Finally, a birthday dinner...

....to celebrate Mom (Corbin's) birthday. It was really on the 8th. But the snow kept foiling our plans to celebrate with dinner. We'll never repay her for the 101 meals she cooks for us every year, but her birthday is a good chance to catch up a little.

After dinner, we went upstairs to visit with the other birthday guests (via our Mac).

And Maya ran wildly back and forth between the bedrooms as Nana and Papa entertained her with puppets!

maya's first road trip

Tomorrow morning, I will leave town with my parents (something I've done countless times before)....and my daughter (something I've never done before). This will be Maya's very first long trip.
She's very excited about it.

We're transporting a piano to 'casacommunitas' (my brother's house in Canton, Ohio).

It is the piano that first taught me to make and love music. My brothers and I grew up listening to our mother's unmistakeable style of arranging hymns on this piano. Falling asleep to her 'sweeping glissandos.' Soon the piano will be at Andy's house for his family to enjoy it's music as he did.... (an excerpt from his mother's day post a few years ago)...

"Lying in bed with the lights out and down the long hallway of the ranch house echo the gentle fingers of my mother playing and playing and playing the piano. Sometimes she would be practicing a particularly troublesome phrase, more often --just playing. Laying there hovering just above sleep I would feel profoundly that the music was a kind of visceral fabric that bound my brothers and sister and father together throughout the otherwise quiet house in the rhythms, the melodies, the countermelodies and always, the sweeping glissandos.

My mom drags her finger up the keyboard, but then slows each of the last notes to one by one keys at the top of the scale and just before the next musical phrase starts there is the slightest of pauses, too brief to fit all of these words into, but long enough that your soul starts to yearn expectantly toward the resolution of the chord, the forward motion of the music, the next great possibility."

I can't wait to hug my Jaelyn and Addison and see them love their new cousin, Maya.

Ryan is coming too, but he can't leave until Thursday after work. We are going to my beautiful friend Al's wedding. (An early wedding rehearsal being the reason that Maya and I are tagging along with my parents on wednesday.) I can't wait to dance to the music of the jazz trio at the reception...

and to be with all of them again...

I miss my friends!

Today we celebrated...

..my mother's birthday. Isn't she beautiful?
She's 59! Even with no make-up, she looks like she's in her forties, but she is actually the mother of four adult children, and six grandchildren!

Yesterday was her real birthday, but it was too full of drama--not the fun kind--to celebrate then.
My mom called us very late on Friday night to tell us that Will, my baby nephew, Isaac's twin brother, had been taken to the ER. He's okay now, but he really scared his mom and dad. I'm sure father Daniel will explain the story at some point on the boy's page. So we went to bed, praying and worrying. Then around 6:30 AM in the morning, my mom called again. This time, to let us know that my Grandpa was also going to the same ER with chest pains. He has been home for about a week now, on medication. The doctors have basically said that there is not much more that they can do for him. His arteries are too clogged and his veins are too thin and weak to operate. So he has been resting and hoping for more time with his wife. They sit very close together and kiss often. They've been eachothers' best friend for over sixty years.

So that my grandpa could come home from the hospital to a peaceful house, Ryan and I took Emma, Jaelyn, Liam, and Addison to the Harmson (Ryan's family) 4th of July celebration. We drove a minivan.
It was weird.

We had tons of fun playing down by the creek, blowing bubbles, snapping "poppers"--(those loud, firecracker things), lighting smoke bombs (Uncle Ryan did that part...not the kindergarteners), playing with hoola-hoops, making sidewalk chalk art, eating, soaking eachother with water balloons and water guns (adults and children), getting very dirty, swimming in Lake Michigan, enjoying a campfire on the beach...




So, if we suddenly became the parents of four children ages 4-8, we could survive. I think.
Fortunately, that isn't likely to happen. We love being "Aunt Gigi" and "Uncle Ryan" for now.
After we dropped the kids off, we went home. And I enjoyed a long, peaceful, hot bath, and finished Life of Pi.
Which has a great ending.
You should read it.