In the news this week

On the weekends NPR runs a brief feature introduced with the simple phrase, "And here were some of the voices in the news this week..." A series of quick audio clips follows back-to-back without elaboration. It's a nice reminder of the significant happenings of the last week (and a good check on whether one has been paying attention enough to recognize the soundbites).

Not that anyone should be paying attention to happenings in our family, but since we've had a fairly busy week--here are some images in the family news this week. Unlike NPR we'll provide a cheat sheet for reference at the end.



From the top: 1. Edith came home from school Wednesday to find a Tinkerbell costume, complete with crown and shoes, awaiting her at the door--a belated birthday gift from her Princess Partner, Sarah. She has either worn or slept with said costume ever since. 2. A first trip to the circus! 3. Joined at the circus by friends and cousins, Edith revealed her abiding affection for Torrey as he demonstrated to her and Sarah the uses of his new glowstick souvenir (courtesy of Harrison's brilliant mother, who brought in two packages of dollar-store glowsticks for the three-year-old contingent, saving everyone the $20 being charged for circus equivalents). 4. Our first glimpse of Thing Two. 5. Friday's torrential rains gave Edith the chance to wear her new bumblebee raincoat from Aunt Janet. (They also soaked Tom as he ran across campus from the physical exam required for ordination to catch the second half of baccalaureate services; then both of us were soaked as we ran from there to catch twenty minutes of the end-of-year dinner for my job as a writing tutor. 6. TAL, B.A., M.A.L.D. becomes TAL, B.A., M.A.L.D., M.DIV. (He may have been in school a long time, but he knows how to get more letters for his money than anyone I know.) Tom obliged trolling spousal photographers by having chosen some of his good seminary friends alphabetically: We didn't have to rearrange the pre-processional line-up at all to get this shot of Tom with L-friends Mona, Shaun, and Kevin. (Jonathan Land on one side and Julie Lillis on the other would have been welcome inclusions, too, if they'd been looking at the camera.) 7. Everyone was still smiling, including mom and dad, after a two-hour service that included a rather incomprehensible address about the graduates having become the "new feral professionals" (?), delivered after the diplomas had been distributed. (And when they prayed that gentle winds would carry the graduates safely to their new professional positions, I was fairly sure that Tom would need less of a puff than anyone there to bump him to the church on the opposite corner of the intersection, where he already has been on staff for some time. Not much changes for us with this graduation--except that student loans come due.) Edith made it through all this by tracing her hand on each page of the program and consuming most of the breath mints in Aunt Janet's purse...and only melted down during dinner afterwards. She proposed to me that next time we do a restaurant dinner, we leave her home with a babysitter. We've suffered enough mealtime indigestion with her now that we're finally persuaded. Church settings she can handle--meals, not so much.