A Rainy Day

We (my daughter, her two children and I) went to the toddler swim this morning at the high school pool. This a Tuesday and Thursday morning activity called "Toddler Swim" to introduce toddlers to the joys of swimming. It works, and is really a lot of fun. The children - Andrew 19 months and Baylee 6 months are getting used to the water, and even Baylee, who screamed the first two times we went, will willingly put her face in the water.

Our usual MO is to swim from 9 to 10, then come to our house for a snack. Baylee will take a short nap at this time, and then we go to the spray park to play. If it's too cool for the spray park (we live in Western New York, after all), we go to the school playground. Then we come back to the house for lunch, after which my daughter takes the babies home for afternoon naps.

Today, however, it is POURING, so not only is the spray park out of the question, the playground remains elusive as well. So... Andrew and I have been playing with blocks, Baylee is still sleeping, and Mom is lying on the couch, having fallen asleep while watching the rain. (Mom can be forgiven for this, as she is a midnight to 8 AM worker 3 nights a week).

When I sit down to type this, I watch Andrew who, despite his young age, manages to keep himself amused with the blocks and the box of toys. He takes out a doll, cradles it lovingly, smiles at it and gives it a tender kiss. This is what he experiences and sees. His parents hold him and his sister lovingly, smile at them often, kiss them and tell them they love them.

This is what we need to do to all of our children.

A Day at Home?

I was looking forward to a day spent just puttering around the house, or at least part of a day, as we have a party to go to this afternoon. However, that changed when the fire whistle went off. My husband is the head dispatcher for the Control Center in our town, and even though it was his day off, when there is a structure fire, he goes down and helps the dispatcher on duty. I am part of what is called Squad 10, which takes drinks (not those kind of drinks) to the firemen at the scene of the fire. Today's drinks of choice, since it is 80 degrees in the shade, were water and gatorade, which were slugged down in huge capacities. Fires that occur at 2:00 AM in January require coffee and hot cocoa, but there was no need for that today. The local drugstore seemed surprised when some of us came in to get ice, water, and more gatorade, but willingly let us have them with our verbal promise to settle up with them later. As a matter of fact, when I stopped in to do just that, the two wonderful ladies on duty said not to worry, that it was being taken care of. Either the company would end up donating the supplies, or they would take care of it. I thanked them, and vow to find out if the company did indeed donate the supplies, as I certainly don't want them to have to pay anything.

All is relatively well. The home was damaged, but not destroyed, there were no injuries or entrapments, the EMTs on the scene took care of the firemen who became overheated, and the scene is cleaned up. There is a lot of work to do on the house, but soon, I suspect, there will be a community benefit, because that's the kind of town we live in.

So to the kind ladies at the drugstore, the firemen from our town and 5 or 6 nearby towns, the two dispatchers at the Control Center, and the squad 10 people, thank you.

Church Thoughts

I said that I would talk about the church a little bit, so here I go. We joined our church nearly 30 years ago, and absolutely loved it. The people there were like our family, and our three daughters always knew that they could go to anyone in the church at any time of the day or night, and they would be taken care of. That all changed a couple of years ago, when some people who had been just mildly annoying became unbearably so. All of a sudden, we were being told how to worship, how to think, how to feel, and how to pray by a very fundamentalist group of people (this was not a fundamentalist church). We were informed that God only hears prayers that are said out loud, and that the only way to pray is to ramble on and on - well, they didn't say that, but that is what they did. These decrees were not by the pastor; unfortunately, this group of people decided that the pastor was no longer welcome in our church, and took great steps to remove her.

When some of these things started happening, I was reminded of the Pharisees, people who said one thing, but behaved differently. As time went on though, I equated this behavior with the Sadducees, who really thought they were better than everyone else. It makes the Pharisees appear to be simply misguided folks.

Trucks

I never thought that it was a great thing that we live on the main street of a fairly small town, but my attitude has changed. Andrew, my 19 month old grandson LOVES, LOVES trucks. He can sit for hours on our front porch and watch them go by. Each one is a source of excitement, no less than the one before, and the best thing about them is the noise. The louder the better. Some of them even beep their horns when they see him!

New Church

My husband and I left the church that we had been attending for nearly 30 years because of some rather serious events that were occcurring. It has been a long, painful process for us, as the decision was a difficult one. After nearly a year, we are starting to feel less anxious.

We have been attending another church in our community for some months now, and are starting to feel comfortable there. We move slowly, and stay back a bit, because we are very gun-shy about what happened. The church we go to is a different denomination than our old church, which is not a problem, and there are some things that we are just starting to get used to, but it is going well. The minister is a very nice person, the people are friendly without being phony, and we have been accepted.

Some day I will write about the problems we faced.