Lots of Pictures

 A week ago, Lydia hosted her own birthday party at our house.

She likes parties. I find parties overwhelming. So I provided a little support, but she organized almost all of it. All of our kids were here, plus 6 or 7 of her friends. We had a great time.

Present from Naomi, I think. Minecraft cat

The weather winkies were threatening rain but it held off so the second part of the party was in the pool.

It is rare for all of our kids to be in the same place at the same time so this picture is precious to me.

Early this week, it got HOT.

The pool got ridiculously warm. Yesterday it was 90 degrees. It is almost not refreshing but it is still wonderful. We have been swimming a lot.

Rose made this pool with blankets in it.

And of course, when we aren't swimming, we relish the coolth inside. I am so grateful for air conditioning.

Kevin sent me this picture, which makes me laugh. The Babylon Bee is a Christian satire site. I am famous for loathing the sequel trilogy of Star Wars. I sometimes wander around ranting about the Last Jedi and its many plot and character problems. I actually never watched the Rise of Skywalker because I knew it would just annoy me.

This coming week it will be a LITTLE cooler; upper 80s instead of 90s. 

4th of July!

 It is our nation's 250th birthday today!

Our nation has problems, for sure, but in many ways, the USA is an amazing place to live. I am thankful for our freedoms. 

A lot is going on here at the Kendig house. All of this is in no particular order of importance.

I finished my edits for a book yesterday. This book took longer than usual to finish because Kevin has been dealing with back and ear problems and wasn't editing as fast as he typically does. Anyway, I am done with almost everything I have to do.

I am 20,000 plus words into another book already. Part of this new book involves a court case so I am reading up on courts and law in the Regency period in England. Fascinating stuff.

Miriam and Joseph have decided to move out together. They are looking for an apartment. Joseph wanted to move out but was having a hard time finding one given his income. He is currently working as a janitor and it doesn't pay particularly well. Miriam is in IT and together they can find a good 2 bedroom apartment. I am glad Miriam will have a big brother in the same apartment. I like having sibs rooming together because they can keep track of each other.

Miriam is only 20 but she is ready to be on her own and running her own life. That is reasonable. She and the older kids will all be close enough to us that we can give advice and help out with things like car issues and so on.

I will miss M and J, but it will also be nice having a quieter house. I think a lot about how I am 56 and it is weird we have 6 kids still under our roof :-).

Of course, having six kids at all is weird, and nine is truly insane :-).

Anyway, they are looking for an apartment and I suspect will be out of our house by the end of the summer.

Lydia has a new job which she will start later this coming week. She has been working as a concierge at a retirement community for 2 years and she likes the job, but it doesn't pay well enough to live on, really. Her new job has a 20% higher pay.

Lydia's work place lost a couple of concierges in the last couple of months (and now, of course, they are losing Lydia) and so the poor kid has been working really intense hours. That means overtime and more money, which is helpful for her, but she is working 64 hours this week including today and she is tired. New job will not require overtime as far as I know.

Angela, who has been working as a server/dishwasher at the same retirement community, is going to take Lydia's job, which comes with a pay bump and steadier hours. Angela is still looking for an IT job but so far hasn't had any luck.

Part of being a mother is really wanting the kids to be happy and earn enough money, and sometimes life happens and I have to step back and pray and support. 

I have mentioned a few times that I wanted to lose weight. Well, I did so. I dropped my lexapro dosage, because that was the initial spur to my weight gain. I lost some weight, but then realized that I needed my full lexapro dosage and went back up again. Surprisingly I kept losing weight. So I was 180 lbs, and now I am about 167. I am trying to be really careful about eating which, not surprisingly, helps with losing weight. Some evenings I am hungry and there just isn't anything appropriate that is quick, so I go to bed instead of eating.

I am going to end this blog post and start a new one for pictures.

Birthday Season

 It is the beginning of Birthday Season here in Kendig Land.

By that, I am referring to the amusing fact that with 11 people in the house, we have zero birthdays January through April. Daniel's birthday was in May, and we have two birthdays in June, one of whom is Rose.

So our youngest three are now 15 and 14 and 12. They are growing up!

My parents bought Rose a giant flamingo floatie, and it is a HUGE hit.  

Daniel has always been huskier than most of our kids which frankly (given that some of them struggle with being underweight) has been a relief for me. He is growing very fast right now because he is having a major growth spurt. He hasn't passed me and Kevin up YET, but he is working on it.

The last couple of weeks have been hard on Kevin. He has been having back issues, PLUS an ear infection. He is on antibiotics now but the infection is clearing up slowly. All very annoying.

I have been trying to swim almost every day, and it is definitely such good exercise. When we bought this house more than 20 years ago, I adored the size of the house, and the large bedrooms, and three full baths on the second floor...

But I was nervous about the pool. We had a bunch of little kids at the time and I naturally worried about a child falling in and drowing.

But the house was perfect for us so we bought it, and now I can look back and be so thankful for the pool. It is a fair amount of work to keep it in good shape, but it enabled us to teach 9 children how to swim, and that is a valuable skill. When I was in the throes of caring for 9 kids, running to and from swimming classes would have been tough.

I am on a cave diving kick; not, of course, scuba diving in caves personally. I am not crazy. I am reading about it, and watching videos. A few days ago, I watched a documentary called Dave Not Coming Back.

Dave Shaw was a cave diver who died while trying to retrive the body of ANOTHER cave diver from a very deep freshwater sinkhold in South Africa. And when I say deep, I mean DEEP. The first dude was at about 900 feet deep. 900 feet. Think about the pressure involved! It is INSANE.

Dave Shaw went down there, found the body of 20 year Deon Dryer from a decade earlier, and when he came back up to the surface, decided to try to bring his body up for his family's sake. He and his closest diver friend pulled together a bunch of support divers and also a documentary crew, and then when Shaw went down to the bottom to retrieve the body, he got tangled up in a line and also died.

It is horrifying and also just WEIRD. Because there was no real reason to risk life and limb to bring up this body in such a difficult place.

But in the documentary his friends and widow said a lot of it was just that Shaw wanted to push the limits. He mostly did it to test himself, and tragically died. He left a wife and two pretty young kids.

It is incredibly selfish, I think, to do something like that. But then again, some people are drawn to intense danger. They want to push themselves hard. It is a good thing there are people like that, because they are firefighers who run into burning buildings, and chopper pilots who hang off of cliffs to save stranded people.

So yeah, I guess I shouldn't judge, though realistically I am judging. I told Kevin that I am grateful he has no desire to engage in super risky hobbies like climbing very tall mountains and diving caves.

Mid June

 Our three youngest kids spent last week with my parents and their only cousin on my side of the family. They went to zoos and parks and Sauder Village in Ohio. They played games.  They ate delicious food. They made friends with a girl who lives next to my parents. It was all very good.

My Dad took this pic so he isn't in it obviously. The guy on the far left is my younger brother, who lives close to my parents.

This is the second year that my parents have taken our younger kids for a week in the summer. Last year, I was in pain from an anal fissure that took literally months to heal and was very unpleasant.

THIS year, Kevin was the one hit with stupid health stuff. He has something going on with one ear which is causing hearing problems and some  dizziness. He has also been having substantial back and right leg pain. So we didn't do anything very special this week together because he wasn't feeling good.

Well, we did one thing; we finally watched Project Hail Mary, based on the book by that name by Andy Weir. It was a brilliant movie. I love it so much. It is a little less sciency than the book, but there are some additions to the movie that are actually an improvement over the book. 

So yeah, that was FUN. We bought it on Amazon so we can watch it again whenever we want. Just as a "hey, that's hilarious" thing... to rent the movie and watch it once was $20. To buy it was $25.

Ok, we will buy it.

I met my parents in Sauder Village yesterday and brought our kids home. The house was SO quiet while they were gone, but today we have seven kids roaming around because no one is working and Isaac is visiting.

The kids opened their Universal Yums box today. We have a monthly subscription. Universal Yums provides snacks and foods from various countries, one country each month. This month was India.

I swam almost every day last week and now that the kids are back, there will be even more swimming. the pool is a delicious temperature.

The kids were hanging in the living room this morning, chattering with one another.  Warms the cockles of my heart.

That's about it!  We have two birthdays this month, which is exciting. I am working away on another book, of course, which is exciting.

Kevin is not feeling great, which stinks, but we think these will heal up in time. It is just very annoying.

Late May

 I am 99.9% done with the first draft of my latest book. I realized I didn't talk about a semi important character in the epilogues so need to go back and add her.

But mostly I am done. Hooray!

The last week has been WET. We have gotten so so so much rain!  Dayton got almost 9 inches of rain in May, and most of that was in the last 10 days or so!

Our house is on a hill and we have a good roof so no leaking, which makes me happy. There are flooded roads here and there.

One of my odd characteristics is that I like reading about people who do dangerous and crazy things, while also personally having zero desire to do said dangerous things. I have been following the tragedy of the five Italian divers in the Maldives closely.

Short story is that earlier this month, five divers in the Maldives (a group of islands in the Indian ocean) made their way into a deep cave system and all died.  Which is very very sad. Three of them were women, two were mother and daughter, and all were experienced divers. However, there is no indication that they were trained in cave diving, which is extremely dangerous because of course if you get in trouble, you can't just go up. You have to get out of the cave first. It appears that four of the five took a wrong turn and got lost in the low visibility murk and ran out of breathing air.  The fifth guy made it to the entrance of the cave and died there.

So you have to have a certain personality to do dangerous things like dive into cave systems or climb tall mountains. A surprising number of people are overly casual (in my view) about such things. Sometimes this results in nothing more than a few scrapes, but sometimes people die.

I am reading a book called Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth. She has spent incredible amounts of time diving in narrow cave systems. Crazy stuff. Her personality is a weird and wondrous combination of excitement over being an explorer, along with being very detail oriented. She describes her preps for deep cave diving as being extremely meticulous. She checks things over and over. She has lists. 

She has had close calls. She had a serious bout of decompression sickness once for reasons that are not quite understood.

Anyway, the Italian divers were a research group. At least one, maybe more, was a Ph.D. level scientist. And yet, they dove into a cave system without backup tanks, and without a guideline, which is what every cave diver should do. That is, bring a rope, tie one end to the entrance, and take it with you so that you can use it to get back if you cannot see well or get disoriented. These five did not do that. They  made so many mistakes.

Truth is, intelligence doesn't mean wisdom. You can be super smart and still make idiotic decisions. In this case, those decisions led to tragedy.

Back from St. Croix

 Kevin and I got back from our annual vacation to St. Croix, USVA, on Saturday night.

Kevin took 18 million lovely pics, but he hasn't worked on them yet. This picture of me is not the most flattering, but oh well. You can see there is an ocean behind me!

Here is a picture of a very handsome feral chicken.

We had a fabulous week, as usual. I was happy to come back though. I missed the kids.

Our pool was green when we got back, but we threw in chemicals and whipped it into shape.

I am almost done with a book. I know I say that a lot. Because I write fast.

So yeah, we vacationed and we came back. We are mostly done with school for the year. I am in the mood to clean the house, and have been decluttering and stuff.

It is good.

Good-bye, precious Buddy

 

Friday was a sad day. Miriam went out to feed the cats and our oldest cat, Moonbeam, had passed peacefully in his sleep.

He was very old. I am thinking 14 or 15. He was fat his entire life. So it wasn't a huge shock but it certainly was hard.

He had been slowing down but was still friendly and moving around well. No sign of illness, but maybe his heart just gave out.

He was a stray kitten along with his mother and a sibling, way way back. We kept him and found homes for his mother and sibling. He was incredibly friendly. Maybe because he was underfed as a kitten, he had a rapacious appetite and was overweight for most of his life.

One of our neighbors once said to Kevin (while pointing at Moonbeam), "I think your cat is pregnant."

Kevin said, "Well, there are two reasons why I don't think that is true. One, he is a boy. Two, he is fixed."

So long, sweet Moonbeam. You were a wonderful, wonderful cat and we miss you.