheels.

Today the school kids, some of whom knew this boy from their neighborhood, remembered this young man.  We prayed the prayer for the dead in Latin class:

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine; et lux perpétua lúceat eis. Fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen.

Like the students, I want to raise my hand and ask for prayers for my grandparents and for a couple friends whose children are now motherless and for all those parents who have lost children.

Another saying  I came across while doing my research for Latin class: Vivere disce, cogita mori

Life of the party

My daughter’s First Communion is quickly approaching – it’s this Saturday, and it looks like a party is not happening. The Church has a nice reception after the Mass, but the three other families I invited over for lunch are unavailable. Most of my girl’s classmates have family of their own in town – and it’s hard to invite one or two and not all.




So it may be just us going out to a special lunch.



On the one hand I’m relieved not to have to prepare lunch for 30. But on the other hand, the celebration deserves the glory of a spread of foodstuffs and pretty napkins and a bouquet for the table. But even a bouquet feels out of reach since we have no blooming flowers in the yard (except a couple pincushion scabiosa), unless it’s a purchased one, which doesn’t feel as fret with love.



Once I read an article (Where? by whom? in one of the politico-religious magazines like Crisis or First Things, but I can’t remember exactly who or where – for some reason I think it was Rachel Teti. In our old house I know it was a in a stack under my bedside table, but after we moved, things like that are still missing.) about preparing for celebrations. It was published probably around Christmastime or maybe Easter, when everyone is rushing about trying to get ready for an Event. And the column was responding to the criticism of this behavior, by saying that a little bit of work, a little sacrifice, a little fasting, is necessary for a celebration.


Sometimes it seems like people don’t want to have parties anymore because it is too hard to prepare them. Or they have big elaborate parties, like a wedding, and don’t enjoy them. The challenge is letting go of the planning when the celebration is taking place. (By the way, I did enjoy my wedding – my grandfather said it looked like I had more fun than anyone else there. The groom had a good time, too, I think. An advantage to marrying young: no pressure for a fancy wedding.)


There was a paragraph in my Bible study book by Priscilla Shirer that reflected on how we often pray to ask God what we should DO, or we fret about how we should discern and live out our calling. But sometimes we need to respond to our calling as an invitation.  We don't need to take over the planning and preparation; we just need to show up to the celebration and participate. Be happy that we’re here. Trust that God has a vision for it all.
That struck a chord.


So I’m going to show up to the First Communion celebration and enjoy it and not worry about popping a ham or a casserole into the oven before we scoot out the door. Will try not to take too many photos, but instead stay recollected on the unfolding of the Mass. Of course, I’m probably now putting the emotional energy I might have spent on a party into deciding on a dress – one I made, with bunchy shoulders and bad buttonholes, one she wore in a wedding that’s ivory, or one off the sale rack at TJ Maxx that’s glittery. My daughter changes her mind daily and so do I. Ah decisions… easier for boys.

A Yankee does Southern Style Thanksgiving

In 13 years of marriage, I have never hosted a family Thanksgiving dinner in our home before this year. I've cooked a couple turkeys at the grandma's houses, and once 10 years ago I made a turkey dinner 2 weeks before Thanksgiving for our then small fam and a couple single sailors when my husband was going to be deployed on the real Thanksgiving. So when my little brother and his family said they would drive a really long way to spend Thanksgiving with us, I got a little excited.  Wanted to do something special, so decided to try to prepare some Southern delicacies, even if I'm not sure if I really like them.

So we had turducken (note to self: buy a meat thermometer instead of cooking 10 hours to make sure everything is dead):

Collard greens sauteed in bacon grease (note to self: grits are good with butter and cheese, but not on your collards.)

Cornbread oyster stuffing (I think my proportions were a little off; or it's obvious that I like cornbread  better than oysters):

Of course we also had the staples: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes (yellow and white mixed together), green bean casserole, clover leaf rolls, and cranberry relish and sauce. My kids and husband all like these terrible cinnamon apple rings that are only in stores this time of year, so we had those, too. But the best part of the meal were the pies: sweet potato, pumpkin, Jefferson Davis (a meringue topped confection with a cream, raisin, pecan and brown sugar filling), and a most scrumptious buttermilk pie.

We had to take a couple of walks after all the sugar.  Good excuse to try out the macro on my new camera.

Someone really enjoyed the leftovers.