Author: dawnhirn

Grief

“good grief”

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Grief isn’t something you ‘go through and get over.’  It’s been seventeen years since we lost Ryan, and believe me, the process has been far from good.

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People spend thousands of dollars on therapy and grief counseling, and will probably continue to do so. If you are looking for ‘drive-thru therapy’ you will never find it. Grief is an ongoing process.   Google has helped us all save a bit of our money with some quick tips on ‘coping with grief and loss:’

  1. Face your feelings.
  2. Express your feelings in a tangible or creative way.
  3. Look after your physical health.
  4. Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel.
  5. Don’t tell yourself how you should feel.
  6. Plan ahead for grief triggers.

Tuesday was Ryan’s birthday. I keep telling myself ‘time heals all wounds’ – stuff like that, knowing I am breaking Google’s Tip Number 5.   “Getting over it” is just not something I am prepared to do. Ever!   This is not a circumstance; it’s my child.  If you have lost someone you love, you understand.

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But there is something to be said about Google Tip Number 6: “Plan ahead for grief ‘triggers’.”  October is always difficult for Ron and me, as we are drawn more closely to Ryan’s birth and death.  The same pain, confusion and unanswered questions play back in our heads.

 

We have worked through Tips 1 and 3- ‘facing our feelings and looking after our physical health.’  But we have found strength in Google Tip Number 2: “Express your feelings in a tangible or creative way,” which provides for us a landing place – a vision!   By reaching out to others who have been hurt by loss, we have found a small piece of purpose.

Having all suffered burns and spent time working with severely burned children, through burn camps, we have established the Ryan Shines Burn Foundation www.ryanshines.com that reaches out to help the families of other burn victims as they try to get past their physical and mental pain.  We have visited with those around the world who have faced horrendous loss and with tender encouragement we have shown them our scars, our personal physical reminder of healing.

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“Good Grief” sums up Charlie Brown’s attention to life’s details. Otherwise it defines an ongoing process.   Our memories of you, Ryan, grow even more dear as the years pass by.

sweet ryan

Love,

mom

Adventure with Engagement AWE · Parenting

Hot Water

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This week our family has been without hot water, which gives us each a new reply to the question:  “Who ya gonna call?”    Funny, how an older home can provide so many challenging opportunities!  Adventure With Engagement?  The only engagement we have had this week is an exchange of yelps during cold water shower blasts.

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Since we returned from our world adventure, we have gone soft.  We walk into a bathroom fully expecting an elevated potty ,  a shower with warm water, soap and a towel to dry off.   We expected the ‘unexpected’ when we traveled.  Hot water and a porcelain toilet are rare commodities where we visited.  But, we didn’t go for the luxuries.  Would have cut the Adventure part in half!

 

Ron and I had done this before.  The practically-expired camper we purchased in Germany,  didn’t have hot water.  Ever.  So we never expected it.  But in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, we fully expect the hot water to eventually come pouring out to grace our bodies with warmth.  Last week we wasted a lot of water waiting for the cold water in the shower to turn hot.  It never did.

We are raising soft kids.  I recognize this because my parents raised me.  I expect certain things as a given in a home.  Happiness in life involves flexibility — adapting to difficult situations.  Two suggestions:

  1. Travel to a third-world country at least once in your life so you and your family can see how lucky you are to have the luxury of fresh, warm or cold water at the turn of a knob, electricity at the flip of a switch and gasoline at the crank of a pump.  Softies expect everything to work.  Toughen up!

2. When you lose power or hot water, don’t gripe and complain too long, it makes you           look soft.  Remember how good we have it here in the U.S.A…

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Have a good weekend!

Dawn

Adventure with Engagement AWE · Family

Slogan

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Advertisers coined the word:  ‘slogan.’  But I believe every family needs one. In my world,  we all share the same dream, one or two status cars, designer-titled jobs, at least one super-fancy roof over our head, and kids known by their grades, sports ability or talents.   None of this calls attention to the direction we are going.   We need a slogan.

A slogan is different than a nickname;  it’s a motivator, a call to action, a direction, an intent.  Nobody else can give you a slogan.  Those of you who have been hurt by birth or life should always remember this! It’s never about looks or circumstances.  it’s about intention.

Before kids, Ron and I loved to travel and we weren’t willing to save those words for job applications in the place marked:  Hobbies.    We agreed- you can never truly tell people you love about doing something unless you actually do It!  A slogan should be a motivator or a call to action or accountability.  We chose AWE – Adventure With Engagement.

Early in our relationship, Ron and I bought a junky old VW camper in Germany, and set out  for a year of adventure to see places we had never seen and to meet the people in the world!    We were working the AWE, but we knew it would be even better when we added our first sons Ryan and Tyler, and eventually Trenton and Colton to the adventure.    When we lost Ryan, we shelved our dream for awhile.  But true dreams can never be completely retired.  We realized that an adventure is most grand when it includes strangers whose background and life-stories were different than ours.  We heal by sharing each other’s stories of surviving life’s hard knocks.

AWE is the recipe for our family cake.  Each one of us brings a different element to the mixing bowl.  Sometimes the heat of the oven is intense, but we know it will all turn out well.  The frosting on that cake is composed of the hours and days we spend with each other.

Your family cake may be perfectly baked, beautifully frosted and have a flawless presentation.    But unless you reach out an include new places and new people, you may never experience the joy of ‘sprinkles.’

Find a slogan.  And before you adopt it, think long and hard!images.jpeg

Dawn

Encouragement · Travel

Odd Ducks

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Someone once said to me:  “Never criticize someone whose sin is different than your own.”  HEAVY!

We left for our world adventure as Catholics, and came back as Catholics.  But our tolerance for others  and their religions increased as we met them because we realized, we were meeting people, not products.

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When the Hirn family went to meet other people whose world we shared – in China, Thailand, Bosnia, Dubai, Cambodia, Vietnam, Japan, Africa, and beyond — we were the ‘odd ducks’!  The  strange round-eyed, translucent skinned family of five approached life ‘different’.  For goodness sake, we entered the Forbidden City passing a football back and forth, with no intention of being irreverent, but every intention of sticking together by keeping our eyes on each other.   We didn’t need to draw any extra attention to ourselves.  But if we could have translated Mandarin, we would have understood them to whisper:  “Here come mom and dad touring (off-season when they should have been working!)  with their three sons (THREE!!) who should have been in school.  It didn’t compute.

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We were somewhat of an oddity.

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In America, perhaps we would stare at strangers or walk away with a bit of discomfort because of their mannerisms, religion or dress.  But here we were embraced.  The odd ducks were fodder for paparazzi photos.  And everywhere we went, we were snapped, joined for selfies and, in general, treated like rock stars.

 

Those strangers turned friends who practiced Shintoism,  Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Judiasm, and Muslim religions had been kind and loving to the odd duck American Catholic family from the beginning.

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When you travel, remember your backpack.  But even more importantly, check your countenance:   Countenance is the expression on your face that reflects the condition of your heart.  Embrace the odd ducks!

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Have a great week!

Dawn

Adventure with Engagement AWE · Family

Being Goofy

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Since school kicked back up, everyone is in “serious stress” mode.  For the guys, it’s another grade, another challenge.  For Ron and I, it’s squeezing two pounds of sand into a one-ounce hourglass!

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The other night, we found ourselves ‘in between’ the frenzy of homework and extra-curricular events.  You could feel the pressure floating in the air (sort of an oppressive color of burgundy/black) and I recognized it was time for us to ‘lighten up’.   More accurately, the Hirn Fam needed to spend some time ‘being Goofy.’    Sounds like a fairly simple directive, but nobody easily drops into ‘being goofy-mode’ on command.   Tyler had already moved on from homework and had dug his tendrils into his Play Station’s ‘Destiny’ and Trenton and Colton were just anxious to escape and find their own fun.

 

“Game night,” I declared.  And for the thousandth time they looked at their mom as only a disgusted man/child can.  It was easy getting the two younger guys interested in a game of Euchre, which for those of you who don’t know, is a trick-taking card game using standard playing cards.  With a bit of coaxing, Colton dragged his teenaged brother into some friendly competition.  Colton knew he could beat Tyler, and Tyler finally took the bait.

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The beauty of this game is that it is fast!  There is no dress code or gaming table.  We slung the deck of cards on the bed,  each of us grabbed a space, and for forty-five minutes we played hard. Nobody tried being Goofy – it just happened.

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Never be in too much hurry to let each family member run off to  ‘wind down’ electronically after their hard work has finished.    Encourage a good game of cards, or Farkle or Scrabble.  Recruit!   The laughs you take away are well worth the sarcastic eye-rolls you get at first.   And game playing is one of the purest forms of AWE, with heavy emphasis on the Engagement part.    All of us need an audience when we are  being Goofy!

Dawn

Adventure with Engagement AWE

Selfies

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Selfies help us establish how we looked particular time in our lives.  Like statues, we say:  “Here’s how I looked”.  But selfies rarely say:  “This is where I was”.   Can you define yourself by a selfie?  Certainly a  ‘duckface’, or ‘kissie-face’, or a close up of “me-being-dangerous-adventurous-and-humorous”, doesn’t tell the whole story.

When we took our family adventure around the world, we hired a videographer to capture the experience, and by ‘experience’ I mean the moments nobody else might consider capturing.   We each had  cell phones (no service)  to capture moments, but rarely had the time or frankly the inclination to set up selfies.   Our trip’s intention was Adventure With Engagement and each photo was designed around environment or interaction.  That quest doesn’t make us special – but it takes a certain amount of bravery to face the camera in unbrushed grins with dumpling juice on our coats.  We came to learn, to meet others whose cultures and beliefs were different from ours.  And underneath all the differences, we found similarities of heart with these strangers.    You cannot capture that in a selfie!

Next time you take a photo of yourself, consider your circumstances – your surroundings, and those who share your space.  Grab a ‘selfie-stick’ and stand back.  Choose that awkward moment of engagement rather than the “I-look-pretty-great-in-this-one” shot.

Selfies are generally two-dimensional.  But you need to capture the moments that preceded or surrounded your inclination to channel your inner Zoolander!

If you don’t remember where you’ve been, how can you appreciate where you are going?

Celebrate your differences!  Tuesday,I’ll address ‘beliefs’.  Someone much more intelligent than I once pointed out:  “Your beliefs don’t make you a better person.  Your behavior does”.

Dawn

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Adventure with Engagement AWE

Selfies

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“Whether it’s the duckface smirk or the coyly suggestive close-up, selfies are a mainstay of Twitter and Instagram and have parents and psychologists wringing their hands over what they ‘mean’.”   Time.com

I’ll bet psychologists are having an easier time diagnosing “narcissistic tendencies” these days, by simply plugging into a patient’s social media.

I’m not saying everyone who posts a selfie is a narcissist; we all have done it.  But I am saying if you post a photo of your best look every day of life, my power of prediction says you are likely to get the Social Media ‘unfriend’ boot.

We’ve all got to realize, the Selfie we take today is quite probably our last best Selfie.  By tomorrow at this time (24-hours later) scientists tell us we will have lost one-million skin cells.   Sounds dreadful!

We all love seeing photos of each other. But up-close and personal gets stale after awhile.   I enjoy a good steak from time to time; but every day is too much!  We need to see ourselves beyond our sweet smiles, smirks,  puckered lips, and muscles, to include a bit of what is around us.

Our family calls it AWE – Adventure With Engagement.  Without the ‘Engagement’ part, it’s just AW . . . . . . and repetitive performance tends to become pitiful.

Capture yourself in the cloud by adding other people to your selfie, showing your geographical location, your activities, or other forms of your dimension expression.  Perhaps we could start a revolution to rename Selfies into something more inclusive:  like Groupies!  Oh, never mind.  Tyler tells me that one is already taken.

buzz.jpgHave a good weekend!

Dawn

Grief

Dear Weakness, let’s break up!

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I don’t know who decided to refer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as 9/11.  But I get it.  That day changed everything for our nation.  We face airports, travel, neighbors, unidentified parcels, and each other differently than we did September 10, 2001.

And we especially wondered how families of those who were in the towers, first responders and those who had loved ones in the airplanes turned missiles, had the courage and strength to move forward.  Shortly after that tragedy, Ron and I lost our son Ryan in a tragic accident.  I’ll never forget that terrible day, as the date we completely lost our strength and courage.  I was certain I wouldn’t and couldn’t make it through.

But in the time that has passed I have looked back to give credit for my strength:  it is certainly the unfailing love of my husband, the support  of my family and friends, and the gift of my sons.  But the source of my strength is God. God is in control, which was a hard fact to swallow when my Ryan was taken.  But God has and is mending this family. And He certainly understood how it felt to lose a son.

Like 9/11, we lost our Ryan in the ashes, our tower of innocence and life, our purpose for living. But out of the ashes came our faith, building a solid family with the addition of Ryan’s brothers who are our hope for the future.

The World does not have the answers to everything. When Ryan died,  I was confronted with what happens on the other side, after this life on earth. There had to be more to this life than what we experience on earth. Is Ryan in heaven? If there is a heaven and he’s there, I need to believe,  or I won’t see him again. And when I was confronted with this human experience, this death of a loved one, I knew there would come a day when I met God.  What would I say to Him? The day before Ryan died, he had asked his teacher specifically what happens when you die?   He knew he was going to be with the Lord. Jesus has prepared a way into eternity for me too. But what to do for the rest of my life was hard for me to see.

I may never understand the ‘why’ of it.  But I do understand, now more than ever, I’m in a position of being testament to God’s work. I was spared in the fire to tell a story of sorrow, faith, hope and restoration.   And I will do that for others.  And in the meantime I want to know how to to make Jesus real for me today, not in a religious way but a relational way.  I want to open the door to have a relationship with Jesus, as I explore my faith.

After all, He’s the keeper of my Treasure!

Dawn

Family · Travel

Cuttin’ back

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People don’t like the idea of cuttin’ back.  We’re Americans.  We’re spenders!  If you gather the family together and tell them you are about to start a new program which would require everyone to spend less money and save more, you would definitely hear some disheartening groans.

But if you plop a nice family goal down on the table, attitudes quickly can change:

“Ok kids, here’s the scoop.  If we cut back on Pizza Delivery, Apps and other technology, movies, fast food, and eating out in general, we will be able to afford (get ready for your beefed up presentation)   . . . . . eight nights and seven days in glorious Dubai!”  Here’s where you slip in the posters of million dollar automobiles.  Then hold up a photo of Ski Dubai at the Mall of Emirates featuring a 60 metre high indoor mountain slope, and a 400-metre long ski run.  Hold up the next photo of the Dubai Autodrome  Go-cart Track, and simply ask: “Are you up for this?  How about a floating restaurant, or Wild Wadi Water Theme Park, one of the most advanced water parks in the world, or the beaches, the desert safaris and scuba diving, zoos . . . . .”

Now, readdress the corner-cutting ideas: Crank out the concept of Family Movie Night, featuring Hulu or Netflix, catered by your favorite frozen pizza.

Game night also works here and popcorn is a cheap stretch.  Mom’s and dads, invest in a good Yeti cup, and perk your own brew.  Ditch the plastic water bottles by filling up your Tervis, and buy snacks in bulk.  Costco is a good friend.

Cutting back almost always requires extra work. Consider the family dinner: You can have an excellent family dinner at a restaurant, but it won’t be cheap.  You can have a fast family dinner at a drive-thru and it may be cheap, but it won’t be excellent.  Or you can take your time, planning and preparing and cook your family dinner.  You will make it excellent and economical, but it won’t be fast.    Your choice:  a little extra time preparing dinner each night and Dubai 2017?   Or eating your way through your funds, leaving you with a ‘stay-cation’?  Just askin’.

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Talk soon!  Dawn

Encouragement · Family · Travel

The Party’s Over

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“So,  what did you do this summer?”   How many times have you answered this question in the past two weeks? Yes,  the summer of 2016 is a thing-of-the-past, never to be repeated.  You made some great memories, but it’s time to begin planning again!  If you think it’s too early, ask yourself:  “Am I looking out the windshield of adventure or the rearview mirror?”

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You’ve got another vacation coming up in a little less than a year.  And beginning to plan for it now is not a moment too soon.

“We parents have but a handful of chances to create meaningful vacation memories for our kids, thanks to our crazy schedules and the ever-narrowing window when our kids will actually want to travel with us.”  Money, March 2016, Jonathan Adolph

ON YOUR MARK, GET SET, PLAN!  Get everyone involved.    Chances are better for you if you induct your entire family into vacation planning.  There are no bad ideas. Don’t put down anybody’s suggestion, but instead weigh the pros and cons of each family member’s choice.   Investigate!   Percolate excitement by showing photos, videos, whatever you can find to stimulate interest.    You should know by now there is no such thing as looking ‘too far into the future.’

It cost how much?   If you are choking on that thought, you’ve started looking in the wrong places.  Check out “shoulder season.”  This is travel jargon for “deep discounts in off-seasons rates.”  Choose quality days over quantity.  A four-day family adventure off-season often beats seven-days of beach chaos and clutter in-season.  The Norwegians say: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing!”  Think ahead.   Plan.  Check out special savings on GroupOn and Living Social, and sign up for email notifications from Kayak, Airfarewatchdog.com and TravelZoo.

Start saving.  Again, it’s never too early.  Mark a big jar Vacation Fund 2017 and ‘filler up!”  Build drama and anticipation!  Praise family participation, sacrifices and contributions.

Let’s talk Friday about “How to Cut Corners.”  I’ve got some great ideas!

Dawn