Fishing

September 2018

We have been less active in the scouts recently, as the organization moved away from the things we were looking for. Then I found out that the focus this year is on National Parks and they were organizing a series of visits to parks. We were very interested in seeing more of what is near us. I decided to make an effort to take the girls on some of these trips. It can be hard to arrange things through a troop if you aren't going regularly, so I contacted Pat Disharoon, our steadfast service unit leader, and got us signed up for the September outing. 

The girls and I headed down to Annapolis to learn about the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail. We did a few packets for a Junior Ranger badge as we sat in the marina. The badge work involved learning about regional fishing as well as Captain John Smith's trip around the Chesapeake. They did some question and answers and all 4 of the girls participated. Johanna was eager to answer and surprised Dr. Pat by being able to read a map skillfully. Rachael did a speed word scramble. After we did our badge work we headed over the dock, for our fishing boat adventure. Before we boarded we borrowed the bathroom key which was attached to a plastic shark. It is the little things like this that we love.

We joined a few other scouts for a fishing instruction outing around Annapolis. We got to help put blood worms on our hooks and learned to cast. It was fun to bob our lines in and hope for a nibble. Johanna caught a little silver fish. And wanted nothing to stay as far away from it as possible. Megan also caught a fish and handled it with a bit more confidence. We drove out to a set of crab pots and the girls took turns pulling them in. The hand over hand motion was challenging but Rachael got a crab when she pulled one up. The crab tried to escape and ran on the deck, attached himself to the boat captain's shoelace before Rachael helped pull him off. Some of the girls took turns learning to hold the crab, Bridget included.  The captain also got a big brilliantly blue crab.

It was a beautiful day on the water trying something new.

Emma turns 20 and gets an Apartment

August- Sept 2018

My sweet amazing girl got herself an apartment. She signed a lease with her old roommate and set up utilities and set a move-in date between her last day of work and her first day of Junior year at Towson. I am so proud of her. She occasionally asked a question or two as she went through the process but really she did it on her own. She is a competent adult doing responsible things. She makes mistakes and deals with the consequences and keeps meeting her obligations along the way. I remember as a little girl she always wanted a clear answer, a right or wrong, not a maybe or a gray. She has grown up and learned to make space for the nuance, still with a open heart for the marginalized. I miss her.

Emma has been out of the house for the majority of the past 2 years but she has come home on summer and winter breaks. She began to treat her room in the basement more as storage and a utilitarian bedroom than as a her own personal space. She didn't unpack when she came home for the summer this year and instead functioned around boxes and stacks. She was just stopping in. So when she got her apartment with it's full year lease, she told us that Bridget could have her room.

Jim and I had already discussed the room situation and we had decided that we wanted to make sure our college students had a place to live during the in between times of the college years and we had expected to maintain her room. I was a little winded by her readiness to let go of her room in our house. She wouldn't live with me any more,   maybe   never   again.    Deep breath.

We helped her pack her things, and as she did so we put aside a couple of bins of childhood things that she wanted to keep but didn't need in her apartment. I had gotten a few pieces of furniture from my office when it closed, so we loaded those chairs, and tables into the van along with her clothes and kitchen items. Emma also has amassed a number of plants, which we loaded into her new VW Jetta for the trip. The sisters and I, plus Matthew piled in with her stuff and made the trek up to Cockeysville.

Emma's roommate, Mary Ellen, and some of her friends met us up there and we helped to unload and carry her things to the 3rd floor. Johanna enjoyed using the hand cart to roll the boxes closer to the door. Everyone pitched in and we got her stuff in pretty quickly. Megan developed a fever and Rachael was getting together with friends, so I brought the girls home, then Em, Matthew and I made one more trip with boxes and furniture that didn't fit in the first run.

 

I went up a few days later and took Emma grocery shopping. I introduced her to Aldi, which is a discount grocer, where you have to put in a quarter for a cart and you have to bring and bag your own groceries. We stocked her cabinets with staples and loaded her fridge with the basics. It was good to know that she would be fed and that she would know how to afford what she needed going forward.

She came down to visit on Labor Day and we celebrated her birthday as a family. Her actual 20th birthday was on a Thursday of the first week of school but I went up to visit and take her out to eat in the afternoon. I am so proud of the person that she is and I pray for her daily.

Aunt Heather made Emma an Afghan

Happy Birthday Emma!

Back to School 2018

September 2018

It was a huge year of school transitions for us. Three of the girls started in new schools. That meant there was a flurry of orientation days and schedules to figure out.

Rachael is a senior in high school and continuing to take dual enrollment classes at the community college as well. She has a number of math/ science AP classes tempered with Art, music and student aid positions. It will be a busy year.

Megan is starting high school as a freshman. She is stepping into the big experiment of education with a mix of GT and Honors classes and is taking French for the first time. She is a member of the Project Lead the Way program, focusing on engineering topics.

Bridget is starting middle school in the 6th grade, and will get to experience for the first time hallway chaos and locker combinations. Bridget will postpone Spanish class and instead get dyslexia reading instruction class. She doesn't need the comprehension component of the class, so she'll get to do independent projects during that time.

She forgot her glasses, so I ran back to get them

Johanna is starting elementary school in kindergarten. They added a fifth section of kindergarten and Johanna was moved into that section with a first year teacher, Ms. Maltese. Johanna was immensely eager to get started and the staggered entry with extra days off and half days was a trial. She is doing great and her teacher is fantastic.

Room Rotations

Sept 2018

Bridget and Johanna have a six year gap between them and a personality chasm. It took a lot of patience for them to live in the same space together. Bridget had been vocally wishing for her own room for over a year. She wasn't obnoxious about it but she did ask "When do you think I can get my own room?" on a pretty regular basis. I had set the expectation that it might be another few years. Then Emma got her apartment and clearly offered her room up, making it available for a big shift in rooms.

It took me a few days to sort through the debris left in Emma's room after she moved out. Some of it was just trash but some of it we added to her storage bins. Bridget helped me with the clearing out and with the clean up.  The paint on the walls had taken a beating so Bridget picked out a pale pink, called Innocence. On Saturday of Labor Day weekend we got busy early and the girls and I painted Emma's old room and turned it into a room for Bridget. Before Jim headed off to work, he did a lot of the heavy lifting and moved the furniture. Megan asked to be done with the loft bed, so we took it apart and set it up for Bridget. We painted Emma's bed white and moved it into Megan's room. Without the storage in the loft bed all of Megan's stuff had to find new places and it was a big rearranging endeavor. There was a lot of packing up and purging that needed to take place for all of them.

Next, with so much of the front shared bedroom being moved, I decided to paint that bedroom as well. It had been 10 years since it had been painted and it was ready. Johanna had a hard time picking a color but agreed to a yellow. I made the suggestion of a butter yellow and Johanna's response was "no butter yellow". She repeated this whenever we discussed painting her room. We went to Sherwin Williams together to look at paint samples and she picked out a really nice yellow. I loved it but immediately told the big girls not to read the name. I didn't want to start the decision process over. She had picked "Butter Up". Luckily she didn't go back on her choice. She was ready to get painting.

  The yellow paint went on and the room shifted to Johanna's room. We finished her room up on Labor Day, with everyone's help. Even Emma pitched in when she was visiting for her birthday. We got Johanna's furniture back in place just in time for bedtime. Our shoulders and arms were exhausted after 3 straight days of painting. It looked great and everyone was so tired that falling asleep the night before the school year starts was easier than usual.