the unlikely orange

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....

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!

who's ten years old?  this guy!  this tasmanian devil-like bundle of energy and movement and activity. he will be trying to throw a ball over the house one minute, sweeping the garage while wearing roller blades the next, and then wrapping his arms around you in a solid embrace the next.  he is physical.  he is a collector (of anything he can get his hands on...sports cards, presidential antiques, key chains, circuit boards, etc.).  he is athletic.  and he is now ten! happy birthday to the only one of my children who's punctured his soft palate, scored 7 goals in one soccer game, wants to go to antique stores and yard sales, and watches sports with me!

today is labor day, the official end of summer, and so i find myself reflecting today on the summer of 2016.  as different as this summer was, we still did our annual tradition of making a summer bucket list, which i wrote about here , back in july.  shannon designed the bucket list with a patriotic theme, knowing that we would be vacationing in washington dc this summer: and as awesome as that week in dc was, it certainly wasn't the major event of our summer.  no, without question, the mark of summer 2016 for the milinovich's was moving.  everything was either leading up to the move (putting all of our possessions in cardboard boxes) or resulting from the move (unpacking all of aforementioned boxes). but we woke up the first day after moving out of our home for the last 6 years, a place that had become home to us, with great friends at a great church, and this is how that first morning greeted us: and somehow, we knew everything was going to be ju...

  this little ninja turned 5 years old today, and it marks an anniversary of five years of exuberance, vibrancy, and belly laughs.  this kid has a galaxy-sized imagination, and the heart of an entertainer.  he is constantly singing and dancing, telling jokes and doing impressions and making us double over with laughter.  he loves an audience, and since we are his primary one, he seems to enjoy us, at least as long as we give him attention.  he likes us less when we talk to one another, or look in a different direction, but he gets over it.  to be sure, it is a five years that we can't imagine any other way, than loving and laughing and living so abundantly because of him.  we love you, Quinton.  happy 5th birthday!   his lego ninjago cake i think he likes it. 

happy birthday to my crazy angel-haired son, who turns 9 today.  he's a soccer-loving, football card-collecting, harry potter-reading, goal-scoring, blue-eyed, delight.  he brings us such joy, and we hope he feels just how much we love him, on this day and every day!

i'm 40 now.  i've lived and walked and slept and played and sat and generally wandered about in wonder on this great earth for 40 years now.  i don't feel any older, of course, since getting older happens almost imperceptibly, incrementally, but just the number itself - 40 - feels substantial.  there is a heaviness to it.  a heavy roundness, like a giant teardrop, plump with weight, about to let loose from its grip. but if i am crying at all about being 40, it isn't for sadness or aging.  it is for joy.  utter and total joy. last wednesday was my birthday, but the celebration of my birth started before wednesday and went on afterwards.  i started with a party at my sister's house, with my parents and my sisters and their husbands, and all my nieces and nephew there.   we had pie and presents, and it was great to be with my family.  then, on my actual birthday, since we had a lenten supper and service at the church, the church had a ...

just thought i'd share some shots from our january 2016, which included jackson's eleventh birthday, as well as some serious playing in the snow.  every moment is a new adventure, and there is no camera that can capture them all, nor any other way to lock each one away in memory.  still, we try to be present to as many of them as possible, and cherish them fully.  here are some highlights...

how in the world did this happen? our first born son has turned eleven!?! i don't know how you measure out eleven years in any kind of way that makes sense to me, but i know that it has been given to us in laughter and tears, in blessings too great to count and too profound to fully grasp, and in deep, life-giving joy.  this little boy is all-too-quickly growing up, and while i lament the stages and phases that are gone, i sit on the edge of my seat with anticipation about the days ahead for jackson and for us together.  but on this day, between the past and the future, we celebrate this human being, our precious son.  happy birthday, my dear boy.

happy 93rd birthday, vasko popa.  you would be 93 today, but you never made it to 70. i must confess i had never heard of you until i found you on a list of today's historical birthdays, but i liked the sound of your name as it made me imagine some exotic eastern european soda in a glass bottle, drunk in small glasses over ice on hot slavic days.  so i looked you up, and found you were a yugoslavian, like my ancestors, even though you came from what is now serbia, so maybe our ancestors might not have gotten along real well.  still, i'd like to think we could have overcome those differences over a glass of cold cola, which i would raise in your honor for your birthday.  i would tell you that i just read some of your poems this morning, and the one called "in the village of my ancestors" really spoke to me.  it reminded me of a good methodist hymn i have sung many times whose title is really a question, "and are we yet alive?"  and of course this is an u...

this weekend our little caedmon turned eight years old.  our family tradition is to have a bigger birthday party for their eighth birthday party, and you may remember jackson's a couple of years ago.  normally, we just have family parties, but when they turn eight they get to invite their whole class from school and we go all out with a theme.  some may say that we go "over the top," which may indeed be the croatian meaning of "milinovich," but we can't be sure.  regardless, like any pole-vaulter worth their salt will tell you, there's only one way to go, and that's over the top. cade wanted a narnia theme, so we worked hard to make the entrance to the church basement the wardrobe door, which, when opened, revealed a rack of coats and furs.  Once you passed through the coats, you came to a group of evergreen trees, in a snowy white room, punctuated proudly by a beautifully handmade lamppost, which actually lit up!  many thanks to shannon...

wait...what?   ten?   seriously?  i feel like i just wrote these words .  turns out that was five years ago.   half his life  ago.  how the flippin' flip did that happen? however the wide and wild world of science and time want to explain it away, the truth is that it happened.  somehow, our oldest son has been beating out his own heartbeat in this crazy world for ten full years.  the last week and a half have been more or less dedicated to celebrating the insane reality of that with grandparents and cakes and presents and special meals and phone calls from singing aunts, uncles and cousins, just to name some of the festivities.  it's been fun. and it's all been for jack.  our budding little artist, who loves sketching so much that he wanted his mother to make him a sketchbook birthday cake, which she artfully obliged, as you can see below. i love birthdays for lots of reasons, but primary among them is that they give yo...

happy birthday to my beloved...the girl of my dreams....my companion and sojourner.  the best in me is always you.

holy happy birthday, batman! last week we celebrated the third birthday of our own little caped crusader, and it was a festive occasion! even though no one seems to believe it, i did indeed make and decorate the batman cake he wanted, and it turned out okay, if imperfect.  but he didn't notice....he loved it! but probably not as much as he enjoyed the gift portion of the festivities, which included several lego items, much to his delight. he is a blessed boy, of course, but he is also a tremendous blessing, not only to his mommy and daddy, but to his brothers, as well.  we are so fortunate.  he keeps us laughing, guessing, dancing, and tickling him as much as we can.  like any three year old, he can be a stubborn child, trying on his own new ideas and testing out the boundaries and the consequences for crossing them, but even those tries and tests have a certain amount of joy connected to them.  he is just fully alive, freshly so, and cont...

our little baby, our round little man who has thinned out and become quite the little comedian, turns three years old today.  born just before midnight on the 25th of july, to the sweet sounds of grieg's "peer gynt," he was instantly loved and adored, not just by shannon and i, but by his older brothers, too.  it is stunning to think that it's been three years already, but the calendar swears its not lying about it, so we are making a batman cake and blowing out the candles and singing robustly to our young and hilarious little man.  we love you, Quinton, and are so proud of you!

hello there, tim white.  on this day in 1954, you were born in cumberland, rhode island.  i assume that it was sometime later that you got involved in the exciting and entertaining world of professional wrestling as a referee, although i'm certain that if it would have helped ratings to have two babies wrestling a "death match" in a pack-n-play, vince mcmahon would have done it in a heartbeat.  you could have refereed it.  but i digress. at some point you became a referee in the wwf/wwe, which i assume means that you helped crush fake blood capsules and did everything you could to make the action look as fake as possible.  on the other hand, you claim to have undergone 9 different surgeries for injuries sustained while reffing in your 16-year career, including the injury that ended your career: the final three count in the "hell in a cell" match between chris jericho and christian in 2004.  you must have really pounded the ground emphatically.  i ...