Category Archives: daughter

Friday Funny

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My friend Janna writes One Tired Momma over here. Each week she writes a post titled Wednesday Wit. You should read her blog, it’s really good. I thought of her weekly Wednesday Wit posts when, while sorting and simplifying, I came across a copy of an email I had sent to my family back in 2002; Erin was 4 years old. I have a few more of these little gems that I found so I will post these for a few weeks on Fridays.

My kids are now 20, 18 and 15, its hard to remember when they were so little and the sweet and funny things they said and did. It’s been a treasure for my kids to hear their own words and see their personalities through little writings of mine that we are finding…Moms of young children, write down some of what your kids are saying now. Trust me on this, you will be blessed beyond measure down the road by taking the time to do this now. Even if you’re not organized about it, someday you will be going through a box, or a file, or a drawer and will time travel back to when they were small – except there will be no whining or sticky hands this time around.

Here is what it said:

Erin: Mom, dinosaurs are un-pooped, right?
Me: Un-pooped??
Erin: Yeah…umm…un-stinked.
Me: Do you mean extinct?
Erin: Yeah, are they?

See you next Friday for another one!

 

 

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Crisis – I Lost My Phone!!

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Guest Blogging today is my daughter Courtney. She sent this post to me months ago and it kept getting lost within my in-box…today it has been found. (The post, not the phone.)

On my first day back on campus for my junior year at Purdue, the unthinkable happened… I lost my phone. I had met up with a friend to catch up and drink some bubble tea by the clock tower, and at some point had received a text asking what I was doing later that night. I responded, set my phone down, finished up tea, and walked back to my apartment. Halfway back, I realized that the miniature computer I had only had since last October was not in my purse… or my pockets… and when I walked back to the bench we had been sitting on, I found that it wasn’t there either. I tried to text the friend I had been hanging out with, only to remember that was nearly impossible without a phone.

I traced my steps a few times and said a silent prayer of thanks that I already had dinner plans, so when I arrived at the restaurant I had my friends call my phone and leave a voicemail. “Wait… you need my password to get into my voicemail. WAIT… you need my tracer passcode to get into my phone.” I remotely installed apps for lost phones, set a screen telling anyone who found my phone to call my mom at her number, forced my phone to send me pictures and sound bytes of its location, tried to use GPS (the radius of its potential location was 1856 meters. Thanks, phone), and went on several recon missions until the battery’s inevitable death. For days after I frequented the campus’s lost and found locations and checked the activity online, but all my efforts were fruitless, and remained fruitless for the next two weeks, until I got a SIM card for my high school flip phone. But during those two long weeks, something crazy happened.

I survived the experience.

The thing I was most worried about was becoming a social recluse. How do you make plans without a phone? But I found something encouraging – when my friends wanted to see me or were making group plans, they made the effort to reach me on Facebook or texted the people they thought I would be with to make sure I was still getting included. After a two-day-long withdrawal period, it was even kind of nice not having a phone in my pocket all the time, and I found I was able to focus for longer periods of time on a single thing. The drawback was I did get a little Facebook addicted, but when I wasn’t around a computer that wasn’t really a problem.

Thanks to my incredible parents (who dealt with two weeks of intermittent online chatting, as my computer mic was also broken, taking Skype convos out of the picture) I do have a functioning phone now, and I would absolutely choose having a phone over not having a phone (just being honest). But it was nice to get a little taste of a life unwired; it allowed me to see that I didn’t need to be constantly connected, and the friendships I had were meaningful enough that my friends put a little bit of extra effort into including me. I do feel as though phones and iPads and all this social connecting all the time has driven us a little up the wall, and the confirmation that I could survive without it all was good, as I really do sometimes wonder. It’s something good to keep in mind as we go through our lives in this culture – you can survive without a constant connection!

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Walking Unaware within God’s Plan

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Erin came home from school today and shared a little slice of her life. It’s a sweet story of Erin’s heart and God’s hand. It causes me to recall this verse: “…Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” Genesis 28:16. I asked if she would consider sharing it here to encourage others. Here she is….

Hey everyone! It’s Erin, Sheri’s youngest daughter, and I am guest blogging on my mom’s blog today.

At my high school, I’m involved with a peer tutoring program. In the program, the peer tutors (grades 10-12) are in the freshmen study hall classes simply to be available to the freshmen if they need any help or have any questions. We also receive notes from teachers with specific students and subjects to work with.

There was one student I was given to work with repeatedly on missing assignments. For some reason, I found myself drawn to this student. I really wanted him to succeed and turn in all his work and to raise his grade. I knew he was perfectly capable of this, because he was receiving A’s on all of his tests, but wasn’t turning in any assignments. This at least made my job a little easier, because he at least knew the material, but just wasn’t doing the work.

I continued working with this student, reminding him to do his work, walking him down to his teacher’s room to pick up lost assignments, and sitting down with him to begin working on assignments. I felt like all the work I was doing was not having any affect on him. I wanted him to turn in his work and succeed so badly, but I knew I could only do so much and he had to do the rest. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

After three weeks of constant reminders and working with this student, we finally walked down to his teacher’s room and he turned in one of the missing assignments. This felt like a huge victory for me. Though we had turned in one assignment, there were still quite a few to turn in, so we began working again.

Other things came up in the class, and I didn’t have a chance to sit down and work with this student for a week or two. Finally today, I saw him playing video games on his computer, so I asked him if he had any missing assignments to work on. We checked his grades, and found about five or six missing assignments. He found one assignment in his backpack that was already completed, so we walked it down to his teacher.

On the way there, I asked him how his Thanksgiving was. I intended it to be small talk to fill up the silence as we walked through hallway, but God had a different plan for the question. I soon found out that the student I’ve been working with is a “foster kid” (his description). And it turns out, I know a thing or two about foster care. I told him that I had a foster brother that we ended up adopting. I don’t know what it’s like to be in foster care, but now he can at least know that I’m not completely oblivious to his situation, and I do understand a few things.

I knew that I was drawn to this student for a reason. It took me almost a full semester to figure out part of the reason, but now I’m beginning to understand. I don’t know God’s full plan, but I don’t need to know the whole thing to be a part of it. Maybe I’m just in this student’s life for a semester to help him through this semester and then it’s over. Or maybe, with God, I’ll be able to make a bigger impact on him. I’ll show him that someone else cares and wants him to do his best. And maybe this whole thing isn’t about the student all. Maybe it’s God’s way to show me a piece of his plan for me. I want to major in education and recently I’ve thought about beginning after school programs for struggling students when I’m a teacher someday. This could have been God’s way to introduce me to part of his plan. But once again, I don’t really know, and I really don’t need to know God’s whole plan to be a part of it.

~Erin

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Cross Country Meets Make Me Cry

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Seriously, they do. It’s always at the end of the meets, and it’s always the kids in last place that make me cry. And the coaches…the coaches contribute to my tears too.

Erin is in her second year of running cross country for our high school, but in her first season that girl came in last place for her team. every. single. race. Not last in the race, but last for her team. (But here’s the thing, she also “won” every single time. That girl set a personal record each and every race – the whole season – I’ll write more about her later.) Here’s the other thing, her coach was always on the course – urging her on. I would have expected her to be off with the varsity runners, congratulating them on their races, but no – she was always waiting for Erin – her last place runner.

That got me every time. But what makes me choke up at each and every race is the runners that literally come in last in the race. And…well, their coaches.

Let me set the scene…

The first runners sprint to the finish, you wonder how they have anything left in them, but suddenly they do and it’s amazing. Then the middle runners come in and that’s exciting as you see them jostle for position right to the finish line. Then you wait….and wait…and wait…several (or most) people wander away, anxious to find and congratulate their runners, but of course a few parents still have kids on the course…somewhere.

The first race of this year really got me. Our school had a runner still on the course, so Kevin, Courtney and I waited for him, along with one other family waiting for their runner from a different school. Finally, here comes a runner, and I realize one of the people waiting off by himself wasn’t family, it was his coach. And then he is running alongside his runner – off the course – but running, yelling encouragement to him, telling him to lift those legs and use those arms, and we see the runner respond. I’m chocked up. Then our runner comes around the corner, and there are our two coaches whom I hadn’t seen before – yelling encouragement to him. (Tears spring to my eyes.)

I am convinced this is the stuff that matters in life, and I get to watch it each week of the cross country season.

A few weeks later at another race, we again waited for that last runner  – along with lots of other people – finally he came to that last stretch before the finish line and the crowd that is left erupts…clapping and yelling to him. Tears spring to my eyes again.

I don’t usually know the last runner, it doesn’t matter who they are, or what school they are from, what matters is they stuck with it, they persevered, they didn’t give up, they finished the race.

I think it probably takes more mental energy and even emotional strength to stay in the race when you know you are the last runner. I know I am as proud of the kid who comes in last as impressed as I am by the kid who comes in first.

Last year Erin told me the cool thing about running in the back part of the pack is that everyone helps everyone. You run together and if someone breaks away you tell them “Good job”, encouraging them as they go on ahead of you – even if you don’t know their name, even if they don’t go to your school. Oh, that we could all be like the runners at the back of the pack.
There are just so many lessons to be captured in cross country.

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Leaving the Nest

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A mother, looking for a safe place to birth and raise her young ones, chose my front porch. She chose well, it was out of the rain, and as a fellow mom, I was careful to not soak her nest when I watered this plant, which suddenly also served as a home.

Then one day, and for four days, the mother laid an egg; four beautiful, small, vulnerable lives, contained in precious, fragile shells. The day the babies were making their way out of their eggs, our family did our best to come and go through the garage, ensuring that the mother could just sit on the nest to keep her little ones warm (moms look out for each other like that).

We adored watching them, they were so ugly that they were cute. There came a day when we began to hear their teeny-tiny tweets, clamoring for their food each time their mother returned to the nest. It made me think of our little ones when we have been gone for awhile. My little ones would come running to the door ready to see if I had something for them, or to tell me of some adventure (or some perceived injustice) while I was away!

Quickly the little uglies were trading their wrinkly, downy skin for real feathers. They filled out and seemed more crowded in the nest. Before we knew it, they began perching on the edge of their home. I’ll never forget watching that first one leave the nest…

Courtney was all packed up and we were loading the car to make the return trip to college for her junior year when it happened. We had just walked outside and I was locking the door when we saw one of the baby birds perched on the edge of the nest. We stopped and watched as it just sat there, and then suddenly ~ it flew away!

“Ohhhhh wait! Are you ready? Don’t fall! Where are you going?!” All things that went through my mind and even were uttered from my lips as my daughter, ready to go herself, and I, watched this bird leave the nest. We looked at each other taking in what we just saw – the obvious significance of the moment not lost on either of us.

We watched the little one fly higher and higher and eventually find a tree. We saw and heard the mom calling to it from the roof next door. I imagine the mom was tweeting “Good job! Look how strong and beautiful you are! I’m so proud of you!”

It’s funny…several years ago, when my friend Barb’s oldest daughter, Alexandria, left the nest, I sent Barb a little bird and enclosed a letter. In the letter I told my friend what a great mom she was and how she (and her husband) had provided such a strong and stable nest for her little ones, that she could be confident as Alexandria left. I was indeed confident that Alexandria would be secure and strong and ready to enter the world, taking with her all the tools, values, lessons and love that had been given her while in the nest. When Courtney left for college two years ago, I received a similar letter from Barb with a different little bird in a nest.

Now on the sidewalk, Courtney and I stood and watched together, with awe and a little anxiousness, as a real bird, left a real nest to make its own way in the real world. Then ~ I drove her to her new apartment at college. As my own little one has left the nest for another year of school, I will be confident (as I told Barb to be) that we have taught her what she needs to know to fly and find her way – and I say to her even now ~ “Good job, Courtney! Look how strong and beautiful you are! I’m so proud of you!”

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