School is over for the year! If you were in our town a few days ago, you might have heard us coming home from Daniel's final final exam at the high school--we were the ones in that worse-for-wear silver Camry with the windows open and the music blasting and an excited teenager in the front seat yelling, "No more school! No more principal!" (And then there's this: the music that we were inflicting on everyone within earshot was the Chris Tomlin version of Amazing Grace--does playing quality music cancel out the obnoxiousness of playing it too loud?) I wonder if we raised any eyebrows as we went along.
But now we are home (everyone except Tim, who has research obligations this summer), and we are all enjoying the change of pace. I think this is the first actually peaceful summer I've had in four years. The first two summers Daniel was home, life could become a wild ride with little warning. And last summer at this time I had two extra kids (who, at one point, we thought we were going to be asked to adopt) AND was very pregnant. Not a recipe for relaxation. So, this year, I am enjoying getting caught up on mending and hand-wash and cleaning and other projects around the house. I can be out of earshot of the two older kids without worrying that they'll be at each other's throats by the time I return, and I can trust both of them with Joel. I don't feel like I have to be on guard all the time, hoping for good but ready to respond to bad before it escalates out of control. It's a good feeling. There is definitely a time for taking on challenges and being stretched, but there can also be a time for consolidating the gains of those stretching times, and I think that we're in one of those right now.
