Category: General News

Happy March 1 everyone!  March…the month of St. Patrick’s Day…the month that welcomes the official first day of spring…the month where we average eight inches of snow.  March is, I must remember, certainly not spring.  Yet it is the end of winter.  I recall the phrase “In like a lion, out like a lamb.”  Well, this year March didn’t come in like a lion.  The sun is shining, the temperature has soared to the high-thirties, and it’s in general a delightful winter day.

In fact, I went to the grocery store yesterday WITHOUT A WINTER COAT.  I can’t believe it either.  The very idea of not needing to wear a coat seems ludicrous.  I just wore my fleece jacket, and I was fine.  Yeee haaawww.

Now with March upon us, I’m looking around my home and wondering how I should mix up my decorations for the month.  Did you know, by the way, that I change my home decorations every month?  Or at least every season.  Who does that, really?  Me, I guess:)  September through April I change my home decor every month, and then spring and summer I keep things pretty constant.  Except my American Girl, Kirsten, who I change each month.  This seasonal decorating is something that I started doing around age 12, and I haven’t been able to stop.  I’ve toned it down a little from my teen years when I changed all my wall hangings as well.  Now I only change some of my wall hangings.  Something tells me that if Bryan lived alone, his home would not have seasonally changing decor…

My January decorations feature snowmen and polar bears and other wintery items.  In February I add in some red items.  And March I switch out the red with green.  And I’m thinking that maybe the polar bears should depart.  Maybe some rainbows should take their place.

I’ve been curious what my yard and the neighborhood will look like at the end of March, and thanks to my Flickr archives, I can easily see photos from the last five years.  For instance, when I look at March 2007, I get see a calendar with a thumbnail from each day I took photos.

March 4 looks really snowy…like the world outside my window today.

Then on March 19, it looks like my siblings and I all took a walk to our neighborhood park in some balmy weather.

And look…on March 27, 2008, crocuses were popping from the earth in Jessica’s yard:

Maybe I’ll even be bringing home some pansies this month as I was on March 29, 2008!

What a cutie that little two-year-old Andrew was!

We have some fun plans this March.  This weekend we’re doing our semi-annual weekend at Jack’s house.  Maretta and Kyle are driving down from St. Paul, which should be so great.  I haven’t seen them since Michael and Lisa’s wedding in October!  Then on March 12, Joe comes home from college for spring break.  He’ll be in Madison for over two weeks, so I’m hoping to soak up some good Joe time.  My little bro will be graduating in May, and I’m so excited to see what adventures come his way.  Then there are the Oscars (March 8…always a good fashion time), Michael’s 29th birthday on March 19, and Joe’s 22nd birthday on March 25th.

Welcome to you, March!  Hoping your month finds you healthy, active, and full of good cheer.

I love the Olympics.  Really, really love them.  In general, I’m pretty luke-warm about sports.  Actually, usually I’m just plain uninterested in sports.  But there’s something about the Olympics that gets me so excited and hopeful and happy and obsessed.

Since the opening ceremony on February 12, we’ve been watching the evening broadcast each night.  That first weekend, we watched it during the day too.  Then on day four, Tuesday last week, I needed a break.  So I wrote the Olympics a note:

Dear 2010 Winter Olympics,

These last four days have been great.  Really, really great.  I’ve laughed, I’ve yelled, I’ve even gotten misty-eyed.  So thank you.
But, my dear Olympics, I think I need a break.  Just a night…a little time off.   It’s me not you.  Things have just been moving so fast…
So I’m making a choice to skip the men’s figure skating short program and women’s super G and some speed skating.  I may regret it, but I think it’s the best choice for me tonight.
See you again on Wednesday!

Love,
Althea

Since that one night away from Olympics, I’ve been back 100%, and it’s been great.  I love the variety of events.  The skiing is great.  And short track speed skating really makes me excited.  I love figure skating too, although I’m not nearly as devoted a fan as I was in the ’90s.

I wish I had a photo to post of myself at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary.  Terry and I went together just before little Joe was born; I was 10 years old.  My favorite parts were collecting pins, walking around the Olympic village, meeting the mascots Hidy and Howdy, watching a lady use her fur coat as a sled to slide down a hill, and drinking hot chocolate at the cross-country event while listening to the Swiss folks ring their enormous cow bells.  My least favorite parts were losing my hat on a bus on the way to a skiing event and then discovering that my pink moon boots weren’t waterproof and getting so wet and cold that I cried.

It’s too bad that the 1016 summer Olympics won’t be in Chicago…it would have been a lot of fun to take the kids!  My brother Joe is an Olympics-lover as well, and he hopes to go to London in 1012.  I hope he does so I can live vicariously!

What’s your favorite part of the Olympics?  Do you prefer summer or winter?  How do you feel about Bob Costas?  What are you going to do when they’re over?

Love,

Althea

I’m happy to report that it is the last week in February, and I am still enjoying winter.  True story!  I’m having fun playing in the snow, going sledding, bundling the kids up for walks in the neighborhood.  I have a sense that spring is the next season, but so far, I’m not too anxious for it to be here.  My goal is to be a fan of winter until about March 10.  Then, when I start going spring-crazy, it’ll actually be coming in the next month or so:)

Yet, as I gazed out the window at my snow-covered yard, I found myself dreaming of green things growing.  I imagined dirt and worms and grass and flowers.  The Flower Factory just sent me their enormous catalog of plants, and in a fit of gardening inspiration, I decided to map out an ambitious garden for our backyard.  Bryan and I have been envisioning this garden for four or five, or maybe six years now, but we’ve worked on other parts of the yard up to this point.

If you’re interested in helping dig up some turf in April, let me know!  I think we’ll need help:)  Also, I totaled up the cost of the plants that I think I’d like to fill in this new garden, and it totaled (sigh) $400.  So maybe we’ll do this on a multi-year program.

It’s fun to have a plan in hand and a plant list ready.  When the ground thaws, I hope we’re able to spend a weekend removing some turf and laying down landscaping fabric and putting in some edging.  Then the fun part…new plants!  It’ll be a prairie garden, and I can’t wait to have some of my favorite prairie plants growing in my own yard.

Bryan and I really, really enjoyed the BBC mini-series Bleak House. I highly recommend it.

There’s a scene that somehow seemed appropriate with our life this last week of stomach-flu-enforced isolation.  Bryan quoted it the other night, and we both had a good laugh.

Sir Leicester Dedlock: Is it still raining my love?

Lady Dedlock: Yes my love. And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place. Bored to death with my life. Bored to death with myself.

Sir Leicester Dedlock: What was that, my love?

Lady Dedlock: Nothing…of consequence.

Fortunately, this morning Bryan is healthy and at work, Andrew is healthy and at preschool and Sylvia is healthy and is at daycare at Donna’s.  And so far, I have escaped the bug. So we’ve all left our Bleak House, and the sun is shining!
I’m grateful for our piles of books, for 101 Datamations and The Fox and the Hound. For roasted turkey and tapioca pudding. For hours snuggling and blankets and days after days spent in pajamas. We’ve been “slugging it” here at the Dotzour house as everyone got well. I can’t tell you, dear Internet, how happy I am to be rejoining the world!

Due to a run-in with the stomach flu, our household has had a week of semi-isolationism.  When I was out of town last weekend, Bryan got to experience our very first child throwing up incident.  Actually, it was the second.  The first was on a trans-continental flight, and can be read about here.  But that was more of a gagging incident.

At 2:47am on Saturday, January, 31; Bryan posted the following to Facebook:

Sylvia and I are getting matching T-shirts made up: “I survived the crib-barfing of 01/30/10”.

Unfortunately, the crib barfing incidents were followed by the dad’s-bed barfing incident, followed by several sitting on dad’s lap barfing into a bucket incidents.  She fell asleep at 4:30am and has been barf-free since.

When I got back home on Monday, Sylvia told me in excitement, “I pehped!  Pehp.  Sylva bed.  Pehp.  Daddy bed.  Phep.  Daddy pillow!”  She pulled me into my room, crawled up on the bed, pulled back the covers, and showed me where the “pehpping” took place.  Understandably, it made quite an impression on her.

Bryan caught Sylvia’s bug on Tuesday night and was totally out of commission for two days.  He’s better now and back at work today.

After Bryan got sick, I decided to attempt to sterilize the house.  Jessica brought me some Lysol cleaner, I pulled my steam cleaner out of the basement, and I tackled each room in the house with a fierce cleaning energy.  By the end of the day on Wednesday, my hands were red and dry from all the cleaning and hand washing I’d been doing.  Andrew’s were too.  But my house was cleeeeaaaaan.

Andrew held up all week, and was healthy for preschool, but this morning, he had a bit of an unfortunate experience in the bathroom.  Looks like he’s got a touch of the bug.  Sylvia and I have canceled nearly all our out-of-the-house activities this week.  Wednesday night, she was up eight times in the night howling with a painful tummy.  And her diaper situation has gone from normal to very unfortunately not normal.

So it looks like we’ll be canceling our weekend plans as well.

I’m just really, really hopeful that the germs will all have dissipated by Monday.  Granny comes to town on Tuesday, and I want us to be germ-free by then.  Oh, and that means that I also need to stay healthy.  Please, please!!

Thinking back, the last time Bryan had the stomach flu was in 1999.  And the last time I had a stomach bug was in Botswana in 1997.  Oooo, that was a doozy.  Liz and Janet, thank you for helping me through that one.  Neither of my kids have ever thrown up before.  So I’ll just be thankful for the amazing run of luck we’ve had up to this point.  And we’ll keep drawing and reading books and watching videos until health is restored and we can rejoin society!

I had a great time on my western trip.  Thanks to Bryan for caring for the kids (one of whom threw up all night) so I could go have fun for the weekend!

I finished the book The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison, and it was so good!  It really made me step back and acknowledge that while some of the hours and weeks of tending to small children can feel endless that this is a finite and precious time.  Here are some more quotes I just had to share:

The hardest part of being a parent may be learning to live with the fact that there are so many things that we simply can’t control, so much of the journey that is not our doing at all, but rather the work of the gods, the unfolding of destiny, fate.  We give birth to our children, we love and cherish them, but we don’t form or own them, any more than we can own the flowers blooming at our doorsteps or the land upon which we build our homes and invest our dreams.  We may tend the garden for a while, take our brief turn upon the land, nurture the children delivered into our arms, but in truth we possess none of these things, nor can we write any life story but our own.  It’s a truth I had to confront right away, one that I’m still still struggling to accept seventeen years later.

and later

Now, all these years later, as one son prepares to enter high school and the other, unbelievably, to leave it, I often find myself thinking back to the years when they were both still small.  Summer days then began with pancakes and just-picked blueberries for breakfast and might end with made-up stores or shadow pictures on a bedroom wall.  In between, there were walks to the creek, picnic lunches on the back porch, stacks of books carried out to a quilt on the grass, a plastic wading pool that could enchant two little boys for hours, a shallow red dish full of filmy bubble liquid, and the magic wand that once waved wobbly, iridescent globes into the air, each one carrying an invisible fairy off to a distant sea.

It’s still hard for me to believe that all of this has vanished, that those times are truly gone for good.  How fresh and green they are, still, in my memory — the intense, constatnt physical intimacy as well as the countless peanut-butter sandwiches, bedtime stories, earaches and scraped knees, baking soda volcanoes, snowball fights, trips to town for ice-cream cones.  Yet I am grateful to have had all of those moments, for they are the ones that have turned out, in the end, to be the most precious recollections of all, though they went unrecorded, unwritten, unremarked on at the time.

Our photo albums from those days are full of pictures of birthday cakes and holiday celebrations, vacation trips and family adventures, piano recitals and baseball games.  But the memories I find myself sifting through the past to find, the ones that I would now give anything to relive, are the ones that no one ever thought to photograph, the ones that came and went as softly as a breeze on a summer afternoon.

No picture, or home video, or diary entry can begin to capture the nubbly texture, subtle tones, and secret shades of a family’s life as it is from one hour, or day, or season, to the next.  It has taken a while, but I know it now–the most wonderful gift we had, the gift I’ve finally learned to cherish above all else, was the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.

Reading this book, I mostly thought of my two little ones, but in re-reading these passages, I also found myself nostalgic for my own childhood.  For the easy camaraderie I had with my brothers and sister, the way that we were all so entwined in each others’ lives.

I think my mom lived her life trying as hard as she could to cherish the gift of all those perfectly ordinary days.  At her funeral, Terry read her favorite excerpt from her favorite play, Old Town. You can read it here.

I don’t think we can be reminded too many times how wonderful life is.  I’m glad I had a mom who helped share that lesson with me every day.

I’m on an airplane right now flying to the west, and I’m reveling in the luxury of sitting alone, reading a book.

This book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day by Katrina Kenison is so good that I have to share it right *now* even though it means thumb-typing this post on my phone.

I may not have mentioned it recently, but these last couple weeks, my kids have been driving me crazy. Sylvia has been sick and has been throwing A LOT of tantrums. Andrew and I spent a couple days last week in an embroiled battle of wills. The house has gotten too messy, the weather has been cold, and there were a couple afternoons that I was ready to throw in the towel. Except that when your job is Mom, it’s not clear how to announce that you’re giving notice.

Of course, in and amidst the crying and the disobedience and the mess, there were lovely times. And even more fortunately, I have a strong amnesia about hard times, so next week I’ll probably only have a vague sense that things were anything but grand.

So here I sit on an airplane with a book I picked up at the library last night. Katrina Kennison’s book Mitten Strings for God is about my favorite parenting books ever. Her writing is like a balm for my mommy soul. The book currently on my lap is The Gift of an Ordinary Day, and it’s about her experiences shifting from being a parent of little kids to being the parent of teens.

I’m not a big crier, but I’ve sat here on the plane, sobbing over several paragraphs. Her first book was all about slowing down and soaking up the pleasures of everyday life with our kids. This book is about searching and changing and letting go as her little boys grow into teenagers and men.

Here are a few of the passages that cracked open my heart:
About looking back at parenting small kids:
“I learned a lot about myself, and many lessons in mindfulness, during those long days. Intense and demanding as they are, the years we spend with our young children can also be deeply, viscerally gratifying. We know exactly where we are needed and what we need to be doing. Immersed in the physical and emotional realm of parenthood. We develop reserves of patience, imagination, and fortitude we never dreamed possible. At times, the hard work of being a mother seems in itself a spiritual practice, an opportunity for growth and self-exploration in an extraordinarily intimate world, a world in which hands are for holding, bodies for snuggling, laps for sitting.”
She goes on to talk about how her boys have grown up, and the oldest is in eighth grade…
“Sensing the ground shifting beneath my feet, I resisted this new, unknown territory, already nostalgic for what I’d so recently taken for granted. I missed my old world and it’s funny inhabitants, those great big personalities still housed in small, sweet bodies. I missed my sons, kissable cheeks and round bellies, their unanswerable questions, their innocent faith, their sudden tears and wild, infectious giggles, even the smell of their morning breath as they would leap, upon waking, from their own warm beds directly into ours. I missed the person I has been for them too–the younger, more capable mother who read aloud for hours, stuck raisin eyes into bear-shaped pancakes, created knight’s armor from cardboard and duct tape. Certainly my talents didn’t seem quite so impressive anymore, my company not as desirable as it once had been.”

This chapter in her book is about change, and she goes on:

“Change, it is said, goes hand in hand with opportunity. Growing older, I begin to see that finding fulfillment in this next stage of life will demand a kind of surrender that seems beyond me now, a new way of being and caring that I can barely begin to imagine. I suspect I have a lot to learn about letting go.
“I recall my younger, intensely ambitious self with a wince–how avidly I set my sights on the future and how hard I worked at becoming the person I thought I ought to be, in pursuit of the life by which I thought I could define myself. So many aspirations–for a rewarding career, security for my family, success for my children, a marriage that worked, and a life that mattered. I wanted it all. And I believed that if I nurtured those dreams, and planned well enough, they would one day come true. The funny thing is, now, as my children begin to pull away, it is the present moment that concerns me most. Yet try as I might to pay attention, I find myself confronted with all sorts of conflicting emotions–pride in my sons, of course, and gratitude for what we’ve had, but also an almost heartbreaking sense of just how short life really is, and how incomprehensible. How in fact life is not all about planning and shaping, but about not knowing, and being okay with that. It’s about learning to take the moment that comes and make the best of it, without any idea of what’s going to happen next.”

Ahhh good stuff. I’m so glad that this nook found its way to my lap!

Now I’m going to sign off, keep reading, and enjoy a three day weekend with some wonderful friends.
Lovingly,
Althea

Before Christmas, I planted a few paperwhite bulbs in a bowl in my kitchen.  When we got home from Texas, we found that our bulbs had sprouted long, green stalks.  Then last week, the blooms started to appear, filling the air of our home with their peppery, sharp spring sent.

There’s nothing in all the world like blooming bulbs.  They just sing of hope.  And spring.  Or at least of spring in one’s heart!

The flowers are now at their peak of bloom, and every time I walk past them, their sent makes me look up sharply and then smile.

I took a photo of the very first paperwhite bloom, and I now have it as my desktop background.  How I wish that my monitor had a scratch-and-sniff function:)

I thought maybe you’d like to share in the prettiness.  If you’d like to download an image for your desktop, click here for the 1026×768 (standard) size or here for the 1440×900 (wide screen) size.  You can right-click the link and choose “save link as,” or you can click on the link, wait for the photo to pop up, and right click on the photo and choose “save as.”  Enjoy!

I have a whole album full of photos from our Texas visit that I haven’t posted yet.  We had such a nice time!

Here are some of my favorite pics.  Nearly all of them were taken by Bryan’s mom or dad.

When we arrived, Andrew and Sylvia were excited to find that they each had a cookie, a box of crayons, and some Christmas coloring books at their table.  They sat right now and got to work!

Here’s Bryan and Mel…

Grandad and Andrew on Christmas Eve.

Sylvia tends to her new baby doll on Christmas morning.

Bryan and Andrew doing one of their favorite games: chess puzzles

Bryan and Andrew playing with Andrew’s new stacking game (Grace, we got the idea when we visited you!)

Granny reads to her grandkiddos.

These animals get some major use!  They had whole communities built for them, and then they started engaging in strange stacking behaviors.

Andrew snuggling with his Aunt Mel

Grandad and Sylvia play with vintage Little People.  How many can she fit on her fingers?

It wasn’t particularly warm during most of our visit, but on the days that the sun came out, we all basked in the back yard.  Love those piggies!

Andrew seemed to enjoy himself.

Soaking up some sunshine.

Oops!  Sylvia got it in her head that she wanted to be naked, and while it was only 50 degrees or so, she was perfectly content to play outside in the nude.

Oh, and we played lots of games in the evening.  Poker, buckskin, Lost Cities…it’s always fun to play games!

I think I’ve caught-up on photos.  Now I just need to pick up my camera again so I have some photos of January to share!

Hope you’re having a good day!