Puppets, purchases, and papers

This is the season when all the wheels start spinning, faster, and Faster, and FASTER! Until I no longer have control.  On various days, I choose to give up. On those days, I find myself finding every excuse possible not to shower, exercise, or make progress on massive pending papers.

Yes, it is the end of a semester.  I hate deadlines.  How I have enjoyed learning and researching for 14 weeks, and then the last two it feels like sirens are going off constantly, forcing me to make cognizant sense out of all the knowledgeable stuff in my head.  Bleh.  It is not that I don't want to articulate my passionate feelings about how families shape identities and how family history writing can and should evolve in order to tell the smaller stories that shape a nation.  I really do want to articulate it all; can't we just have a long conversation instead?  Nope.  That would not be as well organized.  I get it.  Please pass the chocolate chips.

The research has been fascinating.  Thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ, we not only have the amazing free FamilyTree.org to work with, we have been given a membership to Ancestry.com.  We have been connecting with family members that we didn't even know we had in order to fill in some blanks in the family legacy.  Check out these gems:

This is the army registration card for Josh's great-grandfather, filled out in his own handwriting!  We had been trying to verify whether or not James fought in WW1.  We know he registered from this, and then....

Here is the application for military burial, which assumes that he did serve active duty.  There are still some mysteries in between, such as where and when, but we have the beginning and the end!  No, James did not die in the war, he died after a poker fight somewhere in Oregon (yet another story we are trying to clarify).

The personal connection to my research material (that is my research revolves around how family history work illuminates family trends, identity markers, and can change the way family identifies themselves) has made it so very worthwhile.  I have already started a couple spinoff projects.  It just feels like there is never enough ways to present the information as they extend into so many spheres.

As part of my physical goals this year, I am trying to be as aware of my body and its reactions to stress as possible.  I like stress, it motivates me on one hand.  On the other hand, it ties my muscles into searing knots that eventually separate from my spine and I collapse in an exhausted heap.  As one might imagine, end of semester is a constant tango between stress collapse and productivity.  In the meantime, I am trying to stay relaxed by adding more....enjoyable...distractions outside of academia.  So we have decided to buy a new home, rent our current home, and be committee chair on the annual school fundraiser.

Our current home cleans up nice. Thanks to the new category of 'shabby chic' all our crappy furniture is stylish.  With much gratitude, we already have renter lined up to move in just as we move out.

The new place will be fantastic.  We have been praying and looking for another house that would put us closer to the kids' school and give us a great yard in a good neighborhood.  God is gracious and does hear our prayers.  In our home search, I found this home listed on a Thursday night, I went with the kids on Saturday to see it, we put in the offer Saturday night, Sunday morning we had an accepted offer.

 We sign the first part of December and will move in the week of Christmas.  What a dream!  True to our form, Josh has not yet been inside this home much like our last two houses we have purchased without him having walked through.  I think it is a good luck charm.

To relax in the evening...

 making felt puppets for Viv's class, our contribution to fundraising along with my time spent planning the event.  Honestly, I am so grateful for a creative outlet right now that does not involve the creation or consumption of text.  We, yes Josh is helping me, the entire cast of animal characters for two Jan Brett books "The Mitten" and "The Hat."  more to come on that....

Making our own history

I am glad for the small moments that remind me to take stock of how far we have progressed.  Two projects have been turning my head around and around the concept of making history:

1- Our kids are working on their "personal history" unit at school.  For 1st years (Danny and Viv) they have to bring in photos with descriptions to make a timeline of their life thus far.  Due to the giant hard drive crash of 2013, I have to search through this blog to find photos of the kiddos from 2011-2013.  It reminds me again, that I need to print this thing out so the kids and I can read through those small vignettes that I had wisdom and energy enough to record.  It does go quickly, and I don't remember it all.  Jill and I were talking about the memory processes of small children - only remembering based on photos - I feel I am the same way.  It seems that if it weren't for textual remnants of the past, I might just forget it.  Faith's personal history project is working on a family tree, which is precisely what we are always working on.


2- I have been continuing the archival research for Alonzo Price Bowman through this semester as part of my course work.  I have been developing projects around the historical timeline of his life.  Turns out, Grandpa Alonzo lived through some of the big markers of American History.  The first wave of the project was to create a fully public domain multi-media presentation.  I tracked the first 20 years of Grandpa's life, and here are the highlights:

I just proposed the final project for Grandpa's Life which will include a rhetorical framework to show how it is the small lives that weave into the big histories without which the fibers of our nation would unravel (oh how poetic).

Autumn comes with the traditional

There are certain events that indicate Fall in Indiana for our family, and it seems they all came and passed this month.  We had Grammie visiting for the welcoming festivities of fall: apple picking.  Our friend's tree that we pillaged for fee last year was on an off year so we had to go to a 'commercial' local apple orchard to pick.  The name of this orchard gave us many laughs: "Tree Technology."  Yep, that's new technology - getting small kids with baskets on a stick to pick apples.Josh, the kids, Grammie and Aunt Jill picked 5 bushels of apples that we processed within that week to have plenty of applesauce and apple pie slices all through the winter.  The kids are always involved with smooshing the apples through the Victorio Strainer or twisting the peeler/corer/slicer, which makes the process move swiftly.

When the apples are on, we also know it is time to honor the man who gave us all this lovely harvest: Johnny Appleseed.  Fort Wayne claims the burial of Johnny.  We have a gravesite, although I am not certain, with many other claimants on to Johnny's burial, if the site is not just a relic containing maybe teeth or other random bones.  Ether way, all the community gathers for the fantastic festival in his park and celebrate the handiwork of many who still create without technology (ha, tree technology orchard).  Each year we heard the kids past the vendors to the settler's area and learn some new skills.  This year's skills were:  clay wheel pottery, woodworking (mostly for Josh who still dreams that he will have a wood shop some day), wood carving, copper smithing, and tinkering. 

This fella gave the kids a bit of a science lesson by carving back the stick and then pulling out the worms that were the cause of the great maple to fall.  Josh admired the lacquering.

Because it was the very end of the day the tinkers let the kids play with all sorts of machines and gave them lots of tin trinkets to play with.  They gave the kids a math lesson as to why you need to know geomotrey. 

 Another fall time favorite - the annual Fort4Fit race.  This year we worked with the kids through the end of the summer to run 25 miles, all building up to the Kids Marathon for Fort4Fit.  The kids had gotten the racing bug when we did the Spartan Race in the spring and were mostly willing to do the training.  We were amazed by how well they did on the actual race night!  With Jill, we had one adult per child to run with the kids during the mile long course.  Viv ran hard with Jill, Faith stayed consistent and long strided with her dad, and I ran with Danny.  I was most impressed with Danny.  Throughout the summer he was the least enthused about continuous running; often stopping with side aches.  However, for the race, Danny kept a steady jog the whole time.  We talked about Captain America, of course, to pass the second half mile and he made it the whole way without walking!  All three were so happy to have their medals!  It is so nice to have this family friendly race so close to our home, it is really too easy to do I would be ashamed if we had not involved the kids in their own race.

Start time was 7:30am this year instead of 8am.

The next morning I woke up and walked up to the race start for the 10K race.  Some friends joined me for the start.  To my happy surprise, Jill rode her bike up and became my support through the whole race.  I certainly wasn't in my favored shape for the race, but I made some goals and kept them, only missing my goal finish by one minute (should have followed Jill's advice and had faster turnover the last half mile rather than trying to lengthen my stride, lesson learned).

Josh and the kids made it up for the finish so they could steal my post-race snacks and then go to the library.  It is a fun race because it ends in the Parkview baseball stadium and they have the racers on the jumbo-tron and announce their names so the family can be more participatory in the end.

A new fall tradition for us, thanks to Jill, will be going to a college football game.  We are still learning to enjoy the event, so it was super nice to head over to a small university in town, St. Francis, and watch our good friend and old babysitter Jason "Big Guy" Gardner play as defensive center.  Danny was intent not he game.  Faith brought a book, which suits her personality after watching some of the game she was happy to read.  Viv spent most of her time watching the cheerleaders evidently to figure outs why they had blue and black pom-poms (which she finally figured out about the 3rd quarter and announced to the rest of of that it was to match the team colors on the football uniforms).  It was a very good thing to broaden the horizons of the kids to some of the best parts of fall sporting events.  Jill and I also took them to watch IPFW men and women's soccer.

Finding my soul in one semester past

 Somewhere in the organized jumble of my office wall, a small paper has been holding blog posts unwritten.  I jotted the idea down as they came somewhere between all the other writing I have been doing.  And they will wait a bit longer.

This past semester I have written - composed and typed on the computer, sometimes handwriting them on back pages of texts books - more pages of text than ever before in my life.  It should be expected, of course, since I am a composition and rhetoric emphasis in a master's program. Here is there real break through though - I HAVE LOVED IT ALL!

Seriously.  When in my life have I ever had to seriously edit back my thoughts so as to not exceed my 20 page limit for a research project?  When you have been writing 1-3 page responses on 75-150 page readings for two classes every week for 16 weeks and you are still mega excited about writing your final project such that I was NOT up until the last minute turning them in.

What has been so intriguing Nancy?  I feel like I have finally found my soul in writing.  Things that I have believed are meaningful and I have wanted to present somewhere in written form are finally finding their niche.  Two courses guided me into this happy valley of compositional bliss: Family History Writing and Composing Communities.

The two courses converged in giving me a space to write academically about the influence of literacy on the concept of identity and how communities affect that self-identification as well.  The literate world, or the way in which we learn to learn, whether it be by text or other means, is where we shape who we are and cannot be considered in isolation.  I have felt this concept so strongly in three places; Myself as represented in years of journals, My family where I have learned the most and still claim the largest parts of my identity, and My faith and religious training throughout my life.

In my final synthesis paper for the Family History Writing course I was able to kick start what I feel will be a massive and wonderful venture for a career:

Over a four month period, I was introduced to the nuanced and burgeoning possibilities of family history writing within literacy studies.  As a developing field, our course goals aimed to review and reap as much academically relevant material to define the scope of this writing community.  Benedict Anderson wrote in Imagined Communities that boundaries of communities, although defined, are elastic.  He theorized that membership within a community may not necessarily be based on face-to-face contact, as it once was, but on the largely text based boundaries that maintain unique identity while encompassing larger more vaguely defined groups.  This definition of community is useful in looking at the group of people engaging in family history writing, as well as the communities they are writing about – families.

Because of the marginalized position of family history writing within composition disciplines and methodology, much of the synthesis and defining of what family history writing comes from the contextualization of personal family history writing as supplemented by the ongoing understanding of where that writing would fit within an academic framework.  Although the purpose of this synthesis is not to argue the validity of family history writing academically, it does hope to carve out a meaning and purpose for writing done within multigenre and multimodal rhetorical and literary studies.  What I feel is most poignant therefore, is to define the family and theorize by whom it should be written to emphasize that meaning within academia.

Theorizing and synthesizing family history writing has allowed me to feel more a part of the community of family history writers as well as a more aware part of my own family community.  Being part of a community is more about the individual investment in the meanings, values, and relationships of the community than about defining boundaries.  No specific methodology or theory can teach so many of the intrinsically felt spaces within a community, even within a writing genre.  As boundaries are crossed, extended and expanded, writing studies are becoming more elastic and stretching the abilities of our understanding about literacy and relationships.  We family history writers make our own meanings, and in that way, prove to academia that our subject is of worth.  It is writing essential to a broader definition of identity, and close enough to home for all of us to make changes.  What becomes accessible through the diligent and mulit-modal work of family history writing is more than stories, lineage, and historical facts, it is the identity that creates us all from the very foundation up.  We give testimony and permanence to the sensitive and nuanced definition of who family is and where they fit in a broader spectrum. 

That is the beginning and end of 18 pages of passionate writing combining two courses that led me to the gate.  Here I finally am, where I start on my real journey to fulfilling one of my dreams to write, and I am passionate about it!  I have a list of books to read over the summer, none of which would sound interesting to anyone outside of literacy studies, unless they really loved me and were patient enough to fein interest.  One square of that messy wall of cork board (the original Pintrest ya'll) is covered in articles I have found during research that I have read and will use in a thesis paper next year or just enjoy reading.  The other squares help keep me grounded and rounded; my dreams and positive statements square, the landscaping and home improvement square, calendaring square, home management, and kid school stuff.  I am a well squared person you might say.

At the end of a blissful semester and stressful season of life, my husband ordered me a rad gift to celebrate all the time I had spent typing in front of the home office computer.  I think he is finally realizing that I will be doing more writing, not less, and wishes to save my aching back.  Although my alley trash duct-taped 3-legged chair was functional in the sense I could sit on it so long as I jammed the 4th leg in at the right angle and sat quickly, this new gift is a fine improvement.

We Are Spartan - Family Style

April 26th was a long awaited date for this family.  I had given Josh the gift/challenge of entrance in the Indianapolis Sprint Spartan.  The gift was that I would train with him and run with him, the challenge was for us to train together (he is a morning man and I am not).  We fit it all in and planned an extra special day for the whole family.  My parents scheduled their annual trip out to visit us that same weekend so we could take the kids down and they could be the official photo takers.  My sister Jill joined us as well, she is going for a Trifecta of Spartans this year and we kicked off the season together.  It was my first race, Josh's second.  Our first Spartan race we signed up for in Arizona I got sick two days before so my older brother ran with Josh.  I have been jealous ever since.

It was honestly the most perfect weather or a race day.  It was not too hot, not too cold.  We certainly were not racing anywhere near Indianapolis, but if they had published the real podunck Indiana town in which we raced the whole world would have had no idea what region we were in (Midwest folks).  We raced at an ATV park, which is a perfect location for a Spartan! Plenty of hills and mud.  

 Our starting coral time was 9:45am.  We got there barely in time since we had driven down from Fort Wayne that morning.  I hate waiting for race starts anyway so I was grateful.  Jill was right to advise us to go at an early starting time so the course would not be as sloppy.  I loved it!  We started out running up and down wooded hills.  I felt like I was back home in the mountains.  As a kid our parents took us on tons of hiking trips, and like most kids, we got bored just walking so would often run the trails just to get the hike over with.  I still had the latent mountain goat skills for hopping up and down the slopes on sure footing.  We then swam through a creek and army crawled up a muddy hill under barbed wire.  Once past that obstacle course we headed over this bad boy:

 It gets a bit tricky walking on 2x4s when your shoes are sloshing, but on we went.  Around the lake until we got to this spidey thing:

After that we were in the hills for a good while running up and down creek beds and ravines, climbing over 10 feet walls, dragging cement on a chain, carrying 25lb sacks on our back, more walls, flipping over tractor tires, then back around to the main area where we tried to throw a javelin into a hay bale, which was the first obstacle I missed and had to do 30 burpees for, then hoisted 30lbs up to the top of this tower (which I thought was fun and finished before Josh and then went to help him):

Finally we ran past our kiddos, at the end of 4 miles of running and such, just to the last 3 obstacles; climbing up a rope, which I gave up on and just did the burps, then this wall, which I shamelessly cheated on by using the top of the wall and did not do burpees (using the excuse in my head that the kids were going to start their race soon).

 And lastly over this wall.  This was the only part of the race where I really just felt like crying.  Really, you want me to grip this slimly rope and walk up a slippery wall just so I can jump over fire on the other side?!  No way! I am exhausted.  I attempted once and then just waited and whined until Josh was on the other side and came to pull me over.

 Josh and I ran the whole race together which was a great push-me-pull-you collaboration.  I have much better endurance and he better strength.  I was happy to run through the middle and pushed him to run and he helped me get over big walls.  I can proudly say we did not walk any of the parts where we could run (sometimes you are bogged behind people and you can't help but walk) and we stayed together.  I think our finishing time was around 1hour 35minutes.  I set that as something to meet or beat someday but really don't care about our time, heck, we finished!

 Jill lost us back in the swamps and finished like a champ and 5th in her age division.

Not long after we finished our race, the kids were to start theirs.  I had to promise Josh that I would not talk about taking the kids to Disneyworld for a full year if he let me spend the money to enter them into this race.  I am glad I made the bargain because the kids absolutely adored this race and all the anticipation that surrounded it!  I signed them all up for the mile course, even though the official entry said only kids 7 and older could do the mile.  It was a half mile course repeated twice so I figured I would get them all starting together and if Danny and Viv wanted to opt out after the first lap, they could.

 Faith got herself literally at the front of the pack at the starting line. There were kids up to 12 years old, but she figured since she was one of the 5 seven year olds, she should have an advantage at the front.  She didn't remember that she had been instructed to stay with her siblings.  Ah well.  Let her take the advantage!  Josh was in charge of keeping an eye on Faith around the track and I went alongside Danny and Viv.  The two were so cute at being encouraging and helping each other.  Danny was a bit hesitant with the obstacles the first time around, but was totally fine the second time around.

 These mud pits were by far the kids' favorite part!  They would not stop talking about it, and I get it, I liked playing in the mud on purpose too!

 The second time over, the mud was so sticky that Danny lost his shoe.  It did not phase him at all!  He went right on running.  Lucky I was there where he left the shoe and dug around in the mud until I found it and put it on him later in the race to prevent puncture wounds.

 Here is their last obstacle - You can see that Viv is eying the finish line but being a supportive sister and waiting for Danny to get off.  They had gone around the course twice, what no other 5 and 6 year old would do!  I was mega proud of them.

 It was a fun day for us all as a family!  The kiddos loved that they got their own medal and head band and completed their first race.  We could all talk together about the shared experience and it was AWESOME!  I might even say more fun than Disney (but I will reserve that judgement until we get to go all together in another year).

At the end, for all the racers, they have a spraying station.  Just a lot of hoses and a lot of mud coming off people.  I skipped the power wash option and went back to the calmer hoses to strip my kids to their skivvies and wash them off.  I was glad to have Josh to tag team, as I got one down to the undies he would rap them in a towel and whisk them away behind a tree to clothe them, not that anyone cared about muddy little kids on this day. 

 Here we all are, all finishers!  What a Spartan Fam!

Piano Recitals

This may be more time than you are wanting to waste looking at the internet, but here are the videos of the kids' first piano recital.  Only a parent can really be excited about these pieces because they represent so much progress.  Everyone else in the room is really just waiting for the kid to do something silly, or get too nervous, or otherwise be entertained by the kid itself and not the performance.  A parent also appreciates the value of a kid having to practice and follow through with performing a piece in front of other people, and that is why parents attend these things, so that their kid will get the same nervous fear and hopefully overcome it because like minded parents are doing the same thing.  It is a harmless version of group think.

Danny was first to play his pieces.  He crutched with his teacher in the moment of nervousness, which is his default to completing many tedious tasks.  He had played his pieces at home quite well, as you can tell, they were memorized.  It is cute to see how much concentration it takes to make his fingers move independently. I was really surprised to see Viv be nervous.  As much as her bravado shows that she loves being in the spotlight, it was extremely difficult for her to get through the introduction of her songs.  I was shocked.  Of course my heart went out to her and I was immensely proud that she swallowed down the fear and tears and played her songs magnificently.  She really loves practicing the piano and feeling masterful of her own fingers.  She is the only child that does not groan a bit when asked to practice the piano as part of her morning routine.  Most of the time she practices the piano to get out of doing the rest of her chores.Faith is undoubtedly a natural.  She doesn't have to try hard to succeed at piano.  For her, piano lessons is more about learning to try hard to be better than what is already easy.  While she as playing I could hear her counting quietly to herself.  Playing rythms is the newest part of their learning and she did want to do her ultimate best.  I mentioned to her after that I had heard her counting and was proud that she was being meticulous.  A sly smile slid over her face as she giggled slightly, "You could hear me?  But I was saying it very very quietly."  Mothers will notice everything in the heightened anticipation of their children's success.  She ended her songs and you will see made a quick ballerina curtsey, the exact gesture that the crowd was waiting for. 

I am really proud of my bunch.  They were the youngest and have progressed a great deal in just the four months they have been going to lessons.  I am not the best at keeping them praticing regularly, perhaps that is why we all started young to get better with time.  Originally the idea of piano lessons was an added benefit to having a friend babysit them while I was in class on Thursday, now it is an extremely beautiful blessing for us all.  I am grateful for Jenna's gifts of music and patience that she has shared with us all.  The kids did terrific in their very first piano recital!

Saturday is a special day...

pervious view of yard - mostly weeds

In the primary hymnal there is a song for children that states "Saturday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Sunday."  The bouncing melody goes on to describe how we make everything clean and shiny and extra peaceful before we lay down to rest buzzing with Sabbath reverence.  

I had forgotten this morning what I had done yesterday and woke to a hay field!

For us, Saturday is a day to get ready for Sunday, more in the sense of a 'day of rest' from our Saturday work.  With one full day for projects we work as crazily as possible for as long as our physical bodies can sustain it and then crash into bed relieved that the next day we can take a nap and nurse ourselves back to normalcy with ibuprofen and fresh baked cookies.   April has been a particularly productive month of Saturdays.  I was going to document in words what a delightfully exhausting day I had in the perfect 60 degree weather, but realized that my arms are still a bit too tired to support them up to the keyboard for too long.  We started at 8am, as soon as Josh brought home our rental equipment.  I set directly to the tree stump remover.  It was large and a bit intimidating and first - but way fun once I got the hang of it.  We needed to remove a variety for stumps along the old fence/property line between our house and the neighbors.  We were also hoping to create better drainage from our property, which sits 2 feet above  the next, so we are not draining our yard runoff into their basement.  So, I ran that digger all down the line and loosened as much soil as I could in the process while leveling out two massive root systems, lowering one area down three feet to level and then ditching the rest.

I was extra happy for the loose dirt to move it as topsoil to fill in our insanely uneven backyard.  The previous owners of the house had an above ground pool in the backyard and had flattened the ground under the pool - displacing a lot of the yard in severly uneven proportions. I would not have minded the bumps had any grass been able to grow in the depressed circle.  Nope.  Just weeds.  Thus, wheel barrow full by the next, I moved property line to level backyard while Josh delivered the rentals back and got supplies for the fence we are jointly building with the neighbors as well.  

Looking toward property line you see the shrubery.

Looking down the property line, new posts and ditch.

With the rental, Josh operated an auger - the fastest and easiest way to dig post holes ever!  After counting out 21 holes that would need to be dug, and knowing how long it takes, and the massive effort it takes, to dig them, we opted for the auger.  It was a good choice.  Because we are willing to put the fence together ourselves and demolish the tree stumps by ax and will power it saves us some cash.  Plus, we didn't have to pay for topsoil fill for the yard, and we fixed the drainage problem too!  Mostly.    Work in progress.  And work it was.  From early morning until 8 at night for me, 11pm for Josh.  I was happy that both Josh and I have stayed focused on fitness to support all that lifting, digging, and general physical labor.  It will be nicer every year and every month, and every Saturday.

The orangish area had been a really huge tree stump that was built up about 2 feet above our yard level, now it is depressed.

Level. Imagine the green to come!

The Saturday previous I worked through my grumpiness of sinusitis, treating it with paint fumes to renovate the kids' closet.  I had to take out shelving on the left and paint that little cubby of a space 3 times to make it nice.  Between coats I finished and re-finished all the trim (time consuming) in the bedroom and started the checker-board pattern on the ceiling.  

The main purpose was to create a hanging area where the kids could reach their hanging clothes themselves.

colorful 'drawers' to keep their clothes

higher shelves to keep clothes they are growing in to and toys to save.

With the addition of the 'reading corner' their room is getting quite homey. (and yes, we have a lot of paint on the floor, but we don't care since we will refinish the floors in another year.  Lazy = temporary ghetto mess.)