Category: General News

Sept. 9:  I’ve been meaning to write this post for several days, but it seems like each time I get home and sit down, I immediately fall asleep…a condition that is not compatible with writing a web post.
But now the funeral is a couple days past, and although Andrew isn’t technically napping, he is resting in his room, and I have a few moments to write out how amazed I have been at the outpouring of love and support I have received over the last couple weeks.
Sometimes I felt so caught up in the river of flowers and food and emails and cards and caring gestures that I really had a hard time remembering that it is all because I’m losing my mother.

Here’s a sampling of some of the wonderful things people have done…

• A couple of my co-workers came over to help clean my house and mow my (very-long, quite large) lawn.
• My neighbor Nancy brought me two meals and some delicious, fresh-picked apples.
• A group of good friends who have babies Andrew’s age brought over a feast.  There were an amazing number of dishes including cute labels.  They also gave us a big bag full of tulip and daffodill bulbs.  During the feast (pictures are in the gallery), Anne and Heather took care of nearly all the set-up and clean-up making it a totally worry-free event.
• Heather moved from Ann Arbor to Washington DC on Sept. 1-2.  On Sept. 3, she flew out to spend the week here helping us.  Despite the fact that her life was in humongous transition and that Sept. 2 was the one-year anniversary of her son Allan’s stillbirth, Heather has been a tremendous support for me this last week.  She scanned hundreds of pictures of Mom so I could share them electronically, and she put together the great picture posters we had at the visitations.
• Friends from far and near have sent me flowers and plants.  My house is just filled with the beauty of sunflowers, orchids, and wildflowers.
• Some of the food that people brought to Mom and Dad’s house ended up feeding us.  Christy’s pound cake and Sarah Kidd’s lasagna were delicious.
• Anne came over with plants for my garden.  She planted them and dug up a new garden bed for me in the back yard.  I’ve been meaning to do that all summer!  Anne came back a few days later to mulch and weed.
• My friend Kacy flew to Madison from Washington DC for Mom’s funeral on Friday.  She’s a lawyer and has an unbelievably busy schedule.  It meant a lot to me that she came out.
• Bryan’s parents flew up from Texas to support us and help take care of Andrew during the events on Thursday and Friday.  They are in the process of a really busy time, and it means a lot that they wanted make a point of coming here to hug and support us.
• Heather’s mom just brought us a crock pot full of food, so now we’re set for next week too!

I’m sure there’s more…I keep remembering additional things!  While there’s not really anything that can make losing Mom feel OK, it’s sure been nice to feel so supported and loved.
Thank you!

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver

Continue reading “Wild Geese”

Aug. 22: I was about to start a post updating everyone on my mom’s health, but I felt like to do so, I needed to write about some of the other bits of life that are floating around at the same time.
It’s been a full evening!  I tried to coordinate a potluck party at the beach for a bunch of my Mama friends, but due to the massive storms that came through today, we switched locations to our house instead.  It was a small group…just two families, but I can feel the house still buzzing with the energy from their visit.  Three two-year-olds and two little babies create a lot of excitement:)

Around 8 pm, Joe stopped by with Becky and two of his friends from Bowdoin, Lindsey and Leah.  After spending the last week doing some gut-wrenching flipping back and forth about whether or not to return to Bowdoin for the semester, Joe’s decided to go.  So he and Lindsey and Leah are driving out tomorrow afternoon.  I think he feels really relieved to have made a decision, and this way, he can still come back home if he decides he wants to.  I’m excited for him.  Andrew will miss
his Uncle Joe, though.  They sure are buddies.
Andrew has taken up a new game these days.  He calls it “baby.”  It involves him “crying” and whining until we feed him, change his diaper, tuck him in, or give him a hug.  Then he wants us to be the baby.  He brings us apples and broccoli for food.  He came up with this game all on his own…I think he got the idea from a book we got from the library called Baby Talk.  What a silly and imaginative little boy!

August 5: I’m about to fall asleep, but I wanted to post the pictures I took during our weekend at Jack’s house.  We all had a wonderful time.  Mom felt pretty good, and there was lots of laughing and eating and being outdoors together.  The weather on Saturday was rainy (for the first time in what feels like a month) and chilly, so we postponed the Wisconsin River float until Sunday.  Instead, we drove around some of the beautiful areas surrounding Jack’s place, headed over to Iowa for a bit, and saw some beautiful views.
On Sunday, Michael, Matt, and Lisa had to head home early and so missed our float.  Tremendous thunderstorms overnight kept Kyle awake, so he found a bed to catch up on sleep.  But Terry, Jack, Tom, Josh (a friend of Michael’s), Joe, Becky, Bryan, Andrew, and I had a fun time on the river.  We took a canoe so we could get home fast if Andrew stopped having a good time.  And it was cold, cold, cold, but the wonderful thing was that Andrew was just sparkling with delight the whole time.  He thought that being in the water was so neat, he did NOT want to ride in the canoe, and so he had fun in the river with the rest of us.  We stopped for our watermelon demolition mid-way, there was some watermelon attacks, and despite the lack of sunshine and chilly water, everyone had a really fun time.  Photos of the weekend are in the gallery.

July 29: It feels rather unfamiliar for me to be sitting down with my laptop to do a web posting.  Our days have been packed full this month, and I’ve spent almost no time online.  Our Netflix movies are from June…  Summer is a good time to unplug.  I thought I’d give a little update, though about what we’ve been doing with out days.  Since my last post twenty one days ago, we’ve had lots of activities going on.  Bryan had his wisdom teeth pulled earlier this month.  His wisdom seems to be intact, and he even went back to work the same day.
Andrew’s day care provider, Karen, went on vacation from July 11-19.  Fortunately, Bryan’s mom came to our rescue by flying up here to Madison to watch Andrew for a week.  She and Andrew had some great times together playing with homemade play dough, going to the park, building towers, and spending a lot of nice time together.  LuAnn is so great, and it was just fabulous to have a three-adults-to-one-child ratio in the house.  I think back fondly on that week…
Bryan has been on a sand volleyball team this summer.  They’ve been playing every Tuesday night, and Bryan really has enjoyed it.  Hard to believe summer activities like that are more than half-over!  While Bryan’s mom was here, Bryan and I went to a local baseball game hosted by Widen (Bryan’s work).  It was a lot of fun to spend an evening watching the Mallards play ball, hanging out with friends, and enjoying a summer evening together.
I’ve had a couple travels for work.  Last week, our summer board meeting was up in Minocqua, and while I just drove up for the day, it was lovely to spend a few hours up north.  What a wonderful part of the state!  On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, my Gathering Waters office had a summer retreat at Jack’s house down on the Wisconsin River.  We camped and ate good food and jumped in the river to cool off, met for business for a while, but generally had a fun time together.
We head back to Jack’s with my family this weekend, and I’m looking forward to that.  We’re planning on attending the neighborhood summer picnic this afternoon.  These summer days sure are full!
Pictures from the last three weeks are in the gallery.

July 8: We just got back this afternoon from a wonderful five day visit to visit our friends Grace and Tim and their son John in Washington DC.  It was so relaxing and so much fun to hang out and enjoy summer days while watching our little boys play and explore. I’m John’s godmother, and you can find pictures from our past recent visits in the gallery (October 2005), (July 2006).  Amazing how much these little guys have changed!
We arrived on the 4th, and Andrew and John did a good job of negotiating their own set of rules and procedures about how they played together.  John is an amazingly verbal little boy.  Bryan and I were pretty stunned at how much he can carry on conversations.  The rest of the week we did pre-nap field trips.  Thursday we went to the National Zoo to see the elephants, pandas, and hippos.  Friday we took a bike ride through a beautiful forest to a playground near a creek where the boys had a blast splashing and throwing rocks while wearing their green froggie boots.  Saturday we took another bike ride to a different park where the boys climbed and slid and ran and had a great time.  Our friend Lara from graduate school lives in DC, and she watched the boys on Friday night while the four parents went out to indulge in a wonderful dinner at the Black Market Bistro.  I highly recommend it to anyone living in or visiting the DC area.  On Saturday night, Lara came over for a yummy supper cooked by Grace and Tim, and afterwards, Lara made crepes and we enjoyed a late-night dessert of warm crepes, cold ice cream and Nirvana Chocolate Spread (Nutella only better).
The flights to and from DC went really well, Andrew and John did a great job of getting along and even sharing, and I think we’re all feeling happy and rested and full of fun memories.

July 8: Here it is, the end of the first week in July, and looking back at my web posts from the last month, I realize that there is only four.  Seems like we’ve been jumping from one major activity to the next all month long.  What a nice month June was!  We had fun with friends, I got to go to DC for work and a visit with Kacy, Andrew turned two amidst the loving support of his family and friends, and I turned 30!  I have pictures in the gallery from the last week in June.  They include some quiet time we spent with Granny Lu, Grandad, Ben, and Melanie, pictures from a photo shoot of kids we did at Indian Lake for Gathering Waters, and a few pictures from my birthday party on June 29.  I have a table filled with wonderful birthday cards from my friends, and it makes me so happy to think of how lucky I am to have my life filled with such supportive, loving, and positive people.

June 23: I can’t believe that it’s been two weeks since I last posted.  I guess that being out of town for five days makes that more likely:)  We have been really enjoying the weather and the flowers and the outdoor activities these last weeks.  I went to Washington DC for a fun/work week, and Bryan and Andrew held down the fort here in Madison quite well while I was away.  I put together Andrew’s second year album, and it was a lot of fun to look back through all the changes that have happened over the last year.
We got a troubling phone call recently from my mom’s sister, Aunt Kate (also known as Dear Sweet Great Aunt Kate or DSGAK).  Her husband, my Uncle Greg had kidney cancer several years back.  Just last week a scan discovered a new growth in his lung.  They are looking into treatment options, and they are close in out thoughts these days.
While I was in Washington DC, I got to spend a couple days with my dear friend from high school, Kacy (now Kate).  She, her partner Rueteger, and I enjoyed eating some delicious meals, hiking at Great Falls, and having lots of time to catch up.  While I was in DC, I also got to have lunch with Grace and Lara…friends from graduate school.  For dinner on Monday night, I was able to see my good friend from Carleton, Andy, and his wife Anne Marie, and their little kids, two-year-old Kasha and one-month-old Ciaran.
On Tuesday, I headed up to the Hill and met with five of Wisconsin’s representatives. Afterwards, I headed over the the capitol for a tour, and I was lucky enough to see a vote in the Senate.  It was pretty cool to see a lot of the Senators including Clinton, Kerry, Lieberman, Obama, and Kohl, as they did their politicing.  Earlier in the morning, I walked within a couple feet of Hilary Clinton.  It was pretty cool!
Pictures from these days are in the gallery.

June 1: I’m happy to report that all the albums and story links from 2005 have been fixed and are now working.  I had a lot of fun going back through all my posts from two years ago.  What an amazing time that was!  The back-story on the website fix can be found here.

Continue reading “Website retrieval – the final chapter”