Snapshot: "Measure me!"


 
So here is our family's "measuring stick."  We started marking growth spurts on the doorway in between our kitchen and our dining room, soon after we moved into our new digs in 2001.

 
A few years after we moved in, we painted the kitchen and the trim -- but I was insistent that our growth chart would stay intact.  But then the tall boy and his cousins, the soldier and the Cavalier cousin, just continued to grow.  Coleen's tall boys came over and stood tall to be measured, too.  And they all continued to grow and grow. I suspect that we have not seen the last of the growing among these tall, tall boys.

But that's OK.  We will continue to chart the growth of our urchins, their cousins, their friends -- really, just anyone who is willing to stand up and be measured.

This wall makes me happy every time I look at it.

Happy birthday, adored one!

So the girl in charge turned 17 last week while we were at the beach, which makes me very angsty because it's all going too damned fast but let's not dwell or I'll cry.

Well, here's the thing -- as some of you may know, the girl in charge shares a birthday with Harry Potter, Neville Longbottom and J.K. Rowling. This is huge, people -- especially for a girl who always has a Harry Potter book in rotation, can recite whole passages from each of the seven books verbatim, and kills, kills I'm telling you, at any kind of Potterish trivia game. I mean, just don't even try to beat her. We have used up three hard-backed copies of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, no lie -- literally read them to pieces. In this picture, my girl is saving our seats for the fabulous midnight premiere of the last Harry Potter movie; bet you can't guess what she's reading!

So in the middle of a summer like this one, when you can't trip over a log without finding a photo of Daniel Radcliffe underneath it, the girl in charge was in Harry Potter heaven. And for her birthday, I might have gone just a wee bit overboard on the Harry Potter loot. She got Harry Potter Legos (Hagrid's Hut and the Knight Bus -- way cool!).

She got a Harry Potter wand that lights up when you say "lumos!" (and give it a little shake and make sure a battery is in there somewhere) and a Harry Potter sticker book (which one might think was aimed at the younger Harry Potter fans but one would be wrong, wrong, wrong, mother! because for the girl in charge and her friends -- seniors in high school, remember -- the only thing as cool as Harry Potter stickers would be a Doctor Who coffee mug or a "Tangled" poster, both of which are currently on the girl in charge's Christmas wish list).

She also got a Harry Potter poster book, and I take great glee in reporting that the soldier, who reported back to West Point less than a week later, begged -- begged -- for the Hermione poster, and the girl in charge gave it to him and told me that it was the first time the soldier had ever hugged her.

I do hope this magically wonderful girl (who could have been The Chosen One) realizes how much she is cherished and adored; the world is full of busy-ness and hustle-bustle, and we all move way too fast and talk too much, and fill our heads with worries that don't really mean anything. I feel like every day that slips by is another lost opportunity to make sure my beautiful girl knows: I am the luckiest mom.

In the blink of an eye

So when all the urchins were younger we used to bring our friend Katey along for our family beach week. Just twelve years old when she started coming to the beach with us, Katey was a gift from God because she (and later her sister Betsey, too) was just so great with our kids. She played with them non-stop, and didn't care what the game was: chasing each other on the beach games, or princess-y "let's paint our toenails" games, or rollicking games that involved swords or bows and arrows -- she was up for anything. Sometimes they combined the princesses and the swords to play a kind of "knights storm the castle to rescue the princesses who are painting their toenails while in captivity" game. That was a good one. Here's Katey with the girl in charge -- who adored Katey, and was quite willing to let Katey be in charge of everything.

See, Katey was young enough that she still had fun playing with seven (at the time) kids, but the real beauty was that she was also old enough (and even more important, mature enough) to keep them safe, and to distract them with another fun game when tempers flared, or read a pile of stories to them when nap time loomed. And she never, ever implied that she knew we were using her as slave labor while we lounged in our chairs and read books all day. A gift, I'm telling you, from God. Here the girl in charge and Katey join the (future) soldier at Funland -- the swingin' amusement park at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. All our best beach memories have Katey and Betsey in them.

So you can imagine, I am sure, how fabulous but mind-blowing it was that Katey and her husband and daughters were able to spend some time with us at the beach this year. This picture of my sister with Katey and her baby was a joy to take, but I swear as I looked at the image on the screen of my camera I felt dizzy at the speed of the earth turning so many times on its axis -- in the blink of an eye.

Beach memories . . . .

So while we were at the beach we absolutely did all our favorite things -- things we do every year. For my sister and me, this involved books. And maybe a magazine or two but mostly books. And we weren't the only ones -- we are clearly raising our urchins right, because this is a picture that could have been captured most beach days. Every urchin there was deep into something -- from Stardust, to Pillars of the Earth, to Game of Thrones, to a re-reading of the Harry Potter books in preparation for the big movie release, the books were piled up all over our beach house. I personally read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and loved it!

For the sunny girl and her cousins the beach tradition also involved boogie boards, except for the days when they reported that the water was . . . let's see, what was the phrase they used? "W-a-a-y too freakin' cold."

My tall boy wasn't able to make it to the beach this year (he was stuck in a cubicle), so the soldier brought along one of his soldier pals to fill the void. While he's no tall boy, he is cuter than [think of something really cute and he's cuter than that], and funny, and willing to roll with the punches -- even when one of the girl cousins (who might be the sunny girl, not that I'm blaming or anything) spilled lemonade all over him. And dig this: dude wore a different bow tie to dinner every night. Swear to God.

And we had lots to celebrate! A room full of fathers received their Father's Day loot . . .

-- don't judge me because I
used duct tape to wrap my gifts --

. . . and this up-and-coming Wahoo was the man of the hour, since he just graduated from high school.

A new thing we did this year was that we all sat down together one night and read the script of the play, "Dinner at Eight." More about that is coming because it was awesome!

Mostly we stuck to our main family tradition, which is to spend as much time together as possible with the people we love most in the world.