We have a CHICK!!!

Chick number one just broke through her shell a few minutes ago. It's hard to see that that's a chick in there, but how proud does the mama hen look!

Grocery Overabundance

I can excuse getting to the grocery store and not knowing if you have this or that, buying it only to find that yes, you had plenty at home. I really can. Who hasn't done that many times? But my friends, there's no excuse for the fact that my refrigerator, my very small so I can't buy crap I don't need refrigerator currently holds 3 pounds of butter, three dozen eggs and enough pepperoni and mozzarella to make an army of pizzas.

I've waxed poetic about Retail Relay before. I use our local grocery delivery company so much that they actually came to my house to ask my opinion on how things were going. And they brought gifts. And they told me they could tell that I, unlike most of their customers, seem to do absolutely all of my shopping with them (many people buy staples from them or have occasional deliveries) which is kind of scary. But why oh why would you leave your house and schlep your children up to a grocery store when it can all come to you? Why?)The long and the short of it is that I do do all my grocery shopping with them. Save an occasional mad dash out for milk or bread or a stroll down to the nearest market for fresh french bread for dinner, I'm an online girl. Which is why I am shocked at my own behavior.

I'd like to say I had planned some big baking extravaganza and thus needed all that butter and eggs. Or that we were having a pizza party. But no, the truth is that I sat on the couch, 20 feet from the refrigerator, and ordered on automatic. Lazy sot. Actually I must really have been zoning out, I have absolutely no recollection of ordering a giant bag of large carrots (the kids only eat baby carrots, and yes, I know baby carrots are just big ones shaved down, but now I have to do the shaving) No do I remember why I felt the need to order only three bananas. That's not even one per person! We need at least five at a time in this house so that Evelyn can "accidentally" feed one to the dog and then try again. And I now have so much toilet paper I'm not sure where in my little house I'm going to put it all. But no paper towels to speak of. Let's just chalk it up to one big evening brain fart.

So now I have a whole lot of eggs and butter, and in an unrelated shopping event, two kinds of flour to deal with. Which, you know, is a little bit like telling a pirate you really need to get rid of a couple of gallons of rum. It's not really a case of what to bake, it's what not to bake. I've been trying to be good and not churn out cakes and cookies "for my family" which in the end really means "for me to eat while they are all at school or work." But hey, desperate times call for desperate measures. The fridge is full to bursting. I must bake.

I have this craving for Pavlovas but that doesn't really take care of the butter issue. Strawberries are officially in season (canning post ahead!) so pound cake might be fun. I'll probably spend the afternoon cruising around Smitten Kitchen and Chocolate and Zucchini to see what tempts me. Anyone have a fabulous dessert (well of course it has to be dessert! What else are butter and eggs for?) I should try? Send it my way! My Kitchen Aid is ready to go!



Oh, and in totally unrelated news...heaven help us all because I've agreed to be one of the co-presidents of the PTO. Hang on to your hats!

And in more unrelated news... if things go well, we should have chicks in the next day or two. We're trying to set up a webcam for the big event but since none of us knows how to set up a webcam, that may not happen in time. But we'll give it a shot. Peep peep!

Well That Just Bites (Pun Intended)

Last night, after spending a glorious three hours out in the yard and on a walk with my kids (ok, the walk was all that glorious since one child threw a fit and the other one gloated over the fit and then we had to get home quickly before everyone in town heard the howling, but the yard part was lovely) I came in only to find that I have 15 mosquito bites. 15! I am NOT ready for the bogs to start. It is one of the only things I really hate about Virginia. There are a LOT of bugs. Bugs that fly in your eyes, bugs that keep you awake, bugs that cover your ankles in welts and worst of all mosquitoes that are out ALL DAY LONG. That is just wrong. Really.

The kids are outdoor nuts at the moment. Briton was out the door this morning 20 minutes before the bus came to shoot hoops and I can hardly drag Evelyn in for a potty break. Actually, if I'm totally honest, she just pees in the grass anyway so I can see why she wouldn't think it's important to come in for that. But mommy isn't going down that road so in we must come.

All day I've been itch itch itching. I know, don't scratch! But I can't help it (insert whine here). We've never sprayed for bugs, it just seems horrible in so many ways. But I am sorely tempted. And we're only at Mosquito Day 1, just imagine how irritated I'll be come August. Grrr. I have a homemade bug repellent from Angry Chicken that I want to try, although I'm a little doubtful that it can handle southern pests. But I'll give it a whirl. And then it will be time to bring on the DEET (OK, not really, well, probably not really...)

Little Bits of Happiness

At some point in my last year of teaching (I can't really remember when, or really why, hey, I was pregnant, my brain was mush) I read my students the legend of 1000 cranes and then proposed that we fold 1000 cranes ourselves, in memory of 911, an event that my fifth and sixth graders were old enough to witness, but not really mature enough to comprehend. All they knew was that everyone was sad that year. The teachers, the parents, the world. And this project seemed to be a good expression of the sadness as well as the hope that they, as kids, offered (I know, how profound of me. I'm not usually deep that way!)

So I know what you're thinking, great project! And it was, except that my class was very small, 9 kids. Which is great in so many ways but also not great if you are trying to fold 1000 cranes while teaching an advanced curriculum and prepping for state tests. It was a little mad.

We folded during reading, we folded during rainy indoor recess days, we folded during announcements and roll and while waiting for pickup. We folded a lot of cranes. In fact, we made it beyond that 1000, miraculously, just before the year ended.

By the time summer came around I could fold a origami crane in about 30 seconds and out of any type of paper you threw at me. Gum wrappers? Check. Workbook pages? Check. Whole sheets of newsprint? Check.

I haven't folded on since. I think I out-craned-myself.

Today I decided to venture back into crane folding for an idea I had. A little spot of happiness for an otherwise kinda boring front door (on the inside at least, the outside is still lipstick red, so I guess it's not that boring) I'd totally forgotten how to go about making an origami crane and had to google some good, visual directions. But once the first one was down, I was back in my groove. Of course, by the third one I was out-craned again. I think my fingers started to remember that distant folding frenzy. But three is all I needed. I strung them together, added a bell at the end (so I can hear my children sneak out the front door, a recent issue - I blame the nice weather!) and hung it from the doorknob. And I love it. It's fun. It's replaceable (maybe next version I'll make Briton fold them. Ha ha ha!) and it's just the little spot of happy I was looking for.

Always a good thing.

Swinging with her eyes closed

One of the greatest things about being a parent is getting to witness those moments when light dawns and a child discovers something new about the world. And of course I'm not talking about new as in a new movie or a new toy, these are the things that are wholly new to them, never before imagined. Like the first time they see their toes or the first time the walk across the room. I remember Briton staring at his hands, wide eyed in wonder. As if to say" whoa, where did those things come from?" It never gets old, watching something click in their heads, seeing them figure something out.

At the same time, one of the saddest things about being a parent is knowing that all of this is fleeting. That every day that they grow older, less and less becomes new and wondrous. There are still many firsts out there of course. But now most of them are firsts I don't even want to contemplate. First kiss. First love. First broken heart. First dance as a husband or a wife. Those give me panic attacks. My children are already growing up too fast as it is. But the in between firsts are few and far between it sometimes seems. Which makes them all the more precious when the do come along.

Last week Evelyn learned to pump. One day it was "Push me! Push me!" and then next it was "Look at me! I'm doing it!" And after a few days of starter pushes to get the pumping going, it became "I can do it myself! Don't push me!" And away she went. It breaks my heart a little bit, not being needed in this small way. Of course mostly it's fabulous because it means that I can sit in my chair and read or daydream and not have to get up and stand in the sun to push. But still, a little sad.

She swings with her eyes closed. With abandon. Singing at the top of her lungs as she pumps. Forward, back, in, out.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star."

She swings and swings and swings.

"How I wonder what you are."

And even that little sad bit of my heart has to smile to see the pure joy she finds in that simple act.

Swing on, little girl.

What do a broken washing machine and a weed wacker have in common? Nothing at all...

So you know when you get to that point in the week where you must, MUST do laundry because if you don't, no one will have anything clean to wear? Well we were there on Monday night.

And then the washing machine broke.

And the repair guy can't come till next week.

Fun times.

On the plus side, I've gotten pretty good at hand washing clothes. Thank goodness the dryer still works or I would have been writing this from the loony bin right now.

And in totally unrelated news, I learned how to use a weed whacker the other night. I know, I know, who doesn't know how to use a weed whacker? Ok, so I knew how to use one, I just never had used one.

Despite the fact that, since we switched over to an electric lawnmower eleven years ago, I have been the primary lawn mower person in the house (it's not even that I love to mow, it's that I can mow without running over the cord. And after your husband destroys, say, the seventh extension cord, you just give up and do it yourself) but I've never done the weed wacking. In fact, I've always had a overblown, illogical fear of the weed wacker. It probably stems from the same paranoia that keeps me away from power tools. Or maybe it's a vague childhood memory of being nipped in the ankle with the flying string of my dad's edger. Actually, I'm not sure that ever really happened, but I was told it would happen enough that I grew to adulthood thinking that it had happened. I wonder if there's a name for that - the fear of weed wackers, not the being told something so many times that you are convinced it happened, that's just called childhood.

Anyhoo, while Will and his fair assistant were putting together my pergola (which was lovely, by the way, for our bookclub soiree. And Bre, I did the blue table runner of the white cloth and it was very pretty indeed, but I forgot to take a photo of it!) I decided that the grass was in desperate need of a trim around the edges, so away I went with the neighbors cool cordless weed wacker.

And I totally love that thing.

I'm not sure what that says about me. It seems like any gardener worth his or her salt shouldn't be quite so delighted to see the downfall of anything green and growing, but I did. It made me want to laugh maniacally, except when I try that it just sounds like I'm choking. I'm evil laugh deficient. I can't burp either. But you didn't need to know that.

So now I can't decide if I want a weed wacker or a fig tree for Mother's Day. On the one hand, one of the dogwoods is on it's way to the firewood pile and needs a replacement and, well, you can never have too many fig trees. But on the other, well, there's the destruction of invasive grass at the touch of a button. Decisions, decisions....

Outdoor Room

This morning I was telling Will that, while I was more than glad that the inside of the house is, if not finished, well on it's way, it is so nice to be able to focus on the yard this summer. I love being outside. I'm not outdoorsy in the "I hike every weekend and live to camp" kind of way. I like camping and the occasional stroll through the woods, don't get me wrong. But what I love is to be able to just be outside. To sit in a chair and read a book or work on the computer or just stare up at the sky.

When we first moved in the yard was big and flat, a rarity in our town, but it was also bare. Other than the beautiful cherry tree and a few dogwoods, there was nothing but an expanse of weedy grass. No flowers, no shrubs (ok, there is a holly bush, but it's more in the back instead of the side where the bulk of our yard lies) nothing. I'm not really a flower gardener at all. And to make matters worse, the flowers that I do know about are great in rain soaked Oregon or Ireland, but pretty much crap here. So it's been a steep learning curve. And I still have a long way to go.

I've been really lucky in that we have lots of gardener neighbors who have given us advice and plants aplenty and slowly, slowly, the garden is coming together. Helped, a lot, by Will who spent the last few evenings building the pergola that I've been imagining since before we moved in. We still have a few finishing touches, including getting the clematis and wisteria that I planted yesterday to grow up and over the top to provide a little shade. But for the most part, it's there. Will wants to add another section so that they stair step down over the fence which is fabulous, more places for the vines to grow. Don't tell him but I'd be happy with it as is.

Tonight my book club is giving the room a run for it's money, sitting outside discussing a book that was both fascinating and long (and which I haven't finished....shhhhh) I tried to string lights over the table last night which resulted in some distinctly foul language, 4 broken bulbs and possibly a few frustrated tears. This morning Will helped me restring them before he left for work so now we are ready to thrash out the doings of the Hemming's Family and our own. Can't wait.