2024 - That’s (Almost) a Wrap

Well here it is, the almost end of 2024, and in the spirit of auld lang syne, I am going to try to do a year in review.

Let’s see, the year started off with Liam finishing up senior year of hs with an exciting season of Madrigals, where he got to perform downtown on the radio with Chris Petlak, and then again downtown on Fox 32. It was quite an awesome musical experience for him and us. He was also cast in his last high school musical, Momma Mia which was pretty epic and performed at the White Eagle banquet hall. It was a hike but I think I made it to every show. The whole family met up with him in The Big Apple after he finished a Broadway weekend with the theatre department. Liam is a trooper and continued in band, also going to district honors band and district honors choir. He finished high school STRONG and graduated with honors and the PHS Music Department award. He had a summer of working at Cap’s ice cream and relaxing (after a summer of pandemic and then programs at Berkeley and Dublin the last two years.) Then he successfully transitioned to CU to study astrophysics and participate in the marching band. Now we’re all college football fans, watching the team and the band excel and end up at the Alamo Bowl! We have had the good fortune to travel out to see him a few times this year, including a really good exciting Thanksgiving that included some great meals, an awesome football game with Liam sighting in the marching band and a lot of much needed family downtime. 

Brendan had a great start to junior year, still plays volleyball (now exclusively) and is crushing academics. 36 on his first crack at the ACT, and a fun summer including being a youth ambassador for the DNC and a judge of elections in November. He and Eric head out to Southern California in a few weeks for a nationals volleyball tournament. 

Aidan had a fantastic end to grade school, and started PHS over the summer with consumer ed. He has straight As after that summer and his first semester, with a full set of difficult classes. He’s crushing his first AP class just like his big brothers did. He is doing choir with his angelic voice, had the only freshman solo in the PHS winter music concert, and had his first role in a PHS show. Unfortunately we couldn’t attend because we had longstanding dinner plans we made for everyone to see Liam when he came home from college before Thanksgiving.

Ellen is doing a great job as the family caboose. She is still kind and sweet, and works hard with her schooling. She’s trying out all the sports, taking saxophone lessons and had a staring role as Toto in the SRS spring musical (while Aidan was the Tinman and the rest of us did crew.) She is excited to have ended the year getting a phone, and will begin horseback riding lessons at the start of the new year. 

Eric and I are doing well, and Nessa is everyone’s favorite dog (Squirmy has secured the role of favorite snake.) Tonight Eric and I will go with friends to one of the last nights Dave’s Specialty Foods is in business, as he is closing the store at the end of the year. On the plus side the town has opened a lot of new restaurants and a great little Italian grocery store. Prayers for a happy end of this year and a joyous and prosperous 2025!

Another Day in the Pandemic Times

 But then, apparently in England, the pandemic has ended? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/world/uk-johnson-covid-rules.html?searchResultPosition=9

I’m definitely confused, but the good news is tomorrow is Friday! Seriously, this year 2 of the pandemic has brought back all the trappings of our overly scheduled lives, but none of the deep interpersonal relationships and human comforts that make them bearable. We have no joke like 15-30 assorted basketball games and practices this week, but no one feels comfortable watching the games when you know the next day you could get a message saying a kid on the team has Covid. Everything is fraught. 

Foggy October Friday

 The pumpkins we were growing didn't grow. The side of our house is not suitable for pumpkins we have learned. Liam wants a Gagaball pit. That's a thing but not sure how it's spelled. Brendan's homewroom teacher said he will go far. Aidan made the state sectionals team as an alternate. He won every one mile his raced in other than 2, but in all cases came in first on his team. Liam has a band competition tomorrow in Iowa and has to be at Prospect at 3:45am. AM! Eric is going up tonight with Al S. and I intend to send a lot of memes from Planes, Trains and Automobiles. They will be helping on the Knightshift. Ellen and Brendan and Aidan all had great conference reports from their teachers. The weather is super weird and steamy and foggy and warm. Well, back to a staff inservice day for me.

Day-Tripper

We have this adorable bright yellow bird who started visiting our minivan early in the summer. He comes fairly regularly, sits on the sideview mirror of either of our cars, then jumps down to look at himself in the mirror and jumps back up. He does this for about 5 minutes at a time. I have some pictures and maybe a video of it that I'll try to find and add here. I tried to take a video of him just now but he flew into a tree. We have decided to call him Narcissus.

July 2021

 It's been a minute. How to sum up the last many many weird weird months? Well let's start with now. The three boys are at Scout Camp for a week. It's Aidan's first time, Brendan's second (because it was closed last year thanks to Covid) and Liam's fourth. The last time they were there it was Liam, Brendan and Eric, and there was the Friday night Makajastorm. They'll have to write about that but basically some huge storm blew it with tornadoes and wiped out much of the camp. Thank goodness they were in the cafeteria shelter and were safe. Ok, so last week Liam and Eric were in Berkeley for a Biodesign camp Liam went to at the Lawrence Hall of Science. Then they came home on the redeye Sat morning and Sunday Eric drove the boys up to camp. It's 180 from last summer when almost everything was shut down. This summer Liam has had band camp, Biodesign camp, Makajawan and when he gets back track camp and more band camp. He also got to march in his first parade, 4th of July, and got to perform as a band at Memorial Day even though there was no parade. Brendan has had golf and VBS, and is running Camp WaPella, and when he gets back he will have XC, Track and football. Oh, and all three boys and Eric also went on a scouting canoe trip and Liam and Eric did the high adventure version, which was Liam's first high adventure. Aidan has had basketball, volleyball and track camp, swimming, and he has been in a bookclub. when he gets back he will have another volleyball camp. Ellen has had cheer camp, golf, basketball, yoga and tutoring and now she's in a camp once a week run by the David siblings who are teachers at SRS.  Tomorrow Ellen will go for a 2 night sleepover to Grandma and Grandpa's and Eric and I might try to paint the basement ceiling. I have not yet gone back to the school library, but I will tomorrow. I really needed a mental health break and I hope I can get a lot accomplished tomorrow. 

This year we did not plant a garden but we are growing pumpkins and I have some flowers in pots and in the front garden that are doing really well. We got a big couch for the back patio and it it pretty terrific. Also a giant slipnslide. It's been a pretty rainy summer with days of blazing heat. In fact totday is one of those days so I better go water asap.

Ellenisms Continued

I told Ellen I had some jewelry she hasn’t tried on, because I want to keep it safe. She said “yea, because I might lose it, and then you wouldn’t have it for a fancy equation. Like a party, or a funeral. Do you wear jewelry to an equation of a funeral? Or does that seem like you are trying to look fancy and then it would seem like you were happy about the person, you know, passing away?”

Parenthood in D minor

 

They Get It

A couple days ago Ellen asked if you can have babies without being married. Turns out she was wondering because she doesn’t want to just married, in spite of having crushes on William and several other boys, because she thinks you have to kiss when you get married. Aidan set her straight saying, “Ellen, when you get married you will want to kiss the person you marry. Married people kiss like at least 10 times.” Thank God Aidan was there to clear it up. Also, Ellen is really debating her career path. She’s quite certain she wants to be a veterinarian, but also possibly a rockstar and a nun. She is not 100% certain you can be all those things, but I don’t see why not.

Ellen’s Stuffed Animals

 Echopas - a giant panda the same size as her

Fuzzpro- a purple owl

Freedom and Lincoln - her and Aidan’s Citadel bear

Liam is taller than me today

4 days before his 15th birthday, Liam and I were brushing our teeth in the bathroom and I noticed he just surpassed me in height.  Hopefully a sign the Osgood-Schlatter is on the way out, but this probably means I can't pick him up any more.

LT 2020

Well it’s the pandemic and probably a great time to resume blogging. But for tonight all I want to do is leave this reminder for the future that this night Liam went to bed reading Noam Chomsky and the Dungeons and Dragons handbook. He started freshman year of high school remote, and tomorrow 7th grade BP starts his Northwestern Honors Algebra class. Good night!

Age

I've been young most of my life. That's strange to say, I know, but it's true. In my immediate family I am the youngest, and the youngest by a decade with siblings almost 20 years older. In my cousins I am the youngest, though only by a year and a month, but my closest in age cousin was a lot more worldly than I was, having grown up across the border in Chicago and being deep into the punk scene in the late 80s, taking buses to The Alley and the free bus to Golf Mill while I was riding my bike two blocks away to play in the South Park parking lot or go to 7-11. And on the other side of the family I am the youngest of the cousins by more than a decade, and again I have cousins on that side more than 20 years older than me. My parents and aunts and uncles grew up in the 30s and 40s. I was like an entire two generations younger. So I had a weird perspective of being really young and also knowing that old people weren't really that old, and realizing classmates who thought our grade school teachers in their 20s and 30s were old were just wrong  A lot of those teachers were younger than my brothers and sisters. I would marvel at friends who came to my house and asked how to turn on the piano as if it were a Casio keyboard, or couldn't bear to watch a classic movie because it wasn't in color, or didn't want to watch the presidential debate on tv because they thought it was boring.

I'm pretty sure this directly ties in with Einstein's major theories, right? I knew a lot about growing up in the pre and post WWII era because my parents did that and talked about it. Ration books and ice trucks for ice boxes and baseball games in empty lots and winning a jar of peanut butter or a bicycle at the movie theatre where you'd go all day to sit in the rare air conditioning and watch Westerns trailored by newsreels, and taking the streetcars and pre-Vatican 2 Mass and dressing up for everything and the newness of airplane travel and giant television sets with tiny screens powered by tubes and all of that felt familiar to me, even as I longed for, and occasionally got, faux paint spattered sweatshirts with one giant button, enormous hot pink and neon blue Swatch watches with pop out faces, rock star Barbie dolls, a super long teal earring paired with a small diamond stud, oversized sweaters paired with cuffed up jeans and jellies... The 80s were really far from the 50s. Blondie was really far from The Andrews Sisters. I liked them all and felt safe being young but knowing about those older things, having firsthand knowledge of full service gas stations (one of my brother's worked at Ollie's, before it became Amaco or Standard or something) and whole milk and drinking pop out of glass bottles and then returning it to the store for a deposit. I felt, weirdly, nostalgic for a past I never lived in but remembered fondly. And I felt nostalgic for it's counter-culture rival, the 1960s, too. I just desperately wanted to preserve all those times and the people who lived in them and keep them as part of my present as well.

And now, now for the first time in my life I am legitimately getting old. And now I feel old too, maybe a lot older, because I do intimately know those WWII and Hippy eras even though I really wasn't alive in them. And people who were alive then are disappearing fast and that says something about me and my place in this hierarchy of age. Now, for the first time in my life, I'm really not young, and I wish I knew a little more about the 80s than about the 50s, and I do appreciate the future. It certainly is strange to get older.

Ellenisms

We had two weekends of weddings in a row, which meant two Ellen flower girl experiences. That was pretty awesome. Ellen is so sweet and soft. She got a new level of smart recently, and I am afraid I never did take enough movies of her being a baby and all the cute baby stuff. So before I forget I have to record some of what she still says. Things like,
" You've got that, same as I have." 
"wiff" = with
"Well actually", to punctuate many parts of her stories
This morning I said, "Bye Ellen, I love you so much" and she said, "I love you so much also, Donna."
She loves to break out the Donna every so often. I haven't had time to figure out every nook and cranny of her personality, like I did with the older boys. And I forget what is age appropriate. Sometimes she seems so incredibly young, but maybe that's because she is. I don't know. I think you'd have to have like 10 or 15 kids before you could really be able to take it all in stride and really "get" it. No two kids are the same, which is obvious and yet it still amazes me how different they can be.

I really liked Robin Sloan's book Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore, and now I am reading his new book Sourdough. And I'm reading it really slowly, for two reasons. One is that in the middle of last year I went from having some consistently amazing eyesight for all of my life, save a random pair of glasses here and there like during grad school, to one day waking up to blurriness and no longer being able to read print without tromboning. I of course suspected the worst, but I went to the eye doctor and he proclaimed it, "middle age." Ouch. So poof, just like that I have cheaters everywhere and feel vulnerable and lost without my super vision powers. And it has slowed my reading, which previously was really speedy, but maybe not as speedy as Brendan who can inhale a full-length adult size chapter book in about an hour and change. Liam too is a speed reader. I am a formerly was. :/
The other reason I'm reading it slowly is that I was really liking the book, and it's a very meandering book so you can read it slowly to savor it and that's fine. But then I ready some other books in between and I waited too long to go back to it and it had to be returned the library and when I started reading it again a little of the magic was gone. Or maybe that's just a weakness of the author and his ability to do endings, because I think Penumbra was like that as well. I checked it out again at the library but I couldn't get the regular type and so the fates gifted me with the only available copy - large type. I'm also just starting Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue. Good so far but I'm only on Chapter 3. Hey, what podcasts do you listen to?

Weekend in the Life

Yesterday, it was a Friday. I most likely woke up with a start, as is my way now, always with the feeling that my alarm didn't go off and I'm late for everything. I guess that's anxiety? It's sort of weird because especially after my dad died I had that problem falling asleep, wracked with nerves and anxiety about everything. That morphed into the 2am wakeups and hours to fall back asleep. So honestly this waking up at 6 something in a bit of a panic, well I'd call it an improvement.
Anyway, Eric and I get up about 6ish. I usually get the uniforms and makes the lunches, Eric makes the breakfast. The kids brush teeth, feed the pets, get the water bottles, get the vitamins and ostensibly get themselves ready, but often that requires a lot of cat herding prodding from me and Eric.

(I'm taking over from where I left off when I started this draft. And actually yesterday WAS a Tuesday!)
About 3 monrings a week Liam has before school band. This is another post entirely, but let's just sum it up by saying he is not a morning person, nor am I. And after two years of this now Brendan is in band, and A. He adds another early morning band practice to the schedule and B. Told us that they're supposed to get there at 6:45, not 7, which is what we'd been doing the last two years and Liam never said anything. BUT ANYWAY... In some ways it is easier to get one kid out of the house and only have the three. We usually make a pre-ready breakfast. Is that a word? So for instance Crock Pot oatmeal (cinnamon, brown sugar, apples, chia, flax, add almonds and raisins, delish!) or Trader Joe's dark chocolate croissants (about 85 grams of fat no joke but mmm) and those are nice because you put them in the oven before bed, they proof, and the oven turns on and bakes them WHILE YOU SLEEP! I'm looking for other of those types of dishes if you have any suggestions.
Well that helps with the mornings so that is good. But what is bad is that Eric and I don't got to bed until 11 - 1 (usually I am the midnight or 1 goer to beder) so it's frankly just not enough sleep. And just like I have spent the last four years waiting for things to calm back down to normal, I have been waiting for many months to get enough sleep. Still waiting.
Well that's about all the ramblings I have in me for now. Soooo sleepy. And still have two hours left at work.

And also, It Was a Tuesday

I'm back. I'm back? Yes, I do believe I am.  Boy a lot has happened these last couple years. I have missed this blog. I'm sad for Ellen's 4 year old sake that I do not have a great record of her last few years, and for 7 year old Aidan's and 9 year old Brendan's and jeepers jolly gee willaker's 11 year old Liam's sake too. They have a lot of great times, these kids, while we were gone.  Eric and I have too. And I look forward to recording some of our next adventures here.

So, let's see.  This summer has been a wild ride. Let's take today, for instance. I woke up at 6 something (allow me to borrow a line from my cousin's FB post - Anxiety is my alarm clock.  It is.  I don't know why but I assume it's hormonal.) At least that sounds right and I do sleep in too late. I'm fighting a cold as is the rest of the house so I slowly dragged myself downstairs, we had breakfast, and Liam hopped on his bike over to summer band. He plays the clarinet these days. Oh!  And we moved!  We are in a house that's just a perfect fir for us. Very nice place to have some mini Great Gatsby parties at as well. So it's a little further from school but Liam and Brendan are able to traverse the paths and get there, and to most of their friends' homes as well. While Liam and his friends were at band, some of the friends' little brothers came over to play. And after band a couple of Liam's friends came over too. And that is how we had 8 kids here for most of the day. In the afternoon Brendan and a couple of the boys went to a local kid-run sports camp, and a couple of Aidan's friends came over. And through it all I have been packing and planning for our upcoming trip to DC. Didn't get asmuch done as I would have liked, but that's pretty much par for the course these days. In three weeks I'll be working quasi full time (37 hours) between two libraries. We shall see, as I have not done this since I was just a wee bit pregnant with Liam. Oh!  I have to go pick Brendan up from a local basketball clinic and that means I have to wake up a sleeping Ellen (Eric is with Aidan at Liam's basketball game.)
But I'll talk to y'all soon, ok?

Ellenisms

Brendan and Liam want to get back to their blogs so I'm gonna too.  I want to create a dictionary of Ellen, because I already can't remember so much of Liam and Brendan when they were little.

ice cone cream - any ice cream creation
Biam - Liam
Nenny - Nellie (herself)
baba - bottle
fonzy dress, fonzy shoes - fancy clothes
my tumny hurts, I sick
all dum -all done, just like Liam used to say
you aw bedder, a widdle bit bedder?
shooshe - sushi
I know - I don't know
You mean
I baby
Go Cubbies - when she wants people to notice how cute she is
I lub you
I lub you, Nessa (pider, bug, pencil)
echo - gecko
Echo Walker - Liam's gecko Skywalker
I die - when she plays with her brothers
funder - thunder

Cleanup in Aisle 5

Have you ever seen the commercial with a little man standing on top of a boardroom table yelling, "There are three ways we can do this.  My way, my way, or my way.  Do I make myself clear?"  My kids love this, and the absolute funniest thing is the world is Aidan's impersonation with his little voice shouting, "My way, my way, or my way.  Do I get myself done?!?!"
Swanky the chop.
And now he says, "Do you get myself clear?!!?!"

Also, that person in the store today who dropped two small bottles of apple juice, one of which burst opened and spilled (spilt?) everywhere, that was me.  I'd like to place the blame on whoever put those juices in the way of what I was getting.  I'm pretty sure I overheard some employee in the refrigerator complaining about me, but it totes wasn't my fault and for the record I put the one that didn't burst open back on the shelf.  What more could I do?  I highly doubt the woman working the cheese section cared and/or had the resources to clean it up.

Who wants to hear about how much I want to work out, but haven't been, or my experience buying this shoe when the salesman explained that because of the different way you have to run you want to start slowly "like just start off with a half mile" and Eric burst out laughing or the fact that I still want to move to Colorado but I don't want to leave the people here?  Or how very, very, very, very tired I am?  Anyone?  Anyone?  Oh wait, how about this small crack in the skin by my thumb that just won't heal? 
I'm sorry to do this to you, but some second graders find this hysterical.  Well, I apologized.

Last chance - does anyone want to hear about the woman who came to my work to sharpen 50 pencils?

Unsung Heroes

Yo, you awesome women, you go ladies!

Boulder

Ok, so, hmm, let's see, where were we?  Ellen's 9 months now, just under 17 pounds, rolling around but not yet crawling.  For point of comparison Brendan was 21 pounds at 5 months and walking at 10 months, but clearly she is not on Brendan's trajectory.  She looked to be about 34/35 weeks when she was born, and if that is true she's about 7.5 months, so she's right on course.  Even for 9 months she's doing just fine.  Very easygoing, sweet, cute as a button.  Terrible sleeper.  But of course.  It's Spring Break now for the big boys, and this year we trekked out to Boulder.  This may or may not come as a surprise to you, but Iowa and Nebraska have lots and lots and lots and lots of farms. (And eastern Colorado too, though they are more ranches I guess?)  It's beautiful even though it's just the early planting season and everything is brown and yellow, but I found myself hoping they weren't all Monsanto factory farms.  Also it got a touch boring, but then I'd remind myself this is some of the most fertile farmland in the world so I tried to appreciate it and help the kids appreciate it to.  Mixed results.  Books on tape are the roadtrippers friend.  We did see some cows grazing in meadows and the occasional horses.  Lincoln, Nebraska is where we stopped the first night, and it was fine, no trees, unremarkable.  The next night we got to Boulder.  This is my kind of town.  The airbnb we're staying at is great.  (We did a homeaway in Saugatuck over the summer, an A frame that turned out to be sort of in the middle of nowhere with water that smelled like rusty nickles, so much so that I bought bottled water even to wash our hands and we drove back home one night to shower.  The house was nice but that water thing, well I just couldn't get beyond it.  Also it wasn't as close to the beach as you'd be led to believe, and the beds were awful.  And everything smelled faintly of the rusty nickles because that's what everything was washed in.  ew.)  This place, by contrast, is in walking distance to everything.  I was vaguely suspicious of how good it seemed to be, and I can't believe how accurately it was described.  And the crunchy reputation of Boulder is totally true!  The ketchup on tables at restaurants and even in our fridge is all organic.  Whole Foods is just one of many natural and organic grocers.  I haven't even seen a conventional chain.  We're about to go to the NOAA and I think we're going to see elk on the way.  We're in a duplex and the people who own it have a 6 year old and 4 year old who invited our boys to come play with them.  They're all out in the yard now.  I really love it here.  I never thought I'd care about mountains but they really are beautiful.  I sort of wanted to love Palo Alto and that area of California, but I didn't.  This, in contrast, is awesome.  Ok, off to explore.  I probably shouldn't have drunk (drank?) that whole cappuccino before nursing Ellen.  whoops!
And seriously...who will move out here with me?  

Look Out! Here Comes the Spider Man!

Today is AMJ's preschool orientation, and therefore I must record here what I wrote about him for his teacher...

Aidan is an exuberant, genuine, happy boy.  He has a very happy-go-lucky nature.  He loves to be in the thick of things.  He loves to do whatever his brothers are doing and he loves to play with friends.  He is a people person.  He is very enthusiastic and he loves to tell stories.  He is tremendous at physical activities (and has a lot of energy!) As opposed to my older sons who seem to be "old souls" Aidan is a "young soul."  He really cares about what is fair.  He is so loving and kind and bright and sweet.  He just had a baby sister born in June and he immediately took to her and is so loving and gentle with her.  He always tells her he will protect her, and wants to be with her and his big brothers all the time.  He is very good-natured.