Learning2Love is hosting the Loveliness of Family Games carnival today. Go visit!

The loveliest games played at the ranch as a family during this late summer/early fall are outdoors. Somehow everyone migrates out front after dinner. Not sure if the pull is the cool evening air or an aversion to dishwashing but there they all end up. You can see the biggest kid is always in the thick of things. <g>  The favorite last spring was kickball but that has been replaced by football these days. It makes no difference to me. It just makes me happy watching them together.

We seem to have always had outdoor games as an integral part of our lives. I can’t recall a yard without a kickball/baseball diamond worn into the grass. There have always been children – ours and neighbors – trailing after Allen in the driveway, the culdesac, and now the pasture as he led one impromptu team or another. I can’t think of a better way to end the day. : )

….you still think you have to be perfect, Susan Branch has this poem on the first page of her website:

Ring the bells that still can ring,

Forget your ‘perfect’ offering,

There is a crack, a crack in everything,

That’s where the light comes in.

– Leonard Cohen

Ashcroft was an old mining village outside of Aspen that went bust.

The Ya Ya Brotherhood ; )   So called in honor of Brendan’s longtime name for Aidan.

"I love the mountains

I love the rolling hills

I love the green grass

I love the daffodils…"

We spent several days in Aspen last week and oh did we enjoy it! It has officially taken first place on my list of favorite spots on the planet. I will post more pics soon…

Sunday was a big day for Aidan. He finally made his First Holy Communion.  It was his FHC but his second attempt. The Sunday before the WI trip was the official day for he and his friends but the night before he starting running a fever and feeling nauseous. By the time he reached the church there was no more wondering. He about passed out in the pew. His temp. had spiked to 102.7    Germs.  They are no respecters of persons or plans. I have been testing out this theory for some time now and am pretty certain children only get sick on major holidays, feastdays, vacation, relocation, and who can forget the most definite time – when Dad is out of town.

Anyhoo, we had him wait then until we returned and could receive as a family. It turned out to be perfect. Here are some highlights of the younger set:

Mrs. Catherine had a wonderful blog entry today. Very convicting!

The Secret of a Happy Life by Fr. Lasance (1908)

One secret of a sweet and happy Christian life is learning to live by the day. It is the long stretches that tire us. We think of life as a whole, running on for us. We cannot carry this load until we are three score and ten. We cannot fight this battle continually for half a century. But really there are no long stretches. Life does not come to us all at one time; it comes only a day at a time. Even tomorrow is never ours until it becomes today, and we have nothing whatever to do with it but to pass down to is a fair and good inheritance in today’s work well done, and today’s life well lived.

It is a blessed secret this, of living by the day. Any one can carry his burden, however heavy, till nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however heavy, till nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all life ever means to us – just one little day. "Do today’s duty; fight today’s temptations, and do not weaken or distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see and could not understand if you saw them." God gives us nights to shut down upon our little days. We cannot see beyond. Short horizons make life easier and give us one of the blessed secrets of brave, true, holy living.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  MT 6:34

More thoughts on growing old here. 

With the conference behind us there is one more major undertaking this summer – the trip to WI. For years, as we criss-crossed the country moving from one military base to another, WI was like Mecca for us. It was where we launched from and where we continued to return. As years have passed this is less because of geography and more because this is where Gram is and she can no longer come to us.

My grandmother has always been the matriarch of our family. The sun rose and set around Gram as far as we were concerned though she never demanded that position. Perhaps because she never demanded it, that adoration has been given freely and generously all these years. It has been tricky to maintain that position of honor and authority as she has aged and become more physically compromised. I think my mother and her sisters have done a phenomenal job in that respect. Gram, too, has accepted the help offered to her in a remarkably dignified manner.

An old friend of mine finds herself in my shoes these days. We are thousands of miles away from ‘home’ and the most important decisions about these women we love are being made with minimal input from us. Both of our grandmothers are struggling to remain in their homes as long as possible and both are now in varying degrees of dependence upon others for their most basic needs to be met. It is interesting to see what this brings out in the people around them. Her brother’s solution to the problem of Grandma wishing to remain at home, but no longer being 100% self-reliant, is to offer her a bleak scenario of either hightailing it to his neck of the woods or suffering a rapid decline leading to a nursing home. He figured the scare tactics would force her hand. : /

We can do better than this. We must.

When I was very little my mother enrolled me in a Catholic preschool.  It was more than a preschool really. There was care for two year olds through a full kindergarten. That is less remarkable than the other aspect of the sisters’ vocation however. On the third floor of the building was their nursing home. Sisters no longer able to work in the order were lovingly cared for much like Tomie De Paola describes in Nana Upstairs, Nana Downstairs. Like Tomie, I visited the sisters regularly. We performed little impromptu plays for our captive audience and brought them soup and scribbled artwork. Like Tomie I don’t recall ever being frightened or off put by thinning hair or missing teeth. I loved visiting ‘upstairs’. It was a vital, connected, sane part of my life and hopefully it was an early and permanent lesson in how to respond to the problem of aging.

I suspect most of us don’t mean to become insufferably bossy and tyrannical towards our elders. It probably has more to do with the role we find ourselves filling at the moment when our older relatives are becoming more dependent. Usually it coincides with having small children to care for and it is easy to lump them all into one bunch whom we consider to be sorely in need of our direction – like it or not. If we have a basically respectful attitude towards our children it goes a long way towards also respecting the dignity of our elders. If not, boy, it all goes south and it truly IS heck to be old. Or young. Or disabled.

Colin, our parapalegic son, is teaching us how to navigate this fine line of knowing when to help and when to step back, when to work behind the scenes and when to allow people you love to call their own shots, even if that means they do things we could, perhaps, do better for them. We have had a lot of practice with this, having had small children in the house for two decades now. The first thing little people tend to express to us is a desire to do for themselves. This drive towards independence is the last thing we relinguish in this world. I hope we are learning how to enable those we love to hang onto it as long as possible. It is not easy. It is not more efficient. It is still the right thing to do.

We try to meet our the needs of those we love in ways that respect their dignity. We encourage them make all the decisions they safely can and, when called upon to help, we offer choices versus calling the shots. We try not to feed our own egos. We try to keep our agenda out of the mix. Its not easy. Its certainly not efficient. Whether it is a two year old wrestling with a buttonhole, an 87yo struggling to write a check, or a young man in a wheelchair loading his purchases at the checkout, you stand back. You give no hint that you could do it better. You learn there are many ways to get a job done and the faster way is not always the better way.  In fact I suspect there is a lot to learn by slowing down whether for young or old or in between. In our quest for efficiency and ease we lose sight of that.

Our value is not tied to our independence. As Christians we should likely know better anyway. Jesus was strongest when He became weak. Christ – as a child in the manger and nailed to the cross – is the very image of dependence. There were two responses among those who encountered Him both places – reverence and hostility. Every time we are faced with human frailty we, too, get to decide how we will respond. My fondest wish is that all we do here, from bottle feeding kittens to returning tiny fledgings to the nest to finger painting cards to Grandmas, is in some way nurturing that reverence and reminding the children that we reap as we sow, therefore we sow kindness.

So anyway, it is that time again. I will be packing up some of the children next week and trekking across the plains to spend a few more days at the feet of a woman I have looked up to my whole life. She has modeled gracious living and now truthfully she is modeling gracious dying. I hope we can continue to offer her the same restrained, respectful assistance she has always offered to us.