Terrible/Perfect

Snowpocalypse Now

We've had some Weather around here. I'm not sure whether to capitalize it or italicize it. We've had some weather. Unlike many of our friends we've been extremely lucky and haven't lost power, so almost a week (has it been almost a week already?) of being snowed on and snowed in has mostly passed in a lovely sort of home-cozy way, filled with four-legged friends with velvet ears, hot drinks, soft, soft yarns, beautiful books, beautiful babes, and a birthday tart for one who turned three (no, I did not make it myself). 

I am prepared to be extremely pleased in almost any situation. It's an excellent policy to have, if it can possibly be managed.

Winter fair

I get the impression...I feel...that Christmas will never be quite as special at any point in my life as it is right now while my children are very young. Some of these things that feel like they are forever, good and bad, are just part of one flickering moment. In these years, there is a very great deal to love about this season. Just being with them, really. They're wound up, and warm. 

In these years I especially love taking the girls to the winter fair at a Waldorf school near us. It was quite cold today and much of the activity that goes on at the fair (and at the school, I believe) is outdoors. We were all bundled up in handknits (except Mr. Terrible; I need to make him a hat, scarf, gloves), freezing the tips of our noses and shoving our hands down in our pockets, huddled into ourselves but comfortable. I like that feeling.

The big girl did the crafts and the little one mostly played. I made a gnome. The Last Gnome. It was the last stick they had available at the gnome-making craft station, marked up already where the face is supposed to go, so I made him bangs and a little low-down face. I stitched up his hat, too, and put a wee bell on it. His head is big. 

I had to sneak him away from the big kid's bedside to take a picture of him.

He seems like someone I'd want close by me. A good friend.

HSSS

We had a great Halloween. It's wonderful to finally live in a neighborhood that we can trick-or-treat in, or more importantly (for the adults in our house) that people come to for trick-or-treating. People were highly complimentary of our pumpkins and took pictures, which made me enormously happy, that such a silly little thing that we enjoyed doing could make other people smile. I had never really thought of that sort of thing as being community-minded but it really is. We will definitely be doing up our house and making fancy pumpkins next year.

The big kid made this really unexpected last-minute decision to be Dracula(!?), I think because library story time was monster-centric, so we had a really long conversation about literary monsters, and she'd just gotten a set of plastic vampire teeth as a party favor. I painted fake blood on my sweet-faced baby, I'm certain not for the last time. Big sigh. Baby doesn't like wearing costumes, so I didn't bother to buy or make her anything. I wasn't even sure she would consent to wearing one out, but her sister/stylist decided on a Minnie Mouse dress and Mousketeer ears from the costume box. It was very cute, and then somewhere along the way Big Kid decided to start hissing at everyone, because that's what vampires do, so Baby started doing the same. I don't know if you've ever been hissed at by a very small child dressed as Minnie Mouse but it is a singular experience. She was bumbling down the street after her sister saying "Weer SKEEERY! HSSS! HSSS! Weeer TRICKR TRRREEDIN!"

Yeah. You're really, really scary.

This morning she got up and said "Arright, Mama, lesss go trickr treedin."

Then she found a stray box of Nerds and poured it over her waffle.

On into November we go rolling, rolling.

Six

I love the family birthday. I love that Mr. Terrible gets the day off for both of the girls' birthdays and, as a whole family, we hang out and have a beautiful day together. Flowers, presents, a special meal, cake, and extra snuggles seem to always feature. Apparently there will be the occasional overindulgence (four gifts? how did that happen?) but really, what more can a person ask for?

Happy 6th, dear one.

R & S

This afternoon our friends (and sweet and dearly beloved Aunties to our girls) got married. I feel like there is so much that I would like to say about that, that I ought to say, but when you're taking photographs of the ceremony, watching two people who belong to one another reading oaths of love written on parchment that your daughter carried to them up the aisle, all of that lives somewhere else, far away. 

It's just two brave souls declaring their sweet strong vulnerable human love, and you're crying all over the camera. 

Summer reading

Mild-mannered alter-ego

I believe you're supposed to wear the glasses and cape separately for the full disguise effect, but that's alright. When you're "SPSPLN" I think you can rock whatever look you want, up to and including a few spots of strawberry lemonade on the back of your cape.

That's more like it.

THE HARVEST

I always think of a movie trailer voice-over man speaking in capital letters when I see/hear/read the word "harvest". THE HARVEST IS COMING. Or THE HARVEST HAS COME. Or even better, IT'S HARVEST TIIIIIME. You understand, of course.

But when I say THE HARVEST right now, I'm not talking about killing people, like our friend the film trailer voice-over man would be (OBVIOUSLY), I'm talking about being a lawn farmer.

I love that people are growing food in their yards. I don't think it's weird at all, or self-righteous, or a waste of time. I think it's a fantastic use of space and that green growing things will always be good for people, unless we're talking about English ivy, morning glory, blackberries, kudzu or Spartina anglica. Invasives aside, fresh food is good, plants are good, clean outdoor air is good, dirt is good. Good things.

I am, as you would expect, a complete failure at lawn farming, mostly because I am very lazy. Also I have dogs who take enormous pleasure in laying waste to plant beds of all varieties, and children who ask "What's this, Mama?" while holding up a freshly plucked tomato sprout between their fingers.

But this spring, one of Mr. Terrible's coworkers gave him a packet of seeds with which to grow some kind of edible pea pods, which was very nice of her. I let them languish in a stupid, unguarded location for a while, until one of the kids said "What's this?" holding up a packet of edible pea pod seeds with its entire top half torn away. The peas sprayed all over the floor and rolled about like marbles. I rounded them up and took them all outside where I dumped them unceremoniously in the one lonely, empty vegetable bed we'd built from salvage wood two years back. 

"There," I thought. And "Bah."

What I didn't expect was that we would have had a spectacularly soggy spring that would unfold into a decidedly moist summer, alternating, however improbably, between not-to-hot sunny summer days and not-too-cool deluges. A springsummer.

You know who likes this? Not me.

The peas.   

I have accidental peas, the tenacious shooting sprouts of probably over a dozen plucky little germinators. I have done nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing to help these poor fellows-I didn't even bother to cover them with soil when I poured them out on the ground-and yet here they are growing in a verdant heap, tangled in and around one another, unsupported by a trellis or poles. They just lie there all day, rained on by the rain, sunned on by the sun, procreating.

Is there much in the world more beautiful than a pea blossom? Say it, too: pea blossom. 

Today I deigned to look closely at the pea jungle and, behold, there were thin ripe pods ready to eat. 

Each of us pulled one, the girls and I, and ate together: accidental undeserving lawn farmers sharing the warm crisp snapping crinkle of the taste of green.

The Maul

I've spent a bit of time in, of all places, Liverpool, England, and one of my favorite Liverpool-isms is the pronounciation of the word "mall" as "ma-wull", with a short a, as in "cat". Mr. T, being the fuzzily cultured Anglo-American hybrid that he is, never heard it that way, but it was so distinct to me. They don't have malls there like we do in the States, and his family members that spent their holidays in Florida (very common for Brits; when we were in Disney World in April it was chockablock with British vacationers) made a point of visiting American malls to buy consumer goods for much cheaper than they could be had in the U.K.

"We love the ma-wulls there."

I always saw that written in my head as "maul", as in "Let's go to The Maul."

We don't often go to the mall, maul, ma-wull here, just because. It's not really our thing. The mall in our town is one of the worst ones I've ever been in; one of its anchor stores is a Forever 21. But a mall up north of us just opened an American Girl store, and we went this afternoon to check it out. It was the first weekend the store was open, and it was wild: they had tickets for time slots to enter the store, enormous lines to buy all of the fiddly little dolly things and scores of little girls with outfits to match their dolls'. Everyone seemed pleasant and happy, though. It was fun to just look. I liked the potty seat the best.

I let the big girl pick out something, so she made a nail-biting decision between ballet clothes for Addy and a little doll that goes with the other historical doll that she really likes. It's a little Nez Perce girl doll in a cradle board. Tiny and detailed. Kind of hard to resist.

We stopped into the children's shoe store to get the girls' feet measured (I need to do that more often) and confirmed my suspicion that the big girl was walking around in shoes one size too small. They were also falling apart, so it was time.

She picked out some Snow White shoes.

Really, literally Snow White shoes. My childhood self is insanely covetous of those pointy-toed, shiny red shoes with bows and little apple buckles. She says she wants to wear them forever, and I don't doubt it. They were a fantastic deal on clearance so I'm seriously considering buying a couple more pairs in bigger sizes for later. 

We sat down as a family and ate mall food and meandered in and out of shops. I bought her new things but no one exploded or imploded. Want and need met amicably and walked along the strand together, chucking stones into the waves. There were warm cookies and half pints of milk with straws.

When I asked her what her favorite part of her crazy-dolly-store-and-new-shoes day was, she said it was visiting her Great Grandma's house afterward. There was the Great Grandma and enormous sweet dogs and a bigger cousin and everyone admired the shoes. What's not to love?

One the way home she spotted a cloud that looked "like a hummingbird with no wings."

It did.