The Thirst

We found a neat globe on sale at Target last week. The kids have been twirling it around, placing their fingers over one place and then another. (I do the same thing.) We found Afghanistan, traced the route Clint traveled to get there. We found South Korea, where he was stationed for what felt like such a long time a few years ago. We found Germany, where our good friends are from and who brought us back things from their visit there this summer. We found Ireland, where Clint and I went together.

It's funny, the more the world seemed to shrink as we found places we had some connection to, the more it actually expanded. Because there are so many more places we know almost nothing about. Places we want to know about. Places we want to see and discover. Places we will never get to go. Places we hope to see as we follow that dream.

The thing about moving around a lot is that it shrinks your time to enjoy what you go to the trouble of finding, over and over again. Friends. Family. Special places. That great diner, that perfect ice cream stand. But actually? As you see more and more of the world, as you meet more and more people, make more and more family wherever you go? You are really expanding. Our hearts and our minds and our special people and places... they all open up as wide as a big sky, as big and as never-ending as a globe on the table in our little house.

It's the same when you open yourself up to learning. I realized this early on. The more I would read, the more I would realize how much was out there to read, and that I would never get to all of it in my lifetime. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't know. Sometimes I think this is the difference between a small mind and an open one. This humility coupled with thirst.

I'm grateful to have a partner with the same thirst. I know we'll manage to take our kids overseas, to see as much as we can, because we both value that. I'm grateful the military will provide us with that avenue. And I'm so glad to see my kids awakening to that great paradox, that sweet thirst. Right now we're touching the map of the world and we're writing letters to send far away. We trace the way it will travel, over an ocean, over countries with languages and histories we don't understand. But we want to. We want to understand. And as everything shrinks, it will all expand.

We're back!

Today is the first day of school here. Benjamin is now a 1st grader and Sophia a 3rd grader! They've started at a new school this year (because of our move, they're in a new district) and I'm really happy and impressed with it. This morning went pretty well. I took them myself since it was the first day in a new school and they weren't sure about finding their classrooms. They both looked nervous and shy, and it's always hard to walk away from your kids when they look like that! But I know they'll come off the bus full of themselves and full of news.





We saw Clint off the end of July. We miss him so very much but we're doing well. He's doing well, too. I'll be writing much more in this space but right now I'm going to go get some things done without kids!

Renaissance Festival 2009

We do enjoy a good Renaissance Festival in this family, and we decided to go last Sunday. As I'm laid up at the moment with a busted ankle (in my usual grace, I fell off the step by my back door while trying to shut the door quickly so the cat wouldn't run out) I think I'll just post some pictures instead of being long-winded. The pictures really speak for themselves, anyway.




Benjamin practices his bow/salute.





The kids catch an Italian rogue traitor.





Sophia gets a ride on a war horse.





Mmm, gigantic turkey leg.





Sophia enjoying the Painted Lady storytelling and, well, painting.






And, of course, the best part was having a great day together as a family, not to mention that we met up with dear, dear friends and enjoyed their company as well. All in all, I couldn't imagine a better way to spend a Sunday.

Happy 4th of July!

Block leave is over and we're trying to make the most of our dwindling time together before Clint leaves, so this is just a quick hello. But I'll be back later! Have a great holiday!

Soon.

Soon my husband will be deploying to Afghanistan, commanding his firefighter company. This picture is from the deployment ceremony today.

Soon the kids and I will have to miss our favorite guy for an entire year. Soon he will be in a country far away, shouldering intense responsibility, seeing and facing things most of us will likely only ever imagine, if that's even possible for us.

Soon the equipment will ship out and we'll update our wills, get special powers of attorneys, contact our bank and credit cards about the deployment, complete last minute tasks around the house, and do all the things we have to do as a family and as a couple to be ready for this deployment.

Soon we'll have two precious weeks of block leave (vacation) together. We will take many, many pictures and smile many, many smiles and enjoy every minute of it.

Soon the kids will get clingy and sad. Soon they will each get a calendar so that they can count down the days of deployment and they will break out their letter writing kits. Soon they will need to creep into the bed I'm sleeping in alone to snuggle more and more. They will help me fill boxes for their dad, filled with colored pictures and notes and photos and small trinkets they want to share with him. We will all go the post office, fill out the overseas shipping forms, tape the box up, and send it very far away. We will imagine the sand in that very old place, wonder how the air smells there.

Soon I will cook smaller dinners. And frankly, probably get Subway more often. Soon, in the stress of the final few weeks, I will wish he would just leave already, so we can get on with getting by and waiting for him to come home. I will call my fellow army wives, my very dear friends, and they will know exactly what I mean and how I feel. Because they are feeling it or have felt it too. We will go to the gym together and joke about how the junk in our trunk will look SO HOT when the guys get back. We will split a bottle of wine. I will remember again and again why I am so grateful to have them in my life, why if anyone asks for my advice, I always tell them not to move home for deployments. You can't get this back in your civilian hometown.

Soon what I put in this blog will feel more like a love letter. A letter to my husband far away, sharing parts of our days and hoping he feels part of them. A letter to my kids, remembering all those little moments that fly by so quickly. A letter to myself, being present in the fresh page of every day. A letter to anyone else reading, because what we share always has a way of meaning something to someone else.

Soon.

Children's theatre, and a movie observation

Last weekend we took the kids and went to Syracuse with some of our old neighbors. We went to a restaurant called The Spaghetti Warehouse where a children's theatre troupe was putting on a play. The Emperor's New Clothes, in fact.




Children's theatre is always just plain fun (in my experience) and the kids had a great time, although I have to admit that the play we saw at The Skinny Improv in Springfield, MO was much, much better...not to mention longer. But it was still worth it, and it was nice to get out and do something a bit different.





When the play was over and we had filled our bellies with good Italian food we went to the Children's Museum, where there was rock wall climbing, a session in the planetarium (where Benjamin kept loudly proclaiming that various constellations did NOT look like what the man was telling us they were, but like a shoe), and then there was this fabulous cycling skeleton who rode his bike as you pedaled so we could see how the bones worked.





It's so nice to see the kids learning, isn't it?


The following Monday Clint was able to leave work early and we went to the movies before the kids were done with school. We saw Angels & Demons, because Clint has read the book and really wanted to see it. I enjoyed it for what it was, and it was extremely fast paced. Now, I haven't read the book so I can't say what the book was going for, but it amused me (in a very ironic way) that the only woman playing any part in the story is responsible for bringing about antimatter, the extremely explosive substance which was stolen and is being used to perhaps blow up the Vatican. So here's a movie that seems to want to make some sort of statement or give some sort of insight about religion, Catholicism in particular, and it gives us an all male view. Oh, except for the woman taking the apple from the serpent. I mean, the woman scientist who created antimatter. You know, that old chestnut.

Ah well. It did have Ewan McGregor, and I don't care who you are, Ewan is hot and a damn good actor.

And now I have to clean up my den of disobedience a bit before getting the kids from school.

Mama's Day Musing

You know, I'm not one to get in to random holidays, particularly ones that seem rather driven by consumer culture like, say, Valentine's Day. I like birthdays and I like holidays laden with old traditions, even if the traditions are just ones you've made up in your own family, and "old" is relative to how long your family has been celebrating it. But the Hallmark Holidays? Totally not my thing. And yet, I like Mother's Day. I don't like it so much for it being about honoring me, the Mama, because I don't need a day printed on the calendar for that (and I can't help but think of all the other women who aren't mothers and are no less for it, or the people who don't have mothers with or near them anymore, or the people struggling with any number of heartaches around the very complex and often messy circumstances of motherhood). No, I like it for the kids. I like how excited it makes my children to consciously celebrate that they are my children. I love their sweet, open faces as they pour a handful of crushed dandelions into my cupped palms. I love the ecstasy you can see in them, in knowing they have thought and worked on some small token that has brought a smile and a squeal from their Mama.

I am thinking about this particularly this year after seeing Benjamin's Kindergarten class at the Tea they put on. All of those kids were beaming at their mothers. All of them were so proud and so transparently full of delight in loving and being loved by that person who came to be honored. Sometimes there is a humility necessary in stepping away from "I don't need XYZ because of a calendar date" and allowing someone to honor you because they want to. And that's Mother's Day...it's about them to be about me at all. It might be called Mother's Day but it's the children who make you a player in it.





It makes me think about how every year on Sophia's birthday, it always feels like it's the day two people were born. My first child slipped out of my body but she birthed me as her mother in doing so.

I am not the same person I was before I called myself a Mama. I am continually, constantly glad of it.

A few nights ago Benjamin was cuddling to sleep with me in bed, and he was rambling in the way he does and he somehow got on the topic of What Happens When We Die, which is something he mulls and seems pretty appropriate to his age. He asked, again, as he does, "Do you think we all start back over again and again, Mama?" and I said, as I always gently do, that I just don't know for sure. And then he said, "When you die and I die, I'm going to hold tightly to you so that if we start over you will be my Mama again." And I said, "I always want to be your Mama."

And that was enough for both of us.