The Shinn Digs

My thoughts feel quite random, but isn’t that sort of what makes a great bouquet? Vibrant colors, flowers of different sizes, shapes and textures. Somehow, the random is put together to make a beautiful piece. I can’t promise this will be beautiful, but certainly random! The bouquet pictured here is my first of what I hope will be a weekly picking from our new “cut flower” garden. I love having fresh flowers in the house, so we decided to do one more (and there may still be another before the summer is through!) garden box. This one is simply meant to grow flowers to cut and bring in to the house or give to someone. The garden is pictured to the left.The last 7 weeks we’ve been a family of six, rather than just four. Our good friends, Matt & Amber Moran, have lived with us while their house was repaired following a dreadful flooding incident caused by the refrigerator! [These machines are dangerous, folks!] Today they moved back into their newly remodeled condo. I must say, I was more than a little sad when Garth moved the two extra chairs away from the dining table tonight. It’s been fun having them join us each evening, though I’m sure their thankful to finally be able to sleep in their own bed after 7 weeks! And our guest room will not stay empty too long … Rebecca’s parents move in tomorrow for the rest of their week’s vacation …

Tonight we had our first salad from our garden! The lettuce, radishes, parsley, and cilantro all were home grown! Oh, and my latest obsession is growing my own sprouts, so there were also some alfalfa sprouts and bean sprouts in there as well (you have to sneak in vitamins wherever possible!) My best guess is that right around FCA Camp time (2 1/2 weeks) is when everything will be ready to harvest … nice. At least we’ll have fresh veggies to greet us when we come home exhausted on July 5th! Enjoy the slide show of garden pics!

I don’t have time to blog… but this is too good. For those who are wondering - yes, the garden is progressing nicely. Maybe will post some updated pictures soon. We’ve planted something in just about every square foot possible in our front and back yard without using the car port roof and digging up the yard. More on the garden in a later post.

Reading someone’s blog is like reading an autobiography … it’s their own perspective on their own life or world around them. It’s such a fun way to keep up with people. Today JJ, a dear friend and four-year Huddle Leader veteran at FCA Camp, wrote a post about her visit last weekend to our house. What a treat to read someone else’s perspective on our life! Certainly times have changed! Last weekend we had friends over to swim - not an unusual happening at our home. But when Matt and Amber, our current house guests, walked in the door, their jaws dropped and they both said, “Your life is so different.” I looked out in the back yard and saw about 13 kids under the age of twelve swimming in the pool - not the typical college students which have made up the pool participants in the past. Times have changed! Thanks to all, like JJ, who have bravely entered in with me and experienced the changes and adapted to them!

This book was really informative. It’s essentially a compilation of a survey of adult children of divorce and adult children of intact marriages. For this particular survey, the researchers limited their data of divorced families to those who continued to be in relationship with both parents after the divorce. There is a great deal of statistical data and interpretation, but it really is informative and helpful.I’ve been formulating my own “theory” that perhaps children from divorced families are not able to articulate their feelings about their parents divorce until they are much older (perhaps adults). I would say the same is true for children in intact families … as a child, we simply don’t have the emotional IQ (and language to go with it) to articulate our present-tense emotions.

I suppose more than anything, this book gave me a small glimpse into the stresses a child must endure when faced with a divorce. As the author describes her own experience, she felt like a football, tossed between parents, spending more time in the air, than in either place. Having not faced this experience as a child, I’m not familiar with this, but am seeing it up close from a different vantage point now. It’s interesting how hard parents work to provided safety and stability, yet how the ideal was never experienced or reached for those participating in the survey.

I did appreciate the author’s challenge that as a society, we’re doing everyone a disservice to consider even the possibility of the “good divorce.” (Between Two Worlds seems to be in direct competition with the findings from The Good Divorce, and refers to that data quite frequently). That term is simply not something the author or survey participants have experienced. There are some really interesting comparisons between those from “good divorces” and “bad, but low conflict” marriages.

For some additional web articles on the idea of “staying together for the sake of the kids” versus “the good divorce,” here are some links:

• About.com article
• USAToday.com article

Any thoughts?

I feel like I’m living in that foggy half conscious state between sleeping and being awake. Things are happening in life that I really didn’t believe would ever happen. There’s the obvious: I’m getting married in a few days … I’ll soon be a mom (of sorts) to two sweet kids … I’ll soon live in a house with a family as opposed to a house full of girls.

But then there are the really weird things … take this morning for example. I now “live” (and by this I mean “sleep and shower”) at Kirsten’s house, 2 blocks from my house (where Garth and the kids live). I normally don’t arrive at my house (where my office is located), until late morning, or well after they leave for work and school. But I have so much to do today, so I told Garth I’d probably be over before they left … which allowed me the opportunity to see the chaos that is “get out the door by 7:40 am so we’re not late to school.” Times like these I want to rub my eyes and think, “I must be dreaming.” For never in my life have these things happened … as Keaton is trying to exit the house, loaded down with his folder and a plate with a piece of toast spread with peanut butter and jelly, Garth reminded him his lunch was on the table. Seeing that his hands were already full, I went to the kitchen to hand him his lunch. As he tried to maneuver the lunch, the toast and the folder, he tilted the plate at too steep an angle, allowing for the perfect opportunity for the toast to slip off the plate and land face down on the floor. He looked up at me sheepishly, and I winked, scraped off the first and most affected layer, reapplied a smearing of jelly, and escorted him out the door, this time carrying the plate of toast for him. I never dreamed these things would happen to me.

Or another example … as I’m cleaning the house a few days ago, I found silly putty … in several weird and strange places (I found pieces of putty, not the full glob of putty encased in the shell). I always keep my silly putty at my desk (for stress relief), so it is rather odd to find pieces somehow ground into the couch, or the carpet, or on the ceiling (I made the ceiling part up … I didn’t find it there. C’mon … do you really think I have time to clean the ceiling!)

Still another example is the endless chatter at the dinner table. I don’t know who Hannah Montana is, or why her parents would name her that, but she is talked of frequently. And I’ve never seen a high school musical that would generate much more than a brief mention in the small town paper, yet there is quite a buzz about High School Musical, which I’ve now seen parts of over a dozen times. Or the hilarious questions I must find answers to … What is communism? Why can’t we visit Cuba? JP, do you buy all your clothes at the thrift store? Do you think Zak would rather have the blue bed for Christmas?

I’m rubbing my eyes … that foggy state between waking and sleeping. Pinch me … I must be dreaming!