HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
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A Monday Ramble
I’m so glad we haven’t had rain for almost a week. Rain makes me so weary. Piper Finnian has attended her first official rehearsal for her upcoming role as Daughter of Ivy in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. (If you don’t recognize the name of Daughter of Ivy in the famous C.S. Lewis books, don’t feel badly about that. Ivy is a housekeeper in the professor’s home where the four siblings discover the wardrobe. I’m not sure the housekeeper in the novels really had a daughter. I just know this play really has a Piper.) She has her four or five lines memorized and she is daily working…
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Five Minute Friday: Encouragement
I’ve been enjoying the assignment-ness of Five Minute Fridays. It’s like a tiny taste of school for this grown up who actually enjoyed high school. A one word topic is given by fellow writer Lisa-Jo Baker and the challenge is to write for 5 minutes flat – no editing, no over thinking, no backtracking. And the other flip of the coin is to encourage other people to join in. I really think you should try it. Even if it’s only to remind yourself how difficult it can be to write for a mere five minutes. (Especially us mothers who say to our children when they complain of their school work, “Oh…
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The Beautiful Burden of Fatherhood
This is a picture of the weighty privilege of the calling of Fatherhood: Otto Fox Wilder. Four years old. He hears Kevin open the front door. Otto slaps his boots on his size 12 feet and leaps out the front door, literally jumping directly into Kevin’s footsteps. He reaches for his dad’s hand, grins a wild straight-toothed smile and says, “Wherever you going, I going too.”
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The Game of Keigley
I’m certain the idea came from an issue of Family Fun magazine almost ten tears ago. Recently, the kids unearthed a hefty stack of fluorescent index cards wrapped in a rubber band. The Game of Keigley. Taking an idea from the magazine, I had created a game custom-designed for our family about our family. The goal of the game was to have fun learning about family details and testing our knowledge about how life in our home operated. Plus, it had the added bonus of encouraging positive habits, such as turning out the lights and picking up your dirty clothes. The set up is simple. A stack of cards.…
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Family Night
I put a Family Night on our calendar for a recent Sunday. I made a plan. It’s what I do. And here comes Sunday. Late morning breakfast. Steaming oatmeal, coffee for some. Laughter. A few rounds of Bananagrams. Timeline. No one seems to leave the table. The sun rises higher in the sky. We’re wearing pajamas or yesterday’s clothes. The sound track to Fantastic Mr. Fox is playing. The activities around the table shift and evolve, but no one exits. Kevin teaches several enthusiastic learners how to play tabletop basketball. (The kind where you use a quarter and your two hands in the shape of a goal.) Piper is diligently…
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Five Minute Friday: See
When I am reminded that it is Friday, I like to join fellow blogger (and real-life friend of my cousin) in her weekly Five Minute Friday posts. You are assigned a topic and the challenge of writing an impromptu post for only five minutes. –———— See. See? I don’t, in fact. I don’t see the point. The reason. The why behind the facts. And I’m such a fan of the why. Mostly, I’m a little obsessed with it. The understanding. I’ve always wanted the other side before I’ve even started. If there’s a lesson to learn, teach me. If there’s a moral at the end of the fable, I’ll read on.…
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Water. My old friend.
Do you know what I take for granted? Running water. Toilets that can flush. Do you know how I know that I take these every day conveniences for granted? Because when my alarm clock beeped this morning and I said good morning to my husband he responded with – “The pipes are frozen. We don’t have any water.” (Yes. We had left water running all night long to attempt to prevent this very situation.) It was 7 o’clock and the temperature was resting at 9 degrees. (Outside, of course. Inside, it was a pleasant 60 degrees.) Kevin left for an early morning breakfast meeting. I pondered my options. From the…
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pause.
We’re sitting on the kitchen floor. Me. Boy. Puppy. First one crawls into my lap. Then the other. And I know whatever plans I had have just vanished. The boy. White hair grown longer than his collar and every time we’re together my dad reminds me that I should have his hair cut. He’s clinging to his cruddy yellow blanket and patting the puppy. The puppy – he’s brown and shiny and snuggled in for all he’s worth and I can’t stop rubbing his short coat. My legs are itching to stretch and my right foot is asleep. I’ll endure. There’s no way I’m going to be the first one…
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The Years I Know I Will Miss
When I hold a newborn baby I remember infant Hawkeye, miniature Scout, Mosely Elliot, wilde little Fox, petite Piper. I remember them all. But my mind doesn’t stop remembering with the lavender-scented downy heads of our newborns. I can still smell the baby spit-up endlessly residing on my shoulder. The cottage cheese-like crud that built up in the chubby neck folds and reeked of formula on sticky hot July days. I can’t forget the sleeplessness that seemed to settle on my brain like a fog for half a decade. Half. A. Decade. At least, people. At least. And of course I would not trade the first year magical experiences…
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And she’s all new for the new year.
Ta-da! These last two weeks it’s been silent here on the blog. Primarily because it was the holidays and I wanted to hang out with my family and not with my screen. And partly because I had a few blog tricks up my sleeve and I wanted them all to be accomplished before I started writing again. And here they are. My kind and generous husband lent his creative skill to my page here and has helped me spruce up the look a lot. I’m quite pleased. I’m anxious to get back to a regular routine – of both writing and standard wake up times and meals and such. It…
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next ….
New and exciting changes for this blog are just around the corner. Wait for it ……….
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the overflow
For her birthday Mosely wanted to have two friends over to spend the night. The next day the girls played all day without arguments or fussing. They graciously included younger siblings in all their games. Together they cycled through playing with the new paper dolls to playing house to pretending to be kings and queens to Legos to playing school to stuffed animals to the little critters that live in their doll house. I was downstairs baking cookies when I thought I heard singing. Stopping at the foot of the stairs so I wouldn’t disturb the moment, I recorded a bit of what I heard. It’s quiet, but it’s the…
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before I sleep …..
The count down to Christmas always comes as a shocking surprise. And the minutes and the weeks fly by and I fall into bed most nights wondering what on earth happened to my day. Magic tricks and snapping fingers and these days are evaporating. I don’t have the mental capacity to string together a tidy post but I do feel the urge to ramble on a bit. We spent a lovely morning enjoying the company of Oma and Papa Dale. We used our gnome idea but instead of a gnome we placed a little red cardinal in a tree. (Virginia’s state bird.) We named ours Virginia and the matching red…
