Quotable

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Jennie C.

Courtesy pretends to be the virtue of the gentle and retiring.

Actually, it is the hallmark of the strong.

from A Right to Be Merry

I’m loving these sweet nuns so much!  I’ll miss them when I get to the end of this book.  Perhaps I’ll just start the book all over again!  Did I ever tell you that we have nuns here?  Augustinian Sisters originally from Malta.  We had a convent at our parish in Illinois, too, but they kept themselves apart and we never knew them.  Our sisters here, though, are intimately involved in the lives of the parish families and it has been such a blessing to us to know them.  Sister Theresa comes every Thursday for bible study.  All five of them came for Davey’s retirement.  They never fail to speak to us at Mass or to welcome us into their home if we happen to stop in during the week.  We all love them and this intimacy has had the happy effect of making religious life seem that much more accessible to the children.  Nuns are people, too!  They tell funny stories, they make mistakes, they teach us tunisian crochet on a whim… and they love.  Nuns rock!

Posted in Faith, Motherhood | Comments Off

Favorite Memories

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Jennie C.

Brenna and Delaney turned in their essays the earliest and I was struck by the similarities in them: both from the same time in our military lives, when Davey was recruiting, both centered on those precious Sundays, the only day of the week he had off.

I think for Davey, it was probably his most challenging assignment, not so much because the job was hard, but because the hours were long, the days all the same, and the leadership abusive. For those of us old enough to remember it, though, those three years were some of the happiest in our family life. Strange, isn’t it? It’s like the less we saw of him, the better the together times were.

I used to get up early enough each morning to make him a hot breakfast and pack his lunch, and if it was winter, I’d shovel the snow off the walk and from around his car so that he wouldn’t get snow down his “recruiter shoes”. We only had one assigned parking spot there and I’d always park somewhere else so he could have our spot. By the time he got home at 10pm, there wouldn’t be any FREE spaces open anywhere near our house.

Every afternoon, just after lunch, I’d give him a call just to chat and remind him that I loved him and that I was thinking of him. On the rare occasions I was unable to make that call, he missed it. In the evening, I’d save him a plate from dinner. When he got off around 9, he’d call on his cell phone and we’d chat for the 45 minutes it took him to get home and I’d heat his meal. We often got another hour together at the table when he arrived, while he ate and decompressed.

It was good.

Meggie was little then, though, and she doesn’t remember good times. That hurt me more than a little bit, to read her memory. She only remembers the deployment years, pain, anger, loss. I hope they can make some happier memories together.

Well, here they are. I put them up on an old blog of mine for linkability and so that this post wouldn’t get too long. :-)

Brenna
Delaney
Megan
Jonathan
Rosie

Preliminary results show there might be a little interest in a young writers linky! I’ll post a topic/prompt on Monday and entries will be due on Friday, which will give us a whole weekend to read our little ones’ submissions. I’m going to leave it up to moms whether or not to correct inventive spelling and bad punctuation, but my personal preference is to correct it for readability. (I have a comma challenged child.) You can use their mistakes as teaching opportunities the following week. :-) If children are really small, they might want to narrate their stories to their typists. That’s fine, too. I don’t want this to be another schoolish assignment. I really just want this to be a fun thing for the children, to get them thinking about writing as a way of expressing themselves, and just to get them into the habit. My children are excited about this; they say I think up the best writing prompts.

Sound good?

Posted in Army Life, Homeschooling | 2 Comments

And the Bad Blogger Returns – Again

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Jennie C.

But I have a good excuse this time! Or just an excuse, period!

Davey was home and it was a big party week. Why? Well, because we’re retiring from the Army after 20 years of service, that’s why.

See? I got this:

I thought about blocking out my name, but that would be silly, don't you think? ;-)

I would show you his, but all he got was a Meritorious Service Medal, which is awesome, of course, but it says nothing at all about retiring. Mine says we’re retired.

So there was the day of the ceremony and we had a party the next day which – thank goodness – was pretty well attended. A good time was had by all, and one older gentleman even said, “I’ve been to a lot of these here things, and this is the best retirement party I’ve ever attended.” Welcome praise, because while I am quite good at making people feel welcome in our home, organized parties are not my forte. Or at least, I don’t think they are. It’s entirely possible that our guests think I’m doing a-okay. ;-)

Anyway, following hot on the heels of the retirement party was Tommy’s third birthday. Ack! My baby is three! THREE! To celebrate the occasion, I gave him a haircut. It’s been a whole half a week now and I’m still regretting it.

See? I mean, these two pictures were taken a mere two weeks apart. But the baby is all gone. He’s a cutie pie, though, isn’t he? And he was asking me almost every night to cut his hair. Sigh. I guess it was time.

But I’m still sad.

It was a good week, I guess. We ate too much cake, but there were balloons and miles of festive red, white and blue crepe paper, and modest gifts in line with the upcoming budget limitations, and pleasant company. One day soon, I’ll get over the habit of sleeping alone, and I’ll remember to check with him before going about my business, and I’ll stop chafing at his “interruptions”. I need a lot of retraining, too. :-)

Later, I’ll tell you about the time they left me alone for four whole hours. I hope I never have to go through that again.

Tomorrow, I’m going to post some essays the children wrote. I’m trying to get them into the writing habit, so I’ve been assigning a topic each Monday, with the essay due on Friday. This week, they wrote about a favorite memory of their daddy, and they are sweet and touching and even a little heart-breaking, but I have permission to post them, so we’ll run with that. If you are interested, I’ll post a topic on Monday and your children can write along, too, and maybe we can have a Friday link-up. What do you think?

Posted in Army Life, Homeschooling, Motherhood | 8 Comments

Kid Quote

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Jennie C.

Jonny, 10, stretching after a big lunch: “I feel like doing yoga today. Too bad I don’t know any.”

Posted in Motherhood | 1 Comment

And Another Week Slips By

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Jennie C.

Bad blogger. Bad, bad blogger.

But I’m pretty good with the children, and I understand my cows better even than my vet, and feeding random stuff I find in the kitchen to the chickens is one of the highlights of my day. Also, my dog thinks I’m awesome and my prodigal cat came back, and she’s pretty fond of me, too, even going so far as to meet the van in driveway when we come home so she can twist and curl around my feet. The laundry is always clean and the dinners are pretty good and the floor is usually swept and other people know they’re welcome for a cup of coffee any old time at all.

So I guess being a bad blogger isn’t really the end of the world now, is it?

~*~

One of the things I have been working on this week is producing a hard cheese with no added cultures beyond what is naturally present in the milk. The best cheeses belong to a particular place and by trying to make for myself the cheeses that belong to other climates, other forages, other bacteria, I am fighting a losing battle. So I am trying to make a palatable cheese based on our own place. It should, if this works, be a perfect synthesis of our own animals, the weather, the grasses, the native germs, turning ordinary milk into a delicious food that goes well with crackers, and possibly tacos and pizza. :-)

~*~

There are R.O.U.Ses living in my chicken coop. I saw one yesterday when I went out – earlier than usual – to gather the last eggs of the day. They’ve been stealing eggs, too, not just chicken feed. I don’t know how to kill them without running the risk of killing the cats, too. Poison is out, for if the cats try to eat poisoned rats, we poison the cats, too. Rats, I’ve read, are suspicious, but whatever we try to trap them with has to be undercover because of the amount of dust and straw and mess they will encounter in the chicken coop. Rats are disgusting. Evil. Mice are bad, but nothing like rats.

~*~

I’ve been married to my soldier for seventeen years now, and at no point has time dragged on so slowly as these last few weeks in the Army. Five weeks left! But it might as well be an eternity. (Why, yes, I am a little dramatic.)

~*~

People keep asking me how terrible the change from military life to home-all-the-time civilian life is going to be. I didn’t know, honestly, until New Year’s Day. That was our anniversary, and we’d ditched the kids after Mass and gone out to lunch. While we waited for our food to arrive, Davey daydreamed aloud about working out in the back field, seeing me coming carrying a picnic basket, the two of us sharing a meal together on a sunny hillside with the tractor parked nearby. I knew right then that everything was going to be fine, because just a couple of mornings before, I’d had the same daydream. Yes, I really do believe that it’s all going to turn out just fine.

~*~

Hope you all have a lovely weekend. I’m going to email my sisters now about their upcoming visit. Only six months to go! ;-)

Posted in Army Life, Country Roads | 5 Comments