Quintessential Jeffrey

 I can't let Jeffrey's birthday celebration go by without sharing a way he celebrated in a way only Jeffrey can! As I mentioned in the birthday post, Jeffrey's sense of adventure is off the charts and I'm pretty sure it begins where my comfort zone ends! For example...he likes taking photos with funky glasses in London...

 He interviews the Attorney General of Texas with questions about Israel, just because he can....

 He actually wears and then poses in American flag chubbies with USA socks...while IN Israel on July 4th.

 All a day in the life of Jeffrey Dagerath. However, for the past couple of years, there have been a list of gags that he's been wanting to try. One he did on his 18th birthday...fill a mayonnaise jar with vanilla pudding and eat it with a spoon, making people think you're eating mayo right out of the jar. That's really small potatoes for this prankster, though. Kinda like training wheels. Well this year, the wheels came off! He had in his mind that he wanted to get a trench coat large enough that when he put someone on his shoulders it would cover them both. They would then walk up to the ticket booth at a movie theater and try and get in with one ticket. (Yeah, this is a NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS gag in my book! The rule follower in me was screaming...loudly!) Jeffrey, obviously, doesn't share the same reservations as me, because he was ready and committed. I figured that it was a gag that wouldn't happen because, even IF he found a trench coat, there's NO WAY he would ever find someone else willing to pull off this gag with him. I mean...are there TWO people like that on the planet. Turns out..yep  there are. And he's friends with her.

So, Jeffrey ordered a trench coat on Amazon. When it arrived and it was too small even for him by himself, I breathed a sigh of relief. Whew, now no gag. I'm not sure why I was surprised, but Jeffrey pressed forward and found one hanging in Michael's closet that WAS big enough and long enough. So if you had been in the parking lot of the Casa Blanca movie theater on Saturday, this is what you would have seen.

 

 So, lucky for Jeffrey, Zoie is not only spunky and adventurous, she's also very petite! 😉

They wrapped up in the trench coat, gave them one ticket and walked right in the theater! It actually worked! Zoie told me the next day that she thought the people at the movie theater probably thought "Well, that's $11 worth of effort right there. Come on in!" I agree. Josiah and Noah (Zoie's brother) were with them and told me that the guy at the drink station applauded them when they walked by later. I guess everyone needs a little laugh every day, right?!

They did actually purchase 4 tickets before the movie to make sure they could all have seats together when they got to the theater. They didn't want to risk getting in and then not having seats. That made me (mama loves rules) feel better. I didn't feel like they were cheating or stealing from the theater.

And now Jeffrey can take that one off of his list!  It's a day in the life...what a life...what a live-r!

Celebrating THE Jeffrey Dagerath....

We had the joy this week of celebrating Jeffrey's 19th birthday! What a joy!! Birthdays are always great days around the Dagerath house, and this one was no exception. However, I truly can't believe I'm celebrating the 19th birthday of this guy....

 Wasn't it just yesterday that he was born? that he was stumping his brothers with his "lifted by" math? (that's a story there!) that he was begging for a chinchilla/Russian tortoise/German shepherd/Irish setter/leopard gecko/Goliath tarantula (Oh, wait...that one WAS yesterday! 😉)? Amazing the teachers at zoo academy with all he knew?

Jeffrey has been such a spark to our family and has since the very beginning of his life until this day amazing Michael and me at not only the things he has done, but the things he even THINKS about doing! Honestly, I can't even count the number of times that I've thought "Oh my goodness, I would NEVER EVER even THINK of doing (insert zany, extroverted, way outside of my comfort zone thing) and Jeffrey just did it..and did it well!"

Of course we would have always voted him "most likely to end up on a Jumbotron doing something" and this year that came true. But something else has continued to happen with Jeffrey. He's grown up-and I'm not just talking about reaching 19, that happens just because you've been allowed to draw breath for that many consecutive days-I mean he's really growing up...maturing, growing so humble and gracious and kind. Still spunky, full of life and adventure, but growing so much in his faith and consequently in his character.

But lest you think he's all the way "grown and no longer a boy"...here's what he requested for birthday breakfast...homemade donuts... And for his birthday cake....Receeses ice cream sandwich cake...just like always.

 It was funny that most of his birthday cards this year all had sweets on the front! A sign?

 And of course, he's not too big to decorate as we always do. The ever faithful birthday banner, construction paper numbers on the table and crepe paper hanging from the lights. Always!

But lest you think he's still a little boy...check him out with Josiah at the birthday dinner at Carrabbas!

 Kinda looking manly there, huh? And really acting more and more manly all the time. I'm really crazy about this guy! What a delight!! LOVE YOU JEFFREY!!

Making due...wizard-style

As we approach the end of our school year, fun things start happening as our year wraps up. Our CC campus has chosen to have a "Celebration of gifts" (a.k.a talent show) for the students there. This is their second year to do it. Obviously, this is our first year since we are new to this campus, but I was excited for our students to put something together to present in the talent show. The mom coordinating the show mentioned that last year the Challenge classes each put something together. So, I encouraged our class to do the same this year. They decided to act out a scene from The Hobbit. A book they had just finished reading that everyone loved. (Have I mentioned that during this year the students read 19 pieces of British Literature?!!...I LOVE that CC makes this possible!)

As our three students were deciding which parts each student would play, it became pretty clear that Josiah was going to be playing the role of Gandolf. So my mind when into motion as to how we could put together a Gandolf costume. Because, come on, if you are going to do it...do it in costume!!

As Josiah and I started brainstorming, I came up with some ideas. Start with a camo Santa hat that's been hiding out in the window seat in Jeffrey's room since I don't know when...cut off the top and paint it with black powder paint that's been in the top of Jeffrey's closet since I don't know when. Actually, I generally know...and it was probably 12 years ago when I bought powdered paint for an art class our boys did way back when. Good news...powder paint doesn't go bad! 😊

 

 Of course, Gandolf needs clothes, not just a hat. So, we pulled out a graduation gown (gonna  be using that one again soon) and a beloved Zorro cape, lovingly made by Granna circa 1998-9. Oh the stories that cape could tell!! 💕 Add a white "beard" (really a piece of square fuzzy white cloth with some elastic attached, which has also adorned a Dagerath posing as Pythagoras, and made in appearance in Shakespeare line recitations through the years), and some Roman soldier "boot covers" purchased years ago (that have also served well in Roman/Latin speeches and Shakespeare recitations).



But we didn't just need a Gandolf we needed a hobbit hole. According to the book we needed " a perfectly round door, like a porthole, painted green with a brass knob in the exact center."

Cue to trampoline, a green throw blanket that was sitting out on our couch and a couple of coasters.

Put it all together and you get a lovely hobbit hole (though "exactly in the center" isn't how I would describe our brass knob...but it's close enough!) and Gandolf. The students all did a great job on the delivery. You can check it out here on YouTube.

All this mismatch stuff to make a costume (which happens more often than not around our house!) made me think I should create my own "design" website. I think instead of Pintrest where everything looks so posh, put together, new and crisp, I'll call mine "Jentrist". 😀 The goal at Jentrist is to see what you can do with the stuff you already have. The great thing about Jentrist projects is when you are done with what you need, (like our hobbit hole and Gandolf costume), you just go home, hang back up the robe, put the zorro cape and beard back in the costume box, put the blanket back on the couch, put the coasters back on the table and then jump on the trampoline. No added new junk! I think I may be on to something! 😉

As I was looking through some books this week, I came across this darling gem from Josiah's "Faces of History" presentation in 6th grade. Though the costume was purchased online, you'll notice a Jentrist creation on his head. Yep, it's the styrofoam part of an old bike helmet, with the end of a broom sticking out of it. Around the front of the helmet is an armband from big brother's Roman soldier costume. Makes me think of a little poem I've heard before that I think will be the motto on Jentrist:

Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or do without.

Works like magic!!

When life gives you lemons....

Remember the storm I talked about in my last post? It left not only a huge cedar tree on the ground, but also a very big hole. What do you do with a big hole? FILL IT IN! But with what? The crazy thing was that the day before the storm, Michael and I had gone to HEB to get some groceries and I saw fruit trees! They had peach, pear, apple, pomegranate, and pecan trees. Right then and there I got my heart set on a peach tree. Who wouldn't love to have a tree laden with peaches??!! So when that storm came and basically predug the hole for us, I confidently and cheerfully informed Michael about our windfall, literally. Needless to say, Michael just saw a big tree that needed to be dealt with and didn't exactly share my enthusiasm!

So, the tree sat in our yard. The hole remained...waiting and waiting.
Then one glorious day, I drove to the post office and saw the nursery in Castroville had AVOCADO trees!! A little back story here....for our anniversary last year, Michael wanted to get me an avocado tree. (Because who wouldn't love a tree laden with AVOCADOS?! Almost more than peaches, even!) The nursery was out but was getting more in a month or so. The day they were scheduled to arrive, Michael called and they had all already been sold. Clearly, we are not the only people in South Texas who crave avocados. So we waited. Then last week, our waiting was rewarded!

My dear hubby and I went that very same day to the nursery to avoid the sell out situation again. And brought home our very own avocado tree. It's called  Joey Avocado. Given our penchant for "J" named things, we saw it as meant to be. And have named it Joey.

Joey sat faithfully and patiently in his pot until the end of last week when Jeremy came home for a visit. Then Michael, Jeremy and Josiah got to work cleaning out the hole already pre-dug for Joey. Turns out, the hole was filled with ROCKS (shocker!😉), really big rocks. Like it takes two hours to dig out two rocks kind of big. But my men persevered and now Joey has a home.
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Here's Jackson by the tree that fell over. Just to give you some perspective of the size of the hole.  That's Joey right in the middle. 

Here's two of the rocks that were dug out of the hole. Massive things I tell you! These were just the big ones. There were three piles of large, medium and small ones. And a great stack of firewood!

Here are Michael and Jeremy deciding how to cut off the branches of the tree. Jeremy was the branch-meister during his stay. He has since cut of EVERY SINGLE LIMB from this tree and stacked it up for firewood on our front porch. 

Hip Hip horray for the avocado tree! (Or rather Ole'!) But what about the peach tree? My heart was still set on it. So my sweet hubby and I set back out to HEB to get me a peach tree. And..they were all sold out. Called another HEB....all sold out. Then Michael went to Home Depot to return some things and came home with....A PEACH TREE!! So while Jeremy was still in town, he and Michael dug up a smaller, dead cedar tree. Thankfully, this cedar wasn't completely surrounded by rocks. There were some, but not the same massive amount that filled up Joey's dwelling. 

 So they dug, dumped rocks and planted Georgia. Yep, that's her name. The perfect name for a peach tree, yeah? Though I guess we should spell it Jeorgia.

 Jeremy planted and then watered her and now we wait.
I think we should have avocados in two years and peaches in about that same amount. Here's hoping and praying the work done here all pays off and we have some yummy yummy goodness coming our way in just a couple of short years!!

Here's the "smaller" collection of rocks from the hole that they dug for Jeorgia. We've got rocks, I tell ya! But soon, we'll have peaches and avocados too! 

I feel the earth move under my feet...

 There are just so many wonderful things about living in the country! The quiet, the fresh air, the trees all around, the chickens, the elbow room. However, one of the things that has been a bit of a drag in our almost ten years of living on this "little patch of Heaven way out west" (shout out to one of our family's favorite movies, "Home on the Range"!) is not having a paved road. Now don't get me wrong. I'm SO grateful for a road! And after Michael and Josiah came home from their mission trip to Mexico, one of the first things Josiah said was "Wow, our road was like a dream after driving those "roads" in Mexico!". So I know what it could be or not be. It's not all dirt, which equals mud after our rains. It's not full of holes. Grateful for that. But it IS dusty, (as our cars and floors testify) and after heavy or hard rains, the gravel washes out and has on a number of occasions left HUGE ruts that make the driveway almost impossible to drive down. When we were renting, we would just call our landlord and he would come and take a tractor and boxblade and regrade the driveway. That was certainly a rental perk! But with home ownership comes not only equity, but responsibility. Thankfully, I've got just the right guy for that task! He is not only responsible, he's creative. He's brainstormed and tried different ideas for how to keep the gravel from washing away and leaving those dreaded trenches. After months of thinking (and thankfully not too much rain) he came up with a plan. This plan involved another great thing about living in the country...your friends have tractors! 😀 He called over a friend from church who has a tractor. Paul drove his tractor over from his place about 5 miles away. Yep, that's the country, folks. Driving the tractor down the highway.  So Paul came and dug trenches. I will admit that I thought, "15 years ago we would have had a group of four boys squatting down right by the driveway with eyes GLUED to the tractor thinking it was SO COOL that Mr. Paul was here with his tractor and moving the dirt around!"

 Here's Paul and Michael going over the plan. I honestly wouldn't have even been able to tell you what the plan exactly was. Clearly, not an engineer here!

 So, he dug a huge trench to pull the water away from the area between the sidewalk and the house so to divert it away from the house toward the other side of the property.

 You can see how he's dragging the blade to create the trench. In the process, there were SO.MANY.ROCKS!! Big rocks, small, rocks, medium rocks. Rocks EVERYWHERE! This is kinda the theme of our property. Always rocks...always rocks! I guess we should be glad that our "house is built upon a rock", that's wise right?!

 Here are some of the rocks and the trench that was dug. So my ingenious husband has been collecting and filling up buckets and buckets of rocks because in addition to the big trench by the house, Paul also dug trenches down the driveway so Michael could fill them with medium rocks that would help water move but not wash away the smaller gravel. So there are little mini French drain, type things all along our driveway like this one.

 The wonderful news...it works!! In fact just the day after all the work was done we had a huge storm and the road stood up beautifully to it. How huge was that storm? Well so huge it blew over this big cedar tree on the side of our house!

Yep, that's a big tree which left a BIG hole. We were fine, We didn't actually even hear the tree fall during the storm. Which begs the question...did it make a sound?! 😉 What will we do about the tree and the hole...stay tuned. I have big plans! 

The race of redemption

Redemption...such a great thing! I experienced redemption a couple of weeks ago when my fav sis and I completed a 10K race in Bryan. It's redemption because it's exactly the type of race I was training for when I was sidelined because of the accident. (One of these days I'm going to write a post about all the ways God was preparing me for what was coming before the accident. There are LOTS of them! One of them was all the months I spent training for the race that was scheduled 2 weeks after the accident. I really believe it got my body in shape to be much more able to handle the stress of a collision with a Toyota truck!).

Somewhere in the middle of January I received an email from the Republic of Texas Run (formerly the Armadillo Dash-as favorite half marathon in Bryan/College Station) that they were having a 1/4 marathon this year in addition to the other races. While I knew a 1/2 marathon was well beyond what I could be ready for in 6 weeks' time, I was thinking a 1/4 marathon may be just about right. See, in my MIND, I still was walking 6 miles in a day. In reality, in my BODY, I was walking about 1/4 mile a day, on a good day. But my back was feeling great when I read the email and I knew it was something I wanted to do. So... I called up Julie and asked her if she wanted to join me. What a thrill when she said YES! So, it was on.We knew we wouldn't run the whole thing, or even most of it, but we would aim for walking for 4-5 minutes and running 1-2. So I strapped on my shoes, and started training...a little. In the end, we ran the first couple of minutes (you gotta run to start...endorphins take you that far!) and then walked the rest of the way. In fact, my back ISN'T actually ready to add running. But, no big deal...just that much longer for a convo with one of my all time favorites to have convos with!

The super fun thing about the new race is that it runs through the A&M campus. It was such a blast to walk through the campus with Julie and talk and remember. We passed Milner Hall (where we were both student workers in the math department...think copiers, typists, gophers..NOT math majors! ;-) ), passed old dorms, and old places we used to walk to class, etc. So fun!

 We weren't the only racers either. Josiah, Lauren and Katie all raced in the 5K. They had a great time doing that together as well. Katie even won in her age group!

It was a chilly morning, the coldest for weeks in B/CS, but as the sun came up over Aggieland, the air warmed up a little and the morning was just beautiful!!

It was just so much fun being out moving, talking with Julie and realizing how far the Lord has brought me in the last 5 months. Julie said that I should have worn a sign on my back that said "I was hit by a truck 5 months ago!". Wish I had thought about that! I think I would have done it, just as a testimony to the work and power of God in my life and in my body!

We were shooting for a time of 1:37 based on what we had done in training. We missed it by a couple of minutes, but when we figured in the potty stop and the selfie stop at Milner, we figured we hit it right on.

What's next? More races in the future. We've already signed up for the Republic of Texas run next year and will improve our time. The ultimate redemption: I'm signing up for the Pecan Trail Run, the exact run that I missed because of the accident last September.

The moral of this story: when life knocks you down, don't stay down. Get up. Even if you just have to walk, just keep moving..and be grateful. I am SO grateful!

Here we are after the finish...medals and all!

Here are our times and the kids' times. 

Daddy "dia-yah" to the rescue...also entitled, Josiah is a rockstar!

Part of our February was very out of the ordinary. My dear cousin, Bonnie, contracted a rare, autoimmune disorder that affects the nervous syndrome, called Guillain-Barre' syndrome. Bonnie is young (mid 30s) and has two young boys: Knox (age 4) and Jax (age 2). In short, because of the GBS, she went from hiking with her husband and boys in Palo Duro canyon on Sunday evening to paralyzed and unable to walk on Tuesday to having to be on a ventilator to aid with breathing and having a collapsed lung by the weekend. So scary! Needless, to say, we wanted to do anything we could to help. But they are in Amarillo and we are in Castroville. What to do????

Well, thanks to Bonnie's husband (Jon)'s frequent flier miles, we hopped on a plane early Tuesday morning and flew to Amarillo with our main goal to be to watch Knox and Jax so Jon could spend as much time as possible with Bonnie at the hospital. My aunt, Cathy, was in town also, but she wanted to spend as much time at the hospital as she could as well. 

Here's the sun coming up over the wing of our airplane. THAT'S early people!

 Even though it was early, my rockstar was cheerful. He was truly excited to be on a plane and ready to help out with the boys.

Knox remembers Josiah from a couple of visits together, but I'm not sure Jax did. It didn't take long though for Josiah to become a hit around the house! Jax called him "daddy" for days (because he calls all men daddy, just easier that way to the two year old mind, I guess!). The day before we arrived he FINALLY picked up on what we had been saying and started calling Josiah "dia-yah". It was so cute!!

Diyah, Jax and Knox played together A LOT! There were pillow fights and bed wrestling...

Making valentines for Bonnie while she was in the hospital. Well, mostly it was Knox making the valentines, but Josiah did give him great ideas and helped Knox.

 Knox is big time into Legos right now. Josiah LOVED this! Here they are building a new Lego that Knox got. Josiah did a great job of not "helping" (i.e. building it instead of Knox!) but just helping Knox to understand the directions. Of course, I bought one for Josiah to build as well. 😊 And Josiah wisely used the opportunity to help build it as an incentive for Knox to obey for DAYS. He's learning these tricks very well!

 Josiah, Jax and Knox played ball in the garage. Also another big hit!

 And Josiah watched/corralled Jax while we went to watch Knox's basketball game on Saturday. 

Josiah spent so much time playing with Jax and Knox. It was really such a blessing for me to watch. It also enabled me to have time to do things for Bonnie and Jon like their laundry, clean their bathrooms, cook some food for the freezer, etc.

I think one of my favorite memories I'll take from the trip, though, were the evenings. Once the boys had gone to bed, Josiah and I would sit on the couch and read from the devotional book Jesus Calling and talk about the day. What he'd learned, what he'd enjoyed, what he wanted to do the same or differently the next day. Such precious, precious memories.

How many moms can write this post about their 15 year old sons????!!! I'm so grateful and thankful that I can. Josiah, my man, you ARE a rockstar!!!