Dad, the boys, and I picked up sticks and branches in the afternoon. We made piles for Wayne to come pick up with the tractor and after that I’m not sure what he did with them. I’m blanking right now what we even did in the morning. The boys have been sleeping in and the adults have been too compared with our normal waking time. I had more of a slow morning writing in my journal, reading, and doing floor exercises.

The other kids were still at camp for the day. I feel like I have been pretty patient and understanding about them doing their young adult/teenage away from home things but I did start to get a little antsy in the day and sent them a mom text about needing to be considerate about other people’s families. I was also asking what their plans were and if any of them were planning on being there for any meals, and if so to let me know.

I called my grandma this evening, as it had been a while again. I wanted to call her on my grandparents’ anniversary on the 19th. She and my grandpa would’ve been married for 72 years this year. I thought of him this past Friday when I was at work, I can’t remember now which resident it was, or what I was doing that made me think of him. Elianna is out with Miles for his last youth group meeting before going to college.

A storm blew in during the early morning. I saw it once it had already gotten here and watched from the window. It’s amazing to me how much even the big trees can blow back and forth. After a while I checked the flood spots and the one in the schoolroom was fine because the towels had already been lined against the wall during the prior week’s sprinkle. But the boys’ room had another flooded mess. I tiptoed into their room and felt the squish beneath my feet once I was close enough to the corner area.

So the boys have moved to the school room again while things dry out and the smell dies down. Dad and the boys did some cleanup in there later in the morning while I drove my niece halfway back to her mom. It was next on my list to get to their room and work together to give it a reset before school starts. It actually doesn’t look too bad in there now as far as the floor goes but something else is going to have to be done about whatever is wrong that is causing the flooding. I know you have to get to the deeper issues of things in order for something to truly be fixed.

The older kids are trying to absorb every moment they can with the camp friends. Ethan and Adam rode their bikes into town to meet Miles and Graham at their house. The girls met up with them once they’d gotten there. Elianna still texts me as she’s moving from here to there with the caravans, sometimes more than I would now expect. I have mixed feelings about the apps where you can track their locations. With Ethan at least, I told him last summer it was enough for me that God knows where you are.

(*photo credit: JWT)

It’s been a good couple of days wrapping up with the camp things. Most of the counselors have left for the summer though there still are a few stragglers remaining for a day a two. It’s always bittersweet closing out with a camp season because it marks again the continued passing of time with another experience lost, never to be lived again. Just like as a mom you get better at moving through the seasons, or at least recognizing the transient nature of them, the same thing happens as a camp wife.

The past couple of weeks seem to have finally caught up with me. There wasn’t time to rest before, or I chose not to for whatever reason. Laura’s mom came out yesterday to spend some time again at the lake. She likes it and it’s something that doesn’t hurt her knee. She and her husband donated a second paddleboard to camp so now we have two to use when people come over. Laura’s bike ride across the entire state of Iowa went well. They start the ride at the Missouri River and then finish at the Mississippi.

Earlier I’d started whining with eyes scanning desperately across the calendar. Where’s the vacation? None of it seemed like enough and there was too much work in adulthood and death truly was a sweet relief from this life. But then I said, “Listen, I really just need you to give me a hug, tell me it’s going to be okay, and give me permission to lay down for a while.” He was readying food for lunch when the girls and I got home from the store. I told him thanks and that someday I wanted to take care of him too.

The days are better, the nights are still so long
Sometimes I think I’m the only cab on the road
~Cab, sung by Train~

Today was the CILCA homecoming which is what camp does to mark the end of the summer. It’s always disappointing that more people don’t come but even with who was here it was still good. It was a decent and expected turnout based on how things have gone in the past. I was talking to one of the moms for a while and while we were doing so she said out of nowhere, “Oh my gosh your teeth are so white. What do you use?”

I’m pretty sure no one has ever said that to me before and I really don’t think they’re as white as she was making them out to be. I was like, “Uhhh, just the Crest whitening strips but it’s been a few years”. She was asking about school(!) and internship and asked if I’ve worked with people who were ghetto. I told her I didn’t think I had. There’re people who are entitled and think you owe them and others who are very thankful.

She’s a social worker who works for the state. Social workers have more opportunities and make more money than counselors, I have no idea why. It can really depress me and rile me up when I hear how state workers make all this money for hardly doing any work. I’m not talking about her, just in general. And then you’ve got people like these hardworking DCE’s who do all these things and basically make pennies in comparison.

I’ve told more people about the homeschool, including my mother-in-law and the principal where the boys were going to school. It’s crazy to me how some people just completely get your life choices and you can talk about homeschooling like it’s the most normal thing in the world. And then there are others who just don’t seem to think it’s as cool or exciting. Trinity was very good to us and if we needed to we would call again.

We took the camp staff out for supper. They hang out for the weekend and still have closing chores to do but it’s become a tradition that we do this with them. Sometimes it makes me wish we had more friends to hang out with, like how did we start out in life with having so many friends?? Like one said, “Camp and college life, it’s not real”. It’s real but there are other parts of life that are real too and you will find your own way.

On Friday Ethan had a race at Detweiller Park in Peoria. Every year they have these races where people run in the evening until it eventually gets dark. They start with the the kids’ fun run which is 1000M. It was very cute and they even had a few very small runners, maybe ages 3-4, where the individual children were running with parents. The open race and the rest were 3 miles, starting at 7. The boys and my niece came along.

Dad and Elianna watched from camp. It was the last night of the camp season so they had to be there more than the others. Ethan and Matt spent the past week helping out at another camp up north. On their way home from there they picked up my niece in Rochelle who wanted to come for the weekend. The kids wanted food before the race but I told them we had to wait until afterward. We found a nice spot under a tree.

The race was fun. Top 25 get a medal and he placed 24th. I thought he was trying to go for the medal but he said he was just running. I was happy and thankful. We have a cousin who was also running in the high school boys race, the last race of the night at 10PM. We were sitting by them in the early hours. I asked him if he had any goals. He said under 15:50. We didn’t stay to watch but we watched from here. He made his goal.

The schoolroom is nice and clean and picked up. Today we finished decluttering and cleaning underneath the couches and throwing more things away. I’ve said this before, how there are these times when the things that I couldn’t let go of before become things I can more easily get rid of. The peace and space of having things gone is better to me than trying to hold on to whatever memory or hope was attached to them.

Like my Bible maps for example. The boys used them for wars with their army men but that’s about it. It was a childhood memory of having posters to look at of the Middle East and Bible cities and towns. It was a grown up hope to use them for something teaching related. We have a 8×10 laminated map that can be stored in the normal homeschool bins. I kept the story ones but rolled them up and put them away in a bin.

The math manipulatives, the multiplication and sight word flash cards, the posters of cursive and regular handwriting, all of it I threw away or put in a pile of things to donate. They can read now, they can write now, they can all do math now, thank goodness. That isn’t even where we do school anymore but it’s still nice to have the space picked up and decent for hosting outside people and for also enjoying ourselves.

Of all the things that have come out here I feel like the worst is definitely the fretting. I think I’ve officially started to drive the UIS people nuts. For most of today I really was trying to figure out how to finish by the end of Spring. Anything to avoid having to go all the way until whenever. After I’ve already been emailing and asking them if I could stretch things out and telling them that I am trying to be mindful of classwork loads.

When we met back in April they were saying to me “Oh but that’s a long time to wait” and I said I was fine with it. I’d accepted and processed and it was really no big deal. The Research Methods class makes my brain recoil when looking at it. It’s too mathy right now for my brain. The Foundations class is only in the fall on Tuesdays. The Neurobiology of Trauma elective looks fun, but I need to keep enough evenings open.

Do half of what you think you can do. That was the protocol that I thought a good guideline. It gives me the room left for homeschool and work shifts and visits here and there on the weekends for meets, all Lord-willing. I truly mean it when I say that. Too many things can turn in an instant which is how I even ended up here in the first place. Your health. Your home. Your family. Your job. None of it is immune to swift changes.

I still have plenty of things to do here, even as the kids are growing up on the regular. I know a woman moving to Germany at the end of the year for three years due to something with her husband’s work. Her goal while she is there is to become a better housewife. They’ve been married several years. I smiled because it’s still an ongoing goal of mine. I love that about life though, how there’s always room to keep on learning.

Josh and Elianna ran some errands this morning. I had them buy a vacuum because I didn’t want to wait two days for Amazon. Every couple of years we just need a new vacuum. I haven’t tested it yet but I’m going to after I’m done here. I went into work for a half hour for an education session focusing on empathy training for residents with dementia. You couldn’t hear or see very well but still had to follow several instructions.

This school thing is temporarily driving me crazy. Sitting through our final class for the summer I started thinking about how I could possibly make the whole thing work. Easy. I just take all three class and internship in the fall. Then next semester all that would leave is one. I’ve looked at the syllabus for at least two out of the four. They’re not bad. The papers here are only ten pages. But the classes are weekly the whole semester.

I don’t know how people do this. 300 hours a semester for internship comes out to about 20 hours per week (using 15 weeks). You get 2.5 hour a week from the class meeting. Six hours a day, three times week, that seems to me like an absolute eternity. And people seriously do this every day. They leave their homes and go to a completely different place for a job that they’d have to hopefully really like. They would have to.

My bachelors program was finished in an accelerated 15 months. Two full semesters crammed into two summers, plus fall and spring with clinicals going on through all of those. I loved it. There was none of this hemming and hawing and calculating and obsessively thinking. There was the aching heart of me missing my baby but it was only for a time until I could finally stay home with him. It helped that he was in good hands.

I did want to quit once while we were sitting by the seminary fountain. I absolutely would have except that I seriously believed then in submitting to my husband. His voice was my divine and guiding light and if I listened to it then I couldn’t go wrong. He didn’t think that I should quit. We were only going to continue having kids from that point on. We were there, I was doing it, I might as well just get it done. He didn’t have that ache.

I thought that going to school, ultimately, was pointless. In the grand scheme of life, when I stood before God, this would not be thing of my life that mattered. What mattered would be how I loved other people and what I did with the time that was given me. That time, I wanted to give it to those most important. Them. I also had thoughts. It would be easier to finish now with one, then to try to do it later with more.

So for me it was basically now or never. Realistically I didn’t see it happening, going back to school later, if I was to quit. It’d be hard to juggle school and little kids, and that would’ve been my choice, and I was fine with it. School isn’t what really mattered anyway. But the voice of God thought otherwise, and the voice of God thought school did matter. So I trusted that voice and I did not quit. I finished and I have no regrets.

School is what it is right now, an unclear path. I walked away glad for another box checked off, but sad feeling like it could be a while before I was back, if ever. But it hasn’t stopped me from looking up Colorado Christian or Johnson, the other schools that were mostly online options. Maybe they’d let me take one or two with them still. But the Tuesday foundations class is a no-go. Those are the cross-country meet days.

I was in the mood to meal plan for September and August and came up so far with a week’s worth of suppers. The dining hall life surely is one of the greatest luxuries here and the relief I feel from the cooking is unspeakable. But the time does come when it’s time to pick it back up and look forward to something more wholesome and tailored. With evening internship hours, it’ll help us all out to have more of a plan.

Elianna and I took a trip to Country Market for watermelon. I was craving it for whatever reason. She brought along cash from the trading post and bought water bottles to restock it. Sam’s was completely out when they went this morning if you can believe it. Josh has been keeping me updated on the latest election happenings, so I’ve heard the general basics here and there. After 2020’s election I checked out completely.

The boys and I have been working in the schoolroom again. Over the weekend the three younger ones were in the living room on the floor playing chess. For a moment I was sent back in time to bliss. The coveted slow Saturday mornings appeared without me asking or trying to force it. The other two kids were at six flags with the camp staff. The oldest has hardly been home all summer, which I do notice but not as much.

We were doing some ridiculous acrobatics in the basement. One of the guest beds areas in a corner has a smell just strong enough that I wouldn’t want to sleep there. We supposed it might have been the vent behind the headboard. We duct taped garbage bags around the vent to block the smell should it be coming from there. I checked a little later and I think it seemed better. It will take me a bit to know for sure.

It was acrobatics because we could hardly move the bed to get to it. So we had to contort ourselves to reach down into the narrow air space where we were able to manage pulling the bed out somewhat. It was cracking me up. This isn’t even my bed. But when people come over it is nice to have the space. Dad came in later when I was resting. We took a nap then went down for supper. It was baked potato bar.

“Are you guys seriously going to be hungry for food in two hours?”, I asked as we finished up our afternoon ice cream. Thankfully they all said no. But they would be hungry by the end of chapel. So the 5:30 mealtime was moved to 9:30. We’d stopped by Country Market after church and picked up food for lunch and supper. For supper we were supposed to have meatballs and rice. No one thought to get any sauce.

Prior to that we were at a pastor’s goodbye party. One of the pastors who has been around here for over ten years took a call to Oklahoma. The parking lot and church were packed. I knew we likely wouldn’t get a chance to talk so I wrote a card. I do get emotional with these sorts of things. Leaving a church is very hard, at least when you were loved and you loved in return.

“Today is the 25th anniversary of Dad and I meeting.” I’d brought it up a couple of times leading up to the day. And those two or three times Dad made the same joke, “And rather than celebrating, Mom’s going to spend the day curled up in a ball, crying over the fact she ever met me.” Sigh. And I responded the same way every time, half-amused yet shaking my head at the pitiful sight, “I’ve already done that”, just to be clear.

25 years is a long time to know a person, and no I wasn’t crying about it. I was actually coming out of a haze, where once again I was sure that I could do no, be no, see no more. Every so often my mind reverts to its original state, and I catch a glimpse of who I’d be if it weren’t for forgiveness or loving, if it weren’t for a God who puts the sorrows and pasts of his children behind him.

I see who I would’ve been if it weren’t for him, and it is not a pretty sight. The basements, the alleys, the colleges that would’ve set me on a completely different path. And though I cannot say for sure, I am fairly certain, that the hardest and most difficult relationship problems we have had would very likely not have been there had he been joined to a different person. I can say for us both that it is true of the good things.