Bill is on leave right now. We spent Friday and Saturday in PA and NJ visiting friends and family.

First order of business: finishing our house in NJ and finding tenants. I think we may have finally gotten some decent tenants…we have a signed lease and check for the security deposit in hand and we’re just waiting for the credit report to hand over the keys and finalize the deal. And we have 2 other people on a wait list if they don’t work out. Thank goodness.

I got to hold two babies – one was 3 months old and the other was 6 weeks old. That was lovely, as was seeing old friends we hadn’t managed to visit in quite a while.

The main purpose of our trip (besides dealing with the house) was a family reunion of sorts in Kearny, NJ. The kids enjoyed the drive up the Turnpike through Newark where you can see the port and the ships unloading at the docks on one side and watch jets land on runways parallel to the highway on the other. And of course there’s the NYC skyline off in the distance. It’s a lot of concrete and asphalt, but still neat.

{My apologies to any city-slickers out there. I prefer rolling hills and bucolic landscapes. You can have your skyscrapers and neon lights.}

Two of Bill’s cousins are expecting babies. That’s wonderful. For a while, I was the only one having any children at all. Bill is the oldest of the grandchildren, so it makes sense that he would be the first married and the first to have kids. But we’ve been lonely waiting for the others to catch up!

Several of Bill’s relatives are teachers. One uncle is a school principal. You can imagine that they haven’t bought into homeschooling as an acceptable alternative to public or parochial school. The principal was asking Billy what 6 plus 2 was, and Billy apparently provided him with a blank stare. I wasn’t around to crack jokes about my teaching qualifications, and of course, my husband in witnessing this felt a bit chagrined that our intelligent son wasn’t being a bit more demonstrative of his abilities, which do happen to include the ability to add 6 and 2.

We’ve had many conversations about our kids not being part of a dog and pony show and about how we don’t want to use them to make us look good. Yes, it would be nice if they could provide a stunning ad lib dissertation on the cause and effects of the current crisis in the Middle East, but that’s just not realistic. So, we get to eat humble pie and hope that one day our kids will manage to be wonderful human beings despite everyone’s fears that our homeschooling will handicap them.

There was also an interesting moment when one uncle called me “narrow-minded,” but I’ll save that for another post. I didn’t mind. I actually felt part of the family!