HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
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tradition
tradition: a long-established custom that has been passed on. Yes. Perfect. I love tradition. I love events and details and activities that you do year after year, holiday after holiday, season after season. And I love July Fourth. Love it. Love the mad rush that leads up to the day. Love the kids helping decorate the porch so it looks all shades of blue, red and white festive. Love the tattoos that every kid chooses to slap across their cheeks. I think part of what I love is how you can try to make so many particulars the same – the food, the location, the order of events (guns, tubing,…
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Resurfacing.
Last week we were in Virginia. The Mother Land. My state of birth. The birth state of four of our six children. And she was beautiful. I know I will be dissecting last week for many posts and tossing out photos like candy on Halloween. Or like sparklers on July Fourth. It was wonderful to see the gang all lined up for our Camp Fourth week. And it was goodgoodgood to be in a landscape as familiar as the tops of my children’s heads. I’ve missed that. The dip and the curves of the back roads that lead to my parents’ former farm and my framily’s current farm. The willow…
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Camp Fourth
When you have ten kids in one farm house, you need a plan. Actually, forget the plan – you already have a camp. So you might as well embrace what you have going on. Which is what we are currently doing right now. “We” being Sally, Sarah, Emma and myself. Yes. You counted correctly (if you were counting). Ten kids. Four adults. Camp Fourth involves hikes, good intentions, multiple snack times, daily grocery store runs, periodic breakdowns, impromptu games of Red Rover and varied sleep stations. We’ve made crafts. Rock necklaces and bead art and painted rock bands.
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Road Rules
It seems the Keigley family’s wheels have been trucking along a highway or two (or twelve) the past few weeks. And we’re learning a few truths. (Seems the road always has a lesson or two for us.) Lessons like this . . . . 1. Knock Knock jokes have a rather limited appeal. 2. Our front left tire is slowly losing air and needs to be regularly refilled. 3. I don’t care for putting air in tires. 4. Hearing your two-year-old son cry your name for thirty-five minutes straight is neither endearing nor conducive to continued driver sanity. 5. The iPad is more than just a beautiful piece of technology – it…
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What King Solomon Sees: Take 3
I have actually been using my legitimate camera lately so King Solomon has not been seeing quite as much. But he has seen a few noteworthy items I would love to share with you. Like this. Hey guys, it’s a map. A bona fide, non GPS, locating device. It’s for real. And you can buy one in a store near you too. I unplugged our John Cleese-voiced TomTom and used this old baby on our recent adventure. It was refreshing. Yet another tooth from yet another Keigley kid mouth. London confessed that she saved her teeth to cash in with Daddy instead of me because Daddy offers a higher return.…
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dunce cap.
I was tidying up the kitchen table after being inspired to do so by reading this blog post by my friend. Listening to The Cure. (Seriously – the iPod was on shuffle and before I knew what was happening I was singing along to “Pictures of You”.) Seriously. That’s true. This whole post is true. (all of my posts are true.) This is what my life looks like. I heard some cries from the girls’ bunk bed where they had been playing happily for over an hour. It had been a beautiful thing that I knew could not last. (The youngest boy was asleep in his crib. The biggest boy…
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A walk in the park.
When you’re two and your name is Wilde Fox a walk in the park is never a walk in the park. First, there’s the desire for control. For complete and utter control. The directing and the wishing and the veryvery underdeveloped verbal communication skills. Next comes the demanding and the pulling and the desperate breakdown that gets him almost less than nowhere. Then, ultimately, a measure of submission is reached. A settling of sorts. A coming to terms with reality.
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a prayer. sort of.
“I think I just love God more than anyone else in the world.” That’s what Cece said my seven-year-old daughter told her one night in their cabins at camp this week. And after the campfire, Cece said London also shared some more thoughts as they discussed the week of camp and the teachings they had heard. “You know, if I was God, I wouldn’t want to save a sinner like me,” London told her. And part of me feels my heart swell to near-implosion at the tender image of my little one thinking such deep and pure God thoughts. And part of me reels in terror at the thought of…
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that figures.
I was lighting a candle on the mantle. Beside the candle I noticed an unauthorized item. A plastic bag filled with various shaped macaroni noodles. I quickly played back the day’s events and conversations for an explantion. Oh yes, I remembered. I discovered Mosely’s plastic bag of noodle stash earlier the day and said, “Put these somewhere else please. Somewhere safe where you will remember them and I will not throw them away.” And so she did. So she did.
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eight summers.
How have we come so far so soon? Eight years. Buddies before birth. Raven. London. Last year these girls were walking the paths of camp. This summer they made their debut as Official Campers. Campers who slept at camp in bunk beds. With a Camp Leader all of their own. (The kind and lovely Cece.) This week they ate camp meals every day. They played Slaps in their bunk beds. The went down the slide so many times and so fast. They called once a night. They took notes and short rests and slushee breaks and long walks. How in the world can this be possible? How can eight summers…
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That word.
Remember our word? Have you thought about yours in a while? I think about mine sometimes in the ebb and in the flow. Free. And I have tried to kick fear’s rear so many times in my past. I’ve written about it. I’ve cried about it. I’ve tried. I’ve succeeded. I’ve failed. I’ve been round and round with it. And I am struggling again. Fear. That dirty dirty word. I have been reading through a Beth Moore book entitled So Long Insecurity for about six months now. And she says she believes all insecurity is based in fear. When you meet insecurity in yourself just ask, “What am I afraid…
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just a figure of speech
My grandmother always told my mother, “Pretty is as pretty does.” And my mother always told me, “Pretty is as pretty does.” And now I am telling my kids, “Pretty is as pretty does.” Which we all know is just another way to say, what you do is more important than how you look. Who you are matters more than what you wear. It’s the inside that counts. It doesn’t matter what the outside looks like if the inside is rotten. You know, pretty is as pretty does. How do you say that to your kids?
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I don’t know.
I don’t actually feel like writing this post. Do you ever have topics like that? Ideas you know you need to discuss, but would prefer to avoid? Problems you know exist, but it would be so much simpler to bury your head in the sand and hope that while you’re down there, the problem would disappear? That’s how I feel right now. Although I’ve been writing on this little blog for a long time now, I am still not particularly blog savvy. Especially in the area of web traffic and search engines and self-promotion. I don’t really stress a lot about that or pay a lot of attention to those…
