Good Eggs

I will admit it.  On more than one occasion, our children have helped give our family some visibility, as well as something for on-lookers to talk about.  This is even more true when we are all gathered in the same pew, for Pete's sake, but it also, redemptively,  includes some neat awards and accomplishments.

But our family has achieved another "FIRST", and I'm still processing the implications.

Kieran, our lovely, 6 foot/opera-quality voiced/ fashion-minded/ Broadway loving daughter, announced to us recently that she had made the Poultry Judging team and will attend the state competition as an alternate.

I laughed. A big ol' Belly laugh.
Long and loud.

And Kieran laughed with me.

See,  I grew up in Chicago suburbia.

For me, that meant every 5th house looked exactly the same.  Dads used edgers on their lawns so the manicured grass didn't creep up on the sidewalk.  Moms parked their station wagons in the garage so the kids could draw hopscotch and sky blue on the black sealed asphalt driveways.  Every yard had a swing set, and the trees had all been planted at the same time as the houses were built, so they all grew at the same rate.  They were little, like us.

My kids are getting an entirely different experience in Central Illinois.

Instead of Big Wheels, they are surrounded by John Deere tractors (and there's an official "Drive Your Tractor To School" day here... Really.)  Instead of trekking out to Jewel-Osco for a pound of hamburger, we run over to the local meat locker for some grass-fed beef, and the grass and beef are just as local.    Shoot, we don't even have a stop light in our town, so my kids can't fathom what it is to have a 10 mile/33 minute commute.

So, Kieran's news delighted me to my very core for the singular realization that my kids are NOT ME.
And through their experiences, I continue to have my world enlarged and enriched.

Who EVER would have thought I would be this close to caring about chicken parts and egg standards?
RTC carcass grading?  Sounds bad-ass to me.  3/16" air cells, pronounced ridges, thin albumen?  Not A-listers, for sure.

The teacher/advisor of this prestigious group is a little leery about my enthusiasm (even asking Kieran, "Oh, nuts.  Your mom's not the kind to want to BE THERE, is she?").  Oh yes... and I want a team promoting t-shirt too.  Where's my camera?

Winner winner, Chicken dinner!

Cream Cheese

I get surprised sometimes by little things, like a personal note in the mail, "found" change in the bottom of an old coat pocket, or, in the case of life in the Krenz House, all socks matching up after 6 loads of laundry.

But I got a little surprise when I posted the following on Facebook today:
"We currently have 8 packages of cream cheese in the house.  Why?"

No, I wasn't surprised about finding so many cheese bricks in the house.  No, my surprise was not that they were all in fact still sealed.

My surprise was that within a few short hours my Facebook post was "Liked" a bunch of times, and there were 48 comments on it! Forty-Eight!  (Okay, okay.  One of those was mine.  An update, noting I had found another two bricks).

I had no idea people cared that much about cream cheese or my family's fridge finds, even enough to pull themselves away from their jobs to comment while they were still at work.  It was, after all, midday and still nap time here.

That amused me, and it got me thinking:  People sure can be moved by silly little things.

I was inspired then to hunt for an old link to a blog I loved writing about MY silly little things, but, well, I'm easily distracted and have not written in a while.  I was much more than surprised to see my last post was dated in April... of 2011.  Two. Thousand. Eleven.   Really?  In that time a lot of life has happened, like my father died. I went to Italy. I celebrated 26 married years. I had a baby. 

I was surprised to see the pictures of my children who have changed so much since I last updated the blog.  I looked over an old post, and it reminded me of a memory I had forgotten.  I flipped through other posts and thought, "Dang, some of this stuff is well-written."  I went back and revisited one of my favorites, and yep, I still loved it. 

Writing is very very hard, and crafting the words and ideas can be torture.  But, I wanted a venue for the things that touched and moved me, here in the circumstances of my life.   I wanted to write because I didn't want to forget.

Simply, whenever I finished a post, and with angst hit "PUBLISH",  I was printing something of me.

Would anyone care?

Perhaps. Hopefully someday my children will want to read these entries, and a few other folks in the interim might too. 

Afterall, I learned today there are quite a few who are willing to help out a lady with an abundance of cream cheese.  And I've got more where that came from.