Walking In the Mist

It's that time of year again.

The finishing season. Finishing school. Finishing sports and ballet and art. We're finishing. We've got end-of-grade testing and tournaments. Recitals and gallery shows. We are anxious to finish. Anxious for summer. For a break.

But finishing is hard and busy work. The week is planned to the minute. So of course, in that typical life way, the van needed a tire replaced. I don't have time to replace tires. I don't have time for a blow-out either. (Changing tires is one of the things I'll add to the list of things to learn to do on my own, later. I don't have time right now.) But a nice man at church pointed out that the white showing through the tires was a sure sign of an impending blow-out. So I begrudgingly took the car to the mechanic and, of course, it was going to take all morning. I did everything I could from home. Then I started pacing. I'm not in a good spot in life for pacing. If I pace I start to think about how I want to be with my sister to comfort her in a hard time. Or I go to the angry or sad place of my current lonely, life-altering predicament. Pacing is no good, not only for my mind but also because I have so many errands to run to help with the finishing.

Just as I was getting good and worked up, it started misting. I love mist. I stopped to watch as it drizzled slowly down the windows. That's when the mechanic called to say the van was ready. For a minute, I contemplating calling a friend for a ride. Then I grabbed my purse and left. I walked. I walked in the mist until I was soaked through and the pacing had melted away. It was gray and cool, and I'm sure I looked a bit crazy. But it was so wonderfully perfect.

Now I can finish the finishing with a properly fitted vehicle. And a properly misted soul.

Strawberries For Jam

Three berry

Four berry
Hayberry
Strawberry

Finger and pawberry
My berry, your berry

Strawberry ponies
Strawberry lambs
Dancing in meadows
Of strawberry Jam

-from Jamberry by Bruce Degen

It's strawberry season! So we took our annual trip to the strawberry patch. Lot's of strawberries were picked. Strawberries for jam. Strawberries for strawberry shortcake. Strawberry milkshakes. Strawberry pie. Strawberries and cream. And just plain, sweet strawberries piled high in a bowl and eaten while hammock swinging in a nice spring breeze.

And The Rest Is A Muddle

Other than the ducks and the fish, and visiting with family, the trip was a muddled bunch of rest and down time.

The kids learned that when you're stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, you have to make your own fun. Like flying down hill in a wagon until you crash into the grass at the bottom. The hills kept getting higher and the crashes harder throughout the week, but they never tired of it. For five days straight they crashed wagons and came home with the bumps to prove it. It was a satisfying, pure kind of fun. The sort of thing only kids could think up.


We also stretched our imaginations. A go-kart was built (to save the wagons, I believe). And, as I mentioned, we came up with hundreds of future children's books about the various careers of ducks.

It wasn't all play. We did a whole lot of resting and snuggling. Mostly snuggling. With that many people crammed into one small cabin, I wouldn't call it a napping house. But it's a good snuggling house. Mom and daughter snuggling. Cousin snuggling. Sister snuggling. And grandma snuggling. All important for a well balanced mental state.


And finally there was a lot of exploring. Exploring nature. Exploring the future town of my sister and brother-in-law. Exploring what grows. Exploring great-grandmas old shed for treasure. Exploring my heart. We all needed to do some exploring. It's good for body, mind, and spirit.

And that was our muddled bit of rest. It was a wonderful break from our normal. And we loved sharing it with people we love and who love us. Thanks for the visit. Thanks for the hospitality. Thanks for the rest.

And Then Came The Ducks

On Tuesday my mom decided to take the kids to the hardware store. They were going to check out the baby chicks and maybe pick up a few more plants for the garden. Apparently somewhere between the chickens and the vegetables they got a little distracted. And then we had what I'm going to call "a grandma moment". You know the kind. It's when your adorable grandchildren think something is cute or awesome, so you buy it without really thinking through the repercussions of the purchase.

And that is how we got ducks.

I was sitting on the porch reading when Chris ran through the door with a box. At first I was sure they had bought chickens. My mom has been talking about getting chickens for awhile now, so a chicken purchase made sense, sort of. I mean she still had no where to put them, but a chicken coop could be built. But instead, he opened the box to reveal two fluffy little ducks. Yes, ducks. There was also no where to put the ducks, and a pond is not so easily built. As my mind is reeling with, "Oh my word, why in the world are there baby ducks in the kitchen", the kids had moved on to playing with the ducks in the kitchen. And my, they were really cute.

So we played with ducks all week. And, with the exception of having to blow-dry one back to life as it's body temperature had plummeted from being put in icy water, it was a fun experience raising ducks for a week. (Yes, I used a blow dryer on a duck. Like I said, this purchase was not really thought through so we didn't have a heating lamp. So I improvised with a blow dryer.) The kids named them Fluffy and Puffy, which I thought was so Beatrice Potter and that of course made me love the ducks even more. The ducks actually became fond of the kids and began jumping from their "pond" into the kid's waiting laps. And luckily for the ducks, a friend with a real pond offered to take them when we left.

All in all, a happy ending. We got to play with ducks and the ducks got a new home. The end.

*A note to the grandma's: Seriously, The End. Thanks for the Beatrice Potter experience. I can now write beautiful children's books about a girl and her duck, a tractor driving duck, and a boat captain duck. But we will only be accepting stuffed ducks of the plush variety in the future.

Mr. Owl!?

"Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop!?

A good question. Let's find out.
A One... A two-HOO... A tha-three..(crunch sound effect)
A Three!
How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
The world may never know."
-1970 Tootsie Pop commercial

Mr. Owl, how many snaps does it take to get a good picture of four kids!? More than three, that's for sure. Try ten or so, plus another person using another camera taking ten or so more at the same time. Then if your lucky you might get one, one I tell you, where they are all looking at the camera, and, if the sun is really shining down on you, they might all be smiling. But we'll call "all looking at the camera" good enough. Because if you stand there too long you have a full blown child mutiny on your hands and they'll threaten to throw both of your cameras in the shark tank. After all, they're already wearing matching outfits for you and sitting calmly on a bench pretending to really like each other, when what they really want to do is spill chocolate ice cream (or pureed carrots) right down the front of those beautiful matching outfits. So good enough is, well, good enough. Luckily, good enough is pretty cute.

And On Friday, The Aquarium

I love aquariums. The darkness and the water. The amazing and unusual creatures. The calm and the excitement of it. The colors are so vivid. I could sit in an aquarium for hours. However, children don't sit anywhere for hours. For them, the most exciting thing in the whole place lies in the next tank. Luckily we had enough slow walking adults to balance out the running kids so that we kept a somewhat leisurely pace and all was seen and enjoyed.

("Yes, yes the jelly fish are cool, but seriously check out my shoes!")

So maybe fast paced excitement is for older children. I guess we all enjoyed the aquarium in our own special way.

More Easter Fun and A Backwards Trip

We have just returned from a week away. It was spring break here, so the four of us loaded up the van, said goodbye to the cat, and headed to Tennessee to visit family and spend some time barefoot on a country road. I think I'll tell you about that trip backwards. The week was full of good stories, waiting to be heard. And backwards seems to be the way my mind wants to tell them. So I'll start with the last thing we did before we piled back into the van and headed home.

I think I want to start here because I'm still in an Easter frame of mind and so it makes since to start with what happened right before Easter, which of course was the egg dying. One of my favorite of all holiday traditions. I love the bright colors and the anticipation of the hunt. As my children have gotten older it has become even more fun. We don't just dip the white eggs in dye anymore, though that's beautiful. Now we tie-dye them, and draw on them, and mix colors to create more colors. It's an artful sort of holiday tradition. And I have to say, I believe this was the loveliest set of Easter eggs we've ever created. It was especially wonderful because we got to do it with a lots of family gathered around to help, including a new cousin who was celebrating her first Easter. And that's what Easter's about. New life, new creation, new loves.