Category: Fun

Mogul-ish.

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Hold on to your hats and glasses:

 

We’re selling our house. And buying another!

We lived in our home in CA for the 10 worst years of the housing market since the Depression. We knew that everything we did to make that house nicer was throwing money to the wind, since at one point our home was worth half what we paid for it.

Then we moved to Oregon, where our CA dollars walked bigly. We bought the house we thought we always wanted, 3000 square feet, terrific view, enormous master bath, wood floors, and molding on every door, floorboard and window casing. It has all the trendy tics: main floor master, great room configuration, walk-out basement, on almost 1/3 of an acre in the best school district in town.

Whoop, whoop!

Don’t you believe it. The great room is the worst design idea since wood paneling; when the master bath is that big, people hang out there all the time; wood molding gets awfully dusty and wood floors show every single dog hair; and it may be 3000 square feet but the usable space is half that thanks to Harry Potter-sized closets.

About six months after we moved in, I looked at Shea and said “You know this is not my house.” He collapsed on the floor. I stood over him and said “When this thing hits a certain dollar amount, we have to sell it.”

This Fall, it hit that dollar amount. We buried a St. Joe in the front yard, hung a sign and sold it in the two weeks including Christmas and New Year’s and during the 100 year snow storm. Boom. Shea looked at the sale price and said “Hey, it’s like you’ve had a job the last two years!”

God knows, I don’t want to get a job, but with Annie heading off to kinder next year I was feeling guilty about all that stay at home (by myself) mom time. But if I can turn this house thing into the equivalent of a first year teacher’s salary? Brilliant!

I called my financial advisor (aka my brother) and asked him his thoughts on a repeat of 2008. He assures me it was a once in a lifetime event. I trust him.

Then I went looking for a fixer upper.  I LOVE looking at houses! Love it! So much that our realtor says I should become a realtor myself and make money from my obsession. I tell her to shush, so that she can make money from my obsession. We all have kids to feed!

I don’t believe in the jinx but I’m still not going to count my chickens before they hatch. Just know that oh my gosh there could be fixer upper posts in our future!!!

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas

 

 

You guys, I have shown you my very cool Advent calendar: A magnetic nativity scene where each day the kids open the door and place another character into the picture.

Do you know that in the middle of my prayerful and restful Advent, my oldest and youngest child were doing their best to block the baby Jesus spot so that the middle child would have nowhere to put him?

They are 10, 8 and 4. They know what the manger scene is supposed to look like. And they know what they are about. And yes, I did have to settle an argument between them about whether the sheep will have to make way for the baby in the hay.

And by “settle”, I mean threaten to take the calendar down and cancel Christmas.

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Do you see how they played a twisted kind of Nativity Risk?

You know me, though. And how much I like my metaphors. So here’s one for you to hold on to these last 48 hours.

What makes my Nativity scene holy is not that the main players are perfectly placed–but that they are there in that place, floating Wise Man and Fallen Star alike, celebrating the birth of the Lord (who, in our version, may float in his trough above the manger).

Same thing with the next 48 hours. Whatever you are trying to pull off, success is not what will make it holy.

Presence will make it holy.

Good luck my friends, and have yourselves a Merry Christmas.

Reading to Win

Gabe and I are reading this book series about twins who travel into stories. Alex and Connor are caricatures of 12-year-old tweens at the beginning—sister Alex is a smart book worm with few friends and brother Connor is the jokester who doesn’t like or do well in school. But then Connor discovers that he likes to write stories of his own. Books later, they travel into his stories to save the day and that’s when they discover that spelling counts.

Instead of being served rotisserie chicken by an all-girl pirate crew, they are served a live and squawking chicken with a rosary around its neck. Rosary Chicken has now become a bit player in the plot, showing up at the oddest of moments. That’s our joke: Actions have consequences. Rosary Chicken.

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From Land of Stories: An Author’s Odyssey, page 130. Illustrated by Brandon Dorman

The Land of Stories by Chris Colfer is the third series of books that Gabe and I have read together, following the seven Wings of Fire books by Tui T. Sutherland and the five (and counting) Fablehaven books by Brandon Mull.

Tween literature has come a long way since the days when teachers begged boys to read the sports page of the newspaper. Turns out boys like to read about more than sports. And if the stories are good, they will keep reading them, as many as the author can write. Like Erin Hunter, author of the Warrior books, a series about soldier cats. There have to be 40 of those things. And they are never available at the library.

Gabe is not the only boy in his class who reads. They ALL read. They share books with each other. They meet on Clash Royale and talk about books. They stand around at football practice and soccer practice and talk about books.

They have conversations like this on the phone: “Meet me at the park. Bring nerf guns and the football. And a snack. And the next Warriors book because I finished the other one.”

I’ve never had a 5th grader before, so maybe this is normal for 5th grade boys to read like crazy.

But I don’t think so.

Here’s what they do around here to support reading.

First, they run reading like an Olympic competition. It’s fierce. Accelerated Reader (AR) points are a BIG DEAL. There are free lunches and medals for every 100 points. The medals get handed out at assemblies. The whole school claps. The beauty of this is that anyone, regardless of reading level, can amass AR points.

Next, the state of Oregon runs a tournament for reading called Oregon Battle of the Books (OBOB). Kids form teams and read books and then answer questions to advance all the way up to state finals. You can read all about it here. Two years ago I was the scorekeeper for the regional high school competition. More boys than girls on the teams, and two of them were great big hulking linemen.

The release of the OBOB book lists usually happens at the beginning of summer, which means kids go to the public library to get the books to read over the summer. They go the first day of summer. I know this because when we got there the second day, they were all checked out and had six people on their waiting lists.

Barnes and Noble carries them too, they just cost money there and our monthly book budget is already a tenuous negotiation.

Now let me tell you what I learned about reading a book with your son. It’s magical. All kinds of conversation starters and access points. That one character who kind of does what he wants because he thinks he’s smarter than anyone else and he gets his sister killed (not really, but he doesn’t know that)? Yeah, that kid was a learning moment for us.

And Rosary Chicken. Gabe’s active imagination extends to his spelling, so when I came out of my room to laugh about Rosary Chicken, he said what I was thinking: That’s totally something I would do. But what he really learned from Rosary Chicken is that just because you can’t spell doesn’t mean you can’t write.

And what 10 year old boy doesn’t need to hear that?

 

Ciao, Summer

It has been one of the greatest summers of my motherhood.

But I am not sad to see it go.

We’ve been to all the movies. I liked Kubo and the Two Strings best with Pete’s Dragon a close second. We swam in pools, lakes, rivers and oceans. We camped and hoteled and grandma’d. Went to bed at 10 and woke up at 9. We ate a lot of ice cream.

We are fat and tan and sassy.

It was a wonderful season, but the wheel is turning and I am ready for the greatest season of all: SCHOOL.

Blessings to the teachers whose school year started weeks ago with trainings and planning and classroom setting up. I see you.

But please, do not expect to see me until at least October.

My ears are bleeding from the 13 million times they have had to process the word Mom since June 10. Or Can I have a snack? Or Can we do something fun today?

My back is aching from loading the dishwasher twelve times a day with thrice the number of drinking glasses as children in the house.

My brain is weak from trying to solve the mathematical conundrums of laundry, like the ratio of shorts to underwear (many vs. hardly any) and family word problems (If five people are going to the pool and mom asks you to pack towels for everyone, how many towels do you need? SHOW YOUR WORK.)

My heart must recover from things like this cup of yuck I found on my hutch:

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“What in the HIGH HOLY HEAVEN is that??” I thought to myself. Then I called for Gabe.
“Oh yeah” he said. “I wanted to see what would happen if I rehydrated a piece of beef jerky.”
And if that wasn’t enough, Annie ran up the stairs yelling “Is it swimming??”

Or this hide and seek playdate run amuck:

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YES, I took a picture. I’ve learned to grab my phone when someone screams.  My friend said I’m like a war photographer. But who’s going to believe this stuff without proof?

I need a moment, just a month-long moment to recharge.

And then come October 1, armed with a pumpkin spice latte and orange cranberry muffin, I’ll be ready.

Rolling on the River.

On Saturday we rafted a meek portion of the Rogue river, with some local friends. Marcy grew up rafting the Rogue and her girls are pretty experienced on the water. They’re a water family, since her husband Kevin is an ocean fisherman by trade.

I also have experience rafting and love it–although I have always done it with a guide. Kate and I rafted the whitewater on the Rogue just a few weeks ago. My motto while rafting is “No Swimmers”. Once on the American river, when we went high on a rock, I reached back and kept the guide in the boat while letting one of my friends go in. I have never fallen out.

We set off in two boats—Marcy and me in one with the little girls and Shea and Gabe with Kevin and their older daughter Sophie.

This part of the Rogue is class 1 to 1 ½. Whenever Marcy talks about rafting the river, she always says some form of “You have to be careful”. You’d never know that from the rafting companies that shuttle anyone 10 miles up, give them a boat, a life jacket and some oars and tell them “Be back at the landing by 5 or there’s a late fee”.

I wasn’t worried at all because Marcy is exactly like a rafting guide, and gives directions in a voice I am pre-programmed to obey. The girls were having a blast with the water guns, the river was packed and the sun was warm.

And then.

I don’t know how it happened. We were trying to go right and Marcy told me to dig in. It was shallow and my oar got stuck but I didn’t feel strain, leverage, anything.

I was just in the water.

Facing the wrong way. Mashed against a boulder by the boat. And the water was COLD.

Later Marcy told me we were in the Rock Garden, a section of the river where there’s a wide, rocky and shallow sand bar that falls off into deep, fast moving and boulder-y water.

“It’s the very place I didn’t want to dump anyone.”

I had a hold of the side rope, so when the raft pushed me off the boulder, I was able to turn and get my feet out in front of me. This is super important–to go feet first and flat down the rapids, like a paper boat.

Marcy made the right choice to let me ride so she could get us through the next fast part and keep me out of the blackberry bushes along the bank. A guy died in the blackberry bushes last summer, although he didn’t have a life jacket on, and I sure did.

Once we hit calmer water, I had to get back in the boat, with only 50 yards to go before the next shallow part. I still couldn’t touch the bottom, so Marcy and I were going to have to haul my butt in together.

There was praying. And cursing. Actually, it was all mixed in together, but God knows how Marcy and I roll and He loves us still. She pulled and I pulled and my body was not working right from the cold but I hooked a leg and then between the two of us, our guardian angels and three years of yoga, I got back in the boat.

Marcy and I laughed hysterically for a good two minutes. Then we decided we are Amazon sisters for life.

I tend to see the beauty of the river, its calm implacability, the way it can adjust to and overcome obstacles. I identify with the strength of the river, mighty and eternal.

But underneath, the waters are roiling and dangerous. If we had ignored the danger, been drinking or not wearing life jackets—like so many boaters we saw on the river—things could have gone very differently.

I know that somewhere in this story, there’s a lesson to learn. I’m not ready to think about it yet. For now I’m content to count my blessings—I was never really in any big danger—and ice my knee.

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