Archive for the 'Family Adventures' Category

July 31, 2008 @ 7:53 am | Filed under: Clippings, Comic Books, Family Adventures, Fun Learning Stuff, Uncategorized

And I was only there for half of it.

Whew. As has always been my comic book convention experience, the weekend was exhausting but sooo much fun. That it fell on this particular weekend was a bummer, though, because a bunch of my girlfriends were at an entirely different conference on the other side of the country, and I (sob) could not be in two places at once.

Looking at all the beautiful pictures from the FCL Conference gave me such a smile, because talk about a study in contrasts! Here’s what their weekend looked like.

Here’s what mine looked like.

Scott had to work at the con Wednesday night, Thursday, Friday, and through the weekend. My mother arrived bright and early Saturday morning, and I brought her home from the airport, gave her a hug, and abandoned her with the children for the next two days. More or less.

On Saturday, while Scott worked at the WildStorm booth and did portfolio review and all that editor stuff they pay him for, I strolled up and down the convention center taking in the sights. There is always a lot to take in.

View from the DC Comics green room.

Saw eye to eye, Yoda and I did.

After a while, you’ve seen so much it all becomes a blur.

Sometimes you just need to sit down and take a little breather.

Fortunately, Scott got a late lunch break just in time for us to hook up with our beloved (and gorgeous) college friend Kristen, her husband Vinny, and Vinny’s Attack of the Show co-producer, Joshua. We survived the cattle crossing that is the big intersection right outside the convention center

and wandered into the Gaslamp District in search of a good place to eat.

Speaking of cattle crossings, we passed these characters just hanging out on a streetcorner.

Rumor has it they were a promo for the TV show Fringe.

The restaurant that boasted of having award-winning meatloaf had a 45-minute wait, so hmph to them. We found ourselves at Fred’s Mexican Cafe, and oh my goodness. The complimentary chips and salsa were so good they nearly made us weep.

Kristen took this picture of me basking in post-salsa contentment.

She also got much better Comic-Con pix than I did.

After stuffing ourselves with cajun shrimp tacos (oh. my. goodness.) and carnitas burritos, we waddled back down the street toward the Con. OK, I waddled. Scott had to dash ahead to get back for booth duty. Kristen and I took our time. We passed Joss Whedon on the street. Kristen greeted him with what is now my favorite greeting ever. (”Hey, Joss Whedon! Yay!”) He grinned. Then we reached Kristen’s hotel and said a weepy goodbye. L.A. is just too dang far away. At least, as the car drives.

Back to the Con for me, where I visited artist friends until Scott was finished at the booth. Tim Sale shook his head in amazement at the news that we are expecting again. I told him we figure there won’t be any Social Security by the time we’re old enough to draw it, so we’re making sure we have plenty of children around to take care of us. He said, “Good point. It’ll be an agrarian society by then anyway, so you’ll need all those kids to work the farm.” Ha.

It was around that time that I had a little bag crisis. The bag I’d brought with me (this delicious creation by Beauty That Moves) turned out to be just a leetle too small for the event. My camera was perched too near the top, just begging to be snatched. What choice did I have? There was this booth full of big ole bags with zippers, and one of them was lime green. Seriously, what choice did I have. OK. I admit it. I have a little problem when it comes to bags. In fact, just minutes later when my husband was introducing me to one of his favorite writers in the comics industry (Kelley Puckett, whom I’ve been hearing about—and reading—for fifteen years, but somehow had never met until this weekend!), he broke off in mid-sentence and said, “Hey, is that a new bag?” I said, “Hmm? What?” And he turned to Kelley and said, “My wife has only two flaws.” (He’s wrong about that, but it was sweet.) “Number one: her ridiculous affection for me. Number two: her compulsion for bags.” I can’t deny it. I am so thrifty and purchase-cautious when it comes to clothes and furniture and household items and pretty much everything except books and handbags. I mean, it’s not like I buy a bag a month or anything like that. But three or four a year, yeah, maybe. It’s a quest, see, for the perfect bag. As pretty as this one but with lots of pockets and a sturdy bottom and some kind of inherent magic that will make me always be able to locate my keys when I need to. That kind of bag.

But I digress.

Our Saturday evening wrapped up with what is for me the best part of a comic book convention. We wound up in the Hyatt bar eating appetizers and drinking beer (ginger ale for me) with a group of writers and artists. I love this, the jovial camaraderie and stimulating discussion of a community of creative colleagues. Our Barcelona pal Andy Diggle was there (but no Jock, alas), and Kelley Puckett joined us, and Fiona Staples (Scott’s artist on Jack Hawksmoor), and a bunch of WildStorm people, and assorted other folks wandering in and out. We stayed up talking too late and dragged ourselves home well past midnight.

And then poor Scott had to start all over at 9 a.m. on Sunday. I lingered at home, took the girls to Mass, played with my little ones. I didn’t want to take a second car into the convention-center madness, so I parked at the trolley station near our house and took the orange line downtown. And what an interesting trolley ride that was. I Twittered the experience (scroll down to “waiting for the trolley” and read upwards) and was probably lucky the Loud Girl didn’t know I was recording her rantings for all the internet to see. I told Scott you know it’s been a freaky train ride when it’s a relief to get back to all the nice, sane people at Comic-Con.

Like these guys.

I am proud to say I bought no bags on Sunday (although the blue soldier guy’s messenger bag up there is kind of cute, isn’t it). I took in the sights and drank free DC Comics cranberry juice and met more nice artists and attended the WildStorm panel. And then it was back to the Hyatt for more food & fun with Fiona and Andy (but no Kelley this time) and Mike Costa and Neil Googe and other engaging, talented folks. Scott, Mike, Andy, and I spent a good three hours talking about the nature of story. That, my friends, is why I go to comic conventions.

Later we stopped by a party hosted by Mark Buckingham, Bill Willingham, and Matt Sturges, but I was too tired to stay long. My obliging hubby took me home where I snuggled up next to my baby who is no longer a baby and dreamed about absolutely nothing, because I was that wiped out.

Tags: Comic Books, comic con, San Diego Comic-Con, SDCC

July 23, 2008 @ 6:24 am | Filed under: Family, Family Adventures, Uncategorized

Last Friday Jane and her friends had the great fun of making blankets together for a service project headed by my sweet and generous friend Katie. All the volunteers were sent home with giant bags of fabric, fleece and cotton, to be used in making more blankets for the pro-life center and anything else the girls want to tackle for themselves or their families. Jane spent the weekend making fleece blankets and pillows, some knotted, some hand-sewn. I promised to work on making a space for her to have easy access to the sewing machine: all three big girls very much want to learn to sew, really sew, on the machine. So that was Monday’s project: finishing the big overhaul of the craft room that I started while the girls were in Colorado.

What I had done while they were gone was: tidy and reorganize the shelves, especially the craft-supply shelves under the window. Now it was time to tackle the closet. Jane was on hand to bag the trash I pitched onto the floor behind me. One of the first treasures I unearthed was a big book of placemats to color in, a German publication I remembering buying two-for-a-dollar at a Hearthsong sale many years ago. This felicitous find kept Beanie busy for most of the day, perched at the table behind me in the middle of the craft room. And Rose worked her magic on the little ones, entertaining them, guarding them from harm, answering countless requests for the refilling of sippy cups.

About this “craft room.” It ought sensibly to be a bedroom. We are (for now) seven people in a 1700-square-foot house. Rilla still sleeps in my bed. She’ll most likely move to a toddler bed next to mine sometime before the baby comes. That’s been our pattern with all the others and it has worked beautifully four times. Wonderboy has his own room, sort of: it’s also Scott’s office and laundry-folding center, and the boy’s closet absorbs a lot of the overflow from the rest of the house. The three older girls share a bedroom, from which we can hear them giggling and talking until late into the night.

The craft room (I call it that because it’s where the girls do most of their drawing and painting and Sculpey-ing and snipping of tiny bits of paper for their own inscrutable purposes) has three tall bookcases full of kids’ books, one tall bookcase full of Scott’s CDs, a fifth tall bookcase half full of more books and, until yesterday, half full of craftsy overflow such as crumpled origami paper, dried-up glue sticks, and eraserless pencils. We must make a lot of mistakes around here, because never in my life have I seen so many pencils with erasers worn away to the metal.

There’s a small desk in the craft room amid all the bookcases. This used to be my desk—since college days, actually—but in this house I wanted to make sure Jane had a corner all her own, so it’s her desk now. She has my old laptop set up there (no internet access, unfortunately—it’s too old for anything but dial-up) as well as all her beading, crocheting, sewing, paperfolding, etc, supplies. What we did on Monday was clear off some shelves beside the desk for her personal use and add a small end table in the corner for the laptop to go on when she wants the desk clear for sewing. And we moved the sewing machine to her desk. Jane’s in heaven.

Rose has long wanted a desk of her own too, and as soon as the dramatic emptying and organizing of the craft-room closet (you can imagine what it looked like before) was complete, she claimed her nook. We have an old children’s table from IKEA in there—I was using it as a kind of shelf. It’s Rose’s desk now, and I think what she loves about it is that it is inside the closet. Safe from sneaky spies, you understand, and prying toddler hands. She found a chair that fits the table and discovered she can store it on the table when the closet door is closed.

Beanie does not yet crave a desk of her own. “I like to be wherever you are, Mommy,” she says, causing me to kiss her all over her face.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we tackled the laundry room and Wonderboy’s room. Stunning progress, if I do say so myself. It may be the last boastful thing I’ll say all week, because the San Diego Comicon begins today (at least, Scott’s work-required wining and dining of the talent does), and just knowing I’m on bedtime duty for the next three days has already sapped all my energy. Also I have to go grocery shopping today and you know how that brings out the wilting lily in me. Do you hear that swell of sad violins? Waaah…

But my marvelous mama arrives bright and early Saturday morning and then I’ll become, for the weekend, a Mary Lennox’s mother kind of mother, gadding off to parties with an airy farewell wave of the hand. Okay, maybe that’s overstating a bit. (Tangent: a Rose quote from the other day: “Mom, I can definitely tell that Rilla is our baby. She’s prone to hyperbole just like you and Daddy. I just offered her a drink of water and she was grumpy and shouted, ‘NO! I never gon’ have water a-more!”)

Poor Rilla. Is it her fault she’s not a morning person?

Anyway, so maybe I won’t be quite as bad as Mrs. Lennox, but I do plan to spend a good bit of time at Con-related festivities. That’s the whole entire reason my mother is flying out here this weekend. Isn’t she the best? (And that, my friends, is no hyperbole.)

Ahead today: Shakespeare Club. I hope. In my closet-cleaning frenzy yesterday I forgot to send out a reminder email to the other moms. Even Mrs. Lennox had better manners than that.

July 2, 2008 @ 6:29 am | Filed under: Family Adventures

So far:

A trip to the pool with their beloved cousin.

Kitty cats to cuddle.

Grandma’s home cooking—believe me, there is nothing better in this world.

Three days in the mountains!

The Continental Divide.

Wildflowers.

Alpine sliding.

Horseback riding.

Roller skating.

Stepping in snow for the first time since leaving Virginia.

Making crafts at the YMCA camp.

Tour of alpaca farm. Baby llamas up close. Wool to take home.

More crafting!

A trip to a lake? The phone was cutting out at this point so I’m fuzzy on the details.

And from the sound of it, numerous gift shop excursions. “I got a hat, and a tiny horse with bridle, and…”

Are these children ever going to want to come home?

June 30, 2008 @ 7:23 am | Filed under: Family Adventures

This is going to be a strange week. My three big girls are off in Colorado visiting my parents. And my sisters, and my twelve-year-old niece. And the Continental Divide. And the awesome alpine slide I loved as a kid. Not that I’m jealous or anything.

Well, the little ones and I have an exciting week planned right here at home. For example: potty training! Woot woot! And closet-cleaning. And under-the-beds cleaning. And bookshelf-purging. Oh, the heartpounding thrill of it all!

Now who’s jealous?

June 27, 2008 @ 6:35 pm | Filed under: Baby, Family Adventures

Have you noticed? Seems like everywhere I click lately, there’s another happy announcement.

Well, here too.

When I read Suzanne’s post in May, I grinned big. I wasn’t quite ready to share our news yet, but Suzanne and I must be just about on the same schedule. Bairn number six is due to join this party in early January. Given my due date (New Year’s Eve, or Hogmanay to you Martha fans) and my track record (all five babies born somewhere between 41 and 42 weeks), Scott is fully confident I’ll be delivering on Elvis’s birthday. That’s January 8th, as if I need to tell you that.

We are all immensely excited. One of us is also fiercely ill, but that shouldn’t last too much longer. Here’s to our first California baby!

P.S. Whom did I miss up there? I know that sentence in blue has more linky potential.

UPDATE: I knew I was missing someone. Because I am a knucklehead, for real. “I’m not a smart person; I only play on on the internet.” I missed one of my best friends, of course. Whose big day is now only days away, and I’ve been counting down in giddy excitement. Ah, Sarah, how do you put up with me?

(And check the comments for other expectant moms. So awesome!)

June 14, 2008 @ 8:40 am | Filed under: Family, Family Adventures, Nature Study

The busier we are, the more I have to write about and the less time I have to write. It’s been an especially busy couple of weeks. Our Shakespeare Club staged a splendid performance of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am so proud of those kids. Our plans to perform outdoors were thwarted by San Diego’s first rain in weeks, but our obliging hosts, the Grimms, converted their living room into a perfect stage. We had a great time and celebrated with Alice’s special Midsummer Night’s Tea menu, which the rest of you can get a look at very soon when her long-awaited book hits the shelves.

Have I mentioned how excited I am about this book? It’s a gem. And I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. It’s called Haystack Full of Needles: A Catholic Home Educator’s Guide to Socialization, and it is full of surprises. And it’s not just for Catholics, nor even just for homeschoolers, for that matter. It’s being published by Hillside Education and is already available for preorder. Woohoo!

(By the way, Alice will be giving two talks at the Family-Centered Learning Conference in Lancaster, PA, on July 26th. Conference organizer Michele Quigley has put together a great lineup of speakers. Looks like tons of fun and I wish I were going!)

Other things that have happened in the past few weeks:

• I became the mother of a teenager (speaking of gems). Congratulations, Jane my love!

• Our ballet group had its spring recital. Jane was in three dances and did a beautiful job. They all did.

• The kids and I made a spur-of-the-moment visit to our favorite local nature preserve, Mission Trails. We’d been talking about the Kumeyaay Indians, and the visitor center there has several Kumeyaay artifcacts, including large flat stones with hollows ground into them by acorn- and grain-pounding pestles centuries ago.

This plant was our favorite sight of the day. It’s a member of the yucca family and goes by the colorful common names of Our Lord’s Candle or Spanish Bayonet.

We also saw this guy. He’s much less alarming in his natural habitat than in, say, our laundry room.

• We had an exciting new visitor to our backyard: our very first sighting of the Western Scrub Jay. No photos because Rose and I were too busy gawking. We had bluejays a-plenty at our feeders in Virginia, of course, but here we’ve been in California for a year and a half and we still hadn’t seen their western cousins! Hard to believe, but true. We’re still watching for a Steller’s Jay. Meanwhile, we enjoy the daily antics of our parliament of crows. Ever since I set up my nifty solar-powered birdbath fountain (awesome Mother’s Day present), the crows have been huge fans of Chez Peterson. They arrive with hunks of bread and perch on the edge of the birdbath, dunking their crusts and tearing off little bites of bread. It’s quite comical, and very messy. We have to clean gooey bread crumbs out of the filter every morning, but it’s worth it.

• The vines that took over our compost pile continue to sprawl across the yard. The blossoms look pumpkiny to me, which would make sense because I did dump our rotting jack-o-lantern in the pile last winter. But the fat green melon-thing that is growing on one of the vines looks decidedly watermelonish. Which is very confusing. I did toss some watermelon scraps out there, but the flowers are way too big for watermelon. All the pictures I’ve found of baby pumpkins look very different in color and shape. I suppose it could be a squash of some kind. Did we compost any squash scraps? Looks too fat for zucchini. We are perplexed.

• Some rodent chewed through the big plastic bin I keep my birdseed in. Whoops. There’s nothing left in there but empty sunflower husks. Poor birdies. Replacement bin and seed is on my list of errands for this week.

Oh, I’m sure there was more to tell, but I’m out of time. I’ll end with the obligatory dose of cute.

June 3, 2008 @ 9:01 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures, Uncategorized

It is always interesting to see what odds and ends have accumulated on my bed by the end of the day. My bedroom is a favorite spot for reading, playing Polly Pockets, destroying bedsprings acrobatics, and sundry other activities. Often, at the tired end of a day, I’ll find a pair of dice, a toy frog, a candy wrapper, a sprinkling of buttons: flotsam and jetsam suggesting that perhaps Beaver Cleaver has wandered in and emptied his overalls pockets on my comforter sometime between his after-school milk and cookies and his slingshot attack on Eddie Haskell.

Tonight I find: two hair barrettes (it’s not the Beaver, then); two small sun visors, one pink, one white; a Sandra Boynton book; the decapitated head of a coreopsis; a crumpled tissue, presumably used (ew); and a book I distinctly remember leaving on the nightstand: Noel Perrin’s A Reader’s Delight, a surprise birthday gift from a darling friend, which I have been treating myself to, one delicious essay at a time, over the past six months. What’s especially intriguing is that this morning, the book’s cover was papered with small pink Post-Its: the evidence of a previous day’s fun-in-Mom’s-room hijinks. I had been keeping a small chunk of Post-Its on the aforementioned bedside table for the handy flagging of quotes to savor later. A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the small chunk of notes had been systematically dismantled, one satisfying shhhnk after another, no doubt, and reassembled mosaic fashion upon Mr. Perrin’s fine tome.

Now, today, all the little pink stickies are gone. Vanished. I’ve looked under my pillows. I wonder where I’ll find them?

***

Beanie and I bawled in each other’s arms today. It was awfully sweet. She had picked up an Illustrated Classics version of Jack London’s White Fang at the library earlier in the day. An adaptation, yes, but the kid is seven. Adaptation or no, this was still a hefty volume. She also checked out Dracula, but I told her I should preview that one for her, might be a little scary. She doesn’t like scary. When we got home from the library, all three girls scattered with their armloads of treasure. Beanie reappeared about 45 minutes later, her finger holding her place in White Fang.

“I think you’re right, Mom,” she said. “Dracula might be a bit much for me right now. White Fang is about a REAL wolf and it is so scary! But I love it. You’ve GOT to read it.”

She remained glued to the book all afternoon. When she finished, with a happy sigh, she turned to me and told me all about it. White Fang’s numerous escapes from peril, his brave acts, his poor mother whom he never saw again.

I tried to think of other wolf/dog books she might like, and Stone Fox came to mind. But oh, that heartbreaker of an ending. I told her I knew a wonderful book about a dog similar to White Fang—a Husky, not a wolf—but that it had a sad ending. She likes forewarning of these things.

“Does the dog die?”

(Spoiler alert.)

“Yes. It makes a brave sacrifice for a little boy. Do you think you’d like to read it?”

“Mmm, no, not yet. Will you tell me the story?”

And so I did, the two of us perched on bar stools at the living-room side of the kitchen counter. How the little boy’s grandpa can’t pay his back taxes, loses heart, gets sick. How the little boy hears about the sled-dog race, the prize money in just the right amount. How he practices with his faithful old dog, Searchlight. How everyone knows the race will be run by the big silent Indian, Stone Fox, with his team of five champion dogs. How the boy is determined to try anyway because it’s his last hope. How Searchlight holds her own against the dog-pack surprisingly well, running neck and neck with Stone Fox’s lead dog. How, yards from the finish line, her old heart bursts, and she falls down dead. How the little boy stares down at her in stunned disbelief and grief. How Stone Fox halts his dogs, leaves his sled, picks up the fallen Searchlight and carries her, pulling the boy on his ramshackle sled, across the finish line.

Both of us were bawling by this point. How could we not? My voice was cracking as I tried to finish; tears were streaming from Beanie’s big eyes. She lunged forward, tipping her stool, throwing her arms around me.

“Oh, Mommy. That’s so sad.”

“I know, sweetie, it really is.”

“But it’s…” She paused, seeking the right word. “It’s noble, too. Isn’t it?” Another pause. “White Fang did some noble things too. But it’s a very happy ending. It’s the best book I ever read, Mom.”

***

I’m in my bedroom, writing this post, when I hear the following sequence of events: Scott walking down the hall. Scott suddenly bursting out in an incoherent shout: “GAAH!” Scott bellowing for Rose, speaking to her softly. Rose murmuring a reply. Scott calling the other girls. Pattering feet. Shrieks, squeals, commotion. Paper rattling. A door slamming.

A little while later, Scott IMs me from the other computer. Wants to know if I’m still awake: a joke, because even if I weren’t working, who could sleep through all that shouting? What on earth, I ask him. He explains, but you’ll need a bit of backstory. See, Rose has this toy snake that looks completely realistic. And sometimes she plays a joke on me: coils it in a box of diapers or a laundry basket, somewhere I’ll come upon it unsuspectingly and scream my head off because THERE IS A SNAKE IN THE BOX OF DIAPERS. Then everybody comes running and laughs and laughs. Oh, isn’t it hilarious, Mom just lost another ten years off her life. Ha ha.

I live with a pack of smart alecks; have I mentioned that?

So what happened was, Scott was walking down the hall to the laundry room and at the bottom of the two-step staircase, he almost stepped on a big old lizard. (That was the GAAH.) Looking twice at the hideous, motionless thing, he realized it wasn’t real. Must be one of Rose’s little jokes on Mom, which hmm, seems my hubby finds those a lot funnier when I’m the hapless victim. Thus the bellow for Rose, presumably to tell her to save her jokes for when Mom is sure to be the patsy.

“That’s real, Daddy,” says Rose. And then it moved.

It was this thing. Eek. No wonder he shouted.

Is a transcript too dorky?

Scott: It was about eight or nine inches long
I love it
Bit the hell out of me, though.
Understandably

me: It bit you????

Scott: Yeah.
Doesn’t have much in the way of teeth, fortunately

me: no way!!!! baby!!!!
how?
where?

Scott: Um. Put its mouth on my finger and closed?

me: You offered it your finger?

Scott: Yes.
Yes.
I thought it might be hungry.
Apparently so.

me: Seriously. Did it really bite you?

me: And more importantly, where is it now?

Scott: It started running, but had trouble getting traction on the floor. So it started to go into a paper bag, which was good.

me: Hooray for lousy housekeeping!

Scott: But the bag was ripped, so it ran out the hole. Which was bad.

me: Boo for lousy housekeeping.

Scott: So I picked it up.
And it bit me.
So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again.

me: Buddy.

Scott: And it bit me again.

me: Honey!!!

Scott: So I dropped it.
Then I picked it up again and tried to throw it outside.
But it was biting me again so I dropped it again.
Finally, I threw it.
And the last I saw it was running under our bedroom door.

(At this point I emit a piercing shriek of my own. I am a long way from Scott’s computer, but evidently the sound carries.)

Scott: Thank you.
That was very gratifying

me: I HATE YOU.

Scott: It landed between the garbage can and the recycling can.

me: I am never taking out the trash again.

Scott: I love it and wicked regret tossing it out of the house.

me: It will never be your friend now.

Scott: Sometimes I act without thinking

me: You?
Really?

Scott: I know!
I think this might really hurt our long term relationship, Liz and me.

me: That’s the same kind of lizard who freaked me out that time in the watering can.
hanging out in there, looking like a rattler.

Scott: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1285/534174395_b6bfe60133_o.jpg

me: Gah.

I do not want to know how that thing got into my house. Nor do I desire to know, any longer, what happened to my little pink Post-Its. It ate them, I just know it.

May 27, 2008 @ 6:52 pm | Filed under: Family Adventures

In the mornings, I am so full of things to write about but don’t have time. At night, I have time but no words. I had about three posts in my head this morning…where they’re hiding now, I couldn’t say.

All right, then, I shall abandon attempts at cohesiveness and simply string sentences together.

Our daily drawing time has been such a lovely part of the day, these past two weeks. We’ve managed it nearly every day except for the weekends and a couple of busy out-of-the-house days. Sometimes the girls paint, sometimes they draw. Jane doesn’t always join us: she is practicing like crazy for the piano guild auditions coming up in a couple of weeks.

I suppose this is fairly obvious, but whenever I say “the girls” I mean my three oldest. Wonderboy and Rilla are joining in drawing time, too. Wonderboy loves the ritual of it: getting out Grandpa’s special picture placemats, distributing drawing paper, passing out the tins of good crayons. He LOVES those block beeswax crayons I bought a zillion years ago. Those things last forever. Rilla loves whatever color you were planning to use next, thank you very much.

Something not going so swimmingly lately: our read-aloud time. This happens from time to time. It’s a kids-of-many-ages rhythm thing, I guess. Sometimes we hit a groove where the little ones are content to bop around while I read; other times, nope. No go. This is one of those times. Beanie and I have been bogged down in the middle of Knight’s Castle for ages, but not because we aren’t enjoying it. We’re loving it, and so is Rose, whose official position at the moment is to prefer NOT to be part of read-alouds, but who inevititably winds up leaning over the back of the couch, drawn in. Shhh. Let’s not call attention to it.

To make up for the fizzled reading-aloud, I’m trying to tell more stories. This is something I used to be very good about, oh, until about five or six years ago. No, wait, four and a half years ago. Wonderboy’s birth was the turning point (a statement that applies to a great many things in our life). I would read folk and fairy tales and practice them in my head in the shower, so that I always had a good story on hand if need or opportunity arose. Boring waits in line, boring waits in doctors’ offices, that sort of thing. Actually this is something I’ve been doing since way before I had kids; I remember telling Scott’s little second cousins some stories at various Peterson family gatherings, and then later it was his nephews and nieces. It figures my own kids (the younger set, at least) would get less of this than assorted friends-and-relations. Shoemaker’s children go barefoot and all that.

So anyway, I’ve been remembering some of the old tales and airing them out now and then. Beanie makes the most enchanting (and enchanted) audience. Rose listens with a quiet smile and then adds funny commentary later. Rilla follows the narrative amazingly well. Wonderboy echoes random phrases—”Horse go fast?”—and then wants to know where Dad is. At work? Yes, Dad’s at work. Where Dad keys? In his pocket. Where Dad pone? Dad’s phone is in his pocket. Where Dad’s wallet? In his pocket. Dad get pizza? Probably. Yes, Dad is probably out somewhere getting pizza at this very moment, with his phone and his keys and his wallet all jingling around in one giant pocket, because we all know that is what he secretly does when he leaves the house all day. Work, schmork. He’s off having pizza.

We’re on to you, buddy.

March 6, 2008 @ 9:23 pm | Filed under: Books, Connections, Family Adventures

This morning Jane was showing me her coin collection, which contains a number of interesting specimens thanks to our world-traveling pal Keri. She has coins from Vietnam, India, Singapore, China, Korea, Japan, and a bunch of other places. We couldn’t figure out where a few of them came from, so we started Googling and figured out which ones came from Korea and which came from China.

The third coin described in this post is one of the Korean coins she was trying to figure out, with a spear of rice on one face. Another coin had writing on it that looked like Greek to Jane, so she took it to Rose for help translating the letters. Rho, iota, eta, they thought—and then a character neither of them recognized, and they brought it to me, and I looked at the other side of the coin and saw EIRE, so I knew it was from Ireland. Not Greek letters after all.

It took a bit of hunting, but we tracked that one down online too and read some interesting things about Irish coins. The one Jane has is a penny, but it seems so big compared to our U.S. pennies, almost the size of a quarter. It has a hen with chicks on it, and there’s a bit of history about some of these hen-and-chick pennies missing one of the chicks. Jane’s has all the chicks.

We saw that there are books with pictures of all the world coins in them, and Jane checked the library to see if there were any copies in our system. There are, and one was in a branch nearby. So after Wonderboy’s speech therapy session, we swung by the library and Jane got her book. Rose got the new Gail Carson Levine, and Beanie emerged from the stacks clutching an Edward Eager novel. I just finished reading Half Magic to her yesterday, or was it the day before? Oh, we had such a good time with that book. Jane was the one who hunted up Knight’s Castle for her, and Beanie nearly crushed her ribs with gratitude.

On the way out of the library, I picked up a cheap Miss Marple collection from the sale rack. In the courtyard outside, there is a mighty old tree, fat-trunked, low-branched, limbs spread wide to beckon small girls with new books. All three girls clambered up and commenced a-reading, while Rilla and Wonderboy (oh gosh, I really do need to come up with a new blog name for him: he’s getting too big for this) hunted bugs at the base of the tree. I sat on the grass, enjoying the peaceful moment. An elderly woman pushed her walker toward us and paused for a chat. “I’ve been watching you since you came out of the library,” she said. She approved of the tree-climbing and the book-reading. “I’m happy to see a mother bring her children to the library. If you read,” she told Jane, “you can do anything you want in life.” She inspected our haul and listened to the whole coin-identification story. She noticed the boy’s hearing aids and we compared notes; she just started wearing them herself. Then her cell phone rang, and she said her daughter had arrived to pick her up, and she bid each child a cordial farewell and departed. “I hope,” she called back to me, “that you have a very nice life.”

Oh, I do, I do.

March 5, 2008 @ 8:41 pm | Filed under: Family Adventures

Thank you all for your kind comments. Emily and I are still working on the finishing touches, which is the best part of moving into new digs, don’t you think? All the boxes are unpacked, and you’re just going around hanging pictures and picking out the sunniest windowsill for your geranium, and the place begins to feel like home.

Speaking of geraniums, they are blooming all over town: great big bushes of them. This knocked my socks off last year and it’s wowing me again. Perennial geraniums. Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. We planted a small red geranium in our flowerbed last summer and it too is loaded with blooms. The African daisies, lovely white petals washed with blue, with deep purple-blue centers, are flaunting themselves all over the neighborhood. Rose can’t resist the clump in our backyard and as a result I am walking around with a daisy tucked behind my ear all day, and I forget it’s there until Scott comes home and teases me.

My friend Katie has a gorgeous tangle of orange-red nasturtiums in her front yard, the most dazzling groundcover you ever saw. At her daughter’s birthday party last week, another mother picked me a handful to bring home. I plunked them in one of the kids’ cups and it’s like the tropics on my windowsill.

Someone needs to teach me how to Photoshop out the water marks on my window. Except I don’t have Photoshop, so never mind. (In my defense, there’s a hanging basket on the other side of that window, so the glass gets sprayed with water every morning. What, you think I should do something about that?)

We had the Journey North gang here today. It’s getting so exciting: we’re beginning to be able to make guesses about the latitude of the mystery cities. City X has to be south of San Diego and north of the equator, that kind of thing. I love to see the light bulbs go off for the kids. The first few weeks of graphing photoperiods were kind of bumpy, but they’ve all got the hang of it now and they breeze right through. We have time afterward for practicing our Shakespeare scenes, which we’ll be performing for the parents sometime this spring. No hurry. The girls are deep into talks about costume plans. The boys hightail it outside for that part—and usually the girls aren’t far behind. Today they invented a game, so Jane tells me. It’s called “Something,” as in “Let’s play something”—thus a game is born. Jane was explaining the rules to me after dinner but by then my eyes were starting to make @ signs. Wednesdays are busy days.

Earlier this week, I took the four younger kids to a park during Jane’s science lab. Jackpot: the parks department had deposited a giant load of mulch on the playground at the foot of the slide, and they hadn’t started spreading it yet. Rose and Bean rushed to the top of Mulch Mountain, elevation at least six feet. They crowed their triumph there under the lanky eucalytpus trees, queens of the mountain for three whole minutes before Queen Rilla deposed them, ordering them to convey Her Royal Highness to the top. Wonderboy, loyal knave, made a brave sally down the slide into the soft hillside. I wished for a camera, or a royal portrait painter.

I thought about the picture on top of this blog, the one I had to bring with me here, no matter what. My father took it—how many 4th of Julys ago? I think Jane was seven, Rose about four. They’re on top of a mountain near our old home at the edge of the Blue Ridge. Here we are perched on the other end of the continent, still climbing mountains, still shouting with wonder on the heights. These are the golden years, I tell Scott all the time. I have been telling him that for ten years. Golden like a sunflower, crowned head craned upward to glory in the sun.

We planted sunflower seeds in the garden yesterday, or maybe it was Monday, when we came down from the mountain.  I’m glad I have them here on this blog, too. They mean happy and golden and sunlight. I am glad, glad to be in my sunflower years.