A Family That Plays Together, Minecraft Edition

As my kids have gotten older, adjusting to being a family that doesn't all live in the same house has been interesting.

On one level, it's not that hard because we've always been a collection of introverts who like each other's company. Which means we're all very happy to each do our own thing at the same table or in adjoining rooms. So if Aden is hanging out with us over speaker phone on Discord while we're doing other stuff, it kind of feels like she's still here and not so far away at college. Mona doesn't live here anymore, but is close by and has a car, so she pops over to say hi on her way to or from Target. Sometimes she'll stay to watch part of show with us, or help with a chore or two. There are days I see her more than I see Quinn who actually lives here.

One of the things that's nice when we're all together is to occasionally play games. I've written in the past about playing Settlers of Catan, but we also love Concept, Code Names, Cribbage, and when we're at the cottage, the family card game of Spite and Malice.

Quinn and I pair up regularly to play Boggle. We've amassed quite a list of words we know are playable, but struggle to remember what they mean. The ones we do remember we try to find ways to use, but it's difficult. (Some of the words on this list are RET, LAT, UTS, ETAS, COE, HIE, WEN, VUE, EFT, and HOB.) We have a lot of discussions about pluralizing things as they are "said by people in another room." Like, AHS, as in "We heard the Oohs and Ahs from the people in the other room." We've had many a laugh-filled argument about whether we stretching the concept too far, and we wonder periodically about those people in the other room. (I picture them just out of sight behind a ballroom door at a hotel.)

The funniest part about looking up words to see if they are allowed in Scrabble is there are some sites that think nearly everything is a word, some that exclude North America from using them, and one site that usually adds a line about how "This is no one's favorite word" which seems unnecessarily rude. Sometimes the Urban Dictionary pops up in our searches, and my all time favorite description of any word was for MER, which they claimed could be used in situations that were either awkward or not (which would be all situations?) and that when used in an awkward situation would not help. So now when there is an awkward pause I'll say, "Mer!" and then we'll agree it indeed did not help.

We also really enjoy family games like Jackbox, which involves interacting online, so we can include people in different places. (Our favorite Jackbox games are Quiplash and Split The Room.) Jackbox is online, but it's not a video game. My kids do enjoy certain video games, but that's never been a family activity. It's something the siblings do together.

But for many years now, like many people's children, my kids have been playing Minecraft. So much Minecraft. And there must be parents who play it too, but if so they haven't bragged about it to me. So Minecraft has not been a family game, just a thing for the kids.

However, Aden has been trying for years to convince her dad to try it. She thought he'd enjoy playing Minecraft, and got him to help build her her own server. Ian has his own projects, and thought it seemed like a chore for him to have to learn to navigate the Minecraft world, so he would politely demure.

But it turns out when I was talking to Aden when she was home over spring break, that she wasn't trying to get her dad hooked on a new hobby for his sake. She just wanted an activity that she could do with her dad. Even after I explained this to him, he was still reluctant to take on another thing, so I signed up for an account for myself with the idea we could maybe share it.

Mona walked me through how to move, build things, break things.... My only past experience with anything Minecraft was this very old video, and a quote from Rick and Morty describing it as "You're mining stuff to craft with, and crafting stuff to mine with," which about sums it up. 

After establishing a little cobblestone island within sight of the island my three kids had built to plant a garden and store supplies, I handed my laptop off to my husband so he could wander off with Aden to find me a dog. He was much better at navigating that world than I was, and the next day Mona convinced him to simply get his own account rather than share mine. Which turns out to have been a good idea, because he wants to do different things than I do. He's got a big mine with a glass ceiling and lots of safe houses to retreat to at night, etc. I planted flowering trees and make flower pots and feed my dog.

But the lovely thing is for us it is a private virtual world where we can be with our kids. All five of us, regardless of where we actually are, can all hang out and have conversations in the Minecraft server. And the kids are so sweet! I noticed fish in the water, and asked Mona how to catch them. The next thing I knew, she arrived at my place in a boat and put a fishing rod among my supplies. If I say my dog is hungry, one of the kids shows up with meat for me to give it. Once I drowned (I'm still not sure what happened) and I reappeared back at my bed but all the stuff I'd had with me was gone. Aden had been in a nearby boat and collected all my stuff where I died and brought it back to me. The kids make sure I have armor, food, etc. It's amazing to watch them move around in that space so competently, and it's funny to have the roles switched where they have to look out for me.

I love seeing what everyone makes. Mona walked me around her pink island covered with cherry blossoms and a second level that's nothing but torches. It's both hilarious and beautiful. Ian's structures are mostly glass so he can see what's around him. Everyone puts up weird signs.

At one point all of us were on the server at the same time, with Aden talking over speaker phone, and she remarked how nice it was to hear "home sounds" in the background (dog barking, Quinn getting up to get a snack, etc.). And when she left me building my house to go on an adventure with her dad and siblings, she said, "It's the dream!"

I don't know how many parents are lucky enough to have their kids excited to join them in their activities this way, but I don't take it for granted. Every time I log onto the Minecraft server, any kid that's on there greets me happily. They visit my place when I'm not there to see what improvements I've made and restock my supplies. We get to be a little family that mines stuff to craft things, and crafts stuff to mine things. 

If you'd asked me even as recently as a few weeks ago if I would ever play Minecraft, I would have just brushed it off. But I like making things, even in a virtual world, and I love seeing what my kids are up to. I love my family, and finding ways to be together when we can't actually be together is the best game yet. 

And now I'm off to mine sand so I can make more glass, and see what Aden's up to. It's a good night.

Moving On and Up and Out

There's this funny sense many people have that parenting means getting your kids to 18, and then you're essentially done. Sure, there's usually college to get them through, and being available to help get them on their feet out in the world, but otherwise, you know. . . Done.

Not so much though. Legally, I guess if I thought of any of my kids as a burden or a menace, I could wave goodbye when they technically hit adulthood and not look back. But that's insane. There are still things to teach and hugs to give and traumas that wrench at your heart as if their suffering is your own. 

My oldest is 21, and she delayed starting college because of Covid, but she's now a couple of years in and her new life living in dorms has its ups and downs even though she likes her school. Last year she worked at a summer camp over break and wasn't home much, but this year she came home for nearly the whole summer break.

My middle kid is 19, and until recently was living at home since graduating high school a semester early, and she wasn't interested in college. She's spent the last year or so applying for jobs and working on sewing plushies for her Etsy page, but she recently began an apprenticeship at a tattoo parlor that is opening up across the street from our violin store and is excited about having real direction.

My youngest is 16 and in her junior year of high school. Although she's technically the only kid at home we're responsible for, often she's the one that seems to need us the least right now. 

When my oldest left for college a couple of years ago, the room she shared with her sister essentially ceased to be her room. It's not a big room, so the idea of expecting its remaining occupant to be limited to just a small part of it when nobody was on the other side was unrealistic. But that meant when my oldest came home from college in June, the best place for her to stay was in a small guest space on the first floor that we call "the nook."

By the mid-summer, however, the middle kid with the room to herself upstairs, moved into our Airbnb above the violin store. She wants to be more independent, and we still want to support her while she's working on her education (even if it's unconventional), so we figured this would work out well. She'll be living across the street from the tattoo place, and in lieu of rent we're putting her in charge of all the building chores (shoveling, mowing, weeding, cleaning the halls and teaching studio, etc.) and she'll get experience paying her own utility bills and budgeting for food. I'm glad she'll be close for a bit.

With the room at home empty, I offered to paint it and help rearrange it to the needs and tastes of the oldest kid. I know she'll only be there during school breaks, but it made me sad that she has been feeling less a part of our home. We picked out a nice new color for the walls, and I got the whole room finished over a couple of nights. We found a new dresser, rug, and curtains, and moved over a couple of bookcases and a desk from her youngest sister's room. And we hung art! That's always my favorite part of setting up a new room. We even got a print by one of her former teachers framed as an early birthday present. The room looks great, and it feels like her own.

(Here are the girls helping paint their room when we first moved into the new house. I split the room and let them each pick their own color for their half. The new single color is a very pale blue that helps open up the room a lot.)

The youngest kid turned down my offer to paint her room, too, but did need a new light fixture, and agreed to some new furniture. She requested a night stand, and a better system for storing and displaying her things, so we ended up assembling one of those walls of cubby box shelves that looks nice. Those things, along with a new small bookcase that better matches the other furniture and a new rug, have given her room a nice update.

We did a whole musical chairs thing with the beds. When the oldest went to college we threw away her mattress and replaced it with one guests would like better. She didn't like the new mattress, so she kept her bed frame and took the middle kid's mattress, while the youngest kid didn't like anything about her bed, so she got the middle kid's bed frame and the newer guest mattress. 

We also sorted all the stuffed animals. That was more involved than you might imagine, because the oldest kid is deeply sentimental, the middle kid is practical, and the youngest is somewhere in between. The piles of what to keep, what belonged to whom, what to give away, etc. got some people rather teary, to the point where I offered to simply scoop up some things to put in storage for another time. The emotional line between being an adult and a child is as fuzzy as a stuffed bunny sometimes, especially when standing in a space where you've experienced being both.

All the shifting about and moving things around has been interesting and odd. Dropping my oldest off at her dorm for the first time a couple of years ago was hard. I was leaving her somewhere far from me for the first time, and I didn't like it, even though I knew it was good for all of us. We found a new way to live that didn't include her being around. But then she was back for months and we developed a whole routine with her being involved in daily life again, and with her at school once more I've had to get used to her being gone all over. 

By comparison, the middle kid completely moving out with little chance she'll ever live under this roof again, has barely been noticeable. During the summer she was over to continue binge watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel with me and her sister each night as usual. She sometimes makes her own meals out of our fridge when she visits. So far she's got the best of both worlds, where she can hang out with her family like a kid when it suits her, and then go home to her apartment and do things her own way when she wants to be an adult. I'm jealous. I've always thought it would be ideal to be able to visit with my relatives without the complication of someone needing to be away from home to do it. I would love to go to dinner with my mom at her house, but still sleep in my own bed that night. I'm glad my own kid gets to do that.

With the oldest back at college, and the middle kid in her own space, we're down to one child at home. And she's the quietest, least conspicuous of the three. She's had an uptick in after school activities, so there is some chance to talk as we drive her places. She's still in charge of making dinner for the family from a meal kit a few nights a week, and sometimes she'll use the computer in the dining room, but otherwise we don't see her much. I feel as if the transition in a couple of years to me and my husband being empty nesters won't be as much of a shock as I feared. 

In the meantime, there is always another thing to manage with kids whether they are home or not: Trouble with health insurance and prescriptions, banking questions, arranging rides, coordinating errand schedules, figuring out dental appointments, replacing lost retainers, helping start a car that won't run, etc. Not the most warm and fuzzy bits of parenting, but all ways of being connected even after kids technically become adults. We can still be helpful. We can still be a safe place to land.

The lovely thing is to learn that my kids still want that connection even when they have other choices. My oldest was recently back for a few days because she was homesick, and our neighborhood is really fun at Halloween. She was happy to be in her updated room. She drew out both of her sisters and I was able to spend time with all three kids together. I used to worry that when my middle kid moved out that we'd seldom see her, but she regularly invites me along when she makes a run to the fabric store or Home Depot. This gives me hope that even as we don't see the youngest much at the moment, that we will still warrant visits when she moves on in the future. 

I'm kind of excited to imagine the next stage of our lives where Ian and I can make plans primarily around just each other again, without kids as the primary focus. It will be interesting to use our house in a different way, and figure out what we eat when we're only two people, and travel places without kids. 

But not quite yet. (I'm glad it's not quite yet.)

No News?

My kids don't watch the news.

I don't really blame them. I didn't watch the news much as a child either. Only big moments intruded on my world, such as the Three Mile Island scare, the hostage crisis in Iran, Mt St Helens erupting, Reagan getting shot, Challenger blowing up.... The rest of whatever was going on was confusing background noise. My parents were well informed, and I figured if there was anything I needed to know they would tell me.

Now I'm the one in the position of deciding what events in the larger world I want my kids to know about. It makes me feel like a purveyor of doom much of the time. We've had frank discussions about racism and war and violence against women as they relate to stories in the news. And of course, mass shootings. Because this is America.

Did Something Eat Something Else?*

(*George Carlin)

Some pictures only a blogger would take.  And some situations become less annoying if they could make a good post.

So with that as explanation, here are some pictures of empty food containers as I found them in their natural habitat:

I know this is not unique to our home, but come on!  Why, children, why?

The Other Mothers

I've always been irritated with people who are quick to dismiss Mother's Day as a greeting card holiday.  Holidays are what you choose to make them.  The commercialization of certain holidays can indeed get out of hand to the point where the real sentiments get lost, but that's the fault of capitalism and the juvenile insistence of the average person in this country that everything be fun or dramatic rather than meaningful.

Major Christian holidays in this country get a lot of attention, and I know members of minority faiths who resent how little the mainstream knows about other holidays when they come around, but I've often felt they should be a bit grateful that the relative obscurity shields them from some of the nonsense, and they don't see important traditions reduced to another excuse to buy unnecessary things.  My kids were surprised to learn Easter was a religious holiday at all, because they've only known it as egg hunts and candy.  For us that works, again, because we can make holidays what we like, and for some of them that means making them silly.

But even secular holidays aren't immune from further secularization.  Mother's Day in this country was eventually denounced by its creator who found its reduction from something meaningful to something used as a marketing ploy to be deplorable.  However, we can pick what we like and reject the rest, just as we can on any other day.  The tricky part is navigating the larger context and being prepared for the various meanings any holiday has for others.  We can't assume it's the same for everyone.

Mother's Day can be complicated because mothers are complicated.

Portioning Out Fairness

My children impress me.  I'm biased, I know, and I love them on a level that has become my reason for being, but still.  There are moments when they surprise me with something new and unexpected where I just stop and wonder how I had a hand in creating such lovely people.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I made the kids breakfast.  I don't often make them breakfast anymore because I stay up very late to work so I sleep in a little while Ian gets the kids off to school.  We're in a habit of making them a hot breakfast every morning, and Ian is out of town for Army work this weekend, so I decided to make crepes for the kids before I went to work.  (That sounds fancier than it is but crepes are easy when you make them regularly.  All my kids can make crepes.)

Mona and Aden were still in pajamas upstairs, but Quinn was available to help me.  He emptied the dishwasher and set the table while I stood at the stove.  When breakfast was ready he rang the bell and settled in to eat.

Sorting

This has been the week of sorting photos.  I went through the giant stack of pictures we developed before the holidays and got everything labeled and dated.  It's a habit held over from the days before digital pictures when I would get the mystery envelope of prints from the developer and sit down with my calendar and try to remember when everything happened.  I'm glad I did, because the first four years of Aden's life are a blur to me now without those photos, and the dates and reminders of where we were mean something to me.  It's still nice to have information written out on the back of a photo, though, even if there are now high tech ways to figure some of that out.

We got our first digital camera when Mona was about eighteen months old.  The best part about it to me has always been the ability to see right away if you got the shot you wanted, and to decide if it's even a picture you want to develop, or make multiples of.  Not to mention the seemingly endless number of photos you can take to try and get the right shot.  It's hard to explain the old limitations to my kids.

When I think back to using rolls of film, the main thing I remember is having to keep track of the countdown on the roll and having to be selective about what I could even take photos of.  And seeing what pictures I actually got was always a surprise, but not one I would want to revisit.  The quality of the photos, however, I still think was better with real film.  There's a crispness to digital photos that can be great, but also somehow hard and flat.  I'm sure that's not true of professional grade cameras, but there was a softness to the pictures of my old-fashioned point-and-shoot that's different from what I get with my digital version.  Not enough to matter, but it's something I notice when I look back at Aden's baby pictures from before our jump to digital.

Another hold over from my regular film developing days is the boxes.  Not every picture I got developed was something I wanted to put in an album, but I didn't necessarily want to throw them away, either, so I'd put the spares in a photo box.  Even though I can now select what photos to develop, I don't always know until I really hold them in my hand what I think.  I also like to have choices when I'm sorting and put things in an album that tell the right story.  Sometimes that means some really nice pictures end up in the boxes, but that's okay.  They are there if I ever want them.

I was good for several years about getting photos into albums.  I have categories of albums, such as friends and family and the cottage.  I tend to put big trips together into their own albums, so if I want to remember my visit to India, or Alaska, or my car trip out West with my best friend, I can find them.  I sort pictures by what I think I might want to look for--such as photos from college, or Ian as a child.

For my children I have them sorted by kid and by age, and Quinn pointed out to me recently that he only goes up to age four, and Aden stopped aging apparently at nine.  This bothered his own need for organization (not that that need extends to his bedroom floor, but that's a different post), and I decided if I didn't get them up to date soon it was going to be too hard to ever want to deal with, so Quinn helped me buckle down and get everything sorted.

Beautiful Day for a Biopsy

Well, it was a beautiful day, anyway.  We've had a gorgeous week here, all in the upper-sixties/low-seventies.  I would have loved to have gone biking along the lake, or even spent a nice hour sitting outside, but I've had to be content with simply having my front door to the store open while I admire the sunshine from my workbench.  Quinn and I took a walk the other evening to pick up things at Target and marveled the whole way that we didn't need jackets.  I love a warm day in fall.

Anyway, I decided I really didn't have much choice other than to just do the next biopsy.  It makes sense to rule out cancer, and the whole thing has been going on too long not to try to find an explanation.  But I dreaded it.

It hurt.  I cried during the procedure because of the pain.  I cried at the mammogram afterward because... I'm not sure why.  I was feeling emotional I suppose.  I hate crying in public, but once you start it's hard to stop.

In Plain Sight

I swim before I go to work most days.  I use a waterproof lap counter on my finger, which means instead of mentally keeping track of what lap I'm on I can push a button each time I reach the shallow end of the pool and I can let my mind wander.  It's a nifty little gadget and one I'm glad I found several years ago.

The other morning while sitting on the edge of the pool and fastening the lap counter to my finger I noticed for the first time that the little wave logo on it is really made from the letters S and C (for "Sport Count").  Now I can't unsee the letters.

It reminded me of when years ago a friend pointed out the arrow hidden in plain sight on the Fed Ex logo.  He wondered how much money they spent to design that arrow that so many people probably missed.  Once you see the arrow you can't not see the arrow.

I wonder sometimes when I look at my kids what I'm seeing or not seeing.  They are not too different from one day to the next, but when you jump back in photos by months and years the changes are startling.  Quinn is simultaneously in my mind very big and very little.  I think part of the charm of raising a boy is being able to scoop up someone in your arms who one day will likely turn around and be able to do the same to you.  I look at him and see my baby, but also hints of the man he may grow to be.

I watch Mona bent over her work and recognize the look of concentration on her face from when she first put a paintbrush to paper as a toddler.  It's a look I can imagine someone falling in love with her becoming enamored with one day.

Lately we've been having Aden come to the violin store after school to do her homework.  There are fewer distractions for her there than at home.  She makes popcorn in the store machine and snacks away while doing research on her dad's computer across the room from me.

She's so grown up anymore.  Aden's 13, and she's now my height and shoe size.  She can borrow my clothes and walk herself to Target or a friend's house and she's been on two overnight field trips out of state without us.  When she hugs me she tries to make herself shorter than I am because regardless of how much she's grown or how the world sees her she still wants to be my little girl.

When I look across the room at Aden sometimes I see the little girl she used to be, and other times the woman she will become.  I struggle a bit to see who she is now.

It's amazing the things right in front of us that we can see or not see.

Bike Trip to the Fabric Store

It seemed like a good idea.  It really did.

But before I get into that story I feel the need to share some pictures of leaves because this Fall has been particularly beautiful.  (These are from right outside my front door and from the park nearby.  Don't let anyone ever tell you Milwaukee's not beautiful.)

When Life Really Is a Picnic

When my kids were smaller I used to wonder a little at how much there really was to look forward to when they got bigger.  I loved the baby hugs, I loved the unexpected things they would say and do, I loved the wide-eyed stumbly cuteness of it all.

Perler Beads in High Gear

Our dining room table is usually covered in projects.  We sort through it all periodically when we have guests coming and need the dining table for, you know, dining, but most of the time it's more of a mail sorting station and an art project area.

For the past couple of months it's been dominated by perler beads.  I know I've written about them before, but for anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, perler beads are little plastic cylinders that you organize on a pegboard, then iron to melt them together to form a single, flat, plastic piece.  Normally people make junky little things with them that nobody knows what to do with (I have some set aside for coasters), and the loose tiny beads get all over and are unpleasant to step on in bare feet.

My kids started off like everyone else making basic shapes such as hearts or circles, sometimes in patterns, sometimes with random colors.  But then they decided to start using the plastic shapes they created as building blocks for larger things, piecing them together into walls of small structures.  They create accessories for use with other toys like hover-boards or food or things from Minecraft.  Quinn even made all his Valentines out of perler beads for his class this year.

Three Plus Two

One of my original editors at Babble when I used to blog there (before the site was bought by Disney and turned into a useless collection of bland click bait) recently invited me to submit an essay for her current parenting site Mom.me.  She was looking for a parenting piece with a military theme for Memorial Day.  At the time we were in the middle of watching two kids for a friend of ours who was off doing two weeks of service with the National Guard.  I had started a blog post about it, so I just reworked that into an essay she could use.

If you'd like to read it, the piece is up on Mom.me already.

I've also recorded it for the local radio show Lake Effect for air on Memorial Day.  (I'll post a link when that becomes available.)  UPDATE:  My piece is at the 46:20 mark.

Mom.me was also kind enough to name me among their favorite military parenting bloggers.  It's a list I'm honored to be a part of.

Although, thankfully, my own personal experiences of late have been very dull on the military front and I hope it stays that way.  Ian recently finished his job as a military history teacher for ROTC at Marquette and is now with a unit that specializes in training other units in mechanical jobs, so it's not a group ever likely to get deployed.  Of course, when I ask him to say those words out loud to make me feel better, he can't quite do it.  He says our current situation with wars winding down and the Army weeding people out using things like renewed tattoo restrictions makes the odds of his being sent anywhere very low, but his actual position anywhere has no relation to what he can be asked to do.

It's been interesting looking at my life from a military mom perspective again, however tangential that status may seem now.  I'm amazed how even stressful events can fade given enough time and new distractions.  I was reviewing some of my old posts from during the last deployment and was surprised what I'd forgotten.*  For instance, Mona used to panic every time I dropped Aden off at school.  I had the very clear sense that from her point of view we had dropped her dad off somewhere and he never came back, and reducing her family down further to just her and pregnant me was unacceptable.  She did not let her sister go without a fight every morning.  Until I reread those words on my old blog I had forgotten the intensity of it.  It was a good reminder.

The Puppies Are Coming Home!

My husband has been on vacation with the kids (our three plus our niece) at the cottage for the past week.  I've been home working since our trip to Detroit.

I have had only this crazy little face to come home to each night:

Chipper (world's worst shop dog) at the violin store

 I'm looking forward to seeing these sweet little faces again:

Quinn, Aden, Ellora, and Mona at Greenrfield Village, Dearborn MI

When we picked out our dog from the pound we told the kids from Chipper's point of view our family was a pack.  The kids are the puppies, and he's protective of them.  (Sometimes too much so, but we're working on that.)  Chipper has stuck close to my heels all week, worried that I may disappear from our mysteriously dwindled-down family, too.  He wanders sadly into the kids' rooms each night looking for them before resigning himself with a sigh to his dog bed in my room.

We'll both be happy when the puppies get home.

Home, Quiet Home

What a couple of weeks.  Lots of things to say, most of which I'm too tired to do much about tonight, so for now here's what I can tell you:

My dad fell again a few weeks back.  He broke his leg up near his hip and had to have surgery.  It's been a rough few years for my parents with my dad's health issues, but until this latest fall he was doing pretty well.  Now things have been kind of reset to where we were over a couple of years back, with my dad using a wheelchair and practicing with a walker, and my mom having to care for him in one room on the ground floor since the rest of the house is like a crazy obstacle course of stairs.

It's been hard.  It's hard on dad who's been scared and in pain, and hard on mom who feels trapped and overwhelmed, and hard on me and my brothers who struggle with how to help from a distance.

Doors Open Milwaukee

This weekend was Doors Open Milwaukee, where over a hundred different places were open to the public for tours and a peek into places most of us never get to see.  It's an interesting event the city tried last year, and it was such a hit they decided to repeat it.  I'm hoping it becomes a new annual tradition because it's a great idea, and it will take years for us to get to everything we want to see.  Too often we neglect to seek out the interesting sights in our own neighborhoods, and it's easy to forget to be curious about places that form the background to our daily lives.

Now, outings with kids are always a gamble no matter who you are.  My kids are unusually good on car trips and in restaurants, and can be trusted not to touch things when we go into stores or other people's homes, but even they get whiny when they are hungry and tired.  Ian and I explained at the outset that Doors Open Milwaukee was optional.  At any point on our tour we could go home.  This was either a threat or an offer, whichever need it met.

The weather looked beautiful but was cold.  Our first stop was the city hall to try and get tickets for the building's bell tower, which meant waiting in a long line at 9:00 a.m. outside.  (Everything on the Doors Open Milwaukee tour was free, but some spots with limited space required tickets.)  There was much complaining about the cold and the wait, even though I think I kept the kids fairly well entertained in the line.  Then I think Mona's mood was officially broken when we were unable to actually get tickets to go up to the bell tower.  I reminded her that it was still really cool to get to stand inside the city hall, but the whining had begun.

Milwaukee's city hall is modeled after a building in Germany and is quite striking.  (And anyone old enough to have watched Laverne and Shirley might remember it from the opening credits.)  Here is the building we did not get to the top of:

Responsibility

I had a much shorter fuse back when Ian was deployed.  The stress of the situation and all the responsibility for our children would drive me to yell too much.  There were times I really needed the kids to step up and do more so that everything wasn't all completely on me every minute.  But they were small.  It seemed like such bright little people should be able to follow certain instructions, but often they just couldn't, and in my heart I knew that. 

Still, there were days when I felt they were letting me down and they would get a loud lecture.  The one I remember best was the lecture about Responsibility.  They had responsibilities as members of our family!  As residents of our house!  They could not make extra work for me by dumping their dirty clothes all over!  If they wanted to have toys they had to pick them up when they were done!  There were rules!  They had to be more responsible!

And my beautiful, sweet children looked up at me, patiently listening to my ranting and raving as I flailed my arms around and talked about responsibility.  They looked sad and concerned and nodded in earnest agreement as I went on.  And when I finished Aden asked carefully, "Mama?  Um....  What does re-spon-si-bi-li-ty mean?" 

School

The first week of school went well here.  Unless you count the second day where Quinn threw up.  Twice.  So he came home early, but had no fever and seemed fine.  We sent him back the next day and things were less messy.  (I have no idea what that was, but I'm chalking it up to 'transition.')

Aden, Mona, Quinn, first day of school

The first day of school Ian biked there with the girls and I followed along a few minutes later with Quinn in the car because we had at least six bags of supplies to deliver.  We get a list every year from each teacher of a dozen things that includes paper towels and pencils and copy paper.  I don't remember as a kid being responsible for any supplies beyond what I was supposed to use myself, but now basic things like crayons and glue are not available in the regular school budget apparently, so all the families pitch in.  That's fine by me, since my kids attend a public school and their education is essentially free to begin with, but it makes me sad that as a society education is such an underfunded priority.  So many of the good things about a community radiate from having a well educated population, so I'm amazed that schools have to fight for the money needed to do what they do.

Of Memories And Editing (Babble)

I’ve been using most of my writing time lately to edit the manuscript I’m putting together.  I’m compiling my husband’s and my email correspondence during his first deployment back in  2006 and 2007.  A friend on the receiving end of both of our mass emails at the time said the juxtaposition of our stories would make a really interesting book.  On the chance other people think so too, I’m giving it a go.

It’s fascinating to put yourself mentally back in a place you used to be.  I’m shocked at just how much I’d forgotten, or possibly blocked out.

When Ian was deployed the first time we only had six days notice before he had to leave.  I was two months pregnant.  The girls were two and four.  I had so many responsibilities with work and teaching and performing that my life was not set up to work as a single parent and I was sent scrambling to figure out what to do.  It was a long fifteen months.
Ian’s stories are fascinating.  He was on a general’s staff dealing with information that gave him an overview of all of Iraq.  I’d forgotten just how upsetting some of his accounts were.  While sorting through and editing some of his own emails Ian actually became somewhat anxious and unhappy again.  I told him I would do the rest of it.  I shouldn’t have asked him to relive the war for my project, but I did need his help identifying what information may not be suitable for print because I don’t know what the army would approve of or not.  Now I only share with him the parts of the book about silly and funny things the kids did, which strangely mirrors the way I communicated with Ian back at the time.

I’m surprised, reading back, at just how difficult Mona was.  I remember her as being challenging, and I can still recount certain vivid moments and character traits, but she has mellowed so much that I’ve long since let most of those feelings of frustration go.  It’s strange to imagine her again as she used to be.  She didn’t really connect through talking for a long time, preferring to go through phases of only making puppy noises or quoting certain cartoons.  I had completely forgotten just how many lamps she broke.

I forgot just how much time both Aden and I spent crying.

Even if the book goes nowhere, I’m glad to be getting that crucial period of time in our family’s history down in some form for my kids to see later.  Only Aden may have vague memories of that first deployment, but it shaped so much of how we function as a family.
I wish so much I could convince my dad to write down what he remembers of his family history growing up, but he just kind of dismisses the idea when my brothers and I ask.  There have been small attempts to wrangle information out of him here or there, but nothing I could easily recount to my own kids if they asked.  My mom has created beautiful art books about my grandparents and great-grandparents, but I want to know her own story most of all.

One of the things we may sacrifice a bit as parents is a sense of our own story having much meaning after a while.  My life prior to my kids doesn’t seem as important somehow.  I enjoy focusing on my kids and the future.  But when I think how much I want to know my own parents as the people they were before I came along, I realize how much my own history may mean to my kids one day.  I don’t know what kind of time I’ll ever have to document much of my past for them, but at least this period of war and the blur of small children will be something they may find interesting.

I think especially when you have your own kids it makes you stop and reevaluate your parents not as parents but as people in a way few events do.  My children may be curious in the future how I juggled all of them with their dad away, and the ways in which their dad did his best to stay involved despite the distance and circumstances.

The one thing they may not see in the edited collection of emails is just how often their dad and I said we loved one another.  Most of my editing is removing emails that don’t advance any sort of narrative, and after the third little note that just says, “I love you” I’m sure readers would get the point.  It’s funny, though, editing out so much love and leaving in the trauma, because it’s the opposite of how I try to live my actual life.

In any case, this process of immersing myself in my own past for a bit has made me both laugh and cry, as well as make me thankful for my family all over again.  We’re in a better place today than we were five years ago.  Many things are easier, I’m doing more of the things that interest me, Ian is home, kids are growing up….  The one thing that hasn’t changed, though, is Quinn would be just as happy spending all of his time in my lap today as he was as a baby.  And his laugh still makes me melt.

(Kids of the past:)

Optimism (Babble)

First of all, thanks to everyone for their kind thoughts about my father.  His condition was described as being in a grey zone for a while, which was scary.  My brother, Barrett, has been at the hospital every day since dad was admitted, providing the rest of the family with updates.  I hate being so far away, but it makes more sense to stagger our visits if dad is getting better instead of worse, and luckily he does seem to be improving.

My dad is out of the ICU.  He will need rehab to gain strength before heading home.  The consensus is that he had a severe reaction to the last round of chemotherapy and the resulting dehydration caused a myriad of problems.  Now when specialists look at my dad and give him about two years it’s still frightening, but it seems like a gift compared to where we were just days ago.

Here in Milwaukee it was the first day of school for my girls.  They were so happy and excited!

Aden was up at five in the morning to get her backpack out of the washing machine and to make herself some alphabet soup.  (She has a new little lunch container especially for soup that comes with a tiny spoon, and she was determined to bring it on her first day back in the lunchroom.)  Mona saved a special sparkly shirt just for today.  Ian made everyone French toast.  I put Aden’s hair in a braid last night so we could sidestep the usual unpleasantness about detangling her before we leave the house.  The only thing that slowed us down was shoes.  Aden hunted high and low before realizing her shoes were in the car, and Mona simply came outside in her socks, then ran back inside when she realized she’d need shoes too.  (When Ian was deployed I had a rule for a while about no one getting to eat breakfast unless they were already wearing shoes.  Shoes are the Waterloo of our morning routine.)

The lovely thing about watching both of my girls at the start of school is their confidence.  Aden is so poised.  She always has been.  And lately she just seems so grown up, and tall, and ready to face the world in a way that’s new and independent.  I walked her up to her new classroom so I could introduce myself to the teacher and get a peek at her new space.  She has friends in her new room already.  She’s hoping they still do show and tell in fourth grade.

Mona’s new teacher seemed very sweet.  I liked that he greeted each child in the doorway while crouched down at their eye level.  He interviewed the kids one at a time, asking for a name and checking his list, and finding out if they take the bus or get picked up at the end of the day.  Mona has a large messenger-style bag instead of a backpack this year because she wanted lots of room for her paper creations.  She has a jaunty kind of look about her when she wears it.  When it was her turn at the front of the line she announced her name with pride.  She loves school and she was glad to be back.  There was no hesitation in Mona this morning.

I’m sure I was never even half as cool as either of my girls.  I was always nervous and worried.  I’m still nervous and worried but I hide it better.  I love how bold both Aden and Mona are in their own ways, marching into a new situation and believing it will be great.  Because they are optimists.  They have experienced good things and imagine more good things ahead.

And in a hospital bed the next state over, my dad is fighting to go home.  Because he knows a bit about good things, too, and believes there is more like it ahead as well.  I want him to be right.  Nervous and worried has limited utility.  I think I’m better off throwing in my lot with the optimists.