Those Old Familiar Feelings

Well, here we are a week ago taking our photo for our Five of Us project. After church, before a birthday party, and before the Gutsy Dad's last night at home pre-BT. (Can't really call it an RLBT or even an LBT, although I suppose by normal standards seven weeks is indeed a long business trip.)

This time he is in a different place, a place that Madelyn calls Danistan. 

I won't lie; this makes me nervous. His descriptions of the accommodations and lifestyle there make his previous destinations seem like first-class resorts.  While it sounds dirty and gross, it does not necessarily sound dangerous. I cling to that. We can deal with dirty and gross for a quite a while, given the alternative.

I've been trying very hard to think of this as just an extended exercise and not a business trip, so I was surprised when I had to confront all the same heinous emotions as I faced before his longer trips. 

That terrible pit in my stomach as the gear gets hauled out, sorted through, strewn all around our home. I hate to see it. Especially the protective gear and the gear that would be used in a defensive manner should the need arise.  Of course I am glad he has all this gear; I obviously want him to be safe; but seeing all this stuff sort of ruins my usual ostrich-like mentality. I am forced to confront what my husband really does for a living, what his job requires of him. And I do NOT like to think about that.

I prefer instead to think of all the little ways he showed his love for us before he left: especially that he planted my hydrangeas for me. I see them through the kitchen window when I am at the sink.

When he left, in the wee hours of the morning last Monday, his ride came a few minutes early. I handed him his usual peanut butter toast in a paper towel, but he left his fresh mug of hot tea on the kitchen counter untouched. For whatever reason, this was heartbreaking to me. I came back into the house, cupped my hands around his warm mug, leaned my head down on the counter and just held on.  I took a few sips of his tea, but I've never been a lover of tea.  What to do?  I couldn't bear to pour it down the drain; he had just made it!  So I stuck it in the fridge. Two days later I was able to toss it without emotional trauma.

The girls and I have been faring fairly well, though already there are several tales for the annals of RLBT lore: I've had a girls night out, I've scratched up the car (unrelated to girls' night out!), I've fed my children strange combinations of food I would never feed my husband, and I've relied on two visits from my parents for help.

This morning I made it to church with the kids by myself and felt like a super hero. Then I sat in the pew listening to a fine sermon, missing the Gutsy Dad there more than anywhere else in the past week.

And here we are this week.  I almost forgot our Five of Us photo (which features, for the time being, four of us), but I dragged out the tripod at story time.

These sweet little girls make me so happy.  They make me crazy, too, and very tired.  But also very happy.  This is what it looks like when we are pretending we've got it all together.

And here's a little glimpse of reality:

Don't worry, honey.  I've got everything under control.

April Round-up

I'm not going to let myself go back (too far) to play catch up. It makes me sad for all the wonderful memories in March and February that I've neglected to report here, but I'm in need of embracing an "onward" sort of attitude these days. Note to Gutsy Self: just because you didn't blog about it doesn't mean that it didn't happen or wasn't meaningful.

So, scrolling through some April photos, here's what caught my eye today.

Easter Day.  Dinner & drinks. People in various states of casualness.  The Gutsy Dad almost always changes his clothes right after we get home from church.  I tend to slip on flip-flops and carry on in my church clothes: who has time to change? Things I love in this picture: the heron carving above my kitchen sink that I found years ago while visiting my sister-in-law (before she was my sister-in-law) and her family when the GD and I were still just dating.  My parents' dog Charlotte lounging on our kitchen floor. The glimpse of Tilly's favorite toy in the background in the playroom.  My birds from Lake Constance on the wall.

I am completely in love with my own children, and I am not ashamed to be proud of them.  Their hearts, their spirit, their creative minds, their quirks, their beauty. Here they are before our Easter service with flowers to decorate the children's cross. 

A favorite birthday present.  My mother asked, laughing at me a bit I think, "You really want a beach cart for your birthday?" HECK YES and thank you!  This thing is awesome. 

She still falls asleep everywhere and anywhere.  Here she is during story time, sleeping on the Gutsy Dad. Ali Edwards once wrote a beautiful blog post about her family dog, parts of whom appeared in almost every family picture. This is one thing I love about my own photos. Our two loyal and lovable fur kids always manage to get parts of themselves in the photos.  Here we feature Tilly's back under the GD's arm and Zephie's rump by Maddie's elbow. 

I've been meaning to write about the physical beauty of our church.  It is my style. Of course, it's not necessary for a church to be beautiful for me to love it, but it certainly makes church all the more enjoyable. This is the church's playground. I would have LOVED this swing set/arc as a kid.

 Perfect blue skies for Easter. The sanctuary was filled with lilies and blue hydrangeas. Perfection. They didn't need to tell me twice when they mentioned we could take the flowers home with us after the service. I currently have a GIANT hydrangea potted plant on my dining table.  It must have 15 blooms on it with more to come.  I need to get this thing in the ground.

I made a frozen key lime pie for Easter dinner.  (Ina Garten's recipe.)  Since it uses egg yolks but not the whites, I channeled my Nana and made meringues with the whites. 

I love that my parents were game to join in our weekly "Five of Us" photo on Easter Sunday.

Project Update: Five of Us

Remember how I said I wanted to take a full-family photo once a year for the whole year?  Well, so far so good. We're nine weeks in, and we've remembered nine times.

To keep this project doable, I'm keeping it quite simple. We take the photo every Sunday, and there is no primping allowed.  Whenever we remember to take it, we take it.  (Alarm reminders on the phone help.) Since we usually go to church on Sunday mornings, we've been taking the photos in the afternoons, and you'll see that we are in various states of post-church unravelling.

I'm also using this project as an opportunity to practice very basic Photoshop Elements skills by adding a few digital embellishments and a number directly onto the photos before printing.

Here are our first nine weeks:

Poor Gutsy Dad was still recovering from his nose surgery from a few days before.  The balloons are left over from Madelyn's birthday, and I'm pretty sure Bronwen was actively nursing when this shot was taken.

This photo was taken on my iPhone at our neighbor's Super Bowl party. Thank God for the phone, since I had forgotten about the photo until that moment! You can tell Jillson was enjoying her friend's dress-up box.

Forgot until late in the day, so we had to take the photo outside. The neighbors may or may not have thought we were weird setting up the tripod on the lawn to take this pic. These photos are revealing how regularly my girls enjoy dress-up clothes! 

This one was taken just yesterday at my neighbor's house.  Please note that I allowed the kids to pick their own outfits, with no constraints (a challenge for Control Freak Me). Madelyn then got her outfit all wet playing in the neighbors tub (I have no idea what she was thinking), so she is wearing borrowed clothing. Funny. I am unshowered. (We skipped church.) The Gutsy Dad is on a business trip, so he's not in the picture.  Boo hiss.  I contemplated whether we should take the photo one day early so he could be in it, but then I forgot to do that, so that answered that.  Then I wondered if I should have him take a picture of himself where he is, and find a way to incorporate it, but I forgot to do that, too. So I guess it's just the four of us this week.

The printed and assembled version of this project includes a 4x6 journaling card, which I am printing out at home and writing on.  (The digital elements on the photos and the printable journaling cards are from Project Life, found here.  I went with the Clementine version.)

I rounded the corners and slipped the photo and journaling card into a very simple and cheap album I found at Target a few years ago.  (You can imagine my delight when I found this album already waiting for me in my closet. Equally exciting was the discovery that it has exactly 52 pages in it... to last a year. Shopping from my own stash.  Love it.)

The inside of the album looks like this when it is all together. Not complicated.

And there you have it. I'm enjoying watching the pages of this little book fill up.