red shirt

At Elliott's school in our well-to-do neighborhood, red-shirting is commonplace.  Elliott is "young" for his grade because he has a mid-summer birthday and when he was 5, we sent him to kindergarten because he was ready.  This wasn't an anomaly in Utah, but it is here in Houston.

Elliott is currently 7 1/2 and in second grade.  There are several 9 year olds in his class.  One of them, Everett, is so big, he looks like he's at least 10.  Don't worry, he's already playing tackle football.

Elliott told me the other day that Everett said to him, "You should be in first grade because you're only 7."  I reassured Elliott that he is indeed in the proper grade and should feel great about being a second grader even if the other boys are older and bigger than him.  Elliott told me, "Yeah I've noticed from the way Everett talks that he's pretty narcissistic."

I'm going to tell Elliott that next time someone questions his being in 2nd grade, he should ask them if they failed a couple grades, because they look too big to be in 2nd grade.  I believe two can play at this game!

Christmas 2013

The best part of my Christmas this year was, like last year, sharing my talents to brighten someone else's day.  The highlight was a Christmas evening stop at a fire station close to our house.  We played for 5 firefighters, who really appreciated our brass caroling.  They said they had received lots of cookies, but no carolers.  We thanked them for their great service to our community.  One of them recorded us on his ipad because he said it had been a rough Christmas season for him and we made it special and he wanted to remember it.  Christmas is not about giving stuff.  It's about giving of yourself, as we remember and celebrate the Son who gave everything for us so that we can repent and return to live with our Heavenly Father again.    It's about helping others feel Christ's love for them.

This is What a Blessing Looks Like

Our 15 year old Toyota Camry is a blessing.  We got it for free from my parents a few years ago after both of our cars had been wrecked (a year apart) and we had zero cars.  Not having a car payment for awhile helped us save up to buy a new-to-us second vehicle, our Santa Fe, which we still love.  My parents' generous gift at a time when it was needed was a blessing.  

The Camry doesn't look like much by today's standards.  It has quirks, like the front passenger door not opening from the outside, but it gets us where we need to go.  From Texas to North Carolina to Utah and back to Texas, or to work or church, we've put some miles on that car.  A car that runs reliably is a blessing.  

This past Spring Brian was about to pull into a parking space downtown before a concert and a motorcyclist rear-ended him.  They estimated the damage done to our Camry at around $2,000.  We spent one hundred  dollars on a new light, used some of the change for new brakes, a couple new tires, and an alignment, and decided to live with the Camry's new 'look' and pocket the rest of the dough.  A car wreck with no injuries? Unexpected cash for an unemployed family?  Those are nice blessings!

(You better believe Brian laughed to himself as he drove this sweet ride to pick up Elliott from a classmate's birthday party in his million-dollar-homes-on-the-golf-course neighborhood last weekend!)

The first time it rained after the rear-ending, I asked Brian to go check the trunk to see if it was dry inside.  If you'll notice in the picture, the trunk lid doesn't quite line up like it should.  He said it was still dry.  That's a blessing!  

Fast forward to the end of a week of torrential downpours we had here in Houston in October.  A week when we weren't so faithful about parking in the garage...I get in the car to run an errand and it smells TERRIBLE inside!  I popped the trunk and it was filled with water.  Apparently, it does leak!  'Hmmmmmmmm maybe that's what has been making that sloshing sound when we make sharp turns,' I thought.  

I didn't have the energy to deal with the stinky car until the next afternoon.  After a couple failed attempts at finding a shop vac to borrow, I headed out to tackle the project armed with a small plastic cup.  I opened up the trunk, took out the black stiff fabric pad, which was sopping wet, and proceeded to bail out cups of water all around the spare tire and on the side where the jack lives (which was all foreign to me, I'd never looked under the black pad!).  After awhile I realized it would be more efficient, and easier, to scoop the water out if I removed the spare tire.  When I did, I saw a couple rubber circles in the bottom of trunk.  I thought, "Oooo a plug?!  Sweet!"  But I could not lift out the rubbery circles so I figured maybe it wasn't a plug after all and kept bailing water.  Lily came out to inspect my progress, took one look in the trunk, and said, "Too bad there's not a plug!" and walked away.  I had been bailing water by the cupful for about 20 minutes and now with more determination, I pulled at those rubbery black circles.  With all my might I got my fingertips just under the lip of the circle and then heard a trickle.  It was a plug!  My daughter's a genius! But now my shoes were getting wet so I spread my legs as I held that plug up and listened to the water trickle out....a new aural sensation for me, my car was peeing between my legs!!  ha!  Laughing at your own car misfortune?  That's a blessing!  

The car dried, the smell went away, we vigilantly park in the garage now, and when I wonder why other's people's blessings look like a shiny new car, with all parts of the bumper present, I remind myself that this is what a blessing looks like for me right now, and I'm so grateful that we have it!  

   

Three-Ohhhh

The past week was one of the most stressful weeks I can remember, but it was all for a good cause.  I successfully threw Brian a Surprise 30th Birthday Party!  It was stressful because the party was at our house so anything and everything I bought for the celebration had to be stashed at a friend's house.  My thoughts all week were about the party but I could not talk about it with anyone or leave any to-do lists lying around (not that Brian would have looked at a to-do list!)  I could not prepare for the party at the house until one hour before, when his dad got him out of the house to take him to a new bike shop in town.  Five minutes after we thought they had left, Brian popped back in the back door and said in a bewildered voice, "What is going on?!"  Stunned to see him, I thought we had blown it.  I had just told the kids not 10 seconds before what was happening and now they couldn't help but start talking about food being hid in the closet, bubbling over with excitement about something.  But it turned out Brian came in to try to find his dad, who had stopped at the neighbor's house to give them some misdelivered mail and had stayed to chat, leaving Brian confused about where his dad was.  Russ came out of the neighbor's house and then they left.  

My mother-in-law Leslie and I weren't sure if the surprise had been ruined.  I went to pick up a babysitter who would help watch the 11 kids who would be there and my friends who had been keeping the food arrived and we spent a mad hour setting up.  

When Brian arrived, he was completely SURPRISED!  Hooray!   I wish I had a video or better picture of his face but another guest said, "His face said it all."  He couldn't believe all the people who had suddenly arrived at our house.  

 I had even made a decoy dinner for him before he went to the bike shop so he was surprised to see a different spread in the kitchen.  I had to come up with an efficient way to feed 26 people without preparing anything ahead of time.  So I did the logical thing, made them cook their own when they got here.  I had all the fixins' of a grilled cheese bar, spread out and labeled on butcher paper, for them to make their own sandwich.  Four kinds of bread, 6 kinds of cheese, ham, turkey, bacon, olives, green chiles, tomatoes, pickles, sun dried tomatoes, french fried onions, and yummy spreads like cherry jam, roasted red pepper and eggplant, and pepper jelly.  My friends brought electric griddles so many sandwiches could be cooked at a time.  Plus I made my favorite holiday punch, Sandra Lee's "Kid's Cranberry Citrus Punch".  It's kid's punch because it's Sandra's only drink recipe that doesn't involve alcohol.  HA!

Pumpernickel, gouda, french fried onions, bacon, and cherry jam were popular on sandwiches!  

We had a white elephant gift exchange which brought lots of laughs.  They know of Brian's distaste of the saxophone and someone brought a Kenny G Christmas cd.  We played some minute to win it games and were impressed with how skilled and competitive our friends are.

It was a really special, happy night.  We are so lucky to have made some great friends here.  This year has been hard but we have been buoyed up by the love and support of our family and friends.

And Brian has one more week in his twenties.  I did the party early since we'll be busy with Thanksgiving festivities in Fort Worth later this week.

Odessa

A couple weeks ago we had the opportunity to take a trip out to Odessa, TX.  Brian was playing with the Midland Odessa Symphony for the weekend and we took the kids out of school and all went in hopes of seeing my Grandpa Marble.  I believe it had been 12 years since I'd seen my Grandpa.  That meant that he had never met my husband or children.  Odessa really isn't on the way to...anywhere and Grandpa doesn't get out of town much.  This past summer I had called my Grandpa and asked if we could come see him on our way back to Houston from Utah.  He said no, that it wasn't a good time because he was in the midst of a series of leg vein surgeries.  I vowed to myself that we'd find a weekend this Fall to go visit him and that I'd do things the Marble way:  not tell him I'm coming!  So when the Midland Odessa Symphony came a callin', I knew it was our opportunity.  

I called him when we got into town and the next day Grandpa and my step Grandma met us at Furr's Cafeteria.  We spent nearly three hours catching up and listening to stories.  It was wonderful.  Grandpa has a charming accent because he grew up in Jackson, Mississippi.  He only had a 3rd grade education and worked hard his whole life to provide for his family as a truck driver.  

He served our country in the Army during the Korean war.  He was trained as a Medic but all he had been trained to do was to inject morphine and hemostatins.  He was captured and became a prisoner of war.  Some injured soldiers who were with him were just shot and killed right in front of him.  A Korean general of some sort at the prison camp had an infected bone in his neck or throat or something like that and it was smelling bad.  He wanted my grandpa to help him.  Grandpa took it out and taught him how to gargle salt water to kill the infection.  To thank him, they left my Grandpa's cell unlocked.  He ran away, dragging the shackle and chain still attached to his ankle.  Grandpa hated to leave his fellow soldiers behind but there was nothing he could have done.  When he got back to the American lines, they started shooting at him so he started yelling at them.  Someone realized it was their good boy from Mississippi and they sent someone out to guide him back through the mine field.  Then the soldiers smashed and sawed the shackle off his ankle, damaging it some in the process.  He also had a fractured arm, which never received any treatment.  They put him back to work.  They told him he could go home sooner if he helped bury the dead, so that's what he did.  When he was allowed to go home, he went back to work for the trucking company the very next day.  

 
We visited the grave of my maternal grandfather.  His name was Edward Lovendale Roskelley.  He owned a Tejano radio station in Odessa.  His radio name was Ross the Boss because when he said his (last) name was Roskelley, people thought he meant his name was Ross Kelley.  People always spelled Roskelley without the second E.  Grandpa's probably rolling in his grave because even in death, some people can't get it right.  When I asked at the cemetery office where his grave was, it took a long time for them to find it in their listings because it was entered in their database without the second E.  

And here is the grave of my paternal Grandmother Shirley.  Above her name is an engraving of a dancer because she was a dance teacher.  Lily is holding the hair out of her face because it was windy.  It was very meaningful for me to visit my Grandparents graves.  I haven't been there since their funerals when I was in high school.  I wish I could get to know them now that I'm an adult but I'm glad I still have memories of them.  

We visited my friend Susanna and her family in Midland.  We grew up going to church and high school together.  

We visited a friend of ours from Roosevelt, Ben Walsh, and his beautiful brood.  Ben plays trombone in the Symphony and teaches a million private lessons a week to support his family.  

Even though the trip was difficult because Lily has hit a carsickness phase and Elliott likes to sympathetically vomit if he is sitting next to his sister when she vomits, I'm so glad we had the opportunity to visit the land of my forefathers, where my parents were raised, and where I was born.  Mostly, I'm glad I got to give my Grandpa a big, long hug, listen to him tell stories, and hear him tell me how beautiful my children are. =)  

round two

After a studying break for the rest of June, July, and half of August (in which we traveled to Utah and back), I started studying for the lsat again.  Initially, it was MUCH harder to get out of bed and get in the groove of studying the second time around.  I really doubted my ability to do focus and improve enough to make it worth it again.  I decided to buy a new book that focused on a section of the test that I really hadn't had time to work on the first time around, the dreaded 'games' section.  After about 3-4 weeks, I had made my way through the book and was SO MUCH more capable of whooping up on a games section!  Somewhere along the way I also registered for the October 5 lsat, committing myself.  I feel I owed it to myself to try one more time. 

I approached study/preparation slightly differently this time.  I felt like I hadn't lost my understanding of the pacing needed in the timed exam so I didn't worry so much about doing as many complete lsats as I could.  Besides spending so much time on the games to build my confidence, I tried to delve deeper into the section that makes up half the score and gain a greater understanding of how the most frequent quesiton types work. 

The weekend boot camp class I had paid for and taken in May, came with the ability to take the class again, for free.  To get my money's worth I did the class again.  Not enough people signed up to take it in Houston so the company cancelled the class 6 days before but told me I could take it in Dallas.  So we loaded up the car after school on a Friday, drove to my parents' and I spent the first weekend of nice fallish weather in a room at a hotel, geeking out on lsat prep.  The class was taught by someone different than my first class had been, and while it was absolutely torturous to sit through it again, it did build my confidence (my fellow classmates were mostly light years behind where they should have been in their preparation) and I did gain some important tips. 

The most important thing for me the teacher emphasized, was that this multiple choice test was about finding the 4 wrong answers, leaving you with the right one.  Deciding to read an answer choice and say, 'no that can't be it because ____'  and marking through its letter, as opposed to, 'well I don't think that's the right answer but let me read the next ones and see what I like better' was a great tool for me.

At my first boot camp class, the interesting thing was that three out of six students had a lazy eye.  At this class, the interesting thing was 6 out of 14 students were in their 40s and 50s. In fact I'm pretty sure two of them were on a date. 

When one of the ladies sat down in a chair in front of me and turned around to say hi I thought to myself, "She's had botox!  What is she doing here?"  And over lunch with her, I found out I had met my first politician, a woman who had been on the Fort Worth City Council.  When I told my parents they were like, "Oh yeah, we know her.  She's our representative!"  (*Wait people know their specific city council representative?!)  Anyway, this woman talked my ear off during the lunch hour about how awesome, charitable, and selfless she is!  My dad calls that keeping her halo on straight.   She told me a story about how she personally helped a destitute black lady with a felony history move to a less dingy apartment.  Her husband had said to her, "Honey you can't drive your Jaguar* over to that neighborhood!"  But hey, it's okay to talk about how wealthy you are as long as you interject, "We're very blessed," every third sentence, right?  Her husband does own an oil and gas business after all, they're very blessed.  (*Sidenote, we live in a part of Houston where Jaguars are a dime a dozen so that sentence didn't even phase me, but my folks got a huge kick out of it so I included that part =)  And when we discussed a question that had to do with an election, she followed up the discussion by interjecting, "And as a former elected official myself, I concur with that answer choice." 

So anyway, the final lsat of my life was yesterday!!!!  The night before and the morning of, my stomach was just in knots.  I couldn't believe I was feeling so stressed/sick about it.  Eating breakfast had never been such a chore. I guess after a combined 4 months of studying, I hoped confidence would trump nerves but the body does what the body does, I suppose.  So I did the only thing a musician knows to do (besides pray!), I took a beta blocker!  That is fodder for another post entirely, but wow I felt so much better!  Brian was so sweet to be willing to drive me downtown so I wouldn't freak out when, sure enough, there was horrible traffic right at the exit, so we had to take a huge detour.  When I finally sat in my seat with my freshly sharpened pencils in front of me, I was cool, calm, and ready! 

I felt much better about it than the first time.  That could have been from the pill, but regardless, I'm hopeful it will be a couple points higher!  You would think I would be SURE my score would be signficantly higher, but alas, the lsat is very hard.  There were still plenty of "It's either this answer choice or this answer choice.....do I spend 30 more seconds trying to decide why it's one instead of the other, or do I just pick one and move on?"  As is the lot in life of a 'not-a-test-taker'.  Sigh.  But I did my best.  I gave it my all in my preparation, I tried my hardest yesterday morning, and I hope God guided my pencil to guess the right letter to bubble in on the questions I didn't have time for.  The Games section that I had worked so hard on this time around did NOT fluster me!  I did really well on it, I think!  So we'll see...I'll get my score by Halloween.  In the meantime, I get to shift my time to writing my essay for law school applications. 

The test took forever, after arriving at 8am, I didn't walk out of there until 1:45 and all I wanted was a large french fry.  Brian was there waiting for me with a dozen roses!  He wins!  They smell so good too!  It's pretty great to have a little role reversal.  After all these years of me supporting him through auditions, it feels really great for him to be so proud of me.  And we did get french fries on the way home! 

 

*these books look thicker in real life!  ; )

Peace out, LSAT!

My Marathon, part 5

All of a sudden it was over. No more early morning runs, no afternoon sprints, no long weekend runs. For the next week, I found myself still solving lsat questions as I turned over in the middle of the night. As I stacked all my books on our closet shelf, gathered up my number two pencils from around the house, life went back to normal. Looking back, the previous 10 weeks seemed like a blip.

I got my score last week. Remember how I said I had been shooting for average? Okay maybe just higher than average? Ironically, that’s exactly what I got. Just a couple points higher than the median score of lsat takers. Am I happy? I’m happy it’s not any lower. But I’m disappointed because it’s lower than nearly every previously administered lsat that I took. I’m frustrated because I’m not sure how I could have prepared better. I don’t know what I could do next time, differently, to get the several points higher that I put in all those miles for. (Besides, not have a mini-freak out during the games!) What do you do when you work your behind off for something and then it doesn’t go as well as planned? Try again sounds like the obvious answer. We’ll see. The lsat is offered next in October. 

I get emails from law schools every day. Some of them have even offered me scholarships, asking me to start this fall after snooping at my score. But those schools must not be very awesome, if they are trying so hard to fill seats in their incoming classes next month. I have heard law school applications are way down, nationwide.

Am I going to go to law school? The short answer is I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer. I mean I would love to have a fancy job to wear a pencil skirt and great shoes to every day that would be intellectually stimulating and offer our family stability and financial security...but I don’t know enough about what it is lawyers do every day to know if it would be worth it to me. It’s an enormous financial investment and I want to be really sure. I don’t know where I would apply. Hopefully my husband will have a job soon and that might provide a clue as to where to apply. But what if his next job is temporary and then what if we’re somewhere else next fall? Law school is three years long and in our 9 years of marriage, we’ve never lived in a city more than a year and a half...

It scares me to think about starting down a path when I don’t have a clue what type of law would make me feel fulfilled. Anyone need a nice, non-confrontational lawyer? I can do passive aggressive! I’d like to use my powers for awesome and make people’s lives better...but I’m not sure what that would mean for me.

I have a long time to think about those things. There are several lawyers in my congregation here and I hope to be able to follow each of them around at work for a little bit and get a better sense of things.

What did I get out of my self imposed marathon? The weeks of studying for the lsat were a sanity saver. That’s really why I kept going. My husband doesn’t have a job. Every day he practices for his next audition. Studying for the lsat gave me something to work toward as well. It added a lot of balance to my thoughts! Even though it was hard, frustrating, and time consuming, it was the right thing for me to be doing. 

 

I learned that I can accomplish MORE when I want to.  I could get up early every day to work on that scrapbook gathering dust in the corner.  I could make more time for geneaology work.  I realized that normal people probably just pick up a book and read when they need to feed their brain.

I want to be an example to my kids of continually striving to improve myself. I want them to learn how to play a musical instrument because I found SO MANY parallels to music throughout my struggling to figure the lsat out. The experiences I had, playing the horn for the last 18 years, brought me all the tools I needed to tackle my marathon (except maybe those pesky logic games). Time management, following directions, simulating “day of” conditions, abstract thinking, perseverance, self reflection/coaching, effective use of practice time, grit, courage, visualization, and attention to detail, are the first few parallels that come to mind. I want my kids to know that they can do hard things. But that’s really something they’ll only learn by doing it on their own. And if I end up going to law school, they’ll have to do more things on their own....like laundry and making their own breakfast and lunches....and it would be good for me to let them do those things for themselves.

I know that there is a plan for me and for my family and I feel hopeful for our future....sometimes I just wish it was all downhill for the next little bit so I could see our next finish line.

Thanks for reading, friends!