Sunday October 14, 2012

We’re sitting in an Econo Lodge in Tennessee with fifteen minutes to spare until we leave for our next family meeting. Our sleazy dissapointment to a priceline bid still provided a very much needed respite for just the two of us. Hard as it is to arrange school to accommodate a two day interruption in the middle of the week, it is worth every minute for the hours alone on the road. We dropped off the boys with my mom in Virginia which meant hours of uninterrupted talk time. Mmmmm make me happy.

Since I don’t have time to type, I’m going to upload a few (or a lot!) of pictures and hopefully you can read between the lines.

This summer has meant:

Swimming at the Middle Ford …. actually a road that heads through a creek and creates a great little swimming hole as long as you get out of the way when a vehicle comes through!

Miss Ava sits sweetly in her car seat in the shade beside the truck while the kiddos play and Steph and I sit beside the water and talk and watch the kids play. It is one of my favorite spots. Hearing kids laugh and water run and seeing blue sky and mountains and trees …. the best kind of mom therapy.

Hours out at the lake. Sometimes just because and sometimes because we were kicked out of our house so work groups could be more efficient. 

The house is slowly and painfully nearing completion. We’ve gone from cardboard flaps to this for a few weeks

to finally having doorknobs!!

The electrician came nine weeks after we moved and gave us LIGHTS. I was all too happy to relegate the construction light stands to the storage and the flashlight to the drawer where it belonged! When he finished, the basement finally felt like a house even if it wasn’t finished.

Construction field trips for the boys, right outside our house. 

A kitchen window with ever-changing scenery:

Dealing with people doing construction in our living zone for weeks on end and cleaning up the wreckage afterward. It’s a strange feeling to leave a cleaned up house and come back hours later to furniture displaced, sawdust, insulation bits, scrap wires, and discarded cardboard boxes. Or to walk into your bedroom and find two strangers nailing trim and a power driver plopped on your bed (that has now been pulled into the middle of the room). Or to take your four year old into his bedroom for a nap when his room is pulled apart, er collided into the middle, and someone is driving nails into the trim and two more people are puttying nail holes. Ten minutes later you peek in to see him sound asleep in the middle of the chaos. Parenting on public display is for the birds, but those moments that make up about 2% of your life can feel as though somewhere along the line you’ve given your child enough security to cope in chaos. When we built our house, David and I said we’d never remodel because we wouldn’t do well with living in the mess. Ironically, we’ve ended up not only living in the middle of the mess, we aren’t even going to live here when it’s finished. Unlike homeschooling, I haven’t changed my opinion about remodeling. If I ever find a place that prints t-shirts reasonably, I am buying shirts for Steph and I that say, “I survived construction 2012.”

So, now it’s October instead of September and I’m luxuriously typing on my own computer while we are at David’s parents.  Maybe it’s time to just call it a post.  But first a few more pictures …

Cookouts with new friends:

and fun weekends with old friends:

Learning to navigate a new town and celebrating the day I could get to the UPS store without a GPS.

SNAIL MAIL!

Getting to meet my nephew, Paxton, for the first time and having a wonderful day together with my family celebrating my mom’s sixtieth birthday.

Embracing the learning curve of home schooling. I always said I would NEVER teach. My dad taught. My mom taught. Both of my sisters taught. I had zero desire. Now I’m homeschooling and loving it. Who knew?

I love that I get to see what Adam is learning and that I can incorporate life and school. The only part I don’t love is the way it consumes me. My sparse social life has evaporated to nearly zilch.  Between living in a basement, being cutoff from long distance friends by the lack of internet, and currently feeling like I can’t even socialize locally because of the enormous time commitment …. some days I feel like the people in the Old Testament who sinned and the ground opened up and swallowed them whole.  I don’t know how all those homeschooling moms who say they get done by lunch time do it, but clearly I am not on the same steroids. The good news is we’re having fun except during Math. We’re 1/4 of the way through and Adam’s GPA is excellent. And the other good news is, my brain is back to being stimulated a little.

Bike rides. Two to five miles for the boys and I. Fourteen to Twenty milers for David. As soon as nice weather and a free Saturday collide, we’re going to bike the trail from Frostburg to Cumberland.

Yellow Jackets. They are everywhere.  Adam unluckily walked into a nest and got stung six times.  He spasmed from pain literally and in spite of advil, benadryl, soda / vinegar poultices, lavender oil, and ice screamed shrilly for over an hour.  When the swelling began to subside a little we realized he had at least nine if not eleven separate sting marks. 

And the best snippet of summer: THEY’VE SIGNED A CONTRACT FOR OUR HOUSE.  Closing is on Thursday. 

The darkness this summer has been both physical and spiritual.  If you suffer from SAD in the winter, you can imagine the fog and darkness of living in a basement with few windows in a house surrounded by woods.  If you don’t, I can’t describe it for you except to say it means you cry a lot and your brain is so dysfunctional that some days you can hardly formulate a grocery list.  But more and more I am realizing the darkness isn’t all going to disappear when we get to live on ground level again.  This is a spiritual darkness we are fighting and while my brain function will return, satan isn’t going to give up in his attempt to destroy what is happening at camp. 

It’s been a good summer.  Not easy by any stretch of the imagination.  But good.  Good because it has had good moments sprinkled through it.  But mostly because in being stripped of so much, God has revealed so much truth to me.  About Himself.  About Me.  About life.  Periods of transition reveal so much of the layers of unholiness that lie within us.  There are hard questions that sometimes don’t have answers.  But more than ever, I believe that nothing in our lives happens without a purpose because of how much God longs for our holiness.  Ever since we’ve moved, I’ve felt God asking me to praise Him.  Even when it felt like blank darkness, to simply worship.  I needed to learn to praise God because of who He is, not because of what He does, or the prayers He answers, or the way I sense Him in my life. 

If it gets any later in the year, I’m going to have to change the title of this post. But hopefully this won’t happen again.  IF they sign closing, we’re moving.  And WHEN we move, we’re planning to get internet. And THEN I won’t have to miss you guys so crazy much. And maybe if I get back into writing more regularly, I’ll manage to write something a little less disjointed.

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