It’s a funny word: aloha. Ten days ago it was full of hugs and hellos, a family reunion in paradise. It meant Welcome to Maui. We were shuttling people in a mini van between the Kahului airport and an ocean front condo in Kihei, anxious to ditch our bags and decorate the sand with our footprints. My side of our family lives in three different … Continue reading Aloha & Mahalo
“Not the least hard thing to bear when they go from us, these quiet friends, is that they carry away with them so many years of our own lives.” ~John Galsworthy I still remember Clark saying we would probably have three sets of dogs in our lifetime together. It’s hard to believe that we have already lost our first set. When Bailey died this summer, … Continue reading Profoundly Difficult: Part 2
This is not a post about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. There are already plenty of those, and since I was one of the early voters it’s out of my hands anyway. I’ll avoid making judgments today and wait for the wisdom of hindsight. Instead, this is a post about our son Sam and our dog Kodi. The events in this post happened eight years … Continue reading Election Day History
I’ve always loved carving pumpkins, stringing spider webs, and checking out the cute ghouls who visit our doorstep on Halloween. In our younger days we attended the occasional Halloween party, most infamously as a pair of dice. I still remember walking into the party and my principal saying, “Oh, look at that… they are in para-dise.” Very funny. In the pre-kid days, our poor dogs … Continue reading Halloween Memory Lane
I finally got the kids their own “real” library cards this weekend. Up until now they’ve had pretend cards they received years ago during a preschool story time, and all the books we borrowed actually went on my account. That worked when they were toddlers and we only wanted print books, but times have changed. Both for our family and for libraries! In this digital … Continue reading Living Libraries
This weekend we headed to the Reindeer Farm near Palmer, Alaska for their Halloween Fun extravaganza. There was no way I was missing this event, since I’ve always envied the fall family festivals my Midwestern family and friends attend. They have a plethora of pumpkin patches to explore, while we are stuck digging through cardboard bins of squash at the local Fred Meyer. (As if … Continue reading Family Fun at the Farm
About once a year, I get the itch to sew. It’s an odd phenomenon since I don’t actually know how to sew, but I try my best. The urge usually coincides with Halloween, because I love to create unique, homemade costumes for the kids. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t even own a sewing machine. This year we bought their costumes, but strangely enough … Continue reading Sew Rewarding
On Sunday Clark decided to take the kids hunting. A light dusting of snow had fallen the day before, so apparently the conditions were ripe for tracking without trudging. Clark has been dreaming about this day since the kids were conceived (probably longer) just as much as I’ve been dreading it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful Sam and Maggie have a dad whose greatest … Continue reading Bunnies and Pachyderms
There is no way to know for certain what experiences are currently cementing themselves as childhood memories for our children, but if I had to make a guess I’d say the daily cruise past Potter Marsh is something they will miss when they grow up and move away. Especially Maggie. Whatever the season, she presses her little nose to the car window and scopes the … Continue reading Swan Song
“Our plan for this gorgeous day was the removal of some of our animals from the world of the living into the realm of food.” ~Barbara Kingsolver, from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Sometimes it bothers me that I’m married to such an avid hunter. How can he look into the eyes of a beautiful piece of nature, only to pull the trigger and watch it die? … Continue reading The Realm of Food
Profoundly Ordinary 