Month: September 2015

Oops, a week in review in the middle of the week.  We are deep into the fall routine, and I actually had to check the pictures on my phone to help me remember what we did!

Construction continues in dribs and drabs, as it is wont to do. Except I had a huge problem with my covered arena! I’m not sure if I’ve talked about the fact that we have four construction projects going on right now and I’m about to lose my mind. The house is the obvious project, and we also have a covered riding arena going in. The grading for the arena is done, and the building is in fabrication. The next step is the concrete foundation work. It’s challenging because everything is new to me and I’m on a steep learning curve. We’ve also got the plans for a party barn that we want to get started–our builder wants to put that in at the same time he builds the pool house. And so the pool and pool house are project #4. I need a score sheet just for contractors!

Anyway, we had a pretty dramatic setback with the covered arena last week. It shouldn’t affect the delivery date but it is giving me gray hair right now. I think the issue should be settled by Thursday but it has been a tense few days.

That’s an x-ray of our little Chico’s pelvis. Somehow he injured himself in his cage. Chico is our chinchilla. If you’ve never been around one, I highly recommend it. He is very social, and right now he is unhappy because he has been confined to a tiny cage while he heals. It’s always helpful having vets for neighbors–we were able to get a diagnosis really fast!

Our football game was one of the best I’ve ever seen…and it ended in a loss. Our boys thought they had one snap left on a first down with five seconds left on the one yard line, but the refs said it was a fourth down and let the clock run out. Tragic. There were quite a few tears in the huddle after the game, but I was so proud of our team as the head coach told the boys how well they had played (they had!) and how much he loved them.  It was a moment that made me sure that for now, our school is just the place I want my kids.

The next morning, bright and early, Jack set a new Personal Record on his 5k time at the Cross Country meet. His team placed first in A division schools–War Eagle!!

The weather here has been drab, especially considering that late September is usually a clear, brilliant blue. It’s starting to affect all of our moods, and the intermittent rain makes it hard to plan on actual outdoor time. Obviously that covered riding arena can’t get built soon enough.

Darcy and Bill took off for an overnight field trip at a 4-H camp with the entire sixth grade. They are back with smelly laundry (how does it get that smelly in 36 hours?) and tales to tell. We are looking forward to a fun homecoming weekend at the high school, and maybe even some time to grill out.

Finally, starting October 1 I’ll be participating in the “Write 31 Days” challenge. We’ve taken a ton of vacations, mostly great and some less great, and so I decided to write about all that fun. I hope you’ll join me as I share some of what we’ve learned in 17 years of vacations near and far with our four kids.

Have a great week!

My heavens. This has been one crazy weekend, and I don’t remember one quite like it for a while. I checked the girls out of school at 1 p.m. on Friday to go to Columbus for a horse show and watched them along with other girls from our barn school cross-country. That is the fancy term for practicing the cross-country course before the show.

I hopped back in my minivan and drove back to school for the 7:30 football game. My football player is a junior, and we only have FOUR home games this year, so I am doing everything I can to be at every single game. I love being a football mom, love the other football moms, and love those boys. It is a special culture.

Back to Columbus (about an hour and fifteen minutes every time) to go to sleep around 11:45. I woke up at 5:50 in one of those “holy cow, where am I?” moments, and realized that I had to be downstairs for breakfast in a little more than an hour. We had a long but incredibly rewarding day at the show. We had six riders from our barn, and everyone finished in ribbons. Hooray! Meanwhile, Jack had a cross-country meet on Saturday morning. And in the epic parenting department, we discovered that what Matthew had described as “quiz bowl practice or something” was actually a meet in Braselton, Georgia, about two hours from campus! I discovered this because some of my friends on Facebook are quiz bowl moms, and they had very responsibly posted pictures. Awesome.

So that is a weekend of football, horse shows, cross-country meet, and quiz bowl. It gets…more.

We arrived home at the barn around 8 p.m. with all the horses. One of them had bumped his head when, as he loaded on the trailer, he decided to rear and back out. We had thought it wasn’t too bad, and made the one-hour trip home. On our arrival, we saw that poor Johnni P had blood dripping on his head and had in fact tried to scalp himself on the trailer. A call to the vet resulted in twelve stitches and an extra hour at the barn.

Bill’s dad John is visiting this weekend, too. I’m afraid he has discovered that we aren’t exaggerating when we say our weekends are jam-packed! He has been to the game and the show, but not the meet or the other meet. (I’m a terrible quiz bowl mom–don’t even know what to call it!)

The results from Saturday? The football team won, 35-13, all six of our Shady Oaks riders finished in the ribbons, Jack’s cross-country team placed first in A-division Cross-country (and continue to be ranked #1 in A in Georgia), and Matthew’s quiz bowl (the “B” team at their school) placed 4th out of ten teams. I think the kids have a lot to feel good about.

Sunday, today, is typically restful. Not so much today. I was worship assistant with our wonderful Pastor Buba, a member of our church but also the director of international missions for our entire denomination. What great fun to help lead worship with him! I highly recommend his Vimeo videos (here’s a sample) to get a flavor of what we are doing to reach nations where it is dangerous to preach the Gospel in person. He delivered an amazing sermon. How cool is it when the kids come home talking about the different points he made in the sermon. Pastor Buba really made an impact on them as he talked about “Alpha and Omega,” and everything that comes in between.

We did get a chance to eat all around the table for a (veeeeeery) late lunch, which is just such a joy to me because I think it reminds us all that not only do we love each other, because we are family, but we truly like each other. We laugh a lot.

This evening we had the great privilege of going to a celebratory dinner for our very first pastor and his wife, celebrating his (really, their) FIFTY years in the ministry as Naval chaplain and Lutheran pastor. What a delight to be with our friends to celebrate this sweet couple. Pastor Larry taught Darcy her First Communion Class, and he has been such a steadfast presence in our lives for the last five years.

Just writing this is exhausting, and that was only the weekend! The new farmhouse continues apace, and I have so many thoughts about the building process. Mostly right now I just want to be sitting on my front porch typing this. That feels like it is a long time away.

I hope that you had a wonderful weekend as well. It looks like this week will lend itself to a calmer weekend, which will be welcome. It also looks like the weather should finally get cooler and more fall-like, which we will definitely be happy about around here!

That’s what a sleeping blog is. The mere idea of posting again, no matter how small, becomes daunting.

But I’m waking this blog up! So here’s where we are right now.

Summer was fun but FAST. I mean, I blinked and it was over. Tons of traveling for all of us, some together and some independent. It changed how we viewed our summer, not as a series of warm, lazy days spooling out, but more as chunks, weeks we were here and weeks we were there.

The house construction continues, more slowly than I’d like, and we have a huge variety of things going on at the farm.

And now school has started again and we find ourselves in a whirl of football and cross country and riding and homework and work and laundry. And I know more than anything that it will speed by in a blur if I can’t stop myself and notice the precious ordinary beautiful days that make up our life.

Here’s a glimpse of the past few months: