What I learned this summer

Linking up again today with Emily P. Freeman for her What We Learned feature....


1.  You write your own swim number on your arm... with your own marker that you bring from home.

Photo by Angelo Pantazis on Unsplash

I had previously observed that swimmers in the local meets have handwritten numbers on their forearms, denoting their identification and which races they're in.  What I did not realize was that you're responsible for doing that yourself.  And it's BYOSharpie.


At our first swim meet I stood with dismay at the race chart, wondering what to do, when an experienced mom walked straight up to me and knowingly held out a Sharpie, for which I was immensely grateful.


2.  Chickens are kept loose in the chicken house and are gathered by machine.


I was incredulous until I saw evidence in the form of this Youtube video.  I always pictured chickens caged up inside those houses, but apparently they herd around freely in there.  Then they get vacuumed up when it's time to move on to the factory.

3.  You can really fry a phone in a hot car... battery, charging port, speaker, the whole bit.

Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash

This one wins the prize for "most painful lesson" this summer.  I was four days without a phone, which is the same amount of time we were without electricity after the derecho when I was nine months pregnant with my fourth child during a huge heat wave, and missing a phone was worse.

I drove somewhere using GPS and forgot to take my phone from its holder on the dashboard, where it stayed, parked in the sun, for several hours.  It wasn't dead when I returned, exactly... it displayed a message that it needed to cool down before I could use it.  But after that it seemed fine.

Until the next day, when it seemed to lose battery power unusually fast.  And then the next day it wouldn't even charge.  I blamed the old power cord, but Jason's cord didn't work for it either.  I was mystified for a while, honestly.  It seemed to recover so nicely after cooling down.  

Jason took it to techno urgent care and they ordered a new battery.  Then they ordered a new charging port, which I didn't even know was a discrete part.  When they put the two together, I briefly had a working phone again... until I realized it didn't make any kind of sound anymore, ever.  This time Jason went to work on it himself, but, sadly, the patient did not survive the operation.

Being without electricity six summers ago was terribly HOT, nerve-wracking to think of my freezer stocked with casseroles for after the baby came, and inconvenient to eat nothing but peanut butter and honey sandwiches.

But being without a phone was like losing my mind.  It was terribly isolating.  It was a bit humiliating to borrow my 13-year-old's new phone when I was desperate.  I couldn't work, I couldn't talk to anyone outside my house, and I lost my grocery list.  

Note to self:  never forget the phone in the car again, never never.

4.  Our church's security alarm goes off at 11pm.

Photo by Katarzyna Kos on Unsplash

Fortunately, I did not have to experience this firsthand, other than getting shooed out at 10:50 with dire warnings of it the night before Vacation Bible School started.  

We had started VBS work that morning around 11, organizing all staff to set up the building, and then staying after set-up to do buckets of administrative prep.  It went later and later, alphabetizing got harder and harder (someone finally wrote out the alphabet at the front of the room to stop the incessantly murmured alphabet song from every corner), take-out dinner was delivered and taken away, name tags were stuffed into plastic holders and color-coordinated, zillions of papers were printed and sorted... 11:00 loomed and we still weren't ready for hundreds of families to drop off their precious littles the next morning.

But the 11:00 alarm warning and visions of the police arriving to question us all drove us homeward.  I didn't quite make it back to church at 6, as some did, but I wasn't that far behind.  

No alarms sounded, no children lost or miscategorized for long, and Jesus preached.  All good and well.

What did you learn this summer?

Indian summer, in which we sleep outside with not a fraction of the skill of actual Indians

Jason and I have recently (this summer) starting leaving the kids home alone with Jeddy officially in charge (though we know Ada's really the boss).


We still haven't gotten used to it.

We get all giddy when we leave the house.  The other night we went out after dark with another couple, like a double date, and I felt like a giggling teenager with a late curfew.

We've gone out for ice cream, to our favorite Mexican restaurant, biking around town... and to the county fair.

We started our fair visit with the requisite deep-fried fair food:  Philly cheese steak, pork barbecue, funnel cake.  Then we visited the cows (always impressive) and the baby chicks (always adorable) and the bunny barn (how could bunnies be anything but endearing?).

Then Jason indulged me by downplaying his propensity toward motion sickness and riding some rides.  After the swooping hang-gliders he told me he was 20% sick but recovering.  I thought the Ferris wheel would be soothing, but after a spin on that and then the swings that go around in a circle, he was up to 50% and I thought we better stop.

We wandered about and ended up watching the antique tractor pull for a while--which is more exciting than it sounds when one of the antique tractors goes beyond the finish line and bashes through the fence a few sections down from the one you're leaning on.  I never did figure out if that tractor won or lost--I was fuzzy on the rules.  But I did get caught up in the rural glory of it all.

Putting to death my natural inclinations, knowing that my children really wanted to go camping and that it had never happened this summer, we scheduled a camping trip the weekend after the fair.  Jason reserved two nights at a lovely campsite--with bathrooms--right next to a little rushing stream, and near a lake with a sandy beach.

Considering that it has rained like the Amazon every day this summer, it was inevitable our weekend would be no different--but, hey, that's what the tent's rain fly is for, right?


We literally slept in puddles.


Well, that may be an exaggeration.  It was more like punctuated dozing than actual slumber.

The campsite was wet and therefore muddy when we arrived at dusk, but we got the tent set up quickly, and after the necessary toasted marshmallows, we all settled in.  For the first little while, we reveled in the sounds of crickets, frogs, and the running stream while we drifted off.


Then the storm began.


It went on for at least an hour, and involved nearly continuous lightning, rolls of thunder, and copious downpours.


The boys slept right on through it.

The girls were up and crying.  We were stepping over the boys to zip up the tent windows around them.  I reassured the girls with confidence that we were perfectly safe, then rolled over and whispered to Jason, "Are we ok here?"  Water was seeping in from beneath and blowing in from the sides and dripping in from above.  We zipped up, reassured each other, and pretended to sleep some more.


After several hours, we were still restless (except the boys, who were splayed out flat, 100% unconscious), we were damp down to our underwear, our pillows were wet through, and there was standing water in the tent.  Ada was "sleeping" while attempting to levitate to avoid touching the wet floor--she was perched on her elbows and knees to minimize contact.


Jason finally gave up and went to lay down in the car, where he stayed awake shivering in a different position for a couple more hours (being damp through).


I did my best to ignore the puddles and told myself my pillow wasn't wet, just cool.

In the morning, Jason started a fire with wet wood by squirting lighter fluid on it, and we had a tasty breakfast of foil-wrapped egg-and-cheese sandwiches.  Jeddy dedicated himself to stringing up a tarp over the picnic table while it was cooking, and we put the other tarp on the picnic table and benches like a tablecloth.  Thus we managed to eat a hot meal while sitting awkwardly side-saddle on the draped benches, ducking slightly under the tarp, while the rain picked up again.


Jason and I were calculating how soon we could pack up when the rain tapered off and the kids found the stream.  The weather was ridiculously wet but not particularly cold, so before long they were wading in and rearranging rocks into dams.  It ended up amusing us all for hours.

We kept the fire going and had another meal at lunchtime that involved foil-wrapped bread, meat, and warm, gooey cheese.  Then we headed to the lake, where we spent another couple of hours catching salamanders and building them pens in the sand.

Jason and I conferred and decided to leave while we were ahead, since we definitely didn't want to sleep there again, and dinnertime was hours away.  I took Ada back to the campsite to pack up, and Jason took the others to the playground.  The first thing Caleb did was stick his hand in a tire that, unfortunately, had a bees' nest in it.  Jeddy said he'd never heard Caleb scream that loud, and as Jeddy pointed out, that's saying something.


Thus, the others joined us shortly at the campsite, where we were breaking down everything and throwing it willy-nilly in the car: mud, sand, puddles and all.  Streams of water ran off Ada's sleeping bag when I picked it up.


We were most definitely not sleeping there another night.

Please rate your camping experience:

Food: 10

Overnight weather: 1

Tent waterproofing: 3

Would you do again?  Well.... I told Jason that I actually kind of prefer it when it rains, because then everyone agrees with me that camping sucks.  Will I do it again?  Yes, I'm sure I will, especially now that my family's expectations for camping fun are about as high as mine are.

It took an outrageous amount of laundry to rid ourselves of the sand, grit and smell from this adventure.

Soul, then know thy full salvation

Rise o'er sin and fear and care

Joy to find in every station,

Something still to do or bear.

Think what Spirit dwells within thee,

Think what Father's smiles are thine,

Think that Jesus died to win thee,

Child of heaven, canst thou repine?

-Henry Lyte, "Jesus I My Cross Have Taken"

VBS 2018

A month has passed since Vacation Bible School ended this year and I'm still working through my withdrawal.


I can live without the work, per se, but I miss the hours spent with the other staff ladies.

One great privilege of being a director is that I get to attend the daily directors' meeting, after most people have gone home.  This is where we discuss all the juicy stuff:  kids who trusted in Jesus; our first-ever VBS fistfight; special-needs kids having good days; encouraged and excited crew leaders; fifth-graders putting tacks on the toilet seats.


The first day, Monday, I went home in tears, feeling unsuccessful.  A program involving hundreds of kids and hundreds of volunteers and all the requisite moving parts has a lot of details that might go wrong.  There was so much room for improvement, and that's all I saw that day.  Plus it was coming off of a very late night of frantic prep the day before, and I was tired.


About 14 hours of sleep later (thanks to my understanding and generous husband), Tuesday was more encouraging.

Wednesday I showed up to church in the morning in tears, before the day even got going.  Somehow unrelated life has a way of still happening, even when you're in the midst of a big project.  We had all known and discussed that working on a VBS makes us a target for our enemy, and Wednesday morning I felt pelted by attack from without.


How humiliating is it to arrive blubbering to a place where you're supposed to be in charge of things?  Pretty embarrassing, yes.  Thankfully, I think my state reminded many others to be praying for protection as we worked to get the gospel out to all those children.


Thursday afternoon we had a post-meeting meeting to work out the list of clean-up duties for the next day.  By the end of many hours and little to eat, we were so deliriously tired, and our maturity level had dipped so low, that we couldn't even say the word "duty" without bursting into hysterics.

On Friday, mid-morning, another staff lady came and found me to tell me that Lizzy had fallen ill and was at the nurse's station.  Several women moved to fill my spot and I hurried off.  When I got to her, she was pale green and hunched up on the floor next to a trash can.  Immediately, the significance of my director name tag, my clipboard, my staff t-shirt melted to nothing, and I was just Mommy.


Apparently she was working on an activity with her crew and felt light-headed, and her crew leader looked at her just in time to see her faint (!), and she caught her in her arms.  [50 points to that awesome crew leader!]  So that's a first for Lizzy.


Being alarmed at the shade of green Lizzy was, and not knowing if she was coming down with a stomach bug, I sent her home with Daddy.  She cried to have to leave, but cheered up somewhat when we promised to collect all her take-home goodies and get them to her when I got home.


The rest of Friday was a long day after a long week.  After the morning was over, it was clean-up time, which we had done our best to organize the evening before at the immature meeting.  Like many other things, there was room for improvement in the details, but it got done eventually.

Another perk of directing, and staying to the exhausted, bitter end, is that I get to learn about all the scary, mysterious storage places in the church:  the basement with the slimy, silent water drip down the back wall, with the elevator so slow you have time to calculate how long you could survive with that many cubic feet of oxygen; the dark mezzanine closet, with an exposed industrial-grade I-beam across the doorway with a hand-written sign marked "DUCK"; Annex 1, which is filled with sawdust and broken sanctuary chairs; Mobile Unit 2, the old discolored trailer with temporary walls and piles of boxes and fake Mediterranean greenery.  Thankfully, none of my visions of The Shining came true, and I'm pretty sure everyone made it out alive to return for next year's VBS.

Swim team evaluation

Other than an introduction to speech therapy, joining the swim team was our major new experience this summer.  It was experimental; as we live right next to the pool, it seemed to me ridiculous that we would never at least try it.  We have, after all, done several years (so far) of Little League, merely because we live right next to the ball field.


Despite my best intentions, I do tend to spend all of Little League season grumbling about it, so I went into swim season somewhat trepidatiously.


But--I was pleasantly surprised.  I would go so far as to say I'm not dreading next year's swim team season at all.


How does an organized kids' sport manage to earn such high praise from me?

Most importantly, I think, it's that there is no expectation that you show up to every practice.  Once the season gets going, there are practices twice a day, most of which we went to when we were home (since we live right here.... and also because I paid $200 for my kids to be on swim team and you better believe I want my money's worth, so yes you're going to swim practice I don't care if the water's cold today).


But no one expects you to be at both practices every day.  You don't have to tell anyone if you're missing practice for whatever reason you choose.  No one minds if you take a long weekend trip.


This takes SO MUCH PRESSURE OFF compared to Little League.  We really didn't have to plan our life around it.

Likewise, there's no need to participate in the meets if you don't want to.  Now, we went into the season knowing that, and the older kids, who were already qualified for competition, were fine with that.  But then Lizzy qualified early on in the season and was thrilled to be allowed to compete, so we did participate in most of the meets--which, whether due to novelty or to the obvious fact that swim races are more interesting than baseball, weren't bad.


But just the fact that you can opt out of meets was very freeing.  It was not a problem to go on vacation, or just to not want to compete.

Thirdly, the kids learned to swim.  Call me biased, but in my book, that's a much more useful life skill than hitting a baseball out of the air.


Jeddy and Ada have gone from being competent swimmers to having beautiful, graceful, powerful, coordinated strokes that astonish me and put my swimming skills to shame.


Lizzy went from being able to doggy paddle several yards to swimming the whole length of the pool with a recognizable freestyle or backstroke.


Caleb went from being afraid of the water to jumping into it (with a floatie) and swimming the whole length repeatedly without a floatie, using only the lane line to rest on.

A further perk is that I know several other families who swim, more so than I know other Little League parents.

And, all four kids do it together--which, come to think of it, is probably part of why the meets are bearable.  There's only one, instead of one for each kid.  Practices together, too, means more camaraderie for my kids, and easier logistics for me.  They can talk about their coaches and their teammates and their practice regimens with each other.


Swim team pros:

• Schedule works into our life instead of dictating our life
• Lovely to sit by the pool on sunny days and chat with another mom friend
• Kids are all in it together
• They become strong swimmers

Swim team cons:

• The kids tell me that the pool in May, recently filled with apparent ice water, is cold on 65-degree cloudy days.  So they say.  It didn't bother me wearing my hoodie on the side, however.
• They can't sleep in 
• For meets, I am again faced with the question of how to figure out dinner

Evaluate your experience on a scale of 1-10; 10 being ideal, 1 being poke-my-mother-eye-out-we're-never-doing-this-again: 8.


Would you recommend swim team to a friend?  Yes, I actually have already.

First day of school 2018

Starting school scaries

School starts tomorrow.

The usual feelings of nervousness are starting to wash over me:  the fear of failure that could happen in various forms.  Not properly teaching them academics is only one, and not the most likely, concern.

I'm spiritually and physically weak.  No one loves them like their mother, it is true, but their mother is impatient and frequently selfish.  Their mother succumbs to a nap every day at 2:00.  Their mother lacks wisdom.

The kids themselves are a hot mess.  Put the four of them together and it results in strife, whining, tattling, and a very high level of noise.  They don't put things back where they found them, regardless of how much time I spent precision-organizing the room.  They complain about everything.  They struggle to understand their lessons.  They get bored, frustrated, discouraged.

But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God... the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy.

In other words, I can't plunge into another school year on my own.  I need to trust God for this, too.  I need peace, gentleness, reason, and mercy.  I need wisdom from above.  I need what only God can give me, and I need the faith to remember that.

By His grace, this year together will be one of living, loving, bearing with and forgiving one another.  We will see more of His goodness than we did before.  We will enjoy His steadfast love.  We will see that there's grace for Mom, and there's grace for kids.  

And bonus if we also learn to read.

James 1:5, 3:17

First day of heaven

The school room is ready, the shelves are filled, the gluesticks are restocked.  Ada already told me she's looking forward to the first day of school, just not the second day of school.

We love fresh and new.  A new box of crayons.  That thrill you get when you're the first one to carve into the jar of peanut butter.  The first day of school.

Isn't this the craving Jesus addresses when He says "I am making all things new"?  Many faces in heaven will be familiar, old, even ancient.  The angels who sang creation's story will be there still.  But somehow, all will be new.  None of the drudgery of a monotonous March school day.  No tired same ol' same ol'. 

New, exciting, surprising--of which the first day of school is the merest, tiniest shadow.