Sunday, January 28, 2018

00 Echo

The day has come. Tommorrow, I will let go of my car that I have had for 18 years. Technically, my dad owned it the first few years, but I drove it, and the most I was without it was about 4 months, for my first semester of my freshman year.

It feels funny to be sentimental to a hunk of metal, but there are so many memories with this car.  It drove me to my first college classes, my job at the library, to soccer practices while I was still living at my parent's house.  It was my work transportation when I worked summers at Hershey Park.  I remember many cries and songs being blared in it, as I sang at the top of my lungs down the highway.

It was how I got home after my freshman year and took a passenger too to get to my big sister's wedding.  It took many trips from PA to TN and vice versa during my college years. It lived through at least 2 tornadoes during these years in TN. One time, some playground equipment suit lifted by tge tornado, dented in the trunk badly and the tornado shattered every window except the windshield.

It survived me getting rear ended on the highway, just before my 21st birthday. It oddly then would be rear ended again a few months after it being fixed.  And then another time when I lived here in OH someone backed into it while it was parked on the street.

I remember the car being towed off the Washington Mall when we took a trip in it with some friends to DC when we accidentally parked too long in a street spot. I remember late nights chatting with my future husband in that car outside his apartment. I remember scarily getting caught on sudden ice on a trip back to OH from TN and spinning out into the median of the highway.

I carted around my first two kids in this car and I loved it. It had this shelf that was a perfect foot rest. I would always drive with my foot resting on this shelf on long drives. This car even had a song written about it by a dear friend.

It was a quirky car with basic features and it still had roll down windows and I loved that about it.  My husband complained that it didn't have intermittent windshield wipers, but I was used to having to have a rhythm with clearing my view so it didn't matter too much.

Its last few years were spent as a commuting car for K at his programming job and he probably enjoyed it as it was the only non hybrid I knew that got 40mpg. Filling it at the has pump was not something to break the bank.

This car was loved and it witnessed a good chunk of our lives and it was good to us. As we donate it, not fully dead, we hope that it can be used by someone else in need of cheep wheels.

00 Echo, you were loved.


Saturday, January 20, 2018

Tiddilly bump

I've been thinking about this quote by C.S. Lewis that I saw the other day:

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.” - taken from the Screwtape Letters

It's making me think that perhaps I need to listen more and shout less. At times, I feel like perhaps we want to be know, hello social media, and for me I like to be right a lot. But maybe its okay not to be.

I just finished a biography on Pope Francis, and I like him as a pope, I mean I did before this book, but I think I understand him more now. I do think he's a bit crazy in perhaps his ways of doing things, because he doesn't want to be in the spotlight, but he's in a position where he is all the time, and I think he forgets that often.  But perhaps, its good for us to remember that he's a person too.  In the biography that I read, it said that he was who he was because of the mercy of God.  He has always had a huge heart for the poor and being that he's from a country that had a lot of upheaval and really crazy things happen under their governments it makes more and more sense. He saw daily how much people were marginalized and not seen as humans and just murdered senselessly. Think of Syria now, and that was a lot of what happened. 

Anyway, I think you either love or hate this current pope of ours, or perhaps you are indifferent. But I kind of like him. I think his heart is there. I think he's reforming some things that need to be reformed for the church to be a better version of itself.  I think he's teaching us that we aren't better than our neighbor. Perhaps the pope's maybe not making sense to us all the time, but I hope that God's grace will shine through it all. God's got this, so lets be his instruments. 

Thursday, January 4, 2018

A baby that likes to be held

I've had one of these before. A baby that likes to be held constantly. That will only sleep when touching you. I know this brand of baby. Sometimes I'm bitter about it, sometimes it tries my patience and I need to leave the house by myself. Thankfully, my husband can and will accommodate this. We love her this baby, and I know she won't need me like this forever. For now, we are here.

I think that actually having this type of baby helps me to see that my worth doesn't depend on my productivity. Because if it did, I would be goner right now. I am stuck when she naps and I am stuck when she goes down for the night. So I sit and I knit or I read or I read to the kids. But I can't clean the house and I can't do a lot of active things.  Sometimes, if she needs a nap in the afternoon I will strap her to my back and we will walk around the neighborhood. And it is okay.

My intention is not to complain about this sweet girl of mine, but just to say how she is. She reminds me of her older brother who wanted to be carried until he was almost 4. He is still probably the best smuggler I know. Well, except for maybe this sweet girl.  But I think it definitely has taken time to adjust to her being this variety of baby. My last, I think, just needed me differently, so its an adjustment for sure.

She is amazingly sweet and I love that she is at the stage that me drinking something while she is held is of utmost excitement to her. Me grabbing a snack, well, to her that's an invitation to share.  And if I did by chance put her down and have her be content, for sure she will crawl to find me and call, "ma, ma, ma, ma" until I respond.

Sometimes I will put her down and she will then find my pant leg and she will pull herself up on it and then I am left being stationary from the waist down but trying to move the upper half of me around the kitchen to prepare food for the family. It's actually quite entertaining. And if I'm in the right mood, it makes me laugh.

Babies don't keep and soon enough she will be like her second eldest brother so very independent, who once was like her in her neediness. And so I am writing this to remember her and to try my best to love and enjoy her as a gift from God.