Soaring and Stillness: Life with the Chickadees

We spent the weekend dancing in Georgia and I was too busy running the Grace Girl from competition to convention classes to do anything else. Yesterday was make-up schooling and extra loads of laundry I never fathomed this many loads of dark hand wash only as well as bathing the dog because she'd been at the kennel for a few days eewwwww.   So, here it comes, a Five Minute Friday: Tender (On Tuesday) Five minute Friday is here...five minutes where I'll write without editing, backtracking, or second guessing.  Five minutes to write because I love it, because it frees me, if only for five minutes... Today's topic?   Tender Ready...Set...Go! Tender  is how my heart gets when I watch them and don't realize it. Dreaming their dreams and telling each other secrets in hushed whisper s  as  the  occasional  giggle slips out. Tender  is how she's always approached her big sister, the one who shows her the ropes and gives her the mo...

It all goes back to elementary school and diagramming sentences... (Taken from  the Grace Girl's book)  I was the girl who loved English class. Every single part of it. From spelling to word definitions to parts of speech, I was smitten. I even was taken with the lost of art of sentence diagramming. Yep. That's me. I was a geek. There are moments in life where I wonder if I should have studied the sciences and not the arts. If becoming an experimentalist would perhaps have given me a different view on the world. If, in being a researcher, I would see things less in black and white... .and more in gray Being a yes or no not a maybe girl is fantastic in some areas of my life. I make decisions quickly. I carry through on agreements. I throw myself into relationships wholeheartedly. I enjoy order. I value those who stick to their word. I have high expectations of myself.  I have high expectations of others I want people t...

In the little moments, I need to remember she's not trying to break my heart. Her sweetness emanates from her in a way unmatched by other children... She's never known me as a physical force like her sister has; as she grows she won't recall how I used to change furniture around because I was bored with the look of the room. She hasn't done those quick trips to the hardware store in search of the perfect paint color to change up the walls. I used to do that. Often . She'll never remember that I was able to easily push her for what seemed like forever on the swing, her wispy curls blowing in the breeze as she called out, "MORE, Mama, MORE!" in that baby voice I can still hear in memories...lost to her will be the pictures in her head of me following her up the steps of a slide like I did with her big sis. Her recollections won't include me running after her as she took those baby steps from tentative to full speed. She doesn't recall ba...

Sometimes we get wild and crazy around the nest. We cook . Confession: I can cook and in cook I mean put lots of ingredients together from scratch and make something delectable and I used to do a great deal of it. My kitchen was permeated with the smells of chicken, soups, chili, roast...the list is endless. I would lovingly prepare foods that my husband enjoyed and my children tolerated. The chicks are not meat (any color) and potatoes gals most of the time. They eat, like, well, chicks. They go for fruits and veggies, salads and whole grains. They love lentils. The prof often shakes his head in amazement. It's not that they don't enjoy the occasional carnivorousness meal, it's that when given a choice between a grass fed burger and a bowl of lentils with peppers. It's lentils. Every. Time. Dinners are healthy. Nutrient packed. Full of protein, minerals and vitamins, carbs and enough fat to keep little bodies growing. Food is usually natural and rarely processed....

Five minute Friday is here...five minutes where I'll write without editing, backtracking, or second guessing.  Five minutes to write because I love it, because it frees me, if only for five minutes... Today's topic?   Vivid Ready...Set...Go! Vivid In my mind I see all the colors of her... purple for that hair color that went awry Irish  green for those sparkling eyes creamy smooth of a face not oft touched by sun tan spots spattering her cheeks the blue of her living area which became a bedroom that matched mine gray Iowa skies on a minus three December's eve yellow happy returns lilies we placed in her garden red for the cowl neck she wore black, a cozy blanket her dad brought the last time he visited distressed wood on the bedside table crystal sparkles in the lime slush a rainbow cascade in her laughter pure sunshine out of her smile She was vivid. Vibrant. Beautiful. It's how I'll always ...

"Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you..."  -Coldplay I desire to follow the light. Have it create a fire in my bones for something more ...I want to do more, be more, create more. In the little moments, where I'm not just a wife, mother, teacher, dance driver, housekeeper, and chef, my voice cries out from under the place I've hidden it. "I'm here," it says, "YOU'RE HERE. BE VISIBLE. Make me heard." Has anyone else ever felt the like?  As women, as wives and mothers and career followers and seekers of word and truth and the often hard of life, perhaps...well, perhaps sometimes we lose our voices. I know we've worked to create them through suffrage and rights and equality laws, but really? In trying to prove that as women we're equal  we've squelched our voice. The one inside . The smallish one that could roar if we'd let  it. If we had the courage to be ourselves and not ...

Tuesdays around the nest have done a one-eighty this month. It's more than a little bit of crazy that our "off" day    you know the kind, the day  where you don't have to leave the house for any outside activity has become perhaps the most filled day of the week. I want to follow that with an UGH  and a drawn our sigh, but the chickadees enjoy flight, so I'll be kind and refrain. I have, however, come up with some alliterative terms that go with our Tuesday schedule.  They include: Topsy-Turvy Turbulent Tiring Today has gone from being our long schooling day to one where we start in the darkness. Instead of lunch at the normal hour, I pack the babes into the car and drive to one of the studios where the Grace Girl is putting in the hours to make her dreams a reality. The prof will pick her up when he's done with work roughly five hours after I've dropped her off  and tonight she'll head home to finish reading Homer's  The...

Five minute Friday is here...five minutes where I'll write without editing, backtracking, or second guessing.   Today's topic?   AWAKE. Ready...Set...Go!                           Awake What I do before the sun climbs into the sky so that I am able to exercise and pray and have a few moments of time unblemished by noise and the thoughts of the day. Awake It was what I was not today when the alarm went off and I tried to pretend that I didn't hear it's call. Awake How I want my heart to be to the world that surrounds me, with all of the messy and beautiful combined. Awake The Grace Girl at 1:30 am trying to process all of the "new" around her. New classes, harder curriculum, new friends who have half a decade on her, new dance and new styles. So much new for a heart that is still just waking up... which leads to troubled bedtimes and notice of the passing hands of the c...

In the days before Little Bit joined our world, I was the queen  of moment capturing, printing, dating and filing. The pre-digital camera days were full of snapping shots on 800 speed film with our 35mm Minolta from every angle.  As soon as the last image was taken I'd rush out to the Exchange  we were military during those years  and immediately have the film developed. When it returned, I'd promptly pick it up and meticulously caption and date the back of each picture, which would then be lovingly and immediately put into the next slot in the book.  If I had a title for those years, it would be, "I dreamed of scrapping"...mostly because I planned on creating masterpieces with the images as soon as my Grace Girl went to school for a few hours a day. Ha Ha Ha....this is me laughing at my decade ago self. I had such big dreams. In late 2003 all of the organizational photo beauty ended. It mimicked those scenes in the movies where the main chara...

I love  the concept of one little word by Ali Edwards .  LOVE IT. I spent a great deal of time at the close of 2010 and beginning of 2011 deciding which  word I should choose for the year... I hemmed I hawed I prayed I desired to choose a word that would remind me, encourage me, challenge me. In my heart, I knew  the term that should be put into practice...I fought it. Tooth and nail. I did not desire to use this word in my every day, in the hard. I'd always prided myself on being a go-with-the-flow gal. This one word? It would show the inner workings of my heart and challenge me to not just say I was okay with things but, rather, BE okay with them. For.  Real. My word? ACCEPT Accept. One little word that rocked me to the core in 2011. I thought  that my word would relate mostly to my health. That's what I planned  on it relating too.  You know, because, um, I'm the one in charge.  Wink.   A...