Snap By Snap

My mother-in-law introduced me to a saying: Get the stink blowed off! This is defined as the need to shake things up, get out of the house, and do something different. I'm convinced that if I had a strong enough microscope, I could look at my husband's DNA and see a gene engraved with the blow the stink off trait engraved on it. That man is always ready to get out and go do something different the usual routine. And so it happened this past weekend that we did just that.

Most of August it was stinking hot and dry (even the weatherman uses this terminology. It's the only fitting descriptor for 94 degrees and 90% humidity with no precipitation), but Saturday was only in the 80's. Practically balmy. So we picked up Mark's parents and drove towards McCormick's Creek State Park.


We have driven all over the country the last two summers and seen all kinds of terrain, but a drive through Indiana's countryside is still breathtaking. The seed corn is drying on the stalks, the grass is mostly brown, the soybeans are deep green, and the trees are a beautiful green - even where they have begun to fade toward fall.
Before we got to McCormick's Creek, we turned at the sign for Cataract Falls  - a place we'd never stopped before. Did I mention that we'd had a drought for the previous four weeks? Cataract might be the wrong name for this time of year. The picture above is what it looks like normally (not my photo). However, the picture below was what it looked like on Saturday. We obviously need to go back n the fall!


One plus for Cataract Falls is that it boasts a covered bridge. I never get tired of these silly things. Maybe because they are on the list of things I didn't see much of (or any?) in California. This one was built with $2000 worth of supplies. Major wow. Can you even build a deck for that now? Another interesting fact was that the reason they covered bridges was because covered bridges lasted much longer than the naked sort. I always thought it had something to do with the snow! Silly California girl.

Every road offers a different mood - remote, dangerous, romantic, scenic, historic - even the everyday roads you travel have stories to tell and hold a promise in that elusive vanishing point. You just have to get off of auto-pilot and travel them with new eyes.

Next up: Skies!

I realized fairly early in Amy's life that she had Opinions. 


When I wanted her to sleep, she wanted to play. When I wanted her to eat, she was full. If I gave her peaches, she wanted squash. This is not to say she was stubborn . . . exactly. But she had Opinions, and was not easily swayed. This was the process of getting to know the very real personality inside this small person that did not yet talk, or walk, and smelled of milk and powder. It was delightful. 


One day when Amy was 10 months old, I picked up her brown stuffed dog, and made it bark for her. Her eyes lit up and she gave a great belly laugh. I didn't know it then, but Amy had found her first passion in life. Dogs. It was an epiphany. 




In the coming years, Amy spent a lot of time learning all about dogs, reading dog stories, creating dog songs, and generally being a dog. I mean really, she was a dog. She was a four year old method actor: Completely immersed. She drove her Sunday School and preschool teachers to distraction by insisting she actually was a dog. A few tried to argue her out of it. Needless to say, Amy loved this, and never gave an inch. Others viewed it as pure disobedience. Amy most decidedly did not love this - and again, never gave an inch. Strong will was (and is) an understatement when it comes to Amy. 






I'll be the first to say that Amy was, ahem, a challenge during the early years. But we loved her imagination and were so curious to see where it would lead her. She taught herself to read at three, to type at four, and constantly produced stories, drawings, and songs. God made her to be a passionate, imaginative, and intelligent person - it wasn't our idea, it was His. Our job was to train her up in the way she should go. It wasn't easy, and it isn't finished yet. 



If you are a parent, an aunt, a grandma, or a close family friend of a child who is "more" - more demanding, more imaginative, more creative, more emotional, more intense than the average child (if there is such a thing as average), listen to their heart. Who did God create them to be? Encourage it. Train them in it. Help them with it. This is where the promise lies:

Train up a child up in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.   Proverbs 22:6

Most people read this passage with an emphasis on the word "should" instead of on "he." As if we, the parents, get to decide the way our children should go. But they are not ours, are they? They are His. 


Celebrate those opinionated babies. Encourage those strong willed children. The promise is not for an easy road, but for a child who grows up with a solid identity rooted in Christ, not merely in the dreams of their parents. 

Considering how often thunderstorms roll through Indiana, it's a good thing our family really likes them. Mark and I both grew up in California and thunderstorms were not very common -even rain was an event. But here in the sweltering summers of the Midwest, the sky is alive with boiling thunderheads that tower 50,000 feet into the sky. They are spectacular.
We've been known to stand outside to watch and listen to the storm (under cover, of course). Or sometimes at night we'll open the blinds, darken the house, and watch the lightning punctuate the horizon. A couple of yeas ago, Amy and I went next door to chat with our Spanish speaking neighbors for a Spanish class project she had been assigned. As we talked about our families, they asked us if Mark had a hobby. Evidently, they'd seen him taking pictures of lightning, and had decided that he must be looking for aliens, which they thought was hilarious. I mean, who would take pictures of a beautiful storm, right? So now, watching a storm is generally referred to in our family as "watching for aliens."

Tonight, we went for a walk at a local park, enjoying a break in the summer's high temperatures and humidity. I took my camera, like the nerd I am, and snapped pictures of flowers and scenery. As I walked back up from the lake after taking the above photo, a lady walking by said, "what's down there?" Judging by the look on her face, "Pretty flowers" seemed a ridiculous answer.

Are we looking at the same world?

Here are a few more pictures the alien hunting flower lovers took tonight -

And God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.  -Genesis 1:31

Do you have a bedtime routine? Goldie does. Each night at 10:00 pm, usually within 10 minutes give or take, Goldie gets ready for bed.
We keep her blanket stored in a basket, and she leaves it alone all day until 10pm. Then she paws over the basket and keeps at it until she has the entire thing out on the floor. She obsessively paws it, noses it, and sometimes grabs it in her mouth and pulls it until she gets it just right. Just right looks like this, tonight:
"Perfect" generally lasts for about five minutes until more pawing, nosing, and pulling is necessary to get the blanket back in shape. She works it from one side of the room to the other, getting out of breath and so frustrated that she sometimes walks away completely and gives up. But she always comes back. Or she pauses in the midst of her work and snorts out a heavy sigh and looks at us as if to say, "This is hard work!"

When we turn out the lights and go to bed, she finally quits her obsession for the night and goes to her bed.  If we're out of the house for the evening, however, she leaves the blanket in its basket. This is somehow a social project. I wonder if she knows it makes us smile each evening?

I am already hearing the mutterings of discontent from my family as they warily eye me with the new camera. "Stand over there together and smile!" "Hold that pose, don't let Goldie move!"  They never know when I will strike. It is so worth it, though, when it means that I get to keep moments like this one forever.

I'd like you to meet my new camera: The Canon Rebel XS

This is admittedly a very bottom-line digital SLR camera, but it is big step up for me! It came with a wide angle and a telephoto lens.

Nineteen years ago, Mark and I splurged on our first really nice camera, in anticipation of the birth of our beautiful baby girl. It was a 35mm Canon EOS 630. It took amazing pictures, and weighed roughly 30 pounds (well maybe not that much). And as with all film cameras, you took your shot and took your chances. I took hundreds of pictures of that poor baby, and then popped her into her car seat for a drive through the Kodak shack in the grocery store parking lot. I probably threw away a third of every roll, and yet I still have about 400 pictures of Amy's first couple of years. Truly frightening.

I've started playing around with my new camera in preparation for our vacation in a few weeks, and have been absolutely amazed at its capabilities. I mean, I've been using point and shoot digitals for over ten years, but they were all pretty basic.This camera has all the conveniences of being a digital (you can take a million pictures in search of the perfect one, and only print the one perfect shot), but it has the added "oomph" of much better optics in the lenses. The level of light and detail captured by these lenses is something I've really missed with the lower level digitals.

I've been a flower fan for a long time. As a teen I took pictures of my Dad's roses, and every family vacation includes shots of the local flowers. So naturally, as I've been playing with my new camera (and since Amy started scowling at me for practicing on her) I went outside to get some flower power.




I admit that the neighbors may now have a nickname for me like "the crazy lady with the camera in the garden." In the three days since I got my camera, I've stalked around the yard at dusk trying out new features. The begonias above are by my front door. I took a snap of the entire planter and was able to crop it down to this image. I didn't even have to enlarge anything - it's like having a microscope for a camera. I sat here on the couch, editing the pictures, and kept making Amy come over to look at the amazing results. The above level of detail is not even the full size of the image!


This is nice picture of a hydrangea blossom on its way to blossoming . . . nice picture. But then I cropped down the image to this, and was amazed again:


I'm amazed at the camera, and I'm amazed that such beauty exists right under my nose every day. I like my hydrangea (even though I call it the Drama Queen for its demanding nature) but this snap reminded me that the large blossoms are really just fractals, hiding smaller and yet smaller beautiful signatures of the creator.


The pots in the backyard saved a surprise for us this year - the Petunias returned! I thought they were gone for good and would have pulled the sprouts as weeds but Mark believed in them. And here they are! I planted only purple, but sometimes a genetic "sport" shows up, blazing individuality. The far left blossom has white at its center that I believed was a reflection, but looking at the full size image you could see that little bee feet had left trails of pollen on the velvet. How is it that such beauty flies daily under our radar!


Ferns always remind me of quiet spots from the backpacking trips of my youth. The shady undergrowth of mountain forests sometimes hid acres of silent green ferns. Each one full of fractal beauty if you had the time to look closely. I'm afraid if I had created the world, I'd be like a bad con artist and put a good bill on top of a stack of newspaper - I'd make the surface look convincing, but not spend the time where I thought people wouldn't look. But no matter how closely you look, or where you look, the creation's beauty is far, far deeper than what we see. Even with the electron microscopes and the incredible technology of our day, there is still beauty hidden in creation that we may never discover. It is an absolute and true reflection of its creator.

I can NOT wait for vacation. We leave on June 11th, and the blog is waiting for vacation pictures: http://dobbstrek2010.blogspot.com/