Lest I Forget

One of the first poems Jack studied this year is "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. We came to the following stanza: They almost devour me with kisses, Their arms about me entwine, Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen In his Mouse Tower on the Rhine. We had to look up this reference because we live close to Bingen and well, a Mouse Tower just sounds interesting. After reading about it, we knew we wanted to go see it for ourselves. Imagine our surprise to discover that it is only a few hundred yards away from the museum where we learned about St. Hildegard of Bingen last year! The weather was cold and windy and we could not access the castle or the tower from where we were. We will have to revisit this site again when the weather is more agreeable. We actually started our day in Mainz, which is about 25 minutes away from Bingen. We went to the Gutenberg Museum. We paid the entrance fee, and the clerk told us that there was a live demonstration ...

Sunday was beautiful, so I suggested we go check out a park I had seen listed as one of the top 7 parks in our area. As with so many things here in Germany, there was no specific address listed in the article and they even said that it can be challenging to find! I made my best guess and plugged that into the GPS and we were off. For once, I was right, and we had no trouble finding the park or the pirate ship! The water was only a few inches deep, and my kids had such a blast navigating those little, wooden rafts. When they finally tired of being wet, and their stomachs were wanting nourishment, we wandered across the park to the mini-golf course, where we had more fun and some food, and maybe even a glass of wine for the mama.  Because they are and because he oftentimes is, I would like to title this one "Crabby Pants".  This duck was floating on another pond nearby, but I startled him while trying to capture the scene and he ...

Sunrise from a few days ago. This mornings sunrise amid the fog. Taken only a few minutes after the first picture. The sun moves amazingly fast! I never used to be a morning person. In the quest to find some quiet time in my day, I started setting the alarm clock for 6:00am. After many months, my body is naturally waking at this time. I arise, start the coffee and grab my Magnificat. I head to the living room and sit in my favorite spot. There is a huge window that affords me a spectacular view of the distant mountain. Now that fall is here, the sunrise is right around my waking time, and not at 4:30, like it is in the summer months. Every morning, there is a new and completely different show that happens outside that window. Some days are so cloudy that it just naturally gets lighter, but there is no great glowing orb rising from behind the hills. But, oh, those days when the sun does burst forth! It is a remind...

Last week we quietly celebrated Therese's birthday. We will have a couple of friends go do something with us soon, and she still gets to shop with the birthday check from Grandma and Pa. I once again had the children wrap her presents. I like this idea a lot. Plus, this time, both Jack and Anna gave her something on their own. She requested a strawberry cake,  lots of sprinkles, and that she could write her own name on the cake. Wish granted. She and I got down on the kitchen floor with a tube of icing and worked together. Dad following directions from Mom, since she still cannot cook. Sprinkles are just so much fun!  

For the entire month of August, Tony was TDY in Scotland. In the military life, it is well-known that bad things happen while your husband is away on a TDY. Armed with this knowledge, I steeled myself as Tony pulled away in the wee dawn hours of the morning. "I can do this", I told myself. He has been deployed for a whole year. This is one month. My husband, at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo 2016 The first incident was not too bad, considering that it could have been much worse. There was this annoying little light that would come on the van's dashboard every time I went around a sharp curve. As soon as the curve straightened out, the light went off. Surely, I thought, if it was a big deal, the light would stay on. Wrong thought. I was extremely low on oil for some odd reason. I was relating the funny light story to a friend at church who immediately checked my oil level. It was bone dry. After adding 3 quarts, it barely reached the safe line on the oil dips...