Simple Life

Jason and I spent the morning today with Skip, my step-dad. This was no planned event, rather, we were huddled together over the engine of the little car Jason and I are diving, replacing the radiator that cracked yesterday. We are very fortunate that Skip, a literal jack-of-all-trades, was both able and willing to help us with this little project. "Half an hour," he said. Anyone that has worked on an engine knows that "half and hour" rarely means 30 minutes. 3 hours later, our little car was back up and running. Before I can even begin to express how grateful we are to Skip for his help this morning, there are a few things I must mention. Mom and Skip just moved to a new home and are still unpacking. It is coming together, but no where near done. We were in Wenatchee, where it was in the mid-30's. We had red skin, frozen toes, snot running down our faces, and Skip had blood dripping from his knuckle. A result of trying to fit his hand in a place it was...

Jason and Lily went to spend a few days in Issaquah with Jason's Mom, Leslie. Jax had a dental appt. today so we stayed behind in Chelan. Today, I was reminded of a lesson Jaxon had taught me a few years ago. The lesson was just as confounding and clear today as it was when he was a toddler. As a little one, Jaxon tended to be on the challenging side. I always found myself apologizing for his behavior. I was insecure about him - people were always commenting, "He's all boy!" I don't think that people meant to hurt my feelings, but it did. As a mother, you always want to have a well-behaved kid that people like. I felt that he wasn't well liked. One day his behavior was especially exasperating, and it was then that the lesson of Jaxon really hit me. I remember very clearly. We were at Macy's, Jaxon was strapped into an umbrella stroller. I was doing my usual dash through the store, as Lily was in preschool and our time was limited to just a coupl...

We are still here, in America. We would have done so many things differently had we known... Hindsight. Good stuff right? We are still in the middle of this crazy process that involves several people and ends with us getting back to Japan. We can't really divulge the details yet... What I can do is focus on the now, which is what we have been doing since we got back. Well, we sort of spent the first two weeks moping and acclimating to the time change, then we started focusing on the now. We had some major questions to answer - where to live, what to drive, what to do with ourselves and the kids. The challenge in answering any of those questions was not knowing how long we'd be here. We were hoping it was just for a few weeks. Now we are into our third month. I have struggled, feeling like a bit of a let down. Here we are, in our thirties, living off the goodwill of others and really not contributing much to society. We have two kids to think about. It is not as if ...