Of course, the batteries of the camera are dead.

I picked out the prettiest glasses that I could find. I call them Sarah Palin glasses and the first day, I put my hair in 2 braids in buns on the side of my head to mark a brand new day. I can see. I am sick from the glasses. I feel like one of my eyes didn't see or work at all. That was the eye that my brain is in. Now I have to reset my brain, especially at work. Everything that I learned at work I learned with only one eye. The other eye is trying to catch up and usually at about 3 oclock I have an anxiety attack about my vision. I feel like how am I going to get out of the building if I am so dizzy from these glasses. People say it takes time to get used to them. I am just very aware of how I see and what I can see. I can do my job standing up, alittle away from the screen so that is the best part. My brain just has to catch up to my eyes. I am not used to focusing both eyes on one thing. It is confusing to me. I will put a picture when we get batteries. I love them though and I can see that my shoes don't match. One day I went to work with 2 different shoes on, silly me! Now I can look and see things like that. Or I pay attention to that, Now that I look like "Sarah Palin"? LOL

I am seasick?

I am now the proud wearer of bifocals. It is an item that I was resisting as long as possible, like coloring my hair to cover the greys. I can't cover them anymore and I can't get away from wearing glasses. The first day was great. But now my eyes are growing accustomed to them slowly and I feel like I am walking on a boat sometimes. It makes me a little anxious taking on the stairs. I have had an astigmatism or stigmatism, I am not sure which for a long time and it feels as though I wasn't even using my right eye at all for a while. It is so tired from looking out of it.
Now that I am reading all day long, the glasses really come in handy at work and I don't have to sit right up on the screen to see. That is what comes from aging. My husband likes them.
We have to get Ethan his. He keeps breaking them. We have to buy them 2 weeks before school so that he doesn't get seasick, like me...(Family eyes)

Last night,

The beauty of the sky was balanced by the boats and reflection of the sun setting on the Lake Norman. We are not normally out on the lake at sunset, but this was a special occasion. There was a movie in the park and even though I had absolutely no intention of going to the park, last night. I had cut out the coupon and showed it to the children and there was no turning back.
Ben picked me up at 8pm, the time that I got off and I complained and groused all the way there. I would have changed my mind, if I hadn't remembered to tell Evelyn to bring the OFF. I had gotten mosquito bites standing there waiting for Ben to pick me up.
We got there and it was the most beautiful sight of my day. We were reminiscing how we used to go to movies outside at Eisenhower park when we lived in NY. This was very similar. I want to say, more beautiful, but I dare not insult my NY heritage. It was so comfortable and I didn't get one mosquito bite, (Thanks to my Evvy's nursing and thoughtful mind!). She has become our family, personal care specialist. She is the one who puts the little bandaids on people and puts a little funny spin on everything. An aside and to illucidate: We were in the car and Ben was starting to correct us about something and He was going on and said it was something about a word that we learned last week. What word was that we learned? We were all searching our minds for the word and she blurted out the word was "shut up!" It was fresh but it wasn't and the whole car burst out laughing because the solemn moment turned into a joke. How is that for a personal care expert?
Anyway she cares that mommy doesn't get mosquito bitten and give up movies altogether, as I am wont to do. We saw Night at the Museum/Battle at the Smithsonian. I think that was the name. I loved it. It was funny and historical and alot of the things that make a movie entertaining for me. I would recommend it highly. I especially loved that they showed Sacajawia as being such a polite woman, in the mix and some of the funny things about ancient Egyptians and the Romans, being shut up in a building together. I didn't see the first one.
I don't get to the movies very much and I rarely watch anything made in this millenium, but this was surprisingly true to much of my studies about some of the characters. The children laughed when I said that. I loved that they cast Robin Williams as my very favorite President Teddy Roosevelt. They could have advertised it to me by telling me that. They let me find out by surprise. I went there complaining and I came home laughing, it was very fun. If Elyse were here, she would have told me that Teddy was in this one and I would have stopped complaining. Horatio Nelson was missing, but, you can't have everything:)

Yesterday, was my day off and

look how big we've grown, this is 2006

Time it was and what a time it was, It was. A time of innnocence, A time of confidences...Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph, preserve your memory, There all that's left to...

Simon and Garfunkel

Oh! Boy, do I miss Elyse, who is in Iowa.






With Daddy at work, I thought I would take some time to observe the little ones in their daily routine, while I took some felt needed R and R. The morning routine was regular and then at 11 oclock they called "Learning Table!" The whole crew of "little guys"(who are not so little except Ezra) sat around the table and I kept the clock while they did their math worksheets. Even Ezra, was working on a timer. I said, I am sick of this. It is summer time. I hate homeschooling! Not really, but I said that to them. Lets play! Don't you guys want to do something fun? They wouldn't hear of it, until they finished their "learning table time". Give me a barf bag. Who raised these fuddy duddy kids, anyhow?
I waited patiently, or not so patiently and I said "lets go to NY". We started trying to make a map of NY that was the size of my coffee table. Evvy went to the internet and copied the small version of the NYS map. We continued to try to work out the measurements. Mr. Pre-highschooler worked on the exchange for the size of the little map to the size of the bigger map that we had, we worked out that the conversions were, about 3x bigger than the original (x='s stuff). I got a little too into it and they were ready to go and "get my medicine before it was all over. We had the plans in place to build a large airport, even though we only had one plane to land in their. The 2 little fellows parked all of their cars around the coffee table to get ready for the traffic jams that we so "sorely":( miss. (maybe we don't miss them, but we don't see that kind of traffic around here but once or twice a year) We didn't finish and gave up in the mid stream. We might start again today, if we are up to it. But it was so fun to play and work and think in unison with the "little guys!" I like not having anybody be the boss of anybody like little siblings do...?:) Maybe? I am bossy though am I not?

We had such a time on Saturday

reminiscing about the days that we used to dance in the living room with Patti Labelle. I showed them the moves that we thought were so dynamic. We did it over and over and synchronized our movements with each other to "You are my Friend". It was so great to see the Youtube show her having a great time with that song. We had a family "shindig"! They could not believe that we used to be children and do those silly things in the living room at 113. The conflicts often give rise to celebration when forgiveness is given and received. That is the beautiful part of being a family. That group DIVERSITY have nothing on us. I wish we could have made up some dances like that.
Now, I keep trying to get my young choreographer Enoch to make up some steps for me, for some stories. He keeps thinking that I am too old to talk about such things. Imagine that:). Too old?

The more things change, the more they...

Evvy's giraffe
stay the same?
We had an episode of elder sister terrorism, yesterday. Older sisters can be the most viscious people on the face of the earth, I am afraid. I never had one, myself. I am speaking from my own experiences. In my house one of the big sisters is gone and the second in "command" is tauting her newfound "authority" with joy. Sad to say. We don't go for that kind of tyranny in this house. One of the babies of the family is the head of household. So, we thought that we had a grip on exorcising that demon of elder sister tyrannical leadership out of our family.
Last night there were tears and the little sister, who has Aunt Jo's fingers and toes, came in, with her little woman self and was weeping. Her identity has changed in the family. (It was the bubblegum incident, all over again "Do you have gum in your mouth?") "Just because I took the last piece of chicken the other day that is all I hear about myself. I will never live it down. I am not greedy."("I am not a liar!") Poor baby!
I could identify, but only as I looked at it through the eyes of my Jo,Jo, toward me. The visceral emotions that were flying and the difficulty for me to calm them between the 2 women, now left to their own relationship, minus the usual powerful and prayerful peacekeeper, who is out on a mission trip. I see that she is usually the diffuser of these conflicts, either by might or by sight.
I did what I could to identify, but a letter from one who can really identify with living above the identities set by wicked step sisters would do much to comfort the little lady who is crying today that there is supposed to be forgiveness in a Christian household and the big sister is rubbing her nose in an offense when our backs are turned. We are dealing with it, but I thought the story was good "BoddenFodder". I love you guys.

Vinegary is a great word!

I walked around for days cussing in Spanish and praying for her. I felt like they were attacking all women. It looked like a very horrifying scene from a gang movie, if you know what I mean. I had a season of feeling like all white people were about trying to lord it over every minority and the grissle and anger was caustic. Then, the light dawned in my soul. I remembered the 100+ days that Clarence Thomas went through his grill and how angry I was at the feminists for that. And they asked her the question about whether she felt that she was ready to make such a lifelong commitment to this at her age. I realized that this is the beauty of it. I have been walking around blessing the process of the trial.
I have seen that for generations there have been powers in place that have tried people and they have been bias, for the lack of the other perspectives being represented. Of course, it looks very one sided when the other perspective is introduced into the mix, because it is. Still, whatever we may think of it, as a person she needs to be tried, because she is going to sit in judgement over us. She has to feel the heat.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic rings in my thoughts, as though it were Isaiah 6.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
HE is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
HE has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,
His truth is marching on!

The grapes of wrath are those foolish things that keep us from truth and cause us to sit under His judgement. The writer sees God's feet trampling them. That is pressure. He wrote that in the light of the civil war. I would much prefer the pressure of the pain of my emotions seeing a bunch of men seem to gang up on a little girl and pray for her to be able to stand her own under their grilling and have that "trample out the vintage", than a war.

No more civil wars, but, I would've come to blows over that in my anger. It brought me to my knees. My girl was on the slave block, I felt like. Do I really want her there with them? I am glad she seemed to stand. I am grateful for Obama, showing us how very far we are from true equity in the system and until all of the cultures and people groups are represented on the Supreme Court, the system will only be looked at by the one group who has complete control, namely men. God is not any one color! And the vintage, or wine that he is creating out of this exercise in history called America, is taking us all to another level of tolerance and grace. If we learn from it and don't come to blows again.
The discussion about her being a Wise Latina, I found especially caustic because she is a wise Latina and there were so many undertones to that discussion. Thank God, he hears prayer, even when laced with such caustic tones as I gave Him.

The Beauty of the "System"!

I love watching the confirmation hearings. I enjoyed the blessing that a minority woman could stand in the process of the heating of the brands to be cooked into what would make her a Supreme Court Judge for the rest of her life. I find it an amazing process. Over the course of time and education, lessons and experience burns off so many of your biases. She will stand in judgement over the whole law, as we see it in this generation. She is a New Yorker. She is a Woman, She is a minority! All those years of judging that are hers and all that they could say was that she had called herself a wise latina? A racial slur? A racial epithet? She would be standing in judgment over the law. I was very glad that I was not on that seat. I have so many racial slurs to my name. I can't seem to clean that part of me out of my mouth.
At first, I was getting so angry that these white men looked to be attacking, who I considered to be "my girl". I was praying for her, every day and she stood so well with their grilling. Then, Senator Graham seemed to bring it all into perspective for me. We are not attacking this woman, he seemed to say. We are treating her as we would be treated, so that her sympathies for those and that which she is to judge will be honed. She will know what it feels like to sit under the judgment. She will know what it is like to have your word and your thoughts inspected by somebody else. I rejoiced that there was a process that could make one, out of so many different people groups. I understood why she had to go through, what she did. She is a tough cookie and I have much admiration for her accomplishments. Moreso, now I have a greater respect for the process that grows us into people who can judge our own grievances and not live in savagery. I love that she has gotten there and I long for the day that it will be all women and one man coming onto "the Bench". LOL

I love that you girls are so full of wisdom for me these days.

My Sunday problems of voicing my opinions in the midst of public, gets me in a whole heap of trouble sometimes. There are so many cultural mores, that I was not privy to. Like what you should or shouldn't say in front of W people and in front of Church people. Not policy things, cultural things. We are in the South and I stand out like a sore thumb as a northerner. With my brash and uncaring thoughts and verbal exchanges. He was raised Southern in the North, but not I. I am always saying what I think about Sotomayor (Halleluia, Did you watch the confirmation hearings?) and other political and religious issues. My children know that that is me. I will talk silly sometimes, like that Madeline Kahn piece, I think is funny. Maybe a little too silly, I don't care, it makes me laugh.

There is such a funny scene in Big Fat Greek Wedding, Where the momma says "It is lucky for me that I have you to help me tie my shoes". That is how they get sometimes. Just part of life in the Grumpy Old Man stage, I will affectionately refer to this as "G.O.M." It is a sickness and they all get it, I hear, from Aunt Lorraine and brace yourself, because they don't mean anything they say and they tell you that too. They just do. I know we love eachother and this is a phase, but it is the fun part where you have to "hold on!"
I am learning that I am not his pastor or corrector, but his wife and lover. I have to discipline myself to try to find the loving thing to say in a situation and leave the rest unsaid until the conflict is over. I am memorizing 1 Cor 13 again. By the way, we are rejoicing that he has gotten a job!:)

Maternal and Paternal collide!

We were definitely raised in maternal family unit. Father was there, but, we all know Mom, Grandma and Great-grandma were the policy makers. Dad was the figurehead, very active, but submitted to the love that he had for this woman(of whom we were jealous). She called the shots and there were no questions when mom called the shots the shots were called.
My husband comes from a completely Paternal system. For 26 years, I really hadn't realized the complete opposite perspectives that we came from. Now that we are both in the grumpy stage of life, we always butt heads on just that distinction. I do believe that the husband is the head of the wife and signed on for that and so did he. Still, there are times when I want to assert my dominance overtly. He is strong enough to deal with that. Thank God.
Now, I just say, would you tell those children this or that. Asserting my way, in imitation of my mother, unwittingly. But instead of the condescencion that I saw at home from my father, Your wish is my command. He takes the reigns and goes, "Ya". I am always happily shocked at the sense of peace that there is in not being the boss of him. He's the boss and when I'm right, he tries to listen and when I am wrong he tells me so. You would be surprised how peaceful a life that is. Peaceful, I say, but not comfortable. I want a Coup De 'Tat! I want a take over, but the troops are well raised and submit to his leadership, so I guess I am out numbered. I do miss the maternal society I came from and just have to visit NY to see a comfortable maternally led family. Miss you girls. AAAHHHHHHH!