HomeLife
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. - Annie Dillard
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and knowing is half the battle
We’re having a trash problem over here lately. Trash services are available where we live. It’s just that standard trash procedure generally requires one to pull trash cans to the end of their driveway. And our driveway seems like a pretty far walk to drag a full (or empty) trash can or two weekly. So we figured if we were already loading up trash to the driveway’s end, we might as well take it somewhere for free. So we just haven’t contacted the service and made the leap yet. And we’ve been living at our house for almost a year now. In Virginia there were dumpsters on every road. For…
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Tricks of the Trade. 4.
Like my family closet idea, this idea is not really mine. I probably grabbed it from someone else’s blog or brain in some form or fashion. And now you can have it too. It’s simple and it’s easy and that’s what makes it a good idea. Serve your kids lunch in a muffin tin. There you have it. Anti-climatic. Not at all dramatic. Lunch in a muffin tin. I drove right on over to Ye Olde Dollar Tree and placed down $5 for 5 brand new muffin tins. (In the spirit of full disclosure – I might have purchased six. I can’t really remember.) The small cups are perfect for…
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have you ever had that kind of day?
You know what I’m talking about? That kind of day. The kind of day where you have expectations, like every day. Not unreasonable expectations. Not bake six-dozen-beautifully-frosted-like-a-magazine cookies. Not sew new curtains for the living room from an idea you saw on Pinterest. Not finish the entire year’s worth of math curriculum in one afternoon. Not those kind of expectations. Just reasonable, normal, run of the mill type expectations. Eat breakfast together as a family. Complete a regular amount of school work. Have lunch. Spend a good afternoon finishing up assignments and taking down the tent out of the yard since it had been set up for a full two…
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my son will not appreciate this one day.
For a while Otto has been able to write his own name. It’s a pretty simple one – what with all those circles and sticks. It’s always been pretty adorable to me to see him concentrate so seriously and push his pencil forcefully across the paper. (Or the wall. Goodness. Six children. First one to ever put pen to wall is the last one.) And he can also spell it out loud for you. But he’s been slipping a little lately when he signs his name on the page. And – I’ll tell you what – he does not care for being corrected or for being informed of the word…
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A Day in the Life: Part Two
I warned you last time. This will probably be anti-climatic. Cliffhangers are not my strong suit. So. Here I go anyway. The day was glorious. The sky was beautiful. Snacks were tasty. School work was being done and complaining was at an all-time low. I was considering crafting a make-shift tent from our picnic blankets and sowing our apple seeds for future meals and fashioning new clothes for the kids out of leaves and bark and never returning home again. It was that divine. Jump Off Rock is a public park. People were coming and going. That was no big deal. But around 1:25 an elderly man accompanied by his…
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A Day in the Life: Part One
The forecast for the entire week was glorious. Warm afternoons. Cool mornings. The type of day designed by the creator of days to be spent out of doors. No climate controlled, temperature regulated kind of day. (Not that those days even exist when you live in a one hundred and eleven year old farm house.) I looked at the week’s forecast and I knew three things. 1. These days are an unadulterated gift. Cold weather is coming. 2. Cold weather is particularly disheartening at our home where last winter we could see our breath in our kitchen on a regular basis. 3. I need to stockpile good days of warmth…
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long enough .
And I would sit here by this gravel path all morning with my Hawkeye. I would watch the sun grow high and the sun fall low with my boy, And it would still not be long enough.
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Man Trip 2012
It happens once a year. Or something like that. Man Trip. The last one involved Great Wolf Lodge and a giant tub of cheese balls. Kevin and our friend Tyler and Bergen and Tyler’s son Baylor get together for a little dude time. This year’s man trip didn’t have such a grand destination. In fact, the front yard was about as far as they ventured. But the front yard is plenty far enough when you add a campfire, some hot dogs, s’mores and camouflage. Oh – and when you allow the two younger boy siblings to have their first inaugural Man Trip experience.
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Where have you been all week and why are you posting on a Saturday?
Why, thank you for asking. The answers are . . . Goodness – I don’t know exactly. At a couple of birthday parties. Visiting a pumpkin patch/corn maze on a field trip. Recovering from a funk some medicine had me under. Trips to the grocery store and the library and small group. Craft night. At home teaching kids about ovoviviparous snakes and Robinson Crusoe. Hanging up clothes on the line and building a quiet place in the woods with my favorite seldom-quiet people. And I guess because I actually can. It’s late Friday evening. I wrapped up season 2 of Parenthood and it seems irresponsible to begin season 3 at…
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Would You Rather?
We drove to a wedding in the mountains this weekend. On the drive across the curvy roads through the gorgeous trees of blazing color, we all played a little car game to pass the time. It’s called “Would you rather?” and it’s simple. One person asks the rest of the players which of two bizarre or both awful options they would prefer. The questions were hysterically funny and I wish I could remember more of them but on curvy mountain roads I am incapable of recording moments in any other fashion besides my not-to-be-trusted memory. By far, the title of Creator of the Oddest Questions belonged to little Willow. (Who…
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morning reminders.
I was lying in bed this morning. Avoiding crawling out of its three-blanketed warmth. (I think three blankets is too many. Too heavy. Kevin thinks otherwise. London commented on the thickness of our bed covers and I told her how Daddy likes lots of covers. She grinned and replied, “But I bet his bed mate doesn’t.” She was right.) Instead of getting up and conquering the morning, I just kept lying there – letting the morning conquer me. I pretended to be pseudo-accomplishing things – like checking my e-mail on my phone. Then I scrolled through the photos stored on my phone. All 1,375 of them. I stumbled across…
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the days.
These are good days. They are. But they are just such busy days that I collapse into bed and find it difficult to find the balance of time management. Cooler weather is blowing around our house. (And through our house. You know.) The thermostat is reading in the low 60’s already and that seems all too early for that low low number indoors. I stole almost a full hour this afternoon and crept out to our hammock and soaked up the sun in the breezy afternoon and spent a little time reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Circle of Quiet. Goodness – I like that woman. She feels …. kindred. Today the kids…
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left without . . .
On any given day I have ten or more ideas for a blog post. I keep a steady stream of maybe posts already written in my drafts section. But usually I just plain run out of time to work my way through all those ideas and false starts and half-completed sentences. Life just wears me down and fills me up and spreads me thin. Some days it’s the baking. Some days it’s the chaos and the mess that keeps me from writing and processing and attempting to craft pretty words out of ordinary living. But today – oh today – it’s just been the details. The sit-down discussions. The wearying task of…
