To a Child Born in April

Two of our four children were born in April, our married daughter and our youngest son, who is turning 16.

My husband, my mother, and sister, brother and my late Granny, and several nieces and nephews, also have April birthdays. We love April! This poem is for them (replace maid and lassie with 'Lad' for the boys ;-)


To a Child Born in April

by K.E.W.
Parents' Review magazine, 1893-94
vol. 4 pg. 361

Happy little April maid
Who in early childhood played,
In the father-tended glade,
All among the flowers!

Happy that thy mother's heart
Knows so well it's mother's part,
To be glad, for glad thou art
Babe of April joys.

Never mind the April showers
The will bring us lovely flowers;
God sends beauty, it is ours.
Wreathe thy happy brows!

Every little leaf and bud
Cowslip field and primrose wood
All for thee, to do thee good,
Skip then with the lambs!

Sing sweet April lassie sing
Thou art part of a joyous spring
Earth is thine, and Christ thy king
Praise him with the birds.

Catching up

As it has been for most of us, the summer has been filled with family, friends, and visitors for birthdays, Independence Day, and bookmaking "mini-camps." Our oldest son had serious car trouble on the way back to Omaha on the fourth, so he had to turn around and come right back home. This meant that he was able to spend traditional "Family Fourth" with us, along with another good friend of his. They helped our youngest son and their cousin shoot off fireworks in the front yard while Sparsebeard and my brother, "Boat Captain" shot off the big explosions in the backyard for all to see. A lot of families in our neighborhood had good fireworks displays this year! It was one of the best ever.


Before J came to visit for ten days from Omaha, I had my 44th birthday. Here are most of the things I spent birthday money on at a couple of thrift shops that two girlfriends and I visited together on a day just for us. First we had lunch together at one girlfriend's home, and sipped blueberry lemonade. Then it was off to a quilt shop and some antique and thrift stores.

I found a heavy duty paper and board cutter for $8, watering can (2-3 gallons!) for $18, a paella pan for $8 (paella is pretty much Spain's version of jambalaya), old Pyrex small refrigerator leftover containers, 4.50 each (I actually bought three), old enamelware storage container (I collect these) $6, two ceramic trivets with herbs on them for $1.99 each.

The blue, Mediterranean "mosaic" mug is from Starbucks (dd's discount applied) and the poppy fine bone china tea mug is from a blueberry picking farm we went to with friends on my birthday. My dear friend bought it for me. It came with a tea strainer and steeping lid. I also bought Lemon Balm Tea that day to put in my new teacup.

About a week later, we found lemon balm herb pots at Home Depot and bought five to put in our garden. This herb is very good for congestion and swelling, but also has a nice, relaxing effect. It is perfect for evening sipping. I've also steeped some of our dried mint leaves with it, and they go well together.



We also bought these flowers to decorate our newly cleaned deck and dining area:

zinnias, balloon flower, I don't know -orange vine, balloon flower, zinnias


Now I must get going on quite a few summer book restoration jobs. I'll also be speaking at a local conference and need to tweak my notes and handouts for that, and load up my "show and tell" basket to display.

Some of you have been to "singing camps" and summer camps and back, gotten new jobs, had new grandbabies, gone to weddings or are planning weddings. What else have you all been up to?

Happiest of summers to you,

Javamom

DC #3 is 15

Watch out! Our 3rd kiddo will be out driving on the roads, soon! Another dinner on the deck, this time celebrating J's 15th birthday.









Andrew cracked a good joke...












Jord holding the bunn bunn (Sharpie Nimh)


How sweet it is...

I have many blessings for which I am thankful!!

Javamom

April Family Birthdays

Well, at least half of them are represented here, anyway :-). My mom and siblings also have April birthdays, galore!

At Grandma Honey and Poppy's home - group birthday dinner for Hubster, our youngest ds (now 13) our only dd (17) and our niece.



Getting ready to set a temporary pet lizard free at ds's birthday party.




Filling water balloons


Water balloon fun!

I'm a little exhausted. It's been a busy month full of birthday cake and ice cream. Espcially the last ten days.

Garden Progress

On this, Dread Pirate Sparsebeard's 45th birthday, we weeded and mulched our little garden!




Do you see the little Romas just in the center? There are three of them so far.

Earlier in the day, we had a Greek Feast with friends and some great conversation. What a nice way to cap off the day, in the garden at sunset. The full moon has now risen, and we are about to eat some dinner and have the rest of the birthday cake, complete with Bluebell Ice Cream, of course.

Happy weekend, all!

Birthday and Christmas instruments

We celebrated the Nineteenth birthday of our eldest son on the day after Christmas. We completely surprised him with a banjo for Christmas, his first hint being banjo strings in a carefully wrapped Christmas package.

For J's birthday, the Hubster has been working long hours in the elf shop cutting and sanding, carving and gluing up this walnut mandolin. This is the sixth mandolin Hubby has made over the years. This one is made primarily of walnut, with a spruce top.

J was completely and utterly speechless. It was great, as he is never speechless!


Teaching the eldest how to restring his banjo, before he leaves for college.


We also played a fun game at our birthday dinner..."Aim for Omaha." The theme of ds's party was "Cars" for various reasons.





Treasuring up many things before he is gone... Javamom

birthday surprise

My birthday started off wonderfully, just knowing that I'd completed my student evaluations and submitted them on Wednesday before leaving the school. I had to flunk one student, as there was no way he could continue on in his habits and poor choices and learn a language. Dealing with that in the best way consumed my time.

Hubster and I stopped on the way out of town to buy a couple of donuts for breakfast. He brought me my favorite: a maple bar.

After arriving at the school, my best friend (who happens to teach here in 1st-2nd grade) brought me a reproduction antique Pepsi-Cola box filled with goodies. I gave up soda two years ago, now, but she brought me six cans of Wild-Cherry Pepsi. She also gave me a beautiful art and inspirational watercolor book, some small children's Spanish vocabulary books, and a Birthday Bundt cake (which always reminds me of "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" now). On the underside of the lid of the box is a bottle-cap checkers board.

The photography teacher printed up a beautiful card for me then went shopping after school to bring me a surprise this morning...I'll write more about that in a minute!

We got to leave the school early and I had planned on grading quizzes quickly when we arrived home at 3:00. Instead, I was in the mood to tidy, as the kids had VBS all week and didn't pitch in on chores as much as we would have liked. It was actually relaxing to get to clean and wash up my kitchen and throw out some junk mail/papers. This would be a very insiteful thing for me to do because...

One of my three best girl-friends dropped by with a Starbucks coffee for me:
A grande non-fat, no-whip, peppermint mocha. We got to visit for a solid hour! THAT was a treat, as I hadn't gotten to spend any time with her since our boys graduated a month ago.

My third best friend called me up to wish me happy birthday...we'll get together soon.

Finally, hubster surprised me last night with a party. I was NOT expecting this! We have been so very swamped with summer school paperwork. Wednesday night, I was so sleepy that I wanted to go to bed at 8 p.m., but we watched a movie instead (Jane Eyre with George C. Scott).

Two of my brothers, their wives, one niece and one nephew showed up to have grilled salmon and asparagus dinner with us last night. My cake of choice was not a cake at all, but THICK, fudgy and chunky brownies!

There was much laughter and a little bit of sentinentality, as we recalled events and shared our feelings about watching our parents age.

I received some *sweet* presents of little thoughtful goodies. the highlight of my presents:

Our photography teacher friend (one of our kids' mentors) found me a rare black Canon Digital Rebel EOS, two lenses (one zoom - 75-300 mm), with an attached extra battery pack, and battery charger. It came with an awesome case that can be attached to a backpack and has a waterproof cover that attaches, if needed. It came with a one gig memory card. Yes we will pay him for it, but he swung QUITE a big deal for the whole outfit.

I am so blessed.

Our oldest son was supposed to go sky diving with his best buddies yesterday. I told him if he died on my birthday, I'd have to kill him (LOL). They got rained out, so no airplane adventures for him as of yet.

THAT was a splendid birthday!!

Javamom who shared the rest of my birthday brownies with my Spanish class today!

Birthday Today

¡Feliz Cumpleaños a mi!


AND it's the first day of summer :-)

Flowers and Poetry

Not only did we have a pitcher full of flowers that I bought for the party (above), some of the girls at K's birthday party brought me bunches of wildflowers. Some of them were three feet tall! Those are some old, healthy plants! You can see them (well, maybe not the tall ones) in the photos below of the feet.

Here is a poem one of the girls made for K with our fridge poetry magnets:





Good times :-)

Birthday was wonderful

The Birthday Honoree (top photo on right)











The stir-fry turned out excellent, the cake was moist, and dd chose her ice-cream: Cookies & Cream and Rocky Road. The company was very diverse and fun! The kids got chiggers on their feet :-) from their little foray of outdoor photos in the wildflowers...but it was worth it, I hear. Instead of candles going on the cake, we each lit a tall, skinny, sparkling candle to blow out in honor of DD's birthday, and to represent our relationships in her life.
Friends stayed late, watched the stars from the rooftop, and one friend stayed over. The presents? Lots of music and tea things, and even some clothes. Some of our best adult friends came for the celebration, as well. This was a happy birthday, indeed!

~ 16 ~

We're in a rush of planning, food shopping and cleaning here with another family birthday celebration coming soon. Instead of going out somewhere, our daughter wants us to host her party at our home, complete with poetry or Shakespeare reading (really!), painting on canvas for all, guitars, casual fun photography with friends and home made stir-fry veggies and tofu. Mustn't forget the green tea and coffee. She hasn't chosen her ice cream flavor, yet, but the cake of choice this year is crumb cake.

How cool is that?

Dread Pirate Sparse-beard and I wanted to get dd a ring for the special occasion, so it was picked out today...a lovely silver ring from James Avery dot com.

Happy 18th!

La Familia

Eighteen Candles

Gift cards and candles for presents

To our oldest son, who was four days early, way back all those years ago. He was supposed to be born in Boston, where we were living at that time. Alas, Hubster's mother was having serious health problems, so we made a last-minute decision to move to Texas...so he was born a Texan, instead of a cool, bohemian Bostonian. (He did keep the bohemian part, truth be told :-).

I bought lots of confetti poppers (I love confetti :-) and prepared the meal of his choice. J wanted homemade lasagna (with ground turkey) and Caesar salad. Dear daughter helped me mix up a yellow butter cake, complete with homemade chocolate butter-cream frosting for his birthday cake...and because we're never too old for sprinkles, there will be a lot of them all over the frosting. The drink of choice: tiny cups of espresso.

Happy Birthday!

Javamom of four, who always wanted to be a mom

On the schedule this week

~Drive the teens to various youth group activities
~Have a friend of birthday son stay over, so he can attend the big birthday party
~Co-host an outdoor water-fun birthday party for our newest teenager and his friend
~Lead CM bookclub at Starbucks (very enjoyable, convicting, enlightening, all at the same time
~Drive the teens to various social get-togethers
~continue decluttering excess stuff, organizing records, bookbinding supplies, rearranging books (need another bookshelf).
~Sweep and mop the floors, vacuum the dust bunnies
~Hand back American Lit. notebooks to my students
~Drive one teen to get applications/meet with prospective bosses
~Happy Birthday to me...somewhere in there!
~Eat grilled salmon for my birthday
~Host a brunch for friends of my teens
~Drive the teens to more youth group commitments
~Meet with one of my best girlfriends for a birthday dinner
~Drive oldest teen to worship practice
~Take 15 yo dd to make cards with friends on Saturday, visit with the moms while there
~Remember to thank the Lord that oldest son (a year and a half later than most kids here, but there were definite reasons for that) will get his driver's license in 2 weeks!

Taximom...
I mean Javamom

Beethoven's Birthday

Happy Birtdhay to Beethoven, my first (as a child) favorite composer.

Also remembering Jane Austen...today marks her birthday, as well.

Not much else to say, as we have music to be ready for tomorrow! I get to help conduct the children's choir...Fun!!

Author Birthdays

"'Stay' is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary." ~Louisa May Alcott

Happy Birthday to Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832. She died two days after the death of her father, Bronson Alcott, in March of 1888.
She is my favorite American author. I think I'd like to study her in Graduate school. side note: There's so much I'd like to read and study, can you relate?

Take a virtual tour of Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Read her satirical work, Transcendental Wild Oats, which is said to be a reflection of her own Father and Mother's disagreements about living in the Transcendentalists' Utopian Experiment at Fruitlands. Read this interesting analysis at the Domestic Goddess website.

Even so, Louisa did love and admire her friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and wrote about another side of him that the public did not get to see or know in her Reminiscences of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Switching gears from Alcott and the Transcendentalists, those 19th century writers and thinkers that we are studying in American Literature these days, today also marks the birthdate of C. S. Lewis in 1898. I came to know about and read Lewis for the first time in my college Philosophy class. The first book of his that I read was Screwtape Letters, then The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity.

The Professor of this class, Mr. Parmer, was probably my favorite Prof. of my college career. He and his wife, whom I had as a writing Prof., opened up the small world in my mind to the opportunities and possibilites (that's a cliché, but so true) that I could only wish for and dream about in my youth....missions, travelling, learning languages, experiencing the Lord's church internationally, just to name a few. They also opened up the world of great books for me.

The day is fleeting, and I've been sidetracked once again*, and I must get back to reading with the boys, and to the duties of the household.

Javamom

*by my teenaged son who wants me to help him hack into his sister's computer while she is out of town babysitting for a few days. How could she have the nerve to put a password on her computer while she is away? Can you say "boundaries?" Ahem.

Settling down

Our family has had exciting times of late, and been on the go with some big commitments and opportunities. My mother always told me that this season of life is the busiest. She reiterated that message to me when we saw her this past weekend, her healing leg propped up on a cushioned chair.

We all drove several hours to the city for her Mother's 90th Birthday party at the old Church of Christ building near Mammaw's home in Oklahoma, the one that holds so many special memories for me. One in particular being that it is the place where I really began to get to know my hubby back in 1984.

He was a youth minister-intern at my Grandad's congregation one summer (he was so surprised when I told him who my Grandad was-one of the elders at the church), and that is where we decided that we needed to go have lunch together a couple of times that next week. I was to head off to Germany for the summer, and he wanted to see me before I left. It is where we met up again after I returned at the end of that summer, as I went back to college a little early, staying with my Mammaw and Grandad until the dorms opened.

But back to the party...all of my aunts and uncles from both sides of the family were there, except the one who lives in Louisiana. He and his wife were waiting out Hurricane Rita. They made it through with just some fence damage and maybe a downed tree or two.

We made it home safely, and just in time to head over to our Art Gallery Photography Exhibit Reception on Saturday evening. It was *such* a special night! Even the President of Izamal, Yucatán and his wife flew in (around Hurricane Rita!) to be there with us and to give a speech. I was humbled and amazed. The Korean Missionary we stayed with in Izamal was also there for this special night of celebration.

Ds and I both have one print each that has sold so far!

I am tired, even though we had a restful Sunday and Monday. It is the *good* tired, the feeling of accomplishment. Today, I've had a lot of time to prepare for teaching American Lit. class tomorrow. I have a couple of good exercises planned regarding Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms.

I'll post more about my Grandmother and her surprise birthday party later.

For now, please go read a most inspiring post by my friend at Liberty and Lily. Take a little time to let her words and thoughtful writing sink in. The post is titled "Ready for Anything," and I'm sure you'll agree that it is more than worth your time to read.

Goodnight, all!
Javamom

G. K. Chesterton

In honor of G. K. Chesterton's birthday, I'll share a couple of good Chesterton quotes, including my most favorite one, listed first.

*A room without books is like a body without a soul.

*Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

*True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

I vaguely remembered some sort of connection between Chesterton and the Charlotte Mason (PNEU) schools. Tonight, while reading some of the Parents' Review articles online, I read this section from one of the magazines in 1900:

"From the monthly "P.N.E.U. Notes" section of regional comments; a wedding announcement.
Volume XI 1900 pg 861
Edited by Miss Frances Blogg.
Sec.,26, Victoria Street, S.W.To who all Hon. Local Secs. are requested to send reports of all matters of interest connected with their branches, also 30 copies of any prospectuses or other papers they may print. N.B.
Kindly write on one side of the paper only. Miss Blogg is resigning her Secretaryship of the P.N.E.U. at the end of the year. Her place will be taken by Miss J.M. Russell. Miss Blogg is going abroad for three or four months, and will be married shortly after her return to Mr. Gilbert Chesterton."

I find it amusing that her last name was "Blogg." I know that's random, but I'm a global, concrete-random sort of a gal!

Famous Birthdays & Quotes

This past Wednesday, May 25th, 1803, was the birthday of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalist.

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."

"We rail at trade, but the historians of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; and that it will abolish slavery." (Emerson Journals January 1844)

"A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us."
~Emerson

Rachel Carson, Naturalist, was born on this day, May 27, 1907.

"The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him."

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."
~Rachel Carson

Birthday Dinner, including Shakespeare!

We celebrated multiple family birthdays with my inlaws and hubby's family tonight. While serving up the cake, dear daughter reminded us that it was Wm. Shakespeare's birthday, as well. He was born on this date, in 1564.


In honor of Shakespeare, I'll share one of my favorite sonnets, # 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Today in History

Happy Birthday to John Muir, U.S. Naturalist, born in 1838 and Charlotte Bronte, novelist, born 1816.

On this day, Mark Twain died, in 1910.
In 1574, Cosimo I de Medici, art patron (Accademia del Disegno), died at age 64. That is old for a Medici!

It is also the day that folks in Rome celebrate the Natale di Roma (Rome's birthday, 753 BC).
For our Texas friends, this is San Jacinto day, marking the Battle of San Jacinto, 1836, when Texas won her independence from Mexico.

Two days ago, on April 19th was, of course, the day the Branch Davidian sieze ended 12 years ago, and the Oklahoma City bombing occured 10 years ago. Did you know it was also Patriots Day in Concord, Massachusetts? Hubby and I lived in Boston for a time, and we enjoyed spending time and working near the old, historical places.
Spring on the Charles River and Walden Pond is fantastic! This week (the third Monday of April) also marks the anniversary of the First Boston Marathon, first run on April 20th, 1897.