After a bit of a blogging rest, I am crawling out of the cave where I've been hybernating. We have been passing around a cold germ since Christmas and I am still under the weather. Hopefully, I will be the last casualty of this bug. For more exciting family fun go visit my other blog, Including Jack.
After a long sabbatical, it's good to be back online and back home. As you can see we've had a summer vacation, and I might add, it was magnificent. We wound our way through the south, stopping at one of the nicest beaches I've ever been too (Destin, Fl), on our way to none other than the very place where "Dreams come true"...DISNEY WORLD. The destination of all summer vacation destinations.
I was surprised at how easy the drive went, compared to road trips with my family when I was a kid. Back in the olden days we didn't have CD players, Nintendo DS, and cell phones to keep us entertained and connected with our friends while we were away. My daughter was content in the backseat snuggled up with her pillow and cell phone, happily texting away with her friends about nothing in particular. The boys entertained themselves with movies and games and hubs and I spent our time going back and forth over which road to take...darn GPS things...it created more controversy than an old fashioned map, but that's another story. What short cut to take and where the best restaurant was located all faded away, once we reached the Magic Kingdom.
Disney World
Hello Bloggy Friends. 
What could be more exciting that chocolate birthday cake? Getting reconnected! I've been without an Internet connection since the big storm. Maybe it was a coincidence, but my Internet connection has not worked since that night. Thanks to hard work from Hubs, I'm back on line. Hurray. Many exciting events have occurred since I last blogged. I've been to swim meets, birthday parties, Volleyball victories and witnessed tween age mini dramas play out right before my eyes. It's good to be back.
Much to the delight of the community, our little town is sitting upon a 20 year reserve of natural gas. It has never been drilled before, because the price of natural gas has not been high enough to warrant getting to this reserve. This reserve has been hard to get to because of the shale that has to be cracked to get down to the gas, plus they have to do horizontal drilling which is a fairly new/costly technology.
Every weekend I see gas folks walking the neighborhood, trying to get people to lease their mineral rights and give them access to the gas under their property. At the same time homeowner associations are banding together to try to negotiate better lease agreements between neighborhoods and the big gas companies that have come to town to court homeowners. There is strength in numbers. The media has begun to talk about these activities, and one comment this morning was"our part of the country will not see a recession because the gas reserve is our own little stimulus package".
The people who own the land where a drill site is located and people with large pieces of property, will fair pretty well. I just don't know how much income this will actually generate for a homeowner. Nevertheless, if it were a little warmer, I'd invite the neighbors over to have a BBQ to celebrate our good fortune and we'd all take a dip in the cement pond.
This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24
On that note, I would like to share with you the gladness we have enjoyed this past week...
My daughters joy of a personal best in the 200 IM at the swim meet, and my son's joy that the swim meet was over.
The joy of being silly at school in a lip sync contest.
The joy of a family wedding...
and realizing that you won't die if you have to dress up in a suit and tie.
The joy of knowing that chocolate cake awaits you, and that there will be plenty of leftovers, because what you see here is only the grooms cake!
The joy of getting "hard to get" tickets to the most exciting concert of your life and getting "jumping up and down screaming" crazy with your cousin (thank goodness for earplugs).
May God bless you and your family with a "jumping up and down screaming" wonderful week like he has given us.
What is it about kids, when you tell them something is dangerous, it makes them want to do it that much more? Our trampoline is in disrepair. The safety net that enclosed the trampoline got torn in several places (because our wild kids and their friends would throw themselves at the safety net and bounce off again), so we took it off. The bumper pads that cover the springs, have come to pieces in spots and it needs to be replaced. I mentioned this to my husband, the fact that we needed to get a new safety net and bumper pads, because the kids hadn't jumped on the trampoline in months. Well wouldn't you know, they all heard me complain about how dangerous it was to have this thing on the hard concrete in our back yard, so they just had to all pile on it, husband included.
One of their favorite trampoline games is "crack the egg", and the 2nd favorite one is "flip the bacon". I won't tell you the rules, but you can imagine how safe those games are in this trampoline. When the yard apes finish off this trampoline, I guess we'll get another one. Until then, I'll just keep the video camera close by and maybe you'll see us on " America's Funniest Home Video's".
The Pinewood Derby is an annual event that kicks up a lot of excitement in our Cub Scout community. This year was my son's third year to race and he captured 3rd place in his age level. I thought his car was great and he had fun building it. He was not entirely happy with his placement, you might notice the attitude in the post race picture and the crossed arms as he's receiving his award. Last year he got 1st place in his age group and was on top of the world, but that's how it is when your the car to beat! Competition gets more intense every year.
This year we had his den over to our house to cut out and sand the body of thier pinewood derby cars. One of my son's friends (actually his mother) made a point to get my husband to cut out a car identical to my son's winning car from last year. That car captured first place in the race, and my son noticed. He was a good sport about it, but he learned not to share his racing secrets with anyone (yes, there are racing secrets and it's very confidential I might add!) The Cub Scouts have to check in their cars the day before the race. At check in everyone has the opportunity to get a look at the competition, and I have learned enough about pinewood derbys that I can spot the potential winning cars. I can spot the winning families by how much graphite they have under their fingernails (including me, my husband, and my son in that order I might add, and that leads me to make the statement "Whose Race is this?"). The top cars are usually within a few tenths of a second difference in times, so you can imagine how competetive it can become.
The races are run very well with a computer software measuring the finishes. It's quite a thrill to see the times flashed up on the video screen that's set up for the fans. Racing music plays in the background while parents and kids all fill up on pizza and coke. Oh, the thrill of victory.
Until recently, I had never spent much time contemplating race relations in our country or in our town. I grew up in a predominately white community and I don't remember any children of color attending my school until I reached Junior High. The most unhomogeneous aspect of the community was the answer to this question: "are you Catholic or Protestant?". Unbeknownst to me, in the late 60'2 and early 70's, a whole flurry of activity was swirling around in the world outside of my bubble...from the hippies and Woodstock, to the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Movement and Watergate.
When I was in third grade we studied slavery in the south and I was horrified when I found out that white people had black people as slaves. It was news to me. I can remember being ashamed to be white, and thinking what in the world were those people thinking. I was immediately determined to be nice and befriend any black kids that came my way, but in actuality, I never ran into any, and so I bopped along oblivious to the events happening in the world around. They say "ignorance is bliss" and it was for a time.
When I got to High School, I was still unbelievably niave and so were my friends. I know that now, because that's when my friend Michelle and I looked at each other and I realized she was Hispanic and she realized I was white. Until High School apparently I had been color blind and so had my friend. That's because friendship trumps color everytime.
Before you get the impression that I've never experienced anything outside of the little bubble of my community, I have to say that when I went to college, I was in the minority. My classmates were Syrian, Iraqui, Iranian, Jordanian and Israeli, Chineese and Japaneese and they were all men. That's what you got when you went to any Engineering School 25 years ago. Suddenly I didn't have that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing and understanding where people were coming from. What my classmates thought about the world around us was very different from what I thought about the world around us.
But I've drifted from my subject...the topic of what has happend in our town recently. A black man and his girlfriend bought a house on the street that I grew up on, and not long after that a fire destroyed the house. They had origionally planned on tearing down the house and rebuilding a new house on that spot, so that is what they did, they took the insurance money from the fire and began construction. It has taken them two years to get to the point that they are now, in building their house, yet the house is still under construction and they have still not moved in.
A neighbor lady (white) was walking her dogs in the neighborhood (off leash which is against the law in our town) and the lady(black) who is the girlfriend of the man building the house happened to be in her front yard and there was a confrontation and the white lady (who happens to be a 60+ senior citizen) hit the black lady with a 2 by 4 that was laying in the front yard. The black lady ended up in the hospital. Jeff Foxworthy and his "you might be a redneck if..." comes to mind as I'm writing this.
Even though our town is big, it still has that smalltown feel to those of us who grew up here. I happen to know the family of the white lady. But on with the story...not long after this incident someone painted words on the black mans garage door. I've cut out one of the inflamatory words, because I don't want to post something like that, but here's his garage door:
The neighborhood, made up of little old retired folks and widows, was sincerely saddened and shocked that this happened to that man. I know that because my parents live within sight of this house. Most of the retired folks keep to themselves and don't get out much, because frankly they might just fall down with their walkers and hurt themselves. It is yet to be determined who may have done the graffiti, but the little old lady that's white, is the prime suspect (apparently she had been in jail they had let her out of jail , maybe good behavior, I don't know and then hauled her off again when the words appeared on the garage door).
To make a long story, longer, the black man did not immediatly paint over this graffiti, but left it up for weeks, causing his neighbors, who had originally been concerned for him, to become agitated with him. Apparently he had no intention of painting over the graffiti, but gathered together some folks from the NAACP and they had a big march through the neighborhood (how'd you like to live in that neighborhood?).
Needless to say, the neighborhood folks were not happy about the organized march and having to look at his garage door for weeks. In addition, all the uproar over the graffiti, caused people to forget that there was a lady who had been hit with a 2 by 4 on the street! The doors are now covered with a blue tarp, some folks from a nearby church convinced him to cover over the words, while he's waiting on replacement doors. When the replacements arrive he has decided to donate the old doors to a civil rights museum in another southern state. For awhile, things were hoppin' in the little old neighborhood, with police in patrol cars watching the house 24/7, but all that has passed and the neighborhood talk and all the activity has died down. I feel bad for the man and his girlfriend, and I feel bad for the neighbors who had to see those words everyday and host a march in their quiet neighborhood.
It's too bad we have to grown up and realize each others differences. Things would be much simpler if we were all color blind.
Have you ever wanted something so badly, but when you got it, it turned out that it wasn't all that great after all? My daughter has experienced that recently. She finally got chosen for Safety Patrol duty. Can you tell she didn't want her picture taken? At first it was a coveted appointment until she realized that she had to be at school 30 minutes earlier than usual, and it has gotten quite chilly around here in the mornings. The prestige of waving a stop sign and blowing a whistle has gone by the wayside, as early morning fatigue sets in. She has four more weeks before she is relieved of duty.
Amidst the flurry of Christmas activities this year, my youngest asked me out of the blue, "now why do we give each other gifts at Christmas?", "it's not our birthday, it's Jesus' birthday, right?". I thought to myself, this is another one of those trick questions kids ask grownups. Not wanting to flunk the grownup test and unsure of how to answer him, I ponder the idea of Christmas with no presents! Yikes! That would be awful. I think to myself, what was that story about St. Nicholas and how does that play into all of this gift giving ritual? Now, I'm feeling like the most uneducated mom, and make a mental note to research the St. Nick thing soon (surely there's a "Christmas Histories for dummies" book at the Christian book store that will tell me everything I need to know). Finally, I explained to him that we give gifts to the people we love, like the Wise Men(Maji) brought gifts to Jesus, to celebrate Christ's birth. He was happy with that answer and ran off do to what ever 9 year olds do, and I was happy that I had saved the Christmas gift giving tradition in our family. Whew, close call.
This incident prompted me to remind the kids that all this stuff we give and get is just stuff to use and enjoy, but that our real treasures are in heaven.
But store up for yourselves, treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. Matthew 6:20
I have to admit, the shopping and the wrapping and the giving and the getting can be a distraction to my kids if I don't continually point them to Christ and remind them that... his birth is the reason we have joy and his death is the reason we have life.
Happy New Year blogging friends. I hope that you and your family had a wonderful Christmas with all of the blessings of family and fun. Our family had a great Christmas break and now we're back to our regular routines. I am thankful for that. Having so much fun can be tiring. We traveled north to visit family and got to actually see a little snow. Those of you who see it all the time are probably rolling your eyes right now, but where we live, snow is a rarity so it is really special when we get to actually see some of the cold fluffy stuff. I couldn't keep the kids out of it so they were soaking wet after a few minutes.
Since pictures are worth 1000 words, I'm going to share several thousand words worth of pictures...and a glimpse into our holiday festivities.
Our family has enjoyed several Christmas Parties and Christmas Musical Celebrations. My daughter is now playing the Clarinet in the band (she gave up the viola for the clarinet) and she is suprisingly good at playing the clarinet (much better than the viola, ouch, I can testify to that, if your reading this honey, I'm just kidding you were ok at the viola, you're just better at the clarinet). So far, she has managed to stay in the first chair spot and I don't have to remind her to practice (which is a big improvement over last years episodes of "Nagging Mother knows Best")
