Today was a fabulous Saturday of sunshine and fresh air and good old-fashioned family togetherness. It felt like everything was crying out with thankfulness that God created them—the brilliant and teeny yellow daffodils, the redbud and plum trees that are beginning to bloom, the grass that’s turning bright green, and of course, us, the humans who get to luxuriate in such grandeur.
When temperatures start warming up again, children flock to playgrounds. Against backdrops of still-naked tree limbs and grass that looks crunchy and yellow, they play hard while the sun shines. And then, as the sun begins its descent, mamas might put them on the swings for a few moments before calling it a day. Heads sag to the side in tiredness, faces a bit drawn. And then playtime’s over and the moms pack up their crews and move on towards home, thoughts of dinner fixings in their minds. Someday soon the sun and its delicious warmth will last long past suppertime. We wait in eager anticipation.
Bunny Portrait by Livia. All others by her mama.
My friends Joie and Jake went north for the L’Abri conference in Rochester and came home with a rabbit. One of Honeysuckle’s offspring, to be more specific. Honeysuckle is well known in the Tredway household. Ever since I began reading of Honeysuckle’s adventures on Margie Haack’s blog—and then met the rabbit in person last spring—we have awaited any news of the bunny and hoped with bated breath that she’d get pregnant. After some time she did conceive and birthed the cutest baby Angoras you could possible imagine. And now those babies are small no longer! Apparently rabbits grow fast.
Livia began asking me daily to visit Joie’s apartment to see Jack. Or Zach. Or sometimes Honeysuckle, which we both called Jack when we weren’t thinking straight. Livia even volunteered to spin Jack’s wool when the time came for shearing. This is how dedicated we are to Angoras now: we watch YouTube videos on spinning. I’m saving up all these thoughts and hopes and dreams for Livia’s future. I have visions of her marrying a Nebraska farmer and then running a menagerie of animals on their farm. Liv will come and go as a rural veterinarian and she’ll take every lost and broken thing under her wing until they are mended. In the meantime, she is learning to add and subtract and read and write. Back to the present. We finally made it over to visit Jack in person and Liv lovingly fed him carrot bits and brussel sprouts. Joie believes Jack is an introvert, so we’ll give him some time to get used to the rapt attentions of a seven-year-old vet-in-training.
Dear Livia,
You sit beside me at the dining room this Sunday morning. Adele is blaring on the stereo and you want to know what rumor it is she sings of. I manage to evade this question as I’m not prepared to explain the intricacies of love lost and found to my first grader quite yet. You are pouring acrylic paints onto plastic lids, mixing colors to paint onto t-shirts. The dining room table is littered with paint bottles, colored pencils and, alarmingly, electronics. Perhaps this isn’t a wise configuration of projects, but it serves its purpose in keeping us close to one another as we express ourselves creatively. The dog is perched nearby in his bed, sending indignant small barks at the people who dare walk by a nearby sidewalk. I stop between nearly every sentence I type to prevent you from painting the dining room table, your wrists, the floor and your jammies. Your enthusiasm for crafts is matched only by your remarkable knack for knocking things over. Yes, you are now painting with your fingers. I tell people that you’d roll your entire body in paint if I let you and I’m not always sure they believe me. I want to encourage this need to physically create, your desire to touch and smear, to feel the paint between your fingers. It requires deep breathing for me to let you get messy and you probably haven’t noticed, but a lot of our projects wrap up quickly when the deep breathing no longer helps. Then again, you are now a big kid and can clean up fairly well on your own. How much fun this growing older thing is. I delight in you, growing girl of mine.
Love,
Mom
DFW Airport, January 2012
As it turns out, I don’t feel any better about avoiding sweets on Day 4 than I did on Day 1. Bummer. The sensation of denying myself sugary treats has become more familiar, however. I am less likely to reach for a Swedish fish or Dove chocolate to pop into my mouth. My mind is beginning to grasp that those things are off limits—don’t even think about it, missy. But I want want want to eat sweets almost all day long. The very idea of self-denial is clearly not something I am accustomed to. (Interestingly enough, we’re not avoiding sweets for Lent, the timing is merely coincidental.) This challenge began in the interest of breaking an addiction to something that is obviously not healthy in my life. You can imagine how it’s not helpful to munch on sweets all day long when you have diabetes. :)
What I am enjoying is the knowledge that I can pick and choose what goes in my mouth. I can pick and choose healthy, life-giving items over the ones that are temporarily rewarding, yet life-draining in the long run. I know I will return to eating all those blessed, amazing, spectacular tasting desserts. I simply hope to show a little more self-control when that time comes.
Right now life seems to be moving by too quickly. I want to slow it down, figure out one thing at a time, make peace with a few issues and then move forward with joy.
But I don’t feel like I can figure even one thing out. It’s more like I’m grasping at straws, trying to make sense of too many things in one brief moment. And then, by the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done nothing with excellence.
Must. get. unstuck.
My friend Bethany indulged me by modeling for a little photo shoot on what had to be the most humid day ever last summer. The payoff was the brilliant light and the time alone with a good friend. We both have little girls now, so it was fun to escape daily life to play with our cameras and the light near the Wesleyan campus one evening.
Now Bethany and her family are in Germany and we miss them greatly. Fortunately, we get updates on little Adeline’s cuteness through Facebook. How in the world did people survive before Facebook? ;)
There’s a sense of formality that comes with posting family portraits online. I want to do it right. And yet it took everything in my power not to title this post “My Big Brudder’s Family.” Yeah, so that would’ve been baby talk, but I truthfully think of Adam as my big brudder—and I love him for always being the guy I can look up to.
Shooting Adam, Kristin, Madeleine and Noah last fall was a particularly fun thing for me to do. It felt like I was pushing the pause button to take stock of their lives. Setting it up as a true photo shoot allowed me to tell them where to stand and how to move, etc.—all the photographer commands I hold back when shooting in an informal setting over birthday cake or Thanksgiving dinner. When I step back from the images and take it all in, I’m struck by how awesome it is that Adam has such a cool family. I love my sister-in-law and my niece and nephew. We really live a full and rich existence.
