Saturday's Old Photo

Well, three photos, actually.

Having oldest daughter back with us has reminded me once again that while the rest of us are gentle summer breezes, she is a whirlwind. From the day she was born, she has never stopped moving—unless she was sleeping or reading a book—often leaving chaos behind her. When she’s not here, we settle into a calm routine that suits the rest of us just fine, and when she comes back, we all have to readjust.

When she was a child, as long as she was awake, I couldn’t relax, because, for one thing, at any moment I might need to make a trip to the emergency room. At two, while I showered at my parent’s home, she went out the unlocked screen door and ended up standing in the roadway with a steam roller bearing down on her. That summer, she also rode her tricycle over a two and a half foot rock wall. Somewhere, there is video of her at fifteen, standing on the seat of her bike as it travels across the lawn, then flying headfirst over the handlebars as the bike tire hits a tree root.

There’ve been finger stitches (uneven parallel bars), toe stitches (mini-trampoline and balance beam), several dislocated knee caps and a few pieces of furniture destroyed, but no broken bones until she broke her toe performing that same aerial cartwheel shown above for the wee ones at the children’s home in South Africa.

While in South Africa, by the way, she did the world’s highest commercial bungee jump, amazingly, without incident.

In this photo she’s jumping rope while jumping on the pogo stick. If you could hear her, she might be counting “257, 258, 259…” or something like that as she jumped. Yep, she was always driven to do more and better.

When she was four or five, she and her younger brother rode in the car somewhere with my husband. He told me later that in the course of his conversation with them, he’d said, “If I hadn’t married your mother, she’d be a librarian somewhere.” Without skipping a beat, oldest daughter responded, “Well, if she hadn’t married you, you’d be in jail.”

Which is why I love her even if she sometimes turns my tidy world upside down.

[In one of life’s little ironies, I have recently become the librarian for my church. That explains, in part, why I’ve gone some days with very little or no blogging. I’ve been busy  reorganizing and cataloging.]

Just Sayin'

 

because I needed one this morning:  Never mind planes, someone should invent a shopping cart on skiis.

She's Back from South Africa

 

Oldest daughter returned to us on Sunday evening, itching from bed bugs bites. She loved and she hated it at the children’s home, which is, I suppose, the way it is with all things like that.

 

It was exhausting and difficult work. Constant crying, she says, from morning to night, because there were not enough people volunteering to work over the weeks around Christmas. That’s one of the parts she hated.

 

And there is a fair bit of corruption, locally, that shows up in things like portable jungle gyms appearing before a dignitary’s visit and disappearing two hours after he left. That’s another part to hate.

 

But then,  she got to hang around with cute kids like the one above and feel needed by them. And that’s where the loved it came in.