this one's for you molls...

recently we received an amazing package from our molls...

she sent teethers and mousies for the boys and chocolate spread for the mommies...

needless to say i think caleb likes his mousey...

such good boys

for the last hour the boys have been laying in their cribs - no not sleeping - they are supposed to be sleeping but instead they have been talking to each other and cooing and playing...quietly...

it meant that i had a chance to clean the up after our landlord and his kitchen/oven remodeling crew covered our entire kitchen in a film of sawdust and and paint dust...

kitchen clean AND babies now sleeping...

go go go

and he crawls!

(this was taken last weekend...)

at a loss

i am at a loss…

over the past 18 months multiple communities of which I am a part have lost friends to untimely death. Other communities have been plagued with disease and other traumatic events. I am at a complete loss – outside of these events close friends have experienced the loss of someone in their lives…I often wonder if this is a function of growing up – as a child I knew people whose loved ones passed away without time for preparation and before it was “their time” but it seems that I notice and experience these events much more frequently. My mom used to say that these things (death specifically) always come in threes…

there is something about raising our children in small, close knit communities frightens me…many of the deaths I’ve experiences in my life (almost all of it in fact) have been related to the incredibly small (yet wonderful) educational communities I was raised in…the first friends school related memorial service I remember was for the husband of Nina’s college counselor…long before that Nina lost a friend in Middle School to complications from pneumonia. In Middle School I lost a friend to suicide (that same year there were multiple suicides in the Chapel Hill community at large.) Later on in high school we lost teachers (yes plural) and a student was killed in a car accident. 

when we live in large communities do we still expeireince the same number of tragedies but is our exposure and the level to which we are directly affected a function of the size of the community itself? Are there still the same number of loses in a large school of thousands? Is it just that a community this big is not directly affected due to its size? Smith was a large community (in my opinion) but it was made up of communities within the larger community. There were the houses and the departments and groups, clubs, class years…you name it. the problem with this scenario is that one person can affect multiple communities. M was involved in crew and then Frisbee and in her house and in her department – as these 3 communities did not have much overlap it meant that her stroke affected upwards of 100 different people on campus if not more. Now with the loss of K you see an outpouring of support and of a sense of loss from so many different people all tied together by a common acquaintance. 

I guess the Smith example goes against my theory of small communities – there were close to 2300 students in attendance my first year. But in the almost 6 years since I graduated (almost 10 years since the beginning of my first year) there have only been 2 major tragedies that affected me personally. There were a few loses that affected other parts of the Smith community that did not penetrate the circles I was a part of…whether these should apply to my count I’m not too sure.

Let’s extrapolate to my experiences within the CFS community – I was there 12 years – in the 12 years I was there we lost J, K, S, P, R, and M…that’s what I can remember off the top of my head it is quite possible there were more. In my 4 years of Upper School (high school) alone we lost So that’s 6 people in 12 years…something in me says that one person every two years is still quite outrageous. It’s been almost 10 years since I graduated high school – in that time there have been fewer losses but in the last 13 months there has been a brain tumor which turned out to be benign a cancerous neck tumor and the death of a young alum…

Needless to say I find it cruel, unfair and slightly incomprehensible that my communities have been so affected by illness, loss and tragedy. I’m not very good at loss – my mind does not know how to wrap itself around it…the best I can do is reach out to those whose lives I have been missing out on in the past few years and remind them how much they mean to me…I can come home every night feeling blessed to have a wife who loves me and two beautiful boys whose eyes light up when they see me.

…baruch dayan ha’emet…