Family Update

The summer days are over, and autumn has officially begun. With the new season come hopes of cooler weather and beautiful foliage. There is a certain sense in which the year is coming to a close. The days are getting shorter, and the nights longer, and our children are growing up. People tell us to treasure the days when our children are small, and, to be sure, there are many wonderful memories. Some, however, I am not so sure how to categorize. In my mind’s eye, I can see Paul and myself in fifty years, sitting in our rocking chairs and reminiscing…

S: Paul, we’re getting old.

P: Yep, but you’ll always be older than me! Har! Har!

WHAP! (sound of cane hitting shins)

P: Ouch! Take it easy – I was just joking!

S: You had better be glad I am not as strong as I used to be, or I would need a shoulder replacement after that!

P: I wonder what the kids are doing these days. I sure miss the times when they were small.

S: I do, too. Do you remember the summer of ’07?

P: Sure I do – what a summer! All three of the little ankle-biters were busy that year!

S: Josiah sprinkled his legos over the floor every morning as soon as he woke up, in the event that if an early-morning burglar got into the house, he wouldn’t get too far. We never had any burglars, of course, but many were the mornings that I had to remove the imbedded legos from my feet.

P: Whatever happened to all those legos, anyway?

S: I believe most of them ended up in the super slide of our first trailer. I never tried to dig them out, because of the entire package of 450 straight pins that Esther deposited in the same slideout that summer. That girl was into everything!

P: Her favorite words were “me-me” and “no-no” – the latter because she heard it so often, I guess. She was the human pinball that year – ran into everything. She could find something new with which to injure herself every day, I believe.

S: She was particularly bad about banging her mouth. It is a wonder she still has teeth! I can’t imagine what the dentist would have thought had she been old enough to go. He would have wondered why a fifteen month old child only had three teeth, and those ones were green!

P: Ah, yes. Many thanks to Crayola for assuring us that our daughter’s favorite low-fat snack was also non-toxic.

S: And don’t forget about Abigail! That was the summer that I was trying to potty train her. She messed her clothes every day. And then the washer broke. Actually, it still worked – just leaked like a sieve. Remember that?

P: Yes. It leaked down into the storage bay and ruined a box of books.

S: And then you tried to fix it yourself.

P: Hey – the Lord called me to preach, not to fix appliances! Anyway, it turned out fine. Just because you could only use the washer outside didn’t mean we went around wearing dirty clothes. Besides, we could kind of get in touch with our redneck side that way.

S: Yes, those were the good old days. I’m glad that we can sit back and laugh about it now. It wasn’t always so easy back then. I guess, at the time, we failed to realize that they were memories in the making.