Celebrating and Remembering

July is only 1/2 over but Rudy and the fam have had enough activity to fill the whole month…or two!  🙂  We enjoyed our annual 4th of July BBQ celebration at the rescue mission, we sent Max off to Kentucky for a very special week-long national youth conference with our church and the rest of us were blessed to host a couple of dinner parties for the 13 men and women who graduated from SBRMs residential treatment program on the 11th…and that was just the FIRST week of July!  Ha Ha

Tucked in between these special SBRM celebrations, we were honored to celebrate another very special couple to our family.  This wedding was particularly sweet as we are friends with BOTH families and we have had the privilege of watching Ryne and Miranda’s relationship grow from high school sweethearts to husband and wife.  Wilson was honored to be an usher in the wedding party and Olivia had an official role at the reception as well…so fun for them!

And all this fun led us right into VBS (Vacation Bible School)  week at church…another summer tradition we all look forward to.  Wilson led the worship team along with Max, Olivia was part of the teaching team for the Kindergarteners, Rolf creatively presented the bible story each night and I was on Rudy duty.  It’s a fun opportunity for us to partner together and have a ton of fun with our awesome community of friends at church.  It’s interesting to watch Rudy as the distinction between typical situations and special ed environments become more apparent for him…although he is making GREAT progress developmentally, the reality is that it is very difficult for him to navigate typical situations without a TON of support and it is painfully apparent at big kid activities like VBS.  It makes me so grateful for our sweet, loving and accommodating church family as well as the gifted special education staff in our school district who pour into our boy.  Speaking of school, Rudy has one more week of summer school…he has had such a great experience…he’ll miss it for sure but it will be nice to have a couple of unstructured weeks before we begin to prepare for the regular school year again.

Today is the last day of VBS and it also marks the fifth anniversary of my dad’s passing…how can it be his fifth year memorial?  With so many significant moments in the life of our family the past couple of months,  Dad has come to mind a lot and I’ve missed his presence.  As I watch the kids grow into independent, confident, interesting people, I am reminded of the last lucid conversation I had with my dad.  He had just found out that his brain cancer was not responding to treatment anymore and that the prognosis was terminal.  The first thing he said to me was that he was sorry he wasn’t going to have the opportunity to see my children grow up and be there for them.  I think it’s very sweet that of ALL the things he could have been concerned about in that very tender, vulnerable moment, his thoughts centered on family and somehow not finishing his “job”.  I’ve thought of that conversation often lately and how pleased Dad would have been to watch Wilson give his speech at graduation or to watch Olivia fearlessly swim with Dolphins in Hawaii or to see Max enthusiastically head off to Kentucky eager to grow in his faith and I think of it almost every day where Rudy is concerned…Because of Dad’s athletic achievements, I think he would have especially appreciated how far Rudy has come and would have celebrated his achievements in mobility with great enthusiasm…and I suspect he would have been in awe of how resilient Rudy is…demonstrating it over and over again when he meets routine trips to the cath lab with a smile, black-eye producing tumbles with a chuckle and monthly blood draws with barely a whimper.  😉

I think Grandpa Dick would be so proud!  🙂