How it All Turned Out

 Back to my poor neglected blog!

Mumpy: no more strokes, but through the process it turned out that she had dementia.  Also, eventually we were to discover, Parkinson's.  She is currently in a memory care ward, but the plan is to bring her home with us after she's no longer mobile (we couldn't keep her safe when she was wandering).  She's doing ok.  We're seeing her three times a week, and the place she's in is super nice, but I miss having her here.

 

 

Pa: My dad passed on peacefully at home. surrounded by love and family in September of 2022, after 3 decades of Parkinson's, and a truly amazing life.  You can read about it on his Wikipedia page. 

 

Mxyl: Graduated college summa cum laude and is working at Sparksoft designing web apps.  He's living at home while he builds his nest egg and fills his 401k.  He's also doing a ton of Japanese stuff: clubs, fan subtitling, and tokusatsu fandoms.

 

Klenda: Graduated art school, did a fellowship year and is mostly through her first
book illustration contract.  She's also doing some teaching and a whole lot of commissions, often for tokusatsu fandoms.  She's also learned a ton of Japanese.  She's also living at home while she builds up her income streams.

 

Zorg: Is starting his last year at Catholic U with a major in business and a minor in theology.  Turns out being brilliant at game systems translates really well to designing supply chains!  He's also a fantastic DM and nerf weaponsmith.

 

Leena acquired me a fabulous son in law and they just celebrated their first anniversary.  They are living in Virginia and she's finishing a music degree at George Mason while also working as a singer and video editor.  She's also still doing commissions for art, voice acting, composing, and audio editing.

 

Choclo and Oob are dual enrolled at the community college and finishing their last year of high school.  Choclo has his driver's license, and Oob has his permit.  They are nearly done with physics and Calculus, and really could graduate at any time, but we decided to take a relaxed transition year to college.  

Choclo does a ton of DnD stuff and is fabulous DM and artist. He is looking at a career in computer animation and game design.

Oob runs an enormous role play server and is the SPL for his scout troop with an eye on getting his Eagle. And has an eye out for eagles and birds in general.  He plans to be a firefighter and EMT.

If you read this blog, it's probably because you're interested in home schooling, and your main concern is probably: will my kids turn out ok?  There are no guarantees no matter what you choose, of course!  But, after choosing home schooling for the last 20+ years, I can say that I really like my kids. 

I mean, yes, they are set up well for their lives, which is what I thought was the main point all those years ago.  But, more than that, they are each uniquely interesting, amazing, good people, and I'm so grateful to have had the time with them.

Update

 

The good news is that she is going to be fine, but my mom, Mumpy, had a small stroke and we spent most of last week in the hospital.

No permanent damage, but it'll take a while to fully recover.

Blessedly, my sister was still here when it happened, and she is staying a few extra weeks to help out.

Also, we went to the new Adventist hospital in White Oak, and it was "towel swan" level of swanky.  We highly recommend it!

My Sister is Here!

 

She got the vaccine out in North Dakota, and headed back to see all of us as soon as she was immune.  

Because of the pandemic, it's been 2 years since we last saw her, and because she usually went to NJ to stay with our parents, it's been a while since she's been in Maryland.

But now we're all together and it so good to see her!!

Sisters of Divine Love and Mercy

 

I am over the moon happy!

After more than a decade, my sister was able to canonically establish her order!!

She's the one on the left; isn't she beautiful!!

If you don't know how this works, she was asked by her bishop to found an order of teaching sisters in Ghana.

In order to found an order, the new foundress (and the first few sisters) are formed by an established order, in this case the order my other sister is in: the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT).

The superior of that order is the sister in gray.

If all goes well, after full formation, the foundress and her new sisters make their vows and receive their new habit, and a new order is born: The Sisters of Divine Love and Mercy!

They made their new vows on the feast of the Annunciation, just about this time last week!

I can't tell you how happy and proud I am of her - this is so much more exciting, even than when she got her doctorate.

It's been such an incredible blessing to accompany her on this journey.  Please say a prayer for her and her new order!

Happy Veterans Day!

 

Veterans Day is pretty special to us, partly because the Emperor and I are both children of veterans.

In the Emperor's case, his dad fought in WWII!

He was wounded by a German shell, not long after he had arrived in France.

He learned to walk again, but carried shrapnel in his leg for the rest of his life.

That's one reason he was buried in Arlington, near his father, a WWI veteran.

My dad was career army, doing bomb disposal for an astonishing 60+ years!  He has more than his share of medals, too.

He served in the Vietnam War, Desert Storm, and all sorts of places in between, and he trained a lot of the people who went to Iraq and Afghanistan after his Parkinson's kept him from traveling.

My dad says (and I'm sure the Emperor's dad would agree) that the price of freedom must be paid by every generation.

 

So a big thank you to all the veterans out there!

Happy Parent Day to Me!

 

Relaxing Together

Wheeee!  Today it's been one year since my parent's came to live with us!

Other than some major health scares around last Christmas, it's been fantastic.  They have a their own little suite of rooms, but we tend to eat together and do fun stuff.  I think they have a nice combination of privacy and support.

Pray for us today, my dad is having his third (minor) surgery in three weeks.  It's exhausting, but, after this he should be both able to see really well and be out of pain, and he should be in really good shape heading into this winter.

It's been a a wild ride, but so fun, and so fantastic to have them here with us, getting to know their grandkids in a new way, and all of us getting to enjoy each other!

Wordless Wednesday Vacation Part 3

 

Weird Things I Found on My Phone Explained, Part Two

 

 

 A dinner that we occasionally have is Pepperoni Pizza Monkey Bread.  We use a sheet pan instead of a Bundt pan because we need to make enough for 10 people. And we do other fillings sometimes.

This is close to that, but not quite.  This is Pizza Monkey Puzzle Bread.  It's a puzzle because one of the little rolls contains something that is technically edible, but is definitely NOT pizza.

Theoretically, you can figure out which one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Choclo actually managed to crack the puzzle and found... a lemon!

 

Which leaves the puzzle of "Why am I like this?" 

 

 

 

 This is from Oob.

If you look very closely, the imperiled person in the middle is not from the usual WWII army guy collection.

He's holding a sword.

He's a Jedi!

 

It's everyone else who's in trouble.

 

 

 

 Birds!

 

Mike really likes hanging out with Leena, but Oob clipped on a few cute (fake) birbs of his own, much to Mike's confusion. 

In other bird news, we had another baby crow (Ace) show up.  He paced back and forth on the driveway until we came out and fed him.

He must have been very young.  He stabbed the cheese with his beak and got it stuck on the tip- a noob move for sure!

He hung out with us for a few hours until his parents got him flying again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weird Things I Found on My Phone Explained, Part One

 This is my sister holding the llama pinata I sent her.  You can tell she thinks it's hysterically funny!

Almost as funny as I thought it was!

She doesn't like llamas for some odd reason involving a llama that spat in her face as a child.

But this is a llama she can whack!  And it's her favorite color!!

I think this is her "I secretly love this llama" face.

 

This is a photo of Choclo by Choclo explained by Choclo:

This is a list that Oob and I made over a year ago that we used to play a game we called "Transform-o-matic"

You walk into the Transform-o-matic, known formally as "The Basement," and when you walk out you are something else.  Or you don't walk out and you pretend you've been completely obliterated.

But then you close and open the door again and there you are!

I thought it was crazy and awkward that so many of the transformations were the exact same thing.

 

 

 

 I was explaining sp00ders to Mumpy because her house is full of sp00ders.  And some wasps.

I was explaining to her that I was going out through the sp00der filled basement into the garage filled with baby sp00ders because walking out the front door meant walking through the colony of wasps who had built a nest inside the front porch wall, and "at least sp00ders can't fly."

To which she answered, "But they can jump."

Thanks, Mom.

Also I remembered that sp00ders can indeed fly.

 

 

 

Which also explains this picture of baby sp00ders.

Just in case you too are not a huge fan of sp00ders, I will now refrain from posting the dozens of sp00der pictures I took at her house in an attempt to identify some of the many varieties.

But the best part of the whole experience was definitely TTHBLOX's comment, so thank you for that if you ever read this!

Poem of the Week: Sonnet 116

 For my niece, Anja, and my new nephew, John, who married yesterday in the middle of a pandemic.  May you ever rejoice in each other and in the Lord!  Like everyone else, I wish I could have been there!

Sonnet 116

By William Shakespeare

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

HT: Poetry Foundation 

Image HT: @KrissMacDonald1 via Twitter

Four Months

We are four months into our lock down/quarantine.  At three months, I was surprised it had been so long.  At four months, I am surprised it's not six or seven...years.

It's not that it's terribly hard on us, it just feels like it's gone on for so looong.  Maybe not even that so much as the feeling that we are on a treadmill with no end in sight.

We miss Mass. We miss people.  We miss going places.  We miss not worrying .

A lot of our friends have given up and more or less returned to socializing.

For us, with so many high risk people in our house, that's not an option.

What has turned out to be a surprising option is a family vacation to a house on a mountain lake in New Jersey.  Yes, all ten of us are going up to visit my parent's house next week!  This is their actual house, the one I grew up in. 

With them living with us most of the time, it's sort of turned into a vacation home.  At any rate, my dad's health hasn't been stable enough for them to visit since last December, so they (and we) are super excited about going. 

Prayers would definitely be appreciated.  I'm less worried about the virus (which is less prevalent there), and more worried that the trip will be physically hard on my dad.

The Concrete Garden

 Six inches of concrete over the course of 30 feet of sidewalk adds up to a lot of concrete.

Also, it turns out that getting rid of concrete is difficult, expensive, and requires special permits...

I had been thinking of adding a garden on this corner in the fall.

 And I had always liked the idea of a garden berm.

And I don't mind when my entire family collectively rolls their eyes at me when I suggest a new garden.

So I spray painted the outline of a garden, and we dumped the concrete there.

Then I ordered a couple of cubic yards of compost and had the truck dump it directly on the concrete.

 July is a horrible time to start a garden here because it's so hot and usually so dry.  So I mostly put in some annuals in the hopes that they would grow quickly and hold the soil in place.

I knew already that the plants all need to be fairly low growing so that drivers can see around the corner, and I already knew a few of the plants I wanted there.

When my local Home Depot had peach Drift roses on clearance, I nabbed two of them!

Come fall, I'll separate a bunch of my perennials, from other gardens and plant up this corner garden properly.

I'll probably add a few new bulbs and other plants, because I just can't get enough of the family collective eye roll really love plants!

Happy Memorial Day!

 With the garden in full bloom, it was an easy year to make bouquets to decorate the graves!

My dad has not been doing well.  No Covid problems, thankfully, but he's recovering from a bacterial infection and we didn't want to be away from the house for too long.

Now that's not something you hear often during lock down!   Where we are in Maryland, near DC, there are still high levels of virus circulating, so we are locked down at least through June1.

 With all that going on, we decided to just go to the close cemetery and not try for Arlington.

We really missed going with our cousins!

Still, it made us happy to think that they would come along later and see the flowers, and we connected by phone after the fact.

 It's been five years since my beloved MIL passed.  I still miss her so much.

Zorg told me that he now mostly just remembers happy times with her, so thinking of her makes him mostly happy and thankful.

I think most days that's true for me, too.

 And we came back and had a cookout with just the 10 of us. 

A quiet Memorial Day, for sure, but still fun!

More Birthdays!

 Last week was huge! 

I turned 50, my mom turned 75, and Mxyl graduated college!

My sweet sister had planned out a fancy tea party themed party (from all the way back in North Dakota).

She also sent me 50 things she loves about me and a slew of great books to read, and a fancy hat (she knows me so well!).

The emperor and the Zoomlians also gave me tons of great stuff, and Klenda and Leena baked and decorated this fabulous tea themed cake!

Best birthday ever!

Then Mumpy turned 75, and my sweet sister in law sent tons of cool presents.  Our favorite was this extremely cool sketch of a photo from shortly after Mumpy and Pa got married!

And we all had a great time showering her with presents and affection. 

My sister sent her 75 things she loved about her (how great a gift is that?!).

All in all it was Mumpy's best birthday ever, too!

Pa doesn't look pleased about the cake in the picture, but he actually liked it a lot!