Richard Henry Lee was the Virginian delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In 1776 he brought forth the motion calling for American independence from Great Britain.

“My name is Richard Henry Lee; Virginia is my home
My name is Richard Henry Lee; Virginia is my home
And may my horses be turned to glue if I can’t deliver
Unto you a resolution on independency!”

I don’t remember learning about Richard Henry Lee when I was in school, but his song from the musical, “1776” has probably been sung a couple of hundred times in the Paladini home in the last 10 years.

“For I am FFV, the first family
In the sovereign colony of Virginia
Yes I am FFV, the oldest family
in the oldest colony in America
And may the British burn my land if I can’t deliver
To your hand a resolution on independency!”

The first time we heard of Richard Henry Lee was when David was in the 6th grade and drew Lee’s name in a small home-school co-op drama about the events leading up to the Revolutionary War. David had to write a report, memorize some of his quotes, and put together a costume.

Then we discovered “1776” the musical, and the delightful characterization of Richard Henry Lee.

And then, within the month, we all went to Washington DC for Monica’s eighth grade trip, and it included a stop at Saint John’s Church in Richmond Virginia – and who do you think we met?

“You see it’s here-a-Lee, there-a-Lee
And everywhere-a-Lee-a-Lee
Here-a-Lee, there-a-Lee
And everywhere-a-Lee

Social-Lee, political-Lee, financial-Lee, natural-Lee
Internal-Lee, external-Lee, fraternal-Lee, eternal-Lee

Since then, it has become a tradition for us to watch “1776” every 4th of July! If you haven’t ever seen it you’re in for a treat! You’ll learn all kinds of tidbits of American history and you’ll have great, fun songs stuck in your head forever!

*Lyrics from the Musical: 1776 (Song: Lees of Old Virginia)

Summertime! Here in California, some of us were beginning to doubt if it would really come this year. Yesterday I was visiting with my little neighbor kids, riding their scooters up and down the sidewalk. They’re glad school is out, but already expressing slight boredom.

I’m sure I probably got bored sometimes in the summer when I was a kid, but as I look back, all I remember is a long stretch of wonderful golden days. Playing and hiking in the woods near our house…swimming in the creek at Pin Hook Bridge…sitting in the hayloft of the barn across the road, eating fresh drippy tomatoes and reading and reading and reading.

Most of my childhood summer adventures were free, but I think it cost a quarter to get into the swimming pool at Coney Island, outside of Cincinnati Ohio. Every Friday my brother and sister and I walked about a mile to our country school, and rode a school bus to the Coney Island Swimming Pool. (To this very day I can’t smell Coppertone suntan lotion without being transported back to the Coney Island swimming pool.) Standing in line, hugging our towels and waiting to pay our quarter, we always saw two signs painted on the wall. One of them billed Coney Island’s “Sunlite Pool” as The largest recirculating pool in the world. The other told us, “You don’t stop playing because you get old. You get old because you stop playing.”

I’ve never forgotten those two signs; they’re inherent in the Coppertone smell. And as I grew up I determined to never stop playing. Who wants to get old?

Billie Holiday sang about “Summertime…when the livin’ is easy” and when I was a young mom I decided to make sure the livin’ would be easy in the summertime! There would still be chores, and there would still be lots of “required reading”, but we would cut ourselves a lot of slack and plan for as much fun as we could stuff into a summer! I wanted my kids to look back on their summers as a long string of golden days, like I do.

And I think it worked. A few days ago I was talking with Matthew, who is now 34. “Remember how we used to go to Turlock Lake every week in the summer?” he asked me. “And we always stopped at the frostee place on the way home.” Of course I remembered! Dozens and dozens and dozens of drives out the country highway to the lake – a happy blur. Not a long drive. Not a lot of money. But the memories are etched in Matthew’s heart with bright clarity.

“And remember we used to ride the bikes out to see the donkey?” He continued to reminisce, “We took carrots and he always came over to the fence to see us.” He even remembered that we named the donkey, Balaam, after the prophet who met a donkey.

I think it’s important to have traditions – happy memories of continuity. But summertime is also a good time to do small spontaneous silly things – those kinds of things you always say, “We should do that sometime…”

For example, driving north on highway 99 we always saw a footbridge arching across the freeway, and the kids always said it would be fun to walk across it and look down at the traffic. We’ll do that someday, we always told each other. Finally we decided to make a list of all those we-should-do-that-someday things, and do them in the summer…“when the livin’ is easy.”

And we did.

We drove nine or ten miles north to park the car and walk slowly across the footbridge. We stopped and looked down at the cars. Then back again, and home. Such a small thing, but it’s one of the summertime adventures we always remember.

Another time, when Monica was stroller age, construction had just been completed on a big multi-story parking garage downtown. The construction was finished but it was not open yet. Matthew sighed with delight, “Wouldn’t it be BAD to ride a skateboard all the way from the top of that?” Wow, that sounded like a great summertime adventure! So I pushed Monica in her stroller and Matthew and his little friend brought their skateboards and we walked to the top of the parking garage and ran and rolled all the way down!

A few years later when Monica was older and David had joined the family, one of them had the idea of digging a pool in our back yard. We decided that was one spontaneous idea we couldn’t really go along with. But John came up with a brilliant alternative! He lined the bed of his truck with plastic sheeting and filled it with water and before long it was also filled with kids!

I don’t remember what kind of checklist we made for our spontaneous summertime adventures. I don’t think it was too fancy, but it did the job of prompting our memories. Our friend Alison has fine-tuned the summertime adventure list, though.

Alison is one of John’s colleagues – a brilliant, hard-working, professional woman – and one of the most delightful hands-on mommies I have ever seen. I saw recently that she made her own variation of a Summertime Adventure List, and I complimented her on her creativity. She told me how much her kids like to get involved in planning the list. And then they enjoy doing the things. But she said they have almost as much fun checking them off the list afterwards!

And so, tomorrow is the official first day of summer. Enjoy it! Think about traditions and adventures and spontaneity…and long golden days of fun.

                I hardly know how to talk about this without dragging out overused clichés and maudlin meanderings of the mind.  “What’s a mother to do?!”  My baby is graduating from college tomorrow. Never mind that “my baby” is actually a happily married man with an adorable baby of his own and a home and a good job.  He’s only 23 and I still want to know how the years passed so quickly!

                 The first time I felt like this was when Matthew, our oldest son, graduated from high school. I was stunned at the speed with which his school days had passed. That was a big part of the reason we decided to home-school Monica and David.  If the time was going to pass that quickly I wanted to be in on more of the fun! 

                   And what fun we had!  Delight-directed education. We turned meal planning and grocery shopping into math lessons. Reading books aloud every time we were in the car…  playing Scrabble and calling it “spelling”…and of course, we did a fair amount of “real” school work. 

                    One of my favourite home school memories happened exactly ten years ago. One morning a Modesto city employee came to the door and asked us to move our cars because they were going to be trimming the trees on our street.  Thirteen-year-old David asked if he could go out and watch them, but I said “No, we need to get started with school.”

“How about if I watch them and write a report about it?”  (The kid was so sly!)

                   David went out and introduced himself to the tree trimmers and asked if he could interview them and take a few pictures.  The men were very accommodating.  David got their address and told them, “I’ll send you a copy of my report after my mom grades it.”

He did send a copy of his report to the Modesto Urban Forestry Department, and about two weeks later we got a call from the City Manager’s office.  The report had been forwarded to them and they asked if David could come down to City Hall and speak with someone in that department.  We were so excited!  Apparently someone wanted to publish David’s paper!

Sitting down with the City Manager’s Assistant, she told us what she had in mind.  They were looking for a young person to write a series of articles for “City Pride, Citywide” an insert that went into the Modesto utility bills every month.  The articles were to be about all kinds of city issues from a “child’s” point of view.   Would David be interested? Would he!!!!

 That interview grew into an amazing opportunity for David.  For the next three years he wrote an article every month.  He wrote about a hamster that was rescued from a storm drain, and how storm drains work. He interviewed our friend Chuck Bergquist, a firefighter. He went on a police ride-along, visited a waste-to-energy plant, the water treatment facility and wrote about all kinds of parks and recreation issues. And much more.  It was home-schooling at its best!

And tomorrow he graduates.  “My baby” has grown up.

                   Even though John and I have technically been “empty nesters” for a few months now, this feels like some kind of rite of passage into that place.  The last little bird is off in full flight.

                     Matthew, with his brilliant mind, and no love for school is a successful journeyman electrician. Monica graduated from Liberty University with honors, and has a great job and a bright future. And tomorrow my baby will walk across the stage and get his diploma from CSUS. 

Mission accomplished!   ( Now bring on the grandkids! )

Like most siblings, our kids usually had a running competition for just about everything.

“I get shotgun.”

“No, I said it first!”

“Can I push the button in the elevator?”

“No, she did it the last time!”

And so on and so forth.

Our solution was that they would take turns having it be their day – their day for everything.

“Whose day is it?’ became a regular question when any conflict came up.  The child whose day it was, got to have first choice about anything and everything.  If they wanted to push the button to cross the street, sit in the front seat, have the first smoothie, put the books into the library book-drop or choose the video, it was decided by “Whose day is it?”

Any issue that might have been a potential cause for bickering was pre-empted by those four little words. 

It might seem like this would promote grasping selfishness, but it was really just the opposite. Sometimes the child whose day it was would disarmingly step aside and generously choose to let the other push the button to cross the street.  Even though it was “their day” it was their choice to either push the button or to let the other have that privilege. 

They managed the schedule of alternating days, and never seemed to get confused.  They even made it a habit to look months ahead on the calendar and see if it would be “their day” on their next birthday. And they made trades so birthdays always fell on their day.

I don’t really know when or how “Whose Day Is It?” ended.  Eventually the practice just faded away and became replaced with a sense of order, fair play, and real other-centeredness.

Easter was last Sunday. So I’m a little late to be right on schedule with a blog about Easter traditions.  But I wore a very cute hat to church today (in honor of William and Kate’s Royal Wedding) and got a number of compliments and comments about my Easter bonnet.

So it’s fair to say that Easter is still in the air!

Easter has always been an important holiday, and busy time for us. Especially since John is a pastor and so much of our family life is connected to church activities. John says Easter Sunday is The Superbowl of church services.

It’s probably been 25 years since we had a traditional ham dinner with extended family.  And I don’t think our kids have ever hunted for an Easter egg.

We always wanted them to think about Easter as the day we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and not all about candy and the Easter bunny. But at the same time, we didn’t want to be those sour faced, legalistic Christian parents who put so much emphasis on church and spiritual things that we missed out on making memories and having a bit of fun and silliness.

So even with the marathon busyness of back-to-back services on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, we figured out how to give candy and bunnies the place they deserve in our Easter festivities.

(Please skip this paragraph if you’re squeamish or a vegetarian) Our “Easter bunny tradition” was that we bought fresh rabbit from the butcher, and ate some variation of what came to be known as barbecued bunny. (Dare I say it tastes a lot like chicken…?) We’ve tried lots of different recipes over the years: roast rabbit, bunny and dumplings, hare hash… Due to time constraints it was usually braised bunny – simmered in the crock pot with lots of spices and potatoes and, of course, carrots.

I don’t think our kids missed out on anything by not believing in an Easter Bunny who came and brought baskets of candy. They got a lot of laugh mileage with the off-beat humor and fun.

And we surely didn’t want them to feel cheated by missing out on getting sick from eating too much candy. So every Monday morning after Easter I gave them each a few dollars and took them to the grocery store where all the Easter candy was discounted. They were able to buy whole bags of whatever candy they liked best – and they learned a lesson in economics into the bargain!

Lots of church services…barbecued bunny and half price candy… hmmm…they may have grown up to be a little warped, but that’s for another blog.