A week ago, our middle son, his wife, his five children (aged 8 down to 9 months), and his mother-in-law moved in with us. His mother-in-law has since moved out of the basement guest room, to make room for our youngest son's wife. This daughter-in-law drove from Nashville and arrived on Saturday, and she'll be joined by her hubby tomorrow night. He will be flying into DC after finishing up a work project.
Oh yes, I almost forgot to add that on Saturday, our youngest son's two cats also moved into the basement with their mama. Aside from a giant playroom and a storage area down there, there's a full bath and a cozy guest bedroom. The cats are living large.
Our middle son and his tribe are not having nearly as comfortable an experience as the kitties, however, as the seven of them are sharing two bedrooms upstairs. My boy and his wife are sleeping in twin beds, like Rob and Laura Petrie. (Does that reference to The Dick Van Dyke Show expose just how old I am?) The 3-year-old, who slept in a crib at home, is using our decades-old port-a-crib in the room with her parents. The baby is still co-sleeping with his mom, so that works out okay. The oldest child, a boy, is on an air mattress on the floor in the other bedroom, where two of his younger sisters are sharing a full-sized bed. It's what you would call a full house.
The reason this little family is here is that they are having a house built, and in a perfect world it should have been done by now. But with all the supply chain issues, weather issues (and to be honest, problems with their contractor), there have been numerous delays. They are very close to getting a certificate of occupancy, and all of their household goods had to be moved over to the new house a week ago so that they could vacate the house they were living in, because they had renters (who'd had a house fire and lost everything) who needed to move in there ASAP.
Does this sound complicated? It is.
So our boy's family will be living with us, about 45 minutes from my son's place of employment and about an hour from the three big kids' Catholic school, for an indefinite amount of time; but luckily, Friday was the kids' last day of school until after the New Year. So at least having to get them fed, dressed, and out of the house by 6:30-6:45 every morning to get them there on time is no longer part of their daily routine. Their parents are pretty relieved about that.
Needless to say, even if the house gets miraculously finished in the coming days, they will not be settled enough to have things up and running (would they even be able to find their tree?!), so they will be spending Christmas here with us.
I'm thinking this will be my last post until after the holidays, but I thought I'd leave you with a few images of life around our house this Christmas. It's pretty loud, and it's pretty crazy. But it's also very sweet.
This will probably be a slightly more excitement-filled Christmas morning than we've had in a while. It should be fun.
Here's wishing you and yours the very merriest of Christmases and the happiest of New Years! May the peace of Christ be with you during this holiday season and always! God bless you!
I meant to blog on the 6th...but life got in the way! I hope it was a happy one for everyone!
Two of our sons celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas in a special way. Here are a couple of pictures son #1's wife sent us from their celebration.
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| This fella is a dinosaur fanatic, which you might have guessed. |
And since it’s almost Christmas, here’s the new hay manger our son just got for feeding his cows this winter. A bit big to be a bed for the Baby Jesus...but a manger nonetheless!
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Wishing you all a blessed Advent, dear readers.
What a crazy development: my 11-year-old twin granddaughters are both taller than I am! The older of the twins (by about three minutes) is 5'8" now, taller than I've ever been.
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| I am protecting her privacy; but I'm also protecting you from seeing my just-woke-up face. Yikes! You're welcome! |
The younger twin is 5'6" and change, which is just about the height I was before I began to shrink. I'm at least an inch shorter than I used to be. AAAGGGHHH! How did this happen? And by "this," I mean two things: how did these granddaughters get old enough to be taller than I am, and how did I get old enough to shrink?
It's hard to accept that these two sweet girls who made me a grandmother for the first time in 2011 are turning into young women. Where have the years gone?! Soon, their American Girl dolls will be discarded and replaced by more grown-up interests. It's sad, but also just exactly the way it should be.
Being out here with them and their siblings this week has been so special, but our time together has passed very quickly. Yesterday morning at breakfast, the twins' 9-year-old sister wondered why we just couldn't stay until Christmas.
Well...that is not an option, dear one. If we could be two places at once, we surely would! But we have a home and a life to go back to in VA, with people there who also depend on us and like to know we're close, people whom we love as intensely as we do those who live out here in Iowa. So today we'll be on the road again; but I'm sad that the days have flown by this week, just as the years have flown. In a perfect world, we could all--every single Pearl on our long and ever-growing string--live near one another and never have to miss each other so much in between visits. Alas, however, this just cannot be.
One of my favorite Catholic writer/blogger/IG influencers, Elizabeth Foss, recently wrote on IG*: "You can be grateful and sad at the same time. You can count your blessings and be all too well aware of the cost. You can be hurt and smile anyway. You can feel both grief and joy. You can notice the light in the darkness."
Yes, that's exactly it! Foss hits the nail on the head, as usual.
Later on this morning when we leave, I'll feel lots of grief, I'm sure. But I'll also feel joy, because I believe that this oldest son of ours, his wife, and his six children are living the life they were meant to live, even though to do so, they have to be far away from us.
Of course I would love it if this beloved family moved back to VA and lived less than 20 minutes from our front door, as they did for four-plus years before they made their move out to the Midwest almost a year ago. But with a life as blessed as mine has been, I'm afraid it would be selfish to want too much. Just knowing that they are all thriving here--living out their homesteading dream, finding a like-minded Catholic homeschooling community and making good friends--is enough. The close relationship we have always enjoyed with these precious grandchildren and their parents has not been affected one iota by their move; the distance between us is only in miles, not in love.
But it's true, as Foss says, that in this valley of tears we live in before we go to our eternal home, even when there are blessings those often come at a cost. A mother's heart must bear the pain of many swords--but if she's lucky, small ones, non-lethal ones--over the course of a lifetime. There is rarely joy without a bit of grief mixed in. So hold your babies tight, young mamas. The days are long sometimes, but the years are rather shockingly short.
*I'm not on IG anymore (of all the social media sites I gave up, that is the only one I still miss); but did you know that you can jump on there and read a post or two before you get kicked off and asked to sign in? So I cheat and check up on Elizabeth Foss (and a couple of others) from time to time.
Well, just when I'd begun to think that it seriously might be time to close up shop here (I mean, it's been over TWO MONTHS since I posted anything new!), something rather extraordinary happened that made me wonder if perhaps I should stick around and keep on blogging. For a little while longer, anyway. (More about that in a minute.)
This past Saturday, two days after Thanksgiving, my husband and I started a two-day trek out to visit our oldest son and his family in Iowa. We had just seen the families of our three VA boys (sons # 2, 3, and 4) over Thanksgiving, and we will be seeing them again for Christmas, along with our youngest son and his pregnant wife who will be coming from Nashville. But we knew that we were not going to be able to spend any of the holidays with our firstborn's gang; so we decided to squeeze in a trip to Iowa before the Christmas season starts getting too busy.
We drove about 10 hours on Saturday and stopped in South Bend, IN, where we stayed with one of my husband's younger sisters and her husband and caught the Notre Dame-USC game (on TV). We were joined by another younger brother of my husband's, along with a few nieces and nephews who go to school out there.
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| My sweet sister-in-law is the hostess with the mostest and I just love her. |
On Sunday we went to an early Mass at the crypt at Sacred Heart Basilica on the Notre Dame campus, visited for a few more hours with our Pearl relatives, and then set out to finish up the last five hours of our road trip. Our son had told us that his family was planning to go to a barn dance that day, where lots of Catholic families from his area in Iowa and even some from farther away (from Illinois and Wisconsin) were gathering at the farm of a large homeschooling Catholic family. The location for this barn dance was actually between South Bend and our son's house, maybe an hour from where he lives--we would have had to pass it anyway on our way to our final destination. So we decided to plan to meet them at the barn dance; we told him and his wife not to tell the kids we were coming, so it could be a surprise. We thought it would be so much fun to show up and when they saw us say, "Oh wow! We just wanted to come to this barn dance; we didn't know you were going to be here, too!"
It really was a hoot to walk up the hill that led to the barn and see our granddaughter (one of the 11-year-old twins) look in our direction, then look at her father as if to say, "What is going on?!"--and then look at us again and realize that her mind wasn't playing tricks on her, it really was us! We hadn't seen this sweet family since they came to visit in VA in September, and it was a joyful reunion, to put it mildly.
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| An awesome sign on the fence outside the barn. |
This barn dance was something else, I'll tell you. There must have been a couple hundred people there--lots of big families with kids of all ages, from teens down to newborns. Sweet, modestly dressed, well-behaved children all. It was a joy to watch them on the dance floor--big ones holding the hands of little ones, without any thought about looking "cool." There was an impressive pot luck meal and a man who was directing the dancers, showing them all the steps, acting as DJ for the music. Our granddaughters were particularly excited to do the Virginia Reel, which they'd learned at the last barn dance they'd attended at this place. (Apparently these amazing hosts have them four times a year!)
My husband left the barn to go into the house just before we were about to leave (I was still in the barn, talking to my grandkids while they gathered up their coats and got ready to go), and he saw the wife/mother of the family who owned the farm, so he stopped to thank her. She was talking to another woman, so he introduced himself to her. This woman told my husband that she recognized his wife. He thought she must be talking about our daughter-in-law, because how in the world would she know me? But then she said, "You have lots of sons, don't you?" He told her that we did, but again, he was baffled. How did she know this about him, and how did she know me? Then she told him that she recognized me from the picture on my blog. Apparently, this woman used to read it and recognized me, and she remembered that we had a number of sons.
My husband brought this nice woman from Illinois into the barn to meet me, and she actually gave me a hug as if we were old friends. We talked for a bit (not about the blog, but about how wonderful it was that these Catholic homeschooling families are creating this beautiful parallel community of like-minded people, even traveling long distances to get together, and things along that line). After a few minutes she hugged me again before she left.
Wait, I did ask her one blog-related question. I asked how in the world she ever found this little site of mine. She couldn't remember how she'd stumbled upon it, and it had been a number of years since she'd read it. But it touched me beyond belief that she'd once been a reader, and that she'd come to know my boys a little (they are so worth knowing, according to their not-at-all biased mommy!). Meeting this very kind woman, a mom much younger than I, reminded me again that aside from being an online scrapbook of family memories for me, this blog might have something to offer readers I will most likely never meet. I felt extraordinarily blessed to have met this one.
Anyway--
I think maybe I'm back. I'm a bit overwhelmed by how much I should have written about the past couple of months but didn't. There are SO MANY birthdays in the Pearl family in October and November, and I never blogged once during those months. Perhaps I'll do a little family news recap before all else is eclipsed by Christmas goings-on.
If you're here, you're probably related to me by blood or marriage, and you know I love you! If you're not related to me and you read this blog anyway, God bless you and thanks so much for stopping by.
This post has gone on long enough, so I'll end here. But in the next few days, I'm going to have to do a photo dump to show you our oldest son's amazing little farm (it's more of a homestead, I guess, but WOW). I'll leave you with just one picture, until next time.
