Living Color

Yesterday, April 26th, more than 5,000 people gathered at our local community college-cum-SUNY satellite campus for a fun run called "Color Run." The 5K "race" includes getting sprayed down at half-mile intervals with brightly colored corn starch. By the end of the 3.1 miles, participants have been doused in orange, pink, yellow, green, and blue dye. (The dye works its way out of skin in about a week, and out of blonde hair in a month or so--I'm told.) I call it a "race" because the throngs are so thick that runners can't manage more than a jog, and walkers are really just sauntering. A better way to describe it is a fast parade of people who have finally found an excuse to wear their loudest, most brightly colored ensembles and get messy. Here's a shot back at the first mile:

Sara, Gwendolyn, and Kerri did the Color Run together. Gwendolyn had trained for this over the last few weeks; finishing a three-mile walk on her own feet was an accomplishment. Here is the triumphant trio coming out of the last splash of color (but before the penultimate glitter station):

~ emrys

Both Ends of the Spectrum

The stark contrasts within my children sometimes amaze me. It's as if, at the age of 5 1/2, there is a policy of full inclusion, unconscious of paradoxes that we will see later in life.

Here is my daughter, gleefully sloshing in the autumn creek water, one of her favorite activities outside:

And here is that same young lady, poised and ready for the beginning of Sunday morning worship:

I'm not sure who taught her to cross her legs like that--I suspect that, yet again, she's imitating Kerri. Of course, one thing is constant: PinkAndPurple.

What a grand mixture we are, from the very beginning!

~ emrys

Dirty Work, Dirty Play

We're rearranging our garden for next year, which means dismantling seven of the raised beds and planting grass seed. Yesterday morning, Gwendolyn asked if we could work in the garden after breakfast. Micah piped up with his approval of the idea. So out we went. They love wheelbarrow work, because it means both moving dirt and riding to and fro in the empty barrow.

We've razed two beds and seeded them for next year:

We found a toad, petted it, held it, and followed it around in the grass for a while:

The dirt from the garden beds is going to fill in the earthen ramp on the north side of the back porch:

Micah spent a good half hour playing by himself inside the barrow:

His big sister spent that time discovering textures in the moist earth:

Both really like shovel work: cutting, lifting, and dumping:

Here is Minute 14 of the first 30-minute period this week when they occupied with same space without making each other angry:

What a blessing to work and play in the dirt with my children!

~ emrys

Remember When . . .

. . . you could fit inside a vacuum cleaner? Remember when you wanted to?

Digging out my mobile phone pictures, I found these two of Micah, at 1.5 years, loving the steam cleaner. It's in repose, getting its resevoir refilled. While an adult makes the trip from living room to kitchen faucet, Micah seizes the moment to climb into his race car and take off.

And for the times when the race car is not going fast enough, the geniuses at Hoover even added a crop with which to whip your vehicle to greater speeds:

Yee-ha!

~ emrys

For The Record

After three years of compiling, editing, supplementary writing, more editing, formatting, more editing, and uploading, it's finally complete: the compilation of our blog posts (plus hosts of extra photos) from 2006-2008.

If you're one of the few family or friends who could imagine dropping $60 for a copy, it's found at: http://www.lulu.com/shop/sara-emrys-tyler/our-great-adventure-2006-2008/hardcover/product-21715499.html

I'm going to take a breather before I get working on another one of these.

~ emrys

Finally . . . That Last Little Thing

Since the day we bought the house, Sara has been complaining about the carpet in the upstairs bathroom. "Why do people put carpets in bathrooms? Don't they know it's just going to get wet?" Having two small children who love to splash during bath time brought the question continually to the forefront of our minds. And we have wondered, since the first time water splashed out of our shower, whether water was soaking into the carpet and corrupting the sheeting beneath our feet.

In September of last year we bit the bullet and decided to change the upstairs bath: new paint on the walls and linoleum on the floor. Here's a glimpse of its original state, complete with Little Splasher #2 and the foreshadowing cordless drill on the left:

 Note the dirty cream walls:

At 14 months, Micah is ready to take on the 14V DeWalt:

As you can see, no expense was spared in the original construction--not quite wall-to-wall carpeting:

 We are big fans of having main colors and accent colors in our rooms. Instead of uniform dirty cream, we went for a light blue main and bright blue accent color. (By the way, I can't recommend strongly enough the yellow pour spout that attaches to the rim of the paint can: saves paint, mess, and is reusable!):

Of course, all home improvement projects are family projects. Here is my lovely partner in decorating:

 Much of this project was done while Monkey See was off at school, which left Monkey Do to help. He's very serious about his role in the painting process:

This renovation happened as Hurricane Dos was entering his Serious Climbing Phase. So he got up on the toilet and reached for some tool on the changing table. I thought this was a good photo op, and grabbed the camera for a couple of shots:

And I was in mid-shutter-click when the changing pad slid and Micah lost his balance. This was my view right before reaching out to catch him:

He was fine.
When the painting was finished, the carpet awaited removal and replacement. Here's the scene with all the trim removed:

To our surprise, twenty-four years of shower spillage had not rotted out the sheeting.

It turns out that the easiest way to cut linoleum flooring for your bathroom is to use the recently removed carpet as a pattern, laid out in the living room. No measuring necessary! It is a testament to the size of our bathrooms that marking and cutting the linoleum flooring had to be done in two phases; the whole cutout of the bathroom floor would not fit in our living room:

When it came time to install the trim, Handyman Deux was ready to swing 22 ounces of nail-driving power. All right: his spirit was ready, but the flesh was a little too young.

So he set himself instead to understanding the tool at rest:

And with new color, new floor, and trim almost completely replaced, we have a new bathroom:

I said that the trim was almost completely replaced. The job was almost done in November of last year. This is June of this year. Even though we plowed through the big parts of this project in good stead, I didn't make time to cut, sand, and seal the one piece of trim that I had to totally replace. (And I needed to replace the leaky sweat valve on the toilet.) I had the wood; I had the tools; I had the polycrylic. I just didn't make the three hours in my schedule to get it done. That's how it often is with my projects: They are not completely finished because of some Last Little Thing that gets put off, as if its small size makes it unworthy of attention before all the Big Things of this world.

Well, two weeks ago I finally got That Last Little Thing done: replacing the sweat valve and trim behind the toilet:

Now the bathroom is done!

~ emrys

Scattershots

Some shots from 2013, which have been hanging out on my desktop for too long.

First, my friend Don, whose journey to a community house for the disabled occupied much of my time and heart in 2011 and 2012. It was a journey filled with frustration and disappointment, but also filled with amazing graces from the Lord and divine appointments. Here he is, proud to be functioning well again:

 And the community with which he now lives, supported by two saints, husband and wife, who care for their charges 24/7:

 Two shots from the youth Game Nights at Nineveh: evenings filled with crazy games, good food, raucous fun, and of course the offer of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

 My Lovely, working on a painting project while Daddy does some woodworking at The Shop (with goggles in case the paint splashes):

 Lintel over the door of a former train station in Ithaca, New York. Uncle Jim tells me that a train used to run from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. My grandmother used to ride the train direct to Bethlehem during her Cornell years. Now, if I wanted to ride the train to the Lehigh Valley, I would have to drive from Ithaca to Rochester (90 minutes), then take the train to Albany (a couple hours), then the train to Penn Station, NYC (an hour or more), then the train back west to Pennsylvania (90 minutes). Driving from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley takes about three hours.

 Two shots of the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky across the Ohio River to Indiana, taken during one of my business trips to Luhville this year. Something about the blue light on the girders attracted my lens:

 Beans, rocks, beads, and salt, mixed together as a material illustration for Time for Children during worship. I can't remember exactly what I was illustrating, but I remember that the kids were not interested in eating this bean soup:

 Two pieces of hard evidence that as much as teenagers (and thirty-seven-year-olds) want to be considered adults, when placed in a room with building blocks, they will inevitably return to a child-like state:

~ emrys

Gifts from Friends

A colleague of mine is an avid textile artist, and along with a couple of other colleagues from my presbytery, enjoys producing works of art for members of the next generation as they appear. Here are the jacket and cap made for Micah--fitting just right his six-month-old frame. (Big Sister could not help but get in the way of the camera's eye.)

Thanks, Barbara, for your gorgeous work!

~ emrys

End of an Era

While completing my degree at Fuller Theological Seminary, I served as the middle school youth leader at St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Chatsworth, California. I learned a great deal about my own gifts for ministry and calling during those two years. For instance, I learned that while I can engage youth with gusto and joy I do not gain sustenance from the work as I do from teaching and leading adults. In spite of the fact that I am probably not called to full-time youth ministry anytime in the near future, I enjoyed the ministry there and the youth who were in my care.

Upon my departure, the other youth leader helped my kids to make a gift for me. Here it is, a velvet color-in image of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane:

Stephanie, Kristina, Holly, Erik . . . not to mention Michael, Chris, Jackie, Tina, Scratch, and several others whose names escape me eight years later: Thank you!

~ emrys