Mothers Day, Birds, and Granddaughters

First of all, I want to wish a very Happy Mother's Day to all my daughters and daughters-in-law who are such wonderful parents to those delightful eight grandchildren of mine. I am also remembering with great fondness my own mother who has now been apart from me for over 37 years. Most of all, I wish a very Happy Mother's Day to my beautiful wife, without whom I would still be a frog!

I know the title to this posting is a strange mashup of things, but rather than string out the topics over several days and in order to be timely, I thought I'd just throw everything together. Several days ago, we looked out towards our bird feeders early in the morning to see this convention of goldfinches on the ground. There must have been 25 of them at the peak of the gathering. Such pretty yellow against the very green lawn.

I had made a couple of wren houses for friends, and while I was at it, I found a different design for one and decided to make it for myself. The plan suggested it was a haiku wren house. I don't know if that is quite true, since I haven't tried working up an appropriate 17 syllable poem, but since haiku poems are meant to describe the natural world, maybe it is possible. Regardless, I like the looks of it in our flowering crab apple tree. Now we await its being found by a wren!

One night last week, Clara contacted me via FaceTime to explain that she was working on a social studies project on family histories, migrations of people to the United States, and the like. She had all kinds of questions for me regarding our family and how and why the individuals came to be here. Fortunately, I have long kept a fairly detailed genealogical history. One of the fun things I can do is create an ancestry chart, which for a selected individual, shows the parents, grandparents, and all prior generations from whom the selected individual descends. In Clara's case, I was able to take it back 12 generations. My friend Richard kindly printed a copy of it in large format so that it was readable. I rolled it up and included lots of related information and stories about the people on the chart and sent it to Clara, who found it waiting for her on Friday when she got home from school. I understand she is very excited and is working on a presentation to take back to school with her this next week. Fun!

Finally, yesterday we went to Prairie High School in the morning. That was the site for the annual Eastern Iowa Girls Run 5K. Girls on the Run is an international organization dedicated to inspiring women to be healthy and confident. Eleanor is involved in the organization, and she did the 5K run yesterday (about 3.1 miles). Rob and Carrie's friend Sara was her "running buddy." It was really nice to see them enjoying this opportunity together and to see that Eleanor has role models like this. Here they are as they near the last turn.

And here is the final turn toward the finish line.

I loved how Eleanor looked up to check to see that her parents and grandparents were actually there for the big finish.

And, I especially liked this picture, where I caught them in what seemed like perfect running synchronization.

If you click here, you can see the results for the nearly 1,000 girls who ran the race. Eleanor and Sara finished at numbers 230 and 231, with chip times of 34:16. (They wear electronic chips that time them from when they cross the starting line at the beginning to crossing the finish line at the end.) Eleanor said this was about 7 minutes better than she did last year. She looked good. Maybe we have a track star or cross country athlete in our future!