the unlikely orange

 oh my goodness, it's been awhile.   2020 has been happening, with a strange cast of characters including masks, ubiquitous hand sanitizer, elbow bumps, mute buttons, take out containers, and amazon boxes.   and while the months have been moving past, life has also been happening.  right under our noses.   as you may know, our family has a long tradition of making a "summer bucket list" each year, complete with items we'd like to accomplish in a summer.  some of the things are annual traditions and special events, while others are foods we want to try, or new experiences we'd like to explore.  in the past we've done our best, but we've never quite crossed all the things off our list.  this year, however, what with a distinct lack of camps and events, provided a bit more time to tick things off the list.  and we completed every item, including making our own potato chips and ice cream, and trying poutine and pavlova.  we pi...

twelve years ago i started making a video of our children as a mother's day tribute to their mother, and somehow it became a tradition.  back then, our oldest son was 3 years old, and cute.  now he's 15 and, well, not so cute .  however, we have really come to love this tradition, and the time capsule of sorts that it has become.  we love looking back at each year's video, to see how we've grown and changed, and how our love for Shannon has remained constant. below is this year's video, and if you want to walk with us down memory lane, the other eleven are down there as well.  happy mother's day to all the mom's out there...you make us feel like a million bucks. 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009

i love to travel, and i love music.  and i also love where the two intersect.  so, whenever i travel, i love to make sure my music matches my context.  recently, as we've taken family vacations over the last few years to california and florida, i have made mix cd's as the soundtrack to our trip.  well, this year is no different.  we are headed to arizona (to see the grand canyon, sedona, and several other places), and so i have put together a mix cd (yes, i still like cd's: OLD SCHOOL) of songs related to our journey and some of the places we'll be.  you can see the songs and the artwork, and you'll be able to see some pictures over the next week or so of our adventures.  here's to the journey!

merry Christmas, yinz guys.  we've been marking our advent journeys with an annual video now for the last twelve years!  for this latest installment, we used the Tractors' version of "Run, Run Rudolph," as a metaphor for all of our running around, and i hope it shows that we've had a real blast this year, preparing for Christmas.  you'll see scenes from getting our tree, making cookies, concerts, impromptu dance sessions, making snowflakes, and much more.  enjoy. 

what a summer! i wrote in june about our annual tradition of making a summer bucket list of things we'd like to accomplish in the fleeting months of summer each year, and i must say that we did pretty good this year!  we had ice cream for dinner.  we played frisbee golf. we went to vbs and music camp. we celebrated quin's birthday with an epic harry potter party. we went to ocean city (twice!). we went to wesley forest for summer camp (well, three of us did). we made a sand sculpture (several, actually). we made orange julius-es.  we did cousin week (again, some of us did...the rest of us were preparing for the aforementioned epic party) we picked fruit (blueberries). we ate at hofbrau pizza. we made a movie. we made donuts. we built a fort. we made a summer cd. we went to seven springs (champion, pa, actually) we hiked the alan seeger trail (along with many other trails!) we watched avengers: infinity war. we went to the flight 93 memorial na...

  tempus fugit.  time flies.  it is said that time flies especially when you are having fun.  well, i must be having more fun than i can handle, because time for me is soaring at breakneck speed.  it's been two months since i last posted here.  i was excited about the summer, and now here i am, what feels like two weeks later, posting about the fact that summer is now over, and my kids are back in school.  time flies.  but it gets worse.  it's not just that the summer whizzed by, but that the years themselves are zooming past at an accelerated clip.  our oldest son starts high school today.  HIGH SCHOOL.  tempus freaking fugit.   seriously, though, the pace is breathtaking.  it feels like only a few short years ago that i was writing about his first day of kindergarten , and now he's going to be a freshman in high school!?!   back then, i was worried about what i couldn't control.  a...

it's summertime, baby!  the sun is out (nope), the kids are home from school (yay.), and it's time to relax a little bit (yeah, right.).  just kidding!  rain or shine, it's time to have some fun with the kids at home, with the extra sunlight, and with the opportunity to make some more memories before these days are gone.  so, once again, Shannon (dang, she is talented!) has designed our family's annual "summer bucket list," complete with all sorts of things we'd like to accomplish in the next couple of months.  we have some of our annual stand-by's, like playing in the rain, having ice cream for dinner, vbs, summer camp, etc.  But we also have some things that will be unique to this summer, like making donuts, playing disc golf, and celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary, just to name a few.  we've got high expectations for the summer, and we know the only way to do it is to say "yes" to life, and to make it happen, so here we go!  ...

i know i'm old.  i mean, there's a growing list of entries in that exhibit file, many of which are obvious to everyone else but me, but i'm at least self-aware enough to realize this one: i still make mix cd's.  as if it were still 2002, i rip and arrange and burn and buy jewel cases and the whole deal.  it's almost like a i can't NOT do it.  i just love it; it's in my bones.  every time we take a family trip somewhere, i make a mix cd focused on  that location, and each summer i make a cd to serve as the soundtrack of our summer, and i make several copies and share them with others as well.  they probably get it in the mail and laugh at me, but i don't really care.  i simply love doing it. this is my fifth summer cd in a row, and you can see the artwork for it above.  the theme is the word "world," as you can see from the songs i chose (also, please remember that my target audience here is the family demographic).   here ar...

this year for mothers day, our boys and i are celebrating Shannon, and how she makes the world such a wonderful place for us, in so many ways.  she loves to travel, she loves to discover the foods and cultures of people around this globe, and she loves to discover more of the wonder of the world.  that wonder is contagious, and i certainly see it taking root and growing in our children, so that when they look around at this beautifully broken world of ours, they see the fingerprints of God, and the hope of redemption. truly it is a wonderful world, and our family is so thankful for the ways that our wife and mother shows us and points us to this truth every day. so without further ado, here is our 11th annual mother's day video: and if you want to see the previous ten, just click this link.  

as many of you know, we try to do something different and interesting for our family christmas card every year (we've done i-spy's, it's a wonderful life, an old time circus, and superheroes, just to name a few).  this year we decided to try our hand at harry potter, since i've been reading the books to the kids out loud before bed at night.  so, from our home to yours, we hope your christmas is happy, magical, and full of wild wonder at the absurdity of a God who would enter into our story, our messes, our muted colors and lonely bethlehem nights.  there is magic in the mundane, mystery in the manger, if you will dare to believe it.

it's Christmas eve!  we have once again put together a little montage (our eleventh annual!) of some footage from our advent preparations for Christmas, this time to a song that i absolutely adore called "Lord, Remind Me" by Jon and Valerie Guerra. we hope you are reminded of the magic and the mystery of this unlikely story, and of the wonder of hope being born in your own heart again this year. 

well, friends, it is labor day, which is to say that the period of the year we call summer is now pretty much completely over.  school has started.  the nights are getting darker, sooner.  and we are taking our summer bucket list out of the frame and putting it into the "to be scrapbooked" pile, an ominous sign by any measurement.  when you are "to be scrapbooked" you are clearly just a memory.  your neighbors are torn ticket stubs, bent programs, receipts, and other two-dimensional obituaries to moments that have gone before.  such is summer, 2018:  a memory.  but it is a good memory.  you may remember that i was reluctant to even share our summer bucket list this year,  and i want to say that while we were able to put quite a few dry-erase x's on that sucker; and while we were able to make quite a few memories, what i hope we got out of it is more than mere scrapbook pages: i hope we continued to build something significant, some...

to my three sons, as i sit down to write these words to you, summer is gasping out its very last breaths.  when the sun makes it a new day tomorrow, you will soon be rising for the first day of school.  it is an interesting moment to be caught in: a kind of swirling whirlpool of excitement and sadness; a reluctant farewell to what has been an absolutely amazing summer, and an expectant joy about the year ahead. and it has been an awesome summer.  we've been to the beach and built a fort.  you went to summer camp and steelers training camp and made sourdough.  we saw a grand slam at a baseball game, made slushies, and danced like crazy fools in the front row at a great concert on tussey mountain.  we've eaten well, explored together, sung at the top of our lungs, and grown closer together.  no small wonder that its hard to let go of all that. but if you knew the adventure that lies ahead, you would not be grumbling about alarm clocks, hom...

my friends, this unparalleled woman is celebrating a birthday today, and i cannot help but stop and say thanks that she was born.  every once in a while i imagine my life without her, and it is a dark and grim vision.  in this vision, there are no children living in my house, no voices singing opera from the shower, no kids books strewn across the living room.  in this vision, i eat spaghetti-o's from a can for dinner every night, and i am stuck in every rut i've ever gotten into.  in this terrifying vision the color of everything is gray, music sounds like a monotonous drone, and everything feels like long, cold nights.  but she was born! and somehow our paths were blessed to cross, and somehow i was able to convince her that spending her life with me wouldn't be as awful as it might have seemed, and somehow these last 19 years feel like the blink of an eye; like a colorful, melodic, sun-drenched, joy-filled, broken-but-blessed blink-of-an-eye journey....

every year our family makes a summer bucket list, a collection of things we'd like to experience/do/achieve/accomplish during the summer.  we don't always get all of them done, but we usually get through most of them.  some of the items are traditions that we do every year, and some are unique to each year.  and of course our graphic designer wife/mom makes it look super awesome, as a kind of family memoir.  here are some from previous years: but this year i felt kind of weird about sharing it.  i mean, my news feed is full of stories of kids being stowed in enclosures made of metal fencing (not cages, we are told); kids who have been ripped from their parents' arms.  children who probably don't have a summer bucket list, or if they do it just says, "get back to my parents," or "escape."  i cannot fathom a more fundamentally blunt symbol of our own privilege and blessing: that we will engage in a summer of camps and cream soda, ...

happy mother's day from the milinovich boys.  we recognize that mothers day isn't always a joyful day for everyone, but for us, we have to say that we are blessed with wonderful examples of motherhood in the boys' motherr, grandparents, aunts, and church moms.  in order to celebrate all that incredible love and nurturing, we've been making an annual mothers day video for 10 years now! here you can see our 10th installment, a tribute to moms everywhere, and especially our mom, using bob marley's "three little birds," as a way of saying that mom always seems to make everything alright, even when things are broken or overwhelming.  we hope you enjoy! below you can see all our other videos, in reverse order (amazing how much these kids keep growing!). here was last years, a superhero kind of tribute: in 2016 we were moving and preparing to make a new home: in 2015 we were celebrating the way mom nurtures and feeds us: 2014's i...

"to my valentine, 2018"  mixed media collage (vintage papers, acrylic paint, glue, marker, on bookboard) february, 2018 gregory a. milinovich valentine's day was kind of tricky this year, since i spent the entire day at the church.  it was ash wednesday, so it was tough for me to make it a day of celebration with my valentine, given that i spent most of the day touching other people's foreheads, reminding them that they will all die.  super romantic. still, i continued a yearly tradition of making a collage as an expression of my love for my bride.  this was the 11th consecutive year for this, and since it was ash wednesday this year, i was thinking quite a bit about brokenness.  and it is true that over 18 and a half years of marriage, we've both had to deal with our share of brokenness: words we shouldn't have said, poor decisions, pride, and more.  to quote someone more terse than i: love hurts.  but to quote someone more loquaciou...

happy halloween from the milinovichs!  our jack-o-lanterns are a puking face (cade), a skeleton jail (me), a traditional smile (jack), a scary welcome (shannon) and a wizard making a potion (quin). 

this mad scientist turns six years old today.  he is a laugh-a-minute, dancing, quotable little Quinton, who alternately keeps us young and gives us gray hair.  he likes to cuddle, wear costumes, and dance dance dance.  the other day i watched him dancing to a piece of classical music and he was whispering to himself "focus...focus."  when he was done i asked him, "why were you saying 'focus' to yourself while you were dancing?"  his response?  with a childlike sincerity: "i didn't want to do anything the music didn't tell me to do."   here's wishing for many years of following the music, and dancing through life with focus, laughter, and joy.   happy birthday, Quin!