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Connecting with Adult Children: Be flexible, creative, and intentional.
Of the three of us ladies at Rhubarb and Rubbish, I am the only one that is an empty nester. The three kids are all in their early 20s but doing various different things from living in another community, raising their own children, and buying houses. All three are busy working and living, while I am still busy working and living. As you can imagine, connecting regularly presents challenges. For my son, who lives in town, I am usually guaranteed to see him once a week at our Friday night family suppers with my parents and sister and her family who live in town. Friday night suppers were started a…
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The Love of Friday Night Suppers
Earlier this month we celebrated recapping our third annual family camp. Shortly after our first camp, there were a few family members in the same community that wanted to keep recreating the amazing time we had. We decided to try having Sunday family dinners after church like we did growing up. We were successful for a few months and then became totally derailed. We found that we had events to go to and just wanted to be home to prepare for the week ahead. We missed the concept of getting together and thought “let’s try another night.” We opted for Friday nights as most often none of us had much…
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Intentional Memory Making: Make time and seize the day.
Last week I told you a story of a regular life activity that created memories for me as a child and the importance of just remembering to be with each other in the Chasing Headless Chickens post. This week, I’m going to address intentional memory making. Every day is an opportunity to intentionally make memories, but some days and events call for a little more intention. As I am writing this, I am reflecting on this past weekend. My entire family, minus a couple of people who had to work, traveled between two and two and half hours to where my daughter lives to watch her performance in The Adams…
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Making Memories While Chasing Headless Chickens
Imagine with me a moment—the summer heat rising off the gravel roads, bright blue cloudless skies, green and gold fields for miles around, a white farmhouse and barn with a variety of tractors and farm equipment haphazardly lining the drive. Now…add in the sound of dying chickens and the screams of a couple of kids about 5 and 7. Ha, gotcha! I know you were thinking of iced tea and a porch swing while eating Grandma’s fresh-baked rhubarb crisp! But, that isn’t in this story. When my oldest sister and I were small kids, my parents would go to my paternal grandparent’s farm and butcher chickens. They butchered enough chickens…
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Let Memories Just Happen
As we navigate life, we are continually making memories. Some are ones we would love to recreate. Others we wish we could forget. For the ones that we want to recreate, do we stop to think about what made them so special? Often we lose what made that special over time. We forget the details, but we remember the awesomeness that we experienced. We also fret and stress when things go wrong. We hyperfocus on the time that had an epic fail in public or when we made a fool of ourselves at work. We choose to make family holidays a stressful time because a member has lost their way…
