The World is Still Spinning Here

I have been absent for nearly 2 weeks, so this morning when I saw that some of you still stopped by the pocket, I felt quite humbled. I fully intended to do a travel post after our trip to the mountains of NC in July, but when we got back the green beans were producing and they just wouldn’t stop! We finally pulled them out this week, just because. There is a later crop coming and the boys are already so excited about picking them every other day. Not.

Also when we got home, we dove into school. The first week we cleaned and organized and bought our supplies. This is the first year ever that we were ready to go before the Back to School sales hit! Some of our eagerness was due to having finished early in May and the children were actually bored with swimming and picking beans and making stuff. Or maybe it was me who was tired of keeping the flock reasonably occupied and the house decently ordered. I was ready for more of a schedule, especially since we plan to take time off this fall. I have purposed in my heart that I will never again attempt to do school and peaches or school and tomato sauce or school and pumpkins on the same day. That is just ignorant. But I am also not ready to throw in the towel on home-preserved foods, therefore we are tucking in some extra school days now.

Well… here we are again, 4 days later. I need to do this post and move on. Summer time is not optimal blogging time. There are just so many flowers to pick and raspberries to eat and porches to sit on whenever all the other stuff has been attended to. The last thing that happens is writing. But I do have some photos to share from July.

I am not good at capturing the moments, like my scrapbooking friends who take pictures purposefully with an album layout in mind. For me it goes like this: “Oh, I should take a picture! Where is the camera? Hey, everybody, hold that right there while I run to the vehicle to scrounge for the camera in the bowels of my purse.” Usually by the time I get back on scene the spontaneity has gone and my boys have evaporated. They really, really dislike posing. So does my husband. 😀

Here we have cousin fun. All these girls are my girl’s cousins and did she have fun. There are four NC girl cousins more that are not even in the photo.

This is my little brother giving the children thrills on July 4. There was a constant scream of hilarity wafting out of that little cart.

And my big brother holding the wee-est baby girl. Aren’t they cute?

Like I mentioned, my photos are quite inadequate to detail the great time we spent with siblings in NC, and I completely forgot to fish my camera out of my purse when we stopped for an afternoon and a night at P.D. and Leeny’s place enroute to the the coast. I guess I was too busy catching up and watching our children become acquainted, not to mention eating so much fabulous produce from their garden.

We crossed the 13 mile (or more) Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the Eastern Shore peninsula and meandered through the countryside to Chincoteague. All of my life I have loved the story of the Phantom and Misty, and here we were in wild pony beach territory. (So were a few other people. 🙂 )

The days were hazy, but the water was great. We had a lot of fun fishing for crabs with chicken necks for bait. I may have warned them a time or three about being careless about the edge of the walkways.

Out of all the takers, only 2 crabs were big enough to keep. We steamed them with Old Bay Seasoning in our motel room and extracted the minuscule bits of meat for tastes all around.

The little girls were in hunter-gatherer heaven, picking up bucketfuls of little crabs and shell bits while the boys were happy jumping the waves. I wished they would have found Gabe’s prescription sunglasses washed ashore, but no such luck. We had walked pretty far up the beach, way past the crowded areas to a spot where we were mostly on our own. To our astonishment, friends from home who live only 4 miles from us came walking along in the sand looking for a spot of their own. 🙂 Small world.

The ponies are smart and elusive, staying out in the marshes, far away from the roads. Just before we left for home I convinced Gabe that it is some sort of crime to leave without at least going to look at the rescued ponies in a paddock where they are quite tame from being fed handfuls of corn from a vending machine. It was a bit of a let down, but the children thought it was neat.

I gathered the troops for a group photo on the morning we started home. I thought it would be such a happy feeling, you know, all lovey and “we had such a good time”. Snicker. Here is what we came away with. In their defense, the sun was a little bright and they hadn’t had much breakfast and it was time to go home and wash the sand out of all the crevices.

I will treasure these pictures always.

Dresser Remake

The finish on the boys’ dressers was very thin and easily sanded off. I made them take extra time to clear out all traces of the aforementioned carving.

We loved the green color and almost decided just to leave it with that, but then we couldn’t have messed with the white paint and plaster of Paris.

I wanted you to see how ~~I look with a cheesy grin and my eyes shut~~ nondescript this dresser really was.

The plaster of paris in the paint made an incredibly hard surface. I had sanded it once, then applied a second coat with just plain paint. It took a lot of pressure to get the white sanded down to show bits of green. This is the step you do not ever want to attempt without a power sander.

We stained the tops in ebony and then we strayed from the tutorial and used polyurethane instead of the wax they recommended (because we had it on hand and it worked fine).

I am ridiculously pleased with our end result, probably largely because of our panicky moments yesterday. Last night I went to bed consoling myself that often painting projects look much better when they are dry. Sure enough, this morning things had taken a turn for the better. I have a really hard time being random when I do something artsy and I think the greenish spots reflect me being studiously random. I should have let Gabe do that, because he is much more skilled with this sort of thing. It bugs me a little, but not enough to do them over.

Who is gonna write on these dressers?

“Not us!”

Who Ate All the Cookies?

Once, a long time ago, some little boys unwisely carved their names on their dressers. Admittedly, the dressers were of unpretentious build and an indifferent color described “maple” in the stamp on the back. This did not excuse the small boys from needing to rectify their wrongdoing. Someday, their mother said, they would have to sand them and refinish them.

A few years rolled by until the mother deemed them big enough to start the process of refurbishing their furnishings. She instructed them to empty their drawers, haul all the pieces outside into the brightness of a gorgeous day. The boys were delighted to wield screwdrivers and a power sander, removing hardware and orange-brown finish with great zeal.

There was this really neat tutorial online for a dresser project that looked very similar to what they wanted their end result to be. Step by step they followed, painting their drawers and dresser bases a beautiful oceany green. That was the point where they ran out of supplies and besides it was lunchtime and everybody was hungry.

The smallest boy got dispatched to the kitchen to make pancakes and fried eggs for the crew while his mother finished up the trim work and wrapped up the brushes.

They decided to do a quick run to town for the missing supplies, dropping off the little sisters at Grandma’s house for a few hours. There was the aisle of Back-to-School stuff, all stocked and not crowded, so they meandered along and picked up their supplies for that as well. Small boys are concerned about their mechanical pencils, especially when confronted with a dozen varieties, but the decisions were carefully made and they returned home to continue the dresser project.

Enroute they had passed a stand with sweet corn for sale, just great for supper. The smallest boy once more got sent off to husk corn and prepare the kitchen for supper. His style of painting was a bit too flourishing for the top coats, his mother decided privately. He might as well do something that he can do well. Besides, stain is a different animal entirely from washable latex paint, as she explained repeatedly to the interested noses poking around while the staining process was going on. “You cannot be needy right now,” she said to the little girl who was whining about not having had her story yet. “And go get me that piece of cardboard in the school room, please.” The little girl countered with, “Why aren’t we allowed to be needy but you are?… Okay, I am going!”

It was getting late, time to cook the corn. The father of the family called to say that he would be working four hours longer than scheduled, so they decided right then that supper would be corn and applesauce only. Who needs protein anyway? The little boy made the supper just like he had made the lunch, surprisingly competent. Then he cleaned it up while his mother and older sibling returned to their project.

The dresser remake only lacked one more step before it could be left to dry overnight. Very cautiously they mixed the paint with plaster of paris, just like the tutorial said. It seemed odd, but they really wanted their end product to look like the photos of the one online. There was a moment of panic when the mother stirred the plaster of paris into a half gallon of paint. Her older son looked at her in sheer disbelief. He knew how fast it sets up and set to stirring vigorously, but it wasn’t being incorporated into the paint quickly enough. The immersion blender, that would do it! It was an inspired idea, but sadly the blender was already on its last spin before it was plunged into a bucket of slurry the consistency of lumpy pudding. It quietly expired before it really did much good, so they were back to stirring. What in the world were they thinking in that tutorial? They wondered this aloud as the two hastily painted on the gloop and spread it with a brush. The plaster was getting stiffer by the minute. This was going to be one hard surface!

By the time the drawer faces were done, they had to spread the paint with a brush dipped in water. It really did seem odd, but they were game to see how it would all turn out. That was when they noticed that they had missed the step of mixing water into the paint mixture. Oh well, tomorrow is another day and they have plenty of sandpaper.

And who did eat all those cookies? I suppose a mother who sends people off to husk corn and clean the living room and go away to play somewhere while she messes around with paints shouldn’t be surprised that there are only crumbs in the jar at the end of the day.

Besides, she knows where she hid the cheesecake.

How Little Boys Pull Weeds

We just got back from a 9 day trip to the mountains of North Carolina and then up the coast. The outdoor chores around here have staked a claim on us all, so I don’t have time to write about our travels, but I thought you might enjoy seeing this sequence from yesterday’s garden work. (Also, I may add that a favorite shirt is a favorite shirt, even long-sleeved in 80 degrees. 🙄 )

Failings and Flapdoodles on a Monday

For starters, those of you who wonder how I ever find time to read should have seen me this morning when I was trying to quickly finish my book before facing the laundry and the 250 feet of peas in the garden. That is how it happens, my dear Rhonda, that an 800 page book eventually gets read.

Anyhow, I was feeling guilty as I scurried into the laundry room to sort out the hampers that Alex had carried down for me. As I turned the corner, I stubbed my toe horribly and yelped with irritation. A close inspection revealed a neatly constructed trip wire running from the edge of the dryer into the boys’ bedroom. Booby traps of all varieties are my little boy’s faulty idea of fun practical jokes lately. Maybe it was the sight of my bleeding, torn toenail, or just maybe it had something to do with the look on my face, but Gregory was instantly penitent. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Mama.” Of course not, but if you ever do that again, son, you will face some very loud music. I stewed and simmered a bit while I was sorting laundry. Maybe I should start a new chapter of M.A.D.D. I thought. You know, Mothers Against Dumb Deeds or something like that.

We have been spending quite a bit of time weeding the various plots around here. There was more than a little grumbling going on, so we pretended that we would starve this coming winter if we didn’t raise a successful garden. It was a fun game for the children and perked them up as they discussed survival strategies. I thought how it is that we cannot really imagine such a plight. Mainly we garden because we enjoy fresh food. By the time we buy all our supplies and the endless array of mulches and sprays and stakes and fences to keep out the deer, I am doubtful that our food is cheaper. If our corn fails because of the wetness of the soil, we are confident that we can buy some. We are daily loaded with benefits and how quickly we forget!

All that to say that we put in our daily weeding hour this forenoon before I picked the peas. I dislike picking them when they are wet and clammy, but then it was hot and I got a horrendous crick in my back. I resolve every year that I will not do this again. There is no more labor intensive vegetable and the yields are discouraging for all that work. And then the next year I go and plant them again because I absolutely love homegrown peas. You don’t need to pity me. I know what I am asking for when I order the seeds. It is a yearly lapse into irrationality. 🙄

About half way through the picking, I noticed that my littlest girl was missing and decided I should check on her. It is always better if she stays very close to Mama, and normally she does this on her own, chattering and breathing my air in her desire to be right where I am. I stepped into the living room and yelped for the second time in the day. There was a quart of bright red cherries scattered across the carpet with very deliberate footprints stomping through them and out the door. …Deep breath. Stay calm and deal with this M.A.D.D.ness in a constructive way… We had a little session where she admitted freely that she knew she was being naughty. Then we picked up the cherries and cleaned the carpet and that was that. All in a day’s work.

I do wonder though, what I ever did that my children think up these crazy ways to “be creative and explore their world” as the child development books say. What weird impulse made my child paint an enormous black smiley on the outside basement wall? I mean, it wasn’t like he thought he could hide it. I have a cousin who sweetly says that her children never seemed to do these sorts of things and I wonder what is wrong with mine in those times. I think it must be the mixture of trace amounts of Indian blood with quite a lot of old Adam. If you never have M.A.D.D. moments with your children, just please don’t tell me so that I will still like you.

I do need to say that the day ended well with us sitting on the deck shelling peas and brainstorming scenarios in which Gregory invented labor saving pea shellers and weed pickers, etc. etc. I laughed so hard I had tears rolling down my cheeks and all was just fine. I like living in my own personal comic strip.

Island of the World

Last year I saw this book recommendation on Tis a Gift to Receive. I checked all the local libraries, but none seem to have heard of Michael O’Brien, so… I bought Island of the World for a Christmas present for myself. 🙂

I told you I have a book review that is the polar opposite of The Hunger Games, but I will also quickly tell you that this is not light reading or suitable for early teens. In fact, it is probably the heaviest book I have read in a long time, quite literally, since it has over 800 pages, but it is also heavy emotionally. I couldn’t shake the story, although I could only bear to read a few pages some days. I don’t want to spoil the story for you, so I will only give a brief sketch of the events in the story that is actually set over the course of a lifetime.

The book is set in the Balkans with the main character being a boy, Josip Lasta, who is the son of a school teacher in a remote mountain village. The family, as well as the entire village, is rich in simple faith. Josip survives the horrifying purge of his village, stumbling in a grief-stricken daze to war-torn Sarajevo where his aunt lives. As he grows older, he is haunted by the cruelty and bloodshed all around him as the communists take over the country. Eventually there is the promise of a career as a mathematics professor, even though he has never joined the party. There is the love of a beautiful girl, a happy marriage, a child on the way, and then there is the awful concentration camp after he is reported to be a counter revolutionary. There is so much hatred, betrayal, and senseless destruction in Josip’s world.

As I read, my western sensibilities of fairness kept insisting that surely soon everything would get better and be happy. Surely Josip cannot live under these crushing evils. Doesn’t he deserve to be happy? As the book continues to track his lifelong journey of forgiveness and his relentless faith that “God always has the final word”, I became smaller and smaller in my own human reasoning. I marveled at the redemption that seeped out of the brokenness of his life in nearly forty years as a humble janitor, a displaced person, a refugee in the foreign land of America.

“Seldom have I encountered the few who are awake, who cast their gaze to the real foundations, which, as human beings should know, are above.” -Josip Lasta, as he approaches the end of his life.

This is not typical historical fiction. There is a thread of purity woven throughout the very human struggles of a man living through the awfullest of times. I have wanted to write this review for a long time, but found myself floundering for words. When I was reading Hunger Games, I kept thinking of this book, another tale of revolution, war, heartbreak. The contrast between a soul impoverished with vindictiveness and a soul flourishing through forgiveness was so startling that I will never forget it.

You will not regret buying this one!

Wildflower Bouquets and Mint Tea

I don’t seem to post very much these days because I haven’t written anything other than grocery lists and the odd quick bits on Facebook. Some of this is due to the fact that we have bitten off an enormous project on our property, fencing a plot and preparing it for productivity. This included hosting a work night with a bunch of ambitious young friends who persevered with setting posts and stretching wire in drenching rain. It also entailed hauling a dump truck load of compost from the barnyard of our friend, the horse farmer, and spreading it all by hand. Gabriel has started four rows, each 25 feet long, of raspberries and blackberries. Next was a large plot of asparagus, which you may know, is quite a production. Asparagus has to be planted in rich soil, 18 inches deep, so we dug these massive trenches and made the rootlets comfy. They are coming up thin little pencils, very happy with their bed. Just last week we managed to get the rest of the garden planted, corn and squash and melons. It is nice to have all the space to plant stuff that we never had room for in my kitchen garden which is close to the house.

In this process, I hauled straw for mulching and a load of 5 scoops of mushroom mulch, which I personally unloaded by scoop shovel, thank-you-very-much. Since we replaced our mini van and our truck with the Suburban and a trailer, there was nothing for it but to learn to back a trailer if I don’t want to wait helplessly until Gabe has a day off work to do all the hauling that needs to be done. When I went for the straw, I chickened out and let the farm girl back the trailer into the barn. Then I came home and practiced for a while, down around the curves, backing into and out of the fenced garden. I didn’t hit anything, but I am not telling how many times I had to pull forward to straighten out a potential jackknife. Still, I am getting better! It is an empowering feeling, not unlike the time I finally pulled off a perfect parallel park for the first time. 🙂

We took two days to camp at the local State Park. With the weather so perfect, who can resist? I packed up the stuff and the kids while Gabe was at work… bikes and gear on the trailer once more. It was a little like trying to keep a clear head and not forget anything while surrounded by five very excited, very vocal crickets. We decided not to go the tent route this time. The cabin rentals were on a first-come-first-served basis and I was a bit nervous. What would I do with my happy load of people and stuff if we got there and there were no cabins available anymore? We got to the campground at lunchtime, fortunately found a nice secluded area where I had no observers while I backed that trailer into the trees. After I tucked the littlest crickets into bunks for their naps, I sat in a chair by the fire that the boys had built by using an inordinate amount of charcoal starter because we forgot paper. I just sat. And I thought about how last winter we fantasized about all the camping we want to do this summer. I looked up through the lacy caps of the trees and swatted mosquitoes and was happy. Gabe couldn’t get off work until nearly seven that night, but the cabin made it really easy to set up camp.

We had friends from church join us for the second day. Swimming, boating, fishing, biking, just wearing ourselves out in general, doing the cooking the hard way and all that. 🙂 Is it even fun? I ask myself that when I am clearing away the aftermath, washing smoky clothes endlessly, and dealing with all the over-tired grouchiness. All I have to do is ask the children, and yes, it is fun!

There was a 5K on our last day at the park, racing around the lake on the trail. One of Gabe’s friends from work lost a baby to SIDS and the run was to benefit SIDS research. The boys and I registered to walk, although we ran some of the way. Alex came in 2nd of all the walkers. Greg and I dragged along a bit more, coming in 21st and 22nd. There was a lot more competition among the runners. I can’t remember exactly what Gabe’s spot was, but it wasn’t too shabby considering that he hadn’t practiced much and there were a lot of thirty-somethings runners.

The next day was a picnic for the EMS personnel in the area and the day after that was our Rita-girlie’s 5th birthday. It crept up on me when I was otherwise occupied and I had not gotten a present or made the traditional special dress. I knew I would not have time to go shopping after our camping jaunt, but I did take a few hours to walk through a community yard sale. I found a lovely dress and new shoes for her and I prayed for something special yet, not having any idea what I was looking for. I am more prone to shop for birthday gifts on Amazon than at yard sales. Then I saw the vast collection of Boyd’s bears, all new and just the sort of thing that would delight Rita. I got her a lady bear with a velvet dress and a hooded cloak. She has named her Mrs. Teaberry and thanks us repeatedly for her beautiful present. 🙂 She wanted a flower cake and insisted on blue petals with a yellow middle. We didn’t eat it for over a day, so it darkened to a shocking blue and she just giggled with glee. Here she is with her special dress.

This was followed by three days with out-of-state cousins amidst picnics and cookouts and fishing and Old Bedford Village. Gabe had 40 hours of work in those three days… I have been just trying to keep breathing and doing laundry here, but the kids would say we have been really living!

No Winners Allowed

I just finished reading The Hunger Games trilogy, that pop fiction series that is being aggressively marketed to young adults, made into movies, spawning fan clubs and Facebook sites. Before I critique any further, I will say that Suzanne Collins can write. Her style is engaging and fast paced, just what is required to sell books to the young.

The story is set in some post-apocolyptic time where North America has imploded, devastated by a civil war against its Capitol. It is now comprised of 12 outlying districts and the Capitol, which is the seat of power. To discourage any further uprising, the Capitol keeps the districts in poverty and isolation with fences around each one. Every year the districts are required to have a reaping, where one boy and girl are picked to participate in the Hunger Games in an arena set up by the Capitol. There can only be one victor, therefore all participants in the games need to learn to survive by killing ruthlessly. The games are televised to all districts, with the most likely survivor being the one who can get people to like him, thus receiving gifts in the arena. The author does a masterful job of making one like the main character, Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers to take her sister’s place at the reaping. She starts out nobly in the games, protecting the weaker children, forming alliances with kindly intent.

You want her to live, but you start to realize that all the other kids will have to die for that to happen. It is, quite literally, kill or be killed. She pretends to fall in love with the boy from her district as a strategic measure to arouse sympathy from viewers of the games, thus receiving pricey donations in the arena that make the difference between life and death. She does manage to survive and insists on saving the boy from her district, strong-arming the designers of the games with the threat of suicide if they do not allow him to live.

This event catapults one into the second book of the series where Katniss is touring the district as the much-pampered winner, along with her “boyfriend”. They keep meeting the families of the other slain children, some of whom Katniss herself eliminated. Guilt and confusion set in. Maybe survival of the fittest wasn’t the right way to go. Someone is responsible for these actions. There has to be someone to hate, someone higher up who needs to be eliminated. Katniss herself is blacklisted by the Capitol because of her act of defiance at the end of the games. The Capitol fears her ability to incite revolution, and decides to use only former victors of the games for the reaping of the next games. Of course, this takes her back into the arena with people she has come to know and care about. Once more she is required to kill or be killed. They all hate the Capitol, the president, the game makers. Katniss hates herself and this no-win situation. There is no way out. She has decided to try to save Peeta, the boy she pretended to love in the first games, as an act of atonement for using him. Just as she thinks she has figured out a way to do this, there is a tremendous disruption in the arena and she is airlifted by hovercraft to a district that she didn’t know existed.

Book 3 is her experiences in District 13, the underground district with nuclear weapons. It describes her coercion into being the face that inspires a raging revolution, her decision to kill the president and end this madness. She is just a shell of a person, consumed by hatred, propelled by one desire to get revenge. She sacrifices everything for this goal, with an ever growing wake of destruction behind her as her friends die defending her and her enemies fall in front of her. She emerges, victorious, alive! The Capitol is overthrown. The last scene in the book is of her children, dancing happily on the meadow that has grown over the mass graves of the victims of war.

I know my take on the books is quite different from the reviews that call them “phenomenal” or “brilliant” or “compelling”. I think the primary adjective should be “disturbing”. This is our foremost, best-selling literature for young people, this mess of absolutely no way out. It is hopeless. No matter how much the characters wish there were a way to live without killing, they feel that there is no choice. In fact, it is all for the greater good, this awful morass of death and destruction.

What would have happened if the mentors would have instructed the kids in the games to refuse to kill, to band together as brothers, to love instead of hate? What if the Capitol would have been disarmed by a people who refused to rise to the bait? What if returning evil for evil is not the best way to bring change in a society?

It disturbs me that this mindless do-whatever-it-takes to survive is being touted to our children as the only way to live. There is a constant dilemma of what is absolute (you shouldn’t kill) versus what makes sense (you should stay alive) and in nearly every case what makes sense hurts other people. Right does not seem to be relevant. The books are a sad overview of a society with a sagging framework of morality. There are no absolutes; it is each person looking out for his own interests in the end, with only a few fringe characters who care about other people. It is chaos.

The author is at least honest enough to describe the desolation in the soul of a person who steps on top of others to stay alive. She does not have any solutions to the problem of a shattered spirit and divided soul except the passing of time. Katniss and Peeta simply have to live with their gnawing regrets. There is no redemption other than having children who don’t have to face the same impossible odds. In fact, they are not really winners at all. I am terribly saddened when I reflect that this is, indeed, the way many post-modern people view life.

I am one of those annoying fundamentalists that believes what Jesus taught is to be taken literally. I know that I live it imperfectly, but I am willing to stake my life on it that His is the better way: the way of suffering love, the path of forgiveness, the eternal perspective of winning by losing. I don’t want to live my life on the premise that there is no higher way than to live for myself, that the only way to save my life is to keep it! I am not buying that load of empty nonsense and I am certainly not going to feed it to my 7th grader.

Another day I will do a review on a book that is the polar opposite of this one. 🙂

Of Dirty Socks, Rock Collections, and Jawbones

I wink at my boys’ room cleaning efforts, ordinarily. Every Thursday they hit the basement with the vacuum cleaner and the broom. If the surface is fairly serene upon inspection, I tell them it passes. But once every couple months I dig in there with them. It is at those times that I wonder whether small boys are not a different species altogether. We clean out from under the bed, the dressers and the bookshelves. We wash surfaces instead of dusting them. 😉

We find stuff: nuts and bolts, tools, notebooks with secret codes, old shell casings, worn-out steak knives for throwing, cards from friends who sign their names Your Buddy. We find Legos, scores of them gone AWOL, but there they are under the pile of shoes in the closet or behind the nightstand. Today I found a stash of clean hankies (so that is where they went) and wash cloths in the boys’ sock bin. And my missing tan sock. And some little girl garments as well. There were the four purple buttons that I had put carefully in my sewing cabinet just last week. Swiping under the bed with my arm, I hit against a sticky blob, Greg’s ant trap gone bad. Ewww. Terro on a corn chip, with no ants in sight. There were stacks of books, all of which they are currently reading, of course. I totally understand that, but really, we have shelves. I was quite ruthless with the trash can and they only protested mildly. That stack of counterfeit money they have been working on? Trash can. The cat jaw bone with teeth intact? YUCK. Trash. The socks with holes in the toes, being saved for some obscure future project? Trash. Sorry, boys, but we are beating back chaos here.

I love my boys and their boy-ness. I have no objection to their treasures and collections. They replaced the cute curtain I had made for their room with a dark piece of plaid fabric and I let them. Their walls are decorated entirely with original artwork tacked in no particular pattern and I do not mind. But I do remember my 10 year old self thinking boys are kind of gross, and now I know why. At that age they are. We are at the stage where they would happily live in the same clothes, day and night, all week with nary a bath or hair wash in the entire time. I have been assured that this will rapidly switch to a constant buying of Old Spice, a continual battle with too many towels in the hamper, and many lectures on conserving water. Isn’t life so interesting? 🙂

If cleanliness is next to godliness, my mother-in-law is a saint. I get to live with a man who was taught neatness and impeccable grooming, and I do appreciate it. I have asked her how she did it… teach her six boys to be thoughtful of the housewife, to think about their shoes, to fix beds without wrinkles, to run vacuum cleaners and fold laundry when necessary. She sighs and says I married the careful one and she is still working on the ones at home, but I have observed them all and none of them are slobs. 🙂 Mainly she says she just tried to teach them faithfully. What else is there for any of us to do? I have a theory that they became careful because they were required to help with the housework.

For the sake of my sons’ future wives, I will maintain my post faithfully too. “I really like when my room is organized,” Alex said today, “only it is so hard to keep it that way.” That seems to be the trick, doesn’t it? Not so long ago they insisted that they like it better messy. At least we have gotten past that point.

What do you think? Is this a matter of personality or training?

Teacher’s Left the Monkeys Out…

I have been scrambling to find creative channels for all the energy running around here now that the books are done for the term. The new books came before we were quite finished, but we hustled them off to storage. This year instead of allowing myself to sink lethargically for a week after those last lessons were done, I decided to be super productive and repaint our bedroom. It was a good time to do it, since Gabe had a five day stretch off work. It is feast or famine in this line of work. :O

I spent my birthday painting trim in our room. It was fun, although careful painting always leaves me muttering after a few too many hours of strained concentration. But that day I didn’t cook because my friend Ellen paid for our pizza supper. Wasn’t that the kindest thing anyone could have done? We ate on the dock down by the pond… Meat lover’s with stuffed crust for the small people and roasted veggie with parmesan for Gabe and me. The boys had gone out earlier and picked huge bunches of wildflowers and forsythias to put in jars down there so that it would be festive. They even stripped a bunch of blossoms to float on the water. 🙂

Gabe and I took off the entire next day, with my blessed parents doing babysitter duty. It was a spectacular May day. We loaded our bikes on the back of the Suburban, but the first business was picking out a carpet piece for our room. Then we went to a tea room and had teeny cookies and tall glasses of iced tea. The vehicle needed a top-up at the lube place and then we thought we should have some protein before biking, so it was convenient to grab some roast beef sandwiches.

We rode 16 miles of Rails to Trails. It is hard to describe the joy for this Quality Time/Outdoors Lover. There were violets blooming so thickly along the trail that you could actually smell them as you breezed past. The redbuds were in their heyday and all the birds were happy. Let’s just say Gabe hit on the perfect birthday gift, the two of us tooling along, stopping occasionally to look at the river, to eat Toblerone, to pick flowers, and maybe to rest our legs. 😉 Even with the stops, we got to the end in two hours. The end of the trail was quite close to Gabe’s sister’s house, so they picked us up, sparing us a 16 mile return trip. Chipper as we may think we are, those bike seats can come to feel a bit “gnarly” as Gabe so aptly described it.

We had supper with my sister-in-law Ruby and her husband, lingering long over dessert before we headed home. It was just a delightful day all round, and my mom and dad were exhausted instead of us. 🙂

The next day we finished painting the bedroom and replaced the carpet. Thirteen years ago we painted our bedroom a pale grey. It needed freshened, but I wanted to keep it grey since that lends itself to any other accent color. When I went to pick out paint, I bought Reflection for three walls and- wait for it- Earl Grey for the accent wall. 🙂 🙂 I suppose it could just as well be called Iron Filings, in which case I would not have bought it. (Please don’t tell me I am the only one who is swayed by the names on the paint sample chips.) I love the end result! We have teal and orange throw pillows and a glittery new curtain, but all the rest is same old, rearranged. (Oh, and I am in the process of gluing hundreds of muslin “flowers” on the lamp shade, but I ran out of glue.) That night as I cleaned up the brushes and paints, my friend Michelle stopped in with two gorgeous boxes of cupcakes. Or that could be two boxes of gorgeous cupcakes. Either way, it was so sweet. You can see why I cannot ever be really cynical. I know too many nice people.

As for the children’s activities those painting days… I think they pretty much ran loose in the outdoors and hung around wherever Gabe was working. One project we started them on is blazing a switch back trail up to the top of the ridge. Every time we want to go on a walk in the woods, I end up hauling a chunky child or two straight up the side of the ridge and carrying them back down when we come home because the grade is so precipitous that they just slide. We don’t go on as many expeditions as we would like because of this fact. So now they have a trail up half way and the little tots can climb up easily on their own. Until the trail stops, of course. One of these days they will manage to get it all the way to the top. I think they are starting to catch on that this is busywork. Gregory said today, “This could become sort of a chore.” And Alex thought that the trail could require a lot of maintenance. Tee-hee.

Oh, and it is So Hot already. Please, please, please, may we go swimming? The first time I finally caved and let them go into the water it was still April. They lasted about 20 seconds. I thought, good, now they won’t beg for a long time. But it really has been warm lately, so they have been puddling around in life jackets around the dock. I just sit and watch. It is a little muddy yet for my taste.

Alex has graduated to driving our little tractor slowly along in our garden/orchard plot, stopping every now and then to pick up the piles of rocks the children gather. Some days they do that in the space left vacant by math. 🙂 We are building a fence around it before we do planting, hopefully rabbit-groundhog-deer-proof fence.

This morning we zoned little garden plots for the three middles. Alex has plans for popcorn and gourds later in the season and Addy is sharing my garden. 🙂 It was so funny how different they felt about what they wanted to grow. Rita was all enthused about veggies: broccoli, peas, beans, lettuce. Olivia wanted lots of flowers. Gregory has a mixture of flowers, ornamental corn and one melon plant that we hope doesn’t get frost bitten. In the end he deigned to plant some lettuce for my sake.

The boys started a little cottage industry of making cross bows out of craft sticks, hot glue and rubber bands. They ended up with about 10 orders from friends and just like that a thousand craft sticks and the new pack of glue sticks was gone. Also most of my bamboo skewers became arrows. They are learning things, like paying for supplies and being kind to nonpaying customers. And I found out exactly how far one can get on a lampshade project with one glue stick.

We are about to enter a period of feast-time, with Gabe finishing up a seven day stretch of work tonight with an entire long weekend off. Oh, glory! And a church picnic to boot!

Tell me, how are you occupying the busy little people who are done with school?