The Call

"Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it." ~Proverbs 22:6

Every child has a calling from God. Raising Vanessa and Zane with purpose will allow us to discover His unique plan for each. We pray we keep our hearts open and clear so we receive and lean on the Operator's transmitted guidance and direction. Unfortunately frequent busy signals keep us from assessing, recognizing, determining and discovering their God-given calling, whatever it may be. Frankly, I don't want to miss the call.

Aunt Bettie

 July 19. 1928 ~ May 9, 2013

Another chapter closes. Bettie Joe Chaffin. For her children, she fought a good fight. She was a giving person. She touched this world in a unique way. Her care and love for her baby brother, my dad, influenced her baby brother's children in tremendous ways. We spent a lot of time with her. She advocated our relationship with my maternal grandparents and adored them. "Vicky, they are/were great people. Some of the best people." Sometimes when we were with her, she picked up the phone (back when there were charges for calls to places 20 plus miles away) and insisted we call to check in on our grandparents. She would let us talk as long as we'd like.

She hosted her baby brother anytime day or night. She was a constant provider for him when the pressures of mental illness and providing for his family became too much. She provided in-home care for others with physical ailments or who were mentally challenged. They mirrored her love and giving nature, by making me and my siblings knitted slippers and various other things. She encouraged her daughters to bring home boxes of donuts and pies from the bakery they worked at to give to us. Her house was tidy and fresh for sleepovers. Her breakfasts were the size to feed armies. She developed my love for bacon and eggs fried in bacon grease.

She is one I'm very similar to in terms of my hypersensitive nervous system. In fact, she was likely more nervous. She was a worrywart. Other than her nervous nature, and all the bacon grease, she remained relatively healthy and extremely feisty all of her years, until she was diagnosed with breast cancer in late summer of  2012. The lady also got through life with relatively good eyes, resorting only to OTC magnifying glasses as she grew older. I did not get her or my father's healthy eyes.

In our last conversations, she talked about how many more years she lived than her mother, who died of cancer in 1952, but at the age of 46. Indeed Aunt Bettie was satisfied and ready to move on.

She would have been 85 on July 19. I imagine her reunion with her mom was glorious. I imagine she and my father talking nonstop and leading endless conversations with their sister(s) and brothers chiming in every so often with sarcastic and silly comments. (I was just told that Uncle Kenny talked more than all of them -- that Aunt Bettie was quiet in comparison. That's hard to imagine!) This might not mean much to the audience of this blog, but oh my goodness, it says so much to our family about the liveliness of that generation.

Our memory of her and memories with her live on. I'm thankful for that.

How far can she go?

Vanessa usually has a strong desire to climb trees after school. Although sometimes she challenges me to do so, I'm not really willing to test her daring and challenging nature. There are times when she can be stubborn and defiant. She's a risk taker in many ways. She's learning the skills to get what she wants in a more nondemanding way. The camera is stay-calm strategy for me, like here. Occasionally I have to step in and demand she stop. I'd like to think that my allowing her to explore some risks will ensure her understanding my sense of urgency when I DO plea with her to stop something.

It worked this time. And she assured me that she didn't need my help.

Where's Zano?

Zane and Vanessa love to look at pictures. Zane has started analyzing pictures. He asks for details and almost always asks where he's at if he's not in the picture. "Where's me?" And you can't make up something like "Oh, I think you were playing somewhere." Zane will drill you until he gets the specifics. Then he needs to approve your story. "No. Where's me?"

"You were with Daddy, in the great room, playing on his iPad."
"Yep. Daddy. Uh-huh. Me."

We end this post with additional remarks from Zane:
"Where Mama go? Where ants go? Where rocks and sticks go? Where birds go? Where boys go? What we do next?"

Field Trip

 

We've waited for this day all year long. It meant Vanessa could ride a school bus. There were so many parent chaperones that our groups were extremely small. Even so, we couldn't help clustering into bigger groups. The weather was perfect. Behavior was perfect. And best of all, we fulfilled our agenda by studying a ton of things first hand.