Summer

The kids are back from Denver. They ended up on a different flight because of delays with their original flight. The wonderful folks at Midwest Airlines served them well! We got them back an hour earlier, even though they left an hour later than originally scheduled. This worked out well - even with the extra security check they had to endure. (Nothing was confiscated.)

They came home, full of excitement and refreshment, eager to show all their pictures and tell us everything that happened the entire time. It is SO good to have them back! Thank God they are safe and happy and blessed! Thank you to all who hosted them!!!!! You made their summer an unforgetable one! They enjoyed seeing you all again and enjoyed the beautiful mountain weather; albeit a bit colder than they have been used to!

Joel is back to work, Aliya is looking for paid work, playing soccer, and enjoying summer life. Abby & Elle have a clean-swept room (thanks to Elle and I while they were gone), and it feels great! They are enjoying friends, the pool, and getting tans with lots of sunscreen. I have tried my hand at the tanning with lots of sunscreen, but not much is happening for me. I have more freckles. The girls have a few more adorable freckles, and much more melanin everywhere else. How are we related?

The house is taking shape. Brian has repainted our kitchen, put up the moulding under the new counter tops, and is working on replacing the piping in our house (polybutelane). Then he can have a drywall party to help finish the basement. I can't wait!

I need to do some gardening. So gardening friends, infuse some of that love of the earth and the great outdoors into me. I have weeds growing considerably larger than my azalea bushes. Why do I not pull them? Because they are spikey and stubborn. Does this say anything about my spiritual life? Hmmm..... I have a flower bed up front with lots of various "leaves" and no flowers. Time to redo it. My gardenia bush is blooming, then failing. Time to prune off the old buds and allow some new ones to appear. They smell so wonderful! We have trees growing where we thought we had pulled them. How do we keep up? But I am not whining. I love my yard; I just need to love it enough to do more about it! That is on the agenda today. It is not quite so hot, so it is a perfect time to get going.

One interesting thing happened. We had petunias (?) growing in our front porch pot last year. We bought a million of all the same color and planted them everywhere in all the pots we had. This was my idea of creative gardening. We let them die out at the end of the season and did not, ahem, do anything about cleaning them out and replacing them with seasonal flowers in the fall. Now we somehow have a new, freshly blooming pot of petunias on our front porch. I have done nothing but let them grow.

So is the lesson that I really just need to let nature take its course? Or do I really need to pull those weeds? Don't answer that.