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Welcome to our family website, a digital patchwork quilt sewn day by day. By sharing "scraps" of our lives with our loved ones, we're hoping to stitch continent to continent, time zone to time zone, heart string to heart string. Please embroider a comment or two on the fabric of our lives and enjoy! Please also visit our "Mindfire Homeschool" website!
Isn't this fantastic??? Lvov made it for us for our anniversary. I can't think of anything better to do on my anniversary than to embrace Phil with cardboard arms while being served miniature dinner at a milk carton table. Lovely!
And we really did go out for a nice dinner, but the place was a real dive - no milk carton tables, no wash cloth table covers...but we did our best to enjoy ourselves.
We dined at Club 21, a bar/restaurant that has a stunning view of Kaiserslautern. It felt as if we were looking out an airplane window - the fresh perspective revealed the city's secrets and every building, alley way, store, and park suddenly made more sense. I saw the interconnectedness of the city; I finally understood the dead ends, the roads I had always meant to take, and the confusing places that I can never quite "map" in my mind's eye.
That night, feasting on delicious food and looking back over the view of our lives together with different and older eyes, everything made sense: the dead ends, the confusing places, the roads we never took. Everything with my boy made sense.
I'm lucky, lucky lucky.
There are pigeons and love-birds all around Paris' famous Notre Dame Cathedral. Oh, look, here's a couple of love-birds snuggling in front of the wood and calligraphic metal door of the cathedral. Can you hear them cooing? Can you hear the mighty organ reverberating ecstatically through the stone walls of the gothic cathedral?
Inside, the cathedral is glowing with candles and faces turned to god, burning passionately. Everything rises. Far above us, in the pocket of heaven tucked into the angles of the cathedral ceiling, our prayers took wing in the dark warm spaces. A little bit of this hallowed atmosphere entered our lungs, then released itself back into the respiratory system of the cathedral, each of our bodies a minute bronchi in the breathing in and out of this great stone spirit.
This was a brilliant day and night! Oh man, it's the stuff of dreams! We spent time at the legendary Shakespeare and Company English-language bookstore, where we saw a poetry reading and where the kiddos curled up on an old couch with the resident puppy. Then, just literally a hop, skip, and a jump across the river and voila! We were at the Notre Dame cathedral!
We visited the cathedral in 2005 too, but it was closed...so we hung out with backpackers, tourists, and all sorts of colorful characters late into the night watching street artists and fire jugglers. This time, though, oh man...not only was the cathedral open, but there was a midnight mass in progress (serendipity - my true religion!!!) when we entered, replete with organs and the sound of many voices raised like wine to god. After this heady experience, we had a scrumptious picnic while watching a street performer juggle and blow fire. Every time I look at this picture (above), it evokes these memories.
On a sophomoric note: in this picture (above) Phil's backpack looks like a futuristic jet pack, the twin "jets" of the French bread about to propel them across the Seine. It cracks me up!
With full hearts and souls and bellies we strolled around the Left Bank as long as we could before collapsing. It's a sacrilege to waste time sleeping in the city of lights...so we traded a bit of sleep for a bit of Paris that we'll have in our memories forever. A dream for a dream.
It's been almost 14 years. We've created two amazing daughters, lived on three continents in twelve homes, and owned eleven cars. And still Phil brings me coffee and breakfast in bed every weekend morning.
These little kindnesses are my currency, my diamonds, my peacock feathers. I am unbelievably rich. The scuffle of Phil's footsteps climbing the stairs to our attic bedroom are the gentlest alarm clock. Time to awaken from the dream into the dream.
I created this video about a year ago, but I couldn't figure out how to burn it onto disks for Christmas presents. I was so frustrated! Jody and Jean saw a little bit of it last January when we were back home. The original movie was about an hour long - it was a documentary about our lives over here, and had tons of pictures of us visiting you guys in the states. In retrospect, an hour was a little long, so it's probably a good thing that this blog limits me to about 5 minutes of video - short and sweet!
So here is your main Christmas present - a year later! It's a thank-you video to all of you for being so supportive and amazing while Phil was deployed to Afghanistan for 6 months. You all really outdid yourselves sending us tons of gifts and love on December first so that we could celebrate an early Christmas before Phil deployed on December 7th, 2005. Thank you!!! We couldn't have done it without you!
Three years ago in Japan a dentist accidentally shattered one of my teeth. Ever since, we've been saving up $ for cosmetic dental surgery. I'll be having the surgery sometime in the next year. Well, Akychame came to me the other day and showed me her piggy bank. It was stuffed with crumpled dollar bills and Euro coins. She told me that she's been saving up for months so that she can buy me coffee and cake at a really fancy restaurant to celebrate getting my surgery done!!! I think I'm the only mommy who has a tooth fairy - not for losing the tooth, but for getting a new one. I'm so incredibly lucky.
