The Merry Month of May

It's time to play "catch up."

I feel like I often spend too much time playing this game, but sometimes, you gotta do whatcha gotta do.

So, I've decided to be merry about it. Yep. It's time to spend a few minutes catching up on the merry month of May.

At the first of the month, we found ourselves in celebration mode in Rochester, MN, at the wedding of my niece, Lauren Wynn, to Ryan Residence. It was beautiful, holy, and joyful!

Delightful table/name cards

Mayowood Stone Barn was beautiful.

Succulents for centerpieces

Sweet nieces from the PNW came in for the festivities

My brother, Andy, dancing with his daughter, Lauren

Three of my beautiful nieces with a grand nephew and grand niece thrown in!

I'm a sucker for Daddy/daughter pictures

The next weekend was Mother's Day. It was the first one for me without my mom. It's still weird to know that. I miss her.

In our world of social media, it's always interesting to see what ends up there on those kind of days. Some of the kids did the IG thing, some didn't.

The ones that didn't still love me ;)

Our annual jumping pic where one of us didn't jump

The Cali kid harkened back to 2012

We also celebrated this girl's 24th bday this month! 

About 6 hours after those fun pictures....

Mayday! Mayday!

My Lou and I picked a bad time to miscommunicate. We were about 2/3 of the way through a delightful bike ride when I thought we were going left at a corner, and he thought we were going right. When you are riding side by side, that doesn't work. In the middle of our collision, I screamed and then both of us proceeded to hit very hard asphalt. Lou's right collar bone took the brunt of his fall. My right rib cage took the brunt of mine. We've both also enjoyed some bruising and road rash. Good grief. Talk about an unexpected inconvenient event! Not what we had planned, but seeking to glorify God in the midst of it.

Two weeks after our wreck, Lou had to have surgery to fix that broken collar bone and make it line up and heal correctly. Grateful to God that all went well.

The doctor is the patient

You can imagine the teasing we're now receiving as a result of our Mayday! moment. I laughed out loud when I received an email from my brother, Andy, with the following limerick.

Well, four days after the wreck, broken rib or not, I was going on a long planned for and much anticipated trip with friends to To Kill A Mockingbird land. Sue Roweton, Marla Kemp and I have been chatting about going to Monroeville, AL, the home of the author of TKAM, Nell Harper Lee, for over a year. Every spring, her home town puts on the play on weekends. We hit town to enjoy the 2nd to last show of the season. Such a great time with the dearest of friends.

And, if you haven't read To Kill a Mockingbird, stop reading this, and order a copy and read it.

So, so good.

Side trip to Selma, AL, to walk over this and remember. #bloodysunday

Lots of interesting things to see/read in the Monroe County Museum

1st act of TKAM is outside

Not gonna let a little rain stop us!

Selfie stick fun

A short week after my Alabama jaunt, my man and I journeyed to Fayetteville, AR, with 4 of our buddies to celebrate our friends, Marla and Wes Kemp, birthdays. We toured around the town and the University of Arkansas, where we've sent 4 of our kids and a ton of our money. Then, we spent a bunch of time geocaching!

If you haven't Geocached, you should. With the help of a handy dandy app, wave points, and clues, you go on a "treasure" hunt for the caches. Once you find them, you write your name in the log in the cache and, of course, take a picture. I think we found 6 while there. Tons of fun!

Marla, Wes, Lou, me, Connie, and Kerrick

We called ourselves the Liber8ors :)

I actually didn't travel the entire month. I stayed home long enough this week to watch our good friend, Lane Nutt, plow up our garden spot. Talk about a good neighbor!! 

He and his wife even ran over later that day with some extra corn seeds and planted a couple of rows of that for me! I think I'm going to garden like this every year!

Well, here we are at the end of the month. I've included so much - and left out so much.

Each full, busy, hard, easy, happy day is such a gift from God, isn't it? Each marriage, each Mayday!, each trip, each friend - all gifts of grace.

I'm grateful. Just as I know you are for the gifts of grace in your life.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing my merry month of May with me.

Blessings!

A New Thing

April is, as I'm sure most of you know,  National Poetry Month. Last year, I celebrated by gracing the sidewalk outside of Bolivar Family Care Center with the poems, "Trees" and "The Sun.".

This month, I'm going to celebrate by embarrassing my kids.

During our homeschooling years, I was big into making my students memorize poems. I loved (and still love) the beauty, the order, the vocabulary, and the rich meaning squeezed into the carefully crafted stanzas of poems. I made the kids memorize because I wanted great ideas, thoughts, and clever wording to be available at a moment's notice in their memory banks. I'm not so sure my children felt the same way, but they did their part and memorized.

I did my part and recorded, forever and always, the recitations of the many and various poems they memorized. 

I can't adequately describe the collective groan that erupts from our kids today when we are watching home videos and one of them appears on the screen in the "I'm about to recite a poem" position. That is quickly followed by, "Oh, Mom!" and laughter as we share the tortured happy memory of those eventful days.

So, to celebrate this year, I'm going to share with you some of the poems I recorded them saying way back when.

Our Luke, now 23, will start us off. It is more than ironic that the first poem I found him reciting was "The Things That Haven't Been Done Before," by Edgar Guest. He has recently embarked on some new adventures of his own - and these, like the ones described in the poem, are at the rim of the far-flung sky. As his dad and I watched his 10 year old self say these noble and courageous words, we loved him more and prayed for him again.

I've included the words to the poem before the video. I encourage you to read them before you watch. When Luke recites the poem, you can understand most of the words, but not quite all. Our ten year old still needed to work on enunciation and projection!

My apologies for the couple of seconds at the beginning (about 8) and the couple at the end of the video that aren't Luke reciting his poem. I didn't know how to edit the video and my technical crew (Faith and Elizabeth) weren't here to show me how. My internal posting deadline was looming, so it went up "as is."

Enjoy!

The Things That Haven't Been Done Before

The things that haven't been done before,

Those are the things to try;

Columbus dreamed of an unknown shore

At the rim of the far-flung sky,

And his heart was bold and his faith was strong

As he ventured in dangers new,

And he paid no heed to the jeering throng

Or the fears of the doubting crew.

The many will follow the beaten track

With guideposts on the way,

They live and have lived for ages back

With a chart for every day.

Someone has told them it's safe to go

On the road he has traveled o'er,

And all that they ever strive to know

Are the things that were known before.

A few strike out, without map or chart,

Where never a man has been,

From the beaten paths they draw apart

To see what no man has seen.

There are deeds they hunger alone to do;

Though battered and bruised and sore,

They blaze the path for the many, who

Do nothing not done before.

The things that haven't been done before

Are the tasks worth while today;

Are you one of the flock that follows, or

Are you one that shall lead the way?

Are you one of the timid souls that quail

At the jeers of a doubting crew,

Or dare you, whether you win or fail,

Strike out for a goal that's new?