From the mouths of babes: Downs Christmas letter

Here are some highlights from 2008...

Funniest:After repeated attempts to get Zach to stop picking his nose, I finally ask him, “Why do you keep picking your nose?” He replies, “Because my brain keeps telling my finger to go in there.”

Displaying the most cultural sensitivity (“When in Rome…”)We are looking at horses in a pasture during a visit to my parent’s house. After a few minutes Zach asks, “How come none of the horses are saying, 'Ney'?” Jake responds, “We have to get to know them better first. And we should try to speak their language to them.” Then he goes up to the horses and starts to say, “Ney, Ney.”

The “Be careful what you say, it will come back to haunt you…” prize:I am always lecturing the boys about other less fortunate kids who have far less than we do, especially when they are complaining about something silly. I usually say, “Find a real problem before you complain to me.” One day Will is complaining and I hear Jake say, “Will, that’s not a real problem, find a real problem!”


Most literal (#1, #2, #3):Zach is sick and needs a syringe of medicine. I try to give him a dose but realize I didn’t get any in the syringe so nothing comes out when I put it in his mouth and dispense the syringe. Zach looks puzzled when nothing goes into his mouth and asks, “Hey, is that air medicine?”

Zach comes up to me when I am reading a book and asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m reading a book. He responds, “How come I can’t hear you if you are reading?” I tell him I’m reading it to myself in my mind. He leans in close to my head and puts his ear next to mine, listening carefully. Finally he says, “Yes, I think I can hear something in there!”

We saw the movie “Bolt” as a family, which is animated with a voiceover by Miley Cyrus (Hannah Montana). After the movie, Will tells me that it was Hannah M. doing the voice of the girl in the movie. This was clearly stunning to Jake whose eyes got big as saucers at this news. You could see the wheels turning in his brain as he tried to figure out how they made her voice come out of the little girl in the movie. Finally he asks, “Wait, was she in the theater standing behind the screen?”

Most astute (and sad) observation:Jake: “I’ve noticed that little girls and little boys and grown-up boys are all fast, but usually grown-up moms are slow.”

Heavenly impressions:The boys understand generally what Dad does for a living and we’ve also explained that the reason Dad has to work is to make money to live. One day Will asks me, “Mom, are there going to be battles in heaven?” (No) “So, no wars in heaven?” (No) “How about money, will we need money to live?” (No) “Yeah, Daddy won’t have to work in heaven!”

Zach is having a hard time with separation because of missing mom. One day when I come to pick him up he is surprisingly OK and tells me it is because “While you were gone I hugged you in my heart.” I ask him how he got the idea to do that. “God told me to do it.”

During a discussion of how God made everything in the world, Will offers, “I know how God made Hisself. He was in heaven and he said, ‘Let there be me’ and poof, there was He.”

Sweetest:Zach knows I’ve been sad about him getting bigger and turning 4. I always tell him that I want him to stay 3. He says one day, “When I get taller do you miss my small?” Finally, the big 4th birthday arrives. He tells me, “Cheer up mommy, it’s gonna be lots of fun. And I promise I’ll give you the biggest piece of birthday cake.”

Most appalling behavior by a mother in front of her children:It was a long fall, full of volunteering and cooking for various events on base, particularly things related to Mike’s squadron. After a particularly grueling week where I’d baked 6 dozen cookies, among many other things, Mike tells me on a Sunday afternoon that there is another event on Monday and asks if I can send something in for lunch for the squadron. We are all in the car, and in a moment of weakness (thinking I am more or less muttering to myself), I respond, “Sure, I don’t have anything else to do. It’ll be just like every other day that I’m cooking for the stupid squadron.” (I know, I know, it’s terrible!) I hear gasping from all three of my boys in the back seat. Will says, “Mom, Santa can hear you!” Jake says, “Mom, you should never call anything stupid and you should enjoy doing things for Dad!” Zach says, “Mommy, you’re going to get a lump of coal in your stocking!” So, I felt very reassured that my boys are learning to have the proper perspective on things, if not because of me, at least in spite of me! And if anyone from the 303rd is reading this, please forgive me!

The "Thank you Brits for not dumbing-down Thomas the Tank Engine" prize:

Zach, whose whole life revolves around Thomas the Tank Engine can often be caught saying things that he hasn't picked up from us. Thanks like, "I got myself into a right pickle." To his brother: "You're an impertinant scaliwag." Or, "We've got to do it straight away." He uses "nearly" rather than "almost" as in "I nearly bumped into the table." He's always remarking on whether things are done "properly" (OK, this he might have gotten from me!).

Most heart-wrenching:I’ve told the twins how I lost five babies who are in heaven because they didn’t live to be born. They know they are adopted. A few days after I explained about the babies we had lost, Will says, “I’ve been thinking about it mommy and it’s really good that we were born in another lady’s tummy. We might have died if we were in your tummy. This way we got to be born in her tummy but still get to have you as a mom.”

Sadly, I didn't actually send the letters this year, I hope to get to it, but it will obviously be an New Year's letter, if it happens at all. So, this blog post is my closest approximation of a Merry Christmas greeting. Here goes, "Merry Christmas!" We pray for God's blessings on you and your family across the globe now and throughout the coming year.

One Night in Budapest

There are pros and cons to military life and how you feel about those pros and cons is mostly dependent on whether you are a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty person.

For example, on the one hand you may have to live in far-flung places like Asia. On the other, you get to live in far-flung places like Asia.

On the one hand you have to pull chalks and move your family every couple of years. On the other hand, a new adventure is always just around the corner, and if you happen to hate the place you are living, at least you know you won’t be there too long.

One of my favorite things about military life is the fact that you are always running into people you’ve met in other places. This can be a good news/bad news scenario, depending on how you feel about the people you keep running into.

Take what happened to me this summer when I was signing my kids up for Vacation Bible School at the Chapel. I run into a woman who looks very familiar to me. I get the feeling we’ve met and spent some time together. This is not an uncommon experience for military folk and the reflex is to go through the mental rolodex of places you’ve lived, searching the grey matter for clues. When this fails, you have no choice but to ask the person who they are and where you've met, which can be awkward.

Finally, I introduce myself, which prompts her to do the same, and I’m stumped because even the name doesn’t jog my brain. I come clean and tell her she looks familiar and we start doing the inventory of stations. Florida? No…. Northern California? No…. Rhode Island? Nope….. Alabama? No….. D.C? Yes, when were you there? Yes we were there then…what were you doing? No, it wasn’t D.C…. Germany? No…

Then she gets the look which tells me the ah-hah moment has arrived, “We had dinner with you and your husband one night in Budapest.” And it all comes together.

Jenny and her husband Steven were in Budapest because he was an Olmstead Scholar (he’s exceedingly bright). We were living in Germany and wanted to visit Hungary. A mutual friend suggested we meet them since visiting a city with someone who lives there is much more fun than going it alone..

Which brings me to the next thing I love about the military--it makes for an connection with people who are otherwise strangers.

Steven gave us a tour of the city and Jenny met us out for a dinner, which was distinctive because they served us delicacies like whole cow tongue (hairs intact). This may be why I just barely remembered Jenny—I was scarred by the tongue experience. We went back to their place and spent a pleasant evening together.


Eight years and several moves later, the Downs and the Renners collide in Korea. It's their second visit to the Pen - Steven passed up the chance to get his Ph.D at Oxford to come here. Pause and reflect on that for a moment.I'll wait.

The upside is that because they are here, we reap the benefit of getting to really know them, far better than we were able to during one night in Budapest. And we know that even when our time in Korea is over, and we go our separate ways, we won’t say good-bye, just “See you somewhere…”

What We've Lost

 
My book club is reading A Severe Mercy, a memoir by Sheldon Vanauken. The author describes going back to visit his boyhood home, called Glenmerle, after a decade of being away. Vanauken lived there through his early 20s until they lost the home after his father's death in WWII. That his home had a name should evoke a certain image of just how grand it was. Here are some excerpts about Glenmerle and his childhood:

"On either side beyond the poplars lay the gate meadows where the wild strawberries grew. An image leaped into his mind of a sunny white tablecloth and a blue and white bowl heaped with small exquisite red strawberries and flaky shortcake in the thick yellow Jersey cream from the near-by farm..."


The gardner’s grandson was his playmate when he was a child. They swum and fished the stream with bent pins and prowled the woods. They snuck out at night to pinch watermelons from the farmer—stolen watermelons are sweeter—and brought them back where, on top of the haystack beside the cabin, they would eat the dripping hearts while bats flitted across the sky...


 
"He remembered as though it were but a few days ago that winter night, himself too young even to know the meaning of beauty, when he had looked up at a delicate tracery of bare black branches against the icy glittering stars: suddenly something that was, all at once, pain and longing and adoring had welled up in him, almost choking him. He had wanted to tell someone, but he had no words, inarticulate in the pain and glory. It was long afterwards that he realized that it had been his first aesthetic experience. That nameless something that had stopped his heart was Beauty. Even now, for him, ‘bare branches against the stars’ was a synonym for beauty."
 
Vanauken's description of his childhood and the places and the memories that shaped him left me melancholy for two reasons.

First, as a military family we never live anywhere long enough for the boys to collect memories of “that one special place” that will mean everything to them looking back as adults. For me, that place was (and remains) the lake in North Carolina where I spent summers visiting my grandparents (and now my parents). There’s something about the continuity of not just people, but a place, that anchors a soul.

The second thing that struck me was what we’ve lost in the name of progress. The author’s descriptions of his life reveal an un-hurriedness, an ease to living, where time was “wasted” by our standards; reading, fishing, "prowling" the woods or skipping rocks on a pond. Family gatherings, an encounter with nature, a good meal or just a bowl of fresh strawberries were commonplace and yet they nourished his spirit and, over time,  defined him.

In contrast, I think about the settings and the "scheduled-ness" of our lives, where children rarely spend a whole day playing in the woods, certainly not unsupervised. Instead they have play dates at parks where they climb jungle gyms, not trees. An hour or so later, we cart them off to the next thing, soccer or tae kwondo or a fast food dinner eaten far too quickly even by fast food standards. Our time with extended family is precious but infrequent, and I fear that the memories, so few, will fade from, rather than imprint onto their hearts.

Mike exposes our boys to beauty and nature and talks to them frequently about the wonder of the creation.  But when they are surrounded by strip malls and suburbs and traffic and high rises and schedules that keep them jumping from one thing to the next, I wonder what they will remember most—the 3 hour hikes we squeezed in on Saturday afternoons or the frenetic pace of their everyday lives? I wonder if we have given them enough space in their schedules and quiet time in nature so that they will one day be struck by beauty in a way that stops their heart and creates longing and passion?

Much about the places and pace of our lives cannot be changed. We are committed to the military, so continuity in one place is not in the cards for us. Many of the demands of our schedule cannot be avoided, but some of it is a choice. I want to be more intentional about how we spend our time and keep "the main things, the main things.”

I also want to be honest about the trade-offs we have embraced as a society. We've exchanged Glenmerle for a virtual reality life lived through an avatar in a video game or on the internet, a relentless 24/7 news cycle where all that's wrong in the world gets played out before our eyes, Blackberrys (not the kind you eat), text-messages, celebutantes, cell phones we won't put down, fast cars, fat bodies, and STRESS. It was a devil's bargain and it can be called many things but progress isn't one of them. I don't want to romanticize days gone by too much. I know each age has it's pitfalls. It just seems that we have lost so very much...
The pictures in this post are from the year we spent in Newport, RI while Mike was attending the Naval War College. They remind me of Vanauken's description of Glenmerle. Newport is stunning in every season and that year we rented a cottage right on the beach. The picture above is our front yard. We encountered nature in all its splendor every day during our year there. Our boys played on the beach most days and our dining room table offered a better view than any restaurant in town. Our schedule was more relaxed because Mike was in school and we had time to waste, walking on the beach mostly, and waste it we did. We hosted parties, often, with our military friends, who become our family, when biological family is hard to come by. However fleeting, one thing I know for certain, the Downs' boys will remember Newport.

I don’t know how to recreate that time, but I’m glad we had it.

This is the view from our front yard during one of our lawn parties (actually above and below are 2 separate parties)

Will and Jake on the Cliffwalk across from our house...

Another beach nearby with St. George's boarding school in the background...

Black Ops

Mike's squadron is the 303rd Intel Squadron, affectionately known as "Skivvy Nine" which makes perfect sense if you ask me. But for those of you for whom this is clear as mud I will just tell you that back in the day, it was actually the 6903rd IS, but the Koreans couldn't pronounce "sixty-nine." Instead it was invariably called "skivvy nine oh three." So there you have it.

But I have digressed from the real reason for this post, which is to tell you about the black ops mission that the boys and I planned and executed this week. The last day of each month Skivvy Niners have a promotion ceremony for those who are being promoted. On behalf of the Skivvy Nine spouses group we made congratulations posters and baked some pumpkin bread to be loaded into goody bags. The boys decorated the bags and all I can say is ADORABLE. They started writing things on them like "My name is Zach," and "My name is Will." I didn't have the heart to tell them it wasn't about them, but about someone else's accomplishment. I figured no one would mind since the pictures were so darned cute and self-absorption at their age is still expected.

The first picture is a picture of the bags en masse.


This is a picture of one of Zach's bags. He has just now started drawing people.


The final picture is Will's. He really is our artist and I was so taken with his depiction of himself on the bag.I must say that attempting a black ops mission with three little very excited boys is a daunting task. Trying to "sneak" up to the doors and surreptitiously tape up a sign and plant a goody bag to the door is, let's just say, challenging. So, truthfully, we did get busted, a couple of times, but I'd say the intended targets were delighted, so it all worked out and the boys are looking forward to next month's undercover mission.

303rd IS Combat Dining In

None of this will seem unusual to any of you military types, but to those of you not in the military, these pictures are from a "combat dining in." There are (water)guns and humvees involved, strategy, offensives, and most certainly battles. This looks like way more fun than the buttoned up dining outs that spouses are invited to. In the picture above, Mike arrives to kick-off the festivities.





My only question is why the ladies in this picture have puny little squirt bottles relative to their male counterparts with the gigunda squirtguns. What gives?