The Simple Things

Hi this is Becky.Inthe first picture is Abby,David,Pango,and me.In the second picture is Laz,Dad,Mom,Becky,Abby,and David.

In the last picture is our new doggy Pango.The other one is David and Abby and me down by the Lake last night with Pango. David has his wet suit on because he dared himself to go in the water but he ended up only getting his feet and his head in! There is ice on the Lake!

OK, now me, Carolyn. It doesn't take a genius to notice that it's been nearly 6 months since our last posting...back then we were fresh from 4 lusciously relaxing months in New Zealand. We're so grateful for that time we had...what a gift. Life back in the US happened to us gradually, thank goodness! Being at our Lake house for 2 1/2 months was a perfect transition. It all seems so long ago now.

Seems like life has been moving at 100 miles per hour since the second we set foot back on Peddie School soil in September. Of course, we arrived home from the summer at the last possible minute, as is my style...why face the unpleasant now when you can put it off for a couple more days??? Is it possible that I once thought of myself as a fully organized, fully planned, fully together sort of a person? If ever I did, I've liberated myself from that story at last! But I digress....

Most of the fall was the typical busy-ness of a family with 3 elementary school children and two working parents...soccer practices, soccer games, girl scouts and cub scouts, Princeton Girl Choir for Abby. For the first time I felt full on the reality of how hard it is to live at a boarding school when you have multiple school-aged kids and a working spouse. Night-time dorm duties, twice weekly mandatory family style dinners, football practice and games, Saturday classes--these all made it very hard for Jim to participate in the kids' daily lives and when we layered on my being out of town working for a full 3 weeks plus many odd overnights over the course of two months, it was chaos. So we are (or rather I am) feeling a bit torn about whether this life is sustainable. Juxtaposing it against life in NZ makes it hard to be objective, but then again, NZ has given me a new standard against which to measure....I vacillate between telling myself that this is reasonable and knowing that it's unrealistic and going back again to the notion that realistic is just another way of saying "limited". And feeling limited is not a good place for me to be. So we talk and wonder and who knows what's next. Perhaps more of the same, perhaps not.

Just as things were promising to calm down (around the beginning of November), we got a few surprises. The first is pictured in two of the three photos above. Pango, pronounced Pongo [ go here http://translator.kedri.info/ ] with a soft G sound (which means "black" in the Maori language) joined us rather suddenly on election day. The kids briefly talked about naming him Obama, but we figured that would be a very popular name, so we thought again. Pango is a 3 month old Golden Doodle (mix between Golden Retriever and Standard Poodle). He's adorable and also takes up LOTS of time. Jim does most of the heavy lifting, but I'm still trying to get used to things like not being able to set anything on the floor without the fear of it being chewed up! Pango is, however, one of the "simple things" I refer to in the title above. He's anything but easy, but supremely uncomplicated.

On November 7th, 3 days after we got Pango, a not so simple thing happened. I got a call from my step dad saying my mom was in the hospital for the third time this year. After being released several days later with no diagnosis, she was back in a week later with slightly different symptoms. A week and two trips (for me) to the DC area to visit her in the hospital, she is back out, still with no satisfactory diagnosis. This, of course, has been both tiring and evocative of all kinds of emotions for me. Aging parents (but wait, my parents aren't old! really, they aren't), how to approach increasingly complex medical issues, dealing with my own and other family members' emotions and ways of coping with it, wanting my mom to be upbeat and hopeful when that's really hard. Anything but simple.

So, we quickly threw together an uncomplicated Thanksgiving. First, Jim's lifelong friend, Tom Lasley, who now lives in Grand Cayman, came over for a short visit (he's also in Princeton with his aging mom). Picture above with weird hats and marshmallows in mouths is a long tradition with this crazy friend! We ate dinner with Jim's sister's family and his mom, then came up here to our favorite escape...our Lake house. It's cold, so we have a fire, around which we've eaten most of our meals and played simple board games. We spent much of today outdoors raking leaves, throwing rocks onto the iced over lake to see how far they'd go and how much they'd crack the ice, and watching our new puppy marvel at life outside of Peddie. I do that, too.