Reno Wrap Up

We are down to our last weekend in Reno.  It's hard to believe how fast this 6 week leg of the journey went by.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Two trips to Lake Tahoe.  Especially the part where you get over Mt. Rose and see your first glimpse of the big blue lake through the trees.  
• Lots of family dinners.  Anyone who has dined with the Chings knows that the food at these gatherings is delicious and plentiful.  I should list a menu sometime to show that the word "plentiful" really does not do justice to the spread of food at these gatherings.  
• In Virginia, we watch TV using Netflix, so we've enjoyed having full cable this month, especially House Hunters, the NBA Playoffs, So You Think You Can Dance, and Bubble Guppies.  They also have Netflix here, so my mother-in-law and I have been watching Season 6 of West Wing.  
• Attending church while the grandparents babysat our kids.  Normally Kenny and I trade off doing kid duty while the other one attends church, so it was nice to get to go to services together.  
• Joshua and Zoey really got to know and enjoy their grandparents and their cousin / aunt / uncle.  This was the major goal of the trip and it was a big success.
• I met up with some of my former co-workers, enjoyed their company, and in talking about cases, remembered that it's really not so bad to get a few years off from being a lawyer.  

Up next, we drive to Nebraska, arriving just in time for the 4th of July.  Kenny will stay for a week and then head to Strasbourg, France, where he will be teaching a summer course in comparative constitutional law for 3 weeks.  The kids and I will be staying with my parents in Lincoln.  Several people have asked me if I'm disappointed that I'm not going with Kenny to France.  The answer is no, I am relieved.  With two very young kids, my day mostly consists of getting them to eat (especially Joshua) and sleep (especially Zoey), and both of these tasks would be more difficult in France.  Hopefully the opportunity will come up again in the future, because it would be an awesome family trip down the road.  Meanwhile, check back in a month - maybe we can get Kenny to do a guest post about his time in France...

For those in Nebraska, I can't wait to see you soon!

Some thoughts from Henri Nouwen: On Judgment and Gratitude

I just read Henri Nouwen's book "Spiritual Formation" and while the whole book is pretty great, there are two passages that stood out to me.  The first is on judgment:

"Judging others is a heavy load; why not let it go?  Being judged by others is a relatively light load; why worry about it?  Often I have asked myself:  What would it be like if I no longer had any desire to judge another?  Or be controlled by the judgments of others?  I would walk on the earth as a very light person indeed!"  

I 100% agree with this sentiment and it would radically change my life if I could internalize it.  It would be interesting if there was an app that could chart how much of the day I spend judging and feeling judged:  I watch HGTV and judge 20-year-olds for being so entitled and thinking they need stainless steel appliances and granite countertops; I take my kids out to the park and worry that other parents are judging me as the worst mom ever when my toddler starts screeching and my baby starts eating sand; I go to the grocery store and judge the person in the next aisle for the food that's in their cart, but also worry that they are judging me for the very same thing.  And on and on.  How much stress and anguish could be saved if I stopped judging others and worrying about whether they were judging me?  And why is it so hard to cut out all the judging?  Good things to think about.

The second passage I really liked is on gratitude:

"Gratitude is not a simple emotion or an obvious attitude.  It is a difficult discipline in which I constantly reclaim my whole past as the concrete way God has led me to this moment and is sending me into the future. It is hard precisely because it challenges me to face my painful moments -- experiences of rejection and abandonment, feelings of loss and failure -- and gradually to discover in them the pruning hands of God purifying my heart for deeper love, stronger hope, and broader faith."

Nouwen is saying that we should be grateful for the good *and* the bad stuff in our life because God is using all of it to grow you.  I tend to think of gratitude in a much different way - I think of it as being thankful for material blessings, positive experiences, new opportunities, and good things happening to my friends and family.  And let me tell you, I struggle even with this "easy" type of gratitude - it's so easy to let the good things in my life become the status quo and start wanting more.  But I agree with Nouwen's characterization of gratitude, and while I'm not even close to actually feeling grateful for the hard things in my life, it's helpful to read passages like this and reflect on how hard experiences move us towards deeper love, stronger hope, and broader faith.

I just scratched the surface with my reflections on both of these quotes, so I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences with these ideas.

Top 10 reasons i love (but also sometimes hate) Facebook

Facebook has been getting a bad rap lately.  Criticisms include that it makes us feel bad about ourselves, that it causes people to have less real connection with each other, and that it causes people to waste too much time.  I'm not suggesting that you should completely ditch your real life friends and family in order to spend all day on Facebook, but I think there are some really great things you can do with Facebook (as well as things that I sometimes love and sometimes hate, listed at the bottom).  Without further ado...

Things I love about Facebook:

1.  Sharing important information -- When I have a big announcement to make, Facebook is a very convenient one stop place to announce to everyone, all at once.  You don't have to compile a big email list or make phone calls one by one - you can just post your news and everyone will see it.  For us, this was especially convenient when Joshua was having lots of surgeries and we wanted to get news out about it right away, but didn't have time to make contact beyond a Facebook post.
2.  Allowing you to be social even when you're isolated -- Right now, I spend most of my day at home with J and Z.  I love them very much, but it gets lonely to spend the day with kids who aren't able to have a conversation with you.  Facebook allows you to interact with others.  It may be more shallow than a real life interaction, but it's way better than nothing, which is what the alternative often is if you're caring for young kids around the clock.  
3.  Hearing other people's important information -- I love hearing when people got engaged, had a baby, took a new job, etc.  I know that for some of my Facebook friends, I wouldn't be hearing about these things (at least not in a timely way) if it wasn't for Facebook.  It's like all the stuff you would hear at a class reunion, only you get to see it happening in real time.
4.  Crowdsourcing information --  You can post a question and very quickly get recommendations for a good HVAC repairman, how to administer medicine to a baby, what's a good book to read, etc.
5.  Connecting with long lost friends and staying in touch with friends who are far away -- I've moved around a lot in the last 10 years:  I've lived in 6 states for at least a year, and 3 more for at least a month.  I've made friendships that were fiercely close in that time and place, but that have been hard to maintain once we move into different time zones and life stages.  Facebook allows you to stay in casual contact with people who were at one time your BFFs and who you still care about.
6.  Celebrating people's occasions --  It's helpful to have a website remind you when it's someone's birthday, or wedding day, or graduation day.  And it's fun to get a flood of well wishers when it's your special day.
7.  Connecting with a support group --  This has been the biggest one for me.  Facebook has allowed me to connect with other parents of kids who have Pierre Robin Sequence and other parents of kids who have feeding tubes.  I don't know other parents in real life whose kids have these things, and it has been enormously helpful to get practical and emotional support from other parents who are going through the same thing.  It's also gratifying to be able to give other parents support.

Things I love / hate about Facebook:

8.  Hearing other people's info, small  - I might be in the minority here, but I like hearing what people ate for lunch.  It is my Input (from the Gallup Strengths profile) - the more information, the better, and it doesn't have to be particularly consequential to be interesting to me.  BUT, there is definitely a "TMI" line where things get a little too mundane, too personal, or too gross to belong on Facebook.  It's hard to define, but it's like the obscenity standard - you know it when you see it.
9.  Getting in debates / sharing political ideas - It used to be the case that it wasn't polite to talk about religion or politics, but this is not the case on Facebook.  For the most part, I love to see where people stand on politics, even when I disagree with them.  But sometimes, either the original post or the ensuing debate becomes nasty, and this is what I hate.  Also, I've found that I usually regret it when I get into a political debate on Facebook because it's just not the right format to discuss complicated ideas and it doesn't allow you to convey non-verbals like tone to the other person, which in real life might keep the conversation more civil.
10.  Seeing people's travel pictures --  I love this because I get to live vicariously through you fabulous world travelers.  I hate it because it makes me jealous :).

What would you add?

Reno Update

We are two weeks into our summer vacation, so I'm posting a family update.  The short version:  so far, so good!  The grandparents have been very generous about babysitting, so Kenny and I have been able to spend tons of alone time together, which is something that we rarely get to do in Virginia.  We have done activities ranging from the practical (car seat shopping) to the romantic (anniversary date) to the hipster (brunch).

Joshua is enjoying spending time with both grandparents and with his cousin Lewis.  We had some concerns about his shyness, but he quickly became comfortable with all the relatives here.  Lewis and Joshua enjoy throwing rocks together, Grandpa Keith and Joshua jam out to the ukelele, and Grandma Betty and Joshua run laps around the house together.  Joshua's speech and eating don't seem to be suffering from the break in therapy.  His speech continues to improve, probably from getting bombarded with new people and experiences.  His eating is about the same- he still eats a limited range of foods, limited volume, supplemented daily with tube feeds - but we haven't seen any eating setbacks since we've been on the road, so that's positive.  We are having some trouble with Joshua not wanting to share toys with Zoey, so if anyone has tips on how to work on sharing, I am all ears!

Zoey is at that end of baby / beginning of toddler stage where it seems like she is developing new skills and getting more interactive every day.  Since we arrived, she has learned to pull up to standing, do motions that sort of look like waving and blowing kisses, and start to make sounds that are more like words (like "ba" for ball).  It is really interesting to watch a typically developing baby grow, because these new skills come so fast and so easily.  You don't have to do anything except let them loose on the floor and they basically figure it out on their own!  Since Joshua had all the medical interventions at the beginning, he missed some early development, so we had to work really hard with weekly therapies and daily exercises to get him caught up to the point where he could do things like crawl and pull up to stand, so it's astounding to watch the difference.  Zoey is also at the stage where she will stick her finger in a light socket, pull dishes off the table, rip pages out of books, etc., so we are keeping a close eye on her.

We have about four weeks left in Reno, so we are looking forward to more family time, a trip to Tahoe, and whatever other unknown adventures await this month.