player

We've noticed recently that Tolliver gets a kick out of interacting with young girls.  I mean, it'd be fair to call him a bit of a ladies' man.
At tailgating last week he was quick to deliver a bottle of water to a lovely high school coed.
One afternoon not long ago, as I spoke to a group of third grade runners, Tollie vied for their attention by interrupting me repeatedly to tell the girls what he remembered about Celia.
And at church, during part of an intergenerational game, he would not let me or Tucker help with his playing cards, but carefully took turns picking each of the pretty gals from the youth group to read for him.

The good news is he's not yet singularly focused, and still has plenty of game in other arenas, too:
building arsenals with wooden blocks, playing Bug Bingo and exploring the physics of fulcrums, to name a few.

just over here drowning in love and exhaustion

seven months

and I can literally feel my heart swell when I look at him.

So many Saturdays

in Old Columbus Town.

messmaker(s)

messmaker, messmaker
make me a mess...

leaving room for wonder

On the way into church over the weekend, the boys paused in the parking lot to inspect an insect.  Tuck declared his unsureness over what, exactly, it was.  Tols chimed in to say that was okay, because God doesn't want us to know everything.  He wants there to be mysteries for us to think about.  

I believe he's right.  I am not interested in anything too rigid, in anything that does not leave room for doubt.  There's lots more room for others, for the whole wide world, when we declare an I don't know, when we admit that we're not sure what we think about something, when we allow ourselves to wonder.

just being

I may have lost some of my social graces when we lost Celia.  I say no a lot.
I have developed some opinions about being over-scheduled, about the disease of doing too much.
We stay busy enough, but we don't sign up for stuff we don't really want to spend our time doing.

I hear people play checkers with their schedules, like one of them has to win.
Being busy is not a badge of honor, and exhaustion is not a status symbol.
I want our boys to know who they are without activity as a metric of their worth.

Just this week Tuck built a desk caddy and Tollie made a football field out of Legos.  They read books and played ball with the baby, tinkered on the piano and created blueprints of a very spooky amusement park.  Tucker sketched a pattern for his Halloween costume, captured a praying mantis, and learned about long division.  Tolliver mixed paint to make new colors and put together, through lots of trial and error, a pretty fancy Hot Wheels track.

And I went to a fundraiser.  I almost cried trying to tell a famous Hollywood producer about my girl, the one with red coils springing from her head like cursive, clearly spelling love.
Lots of Batten literature explains that affected children lose their childhood.  We don't want her brothers to lose theirs too.
Her illness gave us a far surer sense of what's worth our time, and often that means we're huddling close, just being.

Join us at The Hills, Worthington for happy hour this week, to benefit BDSRA.
Or don't.  It's your time, and you're always allowed to say no.

Also, I ran across something I wrote several years ago, before a happy hour that benefitted hospice.  Click the link if you have time to read more:
her hair, his heart