Today a possum waddled (strolled?) right up to our literal back door.  I watched him.

He was disgusting.

But his absolute grossness did not stop me from making a science lesson out of the poor rodent look-alike.

I’ll spare you the photo since you might be reading this early in the morning  – but if you’re desperate to see it you can visit his unique horribleness on Facebook I suppose.  (I didn’t spare the photo there, I’m sorry to say.)

Also.  The photo revealed how weirdly odd my back “porch” area is.  Why are there two empty old glass bottles you may ask?  Oh – that’s because the kids found those glass bottles in the woods and they insist that those bottles are not, in fact, trash, but are – instead – treasures.  The shells by the side of the glass bottles and the uh – playing dead – Virginia opossum?  Oh – those are shells from our beach trip so many months ago that we just “have to save”.

Our lawn is precisely the reason why I don’t think we can ever live in a neighborhood, people.

We need to be a back woods family.  It’s true.

A lawn that no one notices and no one can see from the road.  An invisibility cloak.  That’s what our lawn needs.  And our house.  Maybe our entire lives.  (Do Life Invisibility Cloaks exist?)

It is constantly riddled with blankets from picnics and the tricycles we outgrew years ago.  A giant Jenga set that we really should store out of the weather and two beaten down soccer goals and a myriad of wooden swords and giant sticks masquerading as wooden swords and whatever the cat drug in last night – and the cat that drug whatever it was in.

We’re a mess.  

 

 

But today the kids played “Adventurer, Princess & Prince” with their friends and we read the next to last chapter of Stuart Little together.  We ate three meals at our messy kitchen table.  (Although one meal was all ready to go until I realized that the chicken I was planning to prepare had been put in the freezer instead of the fridge and that was an unfortunate situation but we over emphasized the veggies and rice and were all just fine.)  I also saw my son walk out of the house with a plan and an ax, whilst wearing a coonskin cap.  And – I was forced to say sentences such as, “Listen, don’t swing a pipe with poop on the end at your brother, for the love.”  To which I added the super cool parent addendum of, “Also, listen – please don’t ever do anything that makes me say a sentence that includes the words poop on a pipe again.”

After we sat at our table and drew pictures of possums into our nature journals and read a few paragraphs about said possums, I quizzed the kids to see what they recalled.  I rewarded their recollections with marshmallows and chocolate chips that hannaH had left at our house before she left the country last week.

And so by the end of this rambling post you know that our yard is a wreck, possums are weird (Did you know their babies are born the size of a bee?  Marshmallows for you if you did!), there’s a pipe lying somewhere in our yard with poop on it, I forgot to ever find out what outdoor activity required a hatchet today and – side note – our kitchen table is still scattered with notebooks and colored pencils.

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