Taryn's Journal

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Everyday life- for everything there is a season

Sharing an hour and splitting a milkshake with Mom

Sharing a lazy afternoon and homemade ice cream on a swing

Reading together for fun

Reading alone for a book report

Getting along

Not getting along

Winning and losing

Making connections between story lines

Making connections as lives intersect in high school

Orange and blue inside and out

Being the kid who whistles through life, even if no one else in the family wants to go swimming in a cold autumn pool

Celebrations and conundrums

Natalia's birthday falls on our anniversary. As an anniversary gift to us, we did NOT accompany Natalia to the Shawn Mendes concert last weekend at the fair. Thanks Aunt Nee Nee! (I hope your ears have recovered from screaming fan girls.)

Sleepovers and fall breaks...doughnuts and chocolate cakes

London Eye, meet the SC State Fair

Enter the era of "meet your mother at the rocket"

Meeting the complaints that four of us went to the fair and three did not with nonchalance.

Life is not fair.

Going to the friends of the library sale with the grandparents. Getting a funny look when all of us attempt to enter on one membership. Large family problems #42

Reading the Legend trilogy, the Lunar Chronicles, the Under the Never Sky books and the Fox Chronicles. Keeping up with my young adult book club reader kids and pondering Proverbs and Blue, Like Jazz while I drive four hours of carpool around our city

Applying words like miasma to family gas issues

Word girl humor

My huntsman

Enjoying dinner outside on the garden patio at Terra

Revisiting the autumnal problems of the long-married:

Yes, I understand and champion practicality, but I am also a romantic at heart.

Torn between conflicting ideals such as "Yes, I understand that you need downtime, a hobby, and friend-time too" and

"I still like to feel as exciting as deer season, football, or working out to you"

A do-over the next day and resolve

There are three things that amaze me- no, four that I don't understand:

How an eagles glides through the sky,

How a snake slithers on a rock,

How a ship navigates the ocean,

And the way of a man with a woman.

(Proverbs 30: 18-19)

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Homework central

Somehow, on any given evening, our bedroom becomes homework central. It is a mysterious phenonenom seeing that there are plenty of other places kids could gather to do vocabulary words or algebra problems or read the biographies of presidential candidates. I think this is one of the things that annoys me now, but that I may someday miss. One child failed two tests while our tutoring services were otherwise engaged on the lounge chairs of Jamaica, so I will count this as one of the "back to reality" moments of 2015.

Better Together

We are thankful to share life with a great group of friends. Friends that are busy raising their own families and working their own jobs. Every five years, we defy the odds and go away to vacation together and celebrate our respective anniversaries.

Not a single SLR in sight this trip after the trouble I had with the humidity five years ago. Enter the era of the selfie-stick.

Which one of these girls wears the 50 SPF, sits under the umbrella, and still is developing crepe paper skin?

Girls night out at the French restaurant

Spa day after enduring a spirited time share presentation

First time I've ever tried the hot bath followed by an ice plunge. Brrr!

These are the friends that we cut up with. That we love to go to dinner with.

These are also the friends that prayed fervently when my mom went to MDAnderson the same week we were on vacation and got a great report. No cancer this time, just scar tissue!

While we were gone Amy's dad developed bacterial pneumonia and was flown to MDA when we returned.

We are recognizing more and more that there is a narrow circle of opportunity where travel is involved: when you have both the time, the money, and the health to get away. Perhaps five years is too long to wait for the next one?