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seven generations
Yesterday we had a special stake conference with Elder Godoy of the Quorum of the Seventy. He talked a lot about family relationships. He asked us how long our family had been in the church…what generation of church members we are. I counted back and figured out I am the seventh generation member.
Oh my.
My heart swelled up with joy at the thought of being seventh. Keziah Keturah Van Bethuysen Rollins, James Henry Rollins, James Watson Rollins, George Leon Rollins, Myrtle Easton Rollins, Dorothy (my mama), and me!
Seven is my favorite number. It is sacred and oh, so very dear to my heart. I was born on the 7th at 7:00, weighed 7 lbs. and my mom was in the delivery room for seven minutes. In Hebrew, another one of my great loves, seven/sheva means holy, complete, covenant, fulfilled, perfection and basically everything good and wonderful you could ever think of. I am so in love with seven I gave one of my children the middle name of Sheva…really Elisheva…but we call her Sheva.
I have always been in awe of my seventh generation grandma on my mom’s side, Keziah. She lived a hard life of hard work, sacrifice, and great faith. I grew up hearing of her struggles and triumphs and decided early on to be just like her. She raised brave children willing to do hard things…she is the mother of James Henry, one of the Joseph Smith’s bodyguards who was with him at Richmond jail and on the Zion’s Camp march, and the mother of Mary Elizabeth and Caroline, the girls who rescued copies of scripture from an angry, violent mob and hid for hours in a corn field while the mob searched for them. I wanted to be a mother like Keziah who would raise righteous children who loved the Lord and would do whatever He asked of them.
I have a pretty strong spiritual connection to the seventh generation mama on my dad’s side, Barbara Bortner. I feel all warm and squishy towards her and can’t wait to meet her. Her two daughters, Anna Marie and Jane are grandmas of mine on both my dad’s paternal and maternal side.
So here I am. The seventh generation of people who sacrificed all they had to follow the direction of God. My deep-thoughts-with-Tracy has me asking myself these types of questions:
- What legacy am I giving my children?
- What is my duty to my ancestors?
- What stories do my children need to hear to prepare them for their futures?
- What character traits do I want my grandchildren raised with and what can I do now to pave the way for that to happen?
- What can I do to nurture my children’s faith in the atonement of Jesus Christ?
- How can I strengthen our family relationships?
- What traditions will bind our family together?
- How can I more fully bless Richard’s life?
- What daily practices need to change in our home?
- Why did God place me in these family lines?
- Why did God give our children to us?
- What does he want us to do with this sacred gift?
- Do my children see love in my eyes?
- Do they feel my love in their hearts?
- What skills do they need to raise healthy, functioning families?
- How can I more fully involve my children in family history?
- Are my children being guided by the Holy Ghost?
I am going to spend some time pondering these questions and any more that come to my mind. Then I am going to act on the promptings I receive. Investing in my family is high priority for me. I am done surviving. I am done getting by. It is time to thrive as a family.
renewal
Banner weekend! So many of my posts are dismal and depressing, but here is one full of cheer!
Good thing #1: I have a comfy mattress! Wahoo!!!! For the first time in a long, long, looonnngg time, neither of my shoulders shifted out of place in the night! I can’t even tell you how incredibly thrilled I am at this turn of events in our life!
Good thing #2: My father called on Friday afternoon and said he was going to come and see me in a few weeks! Oh my stinkin’ heck. I almost died of shock and then I got all giddy. I have seen my father very few times since he left our home when I was 12 – 1986, 1987, 1992, 1992, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2009. He saw a Blythe when she was a few months old and then not again until five years ago when she was thirteen. Our other three has met just once. So this is a big deal. A huge deal. I hope, hope, hope my foot is all better by then so I can be up and doing stuff with him.
Good thing #3: After days and days of being confined to the four walls of my bedroom in an effort to heal this foot quickly, my sweetie took me to the movie on Saturday night. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is laugh-out-loud hilarious with its witty lines, inspiring with its message of pursuing your dreams, and flat out brilliant. I adored it and can’t wait to see it again. Garlic fries and a peppercorn burger hit the spot after the movie and I think I am buoyed up for a few more days spent in bed.
Good thing #4: Much of Saturday was spent reading about William Wilberforce. Oh, I love that man! His courage to do what he felt called to do filled me with resolve to do what God has called me to do.
Good thing #5: Today we had a special conference for our stake and during the talks, I had a lot of thoughts about my relationship with Christ, my children, my wifehood, and the heritage of faith I want pass to my descendants. Lots of good messages and I am going to spend some time this week pondering what God would have me implement in my life.
So, a good weekend, full of light and love, fun family times and spiritual renewal. Now I can enter the next week with a cheerful heart and a lighter spirit.
more of that miss annes
Our Annesley is growing up. I keep noticing all sorts of little things that say my baby girl is entering a new phase of her life. For one thing, she looks older. Her face is changing. I don’t really know how to describe it except to say it isn’t quite as cherubic as it used to be…thinner, a few more freckles, a look of seriousness in her eyes that never used to show up. Her body is lankier, getting longer and gosh, I don’t know, just different. Her legs seem stretched, her forehead seems bigger, and her hands are girl hands, not chubby, round hands.
She still comes in to my bed every morning and snuggles with me. It is our favorite part of the day. She tells me all about her nighttime dreams and I rub her back and clean out her eyes and smother her with kisses.
My body’s injuries have been hard on this wee one. She doesn’t really remember a time when my body wasn’t hurt. She keeps saying things like “I wwwwiiiiiiiiiiiiisssshhhh you didn’t have to be in bed all the time!” or “Why do you have to keep getting hurt? I want you to be all better and no one to ever hurt your feet again!” or “Mommy, do you think you will ever be better?” She is also very concerned for me with questions like “Mama, will that hurt your hip?” “Mommy, do you want to rub your neck?” This whole slew of injuries has sobered her. It hurts my heart for my little one’s childhood to be so different from her older siblings. No bike rides with me pulling her behind me, no hikes with her mama, no airplane rides on my legs or standing in my hands and balancing in the air. She is getting other memories and while I know I am loving her and nurturing her wondrous spirit, I sometimes wish I could wave my magic wand and give her back the last two years of her life with a functioning mama.
Annes and Fisher are best buddies, spending almost all of their time together. They love to explore our property, catch bugs and snakes, build their fort, sled all over the yard, and ride their bikes up and down our road. I am so grateful they have each other. Right now she is learning to read, loves writing her letters and playing games, dances around the house practicing her moves for her clogging class, and snuggling, snuggling, snuggling with anyone who will hold her. Her need for touch is enormous. I don’t know if it is possible to rub her enough. The other night all the children were gone to a play and Annesley was left home alone with me for the evening. We played Spot It and Battleship and she told me all sorts of stories. When it was time for bed she didn’t want to go sleep alone in the basement, so she climbed in bed with us and I held her just like when she was a baby. As I painted her face and rubbed her legs as she drifted off to sleep my heart welled up with love for this precious, precious, girl whose presence in our family is such a miracle. Sometime during that night of holding her it occured to me that there might not be many more of those kinds of nights left. There will come a day when she doesn’t need to sleep in my bed when her siblings are gone, when perhaps she won’t ask me to rub her and won’t start moving my hand across her back when I stop. And I will cry.
That night before she settled down in bed, she bounded over me to get my pills for me from my bin.
Me to Annes as she leaps precariously across my bed: Watch out for my foot!
Annes: I did! I was staring right at it!
Papa: What mama means is stay away from it, not look at it.
Annes: Oh!
She says all sorts of crazy things in the course of a day.
You are the best mama in the whole, whole, wide world.
Her phrase of choice when she doesn’t get what she wants.
You hate me!
Keziah won’t let me rub her anymore unless I pay her, so now I just have to rub myself.
I love Jesus sooooooooo much. He is my bestest friend.
Fisher says I can’t be a chicken owner if I don’t help him feed the chickens! Harumph! I don’t wwwwaaaannnnnttttt to feed them today and now he is taking my chicken back! Why can’t he just do all the work?
Mommy, I love you. I’m so glad Heavenly Father gave me to you. Your belly is sure fat, do you think he is sending us another baby? I wwwwannnnttt a baby. I will take care of the baby all day long just like I take care of Oaklynn. You can stay in bed.
Oh, how I love this girlie. She reminds me so much of my little girl self. So much confidence, so much life, so much joy.
thankful thursdays 2/27
Gratitude is a game changer for me. It helps my brain focus on the precious, my heart enlarge with joy, and my soul to ccccaaaallllmmmm down. Thursdays are my days to think deeply about thanksgiving.
- If you have read WOK for any length of time at all, you know I have richly blessed with amazing friends. Today is another example of their awesomeness. Yesterday we made a plan for me to stay completely off my foot for 36 hours so I could have the cast-like tape removed and let me skin heal a bit from being wrapped up for so long. Being untaped means no getting out of bed except to crawl to the toilet every few hours. But then at 9:55 this morning, I got my email reminder that today is chicken day – 120 lbs. of chicken were waiting for me to pick up and then do something with…can, freeze, etc. Kat, Sheri, and her daughter helped us freezer pack my huge Zaycon chicken order in about 45 minutes!!! OMSH! They are amazing! It would have taken Blythe and Keziah hours and hours to do all that work by themselves, but six pairs of hands working hard together made the process easy-peasy.
- Last night I was blessed to attend a wonderful presentation by my friends, Bob and Tasha, on “When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Lemonade.” It was exactly what I needed – a kick-in-the-butt to try to see things from an eternal perspective and effective skills to experience peace in the moment of trial.
- A big, sobbing, sisterhood hug.
- Minestrone soup brought from a dear friend…so delicious and such a blessing to have delicious comfort food.
- A big bag of venison – thank you Vanessa!
- My Annesley was able to start taking piano lessons today. She is so, so happy! And I get to start the process of being a Suzuki mom again. Now that my girls are grown up and practice without me, I have missed those early lessons with my little ones and I am excited to start the journey again with some of the experience I have gained over the years of being a music mom. Surely I will be calmer and far more nurturing this time around, right?
- I’m so thankful to start off each day with heaps of kale deliciousness in my Keziah-made-green smoothies. I don’t know what I would do without that girlie.
- While it is hilarious to me that I have to be using one, my walker is a huge gift to my physical well-being. I’m sure taking the weight off my foot when I need to walk on it is helping those ligaments to heal.
- My sweetheart’s hand to hold while I try to sleep with this walking boot on. I don’t think I could make it through the long nights of foot pain without him.
- Having Blythe as a driver and errand girl is making staying in bed this time a lot easier. I’m so glad she finally has her license!
I am blessed beyond measure. Life is full of ups and downs and ins and outs and all sorts of cliffs and mountains and valleys and I love it. I am grateful to be able to live this life and have these gut-wrenching, awe-inducing, and soul-streching opportunities to grow and learn and most of all, to love.
stay talus stay
I have learned some interesting anatomy stuff through this most recent foot injury. For those of you who are bored to death of anatomy here at WOK, just skip this post. For those of you who are fascinated by the whole body parts study like I am, read away…
My foot was not technically dislocated because dislocated has a specific definition outside of the obvious meaning of the words dis and located. I thought if one or two of the bones that make up a joint are not in the correct location then they are dis-located. Makes sense, right? Well, I guess there is more to it than that. An actual dislocation occurs when the bones are not in their correct location AND they tear the entire capsular sack when they move out of place. If the sack stays intact, it is not a dislocation regardless of where the bones are. Interesting, eh?
Having super defective connective tissue that stretches and stretches and stretches AND stretches complicates things a bit. My capsular sacks don’t generally break, they will stretch to timbukto and let the bones be waaaayyyy out of place and then sit there all stretched out and saggy with little ability to rebound back to where they should be. Even after the bones are put back into their correct places the poor, decrepit ligaments and fascia are over in left field wondering how to get back to home plate.
So most of the time when my joints slide out of place, they are not actually dislocating. They are far away from where they should be and much further out of place than is typical in a normal dislcation and my nervous system recognizes this and starts screaming at my brain that something is amiss, but they are not technically dislocated because the capsular sack is intact. Unfortunately there isn’t a good word to describe what is happening to me. The best word seems to be dislocation, but now that I know it isn’t completely accurate, I am on the search for a better term.
So, my talus was significantly out of place as were the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th metatarsals, but they weren’t technically dislocated…just sprained and super-duper sore.
I was able to see Jeremy today so he could work on my foot and put it all back together again. Good news! The talus stayed in position from Wednesday evening to this afternoon! Hip, hip hooray! Two smaller bones, cuneiforms (not the language, the bone!), were out of place and it hurt like the dickens to put them back, but my whole foot is feeling much better now that they are back in the correct spots and it is all taped back together. I am now back in bed for the night with my trusty robot walking boot and waiting for my sweetie to come home.
My job for the next week is to stay off it as much as possible, wear the walking boot in bed (oh, my, can I tell you I HATE WEARING THE WALKING BOOT WHEN I AM TRYING TO SLEEP), try really, really hard not to injure anything else, and I get to start some really simple bridging exercises that should work the muscles in my foot AND my hip. Last week Kat helped me find a new pair of Danskos to provide massive arch support to the talus while it is healing – so whenever I am out of bed, I need to wear them (they are ugly as heck, but they are doing the job that my ligaments can’t do, so I will bury my vanity in the sand and wear them). I’m also going to up my intake of Vitamin C with a product called Collagen C by my favorite supplement company, Standard Process, and try super hard to nurture a positive attitude. Jeremy says I have had an attitude at the last few appointments and it is true, I have been rather grumpy, so I am going to try to focus on the gazillion positive things in my life.
cyclops
Me: She is learning how to apologize by how you apologize to her. Please, please use a kind voice and look her in the eye and give her a hug.
K: The eye? THE EYE! She is NOT a cyclops!
Me: Oh honey, please, can you just apologize?
K: I am NOT making lunch if you are going to keep talking to me.
Me: Oh sister, please bring out your best self.
K: You want me to apologize to a CYCLOPS?!?
This girl. This loud, obnoxious, hilarious girl who reminds me so much of myself and brings me SO much joy is also a fireball of crazy contention in our home. Laughter and prayer are my only hopes!
two years
February 20.
A myriad of emotions, thoughts, worries, and gratitudes.
That day there was snow.
This day there are blue skies and sunshine.
That day there was through-the-roof-pain.
This day there is soreness.
That day I felt strong and powerful and loving. I was doing something my daughter desperately wanted to do and my body was capable of doing it.
This day I am trying to feel strong and powerful and most of all, loving, but a huge part of me feels broken and tired. Somedays I succeed at letting my love shine through to the people I love, and sometimes I really don’t feel or behave loving at all.
That day I could see Keziah and I entering a triathlon, working our butts off, having an activity we could do together for the rest of our lives.
This day I don’t know what I see. I am trying to see a strong, vibrant body doing the things I love, but it is a blurry picture.
That day was full of determination to run further and longer.
This day is full of determination to heal, endure, and believe.
That day I was blind to the journey I was about to embark on.
This day I can see and I don’t always like the view.
That day my husband had to pick me up and carry my body to bed.
This day his strength, hope, faith, rock-solid goodness, patience, and sense of humor have carried me for the past two years.
That day I didn’t know how much goodness there is in the world.
This day I know this world is full of kindness, generosity, compassion, and miracles and my heart quivers with the full-blown love I am surrounded with.
That day I didn’t know my heart needed healing.
This day I beg the Lord to take my heart.
That day my body could do anything I asked of it – a back flip, a bike ride, climbing the rope, walking the beam, twisting, turning, jumping with joy.
This day my body can do very little.
That day I didn’t know I have a genetic disorder that forms defective collagen.
This day I know that collagen effects every aspect of our bodies, my body is not held together in any sort of normal fashion, and pain and injury could make up a large part of my life.
That day a part of me died.
This day I am learning how to live.
four eyes are a thing here
The problem with having two parents with eyes that don’t work so hot is that those parents often create children with eyes that don’t work so hot. So far all of our children have needed glasses. We haven’t had Annesley tested yet, but she probably should be since we are batting a thousand in that department.
I need an eye exam so I can get a some new boxes of contacts. Truth be told, I really need a pair of glasses as well. Miss Annes broke mine a few years back and I haven’t replaced them yet. It seems every month there are more important things to spend my pennies on…isn’t that how it so often goes in life?
Fisher needs a new prescription. For the last six weeks or so, he gets horrible headaches when he reads to me. Yesterday I had him take his glasses off mid-read and he read much better and the headache went away, so I think his eyes must have changed recently. His father’s did the same thing when he was a boy, so it doesn’t surprise me too much.
Blythe has lost her glasses in the past couple of weeks. We keep searching for them, but they haven’t been found yet, so we may need to replace hers as well.
I think Keziah’s are fine, thank goodness! So now I need to figure out how to pay our taxes, get three eye exams, at least two new pairs of glasses, and two boxes of contacts for me (the joys of having one near-sighted and one far-sighted eye). Time for creativity and penny-earning ideas!
book bonanza: infinity and me
Oh my goodness, I love Infinity and Me SO much! We found it at the library on an end display and as soon as I laid eyes on the cover, I was melting. I quickly skimmed it and fell even more in love – numbers, adorable red shoes, curiosity, wonder, and genealogy all in one book!
Uma, the narrator, is confused about the concept of infinity. She can’t understand it and feels small and insignificant when she tries. Uma starts asking people how they picture infinity and gets a wide variety of answers. Charlie, her number loving friend, sees enormous numbers. Samantha, her bestest girl friend, sees a number 8 taking a nap, then turns the 8 into a racetrack that she drives around forever. Uma is still confused and asks her grandma how she imagines infinity. Her grandma says “I like to think about a family. First, you have the great-grandparents, then the grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren…it could go on forever.”
Swoon! Oh, how I wish I had written this book! It combines all my favorite things into one beautiful picture book.
monday morning update
Hmmmm. My right foot is hurting quite a bit. Thursday and Friday it was hurting along the backside of the ankle, but last night and this morning it is hurting around my big toe and the 1st metatarsal. I think it looks pretty good, but when Sheri changed the magic tape last night, she said there was still some swelling. When I took a bath on Saturday, the water pressure hurt too much and I had to get out fairly quickly. Soooo, I don’t really know if it is getting better or not.
Another strange thing happened yesterday…my heart started hurting pretty intensely. I don’t know what it was or what it means, but it did frighten me. It feels fine this morning and I am hoping it was nothing, but who knows?
On tap for today is learning time with my kiddos, iFamily board meeting in my family room, staring at the sunshine out my window, missing a super-fun trip to Costco with my gal-pals, supporting my little Annes in her search for Rosie, her missing kitty, finishing my read on Abigail Adams, and working on my lecture for Wednesday’s WUBA class. (I am determined to make it to iFamily on Wednesday. I may have to spend the day on the floor, but I will be there to teach my class!)
And now, I need to get out of bed before bed sores set in!
I'm Tracy, a mama with big dreams, crazy ideas, loads of laughter, an insatiable desire to learn, and enormous piles of laundry.
