Empty Nesters - Remember When

Today our youngest turned 25 years old.  I can't believe.  Where did the time go?  Not only that, but he bought a home.  It's about 35 miles away from us, but it is close to his work.  He was living in Welsh with his brother, Russ, but now he's on his own.  We helped move him in.  His Momma has been helping him clean and get everything in order.  We are proud of him and all of our kids.  Here he is standing by his front door:

I am positive that many of you who are reading this have experienced the same bittersweet feelings I'm trying to express.  Since welcoming them into the world, you try to do your dead level best to introduce them to Jesus, parent them properly, instill values and teach them skills so that they can make it on their own in a dog eat dog world.  You think you have all the time in the world.  But you don't!

And then the day comes when they pack up and leave.  And the house becomes big and quiet.  You are left painfully aware of the mistakes you made in parenting and wishing that you might have done things differently or better.  We are frail and faulty, right?  You've shot your quiver of arrows out into the world.  You pray for your kids who are forging their own way in a cruel world.

You are left with silence and memories of their childhood.  Time marches on.  It waits for no one.  It's a stark reminder that I should be a better steward of it.  Looking back I remember Benjamin as a young boy out in the side yard with his rifle and Confederate Kepi hat reenacting Pickett's charge.  He'd get shot by a sharpshooter and lay writhing on the ground.  We watched from a distance as he imagined various combat situations.  He and Russ fought many battles against the enemy and each other with Air-soft guns.  In fact, look what I found years later in the side yard:

Look right in the center of the photo

Can you see the bright orange air soft pellet?  I think decades from now someone will find one of these and wonder what it is.  Years ago in digging up the bed in our garden in the side yard to plant Irish potatoes, I unearthed an old blue porcelain marble.  Years and years ago, in the same place where Benjamin and Russ battled it out, another young man played marbles, enjoying times of imagination and fun, with parents looking on at the innocence and vivid imagination you have in childhood.

In that same general location, eighteen years prior I constructed a simple swing for Laura Lee and hung it in a live oak tree.  She'd swing and I'd push her.  Good times!  She (and Russ) have homes of their own now, and the swing sits dormant, swaying only when a swift breeze pushes it.

Alan Jackson sings a song called "Remember When," and it gets me in the 'feels' whenever I hear it.  

Verse 4 says:

Remember when
The sound of little feet
Was the music we danced to week to week
Brought back the love, we found trust
Vowed we'd never give it up
Remember when

Verse 6 says:

Remember when

We said when we turned gray

When the children grow up and move away

We won't be sad, we'll be glad

For all the life we've had

And we'll remember when

I think Alan Jackson puts it in the right perspective.  Although it's sad, we'll be glad, for we shared a lot of love and life.  We often talk on this blog about raising animals and plants and honeybees, but the most important, by far, crop we raise is children.

Leavin' On A Jet Plane...

All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go, I'm standing here outside your door...

The year I was born (1966), John Denver wrote a song that was later sung by the trio Peter, Paul, and Mary and was a big hit.  The song, of course, was "Leavin' on a jet plane."  This past weekend our oldest daughter, Laura Lee, left on a jet plane en route to Capetown, South Africa, where she'll spend the summer on a mission trip with a group from her church.

Tricia and I drove her to Dallas where she boarded a British Airways flight that (much later) landed in London at Heathrow airport.  The next day she boarded another long flight to Johannesburg and then another to Capetown.  We kept track of all the flights on the flight tracking site, FlightAware.

Here we are in the airport waiting for another member of her group.  We made it to the airport after making only a few wrong turns.  We joked around, saying, "Maw & Paw come to the city!" Laura is actually joining the rest of the group a little late. Since she is a teacher, she couldn't leave until her school let out for the summer.

Laura met up with one of the members of her group, checked her two bags, and got ready to board.

She'll be coming back in mid to late July, so that she'll have a couple of days to get over jet lag before she has to report back to school to get ready for a new class of third graders to teach.

We told her goodbye and put her in God's hands.

So kiss me and smile for me

Tell me that you'll wait for me

Hold me like you'll never let me go

'Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane

Don't know when I'll be back again

Oh babe, I hate to go

Etched in Stone

Yesterday I noticed something that I walk past everyday without paying much attention to.  Like many people do, when we poured the slab for our driveway on August 15, 2002, we had our kids put their handprints, their footprints, and their names into the wet concrete.  Fourteen years later I look at those inscriptions and think about the multitudes of changes that have taken place since then.  Laura has now graduated from college and is teaching third grade at a school.  Russ is a senior at LSU.  Benjamin is now driving!

Etched in Stone

Similar to marking heights with a yardstick and putting dates on the wall as kids grow, marking things in concrete is a way of preserving an event in time and saving it for later.  Times change, we grow up, we have experiences - both good and bad that shape us and mold us, but a reminder of that little 9 year old girl who excitedly put her hands in the concrete is there when I walk out the garage door.

Laura Lee

So is that little 7 year old boy with a big smile and full of happiness, always clowning around.

And so is that little 1 1/2 year old Benjamin who was squirming around so much you can't really tell that the marks are handprints and footprints at all!

We've been doing this for thousands of years.  Yahweh inscribed the 10 commandments in stone and gave them to Moses atop Mount Sinai.  Egyptians carved intricate hieroglyphics in stone.  When we want to honor great figures in history, we carve memorials in stone either etching their names or their likenesses so that we can remember them.

But regardless of the permanence of stone etchings, nothing beats looking at or spending time with the real thing!

Great faces.  Great places.

Kid, You’ll Move Mountains!

How fast four years flies by!  It seems like it was just yesterday that I posted This Post explaining how we were moving our daughter, Laura Lee, out of the house and into her dorm room at LSU to begin her first semester at college.  And now… Well, Friday we traveled to Baton Rouge to attend her Graduation Ceremonies.  I’m telling you, where does the time go?  She graduated with the highest honors – Summa Cum Laude and we are very proud of her.  A lot of work went into her Bachelor's Degree and it was all worth it.  She’ll be teaching Third Grade in Baton Rouge starting in mid-July.

There’s a lot of mixed emotions with this big event.  Happy that she’s beginning a life on her own.  Proud of her success in the classroom and of her creativity and talents.  Protective of her as she goes out on her own.  Prayerful for her direction and continued success.  Sad as she’s officially stretching her wings and leaving the nest, flying out on her own.  Reflective and introspective as I wonder if we gave her the tools in her toolbox to enable her to go out and thrive on her own.

LSU has a Main Ceremony for all graduates in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center at 8AM.  The family arrived in Baton Rouge bright and early to cheer for her.  Let me back up a minute.  She didn’t want to go to the ceremony.  She said, “No one goes to the 8AM ceremony.  It is too early.”  We insisted that she worked too hard to miss this big day and she begrudgingly showed up.

What if you threw a party and nobody showed up?

She was right!  The picture above shows the total number of graduates attending the 8 AM ceremony.  No doubt, the few that were there were likely brow-beaten by their parents to attend.  Laura sent us texts during the ceremony that said, “Look at me – one of the 8 people that is here!” and “I think I’ll do my nails.  Is that okay?”

2016 Spring Graduates of Louisiana State University set a record as the largest graduating class in history with a total of 4,102 graduating.  LSU has enrollment of 31,527 in the Fall of 2015.  Here’s some neat statistics:

Graduates in Laura Lee's class represent:

·         61 of 64 Louisiana Parishes

·         46 US States

·         61 Foreign Countries

·         The oldest graduate was 81 years old

·         The youngest graduate was 20 years old

·         Females made up 54% of the graduating class

We took a lot of photos to capture the big day.  Here’s our girl amidst the throng of fellow graduates on the floor of the PMAC after the ceremony.  She might be a little hard to pick out.

I did it!

Here’s our girl posing with the Bronze Mike the Tiger right in front of the live Mike the Tiger’s cage.

Stand right up and ROAR!

My Mom and Dad made the journey to hoot and holler for her and we snapped a photo of them with her under the “stately oaks and broad magnolias.”

Graduation with the Grandparents

And here’s the proud parents with the graduate:

And the brothers

Russ, Laura Lee & Benjamin

In front of Tiger Stadium in cap and gown:

On the ramp of the PMAC in front of Mike the Tiger’s tower.

Now, later throughout the day, each respective college convenes for the diploma ceremony.  This is where you get your name called and you walk across the stage, shake hands with the Dean and receive your diploma while your family screams and claps in happiness.  At 11 AM Laura Lee’s college, The College of Human Sciences and Education commenced the celebration.  I’m happy to say many more people attended!

If you look closely in the next picture you can see her and her name on the big screen receiving the piece of paper that represents many hours of hard work.

So proud of our girl:

We met at 1:15 for a celebratory meal at Juban’s.  Here’s the family smiling and about to enjoy a good meal and fellowship.  Juban’s is famous for their “Hallelujah Crab,” a fried soft-shelled crab stuffed with crawfish tails, shrimp and crabmeat, topped with Creolaise sauce.  The reason it is called Hallelujah crab is that it is arranged on the plate with the claws up in the air.  You can sort of see that on Dad’s plate below.  Hallelujah, also though, that Laura Lee graduated and did so well in her studies!

Here’s the pretty girl at the head of the table

And finally with flowers on the way out of the restaurant

Congrats Laura Lee!  We love you!

Juban’s appropriately had a special menu for the 2016 graduates and on it, the quoted a passage from Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the places You’ll Go!”  I read that book to Laura Lee when she was just a little bitty thing and I thought it was appropriate for the occasion.  I’ll share a few lines from it now:

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy girl who'll decide where to go.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)

KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!

So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
You're off the Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!

It’s me again.  We love you, Laura Lee!  Happy Graduation and we wish you all the best that God has in store for you…

A Work of Art

This blog post is quite the quantum leap from yesterday's post about getting down in the dirt and digging up potatoes.  Today we're going to get ourselves cleaned up and get cultured and critique some art.  Years ago there was an art exhibit in New Orleans featuring the artwork of French impressionist Edgar Degas.  Our daughter Laura Lee really likes Degas art - always has.

So when her art professor in her college class assigned the class a senior art project, Laura knew exactly what she wanted to do.  The assignment was for the students to 'become the artwork' of their favorite painting.  Sounds kinda intriguing, does it not?  Laura and her good friend decided that they would 'become' the Degas painting, "Two Dancers Entering the Stage".  Here is the painting:

Edgar Degas' painting, "Two Dancers Entering the Stage"

So the girls got busy and painted the backdrop on a sheet.  Then they got dancing outfits and painted both the tights and dance skirts and even painted themselves so that they would look like a painting. They stood in front of the backdrop that they painted and posed like the two dancers in the original painting and had a friend snap a photo of them.

I think the results were stunning.  What do you think?

Living replica of Degas' work (Laura Lee on right)

Pretty cool, huh?  She got an A+ on her final art project of her senior year in college and is set to graduate on Friday, May 13th.

Oh, here are the subjects of the painting once they stepped off of the canvas:

Stepped right off the canvas

Mom & Dad are proud of their creative girl!