The life and stories of a cancer ninja
Okay, so I’m really excited about tomorrow. I have been writing a post about Carrie’s summer …
This is Carrie, by the way … in case you forgot….
[Not sure who that gigantic blur is next to her …]
Anyway, I’m really excited to share with you what I’ve been learning about in regards to Care’s summer. Because she’s cool …
And she puts up with a lot from my kids …
Oh yeah, and she’s cool. Did I say that already?
Hope to see you tomorrow!
As promised, I updated our Memorial Day pictures this weekend. Hey! In my defense … I remembered yesterday that we didn’t have pictures from last year because we were in the middle of a cross-country marathon drive. I’ll have to tell that story another time … I’ll also have to figure out my excuses for the other three years not having pictures at a later date as well.
We started out our morning with a parade…
And, the “A++ Father Award for Standing in The Hot Sun On a Parade Route” goes to … my husband! I say this because I was over here for about 98.5% of the morning …
…sitting on the step of a dentist’s office in the shade of the building right behind Bob the whole time. PS: I wish I could tell you why Aidan makes that face at the camera, but I can’t, because I don’t know why. I think my two year old is officially “too cool for school” … or the camera … whichever the case may be.
A funny thing about my family …
We love to cheer on a parade. Side note: look at my prim and proper mother with her backwards hat! I have no idea why it’s like that in this picture, but I’m sure she’ll die just a tiny bit when she sees it.
Anyway, we love to cheer a parade! Please notice my dad’s wide open mouth … he spends a large amount of any parade we attend calling out to the participants. There’s one parade we attend every year where we’ve started noticing that the same people sit by us year after year. I think it’s because my father is almost as entertaining as the parade. When we were younger, he’d call out and cheer to all the church and school kids we knew in the marching bands, etc. Now, he calls out to people he knows from the city … everyone from the mayor to the marching veteran whose coffee he pours at Starbuck’s and recognizes by name. We laugh and it’s entertaining, but my dad has a great gift for making people feel special, even those he doesn’t know … as evidenced in this picture: he’s calling out to the flute players and telling them what a great job they’re doing. True story. He often calls out to the parents marching alongside the groups and bands with “Way to go, PARENTS! You guys make it happen!!” I love my dad.
We finally got out of the heat for an awesome lunch that included an addictive spinach salad (a recipe I WILL be posting in the future) and then a little of this …
I’ll just let this picture speak for itself. Powerful in it’s total lack of action, right?
After a little siesta, we let the kids hang out in the sprinkler. I should just preface this by saying … I LOVE these pictures! I love them so much that I drool over them a little every time I look at them. Okay, I’m done.
Side note: THIS is why you cloth diaper. Green, Schmeen … do it for the awesome pictures of your babies’ little bums in adorable colors, that’s why.
If this picture had sound, you’d hear Darcy and Aidan laughing while Chase shrieks at the top of his lungs while clapping his hands.
Try as they might, the kids could no longer be patient after a while and so it was time for dessert … and by “kids“, I may mean “adults“, and by “dessert” I definitely mean “s’mores” … oh, yes. However, the kids (the real kids) aren’t big on s’mores yet (yes, I know, something is genetically wrong) so they got ice cream cones. Which probably made for better pictures anyway …
Not one to do things by half, my youngest ignored the “licking” concept and moved into the more intense ice cream consumption phase of trying to put the whole cone into his mouth.
Which didn’t really pay off as he ended up with more ON him then in him …
Please note the totally hair-tastic look of this child. Gracious, he’s going to hate this picture some day! However, for his mother, it will always be a work of art.
Hope you all made the most of your day and enjoyed it!
Have a funny Memorial day story or pic? Feel free to post it below!
Hey, so, about our week …! Because I know you’ve all been dying to know …
Right now, we’re spending a lot of time with my little sister who is in town for the week after doing this:
Aw, isn’t she pretty? Don’t be fooled, she’s also a bratty little sister. Sidenote: She’s flanked here by the parental units who flew to LA to make sure she did the dirty deed and actually graduated. And another sidenote [because they’re fun]: that bling she’s wearing is a lei made out of chocolate candies. I wish I’d graduated from her school.
Care leaves for a summer ministry position tomorrow morning. Stay tuned on this story. As I’ve been talking with her, this ministry makes me want to cry because it’s so amazing and I’m looking forward to writing more about it sometime this weekend or next week.
On a pretty major note, we started off the week with a little of this:
Meet “E4” — 4th child and 3rd boy, due in the Fall. Isn’t he cute? He has his father’s fuzzy features, don’t you think? Haha! …ahem. Anyway…
On an (almost, but not really) equally major note, we’ll be finishing the week with this:
For those of you who might not know this if it slapped you in the face, this is PIZZA. Chicago-style pizza. Everything-else-you’ve-ever-eaten-pales-in-comparison pizza. From Lou Malnati’s. I think I’m actually drooling a little. [Mike Blackburn, wherever you are, eat your heart out]
We’re also looking forward to the long weekend in which we hope to be doing a little of this:
This is us at a Memorial Day parade …about a hundred years ago. …which was apparently the last time either of us took a camera to a parade. Plans to rectify that this weekend … so you all can see how much more mature we are [ha!] and also how many more children we have now [hahaha!].
More from the Ewoldts at large (or the large Ewoldts?) very soon …
Today, I’m celebrating HAIR!
Just to be clear, I do NOT mean this kind of hair … this is troubling hair …
No, I mean THIS kind of hair!
Scoff if you will, but this is a BIG DEAL! For those of you whose children pop out with a full head of hair and keep it, you’ll never know this anguish, but rejoice with me all the same because my little bald boy is finally getting hair!
A short month ago …
And now! Glorious now!
Sibling interruption: “Why are you taking pictures of Chase’s hair, Mom? Take pictures of us too!”
See? They have hair too.
Uh, I mean …CHASE HAS HAIR!
Okay, I’m done now.
Until his first hair cut. … and then I can’t be held responsible for posting a weepy “my baby’s first hair cut” blog. Consider yourself warned.
Okay, now I’m really done.
If you enter our building from the parking lot, it feels like the front, but it’s really the back, and you have to walk right by the laundry room before hitting the lobby. We’re a very classy establishment.
I came in late on Monday night from an appointment, and saw one of my neighbors doing a little late-night laundry. We chatted for a few minutes and, in the course of our conversation, she mentioned that she knew me and she knew the kids (everybody in our building knows my children … you’d have to be deaf and blind to NOT know my children), but that she’d never met my husband.
I said it was quite probable that she hadn’t, but then remembered that she had briefly met Bob on the morning after the blizzard in late January. When I mentioned this, she looked shocked and said, “Oh my word! He’s the hospice angel!” This took me by surprise. I have heard my husband called many things, but “hospice angel” has never been one of them.
Here’s what happened: On the morning after the blizzard, Bob was home (as was half the state). There were 3-foot-high drifts around our cars and we suddenly saw this neighbor trying to dig her little car out of the snow. I should probably mention … since we have an outside service at our condo for snow removal, none of us keep shovels …something you really wouldn’t consider until you’ve spent 45 minutes unearthing your car with your floor washing bucket. Anyway, if I remember correctly, she was using her windshield scraper to try and clear out the parking space. What stood out to us was that she was wearing scrubs. We figured she must be a nurse on her way to a hospital, so Bob had grabbed his coat, found a garbage can lid, and went to help her scoop the snow away from her car. She got in to back out, got out of the space, and Bob came back inside. End of story … or not?
Here’s what we didn’t know until Monday night. Lourdes is a hospice nurse. She couldn’t get to any of her patients that day because of the snow, but she’d gotten a call from a nursing home close to where we live begging her to come because nobody else could and they had a patient who was actively dying. She told them that she would try and get her car out, and if she couldn’t do that, perhaps she could try to walk. She told me that she was just about to give up when this guy with dark hair and glasses (Bob) seemed to come out of nowhere and helped her get her car out. By the time she backed out of the space, he had left (having come back inside). She said she’d never seen him before or since, but because of his assistance, she made it to the nursing home and was with the patient when he/she died that day. The hospice and nursing home staffs still refer to her unknown helper as her “hospice angel.”
This is a crazy and rather humorous story, but it reiterated something to me. I never know how helping or serving another person is going to be used–in their life or in my own.
I once heard John Piper address our understanding of the mind of God and now I wish I could find the quote … something to the effect that we see only one thing and God sees everything all at once. In this tiny instance–how helping to get a car out of the snow ensured that a hospice nurse got to the bed of her dying patient.
When I thought about this, I felt a reminder to “Be ready.”
Are you looking for the opportunities that God puts before you to serve others? Will you be ready?