Mother May I?

Mother may I please be done with May now? I mean, there were lots of lovely things that happened and all, but please? Is it over yet? Can we just have some good old-fashioned boring time now? Or Slogtide, as I heard someone so eloquently call it this week? Slogging sounds good. Yes.

I’m glad that I kept with my motto “If you’re going to be crazy, take lots of pictures. That way, you’ll remember it all later as the blessing it really was.”

The other night, I discovered that my youngest daughter also has a motto in life: “Insert the word ‘nostril’ into at least one sentence every day.” It’s a good motto and she is definitely living by it. Sometimes, when she can’t think of natural ways to insert it into the conversation, she’ll just throw her arms open wide and her head fully back while singing loudly and passionately about the nostrils that are in her nose.

And now, some Mayness that I share with all of you:

Starting with the girls’ production of “Once Upon a Mattress” where Callie was Lady Larken

…with a little bump in her belly that was supposed to be a baby

And Sadie was the Minstrel

Then Callie and Sadie went to their “Castaway Cotillion Prom” where Sadie wore my prom dress from 1990 and Callie was a fairy and their Aunt Janet was Pocahantas and as silly as that sounds, they all looked beautiful (thanks Aunt Janet for this picture!)

Then our long lost Caity came to visit so we did what people do with long lost Caitys

Grace enjoyed her birthday pool with her cousins and a friend

Then some seriously wonderful people received confirmation at church

Grace was one of them

My parents were too

So was Crystal Mistal

Then we went for a wine and cheese garden party at a dear friend’s house where my goddaughter was the cutest

This was my tag to identify my glass

We all got good ones

The glasses were beautiful

The garden was beautiful

The friends were beautiful

Even the chicken coop was beautiful

My dad is the cutest dad in the world

Ethelweard’s dad joined us too, which was so very awesome. He was funny.

As the sun went down, it only got more beautiful

And even though I just put up ten thousand pictures, there are more that were taken and more that weren’t. There was the ordination to the priesthood of our dear new friend, Thom. There was swimming at Uncle Billy’s and Aunt Sally’s on Memorial Day. There was the graduation of some wonderful young ladies that we have watched grow. And now that they’ve graduated and school is over, I now have a senior of my own who will be graduating next year. Next year! If I thought this May was crazy…..sheesh moneesh.

One step at a time.

I’m so glad it’s over. And I’m so glad I have so much love in my life.

Somebody That I Used to Know

I know I’ve written about my Facebook dilemma before. I’ve gone back and forth a number of times on how I feel and what to do about it. So have others. And yet, at the risk of overkill on an already Facebook-saturated media week, here is the promised article that I just can’t stop thinking about:

Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? – The Atlantic.

It really is a fascinating and well-written article. Very much worth the read even though it’s long. It’s helped sum up for me a number of things I’ve been feeling but for which I just couldn’t quite find the words. Particularly this quote right here:

“When I scroll through page after page of my friends’ descriptions of how accidentally eloquent their kids are, and how their husbands are endearingly bumbling, and how they’re all about to eat a home-cooked meal prepared with fresh local organic produce bought at the farmers’ market and then go for a jog and maybe check in at the office because they’re so busy getting ready to hop on a plane for a week of luxury dog-sledding in Lapland, I do grow slightly more miserable.”

Why? Why does that make me miserable? It just doesn’t make sense and yet it’s true. These are not depressing things. In fact, they’re all presented as happy things. So maybe that’s the issue. Could it be jealousy? I have never thought of myself as a jealous person. I am really pretty happy with my life and with who I am. And even when I’m not happy, I never find that I am depressed because I am comparing my life with the lives of others. I think it’s more of a sick feeling that I might be guilty of predatory behavior than jealousy. It just feels weird to be reading the intimate (albeit lovely and clever and innocent) details of the lives of people that I don’t really know. Who of us is the same person we were twenty years ago? Just because I was friends with someone twenty years ago doesn’t mean we’re friends forever. I don’t know them and they don’t know me and yet, because we used to know each other, we’re now linked forever in some weird, alter-world where only little tidbits are spewed forth and they never add up to a whole picture of anything.

“It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear.”

But it’s not only the people that I don’t really know anymore that I find depressing. There are many people that I know through church, work and my kids’ schools that I really like when I spend time with in person. But the things they put on Facebook sometimes make me hate them. The casually voiced opinions or obsessions on things political, relational, and health-related can really put a bad taste in my mouth about a person that I thought was utterly delightful before. Not only do most people try harder to NOT be offensive to others in person (which shows that they think other people are important AND that they care what others think of them), but we also can have a lot more grace with other people in face-to-face conversations. An ill-timed comment can often be overlooked and quickly forgotten when placed in context and when body language can be read (and when we are well aware of our own tendency to do the same). But once it’s on Facebook, it’s out there forever, and it’s not usually easily forgiven or forgotten.

And then the final thing that made me feel great shame was this statistic:

“Among 18-to-34-year-olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed.”

How did I become part of this? I’m not even in that age group anymore! And it was actually one of the main reasons I was opposed to getting an iPhone for so long. I didn’t want to become one of those people addicted to checking things on my phone all the time.

But…..

I have teenagers. They’re on Facebook. Their friends are on Facebook. Their teachers give their assignments on Facebook. I want to be where they are. And let’s face it, there is no better way of reaching anyone and trying to arrange a party, a visit, a phone call, or whatever. It’s an always-current address book. Who doesn’t love that? And so, while I’m still trying to decide what I’m going to do with these new-found words-put-to-feelings, I am happy to report that I no longer check Facebook before getting out of bed in the morning.

And somehow, that makes me a little happier.

Odds and Ends (But Mostly Odds)

Come to think of it, there aren’t even any ends at all. I keep starting things and then running to the next thing. I just don’t know what an end looks like anymore.

We’ve entered May! The busiest month of the year! No sleeping allowed! We’ll start it off with Callie and Sadie’s Spring Musical, followed by a Princess and Pirates prom (of sorts – where the entire school and their families are all invited), followed by a visit from our long lost Caity friend, ending with Grace being confirmed on Whitsunday (along with a number of other exceedingly wonderful people that I love). In between all of those things, we’ve got homework, homework, homework and studying for tests as the school year winds down. Somehow, we’ll try to get Callie driving as well as summer employment as well as singing up for summer classes.

Summer! It’s almost Summer!

I’m a wee bit unendingly exclamation pointy today.

Togo had to go to the doggie hospital this weekend and get medicine for biting all his skin off and getting himself infected. He also has to wear a cone on his head to stop himself from biting himself. He’s so disoriented with that dumb cone, he can’t even move. He just keeps running into things. And Chris keeps singing Coldplay in Togo’s voice which makes me die laughing. He sings about us fixing him. It’s hilarious. I bet you didn’t even know that Togo had a voice. Oh, but he does and we hear it often in our house. Togo is a funny dog. And Grace thinks that the cone is called a coma and she keeps asking how long Togo has to be in that coma.

I read this really good article this week and I really want to talk about it but this post now seems too odd for that so I’m saving it for my next one. If you want to go ahead and talk about it without me, go ahead. I’ll catch up later.

I finally got my daughter that never kisses me goodnight to start doing so on a regular basis. She now makes a big show of coming in my room with the sappiest, sweetest, snottenest smile on her face with her arms held open wide like she’s been waiting for this moment her entire fifteen years of life. Then her voices oozes with honey as she says “Good night mu-huh-ther. I love you.” Then she plants a big one on me. I tell you what.  It’s awesome.

We had a church picnic last weekend where softball was played, which was awesome too. I’ll end with that for your viewing enjoyment. If you have an interest in seeing all four hundred million pictures from that day, clicking on any one of them should take you to all of them. Voila! And Hidey Ho!

And that’s what I look like when I die laughing. Which happens a lot seeing as how we own a talking dog.