eight

Milo is not my baby anymore. Even if Lucy hadn't usurped his status last year, by now I'd have come to this realization anyway. Milo is his own person. He has his own quirky sense of humor and his own way of being in the world. His head almost reaches my chin, and he outweighs his older brother by more than 10 pounds.

And he's eight! Old enough to have sleepovers and homework, and old enough to be a leader on the playground and the soccer field. We celebrated his birthday last week with a family dinner. His best friend Miles joined us, because Miles is basically our third son.
Of course Gramma made her angel food cake and Milo had a piece without frosting because he doesn't like frosting (he does not get that from me).

We celebrated with his friends at the pumpkin patch. There are no pictures of the corn maze where they spent most of their time because Joel was too busy keeping track of 12 kids and I was too busy hunting pumpkins with Lucy. But here's one of Milo and his friends with his newest treasure - a Pokedex. (Yes, that's an entire index of the pokemon universe. Wow.)

It was a sweet birthday weekend. We were exhausted by the end of it, but it was important to celebrate our brown eyed boy in style. Milo will never be overlooked as a "middle child" in our family - he takes up way too much space for that to ever happen. He has always been our easygoing boy, always the pleaser and the peacemaker. But he asserts himself too, and lights up our family with his infectious laugh and loving bear hugs.

decompressing

What a ridiculous couple of weeks! That cliche that when it rains it pours? Yes. Normally I don't use this blog like a journal, but I was looking back over my last few posts, and realized that I have been really skimming the surface lately. (Here's Liam's soccer team, aren't they cute. Here are the boys riding their bikes to school, don't they look cold...)

Anyway, there's a lot going on under the surface around here.

Our dear friend - who is really more like family - discovered a black spot on her lung last week that turns out to be cancerous. The same cancer she had beaten only months before. We are confident that it's all going to be fine, but this is a battle we were hoping she would not have to fight again. (She's starting radiation this week.)

Right on the heels of that news, my dad called to tell us that he has to have abdominal surgery to remove some masses in his large intestine. His surgery was scheduled during a three-day trip to Seattle for my company retreat last week. I met Joel and the kids and Rohanna in Portland on Friday to visit Dad in the hospital and help him transition back home. He's doing great now, and his pathology came back with the great news that the masses are benign. (I didn't take a photo of him in his hospital gown, but here's one of him from last winter. That's his senior picture.)

While we were in Portland, Rohanna and I decided to visit Buzzy, our step-grandmother. She is our mom's stepmom. Our grandfather passed away in 1995, and Buzz recently moved from their beautiful house in Cannon Beach to an assisted living facility in Seaside. There is really nothing good to say about assisted living facilities. Or Seaside. It was a hard visit. (And why do they crank the heat up so high in those places?) But she loved Lucy, and in the end we're glad we went.

Oh wait - did I mention that our downstairs flooded last week? Yep, the washing machine overflowed (for three hours). We had to remove the carpet and we've been living with industrial dehumidifiers for the past week in an attempt to save our drywall. Ugh.

But this week is calming down. I do feel like I keep looking over my shoulder for the other shoe to drop, but it feels like "normal" is in our future. Life is a series of peaks and valleys I've learned. Today I'm looking up at the nearest peak, knowing that there's a lovely view at the summit.

I leave you with an excerpt from the Tao Te Ching which a coworker sent me last week, which I am working on believing:

Be completely empty.

Be perfectly serene.

The ten thousand things arise together;

in their arising is their return.

Now they flower,

and flowering

sink homeward,

returning to the root.

The return to the root

is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be,

to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom.

Without it, ruin, disorder.

To know what

endures is to be openhearted,

magnanimous,

regal,

blessed,

following the Tao,

the way that endures forever.

field day

Milo's third grade class is doing a field study of the Amazon wetlands in Eugene. Along with several parent volunteers and their teachers, all 24 of them walk to the wetlands twice a week to observe the different ecosystems in and around the wetlands, draw what they see, and research points of interest.

Last week I had the honor of being one of those parent volunteers. I was in charge of a group of five (mostly) sweet kids, including Milo. We spent our time down near the water, looking at bugs and plants from different vantage points. It's a big responsibility for these kids to keep their act together and their voices low for an hour in the woods. But as Milo's teacher Kathy said: "we are serious biologists and artists, and we can handle it."
Kathy has been a teacher for so long that some of Milo's friends' parents had her when they were in elementary school. She's strict and no-nonsense - traits that had me nervous when I first met her. But I've had the chance to get to know her a little over the past few weeks, and I am starting to form a much more generous opinion of her. She's clearly dedicated to teaching. Somehow she manages to be creative, while being a stickler about rules and keeping the behavior of her 24 students in check. Milo's a bit of a stickler about rules (and fairness) himself, so I'm starting to see this as a good match.

Celtic

Liam's U10 (that's "under 10") soccer team, Celtic (named after a Scottish pro team) is first in their league this fall, thanks to a 1-0 win over North Bend yesterday! The cool thing is that these boys are playing up a year - they're in a U11 league. Liam (top row, right end) has really risen to the challenge this year. His coach, "Coach Finn," is Scottish, and with a charming accent he challenges the boys to bring their best game to the field every day. Who knows if Liam will stick with soccer for the long term, but for now this is a wonderful experience.

walk and bike to school day

These are chilly October mornings, but the boys got up 30 minutes early today to ride their bikes to school for walk/ride/carpool to school day. (I recommended mittens, but it's possible that mittens are not cool...)