it was just like that...

Illustration by Cicely Mary Barker

Today Ben told me I have a cute personality, and, well, I just don't ever want to forget that. (Heeee likes my spark!!!!!!) ^_^

 

the house with numbers...

Illustration by Roger Duvoisin

This is an attempt to blog about the number eight. I was going to title it "The Number Eight", but I've found I'm much to fickle to decide these things in advance. Who knew that cleaning the basement would inspire so many new blogs? Well, the number eight is a mailbox sticker, a very large mailbox sticker which I purchased shortly after moving into this house, some years ago. There were three other numbers. They're all supposed to go together, and they're all supposed to be on the mailbox. Since we moved in, our basement has flooded almost every year, which has led to lots of frantic scurryings to get everything to higher ground. At this point, pretty much everything down there is in a plastic tub with a lid, because that is the only way. So, one year we had what we like to call the Great flood. So much of our stuff was ruined and tossed out, and anything dry was quickly tossed into any random box with a lid in the chaos. We now have several large tubs filled with who knows what. This is the same situation which led to my previous post "Chris's Keys". So, every once in a while, when I'm in the basement rummaging through, looking for something, I'll come across one of these numbers. I have high hopes that one day they'll all come together and go on the mailbox. As it is, our post-man just knows that our mailbox is the one with no numbers. I could go out and just buy new numbers, and I've thought about it before while standing in Home Depot. I was right there in the sticker section trying to tell myself that the original numbers were way too big anyway, and I should just replace them; but I couldn't do it. I really just feel that, one day, it'll work out. One day... my shower will work, Snow's wall will be patched, the kitchen will have cabinets, & the rooms will have baseboards. The decks will be done, Sage won't run off, the mice won't get in, and the boxes in the basement will be completely organized. That is when I'll find them. The numbers will be there. You know what, I should take number 8 out there right now, just in case, before it gets lost. I wonder if it'll confuse the mailman if I just start sticking them on as I find them. Anyway, that's all. I'll let you know how it all pans out.

 

Chris's keys...

Way back a few years ago, when my kids were a little much smaller than today, there was a key. The key belonged to the house of Annie, a neighbor's dog. The neighbor was named Chris. Chris had issued the key to my children for Annie's sake, so she could get outside in the afternoons while he was away. Annie loved it, the kids loved it, and Chris loved it, and all was well, until one day, we lost the key. I say we, because I feel some responsibilty (the kids being so small), but I want you to know, I never touched the key. This was an arrangement between Chris and the kids, which they seemingly had under control. I was a little embarrased to have to admit we had lost the key to his house, but Chris just laughed and went out and made a new key. After maybe a week or so, we repeated that exact same scenario. Then, again a while after that. At some point, Chris gave us a ring with two or three house keys. Personally, at this point, I would have had my locks changed, but he didn't seem too concerned. Honestly, I don't know that he had any other options for Annie. It was definitely awkward for me; I was mortified to mention to him on numerous occasions that we had lost the key yet again. It reminds somewhat of a feeling I experienced in school when I was tardy at over and over, that feeling, walking into the administrators office and having to come up with fresh excuses again & again. I still haven't gotten over my phobia of administrators. So anyway, these shenanigans with Chris and Annie all took place about 6 or 7 years ago. They are no longer our neighbors. In fact, they no longer live in our old neighborhood. So a few weeks ago, we were cleaning the basement. I hope you are already laughing; we laughed so hard. A few weeks ago, Daniel, Hannah, Emmeli, and I were going through some junk boxes in the basement. I had been down there all day cleaning and organizing and wanted to get to some sort of stopping point, so I had called in the reinforcements. It was the end of the day & the kids were all being so silly. They just didn't understand the seriousness of the situation; I really needed to get the heck outa there. So they're just pilfering through, stuffing their pockets with long lost treasues. Daniel was DJ and he was playing the worst music he could imagine, in an attempt to force me outa there, so I would stop giving orders and just let them party. But I hung in there. There were only a few things left to do, and I was enjoying having everyone around me after being down there by myself all day. I was fighting with Daniel to change the music, trying to get Emmeli to take off the roller blades (and then get off the skateboard), & trying to get Hannah to stop getting so distracted by all the shiny objects and get down to business. "What's this? What's that? Oh yah, I remember that." And then suddenly, she blurts out, "Chris's keys!" I think it took a half second for all of us to get passed thinking, who's Chris? Then, we all burst out laughing (everyone except Emmeli, I think, who's probably still thinking, who's Chris?)

 

Lighting the way...

Illustration by Adrienne Adams

If you follow me on instagram, then you already know that, yesterday, I was up in Hannah's room snapping pictures. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. I've been wanting to take pictures of simple things like: the ukulele leaning in the corner of my room next to an unhung painting of a banjo, a crocheted rhino standing on the metal shelf in my closet, or a cup of coffee in the shadow of a stack of school books. We take for granted that we'll remember these peaceful mini-vistas. They are the backdrop and part of the setting for so many memories. Things that are so familiar today will one day be forgotten. I can remember when my kids were a bit younger, I used to think "these are the glory years", but now, I think these are the glory years. They haven't replaced the former ones, they are just a very long extension. I love these days.

So, yesterday, I went up to see Hannah during her writing time. She was sitting on the floor next to her mushroom stool, listening to music, and talking to herself as she wrote. I could hear her as I was walking up the stairs. Last year, on her birthday, which is steadily approaching again, she set a goal to write a book & she's now almost done with the first draft. The book has nine chapters, which she laid out in the beginning. Each chapter highlights a new adventure or encounter experienced by a little boy named Erven. The sweetness of the book is Erven's unique perspective. As you observe his antics, you find yourself growing and stretching and shrinking as well, and I mean that in the most philosophical way. The largeness of your world will be swallowed up by the smallness of his; you'll find yourself understanding things you already knew. You'll find that you're a better person after a short walk home from school with Erven. So anyway, that's the best I can do to describe it on short notice & I'm excited for you to read it. It's amazing when your kids are writers. As they painstakingly light the way, you get to see all the shiny things hiding under the surface of the day to day.

 

She must be in the dungeon...

Illustration by N.C. Wyeth

First off, if this seems a little rushed, it's because it is. There are three things I want to blog about and I don't think I'll have time, but, considering the recent lack of inspiration, I wanted to at least get started. For the past two days, I've been toiling in the basement. Although disgusting and exhausting, it's also been a sweet experience filled with memories and reminders. Kids scurrying up the stairs with pilfered treasures, reminiscence, delirium, and laughter mark my time in the dungeon. Now, I've emerged with fresh insights and a weight off my shoulders. As a reminder for myself, because I may have to go at any moment, my next three blogs will be Chris's Keys, The Number Eight, and Painting Icebergs. I'm borrowing Hannah's idea to lay out the titles first. Hannah's been writing a book and I want to tell you all about that too, but I'll wait on the title for that one. For now, I have to go. The dryer is beeping, I need to call my grandma, I'm going to a friend's house, and I need to get the basement to some sort of stopping point. When I come back, I'm going to see if I can get Daniel to help me with "Chris's Keys", because he's so much funnier than me. And since this blog really has no substance, I just want to end by saying, if your basement is in need of some affection, go for it. There are treasures to be found, there are stories to be told.

 

full speed ahead...

Nothing motivates like fallish weather; must be ingrained from my childhood; you know, all that scurrying, shopping for school supplies, & whatnot. For us, it's kinda weird, because we never stop having school, but still, come fall, things do become a little more urgent-like. I think this year I might buy everyone some school supplies, just for fun. I always loved that about back-to-school. Anyway, we still have a couple more weeks before we switch gears to start the new school year (& we're still finishing up the last four weeks of last year), nevertheless, I'm getting excited. I'll be using the same program for Hannah & Em that I used for Snow & Daniel at this stage, so as I'm reading through the booklists for this year, everything is familiar to me and I love it. Not only that, but we've been doing a chronological study of history and we have now come full circle, back to where we started, and will go trough it all again, building on what we've learned. That means Hannah & Em already have a foundation for everything we'll be covering this year. I feel so blessed that this has been my life, to keep my kids home with me, to learn together at our own pace, to watch my kids grow into their own personalities without the extreme influence of peer pressure and outside agendas. I'm not always so vocal about homeschooling, because I'm always afraid I might offend someone, but this is my heart on the matter. Right now, Hannah is drinking her orange juice with a glow straw in a "galaxy of shoes" (in the shoe closet). Let's face it, you just can't do that in traditional school, and even if you could, mom wouldn't be invited. The End.

 

lucky bunny...

Illustration by Art Seiden

Snow bought baby bunnies! They are so fluffy and so beautiful! I can hardly stand it! They are like little clouds that you can name, and hold, and walk on a leash. This isn't what they look like. This is me, ^_^ I'm the lucky one. The rabbits are French angoras. Bergamot looks like swirls of smoke, black & grey with a black face. She reminds me of a little black rain cloud. Chamomile looks somewhat like a wild rabbit and that's what Snow loves about her. But you've never seen a wild rabbit this fluffy. There's so much fluff, if it weren't for the long ears, you might forget there's a rabbit under there. She has the same smokey appearance as Bergamot, but she has peppery tan speckled highlights and her ears are outlined in black. If you follow my herb blog, I'll be posting lots of pictures there. We also recently acquired some butterfly koi. They are almost equally as lovely, but not cuddly like Chamomile and Bergamot. We named the fish after the planets, including Pluto, because there are 9 of them. Funny thing, I called the smallest one Pluto right off, just because he was smaller than all the others. Then, I noticed there were 9, & that's what started the planet thing. I didn't know at the time, but it turns out that Pluto actually isn't a butterfly koi. He's the only regular koi in the bunch. I don't know what you want to do with that bit of information, I just thought it was interesting. My favorite of the koi, I named Venus Callypso. She is very special, so she gets a special name. Mercury is also amazing, he looks just like liquid mercury. They are all amazing. So anyway, I just wanted to send out the announcement. If you live within driving distance, I highly recommend coming over. This little herb farm is fast becoming my happy place.

 

sugar, spice, and everything nice...

Illustration by Millicent Sowerby

I don't know if you're a Pinterest person or not. I am sometimes. I like it, scrolling through my own little collection of images, ideas, & interests. It certainly beats scrolling through, say, Reuters, where I can simultaneously see ads from where they've been snooping into my Amazon account. And when I like photos on instagram, where do they go? I have no idea. I can click on a little heart & see what other people have liked, but what about what I like? I just save my favorite instagram likes on Pinterest. That seems to be working for now. Where was I going with this? Oh ya. Pinterest has created a new update. Now it gives a little description at the top of each board, telling people what sorts of things are to be found there. Nobody ever fills in descriptions, so they've just taken to doing it for us. Whatever. Anyway, there's one page where you can view all the pins that you've ever pinned. Since there's a handy little description there, you can, at a glance, find out just what you're all about. It's like a visual personality assesment. All you have to do is sort through millions of images of which you will choose a handful of your favorites & voila, Pinterest will tell you who you are, in a nutshell. It takes a little time, but it's better than jellifying your brain with questions that have no good answer. I don't know, all those images can be a bit stupefying as well. Maybe it's not any better. But this assesment is pretty painless, seeing that it's actually going on while you're just minding your own business. Wait. You mean, at the click of a button, the whole world can see right through me and lump me into a mass to be squished around and shaped, flattend, & cut out with cute little cookie cutters? This age of tracking & categorizing is kind of scary. The interwebs keeps getting stickier & stickier. So anyway, the consensus is that my brain is full of lavender, herbs, foraging, plants, teas, honey, flowers, basil, dandelions, bees, bouquets, and healing. Not sure what anyone's going to do with all that information, hopefully nothing too sinister. Me, I'm going to take it to mean that inside my head is quite lovely. I mean, you can almost hear the birdies chirping in that garden. And that's just the way I like it.

 

safe and sound...

The past few days I've been going through all sorts of old photos. I've been looking for pictures of Snow, Daniel, Hannah, & Emmeli around the farm. We're now, officially, calling it a farm; and today, Ben was even driving around, plowing up gardens with a tractor. It was a little tractor, & a borrowed tractor, but a tractor none the less. So that was pretty exciting & it made the whole farm persona feel rather legit. But I won't talk too much about that now, because I already have a farm blog where I'm letting everyone know all about our herb farm adventures. So, once I dug up all those beautiful photos of the kids in the garden & in the trees & whatnot, I was really anxious to share them on the blog. See, the blog is two-fold. It's for random people who are interested in what's going on on the farm, but it's also for me. Of course I want to include those beautiful memories of our earliest days scratching in the dirt! But I just couldn't do it. About 5 min. after posting a sweet mini bio about Em, & after plastering her sweet face onto the interwebs, it occurred to me that that just wasn't happening. So I deleted it. I was going to do a little intro for everyone on the farm, but...well, now I'm not. For now, I'm just going to be redepositing this here for safekeeping. Anyway, this is what It looked like:

__________________________________________

A very good place to start...

"So my next few posts might be a little retro (retro here meaning- a couple of years old). We only bought this house six years ago, but six years is half your life when you're twelve. I never thought of it 'til just now, but Emmeli has spent half her life growing up on the farm. Well, it wasn't a farm in the beginning. We've gradually transformed this place from 'house with a very big yard' to herb farm with orchard, forest gardens, pond, bike trails, bridges, & bees. Emmeli is our youngest daughter. She's a barefoot girl with long blonde hair who sometimes stumbles right out to the garden in her jammies with a rake and shovel. She loves the pond with all it's frogs; she catches garter snakes with her bare hands; & she's looking florward to the day when we have animals. We're planning to put in a pasture, & hopefully someday get some sheep & possibly some goats. I'm hoping that we also get a guard donkey; & if we do, I'm going to name him Heimlich."

 

peaceful slumber...

So, this isn't exactly the terrain, but just imagine that those are seabirds and they're flying over the ocean. There's no need for a scarecrow. Just imagine how it feels to nap with the sound of the ocean waves and a lovely breeze. The birds are chirping and you're surrounded by fluffy bunnies. You don't have on pirate boots, but you do have on a piratey head scarf. Actually, the more I look at this picture, the more ridiculous it seems, but as I was lying in the hammock looking for a good blog pic, I really could relate to this pirate kitty in his peaceful slumber, being surrounded by birds and flowers and bunnies. So lovely. Well, it was really a lovely thought until Snow told me that, actually, he's pretending to be dead so he can catch those rabbits for the farmer to eat. K. Happy feeling gone. But there really is nothing better than a traveling hammock, let's focus on that. You stuff it into a little sack and take it with you wherever you go. It really is amazing. If I ever start a non-profit, I think we'll go around and hand out hammocks & colorful bandana's stuffed with "Kind" bars and tied to sticks; you know, so hobos can carry them easily over their shoulders. I think using Kind bars instead of Cliff bars or Powerbars will really have a nice effect. Kind are the best anyway. Sorry for the rabbit trail, I was really having a nice thought there and I just decided to go with it. Anyway, we're here on this beautiful island again, only this time we have the minions & it's the best thing ever. Hannah & Daniel got to jump off a cliff, Emmeli's been chasing lizards non-stop, Ben & I swam with a sea turtle, and Snow is inventing new uses for coconut fiber. This really is the optimum time for a family vacation. I'm telling you, if you have 4 kids and the youngest is 12, go now! on a family adventure; that is unless your teenagers are punks, which mine are not. When I say punk, I don't mean it in the usual way. What I'm trying to say is, if your kids are agressive and violent young criminals, just stay home and see if you can get that worked out first. Well, I'm going to sign off for now, but I hope to do some more writing while I'm here. Funny thing, the last time I wrote was right after my last trip here. Apparently this place has a nice effect on my psyche. And another little tidbit: I looked up the definition for slumber- a natural and periodic state of rest during which consciousness of the world is suspended. To me, that actually sounds like an excellent definition for vacation. Thanks for reading my blog. You guys are the best.

 

comforts of home...

Here is a blog to get me blogging. I don't know what happened to that part of me that liked to spill the beans. Lately I'm forever sweeping them up. But, today, I will scatter them like rain and then tread on those tiny pebbles 'til my bare feet hurt and I want to go home. Lovely vistas, rocky places, random forms of wildlife relaxing in the road... it doesn't really matter what you talk about, or how, or when. What matters is that you do talk, otherwise you're nothing more than a mute banjo hanging by a thread.

All my life I've wanted someone to love me the way he did that one time we went to the treetops and recorded the sunrise. It was a lovely dream that awakened to the sudden sound of surf, a shower of rain, and a near-pass-by that almost resulted in a head-on colllision. There were night walks with giant land crabs, treacherous climbs, and lots of swimmings hand-in-hand. We had breakfast, lunch, & dinner & a jeep named Sunny. We saw some of everything there was to see and left unmarred. At the end, it was like when Cinderella's beautiful ball gown turned into a homely house dress and apron, only it was a lovely fish taco which transformed into a cheese quesadilla. All you have to do is blink and stand in line for three hours, and you're gone. One minute you're diving into the ocean surrounded by all that is lovely in the world, and then, next thing you know, you're wet, salty, sticky, & have sand in your shoes. What's interesting is that you don't do anything about it, because you're still coasting down from that lovely green peak. Now, you just ready yourself to round the next curve, which will likely land you on the brink of a herd of goats; but as you squeal your brakes and go around, what do you do? You snap a picture. Why? Because even though those stumpy road blocks interrupt your lovely traverse and could send you driving off the side of a cliff, they are a part of the story, one you will likely forget if you don't write it down. And without obstacles and obstructions, there's nothing but nothingness, and if there were no twists & turns, all would be straight. Somehow, crumbly canyon walls, deep dark crevices where anything could be lurking, and sliding backwards down a muddy hillside with no railings in the middle of a rainstorm bring as much meaning to the picture as butterflies and rainbows. I don't really get it, but I kind of sort of do; and dwelling on it in this way is better for me than not. This is life... everyone knows it. Ups & downs, goods & bads, vacations & homecomings; is it a wonder I should need to talk it out? So anyway, aside from the beauty & wonder of the tropics, home is where my heart is and now it is time for me to leave this blog and get back there. Lovely adventures always land you back in the snugness of your well-kept hobbit hole.