Hello! When I have nothing interesting to say, I can always post recent scrapbook pages!
These are from earlier this spring.
I got the best treat this past weekend! My sweet little niece, Piper, came to stay with us while her mommy and daddy went camping. We had the best time!
She didn’t cry at all when they dropped her off, which was highly gratifying.
The cousins had fun playing!
Morning snuggles!
I love her little smile!
An outing.
LOTS of selfies.
I hope we get to have camp again soon! I already miss my little pink buddy!
I never really know how this anniversary will affect me each year, the anniversary of my mother’s death. Last year, I was surprisingly stable and not unhappy, and I thought that maybe I was “getting over it.”
Enter this year: I am never going to get over it.
A strange fact that is blowing my mind this year: when my mom was my age, 37, I was 18 years old. WHAT?? I can remember my mom as a 37-year-old woman, and I can’t remember her at all. I was busy being 18 and self-absorbed. What I really want, more than anything, is to talk to my mom about being a 37-year-old woman.
I just miss her, too, plain and simple. I want her to come over and sit in the driveway with me and gloat over my pink climbing rose and my enormous, out-of-control lavender bush that is taking over said driveway. I want to drop in and let Aiden go mess about in the woods while I hang out with her on the deck, or down by the pool. I want to call her number on the phone, and hear HER voice answer.
So, yeah, fifteen years is a long time to wait around to do these things, to miss someone.
There is also somehow a sweetness swirled through all the pain, an overwhelming gratitude.
The sweet thought that the number of years I will miss her is finite.
Look at this ridiculous thing:
Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? I walk outside and see this rose and usually make some kind of noise and wave my arms around and then bury my face in its blooms and whisper things to it.
Last fall, I gave this bush a severe lopping, donning all kinds of protective gear, because this is a vicious rose, a mean and nasty rose, a rip-your-skin-off-and-flay-you-alive rose. We’re talking bike helmets, people.
It has rewarded my courageous pruning with magnificence.
I love this thing.
I love this thing, too. He has always been a jumper, since we first met him. He throws himself off of everything, no fear whatsoever. But he has never been much of a climber, approaching monkey bars and climbing poles and trees with reluctance. But suddenly, after two rough weeks of challenging behavior and bedtimes, he has emerged on the other side as a CLIMBER.
I am so proud of him for overcoming his fears.
These sillies:
And now, the picnic! Kingwood, aunties, cousins, peacocks, food. It’s a party.
(stole this from Heidi’s facebook, bwahahaha!)
And now, it rains. Thank goodness, and I won’t have to water!
Well, we had Memorial Day weekend. Chad’s mom and dad were visiting from Texas, and it is always good to see them.
Sweet mom, enjoying her strawberry milkshake at Dan’s Dogs.
And Grandpa Doug, who is keen to spoil Aiden at any given moment. Not that Aiden minds.
The weekend was cool but beautiful. We did a lot of work outside involving tons of gravel and dirt, which is my favorite thing in the whole world. For real.
But then, Sunday afternoon, Aiden fell and smacked his head on the driveway, and we ended up spending our evening at the ER.
Two staples in his head later, we were good to go. Of course, I had to scour the town for children’s acetaminophen without artificial color, but I won’t get into that. Thankfully, he hit his head in all that new gravel instead of the concrete, so instead of a concussion, he had a big gash. But I will take a big gash over a concussion any day. We are considering a helmet for everyday use, though. 
And that is what has been going on around here. Good times!
So, yesterday was hot and humid in these parts. I called my friend Christi and arranged to meet her and her kids at a nearby lake “to splash around in the water and play in the sand.” And I told Aiden that although he was wearing his swim gear, we were NOT going to swim, just walk in the shallow parts, look for crayfish, and dig in the beach.
Yeah, right.
They walked across the lake, back and forth, crawling on their knees when it wasn’t deep enough for their satisfaction.
They had the best, best time, and all three of them begged to go back tomorrow.
WHAT a great weekend! Three days (since Chad took Friday off) of hanging out in our backyard, moving dirt around and burning stuff. What could be better? (In fact, when I texted Chad on Wednesday to convince him to take Friday off, I said, “We could get out the fire pit and burn stuff.” And that’s when he responded with, “I just sent in the request.”)
We celebrated our camping debacle with dinosaur pancakes on Saturday morning.
And then, the guys headed out back while I headed to the library book sale. Huzzah!
We have been working on this section of our yard for several years. We used to have a huge maple tree here that was slowly dying and dropping branches through the roof and into the yard. Finally, two years ago, we had it taken down and sawn into huge chunks, all of which were left strewn about. I had been using this area for my composting as well. My ten years of composting. That’s a lot of compost. Last fall, we built the three-bin compost system, and we have slowly been transitioning from big random piles to small, not-so-random piles. The plan here is to level out the side by the garage and build raised beds for veggies, as this area faces south and gets a lot of sun. We will eventually have a tidy pathway as well and I won’t cringe and look away every time I sit back here!
First, we burned everything in our “burn pile,” which consisted mostly of the rose canes from my climber in the front bed. I gave it a severe pruning last fall, hoping to prevent that horrible black leaf spot mold stuff that is trying to kill it and break my heart. We then moved the compost tumbler over to the compost side where the burn pile had been. We are going to use the tumbler for kitchen scraps, so the neighborhood raccoons stop making a huge mess out there all the time. Sorry, neighbors, if we smoked you out this weekend. A built-in stone fire pit is also in the works for the summer. We are a family of pyromaniacs.
See that pile that Aiden is working on? Compost. Beautiful, beautiful compost. That is going into the raised beds.
We splurged this time and ordered these amazing corners. When we built our other raised beds, we just used screws to assemble them. Chad likes this system much better! This is the 4×4 bed, and we are also going to do a 4×8 bed.
And then, we grilled pizza.
It was so good, we made the ugly face.
My dad and stepmom have been sending Aiden camping gear for his birthdays lately. Last year, it was a really cool tent. This year, a sleeping bag. He has been dying, DYING, to have a “camping day.” So we planned all last week to camp out on Friday night. We had a great day together (Chad stayed home!), and in the late afternoon, we set up the tent and got ready for our adventure.
It was really funny when Myles joined us inside. This is, apparently, a three man, one dog tent.
All was going SO well. Until Aiden went to bed.
There is a very busy road behind our house. All the time, cars and trucks, sirens, people walking and talking loudly. People from the next street over running leaf blowers and lawn mowers. We tried to tough it out. Chad went in the tent to sleep while I stayed by the fire, reading on my very rustic and campy Ipad.
Some robins, silly birds, decided to have a big fight in the tree above the tent at dusk. A fire engine came screaming through the intersection. Someone decided to share his awesome bass with the rest of the world. It was, in a word, NOISY. Way, way too noisy. Aiden was still awake two hours past his bedtime, and the neighbor’s security light behind the house shone directly into the tent. We laughingly called it, hauled in our stuff, and went to bed in our quiet house, with fans running for white noise.
We absolutely plan to go camping for real, hopefully sooner rather than later. However, next time, we are going to find a quiet place in the woods, far away from traffic and security lights.
Aiden was still completely satisfied with the experience and plans to hang out in the tent for most of the day.
We will try again.
We solved a huge problem in our back yard this week. I was so DONE with the “flower bed” behind the house that I was ready to just spend millions of dollars building a deck over it and never seeing it again. But then, last Sunday, Chad and I had a brain wave: What if we rebuilt the most annoying part, the stone path that winds through?
This before picture is from last May, when everything happened months too early.
And from here, it doesn’t look so bad. But every single spring, I have had to pull up every single stone and pull weeds and rein in the dead nettle and lady’s mantle, and I had stolen some of the stones to use up front in the veg garden, and the part over by the hose was just too horrible for words.
This is what we ended up doing:
We did half on Sunday afternoon, together, and then Aiden and I worked to finish the rest of it during the week.
After:
Now I don’t hate the backyard anymore! And it didn’t cost a million dollars! Maybe around $50, for all that pea gravel, and that, my friends, is totally worth it.
They are SO CUTE.
I could watch them all day. Aiden and I sit on the front steps and watch all the time. We laugh when they forget we are there and pop up and peep like crazy things. We look at each other open-mouthed when Mama comes swooping in to feed them. We talk to them and try to coax them to look out.
There are four of them, and they are getting so big they hardly fit in the nest anymore. They jostle for space, and the biggest, bravest one is usually perched on the edge, looking around.
I love them.
Another silly thing:
He really, really does. He is one of the best workers I know. But it has to be REAL work. Grown-up work, not manufactured-for-a-kid-to-do work.
This kid is a whiz with a shovel. I’m just sayin.’
He insisted on pushing this _very_ heavy wheelbarrow all by himself to the compost pile.
After, as we were companionably digging up a bed together, he said in a confidential aside, “I kinda like working.”
It seems that way! Birthday after birthday, mother’s day, weddings, Memorial Day. . .it’s an endless stream of parties and making food to take and figuring out gifts and cards and who is taking whom. The older I get, the less good at this stuff I become. Seems counter-intuitive, but there it is. I am NOT complaining. I’m just. . . overwhelmed.
Enough talk! More pictures!
Jordan’s birthday was last week, and we descended upon him in his new digs with dinner and pie and fudge.
I also climbed a tree. I am happy and quite gratified to say that I still got it.
The flip flops were not the best choice, but I was trying to show the boy how to do it and didn’t think that far ahead. I kicked them off once I got up there.
Then we celebrated my sweet niece’s first birthday. I love this girl!
My favorite one, from behind her chair, looking out upon the throng.
She was amazing through the whole thing. Chill and happy, curious and game. I just love her. My brother was amazing too—it was his first big party to host, and he was gracious and welcoming and he worked so hard. Our mom would be really proud of him, and so am I. To make it even more amazing, his beloved little dog, Shadow, had just died suddenly the night before the party! Jon was amazing.
And then, if you are all still with me, was Mother’s Day, a complicated day for me. I’ve been using the word “fraught” a lot in my journal to describe certain situations, and it works here too. Mother’s Day is so emotionally fraught for me.
Breakfast
a rose at church from my sweetest boy
Lunch at Aladdin’s
On the improved pathway, our afternoon mother’s day project.
It was a good day, a really good day. And I’m glad it’s over, and the week is over, and now maybe we can be normal for a few days.
Ya know?
Wanna see some babies? I have two kinds, the birdy kind and the people kind.
Here is the birdy kind:
Mama and Papa robin are so very brave these days. Every time we look up there, we see these naked little beaks making yellow triangles above the edge of the nest. Sweet babies!
And here is the people baby, brought to you by our hero, Sarabeth.
She is so very sweet and tiny!
In other news, I took my boy and his new bike on the trail yesterday.
He did pretty well, except for that time when he didn’t move over and almost got run down by another cyclist. And that other time when he accidently hit the brakes during a particularly fast sprint and skidded all over the place. It took a few sobbing minutes of “I don’t like this bike, I don’t like this bike!” before he’d get back on and try again.
At student life group, we had a little fire.
And then Chad took a foot to the face during a game, and now he looks tough.
