July 2017

A month and a half has passed since I last blogged. I get so busy living that I forget to write about it. Then something reminds me: a great memoir I'm reading that inspires me to write my own story, a friend posting on her blog after a long hiatus, or finding an old journal of mine stuffed away in a box in my closet.

I'm sitting in Starbucks at the neighborhood Target. I dropped William off for Strength and Conditioning this morning and decided to spend the next couple of hours before class studying. Target is a distracting place to study. I keep thinking I need to go check out the hair products, or see if they've put those throw pillows on clearance yet. I have midterms this week. I'm only taking two classes this summer. With all our traveling I didn't think it was good to take the 5 week biology class. I really didn't want to take that class anyways. It was just a refresher course that wouldn't count for anything and felt like a waste of time, money, and energy.

Since I last blogged Margaret graduated high school (!), William graduated middle school, we took a trip to New York with the older four kids, Hazel learned to swim on her own, Olive potty trained herself, we took a week long camping trip to the Davis Mountains with both sides of our extended family, I got a new library card (woohoo!), and there were many small and large blessings from heaven that I do not have the time to chronicle here.

We hosted a big graduation party for Margaret and Claire. Everyone chipped in to make it special for them. I made a 600 photo slide show to play at the party, and I think I cried every time I worked on it in the weeks leading up to the party. Those girls are precious. We watched Claire accept her diploma on Friday, June 2, and then Margaret on Saturday, June 3. Brian and I whooped and hollered for all the seniors we knew personally in the Viper Class of 2017. That was a special class. We came home to a house full of food leftover from the party and scrambled to clean up and pack for our trip to New York early the next morning. Margaret left for Project Grad with her friends, and the rest of us went to bed for a few hours sleep before getting up at 2:30 am. We picked up Margaret at Dave & Busters where Project Grad was held around 4 am. and headed to the airport. After such a crazy, hectic last month, we kept joking about how we were headed to New York City to "get away from it all".

The trip was just what we needed. It's great to have kids that are at the age you can enjoy taking adventures with them. It's no longer stressful, and they are really fun to be with. New York was beautiful as ever. I'm Texan through and through, but there's a part of my heart that belongs to New York City. I think heaven will be something like NYC, all the different colors, languages, and beautiful people God made all living together.

As mentioned above, we just got back from a week long camping trip to the Davis Mountains. Brian bought a mansion of a tent for us, and he and I enjoyed having a  "room" all to ourselves with the little girls in the next door on the other side of the nylon partition. It was like that old movie It Happened One Night. The rest of the kids were divided up among the 9 other tents our group set up. We had far too many tents for the number of people in our group, which wasn't much of a problem until it started raining and we had to rush and zip up every tent window and door. Or if we had happened to be away when it down poured, which happened several times, we had to go tent to tent and pull out all the wet things and hang them out to dry.
Despite the rain, the trip was amazing. West Texas is so barren and harsh, but at the same time so beautiful. The little town of Fort Davis does the Fourth of July week in a big way. We all joined the throngs lining the main street on July 1st when they had the parade. I still don't know where all the people came from as the town has a population of about 1200. There were probably 5 or 6 thousand in town that day wandering through the craft and food booths surrounding the courthouse, watching the Cowboy Hypnotist do his thing, drinking cocktails in the garden behind the Limpia Hotel, touring the fort, or eating at the handful of cafes in town
We did a lot of hiking, both in the Davis Mountains state park, as well as at Big Bend where we all caravaned one of the days. We split into two groups, one group hiking the Window Trail, and the other, more adventurous ones opting for the Emory Peak trail. Every since we planned this trip I had hoped to get to hike to Emory. It's where Brian proposed to me 20 years ago last April 2, and it would mean a lot to me to make the trek this year. It worked out that we were able to make the nine+ mile hike, us along with about 6 teenagers and Olive who Brian carried in the Ergo. I've made that hike three times and no time have I seen it as pretty as it was that day. They must've had some rains recently because the dessert plants were all in bloom. When we reached the pinnacle where you have to do a bit of scaling to reach to geo marker I completely froze. I couldn't look down and couldn't move. How did Brian ever coax me up there back in 1997. I have no memory of being afraid. We just climbed right up and spent about half an hour up there taking pictures and enjoying the miles and miles of views into Mexico. But this time was different. I almost didn't climb up to the top, but Brian spoke spoke courage into me and I made it up. There was a guy at the top that we discovered was also from Austin and he was kind enough to snap some photos of us. William was the only other one from our group that climbed to the very top, the others, Olive, Margaret, Patrick, Lil' Thomas (we still call him Little Thomas even though he's now 16 and taller than most of his counsins to differentiate him from the other Thomases in the family), Samuel, Tommy, and John stayed just below.
Another day we drove over to Balmorhea to swim in the large spring fed pool. The drive there is spectacular and snakes through an area that was once part of a great-great uncle's ranch.
It's now been nearly a month since I blogged the above post. I haven't had a chance to come back and wrap it up.
The past month has been filled with all the things I love best about summer: hours and hours spent at the pool, visits to the library, late nights watching movies, playing in the sprinkler, reading books together. I've been taking two classes, but have tried to not let it interfere with our usual summer activities.
Margaret and Sam have worked most days/nights of the summer. They both work at a neighborhood restaurant, she hosting and he bussing. She'll be moving on to a different job soon, and I'll miss seeing them coming home from work together in their matching work shirts.
Margaret has decided to go into nursing, and is registered for fall classes at ACC. We will have some classes together, which is kinda cool.
Activities has started picking up around here. William has been going to strength and conditioning every morning all summer at the high school, and now he and John are in football camp in the evening. Samuel trained with his trainer, David, all summer. cross country just began their season training yesterday, so he'll be having early morning workouts every day till winter. Sam is determined to get a running scholarship and is putting in hours of running and weight training every day.
William and John will both play football this fall: William at Vandegrift and John at Canyon Ridge. I'm happy to have another season to cheer on some of my boys in my favorite game.
Hazel starts kindergarten in less than four weeks. We've talked and talked about it for so long and it's finally  almost here. That little golden haired baby of mine is starting school.
Olive doesn't have much on her agenda for this fall but to be loved on by all her people. That girl gets cuter every day! Her curly hair now hangs in ringlets around her face which is sprinkled with freckles. She is a firecracker! Not a day goes by that I don't have to tell her to stop tormenting Hazel. She knows how to push Hazel's buttons and teases her mercilessly. She's feisty and stubborn and is so much like me.