I Love You So Much and So Much {pretty, happy, funny, real} (Vol. 18)

May 21, 2015May 21, 2015 / Julie / 11 Comments

{pretty}

My boys are turning into quite the little naturalists, which is obvious to anyone who approaches our back door.

(I require them to leave their rocks, sticks, feathers, etc. outside. Depending on your outlook, that will make me seem either curmudgeonly or very clever.)

When they first started leaving rocks at the door, I was annoyed, not wanting a cluttered entryway. But as their “cowections” grew, I began to warm to them.

At this point, I do believe I might actually find the collections beautiful – or {pretty}, at least.

I certainly like what they encourage in my boys: wonder, curiosity, an eye for detail, one for beauty. They’ve begun paying more attention to the birds – not just noticing them, but identifying them too. Indeed, my four-year-old came to the back door the other day holding a dead bird, its wings splayed and stiff. “Look, Mommy! I found a dead bird skin! It even has claws!”

It was a woodpecker, which is, I think, why he’s been particularly interested in that species lately. The day after the dead one, he spotted another (living) one just outside our kitchen window. He sat for a good hour with his grandmother, perusing her birding field guide and asking her questions.

He even drew one.

Lovely, isn’t it?

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Just one random, unrelated {pretty} — look at those curls!

{happy}

We’ve had lots to be {happy} about this week.

After losing our bees over the winter, new ones arrived.

My oldest son “graduated” from pre-school. (This is happy! I know it is! But I keep having to remind myself that it’s not actually the saddest thing to happen to me in some time.)

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The kids’ chairs all set out with balloons looked so sweet and cheerful.

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Of course, at first the kids were too interested in the balloons to pay much attention to anything else!

Also, there’s this child:

Well, there are these too:

They each make me awfully happy.

But that first one – he’s been such a lovey little love lately. I’ve been hearing “I wuv you, Mommy.” more times a day than I can count. One evening he said, “I wuv you so much and so much” and it struck me so greatly that I’ve been using it with him too.

I love you so much and so much.

Isn’t that just a joy?

Another evening he said, “I wuv you sooo much, Mommy, because you’re so beautiful.” Later it was, “You smell delicious, Mama!”

My brother pointed out to me that my boy could simply be sucking up in anticipation of my discovering some great damage he’s done, but… I don’t think so.

{funny}

{real}

How about for this one I tell you about meeting another blogger in {real} life?

Those of you who follow Catholic All Year may know that the Tierney family has been vacationing in the DC area for the past week. Well, when Kendra mentioned their plans on her Facebook page (including a plan to visit Annapolis), I messaged her to offer her family a tour of the Charles Carroll House. The House was the Annapolis home of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence. And I just so happen to be on its Board of Trustees, so… it worked out!

The Tierneys were lovely – and just what I expected from having read Kendra’s blog. (So, there’s authenticity for you, right?) I hope they enjoyed the visit, and that talk of plaster and paint and persecution and politics didn’t bore them too, too much. (Though we had a wonderful, knowledgeable docent, so I don’t think that’s the case!)

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One of Kendra’s boys found a soccer ball in the bushes. Perfect!

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I love that my boys have been able to spend time at this beautiful, special place.

I know that Kendra’s little Frankie, at least, enjoyed running around the grounds with my boys and those of my friend Betsy. She and her three met us in Annapolis for the tour (during which Betsy monitored my boys) and a playground outing. Thank you, Betsy!

By the way, for those of you who don’t read Catholic All Year, you may (may?) be interested to know that just as I hosted the CWBN Mid-Atlantic Conference at my home a couple of weeks ago, Kendra hosted the CWBN California Conference at her home a week before that. Small world, right?

I think that’s it for me this week! Be sure to stop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for the everyday contentment of {pretty, happy, funny, real}.

Smiles and Summer: {pretty, happy, funny, real} (Vol. 14)

July 3, 2014July 3, 2014 / Julie / 3 Comments

It’s been quite a while since I’ve participated in {p,h,f,r}. We’ve just been through a series of preparing for parties and recovering from parties and dealing with emergencies and illnesses and injuries and… it’s been a little hard for me to see the forest for the trees.

But now I’m breathing a little more slowly and *thinking a little more clearly, and beginning to once again take note of my contentment with our everyday little lives. So I did a quick perusal of my camera’s memory card and I present to you the following:

{pretty}

We’re now getting lots of {pretty} smiles from this little guy, who will be a full three months old on Friday!

And even when he’s not smiling, he sure is pretty.

{happy}

When our oldest son turned four last month, we gave him a sandbox. The boys were so {happy} to be finally helping Daddy put the thing together this past weekend, and then even happier to get to play in it for the first time on Tuesday. They even had friends here to help them break it in.

He’s such a good little worker.

We’ve also been happy to see the bees do well settling into their new home. Brennan brought in some burr comb the other day. (Comb that was built where it shouldn’t have been.) The boys sure did enjoy checking it out!

{funny}

The other day while the boys were playing outside, I suddenly stopped when I remembered it: the sprinkler! In my mother-in-law’s garden! Sure enough, when I got out there, the following scene greeted me:

“We’re aw wet!” Oh, yes they were – clothes and all. I’m so glad I was in the right mood to see how {funny} it all was.

Though I’m not sure the sprinkler thing was quite as funny as the dinosaurs that were – in ever such an orderly manner – exploring our front staircase.

{real}

No. explanation. necessary.

For more images of contentment, don’t miss {pretty, happy, funny, real} at Like Mother, Like Daughter.

*Please note: I hope you’ll stop back here this afternoon, when I’ll be posting on religious freedom and why I think it’s worth worrying about. (Yes, this involves Hobby Lobby. Fun stuff!)

Better With Bees

May 23, 2014May 24, 2014 / Julie / 4 Comments

Hello there! Welcome back to this sporadically-kept-up little blog.

Last week we suffered a great disappointment in the Walsh household:

Those are bees. Tens of thousands of poor little dead bees.

Oh, what a gloomy day it was.

After 18 long months of being bee-less thanks to one household move and one improperly-applied mite treatment, we were all eagerly awaiting the delivery of two new packages of bees. They’d arrive too late to give us hope of a honey harvest this year, but still, once they arrived we’d be beekeepers again. (And by “we” I mean “Brennan.”)

So it was with good cheer that Brennan took off work that Wednesday morning, one eye on the driveway and another on the door. The bees were supposed to arrive by 10:30. He waited and we waited and… no bees. Afternoon calls to UPS and the apiary revealed the sad news: our bees’ truck had suffered a major delay when one package was punctured and (you guessed it) thousands of bees convinced their driver to pull over and call for help. One long, hot day later and the damage was done: 75 packages of bees (nearly a million of the little gals) were lost.

Our own two packages were to be delayed by just one day, but we knew it wasn’t looking good for the critters. Sure enough:

Poor little dead queens.

Dead, dead.

But! One last-day-of-preschool, a few celebratory ice creams, one evening stroll by the water, and a couple of long days later…

This is the spot where his father proposed to me six years and three boys ago. Mushy, mush, mush…

Poor, neglected third baby gets most of his bottles this way.

We got another shot at the deal. This morning, Brennan once again took off work and kept an eager eye on the driveway. Thankfully, he was not to be disappointed again. Some 20,000 of the little ladies arrived safe and sound.

He’s spraying them down with sugar water.

Not only were they alive, but they were nice and docile, which is a great sign. They looked healthy and seemed to have accepted their new queens. (That is, they were working hard to “rescue” them from their cages. Brennan decided to help.)

He had no problem placing the bees in their hives, so as far as we know, the operation was a success this time around. Let’s hope so, not only for the sake of those precious little things, but also for the happiness of my hubby. (And our wannabe-beekeeper little boys.)

“I wanna hold a queen dead bee!”

Keep your fingers crossed. We’d like to keep adding to the following collection. Life is better with bees.

How We Met

July 11, 2013July 11, 2013 / Julie / 10 Comments

Grace of Camp Patton has been telling the story of how she met her husband and decided to turn it into a little “how we met” link-up. (So go check them out!) I have entirely too little time to be doing this right now, but…

Today is my wedding anniversary, and I did post this little piece yesterday in honor of my husband, and (it being just past midnight) I have just been drinking this glass of wine, and my husband did walk in with these lovely roses a few hours ago…

So, all the stars seem to be aligned. I can’t resist. Now is the time for me to write about how Brennan and I met. (In a quickish amount of time, hopefully.)

To put it most simply (and I already mentioned this in my earlier piece), we met on eHarmony. Brennan and I had both been single for quite a long time. He (as always) was very pragmatic in his decision to join – it was just no big deal. I, on the other hand, had anguished over whether to try eHarmony or something like it. I just couldn’t imagine having to tell my family that I’d met someone online. The horror.

Eventually, though, I got over myself and decided to give it a shot. (To give credit where it’s due, I only got over myself when a friend of mine, someone whom I admired, became engaged to a really wonderful man she’d met on eHarmony. Kathleen, I’m looking at you. Thank you.)

By this time, I was in my late twenties and I had almost always been single. I’d had a couple of very quick, not very meaningful relationships looong before and another that went on (and off) for a couple of years, but was like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. More recently, I’d had a couple of guy friends who were maybe-more-than-friends (maybe?) but nothing ever seemed to progress. So I didn’t exactly have high hopes for this internet thing.

But, whaddy’a know? In the slew of guys I was matched with when I opened my account, there was this one who mentioned something about bees. Everybody else was saying how they liked to keep in shape or hang out with friends – one guy even went on and on about how much he loved his iPhone. But the bees… I was intrigued. We progressed through the million-and-one eHarmony steps (me waiting with baited breath each morning to see the response that would be waiting), until we finally spoke on the phone. And he was so nice and talking to him was so easy… it wasn’t long before we set our first date.

Brennan and I decided on the county fair – a fun place to walk around and see some sights; public enough for me to run away if I needed to. (I can be quite practical too, you know.) I did warn him, though: “The fair would be fun, but we’re liable to run into some of my family there. If you have a problem with that, we can go somewhere else.” But he didn’t – not at all. And it’s a good thing, because we did indeed run into some of my family – my great-uncle, a couple of my aunts, a few of my cousins… I think we hit ten of them in all.

But Brennan was such a great sport about it! And we had so much to talk about. It was easy and comfortable… and I was so happy. He was too; later he told me that he knew that very evening that I was the one for him. (Blush.)

Within the next couple of weeks, we went out a few more times, including one impromptu and very cozy weeknight date at a coffeehouse concert in my little city. The next day Brennan left for a family wedding back in his home state of Minnesota. Oh, how I missed him. I was trying not to call and bug him, but when I found out that I had the opportunity to go to a big, fancy dinner through my work – and I could bring a date – I had to call to see if he wanted to join me. He did – no question. When we went to said big, fancy dinner a couple of weeks later, Brennan introduced himself to our fellow guests as my boyfriend. It was hard for me to hide my excitement.

I won’t go on in any more detail. The basics are that a year later, we were engaged. Nine months after that, we were married. Eleven months later, we had our first child. After another fifteen months, we had our second. The time has FLOWN.

And today – exactly four years since we were married and just shy of six years since our first date – I am still amazed by how quickly my life changed. In June of 2007 I was 28 years old, long single, and (though yes, I was still hoping and trying to meet “the one”) just starting to come to terms with the idea that I might never marry. By August, my future husband knew that I was “the one” for him. Soon after, I knew it too.

The whole thing happened so easily and naturally and comfortably. (I think I might have typed the words “easy” or “easily” 13 times so far in this post.) After years of angsting over the whole business of meeting my hypothetical future husband, all of a sudden everything just fell into place. Like it was no big deal. How. Amazing. And what a blessing.

So… that is my own story. But maybe I can be so bold as to suggest that it might hold a little glimmer of hope for some of the long-single ladies out there. I’m not going to tell you “Don’t worry; it will happen.” (Because I hated when people told me that: They didn’t know what the heck would or wouldn’t happen in my life.) But I will tell you that you just never know. Whatever your life ends up looking like later, it will most definitely be different from how it looks right now. You just never know; change could happen soon. And it could happen quickly.

Five Favorites (Vol. 2): Anniversary Edition

July 10, 2013June 6, 2014 / Julie / 7 Comments

Linking up with Hallie for this week’s Five Favorites! Be sure to check out the rest!

(Updated to add that I’m also linking this post to Jenna’s “I Pray I Don’t Forget: What I Love About My Husband” at A Mama Collective. Check out those stories too!)

Tomorrow we’ll celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary. To mark the occasion, I thought I’d dedicate this week’s Five Favorites to my excellent husband, Brennan. So here’s some background on our relationship, Five of my Favorite things about B, and some of my favorite photos from our wedding. (Randomly placed and more than five, because I needed to break up the looong intro in #1.)

— 1 —

Brennan is interested in things – so many things.

In passing, this may seem pretty inconsequential: “Umm, big deal, Julie. Everybody’s interested in something. Even lots of somethings.” So let me back up for a minute and give you a little background on what lead up to our relationship. It should give more meaning to this and some of the other Favorites. Or maybe I just like to provide more information than anyone could possibly care about. One of the two.

Anyway, I was single for what felt like a looong time before I met Brennan. And I mean single single, not dating-but-not-yet-married “single.” Other than three very brief relationships in my early twenties, I was alone and lonely, day-dreaming of my ideal man. (Does that sound a little pathetic? Sorry. It was what it was.) Toward the end of my twenties I had the blessed insight that I needed to adjust my outlook on single life and my approach to maybe/hopefully finding the man with whom I could share a future. All-in-all, it’s a longer topic for another day. But the pertinent part is that I refined the list of qualities I hoped to find in my future husband. I realized that, most of all, I wanted to find a man who was good and kind, moral, responsible, hardworking – and interested in the world around him. I knew that I could never marry a man who didn’t have those values. And I figured that if my husband had an interest in the world, a hunger to learn and do, then our life together would be an open horizon – something to be explored.

We walked to the church, which was super fun,
except for how worried I was about the hem of my dress.

When I met Brennan, everything fell into place very quickly. Good? Kind? Moral? Responsible? Hardworking? Check, check, check, check… and check. But the clincher was really that he was interested in so many things. He caught my eye on eHarmony (yep, that’s how we met) because he said he loved bees.

Bees? Who loves bees? My beekeeper of a hubby, that’s who. A few years before, Brennan had gotten to talking with a co-worker who kept bees as a hobby. B thought it was interesting, so he started to read up on it. He read and read and researched… and the next thing he knew, he was putting together hive boxes and picking up packages of buzzing bees from unhappy postal workers.

We gave out little jars of Brennan’s honey as favors.

Brennan has done the same thing with other hobbies: skiing, target shooting, cooking, home improvement, etc. On the house front, he’s taught himself how to do all sorts of useful things: woodworking, plumbing, mechanics, painting, even pest control. Brennan identifies something he wants to know how to do and he just figures it out. There doesn’t seem to be a “What if?” with Brennan – just a “How?”

Likewise, Brennan has cultivated his interests in history, architecture, and politics by reading and reading and reading… The man loves the internet. And good nonfiction. And audio books that he can soak up on his commute to and from work.

Brennan didn’t grow up doing any of the above; he wasn’t influenced by beekeeper or carpenter or plumber or historian or architect or politician parents. He just happened upon something (many things) that interested him, he had an open mind, and he decided to pursue the new activities and ideas. With gusto. I love that. I can’t wait to see what will be inspiring my husband in ten or twenty years.

— 2 —

Brennan gets stuff done.

Just as I love how Brennan is active in pursuing his many interests, I also love that he takes the initiative to just go ahead and do what needs to be done – even if it’s tedious or unpleasant. Me? I’m the procrastinating type. The type who avoids the things I find intimidating or disagreeable. But, big or small, Brennan does what needs to be done. Hours upon hours of schoolwork while also working full time? He does it. Paying the bills, going to the doctor, cleaning the bathroom? He does it. Doing preventative maintenance on our very old house? He does it. And not just that – he does it well, without a fuss, and with very few complaints. What a great example to set for our boys. (And, er… for me too.)

— 3 —

Brennan is a loving father and a patient teacher to our boys.

On one of our first dates, Brennan and I visited an arboretum. Walking through the trees, Brennan spotted an insect hovering near some leaves. Very gently, he pointed it out to me, studied it a bit, and explained what it was doing. In that moment I thought to myself, “Wow. What a wonderful father he’ll be.” And he is. Brennan had very little experience with children before our boys were born, but he jumped in with both feet – doing all kinds of tedious tasks, showering the boys with hugs and kisses, playing all their wild games, teaching them about the world around them, and showing them great patience and a powerful love.

— 4 —

Brennan is a kind and supportive husband.

This cake tasted so good that our guests gobbled it up before we could even get pieces ourselves!

I love staying home with my boys, but I am a social person by nature and I need to be around other adults. I need some mental stimulation and I need a bit of a break from the constant demands that come with having two very active young boys. I also need to feel like I’m giving something to my community. Brennan understands this, he supports me in my efforts to do things outside of the home, and he has never once complained about it. And it’s no small thing on his part: I serve on the board of a historic home an hour away from our house and I sing in our church’s choir. Both require my presence at times that necessitate B leaving work early. Sometimes hours early, meaning he has to make up those lost hours on another day. But Brennan says that if I really want to do something, I should do it.

— 5 —

Brennan has high standards.

Gotta love the tiny spectators.

Brennan has high standards about lots of things – work, behavior, food, coffee and chocolate, goods and services that we buy – but let me feel flattered for a minute that he also had high standards when it came to finding the person he wanted to marry. When he was doing the eHarmony thing, going out on first date after first date, Brennan’s buddies at work started to give him a hard time. They’d joke about how he rarely made it to a second date. “What’s wrong with her this time?” was their standard question. One friend told him “everyone settles.” But my Brennan? He answered, “Not me.” He shared my conviction that it was better to be single than to be with the wrong person.

Perhaps this last Favorite sounds a bit self-gratifying. Certainly I’m glad that my husband didn’t “settle” for me. But more than that, I admire a person who will hold out and work hard for what he or she really wants. Too often these days, people expect instant gratification – in relationships, in their homes and careers, in their spare time. But Brennan couldn’t be farther from that. To achieve the kind of life he wants, Brennan works hard, he makes smart decisions, he sacrifices, and he is patient. He sets high standards for himself and he keeps to them.

I am so thankful that this man came into my life. I am grateful for all his hard work and careful planning. I am glad to have his love and his good company. I feel blessed to be building a life with him. Happy anniversary, Brennan. I love you.

All photos are credited to Gordon Eisner.