Filed under: lists
here’s my list of things i need to get done before we leave for sebastian on saturday. actually, we’re playing paintball on saturday morning (for a friend’s birthday), so really it’s things i need to get done by friday….
- FIND MY POINT & SHOOT CAMERA!!!
- box and mail courtney’s birthday gift
- finish and wrap sherry’s birthday gift (no “don’t worry about that, katie” comments please, sherry)
- justin’s birthday card (and maybe a t-shirt?)
- t-shirt design for emily (pbghs)
- finish & e-mail stationary design for jessica
- haircut
- get ryan some b-day thank you cards
- layne’s birthday t-shirt
- sweep/mop kitchen floor
- sweep/”shine” wood floor
- pick up porch
- sweep porch
- dust everywhere
- make harper a “chore chart” for the fridge
- vaccum the girls’ room
- wrap or bag layne’s gifts (we’re celebrating her b-day on sunday so that ryan’s family can come too)
- go through portfolio to choose images for the new website
- PACK!!!
Filed under: layne
harper’s been in tallahassee for almost a week. it’s been cool to have time with just layne and me. she’s so fun right now. she’s starting to try to stand unassisted by herself (no steps yet, though). books have recently become an OBSESSION. she’ll drag a book clear across the house to me in hopes that i’ll pull her into my lap and read it to her. she is constantly pointing at anything and everything and nothing. i know this is completely normal, and i remember harper doing it at this age, but it’s still funny when she does it. the other day in the car she was dancing with her arms…it’s the first time i’ve seen her show any reaction to music and it was really cool…since then i’ve seen her dancing by bouncing up and down, just bending her knees. cute. she’s still babbling quite a bit. a few actual words we’ve heard her say so far: mama, dada, hi, bye, ba-ba (baby), uh-oh (uh-uh), and she tries to “moo”, but it just comes out like “mmmm”.
every day is more fun than the last!
Filed under: books
i’m not the best writer and don’t really know how to write a book review, but in any case i should’ve written this a week ago. i hate that i’ve already forgotten so much about the book.
on the back cover of The Brothers K (by david james duncan), there is a quote that calls it “ambitious”. it is that, to say the very least. it is an extremely detailed, personal, enveloping story of an American family during the 1950’s/60’s/70’s as told by the youngest son, kinkaid. papa is a warm, talented baseball pitcher with a seemingly bright future in the majors. mama is a religious loving mother with a troubled past. they have a quick romance, marry, and then bring forth 4 boys and twin girls (in that order).
the story that kinkaid tells is one of simple life pleasures and complicated family hurts. duncan’s character development is astounding, as he knows each of the 8 central characters unbelievably well….knowing even more than kinkaid (as a memeber of the family) could’ve known, had he been real. duncan follows each character’s involvement in the story’s themes which always seem to have something to do with church/God, baseball, and, well, family.
duncan successfully draws many emotions out of the reader (at least he did out of me): happiness, anger, relief, hurt&despair, confusion, triumph, and even fright. thanks to his outstanding knowledge of each character, and of the details of the times and places in which they live, the book feels like a really really good movie. the title is derived from “The Brother Karamazov”, a classic novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. i’m embarrassed to say i’ve never read it, but from what i’ve read about it, Duncan was definitely highly influenced by it. (Wikipedia says that “The Brothers Karamazov” portrays a patricide in which each of the murdered man’s sons share varying degrees of complicity. On a deeper level, it is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, reason, free will and modern Russia. This is definitely extremely similar to the story kinkaid tells.) however, i think that by naming the book “The Brothers K”, Duncan was referring to the fact that the boys’ father was a long-time baseball pitcher. “K” in baseball is the character used when a batter strikes out, which, for a pitcher, is a good thing.
like i said before, i don’t know how to write a book review, but i wanted to write something about this book because I LOVED IT and i want everyone i know to read it and love it too! it does contain some language and some brief sexual references, but much of the story is about 4 teenaged boys, so i thought it was just authentic.
now go get it and start reading!!
it’s weird to be at home on a sunday morning… ryan went out on the drift boat early this morning, so i’m waiting on him to get home and we’ll go to the late service. layne loves this plan because she actually gets to nap in her own bed as opposed to not napping at all like most other sundays. here are some random things going on right now:
- on friday my friend kristen watched layne all day so i could drive harper up to gainesville (to my sister’s). mom had driven down with owen (my nephew) and was picking up harper, and hannah and justin (my sister’s kids). on the way home i stopped at an outlet mall in orlando for a few hours. it was so nice to just wander around for a little bit and take as long as i wanted in each store. everytime i saw a stroller with a kid in it (which was like every 4 seconds), i would gigle silently out of sheer delight that i wasn’t pushing one.
- i just stumbled upon this article and it made me so incredibly sad. i am scared to death of what America will be like when my girls are old enough to marry. sometimes i feel like the most important parts of our lives are being chipped away and there’s nothing we can do about it. i hate living in such a selfish indulgent world.
- ryan’s off work on friday and then saturday we’ll be driving up to the beach house in melbourne/sebastian for a week. i can’t wait! this is the first year we’ve had a repeat for the BFR (buerke family reunion) location and it’s so much fun to know where we’re going and what to expect. it’s also fun to think about where we were last year at this time. crazy that it’s been a year already.
- since coming back from NC a week ago, i have had ZERO motivation to do anything. cleaning supplies have been sitting on the counter in the girls’ bathroom for a week. i cooked no meals last week…seriously. everything was either frozen or from the pantry. i should be ashamed of myself letting layne set one finger on our filthy kitchen floor, much less letting her crawl all over it. i just dried a load of laundry that sat in the washer for 3 days. i have no idea what’s gotten into me (or out of me, i guess), but i don’t like it. granted, i wasn’t feeling great for the first 2 or 3 days we were back, but man i need to snap out of it. i need to go work on my bible study right now, actually.
L8TR!
this is us on a walk around the “neighborhood” where the house was. it was a paved road with huge steep hills. layne LOVED riding in this carrier thing (thanks, charlene!). i think harper was a little jealous, although she was piggyback on me for much of the walk…she even ate a snack while she was riding. here are a few more of the same walk/hike/whatever:
the next one is a picture of my toes after harper painted them for me. can’t remember if it was her idea or mine, but she had fun. the excess came off after like 2 showers. looking at this picture, i’m thinking: my feet are SO different than they were before i had kids. why does pregnancy change EVERYTHING?
this is ryan trying to pull a huge splinter out of harper’s big toe. she was absolutely hysterical…i’m sure it hurt, but it was her first splinter, so i think she was more scared than anything. look how white her little knuckles were…i told her to squeeze as hard as she could and it wouldn’t hurt so bad…i was trying everything to get her mind off of it. i pinched her arm (which just made her madder), shoved a popsicle in her face, and something else that i can’t remember now. when he finally got that thing out i burst into tears. it was so hard to see her freaking out and being held down like that…i have so much sympathy for moms with sick kids…i cannot imagine watching doctors work on my kid all the time.
this picture is pretty self-explanatory. i love harper’s new carseat, but it’s one disadavantage is that it doesn’t recline unless the seat it’s sitting on does. this one didn’t. it hurts my neck just to look at her.
the house we stayed in was great. it was fairly secluded, cozy, roomy, and had everything we needed and more (there was a ping pong table in the basement that we really never got around to using). here are some pictures of the happenings at the house and of the views from the house.
first, a pancake breakfast. we ate GOOD while we were there.
next, a smokey mountain sunrise.
sunset from the deck
another view of another sunset
this picture didn’t really come out (why can i still not figure out what ISO to use when?), but it shows another view from the deck…
the girls had fun watching the sneaky squirrel…he was alot more persistent that i think i’d be…that birdseed must be really good.
harper’s tent and the awesome porch swing (looked out to the lake). i miss that swing!!
shooting gordon’s pellet gun. they set up some “targets” in the yard (mostly trash…pizza and cereal boxes). it was alot of fun to shoot…even harper tried it.
playing with some “shooters” (water guns). i think this was one of harper’s favortie things we did…maybe because when her clothes got too wet i let her take them off. she kept telling erin and i to get naked too.
“exploring”. she really did figure out how to see through them. i think in this picture she’s trying to look at what daddy and opa are shooting.
one night as we were going to bed there was a crazy lightning storm. it was so cool because we went out on the deck to watch and take pictures and it took a good 20 minutes for it to reach us…after that we went in a turned off all the lights and watched it from inside. i’ll never forget that.
i like this picture. i think he looks like a little garden statue.
this is one of the wierdest places i’ve ever been (in america, at least). yes, i am a christian, and yes, i love God’s word. however, to see the 10 commandments written in 4 foot tall concrete letters and laid out on the side of a hill doesn’t move me to feel…anything, really. we stopped here on our way home from the waterfall (that’s why, you’ll notice, harper is still only wearing her Jane Fonda getup).
(at the bottom of the hill there was a replica of the tomb that didn’t look AT ALL like what i think the real tomb did, a hill with 3 crosses, and a pathway up the other hill that was lined with Psalms monuments or something…we didn’t go over there)
there were stairs inside the big “book” at the top…we climbed up on top of it, but you couldn’t get close enough to the edge to get a picture of anyone looking down.
this place was called coker creek falls. it took us about an hour and a half, two stops, and some time on the internet to find it, but when we did it was well worth it. these types of places are pretty much ideal to me…running water, big rocks, and no crowds. it was so fun to get to share it with harper…she loved it (as you can tell from the first picture).
ryan told her to stand on the rock and not to move. she obeyed. 
the girls on the trail…this place would’ve been cool even without the water…the trail was very well worn, but still a little challenging…parallel with the side of a hill.
wedgie. 
coming in from testing out the current speed for us. (yes, i’m kidding)
thursday morning i woke up still not feeling so great. gordon, erin, and ryan had been gone since 7:00…we’d rented a pontoon boat for the day and they were trying to do some early morning fishing. didn’t catch a thing. the rest of us joined them for lunch and we rented a tube to pull behind the boat. we cruised around and stopped at a little waterfall that we’d been directed to on wednesday (by the marina staff). harper hated riding on the tube…she was scared to death…surprised us all. we parked the boat and all went back up to the house for a nap/rest. after naptime and an early dinner, sherry stayed home with the kids (thank you) so the rest of could go back down to the boat. we tubed and rode around until 7:00 when the boat had to be back. it was alot of fun…very relaxing to just sit in the front of the boat and feel the wind on my face. after the kids went to bed that night, we played uno spin.
on friday morning, the guys stayed with the kids so erin, sherry, and i could go into town (about 30 minutes away) to some antique stores. we had a good time browsing, but made no major purchases…i got an antique postcard for ryan (monkeys riding a tricycle) and erin got harper an adorable pair of slip-on keds at a consignment store. as soon as we got back to the house, ryan and gordon and i all threw some sandwiches in a bag (thanks once again to sherry!) and took off for the nantahala river. erin decided not to go because she did something to her knee on thursday and it was really hurting her. we missed her, for sure, but i think she made a wise decision. we went rafting for about 2 hours (great time…wish i’d have risked taking my camera because we never got wet above the waist) and then headed back through town to pick up some zaxby’s for dinner.
saturday was the drive back to orlando. i hardly slept on friday night because layne was up alot and i was coughing all night so i was TIRED and grouchy, but the trip went pretty well. we got back around 6:00, had some pizza, and harper got in the pool for a little while. ryan and i headed home on sunday morning. my house is a disaster, still, and i really shouldn’t be blogging, but layne is asleep and harper’s watching a movie…
next post: pictures!
Filed under: books
we got home today around 1:00. i’m planning on uploading pictures and writing part 3 of my trip journal tomorrow. just put both girls to bed and i’m planning on reading for the rest of the night…this book is incredible and i am so close to finishing it!
