Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety Jog
A week ago our family was in the Canadian Rockies, on a trip courtesy of my parents. We spent time in Banff, Yoho, and Jasper National Parks, and had a delightful time hiking, canoeing, and rafting. Normally cool, it was especially chilly as Arctic air poured down from the north, but we managed to have rain only at convenient times. My favorite expedition was our rafting trip on the Athabasca River, a glacial melt-off tributary. But there were many other wonderful times, like Kara’s and my hike up to a high meadow on Mount Edith Cavell, and the walk I took with Andrew and a few others along train tracks where we discovered luscious ripe red raspberries. All week we saw fantastic waterfalls, powerful rivers, and glorious mountains capped with fresh snow, continually reminding us of Psalm 121, which Tim used as a teaching passage for our family worship on Sunday.
Traveling with my parents and most of my siblings plus their families, went well, though Tim and I were exhausted by the end. (Kara has an outrageously bad picture of Tim and I on the way to the Vancouver airport, looking as stressed as we felt that morning after getting our family packed for home and loaded in three limos before 5:30 AM.) Moving a family of our size offers some special challenges. Picture us staying in a high-rise, upscale hotel in downtown Vancouver, with a by that time totally spent toddler. Or imagine us in a crowded airport, where it took the full two hours allotted to get through security, border control, and customs. (“There are 11 of you??? Awesome!” said the border control fellow.) We found ourselves counting children continually, and happily arrived home with the same nine we started with. Throughout the trip we had many, many interesting comments about our family size, mostly very positive. We were happy to report that, yes, all the children have the same mom and dad, who have been happily married for 24 years. It seemed in Canada that the tourists, most of whom were French or Japanese, typically had just one or at most two children. So we were quite novel.
It’s good to be back home again. The oldest two are back at Purdue, Tim’s running with his work, and the rest of us have started school again, a return to normalcy after a pretty intense summer.
If you’d like to take a peek at more family photos, you can check out Kara’s blog. You may have to flip past her most recent posts about life back in school, but then she has zillions of vacation pics up.
Psalm 121
I will life up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
Traveling with my parents and most of my siblings plus their families, went well, though Tim and I were exhausted by the end. (Kara has an outrageously bad picture of Tim and I on the way to the Vancouver airport, looking as stressed as we felt that morning after getting our family packed for home and loaded in three limos before 5:30 AM.) Moving a family of our size offers some special challenges. Picture us staying in a high-rise, upscale hotel in downtown Vancouver, with a by that time totally spent toddler. Or imagine us in a crowded airport, where it took the full two hours allotted to get through security, border control, and customs. (“There are 11 of you??? Awesome!” said the border control fellow.) We found ourselves counting children continually, and happily arrived home with the same nine we started with. Throughout the trip we had many, many interesting comments about our family size, mostly very positive. We were happy to report that, yes, all the children have the same mom and dad, who have been happily married for 24 years. It seemed in Canada that the tourists, most of whom were French or Japanese, typically had just one or at most two children. So we were quite novel.
It’s good to be back home again. The oldest two are back at Purdue, Tim’s running with his work, and the rest of us have started school again, a return to normalcy after a pretty intense summer.
If you’d like to take a peek at more family photos, you can check out Kara’s blog. You may have to flip past her most recent posts about life back in school, but then she has zillions of vacation pics up.
Psalm 121
I will life up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
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