best-cousin-friends

Oma's Birthday, 2007
Bemidji, MN

Oma's Birthday, 2008
Bemidji, MN
Oh, how we love our cousins!!

memories of childhood & family

I love summer. I love my family. I mean the family that I grew up with and the family that I created and the family that I've chosen. I love the time spent with those people. I am present at the very moment we are together, then, the memory fades into a feeling...
I love this sticky heat. I love the big trucks outside my house, shaking the street as they dig the dry, hot earth from under the asphalt, shaking the dust into my windows like confectioners sugar on the forbidden sweet bun. My whole house is shaking to it's very foundation, and yet I feel safe tucked inside, the shades drawn down and the fan pushing the inside air lazily around the room...
I love my life. My very simple, complicated life. My girls are draped across the pillows on the floor, sweaty legs and arms akimbo, drowsily watching yet another movie while we stay, stuck, inside our dusty, shaking, non-air-conditioned home on this 98 degree day in urban Minnesota...
I am so happy.

cabin happy

We went to the cabin up north to celebrate my mom's birthday! My family from California (Uber Uncle and Sweet-n-Sassy-Sister-in-law and lovely, lovely nieces) were here to help celebrate. We had a wonderful time. We shopped and chopped and laughed and grilled and ate and drank and chatted and laughed and boated and roasted lots of edible things over open fires and swatted mosquitoes and laughed and relaxed and...

...do you notice? No bickering?! Not once! Hooray!

Even with all of that joyful familial merry making, no one was happier than Shadow.
Go figure.

We love this dog!

And he loves the cabin!

Happy Birthday, Oma!