Freeze frame

If there had been a camera pointed at this door for the last 20 years it would have captured:

A young, lost, confused 20-something me trying to figure out how to live halfway across the world.

A delighted and pregnant me with Baby # 1

An exhausted and anxious me with tiny girl.

A tired me running after toddler girl

A tired me running running after toddler girl and growing baby # 2

A pregnant me figuring out how to do this a second time

A delighted me with a tiny boy in a car seat

A dazed me with tiny boy and "helpful" big sister

A me - from time to time through the preschool years trying to keep them from playing with the toys, or slumped on my chest sick

A me with fractured bones

A me with school-age children getting check-ups or flushed with fevers

And today a me with 2 teenagers getting check ups

I am SO grateful for one Doctor through all of the last 20 years who has helped me through all of these transitions.....who runs ridiculously late but always has enough time for me.... who errs on the side of caution... who seeks specialist help if she needs it.... who only ever yelled at me once!

She has celebrated the high moments with me, held my hand through some tough times, always been a sympathetic and intelligent physician.

 She cares about the whole of me and my family and we are so lucky to have her.

Are you my home?

I have been thinking a lot, mainly in the dark, awake hours, about the notion of "home".

I keep saying we are "going home" when I talk about our trip to SA and then as the words come out they feel discordant....wrong....my gut flips.  Then I get all wordy and complicated trying to retract without seeming like a crazy person.

This is home...... Canada..... right?  It's been 20 years....almost half my life....and yet...yet..... I cannot say it with utter conviction.

I feel split.

My Dad call himself Afro Canadian which brings puzzled looks and some hilarity from a very white dude with a mixed accent.

I don't know what to call myself.

I really want to be firmly "at home" somewhere...I want to belong to some place....I was not born to the gypsy life....I need roots.

I feel I have lost the right to be South African through time and distance.....I go back there with much mixed emotion.  I have never been back and I find as that day approaches I am increasingly full of emotion.

Emotion I am having trouble processing.

I have heard it said of immigrants that you have to go back to your homeland and return to your new land to feel "at home" in your new place.  I have heard many people testify to this truth and I see now I missed that step in my immigration process.  Now faced, by my own choice, with the reality of stepping back on African soil I feel a huge wash of emotion over me, tears at the ready... but why?

For what?

Certainly not regret.

I love the choice we made to come to Canada.  I love our life here.  I feel abundantly blessed to be living here and raising our children in this place.  I appreciate the liberty and peace and relative wealth and ease of life here.

I am curious how it will feel to be back in South Africa....to smell and hear and feel South Africa as it is today.  To return to places that hold tremendous significance in my personal history, places that will forever be part of my story wherever I live. To be with people who "get me" is a different way than friends here, who share deep history.  To reconnect to family, to have our children connect with their family they have lived so far from.  To see DNA trump distance....I hope.

Will it be healing?  Will it reawaken my African genes?

How will it feel to come back to Canada?

I don't know......about any of it..... and it scares me a little bit.

Ok... maybe more than a little bit.

Wordless Wednesday - Fogged IN

We have been fogged in for well over a week now - it is harder to photograph than you might expect....here are some iPhone pics......

Soul Fill Sunday

After a big day and night yesterday I was ready for a slow day.

Allan left at the crack of dawn for a fishing trip and I blessedly went back to sleep until the church alarm.  I woke the kids, got the dog up and fed, made myself a tea and had some granola and yogurt after realising I hadn't really eaten since breakfast the day before.....and it slowly dawned on me the children were not stirring upstairs.

I repeated my waking efforts to no avail and realised if I actually got them up I would be dragging grumpy teenagers to church so I abandoned my mission and crept back under the covers myself and listened to the radio for a bit....in defense of the sleepy teens Lindsay worked so hard with me all day yesterday and David had a robotics competition (in which he did really well) and then helped out at the auction...... I think a slow day was in order for them too.

My friend Emily and I had planned to go to a sale of equipment and props that a theater company was having so as I was heading out two sleepy teenagers had just emerged.  The sale was interesting and we both got a few things ....mostly for work.  We then headed to a Farmers Market in Southlands in
Vancouver.... and what a lovely little find it was....small and whimsical and soulful.....we both fell in love with the place. We did a little veggie shopping and then had a delicious heirloom tuscan tomato soup and slice of bread from Urban Digs ( I also got some of their preserves and Beer Mustard!!) and watched folks go by for a bit.

We wandered through the farm, watched the horses and I think we both felt a little restored from the busyness and business of our lives......or maybe it was the Magic Path?  :)

I came home and had a very rare nap.....which truly wrecked me though it was quite delicious to crawl into bed and close my eyes for a bit.  Lindsay and I had our flu shots yesterday morning and I think we are both feeling a little "draggy" today......or maybe just tired.

The kids and I just came home from Family Dinner with my parents and my Great Aunt Jean visiting from Ontario.  At almost 91 she is the last Richardson of her generation and one of the most charming.  It was delightful for the children and I to chat with her....she is beautiful and intelligent and interesting....a keeper of many hours of family lore and legends.

A delightful way to cap a busy weekend.

Keeping tabs!

There is a joke on the internet that goes something like this "a woman's mind is like having 100 tabs open on the computer"....or something (I could look it up but that would mean opening another tab!) but as I dealt with a rather wider than usual range of items and issues this week it rang true.....to me.

I do feel like I have 50 tabs open and there is stuff to do in each one.

I find myself flipping from reading hotel reviews in Frankfurt to reviewing budgets with accountants to editing photos of children doing art projects to wondering why the heck I cleaned the carpets the day before hosting a herd of youth .....and that's the pace I can keep up each minute of the day...... (then no shock that at 10pm when I put off my bedside lamp that my brain does not cooperate.....tabs left open all over the place!).

The Summer just went full tilt into the Fall which is crazy busy.  The final loose ends on the new centre are not yet tied up in a pretty bow and I just got a notification for a 30% completion walk through on the next new centres (which to curse me is actually running ON schedule when I am used to these things being years
behind schedule).....and we are suddenly in design of the 3rd new one.....which will hopefully fall hopelessly behind schedule before I lose the plot completely.

And that stuff is all extra to my regular job of keeping the wheels turning and the lights on in the organisation on a day to day basis! You get my need for multiple tabs yes?

Then this weekend in our annual fundraiser which somehow came to rest on three people again.....and again.... we managed to pull it off and are hopeful that the (much needed) dollars pour in tomorrow night so that tab can be closed before the system crashes altogether.

My beloved children keep flashing the countdown timers they have installed on their phones that show how many days, hours and minutes until we leave for the grand adventure..... I try to look pumped and excited instead of panic-stricken......and immediately 25 tabs open in my head with all I still need to do!

My poor friends must think I have abandoned them completely as I have been a lousy communicator and connector lately.....reduced to late night texts professing my barely visible friendship and love!!  I have all your tabs open peeps I promise and I think about you all often - usually while driving - when I can't text or call you.

Then there are the 20 or so tabs open about random, useless, ridiculous things......
like what the heck am I going to wear to the art auction tomorrow?,
remembering to pick up leaves and pine cones for decorating the art,
wondering when to schedule flu shots,
when the fog will lift?
and
whether or not the USA got its stuff together on the debt or should I be checking in with my mortgage broker about interest rates.......

And there went another 5 minutes of my life I won't get back.....

Oi - the tabs need to CLOSE already......where the heck is the button?

Wordless Wednesday - Fall sunrises

There is about a two week window each Fall and Spring when the sunrise is just as I am driving to work - I find it irresistible not to drive down to the river and take photos - I LOVE IT!  It's such a fleeting moment - as soon as the sun come over the horizon the colour show is over.... I have used filters on a couple but for the most part they are just that colorful and incredible......click on the images to see them larger if you wish.