Miser Family Update, summer edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.

My husband writes that "I will be in Prague tonight. Today's ride added hills to the headwinds. Slowest ride ever. I will be in Poland on Father's Day."  He's visited Belgrade, Budapest, Macedonia (?? I think ??), and probably a few other countries I didn't get to hear about. In spite of his being a half a world away, much of our married life is completely as usual, with him on a bike and with me fussing about finances.  So that's good.

For my sons, the big news is that school let out this week.  Summer begins.

I've mentioned in the past that J-son has spent a lot of time with friends of his.  I tend to think of this as "teenage boys hanging, doing who-knows-what".  But this past week, partly because of graduation parties, I've gotten to chat with the parents of J-son's friends.  They say things like, "J-son is such a good kid; we're so glad he's friends with our son.  He's become like family around here."  I look at these parents after they say these things, waiting for the sarcasm tag, or the "wink-wink", but it never comes.  They're truly earnest.  It's heart warming, if a little surprising.  J-son is at a boxing match today; I don't know how he's doing yet.

Once school let out, N-son reconnected with some of his favorite chefs at our local soup kitchen late this week.  He and I-daughter also dazzled audiences of shoppers (and music lovers) at our nearby Kitchen Kettle Village in the lovely little town of Intercourse, PA, with a choral performance.  In the photo below, I-daughter is in a black t-shirt in the front row on the left, and N-son in an orange shirt in a back row, just a bit right of the middle.

K-daughter, with the help of I-daughter, has gotten even better at doing the butterfly.  In fact, I-daughter tells me K-daughter did two lengths of the pool.  Woo!  Meanwhile, K-daughter's daughter continues to bond with our new dog Prewash.  They battle over their same toys.  They cuddle and giggle together.  (Maybe Baby-A wants to become a puppy.)   But Baby-A can't go up the wooden stairs through the dog door into the dog yard, and now Prewash can. (Success!)

Me, I'm still doing math and committee work and ancestor stuff.  Speaking of ancestor stuff, here's part of a letter from my grandfather to a friend, that I don't want to save in its entirety, but this little snippet is so much fun (for me) that I'm going to share it with you.  It's from November 1966, when I was eight months old:

On [this date in March], Billie [my grandma] and I gave birth to [Miser Mom].  This is a pretty good stunt, because it happened in Palo Alto while we were still in Oxford.  She is, as you can imagine, having a had a number of similar experiences, the most beautiful creature ever to grace the face of this globe.  Actually, she looks exactly like our own children when they were babies.  We can verify this by running our old movies.  There are scenes in them which in appearance behavior and expressions, could be inserted into the current record we are making of [Miser Mom], and it would appear to be all the same child.  

It's so encouraging to read my grandpa's letters, and to see these threads travel through the generations.  My grandpa became a lifetime member of the NAACP several years before I was born.  I think he would have been very happy about his great-grandsons, even though they don't look exactly like the other children and grandchildren as babies.  But the love and pride, that's a great tradition to be part of, and I'm enjoying my children and grandchildren this summer, as I'm sure he enjoyed his.