Focus on Life: playing catch-up Weeks 15 through 20

If you're looking for the Bead Soup Blog Party #8 - please click here!

Sally Russick of The Studio Sublime is hosting the 2nd year of 'Focusing on Life'; for 2014 Sally is providing a monthly theme, with a more fine-grained focus each week of the month.

I had a crazy April and so far May too - so my last submission has been week 14. Back then we were still in April, focusing on moments.

I did lots of focusing, really, as the following week I had 2 presentations, 1 project, 1 assignment, and 2 reports due :) That was on the school-side. Not counting the fact Easter was approaching and the house needed some cleaning and the kitchen needed baking and cooking and egg colouring and... Well, you know how it goes.

So back to focusing.

Week 15: A moment of focus

With the Easter fast approaching - that was my primary focus. The Light. I love Easter, it is by far my favourite religious Holy day. I had an interesting philosophical conversation with William: what is more important, Christmas or Easter? For us, as Orthodox Christians, the main focus is always on Easter. Yes, we need Christmas (Nativity) for all to follow, but Easter (Resurrection) is what defines us. So we focused simply on the Light that was brought to us. And what you see there is the Light brought from church the night of Easter. There are no candles lit before midnight, at midnight everybody gets outside the church, in the cool night. The priest is the last to come out of the church, and he brings The Light outside, the message of Christ's Resurrection in the symbolic lit candle. The closest person to him light their own candle from the main one (and one from another after that) until everybody holds a lit candle in their hand. The sermon is being held outdoors, and after a short procession around the church we can now all enter the church, bringing the special message "Christ is risen!" with the answer "Truly, He is risen!".

Week 16: A moment best captured in black and white

Our chocolate lab, Lucky. She's a true lady in this picture - I am happy she let me take it (she's not camera shy, but she doesn't like to pose, like our 2 German Shepherds before her!). Isn't she adorable?

Week 17: Evening moments

From the 'A boy and his dog' series: this is a true evening moment: William watching something on TV before bed, with his hand on the above-mentioned dog :)

That concludes the 'Moments' month, April.

For May Sally picked the 'In, At, and About' theme.

We start with Week 18: In your (their) hands

First in their hands: we went on a school trip at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) with both Grade 5 classes. The focus of the trip was Ancient civilizations and the trip had 3 parts: about 2 hours of roaming freely through the museum, then 1 hour in a lab, working on Egyptian artifacts, and 1 hour with a guide, in the Egyptian exhibit. The picture is not very good, but it shows that their hands truly touched antique Egyptian artifacts. William has gloves on, holding a miniature statue of a god of some sort (you can't keep up with Egyptian gods!). They had artifacts from 2,000 to over 6,000 years old. And they got to touch them, to study them, to analyse and try to figure what they were for. I couldn't help but sigh at the idea of having such an opportunity so young!

And this is in my hands :) Yesterday I had enough of this horrible weather (it's grey and cold) and I was thinking to order myself a cheerful flower arrangement. Then I stopped and thought - why?! Went to the market (the farmer's market is open!!), bought 2 bouquets: one with yellow mums, one with white mums. I looked for a red tulip or rose, but I couldn't find any. Came home, and with half of the flowers I made myself what you see. At a fraction of the cost and as cheerful (even more cheerful, since I saved tons of money :) ) as the wan I wanted to order originally. I promised myself to keep this activity (making myself cheerful arrangements) going as long as possible. And if you wonder, I made another similar arrangement with the rest of the flowers, but the effect is not the same - one needs the smiley mug for this to work perfectly :)

Week 19: Good things inside

We recently bought a dragon fruit. It was adorable on the outside: the bright pink with a very bold green. But when I cut it - I couldn't believe my eyes how beautiful it was!! And yummy too. Hence - good things inside :)

Update: The dragon fruit tastes good. It is a watery fruit, the feel of watermelon a little bit, but way, way, way more sweet than watermelon. Cold it's better than at room temperature (just like watermelon too).

Week 20: The view about the ground

Last week, we got sick with some sort of a virus: both William and I spent Mother's Day and the next one in bed, watching movies. We filed it under 'fun' :) Right before, though, on Saturday, we had a splendid spring day and we managed to clean our veggie patch, add some new soil and plant it. If they didn't freeze last night, we will have tomatoes, onions, peppers, and salad. Plus the usual herbs. And blueberries / raspberries. Looking forward to late summer :)

Thank you for stopping by - and sorry for a longer post... hopefully I'll get back into the weekly rhythm now.

Focus on Life: Week 12 ~ Expression

Sally Russick of The Studio Sublime is hosting another year long challenge which is... sublime... as you'd expect with such a studio name. The challenge is named 'Focusing on Life' and for 2014 Sally is choosing a monthly theme, with a different prompt each week.

The theme for March is 'Checked Out' and this week's theme is Expression.

This is from the category 'A boy and his dog' ~ and while I don't have enough pictures of them (the dog is not a camera-friendly one, she's way too curious :) ), I have endless memories of their cuddles. They love each other to pieces, that unique, remarkable love between a child and his dog.

To see how everybody else captured the Expressions of March, please check below.

Your 'feel good' video of the week

This is one of the most adorable videos I've ever seen - that man has a heart of gold, God bless him!



Enjoy!

Cora: July 2006 - May 2013

It doesn't escape me the irony of an early thought: in writing the article for Focus on Life: Hope I wanted to write about Cora and the hope I had she'll be OK... then I didn't put that on the 'paper'... maybe inside I knew the only hope was to have a painless end...

We first had Brondi, our first German Shepard. She has been an amazing dog - truly incredible. When she left us way too soon we first thought there will be no more dogs. But William was young and a couple of years after we realized there is no point in depriving him from the unique love of humans' best friend just because we were still feeling pain. So we started to look for the next family addition - vowing first it will not be a German Shepard. The more we browsed the internet for dogs - the more it became clear that we are, indeed, one-breed people. A visit to a breeder close-by and this little cute puppy was the only one in the litter that followed us around. She had a small 'defect' at the corner of her left eye which the breeder (and later the vet) offered to remove it. We never allowed it - she was unique that way, and very cute looking even when she grew older - and a few weeks after she came to live with us, our beloved Cora.

Soon we discovered she thinks of William as her own brother (he was just 3 at the time) and their playfulness was truly contagious. As she grew - she started to guard him (and us, but he was always #1) with the atrocity only love gives one. She hated the postman with passion (I've never seen a dog hating the postman that badly) and let them all know, no matter how often they changed. But she loved us - and she was always ready to give us a kiss, to play, to join us traveling.

She has been sick for a while - fortunately not something to make her uncomfortable (or not for too long), just an illness that had no real cure, no guarantees to ever get better (an immune system issue), one that would make her have more ear infections than the child had. We knew it's just a matter of enjoying her love for us much as possible, we knew it's going to be a day when all this would end, we were just praying to be as far as possible - and that's all God had granted us with her: almost 7 years.

She entered our lives in September 2006 and she left this world yesterday, May 10th, 2013.

It is hard - the house is quieter now (Lucky, the chocolate lab is not vocal at all, she's quite surprised at the quiet too!). There is nobody telling the squirrels to get off. There is nobody to check the door or to argue about who is allowed to cross our yard or not.

Always ready to open gifts on Christmas day - but very politely waiting for everyone
to open theirs before she would get her bone and chew it. 

But there are and always will be the memories of Cora: our brave and beautiful and loving friend.

Watching royally over her kingdom from her favourite spot: the living room armchair:
she barely fit in it, but she would jump on every time she could!

The pain is still raw - we just hope (see, there is still hope) she's now running across the grass of heavens along Brondi and Ferdi and they share memories of our family as they all knew it at different times.

Loving us dearly every moment of her life: we hope she knew we loved her back!
RIP, Cora, you have been a wonderful part of our family!

May you rest in peace loving friend, we cherish every moment we have been granted together and we will remember you forever. You have touched our lives and we hope you know it!

P.S. To match our moods as soon as I got home from the vet yesterday the sky literary opened and rain poured hard for a long time. Tears from heaven?

Then and now

I stumbled over some pictures with my son - taken 3 years apart. The first ones - he was 4 years old, we were camping (and trapshooting) in Mason, MI (an amazing place to be, if you are a trapshooter, I know nothing else about the place :)). In the second set - he's, of course, 7 years old - at another competition, in Marengo, OH (another great place to be - and this one I know outside the camping site too... really nice shopping place - this summer I'll have to check the bead stores :)).

William with puppies (4 yo)

William with puppies (4 yo)

William - with puppies (7 yo)

William - with puppies (7 yo)

Did you find anything interesting in these pictures? Yes - it is the exact same breeder with the exact same cage... of course the puppies are different :) The funniest part? The gentleman remembered us - he even had some pictures of our son in Michigan, playing with his dogs (William spent an impressive amount of time at his place, just playing with the dogs).

Hopefully we'll meet him again this summer, and we'll continue the series of pictures.

Dogs

So... now with the Auction a success and behind me (almost - there is some clean-up left for tomorrow morning and a few other loose strings, but nothing as substantial as the work we put in last week, especially Friday) I am coming back to normal life.

The house needs tending, laundry is in the washer, the hubby has a long list of To-Dos for me, and the child - well, the child missed me on Friday, basically, since I was in school all last week.

The dog needs food, which means I have to go get some meat from somewhere - we started to feed both home-made food after we had some strange and very expensive issues with the German Sheppard. Funny is that almost a year after the very-expensive issues started, when they piled up one after another, after I started to feed them home-made food the veterinarian said 'Yes, one of the reason for what she has (I can't remember how it's called) could be food allergies.' No kidding! And you tell me after I bought medication for about $700per month  (yes, seven hundred per month) for almost a year?! And you know what? The dog's coat looks healthy again, she gained normal weight (she was loosing constantly, even after I increased her medical store-bought food dosage) and while her other medical problem is not completely fixed (and may never be) - she's not getting worse and her symptoms are not as bad as before.

I know lots of people will not agree with home-made food for dogs - however, we fed our dogs home-made food before coming to Canada and always had the healthiest dogs ever. If you think - it's very unlikely you know what's in the human food, but try to figure out what exactly they put in the dog food! Good luck. Everyone is asking - how do I know if they get the proper nutrients. Well - I am using common sense, the dogs will tell me. It worked for 2 dogs before - can't be failing me now :)

To end on a happy and funny note - with barely 3 weeks before C-Day, I'll leave you with this cute video:

Cute dog waiting for Santa

Pretty dog

Every boy should have two things: a dog, and a mother willing to let him have one. ~ Anonymous

This being a blog about pretty things... I can add a pretty living things, right?

In our household we have 2 dogs (a German Sheppard and a Chocolate Lab), a fish, we are not counting the frogs and bunnies in the backyard, and my son is planning on getting an exotic animal for Christmas. After I positively ruled out snakes the debate is now between frogs and turtles.

I just stumbled a wonderful picture of one of our dogs: Cora, the German Sheppard. She doesn't usually like to pose and a picture like this is a rare thing for us. So I had to share it :)

What is your best-furred-friend?