Please ignore the crooked door in his last day of school photos. You see, LittleBrother is difficult to photograph, as witnessed by the disintegration of his first day of school photos. He’s a spitfire, and we learned that even more this school year. He grew and changed and morphed from cute little LittleBrother to this cute but slightly ornery little boy with a sense of humor and an early case of sarcasm. I think we’re in trouble with this one.

I say that kindly, of course, because he is awesome in so many ways.

He hasn’t yet picked a hand to write with, but that’s mostly okay. He writes and colors almost equally with both hands. Though he does bat left handed. He says that he wants to write with his right hand, but he still switches at will; if he wants to color on the left side of the page, he puts the crayon in his left hand. I’m sure he’ll figure it out sometime in the near future, and we’re continuing to encourage him to do what feels right.

Apparently what feels right is reading. I don’t know if it’s because he was basically present for all of BigBrother’s reading lessons or his super awesome brain capacity or just his personality, but the kid is already blowing through early sets of BOB Book readers. When he asked to start learning to read this past winter, I kind of shrugged at him. I suppose that’s one of the problems with being the younger brother. Imagine my surprise when he got out a book and blew right through it. And it wasn’t a matter of having it memorized, because he just blew through a whole set that BigBrother never had. He’s just awesome.

He did a lot of other stuff this school year, too. He made new friends. He went on playdates — without me. He sang really loudly at his Christmas and Spring programs. He made lots of crafts, many of which he was personally affronted if I didn’t keep on the fridge for the appropriate amount of time. He is playing on a t-ball team — without his brother. He got stuck in a tree with his Buzz Lightyear wings. (No, really.) He got started on learning computer skills with his own monitored account and time limits. He can rock a Kindle Fire and an iPhone both. And he grew. A lot.

One of my favorite things about this little man is that he’s tough. He hasn’t met something that he can’t do if he wants to do it. On the flip side, he also won’t do something if he doesn’t want to do it. Both of those things are great traits — but they can be frustrating and hard to keep up with at times. He’s a fantastic little boy who is growing so quickly that I can’t believe my eyes.

He’s very excited to be on summer break. He’s been asking when we were going to the beach for vacation since February. He said last week, when we were going fishing on BigBrother’s last day of school, that he wishes we could go fishing every day. He wants to go camping. A lot. He wants to spend the summer playing and laughing and telling jokes that drive me crazy and poking at his brother and generally being… LittleBrother.

I’m looking forward to it.

So, both boys are now out of school for summer. Look for the OMG post soon.

I won’t pretend to know what you were thinking when you slammed into the back of that Suburban and then careened into the truck my husband was riding in at the time. I don’t think I can wrap my head around the decision to get behind the wheel of a vehicle while drunk, drinking or even only “just had a few.” There is no excuse: You were in the wrong.

Now that we all understand that you were in the wrong, I feel the need to tell you a few things about one of the men you endangered with your bad decision.

He is, hands down, the most amazing man I have ever met. He is a devoted husband, a hands-on daddy, this house’s primary dish washer, a loving son, a helpful grandson, a loyal friend, a faithful believer, and a dedicated firefighter. I suppose if you’re going to get all willy-nilly drunk and slam into two cars that are stopped, hitting a bunch of firefighters was a good choice on your part, though I suspect that you had little to do with that aspect of the decision. But back to my husband…

He seems quiet at first, and honestly, he’s not as loud as me. He is the loud to my quiet, the relaxed to my high strung. He balances me. We’re one of those weird couples that simply matches. We are, if you’ll allow me a Sleepless in Seattle moment, MFEO. Fake gag at our sappy love all you want, everyone else does. But we’ve got a good thing going over here. And that quiet I mentioned? It disappears as you get to know him. While he’ll never be as loud as me, he is quick with a joke. The twinkle in his eye lets you know that even when he’s quiet, he’s laughing on the inside. He makes me feel like I’m the smartest, funniest, most talented, most beautiful woman on the planet. I would be lost without him.

Our two sons love him to the moon and back. About eighty bagillion times. There is no one as amazing as their daddy. I mean, what little boy doesn’t want a firefighter for a dad? He is a super hero in their eyes. He plays rough, but cuddles close. He can swing a light saber with the best of them, and has taught our boys how to cast while fishing. He’s patient when teaching them how to play baseball, how to kick a soccer ball. He does things with and teaches the boys things that I either can’t do or he just simply does better. Like vacuuming. He makes my sons feel loved, valued and important. They would be lost without him.

There are other people, removed from the obvious people like his mom and dad and sister and grandparents, who would be heartbroken without my husband. My daughter. My parents, brother and grandparents, all of whom seem to like him more than they like me. The Fake Husband. Countless others around this city whom he has touched, whom he has helped, whom he has bestowed his winning smile upon. His fellow firefighters, for whom he would lay his life on the line.

Which brings me to this point: I have learned to live with the fear, the worry, the anxiety that comes hand-in-hand with being a firefighter’s wife. Most days, I don’t think about it. He goes to work, and I busy myself with my work, our children, the home and life as it happens. I have forced myself to ignore the scanner, forced myself not to turn it on when he runs out in the middle of the night. Despite the fact that I can function even when I know he’s on a major fire, the fear always looms, lurks in the back of my head, my heart. It’s dangerous, fighting fires. It is. It makes me angry that you took something that didn’t cause me much fear — driving — and tainted it. I don’t want to live in fear every time that he leaves the house that a drunk driver will ruin everything we have with one bad judgment call.

Do you know what frustrates me most, Mr. Drunk Driver? I know nothing about you. The news media in Columbus doesn’t find a car accident caused by a drunk driver that involved three firefighters and two other civilians (of which, those two were transported to the hospital) to be news-worthy. The Ohio Crash Report doesn’t yet have you uploaded so that I can know your name, so that I can google you and figure out if you were set to lose as much as we were that night. So I can know who my enemy is. So I can say a prayer for that enemy, that maybe, God willing, the next time you get behind the wheel of a vehicle, you will think twice about those “just a few beers” that you have had. So that maybe you won’t put that car in drive. So that maybe you’ll think about families and fathers and mothers and children and sons and daughters and friends and co-workers and random acquaintances that would be devastated by the loss of one of their own. The good news is that, once the weekend backlog is officially entered, I’ll know who to pray for — whose name to pray never crosses our paths again.

Maybe you’re a great guy, Mr. Drunk Driver. Maybe you made one bad choice in the middle of a lifetime of great choices. Maybe you feel such remorse that it will never, ever happen again. I hope so. I hope no wife has to listen to her husband recount the moments that could have ended it all. I hope no wife has to experience worse than that — the unthinkable, the unmentionable.

I am thankful that my husband is okay. I am still praying that those in the Suburban that you slammed into first are okay. I spent most of yesterday thanking God and simply staring at my husband. The problem with that is that I’m always thankful for my husband. I didn’t need this near tragedy to open my eyes and show me what an amazing man I married. I always knew that; I didn’t need your help.

We love this man.

So, in short: Keep your drunk-driving, bad-choice-making, family-endangering behind off the road and away from my family.

Sincerely,
The Wife of the Most Amazing Man Ever

(PS: I didn’t cuss in this letter, but let it be known: I have thought all of the letter words since the accident happened. Just sayin’.)

I’ll have an OMG-SCHOOL-IS-OVER post in a week, once LittleBrother finishes up preschool for the year, but today let’s take a look at BigBrother this year.

– __ — __ –

This oldest son of ours has grown by leaps and bounds since his first day of Kindergarten. Yes, physically in that shorts season needs to arrive and stay because some of his jeans look funny. Yes, physically in that he went through another size of shoes this year and, really, I can wear his socks. Yes, physically in that he started to school year with baby teeth, lost six of them (*gag, wretch*), and grew those lost teeth back into his mouth.

But in lots of other ways too.

We started out the year walking him into the school and all the way to his classroom. Then he asked us to stand in the lobby and watch as he walked to his classroom, waving as he disappeared inside. Then we just walked him to the front door. Yesterday, I stopped in front of the school in the drop off circle and he jumped out, told me to have a nice day, slammed the door and ran to catch up with his buddies. Today I shrugged at him as he asked why I was walking him not only into the school but all the way to his classroom. “I have to give your teacher her present,” I mumbled, blinking back tears that this was his last walk down the hall as a Kindergartener. He smiled and skipped — something he couldn’t do at the beginning of the year either.

My worries about him not responding well to the sit-down-and-shut-up aspect of school were short-lived. BigBrother loved his teacher — well, he loves all teachers. He didn’t want to disappoint her. He was on green absolutely every single day of school. He lost a total of two minutes of recess, both near the end of school, for talking when he shouldn’t in class. I figure if my son only lost two minutes of recess for talking, there’s hope for him yet. (Oh, you guys might find this hard to believe, but I was totally a talker in school. Totally.) On his final report card, his teacher wrote:

Thank you, BigBrother, for working SO hard this year! You have been the ultimate Kindergarten student. Enjoy your summer!!

This morning she called him “the shining star” of the class. It almost makes up for the times that he calls me by his teacher’s name at home. Almost.

Photo “pin-spired” by Call Me Crafty‘s post I pinned on my photography board. Also evident in this photo: We have moved!

He was reading — the basics — when school started. In the survey that I filled out, I told his teacher that I wanted him to finish “learning to read,” though I know that there’s really no “finish” to that, that reading and learning are on-going. I’m sure she thought I was nuts, just bragging on a kid who probably didn’t know how to read yet. The second week of school she pulled me aside and let me know that he had been tested and was already reading at a 1st grade level. “I just wanted you to know that I know,” she said, sharing an understanding glance. I felt good knowing that I hadn’t been imagining or talking-up his skills; he was really reading. His reading took off this year, and he’s firmly reading at a 2nd grade level, pushing that envelope every day as well. He reads all the time — occasionally getting in “trouble” for reading after last light’s out. He read the whole way to another city in the car yesterday. I love that his love of reading was nourished and encouraged this year.

He learned the ins and outs of playground fun — and warfare. There was that whole recent b-word exchange, a few hurt feelings on all sides, a couple conversations with the teacher when he came home in tears for things that were more than young friends learning how to be friends. I struggled most with this — with the letting him figure out how to handle the ups and downs of friendships on his own and trying to figure out when I should step in as a mom if things looked to be escalating past what was normal for young children. The word bully is thrown around so much, but I’ve seen inklings of it even in Kindergarten — and it broke my mommy heart. Not just for my all-too-trusting BigBrother who was surprised more than once by angry kids, but for the child acting out. Growing up feels harder nowadays, though I imagine it’s just because I understand what I didn’t back in the day. And, you know, it’s my kid, hear-Mama-Bear-roar kind of stuff.

I thanked BigBrother’s teacher this morning, stopping myself short from hugging her and weeping on her shoulder. I just feel so grateful that BigBrother had such a great year of Kindergarten, great first year of real school. I worried so much about how he would respond to school, to other kids, to a big building, to all of it. I don’t know why I worried.

He’s just so awesome.

And now he’s a first grader. Please excuse me while I weep in the corner.

*insert blubbering here*

Tomorrow, his last day of school, I plan on doing some Pinterest-inspired photos. And blubbering.

My back has been improving. A recent follow-up visit with the neurosurgeon was encouraging as he feels my improvements mean we can continue to stave off back surgery for the time being. I may move toward epidural injections for the pain, but he’s hopeful that surgery is not on my calendar for 2012.

Moreover, I was released from Physical Therapy recently.

I have been working hard since the beginning of the year to do what I can to help heal my back. Some of that has involved making better food choices as the weight gain from the injury and lack of movement were only further exacerbating the pain and the problem. Some of it has been being strong and pushing through the pain, both at Physical Therapy and in my other activities. Almost all of it has been reminding myself that this is worth it, that the alternative — not doing anything — is worse than the pain of trying to get better.

I do have to admit that when they stopped asking me “What did you do to your back,” and started using the word “degenerative,” I didn’t feel any more hopeful about the situation at hand. Degenerative? In my early 30′s? It was only going to get worse? Swell. I moped for awhile, but I can only mope for so long.

I tied my shoes and started walking.

The move to the new house has been good for walking. I started with a very small loop of our development. Then I did a bigger loop. Then I walked the whole development. Then I walked the whole development and out to the parking lot of the church on the road leading out of our development. Then I walked to the part of that road where it starts to go down a big hill. Then I walked down the hill to the creek at the bottom. Then I crossed the bridge. Then I walked to the bend in the road. Then, today, I walked from the bend, clear out through a field, to the next bend in the road.

And then on back home.

Today I walked 2.42 miles.

I had a couple of twinges of pain, mostly near the end when I felt tired, forgot my posture and started to slump. I will say that this degenerative back has improved my posture greatly because it physically hurts to slump. Silver lining to everything.

As I started up that hill from the creek bed, I thought about how far I have come since last year.

I couldn’t have walked that hill last summer. I’m not sure I could have walked it a few months ago.

Almost all of it has felt like an uphill battle. Enduring pain is one thing. Working through it is another. There have been days that I didn’t want to go to Physical Therapy. There have been days that I didn’t even want to get out of bed. Even now with all of my improvements, my back is stiff and tired in the morning. It takes physical exertion to push myself upright, to put my feet on the floor and stand up straight. And that’s before coffee. But I keep doing it.

Because at the top of this hill, there will be a reward.

Today it was a flower that I grabbed right before I hit the top of the hill.

But there are other rewards waiting for me. Like finishing a 5K with friends. Like getting back to yoga. Like chasing my kids around the yard this summer with water guns — since I couldn’t last summer. Like feeling like myself again.

I know that there will be some more pain as I continue to heal. I know that this is not the top of the hill, that there are more uphill battles to come. But I am just so dang happy to be walking up the dang hill. I’ll take this feeling over what I felt last year — and I’m speaking both physically and mentally.

Bring on those hills.

BigBrother brought home a little “All About My Mom” kind of book from school for Mother’s Day. He answered the questions or finished the statements on each page about me. My oldest son? He’s a smart kid. The end of the statement, “My mother looks prettiest when…” …?

“ALL THE TIMME.”

Smartest. Kid. Ever. Sign him up for MENSA. He wins at being six.

Today my boys loved on me. We colored, ate some food, watched some kids sing a song, read some books. They let me nap for 30 minutes this evening, which made me feel human again.

Of course, they also had to love on FireDad who turned 30 today.

We actually celebrated his birthday on Friday since he doesn’t like to share his day. Okay, it’s not that he doesn’t like to share. Today he made me breakfast and doted on me, so we wanted to make sure he got doted on at some point close to his birthday.

As a birthday present to him, some teenage girl working at the drive-thru when we picked up our iced tea did a double-take, googly-eyed, total check out of his 30-year-old self. As we drove away, he exclaimed, “I still got it!”

Yes you do, my handsome husband. Happy birthday. Welcome to your 30′s. They’re kinda awesome.

But BigBrother was mightily upset at the time. He was using all of his facial expressions that mean Serious Business.

“Mommy, he said a bad word.”

“Oh yeah? What word did he say?

A dramatic pause. “The b-word.”

I blinked. What kind of Kindergartener uses the b-word? I tried to think of what I knew about this child’s parents. Did they regularly use the b-word? Or maybe, like me, maybe the mom occasionally forgot that the children were in the car when complete a-words pulled out in front of her in traffic. Ahem. I decided to move forward with my line of questioning. Mainly because I was curious.

“What’s the b-word?”

An even more dramatic pause, if at all possible. “BUTTCHEEKS.”

You have no idea how hard it was for me not to laugh in my six-year-old son’s face. I had to swallow. Hard. And stare at the corner where the walls meet the ceiling across the dining room. I kept swallowing to keep myself from smiling. BigBrother was, at the time, mortally wounded. I needed to respond accordingly. I couldn’t laugh in his face. I just couldn’t.

Once I composed myself, I empathized with him and talked about how some words really can hurt others’ feelings. We hugged a bit and he went off to play with his brother. Who, by the way, he called a “meanis,” which does rhyme with what you think it rhymes with, when he wouldn’t play what he wanted to play. Apparently lessons about names are short-lived.

I chuckled to myself and made note to blog this story tell FireDad later.

Later happened in the car where most of our family’s important conversations take place.

We rehashed the story again, FireDad not doing the same stellar job at not laughing as I did. My laugh-happy husband did bring it back in to the “words can hurt other people” and “that’s why we are careful with the words we choose.”

A pause from the back seat. “Yeah, we don’t choose the letter words.”

FireDad and I exchanged a look. I spoke. “The letter words?”

“Yeah, you know. The a-word, the b-word, the h-word, the s-word.”

I started to get worried at that point. Did he really know all of those words? I mean, those words did have associated “bad” words to them. Did my six-year-old know what the s-word was? We already knew that he thought the b-word was buttcheeks, but did he know the h-word? The a-word? What other letter words did he know? I started mentally composing yet another post about how Kindergarten expanded my child’s vocabulary in ways I could never have imagined and certainly didn’t appreciate.

He continued from the back seat. “The z-word.”

And we both lost it at that point. FireDad and I giggled and snickered and snorted and laughed. BigBrother started laughing too, not quite aware that we were laughing mainly because we were glad that our kid didn’t know a wealth of “ugly” words. He was just happy to hear laughter, to join in. We eventually simmered down and, one more time, brought it back to remembering how important it is to choose your words wisely, to be careful with others’ feelings. No letter words. Especially no z-words.

He may not know what all the words are behind the letters, but he’s learning to be careful with the words he does choose.

And, thankfully, we’re having a good time while we learn. Just don’t make me call you a z-word or flip you the bird — like I may or may not have done to the PTA President. Whoops?

To a child… everything.

You see, my boys have always loved dandelions. On a recent photowalk by myself, I happened upon this amazing little field of dandelions. Just steps off a local walking trail, it was as if it was created specifically for my two sons. And me, because I love a good wisher — as we call them — as well.

It was high noon when I was bopping around in my newfound favorite secret place, but the trees surrounding my field of flowers were tall. Still I knew that the evening sun would bring some gorgeous tones to the little valley next to the creek and I vowed to bring the boys back to make as many wishes as their little hearts desired.

I didn’t tell them where we were going or what we were doing. As we cross over the arched bridge, they knew. They started running and yelling. “Mommy, there are so many wishers! How will we make this many wishes!” Even before the words were all the way out of their mouths, they got started.

And I started snapping.

I went with my 50mm, 1.8 lens attached to my camera because I knew I wanted great light and great bokeh. The 50mm is just a lovely little lens that does those things, and it’s light, compact and easy to use. I usually roll at 2.2 when I’m trying to shoot fast moving little boys with faces and eyelashes and noses and such. Shooting at 1.8 often means that the tip of a nose will be in focus but the rest of the face will be slightly out of focus. 2.2 in outdoor, lovely “Golden Hour” evening light is almost fail-proof. Almost meaning that, yes, even then some of my shots are out of focus.

I will admit that I shoot mostly in Manual now. When I worked at the newspaper, I was pretty much broken of my Auto habits. I sometimes still end up with kids in a snowstorm or a blackout type of “Oops-my-ISO-was-too-high-or-low” mistake photos, but my fingers are fast to change the settings. This evening I was working anywhere from 250 to 500 ISO, depending on where the sun was hiding in the tall trees. My shutter speed started around 1/1000 — the higher the number, the faster the speed which means you might best catch blowing dandelion seeds — and ended up around 1/640 as the sun continued to dip.

Technical jargon aside, there are some things you can do to take an everyday experience and turn it into a beautiful photograph.

Get close.

The photo on the left is okay. You kind of get the feel that we’re in a field of dandelions. You can see some seeds blowing. The colors are okay. But compared to the photo on the right, well, there is no comparison. I simply got closer (and got lower than he was). Doing so may have made the field of dandelions disappear, but it made a much more visually appealing image. The dandelion seeds are easier to spot when not lost in the sea of puffs. The seed in his hair is priceless. The light and bokeh in the trees is just beautiful. The one on the left is a memory. The one on the right is frameable.

Don’t force kids to look at you and smile.

I mean, you can. I do. But that’s just for the “grandmas like pics of the boys smiling at the camera” type of photos. For the interesting, “this series of photos tells a story” type of photos, just let them be and get to snapping. Shoot them concentrating on what they’re doing. From the side. From behind, dwarfed by the tall, tall trees. Not every photo has to be about eye contact and their signature grin.

Change up the focus from one shot to the next.

While I do work in manual settings, I normally work in auto-focus, mainly because the boys move so quickly. My camera does have an Auto-Focus Continuous setting, meaning that it will continue to follow the center of focus even while there is movement. However, sometimes I still flip it into manual to get the exact focus I want, or I’ll center my focus just to the left, right, top or bottom of what I was just focused on to see the difference. In these two photos, I was focused on one brother to the right and then clicked over to focus on the other to the left.

Let your children lead you.

Follow them with the camera, don’t dictate where they’re going to stand or what they’re going to do. Just let things happen naturally. Like, you know, finding a spiderweb and blowing dandelion puffs into it, ticking off the spider. It made for a great picture in the end!

But encourage them to try new things too.

I knew the photo I wanted: I wanted the boys blowing dandelion seeds at the same time, in mass quantities. So after they had fun for about 20 minutes, me following with my camera and making wishes of my own, I had them each pick a handful of dandelions, center themselves in front of my camera and, on the count of three, they blew those seeds. And I snap, snap, snapped. The result?

Only my favorite photograph. Ever.

Of course, to get that amazing photo, I had to cycle through quite a number of… humorous… ones.

In the end, I got a few photos I can use and some that are just plain fun to look at even if they aren’t perfect.

I absolutely love that I got a crazy gorgeous, super fun photo on an ordinary Monday evening in a field of un-impressive flowers that society dubs weeds. If I would have forgotten my camera, we would have missed it. If I wouldn’t have let them have their fun before asking them to do something for me, we might not have captured that one great photo. If I wouldn’t have snapped 40 in a row as they were blowing, I might have missed that one perfect frame.

My photos of the ordinary came together to tell the story of one great photo. Yours can too, you just have to go take them and then tell that story.

The boys got light sabers (aka, life savers) for Christmas a few years ago. As our old house was small, there wasn’t much room for light saber fights in the house. The whole “the local drug dealer makes it impossible to play outside” thing also meant we didn’t get much light saber time in outside either. As such, the new yard has seen a lot of Star Wars action.

The backyard is a great place to act out any number of scenes. Recently we’ve taken to building forts on the back deck. The light sabers also make their way in there, eventually knocking down the fort.

The front yard sees a lot of action as well. I’m sure our neighbors think we’re either hugely dorky or very into violence. Who knows. Who cares? The boys have been having a blast playing and playing and playing and using their imaginations and playing and playing and playing and, okay, sure, some pretend violence.

Which occasionally means someone gets bonked in the forehead with a light saber.

{Don’t adjust your monitors. FireDad was that sunburned.}

But I figure that’s fine, since FireDad hasn’t ever seen Star Wars before. I know, right? He gives me a hard time because I haven’t seen various movies over the years, but he hasn’t seen Star Wars. It’s okay. It’s being remedied shortly. My parents bought him the original trilology on Blu-Ray.

We’ll all watch it together soon. Right now, the boys are discussing various Star Wars characters that they want to be for Halloween. LittleBrother is currently hooked on being Yoda. BigBrother wants to be “Dark” Vader. They’re gender casting me into Princess Leia’s role, and that’s fine because one of my friends has the hair — but I’m going with a white robe, not the gold bikini. Obviously. I do expect them to change their minds umpteen billion times before costume-ordering time is upon us.

Until then, you might see us on our evening walk with our light sabers. Don’t mind us.

We’re just using a little bit of the force to get through our evening walk which solely exists to help tire the kids out the rest of the way before bedtime. We need the force. Let us use it.

There will be more of this next week. For now, just enjoy what has become my favorite photo — which is kind of fitting, isn’t it?