Tag Archives: Love

Family, Home/Life, Our Shetland Sheepdogs

To Be Real — What It Means To Be Loved

Victoria and Kiyomi

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ’You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

Family, Favorite Quotes

To Love is to Be Vulnerable

Together as Family

❝ To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

To love is to be vulnerable.❞

— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Family, Our Shetland Sheepdogs

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

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Kiyomi (12yo), Toshiro (7yo), Sachiko (9wo)

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Family, Holidays, Our Shetland Sheepdogs

Happy Easter!

Together as Family at St. John Neumann (Reston, VA)

Together as Family at St. John Neumann (Reston, VA)

Together as Family at St. John Neumann (Reston, VA)

Kiyomi at St John Neumman (Reston, VA)

HAPPY EASTER!
Happy Easter, from our little family to yours… with love from Ken, Victoria, Kiyomi, Toshirō (and soon baby Sachiko!)

“Man’s fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath, man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

—Ecclesiastes 3:19-21

Family, Home/Life

On this day, 22 years ago… our life began together

Victoria & Ken


22 YEARS TOGETHER

On this day, on October 15th, 1998, Maria Victoria Villa Verdan met Kenneth Balogh Foreman.
Our first date was lunch together at Champps Plaza America in Reston, VA. Vicky was politely eating her lunch and using her napkin to cover her mouth each time she spoke. I thought it was the most polite and delicate thing- a radical departure from the open-mouth gawking and talking of Americans as they devour their food… Vicky later told me that she was embarrassed of her braces, and didn’t want me to see her with food stuck between her braces.
We later joined each other for coffee and a snack at Starbucks in Reston Town Center, and she was puzzled that I wanted to go for a walk with her “Why?! Everything is closed.”
Vicky didn’t realize that I wanted to spend more time with her, and that stores & restaurants closing didn’t mean I wanted our evening to end.