1. Dear Noah, it was soooo hard to watch you fall and hurt yourself last week. You are six and a half and have just taken the training wheels off your bike. You were riding downhill, doing well, and hit a lip in the cement that sent you over the handlebars onto the pavement. I remember watching you go through the air as if in slow motion and watched your bike land on you. I watched your helmet hit the pavement first and remember thanking God, in that split second, that I had insisted you wear the helmet. Then your face hit and you were scraped so badly. There was so much blood; your nose was bleeding from the inside and on the outside, your lip was bleeding, your forehead was scraped. I picked you up and assessed your situation. I could find nothing broken, nothing in need of stitches, so I carried you over to the park bench and held your head in my lap while you wailed in pain and humiliation. I smoothed your hair, remembered how I had first noticed the dark spot of hair when you were two. I noticed the way your hair lay over your forehead, the way your swelling nose was shaped, and the shape of your blue eyes and thought how very much you look like my six year old self. You cried and I stroked your thin shoulders, ran my hands gently over your bruised chest to feel your ribs, and pushed gently on your tummy to see if you had any hard spots. I checked your bleeding elbows, and used a straw to hold water and gently wash away the gravel and blood. As you calmed down, I was reminded just how much I love you and just how much I hurt when you hurt. You were a brave boy. On to less serious things....
2. My sister-in-law came to our fourth of July festivities with these firecrackers in hand. She bought them because they were funny. Part of the idea makes me laugh--pride in the US and its military--and part makes me want to cry (I HATE war).
3. This guy and his girlfriend came into the parking lot behind downtown Estes Park as we were setting up Teek for his first pictures. They got it right away, that Teek was a Flat Stanley of sorts, and asked if he was our traveling gnome. I said that he was, excited that someone else would recognize what we were doing without an explanation. He said that we should take a picture of him on
their car, and what a funny picture it makes!
4. I spotted this window in downtown Estes Park. Someone needs to add a sign that says, "WILL YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND!?"
5. It's summer time and therefore time for swimming lessons! Our lessons are fairly inexpensive (though still costly when you add two sessions and four children) and are held at a local pool mid-morning. It's nice because several of my girlfriends and I signed up for the same session, so it's a big gab-date daily for two weeks. The downside is that although lessons take only an hour in the morning, they take up the whole morning. We can't make other plans for that two weeks. This is a mixed blessing.
6. My maternal grandpa died recently, and his funeral was June 8th. As with any large family, it is difficult to assemble all the members. But eight of the nine of us were able to come to Grandpa's funeral, and the one who wasn't had a really good excuse: he's on an aircraft carrier. It was nice to have (almost) everyone together for a little while. Because Grandpa lived a long life and because of all the scares with him over the last couple of years, his death wasn't a source of grief for most of us. Please pray for his soul and for my grandma, who is still here.
7. I bought
THESE cups at Pier1 recently. When we have a crowd at our home, as we often do, I pull out these glasses. As my siblings and I were getting lunch (see #6), I pulled one down for my brother Eli and wrote #8 on it, because he's 8th of the 9 of us. The others followed suit, and I got a laugh out of the glasses all grouped on the counter later.
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