A Sentimental Journal Day...

Yes, that's right - Sentimental Journal (not Journey).

It's been one of those days. Odd, disparate subjects lead back to one another. Motivation low, but subjects winding round and round in my brain, making me feel as though there's a reason I'm not busy, busy, busy at work; or making, making, making in the Treehouse. Am I supposed to be watching for things, reading the signs? And, as I mention above in my header - my brain tends to work like an eggbeater. My Oldtimer says he loves the way I tell a story because you never know how far down the trail I'll go or what detour I will take before I get back to the original intent of the story. Thank heavens he's a good and patient man who likes my baby-boomer method of telling things.

So today:

My co-worker and I discussed Zimmern and the creepy things he eats, which...

Made me homesick for Minnesota, and then...

A belated birthday gift arrives from my children, followed by...

Reading a Voo Doo Cafe blog entry, leading to Roz's blog, which...

Made me think of a long ago entry in a journal...

Bringing me back to homesick for Minnesota...

...and this can all be interconnected.

So - Andrew Zimmern hosts the show Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel. Apparently, last night's show was about Minnesota. Minnesota happens to be Zimmern's adopted home state, and it is also the state where I lived the first 45 years of my life; where I raised my children, too. Talking about the foods with my co-worker made me a little homesick. It made me wish I could bop down to Lund's and get some Minnesota wild rice, and some of their fabulous tapioca pudding (made with CREAM - it's a dairy state for god's sake...). I loved Lund's Foods. I craved their eclairs with the big, solid stripe of thick chocolate frosting during my entire pregnancy with Bekah.

Bekah...who turned 30 last October. Sigh. I miss my kids. I miss the crazy things we would eat on Saturday nights when we had "snack supper" and listened to Saturday Night Cruise on the radio. I told my co-worker about some of those foods - everything from grapes dipped in blue cheese dressing to smoked oysters to pickled herring to crackers and cheese. I'm still homesick...and I'm missing my kids. All adults now, all with good productive lives, all living in different states, none of them Ohio. How lucky am I to have *3* children, none of them black sheep or worse, and I miss them all and they all brag about me??

My three wonderful kids and Baby O, taken about 2 1/2 years ago.

Then the doorbell rings, and the mailman delivers a nice little box that makes a rattling sound. It's a birthday gift from my three kids. (Yes, my birthday was a couple weeks ago.) They all pitched in and bought me a mother's charm bracelet, and it has charms not just for me and my three kids, but also Oldtimer, the spouses, Miss Olivia, and the unnamed new grandbaby due in May. Gosh I miss my kids, and how lucky am I that they *cooperate* with one another and got this for me?


So I'm reading blogs and emails to distract myself a bit, where I stumble across Ricë Freeman-Zachary's post and link to Roz's blog about journaling. I'm an erratic journal keeper, but what Roz wrote really resonated with me. She made mention of snippets that she's written down, that others have written, that can still make the author and her daughter laugh, years later.


Then I think of the few things I managed to put in a journal, as spoken by my kids, and wonder how many more I've lost, because moms like me just get too many opportunities to save wonderful things said by the kids. I've saved a few, some really great ones, but one in particular came to mind, one that I probably remember only because I wrote it down. When my son Chris was about 4 years old, he had a great playmate living right next door (in a house just off Victory Memorial Drive in Minneapolis). They were allowed to go just one yard past their own yards in either direction. This allowed them into the back yard of the Malone family, who had four children, including a son who loved animals, and was always rehabilitating something. One day, he had a robin with a broken wing in a cage on the back step. When I called Chris to come home for lunch, he told me about the bird in the cage - but that was all. As he sat in the kitchen eating, the phone rang - it was Mrs. Malone. She was *very* upset because Chris and friend had come into their back yard to see the robin; the robin laid an egg in the cage; Chris broke it. It would not have surprised me to see steam coming from the phone, she was so angry.


I hung up and asked Chris why he broke the robin's egg. He gave a perfectly logical response for a four year old - "I wanted to open it because I thought there was a baby bird inside, but all there was was scrambled eggs!" That makes me miss that little golden curled, blue eyed boy. That boy who's now a full grown man, and will now have his own baby in a few months, way back there in Massachusetts. I hope he writes down lots of things she says.
Son Chris and his wife Robyn, 2 years ago...now expecting


I wonder...am I homesick for Minneapolis, or am I homesick for those beautiful babies of mine? Who would think this would all come about because of a TV program and trying to describe lutefisk to a co-worker?