Memorial Day weekend

For a few years now, we've been making the trip up north to visit my family for Memorial Day weekend.  We all get together to celebrate my grandmother, who is turning 92 this week, and with no fewer than four other May birthdays, it has become one of our semiannual visits (besides the holidays).

We stopped in the Wisconsin Dells and Buffalo Phil's train table service was a big hit...

Having fun at great grandma's birthday party

Somehow our first Popsicles (watermelon and blueberries)

A trip to grandpa's farm...

Chickens!

Eggs!

Broken eggs...

Another highlight was my mom and my sister each just got new puppies...

Last Day of School

Happy Weekend!

Madeline turns 75

Hope you are having a delightful Spring! Easter and Mother's Day has just rolled into the Memorial Day weekend, so summer is finally upon us!  The kids are finishing up school and getting geared up for camp and pool season.

We are serious book (and Maddie) lovers over here, so I was so excited to hear that Madeline is turning 75. And of course there is a commemorative edition of the first book released to mark the occasion, along with the New York Historical Society displaying more than 90 original works by Ludwig Bemelmans from July-Oct..  Enjoy!

 

 

Important Lessons

I read things all the time that I think about sharing, I really should just start of runner of article links in my sidebar (which I now have).  But this was too good (and hit way too close to home) not to share (original source).  It wasn't until I dealt with infertility (and loss) that I realized how my life up to that point had prepared me for the strength that I needed to get through it, and I wish there was a way for everyone to have the strength and wisdom that comes from a life of struggles, you know without all the struggles, but that is not how life works. 

Embrace the hard stuff that finds you, it is what makes you stronger and better than you were before.

#6: Everything is a MIRACLE

When a Dream becomes a Nightmare

Will you be my neighbor?

My older sister Emily and her husband Joe are currently battling frac(k) sand mining companies from turning their dream house into a nightmare, by becoming a neighbor and beginning to mine, process and haul the sand used for natural gas fracturing.  When they first moved back to Wisconsin 14 years ago after three years together in central Illinois, they moved in with my parents, found and bought their 40 acres in the country, and started building their "forever house".

This began a very long journey, since they did much of the work themselves.  My sister had helped work her way through grad school in IL, where she'd followed husband #1, by designing kitchens at a big box store.  She designed the entire house herself, w/no professional plans, her blueprints were reviewed by an architect who apparently had no changes.  In the early years, when I'd visit from Chicago, I'd do fun things like stain miles of woodwork.  It's an open-floor plan green and ADA walk-out ranch with clever features like radiant heating in their hardwood floors and a playhouse connecting their kids' Jack and Jill bedrooms.

It was six whole years after they started, after I got engaged, that they would finally decide they were done enough to get pregnant.  The fact that their marriage has survived is some kind of miracle, though her relationship with my dad, who helped them on the house in the early days, unfortunately did not.  She's been estranged from him for a dozen years now.  Ironically, her plans were/are to live like him, off the land (w/an enormous garden, chickens, etc.), and to some extent off the grid.  This part of the state actually looks like Kentucky (since it was missed by the glaciers), lots of rolling hills (great for sledding) and lovely curving country roads.

We have a bit of an odd relationship Emily and me.  We are very different, I can't even list all the ways.  We really have little in common other than that we are family.  She was particularly awful to me when we were trying to have our family, and not because she was building hers, it was just a continuation of much of my interactions w/her, and all I can do is shrug at her intentionally getting pregnant with her #4 the week immediately following my news that our twins had stuck, and that she chose the day my grandma died (when we all returned home from the hospital) the next month to announce that she was expecting again.  For someone surrounded by people who avoid the spotlight, she sure does fight (god knows who) for it. 

So when she called me recently and we got to talking, it was actually the first time she'd told me herself about what was happening to her life as she knew it.  DH had heard about the mines via family at Christmas, but only through the grapevine and we didn't know the status of what was happening.

Coincidentally, what they needed in their fight to keep the mines and the sand processing from filling their (and their children's) air with carcinogens, their dark country sky with 24 hour lights and noise, and narrow roads with sand trucks was my dear husband.  They had been unable to secure a transportation engineer anywhere in the state (or even nearby MN) to analyze the situation and testify to the impact the mines and the transport would have on their little rural Amish buggy community because the industry had tied them all up (w/retainers and conflicts), so that they would not have any opposition to their plans.  The proposed mines, processing, and conveyors are directly next to and across from their home, land owned by people who obviously don't live on the land.

Tonight they and DH are all up in the north woods fighting "big oil" (her words, so who knows she may someday go back to progressive from ultra-conservative...), and their bid for a permit to proceed with the mines.  My mother not so secretly hopes they end up just cutting their losses, as they would have/choose to if the mines break ground, and move to the city.  With frac sand mining in full force, the sandy soil in that area of the state now makes any undeveloped area at very high risk to being converted to a mine.  Crazy stuff, stay tuned...

 

Update:  Well, the news is good!  They are another one of those very rare red dots above.  Hopefully the county will stick to their guns... :)

Accidental decor project

A few weeks ago while the kids were at school, I went to our local Goodwill store to raid their kids' shoes.  A colleague of DH's is traveling to Honduras for Engineers without Borders (yes, that's a thing) and she said the kids there are always in need of shoes, and I found exactly what I was looking for.  Coincidentally the kids' shoes were right next to the athletic equipment, and some vintage wooden tennis racquets caught my eye. 

I had previous pinned this pic (from Lonny, design by J+G Design) as a cute, but not a planned, idea for a kid's room (though this is a SoHo "bachelor pad").

So I decided to pick up the racquets ($10 for all four, which is nuts given what I've found they go for on CL and eBay) and did a mini 1/4 installation in Alistair's room.  Mine is offset to accommodate the top one with a shorter handle.  He walked in the first time he saw them he said "WOW!".  I guess that is all you can ask for, right? ;)

Last week was spring break and as it goes around here, the kids both fell sick.  Some weird on again off again week long puking virus, that hopefully has left for good.  My kids are awesome in their own bed sleepers, but somehow the floor looked better to him last week.  Poor little guy.

We went to Lake Geneva last weekend and upon leaving the Grand Geneva, Marielle threw what amounts to a tantrum for her.  She wouldn't get off the lobby floor.  Might as well take a pic then.

Work is underway on their big kid rooms, I can't believe how big they are getting.  I'm buying 3Ts (to wear now!?), they are all signed up for summer camp, preschools for fall, and we're already looking at three year old programs.  Slow down kiddos...

The Fear of Autism

So if you are anything like me, you read a lot about Autism lately.  Diagnoses are up and it seems to be parents' greatest fear, at least among those afflictions that can't (yet) be found before birth (Did you know that over 90% of Downs babies are never born?).

I found the latest article about the real risk factors they have found (that likely interact with genetic predisposition) to be very interesting.  From The NYT...  

It makes me so angry (and that is putting it mildly) when I hear about people (especially celebrities, who have a dangerous combination of undue influence over the uninformed and being so themselves) touting that they've decided not to vaccinate their children due to their fear of autism.  You may have heard that a particular Chicago athlete and his ex-reality show wife went public recently with their decision not to vaccinate their infant son (and presumably his younger brother, yet to be born) because they are "afraid of autism."  They'd be better off focusing on pregnancy spacing...

 

Now besides the fact that there are no credible studies that vaccines cause autism, there are many that show vaccination can prevent contraction, transmission, and therefore the side effects (including disability, disfigurement, sterility, etc.) and death by preventable diseases.  I'm not here to promote autism as a fabulous thing, I have a sister with intellectual and physically disabilities (caused by Williams Syndrome, a spontaneous gene deletion, which coincidentally is sometimes described at the "opposite of autism" because of extreme sociability) who lives w/my mother at 44, but it doesn't seem to me to be worse than death by preventable disease.  But it seems like there are people who think and therefore act like it is, which makes me sad.  

Part of life and becoming/being a parent is dealing with challenges that you may not have foreseen and wouldn't necessarily choose for yourself/your child.  It also makes me sad that people make choices for their children (or themselves for that matter) that at made from a place of fear, rather than knowledge.