Much Ado About ...

I'd say it was much ado about nothing.  But that's not quite the case.  It was something, but it was not the thing we thought it was.  That was good ... painful, but good.

Last Thursday morning I was busy writing when I heard a small voice call, "Mooommmm ... I need you." and I found Lillie curled up on the floor at the top of the stairs.  "My stomach hurts right here," and she pointed to her lower right abdomen.  "It hurts so bad I can't stand up."

After hemming and hawing, Ross took her to the emergency room for what we were sure was to be an appendectomy.  7 hours later they were back home.  No appendectomy.  It was a ruptured cyst.  For which they could do nothing.  The worst was over and my girl spent the next couple of days recuperating.

All's well that ends well.  Another cliche we can attribute to Shakespeare and one I like much better than the opener.

The End Of An Era

It ended with as little fanfare as it began.

Seven years ago I peeled out of a church service.  Drove to Rockville and watched my girl skate around the ice like a baby giraffe; unsure of her legs and wobbly in all the parts of her body.  Last weekend, we packed her back into our trusty steed (the gold minivan of her whole hockey career) and played the last game for the foreseeable future.

 
She lost the baby giraffe look long ago.  Now she is commanding in net, sure of her body and how to use it to keep the other team from collecting points.  She can't stop everything, but she can do quite a bit.

It's been a long strange trip, involving thousands of miles, camps each summer and an endless routine of practice, games, tryouts and training.

Her father photographed most of it.  I was fortunate to manage a couple of her teams; so you could say, I managed about half of it.  Managing was another round of form collecting, e-mails, information distribution.

We are all both sad that this is over and excited to see what is in store for us next.  I, honestly, never thought it would last this long.  I didn't know then the firey passion that could bloom in ice.

It is the end of a family era.  One we enjoyed and even loved.  Whatever will we do now?

Mother Worry

It seems as though no matter how old your children, you worry about them when they get sick.  Lillie has been sick with something for over a week now and it's just not getting any better.  She's lost her voice completely.  This is torture for my talkative girl.

In other news, we are approaching the end of hockey.  The end of the season and the end of our responsibility to it.  I'm looking forward to having more time, but I will miss my role as a hockey mom :(

The Eye of Mom will now turn towards John.  Not that it hasn't been in the past.  But he will now be far more in focus than he might desire ;)

Next week I'll find some photos to post.

Hockey Winter Classic Family Style

So the other day I got this photo from my brother (of himself and his 6 yo son):



And he said this: "Are you ready to take on these two power forwards?"

To which I responded, "Think you can get a shot past this D and this goalie? Bring it on"


We are developing our own Mid-winter classic ... family style. What fun!

Well ... I'm Climbing Out Of My Hole

I kinda forgot about this space ... not that anyone ever reads it. But still ...

In any case. I'm back with more tales of silliness and fun from the LightHouse. 2009 was ... umm ... interesting. Yeah, that.

LightGirl finished up her season as a goalie for the girls with a 2nd place in the playoffs for their division in their league. Not too shabby. She tried out for a spot on the boys midget (under 16) team for the fall. And made it. We gathered our collective breaths over the summer.

This past fall, LightGirl started playing with the boys team (the Midget U16 Red team). She is the only girl on the team and shares the net with another boy. They are becoming good friends. She's had a difficult time gaining some of the other boys' respect, but has now come through the worst of it.

LightBoy continued with Trigger Time, his 4-H Marksmanship club, and has been doing really well. He spent his first full week away at a sleepover camp in August and loved it. He came home slightly bedraggled and befuddled and happy.

LightBoy is now Secretary for the Trigger Time 4-H club and has his own guns and set of bow & arrows. He has become a valued member of that community. His first competition of this year is in March.

We gained a new puppy in mid-September, our darling Legolas. We adopted him through a rescue operation called Lucky Dog. He sure is a lucky dog and we are lucky people to have him. We think he's part Pharaoh Hound and part something else ... but who knows what. He's a real love. This is an especially good thing, because about 6 weeks after he joined our family, our wonderful Sam crossed the Rainbow Bridge and went home. Unbeknownst to us, he'd had cancer for quite some time and died in surgery.

LightHusband's parents visited us for the week preceding Thanksgiving. It was a whirlwind visit. Capped by LightGirl's stellar performance in a tournament in Maryland. We also got to visit some cousins' near by.

I cannot decide if we ended 2009 or began 2010 with a bang. In any case, it was LightGirl's 16th birthday on January 1, 2010. We celebrated in style at a local Cajun restaurant with a Mardi Gras party complete with a zydeco band. What a fabulous time we all had. She is turning into a really wonderful young woman who I thoroughly enjoy spending time with.




So that sort of catches us up and maybe I'll do better from now on. No promises though.

Dancing With Superstars

We watched Superstars of Dance with Lillie this evening. It was pretty much a disappointment. The music wasn't that great and the dances were very Americanized. Lillie called it at one point, "They won't get a very high score because the dance hasn't been Americanized enough." She was right.

We should have known what it would be about when we heard that Michael Flatley was the MC. There were a few standouts such as the woman from India who spent time dancing with Cirque du Soleil and the couple from Argentina who danced a fabulous tango. But it was otherwise fairly unremarkable. Kind of like franchise Mexican food ...

Why I Homeschool - #73

This morning I vacuumed the livingroom.

And that's why I homeschool.

Really. It is. Of course, there's more to the story than that.

We've begun the history cycle over again this year and are returning to Ancient History. The kids are excited. They love the ancients. Lillie is a little bit miffed that she has to go so deep and begin with actually learning something about the roots of civilization, which involves a little bit of anthropology to begin with. But John gets to the meat right off. He's there, man, in the Fertile Crescent. Digging into maps and irrigation and goddess worship ... the whole deal. The Bronze Age.

I was vacuuming as he was doing some of his work. Well, I began vacuuming and then discovered that the beater bar was completely clogged. So I sat down to pull all the golden retriever fur, thread and other assorted mess out of the bar. It's a tedious task, but rewarding in the end. John wandered in as he completed his history assignment, "Mom, you know what I've always wondered? How come the Chinese always worshiped dragons but no one else did?" Caught up as I was in the spools of fur and thread, I had no answer for him, but immediately wandered down mental roads of future research possibilities. "Hmm, I don't know, John. That's a great question. We should look into that." He went to get some water and ask the same question of his sister, who replied, "I don't know. Maybe they had a few leftover dinosaurs there and that's how it started."

That's when I wished I'd had a tape recorder in the room. They had the most fabulous conversation about dinosaurs, and how some went extinct, how some might have been left, and become worship objects. They discovered fire in the process and fire breathing dragons came into being. They had forgotten I was in the other room, because I was out of sight pulling fuzz out of the vacuum cleaner. I can't remember it all or write it down and if I ask them about it, they'll look at me like I'm slightly nuts because it's a fairly normal conversation between the two of them. And it is.

And that's one of the reasons I homeschool. I love hearing and sparking those conversations. They are wonderful.