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I just asked Cameron to put his Daddy’s shoes away.  He did – he’s a good little helper.  And then I stopped to think about what he’d just had to understand and figure out, and just how amazing it is that our brains put these pieces together.

First, you need to know that Daddy’s shoes were in amongst several other pairs of shoes in a group near the front door.  Our family tends to do a good job of taking shoes off when we come in; we’re not as good about putting those shoes away, so there were at least four pairs collected there.  So Cameron had to sort out a few things: one, which items in the room were shoes, which were Daddy’s shoes, and then grab just those two.  (He did, and then commented ‘Heavy’.)

Then I realized he had to figure out where to put them.  I hadn’t told him where Daddy’s shoes were to go, just “away”.  He parsed that to mean, take them down the hall, and put them in Daddy’s room.  Taking a quick peek, he not only put them in Daddy’s room, he put them in Daddy’s closet, and even on Daddy’s side of the closet.

I got into computer programming because I wanted to teach computers how to think.  I’ve now spent some 15 or so years in the profession, and no program I’ve ever written intuited nearly as much as my not-yet two year old putting his Daddy’s shoes away for his Mommy.  “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” – Psalm 139:14

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Sitting here, waiting for laundry, packing for camping.  Discovered an amazing food/beer pairing this evening: Fordham‘s Summer Forecast seasonal beer (“sunny, hazy, with a chance of raspberry”) and a pink snowball cupcake (discussion of the delights of pink snowball cupcakes here, though mine were Walmart knock-offs).  Grownup bed-time snack delight.

Confession: I had another pink snowball after the first one, so delicious when paired with the beer.  It didn’t taste as good on its own tonight, though I think that’s just a statement of how good that pairing was, as I’ve enjoyed the beer on its own before.

Second confession: I would love to go to the Great Grapes Festival in Annapolis next weekend.  Taste a little wine, check out a few food demonstrations, listen to some music.  I haven’t disclosed that confession to my husband, which means this is something of an unfair check to see whether he reads my blog.

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Yesterday was our ten year anniversary.  My mother-in-law graciously offered to watch the kids so that we could go out for dinner, which was both a wonderful meal and a wonderful date.  (Knew there were a lot of reasons I married him: marrying into his family was actually one of the things I thought was pretty cool at the time, and have only been convinced more and more of over the years.)  I know some folks make a HUGE deal about ten years, but I was pretty torn about how to handle it.

See, the thing is, we love each other each and every day.  I love the life we’ve built.  I got to see Jason really enjoying bouncing around the church on Thursday night, leading the kids in the VBS parents’ night.  I get to wake up next to him, or see him rock our little guy, or dance around with our girls, or enjoy him geek out about which Linux flavor to install on our home systems.  (MY answer: whichever one has a UI which lets me find the ‘Switch User’ button quickly, and whichever one doesn’t barf on Samba or connecting to our home printer.)  We’ve been through thinking we couldn’t have kids, to having 3 kids (!), through two bouts with cancer, each with two associated surgeries.  We’ve gone places, and done things, and still have lots of places to go and things to do.

So, the upshot is, I look at ten as, interesting.  Not wow.  Not amazing.  Just, interesting – hey, we’re ten years older than when this all got started.  But it’s not monumental, in the same way that getting to something you didn’t think could happen is monumental, or working through something hard and then getting there is monumental.  This, this is just – hey, it’s been ten years already!  Boy, hope we’ve got lots more than that left, because it’s sure been good so far.

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We’re in the midst of a home renovation project.  Essentially, we decided that it made more sense to add a little bit more elbow room to our current house than to increase and reset our mortgage payment.  We’re pretty happy with the crew that we chose to do the work – they’re folks we knew already through church who happen to have a home renovation company.  But we’re now slightly over our original schedule’s end-date, with likely another couple of weeks of work left to go.  We’ve been without a kitchen for weeks now and have subsisted on whatever we can cook in the microwave or on a hot plate or on the grill.  Consider your life without an oven, a stove, or a dishwasher.  I’m dreaming of baked goods, and Jason swears that the first week where the oven’s in play, we’re going to roast a different cut of meat every night.   Ham, chicken, duck, …  heck, if there’s a way to roast tofu, I think it’ll be in our oven that week.

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Kudos to Monica Hesse for structuring her article on using Google Trends (about link here) to investigate community values such that she got to end with the closer:

“Using Google Trends to ascertain community standards? Well, that’s just comparing apples and orgies.”

Delicious.