July Happenings (an update)

Teancom as he normally is: sucking his fingers, holding his ear, and tilting his head.

D's Baby Blessing

Last Sunday we were able to be there when DT was blessed. The T's defected to Kentucky and so are no longer in our ward. So we made the short trip down there. Thankfully we were able to attend the blessing and be back for our own meetings. Not that I'm a glutton for punishment (more church, really?), but Rob was conducting our meeting, and I was teaching Primary.

Which brings up something interesting. I team teach the Primary kids with a friend. She is a much better teacher than I am, no question. I feel like I get absolutely nothing taught to these girls. They're 10 and 11-year-olds and they are squirmy and I'm not sure they hear anything I say. :) But one of the girls said I was her favorite teacher ever. So I'm thinking either that she doesn't remember any other teachers, or there has to be some other criteria for making a good teacher. Because CERTAINLY it's not that she's learning a lot from me. :) I haven't figured it out quite, though.

That same Sunday of D's blessing was the baptism of KC. Rob was able to conduct that meeting, too, which was an honor for him to be able to do. Usually it's the Bishop who does that, but in this case he was filling his role as father, so Rob got to conduct. It was great to be able to participate and be there. The 2 youngest don't really get much out of stuff like this yet, but Miciah did. There was another baptism that was announced for this last Sunday and Miciah arranged to be able to be there for that one, too (I told her I had to take the boys home and wouldn't be able to stay). That was completely unprompted by us. It's nice to have such a thoughtful daughter.

5 Signatures

Rob came home last Tuesday with a piece of paper that has 5 signatures on it. That's the 5 people on his committee that had to approve his earning his doctorate. Rob came home and showed it to me. Then he remarked about how strange it is that after 4 years of hard work, it all came down to 5 signatures on a piece of paper. Rob is now Dr. Thacker, and that feels really nice for him.

The re-write ended up equalling about 5 more pages for his dissertation. We'll get it bound soon. I almost don't want to do it, since it's not cheap. But someone looked at him and said, "When else in your life are you going to write a book?" :) We'll get it bound.

Carter Caves Trip

Bodies: the Exhibit

Wednesday morning we set off on our mini-vacation, just me and Rob. We dropped the kids off and went off to the Museum Center to go see Bodies. We watched the imax movie that went with it. The movie was fantastic!! It showed stuff ultra-close up and in different ways. They showed food going down the esophagus and entering the stomach (seriously gross). Then followed the mush of stuff as it went down the intestines, met with bile (truly, it made me not want to eat for weeks). They showed the inside of the lungs (how do they do that?), and that was really really cool. Then they went inside the heart and it was so amazing that I cried. Wow. At the very end of the movie they showed a birth scene, very tactfully done. You didn't see any woman parts, and when the baby was born the doctor wiped it off a ton before you even saw her, so she looked like a human instead of a purple-grey gross thing. It was so amazing to watch the birthing process that again I cried. The movie was moving and amazing. I suggest everyone go see it.

Bodies: the Exhibit was pretty good, too. My favorite part was the baby room. They showed tiny, tiny 4-week-old fetuses (you could hardly even see them!), up to near-full term babies. It was amazing to see them. Other pretty cool things:

1 They had the digestive tract all laid out on a wall.

2 The blood vessel specimens were dang sweet! Seeing an entire body in just blood vessels. Cool.

3 Looking at the cross section of a non-pregnant woman's female parts. Holy smokes, babies should NOT have to fit down a hole that small!! Amazing.

4 They did an anti-smoking campaign. Showed some nasty smokers' lungs and then said, "Each pack of cigarettes takes 3 minutes 40 seconds off your life. Leave your cigarettes here and never smoke again!" Then they had a big clear box with a slit on the top for people to leave their packs. The box wasn't very full, and I wondered if the box was just a display. At the end of the tour, the lady said they'd emptied the box 3 times already since the show opened.

5 It was neat to go with Rob. For him, this was like a refresher course. I didn't realize he knows all the stuff he does. It was fun to ask him random questions about the human body and have him know the answers.

Carter Caves

After leaving the museum center, we drove down to Carter Caves State Resort Park. We were there around 7:30 p.m. and set up camp. The site we first got was a lousy, lousy site in the middle of everything. Close to the bathrooms, people walking through or right by the site every few minutes. No good. Rob went back and asked if there were any other sites we could have. The lady at the desk said that one of their most popular sites, 102, was open. It was set back into the trees a little and was pretty out of the way. On Thursday our immediate neighbors left, so we felt like we were camping all alone, and that was cool.

Thursday morning we woke up and went caving! I told Rob that caving wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be, but I'm not sure what I was expecting, either. We went first through a cave where you could walk, mostly. The next one we did some crawling and it was a little wet, but then opened up into a cool "waterfall" (meaning, water was falling from the cave ceiling).

Then we walked to the cave called "The Birth Canal" where Rob got stuck during Scout Camp. I told him I wanted to crawl through and take a picture of him at the opening. First off, we were at the mouth of the cave and to the right was a large opening that you could walk into. I started walking towards it and Rob says, "No, that's not the right way." He points to the left and there's an opening barely big enough to crawl through. I looked at him like, "Yeah, right." He was serious. I asked him if it was an tighter than the cave we'd just been through. He said no. He is a liar! It was not only tight in places (Rob was belly-crawling, and I almost was. Probably should have, but come to find out I have mental issues with belly-crawling), but in other places you had to crawl through cold water and/or at least 6 inches of muck. Rob had told me about the water and the muck. But until you experience it, you have no real idea.

I took the pictures of Rob at the opening. We took a throw-away camera with us, and who knows if it survived. It wasn't waterproof (we could choose either waterproof or flash, but not both, and what good would it have done to be waterproof but not flash inside a cave?), and we abused it pretty good. I'm taking it in today to get the pics developed, and if they turned out, I'll post them here.

I also measured the opening that he got stuck in. The hole he was trying to get through was 9.5 inches high! Insane. It was small enough that I didn't even want to go through it. Though the idea of going through the hole was more appealing than crawling back through the water and muck. Water on bare hands is painful.

The last cave we went through ended us up at a waterfall, and that was cool. It was about a 5-foot drop off the ledge to get down, so I'm glad Rob was with me. It would have been scary to do on my own. Dropping almost my entire body-length onto a surface that is not only uneven, it has running water on it? No thank you.

Funny things I found out about myself from caving:

1 I already said this, but I learned that I have mental issues with belly crawling. For any reason at all. During the part where I probably should have belly crawled, I instead stretched out my body a really long ways and sang a song to myself with the lyrics of, "I don't want to belly crawl. I don't want to do it."

2 I had forgotten how fun it is to get dirty! I was a tomboy growing up and I got dirty and wet and gross all the time. I laughed at girls who thought it was awful to do those things. At the first spot where I encountered the muck, I looked at Rob like, "I don't think so." But by the end, we were both covered in water and muck, head-to-toe. And as we were walking back, it all came back to me. The freedom of allowing yourself to get so yucky. It was awesome.

3 I am now a wuss. Flat out. Rob took me through a good progression of caves there. Had he started me out on the cave we ended with, I would have not been happy at all.

4 I am not uber-adventurous when it comes to caving. We would come to a part of the cave that got pretty tight. Rob would say, "Why don't you squeeze through and see if it goes somewhere." I'd look at him like, "And, WHY?" No thank you. I don't have to be the person who amazingly fits through a 3-inch opening. I'll let someone else have those treasured moments.

Camping

We spent the rest of the day relaxing. We ate lunch, which was a mini-adventure because we forgot all 3 of our camping-dedicated can openers. Rob opened a can with his pocket knife, and I'm probably retarded, but I was not even aware that you could open a whole can that way.

We took naps. We read books. We talked and talked and talked. I kept looking at Rob and telling him, "It's nice to know that I like you!" We knew we liked each other, of course. But it was nice to have moments that were just about me and him. No kids. No obligations. We know that we like each other as parents. We know that we like each other in a crunch. But it's nice to know we like each other just for who we are without any of the other stuff that makes up life. We still like being together. We still like talking. It was therapeutic.

Ripley, OH

On our way home Friday we stopped by Ripley, OH, which is a town famous for it's involvement in the Underground Railroad. We parked down by the river in the old section of town, on Front Street. I wouldn't mind retiring in a place like Ripley. It's beautiful. Anyways, the John Parker house wasn't open (due to illness, the sign said). So we read the sign outside the house, then took off from there to find the staircase up the hill to the Rankin house. Holy smokes! The hill was awful. :) We were tired before we'd even reached the start of the staircase. Then the last part of the hill, up at the top, was super-steep. A wooden staircase that kept weaving back on itself. Wow. I kept thinking, "We are healthy, young people. We aren't barefoot. We aren't being chased. We don't have a small child with us. It's mid-day. This isn't life and death." It was hard enough to do without any of those things! Rob kept saying, "They probably were in much better shape than we are, though." Probably true. But still.
We didn't realize that the Rankin house would cost money (we should have, of course), and Rob didn't bring his wallet. So we turned around and walked back down the stairs. We would have had to do that anyways, to get back to our car. But it was a bit disappointing. ... My calves were burning before getting down the wooden part of the staircase. We had to stop a lot. It's a huge hill. We drove back up to the Rankin house, paid our $3 a piece and took a look around the house. It was a pretty small house and the Rankins had like 13 kids in there! Craziness.

The history wasn't new to me, since I've read Beyond the River (everyone should read this book. It's a fascinating history). But it was fun to walk around there with all that history around you.

The funniest part, to me, was this: The staircase was not well marked. In fact, it wasn't marked at all. We walked up the hill to a spot that seemed likely to be where the staircase would start, but couldn't see it and weren't sure which way to go to find it. We asked directions from a man sitting on his front porch. ... So here we are, two white folks trying to get up Rankin's Stairway to Freedom, and we have to stop and ask directions from a black man. Something about that made me want to giggle. It seemed perfect.

I love Rev. John Rankin and his family. If we were ever to have another boy, I would name him Adam Lowry. Adam Lowry was Rankin's eldest son and his "conversion" to the cause of abolitionism is a fabulous story. And his involvement in the movement, wow. ... In fact, had I read the book 3 months earlier than I did (Teancom was just born when I read it), Teancom would probably be named Adam Lowry.

Home

Back to life! The kids loved staying at the W's house. Miciah swam and swam and swam. The kids picked blackberries. Elijah got to finally watch Spider-Man 3. :)

Teancom's Birthday

We had Teancom's 2nd Birthday party on Sunday with R & C and the B family. L and Teancom are bestest buds (L will hug him around the neck from behind and Teancom will look at me, smile, and say, "Hug me." Totally cute). We had cake and ice cream and celebrated the life of a cute little boy. He's growing up!

Here's Teancom checking out his cake, right before we cut into it:


Miciah and Elijah in a pretty good picture of the both of them. Elijah is actually smiling, that's a plus. The red box he's in is the toy box that R & C have at their house specifically for my kids. Elijah got in it and told Teancom that it was a present for him. Teancom came over and "unwrapped" the present. The present was Elijah.


Elijah makes funny faces for pictures usually. This was my favorite of the series for the night.


The fabulous R & C.


Elijah and his best bud, A, watching TV. R turned on "cool cars": drag racing. The boys thought it was awesome. I just kept watching it thinking, "Who is insane enough to do this?"


This is baby N. I watch him for a few hours a few days a week. He's an excellent baby.

Rob's New Job

Rob had his first day as a Children's Hospital employee. Monday and today were orientation days. Tomorrow will be his first day actually in the lab. ... Rob came home and proudly showed me his new work badge. The first thing I noticed is that his picture showed him with facial hair! It was the Monday after Scout Camp. He didn't know they were going to take his picture, and if he did, he probably would have shaved for it. :) But what Rob was trying to get me to notice is that under his name is listed 3 little letters: PhD.

Congrats, Dr. Thacker!

We love you all. Thank you for all your support and love and patience during the last few months. We needed it.

Rob, Tamra, Miciah, Elijah, and Teancom