Welcoming March with a Benner family visit!

I'm starting this blog post with these two goofs (who were photographing each other a few nights back) in the bathtub right in front of me making quite a ruckus. We'll see how this goes! Don't get your hopes up for something deep or thoughtful!

And that was honestly as far as I got before Terah got water up her nose and that was the end of that! Now she is soaking up a little post-bath Grandma love on the eve of their departure back to wild, wonderful West Virginia. Alida just commented to me how fast their time went here and I could not agree more. It felt super short to me since Jason and I spent 5 of the days they were here in a training together.

After wanting to take the STAR training through CJP for a number of years, I was able to take part this past week and not alone - Jason joined me and also Noreen Crain, the doctor that cared for Nora and us the last week of her life. What an incredibly rich, challenging, painful, inspiring, stretching, fun, exhausting, meaningful week of learning. STAR stands for Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience. It's a week long training program that looks at cycles of trauma and violence and also cycles of resilience, at individual, family, community, organizational and societal levels. Jason and I are going to work through our manuals together as our next "book" so we can continue to deepen our learning and share more with each other from the week. It's such an intense and compacted time of deep reflection and growth, so I feel like both of us will be unpacking it for some time to come. Two quotes from the week that have been rolling around in my mind are "hurt people hurt people" and "pain that is not transformed is transferred." I thought a lot about my family this week, my own life journey and especially our journey with Nora. At this point, Jason and I are both pretty exhausted. Here's my introvert husband in our first short stint of time between hosting folks at the end of STAR and before his family arrived for a weekend visit. I know he would benefit from a few hours buried under stuffed animals with no one bothering him!!

Our home got a lot quieter late morning today when the last of Jason's family departed. The visit got shortened a bit due to the wintry mix and snow that came down most of today. That said, we savored a lot of special and fun times together. The highlight of the weekend for me was undoubtedly playing sardines last night over at Emily and Jonas' as part of our adoption/birthday party. We are so happy to officially welcome Landon and Quentin into our family. What sweet nephews! The look on Quentin's face was priceless when he learned that we were all going to do an activity that they wanted to do as part of celebrating how happy we are to have them in our family. He exclaimed to Landon, "We get to tell the adults what to do" or something like that. So fun! 

There was a lot of fun cousin time! The moment that made me feel grateful and full inside was watching the kids enjoy time playing in Nora's garden. I'm so grateful for that space and how the water feature captures the attention of little people. They complete that space just by being in it!

I'm racing to finish this before Alida, Terah and Grandma finish the puzzle they are working on. That may be a losing proposition as those three make a pretty good team! So here's just a few other snippets from recent days!

Alida is itching for pet chickens. We agreed on it at a recent family meeting and so she and Jason have rehabbed the lid of the pet coop that Jason and Kali made years ago. The last coat of paint went on yesterday and I think tomorrow may be the day that they "stock" the coop with Goldie Brown and Brownie, Alida's two chosen hens. We'll see how this goes! It's fun to see the spike in Alida's interest in carpentry projects and outdoor chores. She also really loves if that means time where she has her Daddy all to herself!

The other night we finally caught up watching ALL our old family videos. The night we completed that project the girls suggested we look through all our photos. We have only done that one evening and that is going to take A LONG TIME! But it's also fun and special to do together and brings back so many memories as well as offering opportunities to tell stories from times when some of them were not yet born. It's a tight squeeze but I love being squished up with my four favorite people!

A new and very precious thing happened the other evening when we had new friends over - STAR was also amazing for making new connections. Alida helped Terah get her jammies on, brush her teeth and then happily sat down to read with her. The next time I looked over Terah had sacked out next to her. So sweet!

The animals make me feel like spring is upon us! We still don't know if either of our pigs are pregnant but if they are we should have piglets next month! This week our first chicks hatched - only 3 of 7 hatched but they are a cute 3! It never seems to get old! It also seems that mating season is upon us as Duckie is starting to seem more "dabblely" and the roosters are quite "active." And I'm itching to get our next seeds started - hopefully this week. Though at this point, I sometimes wonder if it will ever dry out enough for us to plant seeds. Once again it seems that the ducks are the creatures on our land that are most happy about the wet weather! And watching them enjoy it helps me appreciate it more too!

Puzzle's done!