A Week at Waupoos

Summers at Waupoos are full of activity. Cottagers begin to arrive after 3pm on Monday afternoon and our first group gathering happens for orientation in the lodge at 7pm. Monday is usually a quiet evening, as everyone gets settled into their cottages. Every weekday morning begins with chapel time at 9:30, followed by coffee and muffins in the lodge. On Tuesdays, the staff is introduced at 10am, since they are not present for orientation on Monday evenings. Usually everyone then heads to the pool. The rest of the morning is spent swimming, playing in the park, riding bikes, etc. On Tuesday afternoon, our staff take the cottagers around the property to meet the animals. We have chickens, turkeys, rabbits, two sheep, four ducks, and a Vietnamese potbelly pig named Wilbur (whose belly could probably hold two or three pots).

The pool is open again in the afternoon, but there are also other activities planned by the host family. So far our activities have included outdoor games, crafts, painting, baking, science experiments, and improv. The host families are doing a great job coming up with fun and creative things for the kids to do.

Making ice cream

Every evening has its own activity. On Tuesdays, we go on a wagon ride through the back acreage. On Wednesdays, we play soccer, and on Thursdays, we showcase our talents at the traditional Waupoos Talent Night. This is usually one of the highlights of my week. This past Thursday, Liam performed twice: first he did the actions to a song he had learned at Vacation Bible School that week, and then at the end of the show, he actually took the microphone and sang along to another VBS song. I’ve watched the video clip a thousand times. I’m just so proud of my little guy!

This week’s talent show also included a hilarious dance to What Does the Fox Say, some skits, piano playing, singing, and Sofia doing spins and twirls!

Friday night the host family plans an activity, which is often a movie and popcorn in the lodge. Saturday is our open house, beginning in the afternoon. There’s another wagon ride at 3pm, Mass at 4:30pm, and then a potluck meal at 6pm. Potlucks are bustling, joyful occasions, especially with a full house, as we had last week. We celebrated four birthdays at the farm last week, two of which were on Saturday, so the potluck was crowned with two thickly-iced birthday cakes. The kids were in heaven! There’s usually a bonfire on Saturday evening, where many of us linger until past our bedtimes.

Some shots of the birthday festivities:

As I mentioned last week, we gather with all the cottagers on Sunday morning to share our highlights of the week. Then Matias reminds everyone that there are two places to clean at Waupoos: outside and inside. The kids are sent outside to pick up bikes and toys while the adults finish packing up. Everyone is usually on their way home by noon. The resident families have a weekly meeting in the afternoon and the rest of the day is free to spend however we like. Last week we enjoyed a nice visit with the Baker’s on Sunday evening.

Monday morning the staff prepare the cottages and grounds for a new group of cottagers. Sabrina, Lee-Ann, and I meet with the farm’s administrator to go over the upcoming week and any other relevant business, and then the whole thing starts again! We’re on week 5 of 8 now, so halfway through. The days are flying by – I guess that’s what happens when there’s always something going on! My house is a perpetual disaster, due mostly to the fact that we’re in it just long enough to make messes and leave. But I’d rather spend the summer days outside than slavishly putting wooden train tracks back in their bins.

Last week I had the privilege of sharing a meal with two cottager families. On Wednesday night, I stopped to chat with one of the cottagers while he was barbecuing and he graciously invited the boys and me to join his family for dinner (Brendan was away for work all week, so he didn’t get to partake). I went home to get some things to contribute to the meal and as I was walking back, a girl from the next cottage over discovered that we were eating with another family. “Can you eat with us tomorrow?” she asked enthusiastically. On both nights, the families shared their stories with me. I was moved by their resilience in the face of adversity and by their openness with me. I’m glad to know that people feel safe here and that this place offers opportunities to connect – to bridge the gap of isolation in some small way. When I feel burdened, it’s comforting to know that I’m not alone. Even if we can’t always identify with the suffering of others, letting them know that we see it is a gesture of compassion that can make the pain more bearable. At least it has for me, in times of struggle. I feel that’s part of my role here: to see the suffering of others and stand by them in it. Not to offer advice or solutions, but just to stand by them, in the brief time they spend here, and let them know that they are seen.

Another one of my highlights last week was that one little boy told the group on Sunday morning that his highlight was playing with Liam, James, and Callum. What a way to fill a mama’s heart!

Highlights

Every Sunday morning in the summer, we gather with the cottagers in the lodge to share our highlights of the week. Our first experience of highlights was at Easter, when we were here as the host family (the host family is responsible for running activities over the course of the vacation week or weekend, helping with set up and clean up, and being a welcoming presence to cottagers). That weekend, one of the cottagers shared that his highlight was seeing his sons learn to ride bikes for the first time. That highlight made an impact on Brendan. He was struck by this father’s pride in seeing his sons enjoy a quintessential childhood activity – and also by the fact that the boys were 8 and 10, but didn’t have an opportunity to ride bikes until they came to Waupoos.

This week, several kids said that their highlight was everything. I can relate, because it’s hard to pick just one favourite thing to share about a week here. Every day has its highlights, and it seems the more we practice looking for them, the more readily we find them everywhere, in everything. This is not to say that there aren’t challenges to be faced here too. My challenges this week involved wrestling with post-move exhaustion and learning to navigate the push and pull of wanting to be both outside with the community and inside working at making our new house a home. I realized this week that this feeling of being pulled in many directions will probably be my constant companion here at the farm. There are always jobs to do and people to serve, and they are all in addition to living out my primary vocation, which is to look after my family. As I was making the boys lunch one day, feeling guilty for all the time I had spent inside that morning, it occurred to me that I was still engaged in ministry. I was serving my children, fulfilling the duty of the moment. Being here at Waupoos doesn’t make my children need me any less, nor does it make their needs any less important. My first call is still to care for them, even if other needs beckon. Living here will demand that I balance serving inside and outside and I’m sure there will be many times when I feel torn and frustrated and inadequate. I did this week. But with challenges come blessings, and the blessing in feeling torn and frustrated and inadequate is that it can make us more aware of our need for God. I can’t walk this tightrope on my own. I need the hand of God to hold me up. He can turn my frantic wobbling into a graceful dance, if I lean on him.

I was also reminded this week that God called me here knowing my woundedness. He doesn’t call us to serve only when we’re perfect and whole and have overcome all our weaknesses. He calls us in the midst of our struggles; he asks us to have the courage to give ourselves to him and to others, even in our frailty. The fact is, we are all wounded soldiers. None of us are impervious to struggle. If we waited until we were perfect to do something with our lives, we would never do anything. Not being perfect is particularly infuriating for a perfectionist. But what is perfectionism anyway? Is it not only the misguided belief that no matter what I do, it will somehow not be good enough? Good enough for what? For whom? By whose standards? Ultimately, only God’s standards really matter. Clearly, he doesn’t disqualify us from service because of our imperfection. And through our suffering and our struggles, he makes us holy. If we let him.

One of my highlights this week was a conversation I had on this topic. At open house on Saturday, I spoke to a woman who has a baby at CHEO. The baby is a twin – her sixth child. He has a heart condition and has been in the hospital for four months, which is his entire life so far. Every time I see this woman I am moved by her courage in the face of suffering. Yesterday she said to me that she had prayed for her family to be holy, and that God was answering her prayers. Suffering makes us holy, she said. It makes us pray, it makes us depend on God, it reminds us that heaven is our ultimate destination. This is not just pious sentiment. These are the words of a woman who has struggled and wept and had her heart broken again and again. This is real faith: to be convinced that God is drawing us closer to himself through our suffering.

Earlier today, I had another conversation that moved me deeply. One of this week’s cottagers poured her heart out to Sabrina, Lee-Ann, and me this morning. Her life has been full of suffering and she’s in a particularly difficult situation right now. She feels broken and alone. We listened to her and prayed with her. Afterwards she said, “I’m smiling now. I couldn’t smile when I came in.” Our time together wasn’t the answer to her troubles, but God used it to give her hope. And hope can have such power, even in the darkest of circumstances. There is so much darkness in the lives of some of the people who come here – it can be tempting to despair and wonder why God allows them to be hurt so deeply. But we can’t lose hope. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” (Jn 1:5) And as my friend reminded me yesterday, God can make us holy through suffering.

These were some of my highlights this week.

And then, of course, there were the boys:

Decorating cupcakes...

...and eating them!

Wagon ride

James didn't want to ride in the back!

Craft time

Wishing he could do crafts too!

Ball hockey

Hanging out with Chubs

Waupoos Week 2

Last week was our first week at the farm, but Week 2 of summer vacations at Waupoos. Here are some shots of the boys living it up! More of my photos have been shared on the Waupoos Family Farm facebook page, so head over there and check them out - and give us a like while you're at it!

Painting in the lodge 

There's always a soccer game on Wednesdays at 6:30. Loving the shorts on Liam!

First sparkler!

The new Farm Management Team: Steve & Sabrina Bethune, Matias & Lee-Ann Garcia, and us!

Checking out some bugs at the bugs and reptiles show on Thursday morning

 

Building catapults

Playing Chubby Bunny at the Thursday Night Talent Show (a weekly event)

James' talent: looking adorable

Liam displaying his paintings at the talent show (thanks Auntie Liz for helping him create these!)

Brendan wrote a song for the occasion. James was his biggest fan!

Mythbusters experiment: Will Coke take the stains out of a rag? (No, but it will shine the heck out of a penny!)

Improv night: I think this was some version of The 3 Little Pigs

James and Hope taking Farmer Steve for a ride

Our New Home

Here we are, at the beginning of a new adventure. Brendan, Liam, James, Callum, and I are now the new resident family at Waupoos Family Farm. As at the outset of any good adventure, I feel a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. I have a feeling that the next few years are going to shape us in ways we could not have imagined.

Waupoos Family Farm is a vacation place for low-income families in the Ottawa area. It was founded by an Oblate priest, Fr. Fred Magee, and has been operating as a place of respite for families in need for over 35 years. Located near the Ottawa airport, the farm sits on 200 acres of land. Five cottages are available for modest rent during the summer and on long-weekends throughout the year. Three families live at the farm year-round to maintain the grounds, look after the animals, and facilitate programming.

I first visited Waupoos in June of 2013. Lee-Ann, one of the residents, had invited the St. Mary’s moms group to spend a morning at the farm, so I came out with Liam and James. It was a beautiful day and life on the farm seemed idyllic. I was captivated. I spoke to Brendan about it later in the month, on a night out to celebrate our anniversary. Over pizza, I told him about the farm, about what I had learned from Lee-Ann about life as a resident, and about the way the place tugged on my heart while I was there. He was very receptive and agreed to keep an open mind about the possibility of one day moving our family to Waupoos.

In January, shortly after Callum was born, I learned that the farm was looking for a new resident family for the spring. With a newborn in my arms, I didn’t think much about applying to fill the vacancy. In fact, I didn’t even mention it to Brendan until one day he announced that he thought we should leave Quebec. He was nervous about election talk and worried that if the current government was re-elected with a majority, it would be harder for us to sell our house at a profit in a few years. So acute was his concern that when I told him Waupoos might be an option, he immediately suggested that I inquire about the application process. The election ended up being a non-issue, but by the time it was all said and done, we had already submitted our application and had become quite attached to the idea of living at Waupoos. As we actively discerned the move to Waupoos, it became clear that escaping a potential separatist government could not be the only motivation for such a dramatic change of course for us! Through much prayer and discussion, we discovered that we both felt called to the place for reasons that surpassed our family’s current circumstances. We wanted to serve our community as a family. We wanted to put our faith into action in a concrete way. We wanted to live in community with other like-minded families. We wanted our kids to have the experience of growing up with the freedom to run around and to interact with kids of different backgrounds. We wanted to take a risk, to step off the beaten path and embrace a new adventure.

We submitted our application knowing that if it was not God’s will for us to live at Waupoos, we wouldn’t be selected. There were a few obstacles along the way which had us questioning what the outcome would be, but on April 27^th, on the evening of my 31^st birthday, we got a phone call from the other residents with an invitation to join them. We were ecstatic.

My music lessons were not scheduled to end until June, so we delayed our move until then. We left our house in Aylmer on June 28^th (we’re currently renting it out) and spent the following week travelling back and forth from my parents’ place to the farm. Brendan had undertaken some renovations in our new house and we wanted to get the place as settled as possible before moving our boys in.

Our first night here was July 7^th, week 2 of summer vacations at Waupoos. Summer is the high season here, and a busy time to move in. It’s also the best time to be at Waupoos. Our first week here has been confirmation that we are where we’re meant to be. Liam and James haven’t missed a beat – they are completely at home here, running themselves ragged during the day and falling into bed exhausted at night. I’ve had the privilege of being trusted with many personal stories – stories that have broken my heart and fanned my desire to give as much of myself as I can to this place. So many times last week I asked God what could be done to ease the burdens of these people, and every time I was reminded that Waupoos is an oasis for them. They come here needing rest, acceptance, community, and they find it. One mom told me that her 8-year-old could be herself here: “She doesn’t have to pretend to be happy. Here she really is happy.”  

So our adventure continues. We have don’t know what lies ahead for us here, but we are eager to discover it. The move was challenging but as we begin to get settled, we’re aware that all the effort to relocate is more that paid off in the enriching experience of living and serving here.

A new group of cottagers arrived today. Week 3 has officially begun!