Noah's new past time

Noah recently discovered the unicycle! The first day Noah was learning how to ride it, he practiced and practiced! He practiced to the point of excluding his friends. His friend Eli even said, "Noah stop unicycling and come play with us. I will give you a hamburger." I don't think it stopped Noah. And he hasn't stopped since.

First day of school

Typical. Fun. Exhausting. Enchanting. Heart-warming. Emotional. Stretching. Growing up. Joining in. Letting go.

Loving The Years We've Had Together

16 years of wedded bliss

So much has changed in the last 16 years: ups, downs, jobs, new family members, pets, illnesses, homes, etc, but the one constant in my life has been my love for Andy. Every day I am so thankful to have him in my life. This sounds so understated and trite and, truly, doesn't begin to cover the laughter, the tears and the deep, deep emotion that I have for him. I love you, Andy.

The red door...

 

I love our powder room on the first level of our house! This house accidentally fell into our laps four years ago. When we went to look at it, I had never seen anything like it and when I walked into the powder room and saw walls that seemed like icing I was captivated. When I shut the door and saw the red door I began to fall in love! When I saw it had a light dimmer for ambiance in the bathroom as well, I fell in love completely. I wanted the house. It seems so trivial to base your decision on one part of the house, but I just knew that if the bathroom was like this then the rest of the house was going to be great as well. It lived up to my instinct as we saw room after room: Jack and Jill for the boys, a room with a walk-in closet for Brennna and it's own bathroom. A small mud room off of the garage, a candle closet as it came to be called; these are the reasons I came to love the house even more.

We are leaving this house tomorrow for the last time. We are moving. We have known this day was coming for over a year and it seems surreal as I type this that this is our last full day in the house. We are moving up the street in the same neighborhood, our commitment to our children that their lives be disrupted as little as possible with this move. In fact, Brenna is excited by the pink room she is inheriting from her friend. The boys are, I think, interested in the idea that they will share a bedroom, something they don't remember doing. And me--I have embraced the idea of "lightening." A friend of mine challenged our young women at church to choose a word to be their guide for the upcoming year and all I can think about as I embark on this sometimes sad process of moving is that I am choosing to "lighten". I have lightened my belongings as 16 bags await pickup from Purple Heart, and I am lightening my heart because we are starting over. The heaviness of our situation has weighed on my mind over the last few years, but I know that that is about to be over. We can finally move forward and look ahead. Now that the worst has happened, it looks bright and sunny ahead for which I am grateful.

I will be forever grateful to everyone who helped us get through this. You are too many to name but your kindness has been etched on my heart and I remember every act, word, prayer and thought with love and deep emotion. I am grateful to my husband for working hard to keep us together because, if the truth be told, living in a cardboard box with him would make me still feel like a queen. :)

Busch Gardens

Our vacations plans had to be scrapped this summer (I will explain in an upcoming post; I am just waiting to do so....I wish I could wait forever, but....life happens).

So we decided to treat the kids to a day at Busch Gardens. I cannot believe what a fun time we had!! We arrived around 11:00 am and shut the park down at 10:00 pm, which I never had any intention of doing!!! It was perfect, a little hot, but perfect! It made the frozen lemonades such a treat. We beat the lines to every ride and didn' wait more than 20 minutes for any one ride!

The boys wanted to ride Apollo's chariot right away, so Andy and I separated, he with the boys and me with Brenna. Brenna and I went to ride the "softer" rides. The first ride we did was some Pirate ride where you were on a boat that swung back and forth until it went really high and you were looking at the other end of the ride underneath you.




I decided my description wasn't doing it justice. Anyway, I must have been nervous, not having been on a roller coaster in years, because once the ride started, I couldn't stop laughing. In the middle of my laughing a memory came out of nowhere, ok I'm thinking my laughing must have brought this one out. Every year my mom would take us to Ocean City and they had this Pirate ride there. I remember, along with my twin Tiercy, we were the only ones on this ride and we choose to sit at opposite ends of the ship. As the ship swung higher, my sister Tiercy laughed or screamed so hard that the gum in her mouth fell towards me as I was right below her. I remember laughing about this until our stomachs hurt. Anyway, I felt like it was a good omen to the day to have this wonderful memory come to me.

After this Brenna and I went to a ride called DaVinci's cradle.



I might sound like a bad mom for saying this, but what I loved about this ride was that as it took us up and around to it's tallest height, I saw concern in Brenna's face. She was scared! I was so happy to know that there are things that make her, at least think about doing things twice! She is so fiercely independent and headstrong and adventuresome that I need to see things like fright on her face every once in a while! Again, I caught myself laughing the whole ride; I think this helped Brenna too.

Then we went on a third ride (all of this while we were waiting for they boys on Apollo's chariot). I don't remember what this ride was called and I didn't like it one little bit. But because it was so tame, I was grateful to learn that this ride and any like it were not for me. It was one of those rides where you are tossed and turned inside out and right side back again. It was a dizzifier (that should be the name of the ride), it made me soooo dizzy. Brenna however loved it! Luckily the boys met us at the end of this ride and we were off to the rest of the park.

I can only say my kids love, love, love roller coasters. They, including Andy, were extremely disappointed that the tallest coaster the Griffin was not operating that day. However, we all (Brenna's height permitting) went on The Dark Kastle, the Lochness Monster, Alpenghiest, the Big Bad Wolf and swings! It was so much fun. I really couldn't believe how much fun I had on the roller coasters. It has been years and now I don't know why! I did realize that I needed to have food in my stomach not to get woozy. It sounds counter-intuitive (unless you've had morning sickness) to eat when you are woozy, but it worked.

The last coaster I went on was with Tobin, his friend Drew and Noah! It was Apollo's Chariot, the tallest coaster that day. It wasn't until I was going up, up, up that I started to freak out. Tobin wanted me to turn around and see the whole park as we kept going up and up. I couldn't do anything, I was frozen in fear! All I could see was that we were going up into air.

At this point I must digress to tell you about a dream I have had for years (since college) that occurs when I get stressed. I dream I am driving on a draw bridge like the one I used to go over going to my Grandmother's house. As I am on this bridge it starts to open up in half, like a draw bridge would to allow for ships to pass through. Is this making any sense? Anyway for some reason I can never seem to figure out, I can't stop and I continue driving up the bridge. Only the bridge is opening towards the sky and I am driving up, up and up until I am driving straight up into nothing and the car starts to fall back on itself. Luckily (or unluckily I wake up before I fall all the way back).

So you can see why I wouldn't have thought this ride any fun. Tobin so badly wanted me to look around and I just couldn't do it! As soon as we crested the hill I felt a huge relief. I still kept my eyes closed but loved the feeling of coming a little out of my seat as gravity pulled us down the other side of the roller coaster! And then...it was over! The words of Gloria Gaynor's "I will survive" entered my head. Yeah, we were done! Time for the show where I would remain safely on the ground and the acrobats would be suspended in the air!!

It was fun to see my kids having such a great time! Thanks Busch Gardens. And thanks Andy getting us home safely long after the rest of us conked out!

All-Stars

This was the high tech display board they had at All-Stars. It used the information from the touch pads in each lane to display the time of each team. We came in 3rd.


Noah's coach Jonathan! He is the best coach ever. He is fantastic and made time for a picture with Noah even with a whole meet of races to coordinate and think about.





This is Noah's relay team: Rio, John, Noah and John before the big race!!




The highlight of our summer has definitely been swim team. Noah had an absolutely fantastic summer with going to divisionals, earning 5th,6th,7th, and 1st place for his relay where he swam the last leg, which took us to All-Stars where you have to have a qualifying time!! It was amazing to see some of the technology at the All-Stars. Never having even known there was such a thing, they had touch pads in each lane of swimmers and that could track real time for each swimmer, I marveled. As soon as each swimmer touched the pad, it put the time and place at that moment on the display board for the spectators to see! It certainly created a level of authenticity to the whole event and I felt like we were witnessing our own Olympics!