Archive for September, 2011
Big adventure yesterday! Spent a wonderful morning at the Good Vibrations Unschooling Conference—Rilla particularly enjoyed the art room, as you can see—and arrived home about five minutes after the Great SoCal Blackout began. We’re heading back up to the conference now (some of us), so I’ll have to save the stories for later. Wound up being quite a fun evening, all in all, but we are VERY grateful to have power restored this morning. I know many of our East Coast friends had to endure much longer outages—it can be brutal, seriously. The San Diego heat wave seems to have broken this morning, too, so that’s another thing to be thankful for.
More later!
Scott took the girls to the beach today. “I love being freelance,” he wrote on Facebook later. “(No deadlines were harmed in the making of this perfect day.)”
I thought I was going to do a massive girls’-closet overhaul while Huck binged on Thomas the Tank Engine. Not so. He ran me ragged, that cherub, that imp, playing cars and reading books and watering plants. It was, needless to say, delightful. The closet is still a disaster. It probably would’ve been again in a week or two anyway.
I decided to poke through my archives to see what I’d written about Labor Day in years past. Got as far as this entry from September, 2005—I missed Labor Day that year; it seems we recovering from one of baby Wonderboy’s surgeries—and am now grinning over this tidbit about then-four-year-old Beanie:
The other day she was stuck in a loop of “The Old Gray Mare.” After about forty repetitions, she turned to me and said, “What’s ain’t?”
I explained. She experimented with the synonym: “The old gray mare just isn’t what she used to be, isn’t what she used to be…nope, ain’t sounds better.”
This, my friends, THIS is why I blog. I would never remember this stuff otherwise.
In that spirit, a few recent moments I want to hold on to (some tweeted and/or Facebooked, but they’ve already scrolled away into oblivion there):
* the way Huck can be swung right out of a cranky mood by the magical words, “Where’s the big rig?”
* I love that when my kids play school, it involves each “student” telling the “teacher” what he or she wants to learn, and the teacher runs around the house gathering stuff to make it happen.
* Rilla: “Mommy, how did you get to be so good at blowing up balloons? I thought you were a writer, not a balloon-blower-upper.”
* Today’s morning glory blossom-count: twenty-five. Or, if you ask the two-year-old: “One, two, fee, TEN!”
September 4, 2011 @ 7:04 am | Filed under:
Books My review of First Second’s wonderful Nursery Rhyme Comics is up at GeekMom.
September 3, 2011 @ 9:34 am | Filed under:
Links “I ended up bushwhacking through the hillsides to avoid the ravines that now stood where the road used to be. The road was gone. Sure, little stretches remained, but not many. Our neighbor’s barn was missing, swallowed up by the re-routed river. Further down, a cottage was gone, swept away as the river claimed the path that the road used to take. I came to one spot with no outlet, the river taking over everything. I scurried across a downed tree acting as a bridge over the water. I met some more people, gawking in disbelief at the destruction. An elderly woman gave me her son’s phone number, hoping that I might be able to call if I found service.”
via Smokeless Fire.
Hoping my own Vermont pals are all right…
UPDATED with link to a piece about the devastation in New Jersey and Connecticut. Did you know that more than 20% of Connecticut residents are still without power?
Okay! So! I know I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet here lately! Lots happening offscreen. Good stuff. Busy stuff. I’m not even reading much. But I’ve got a bunch of posts in the hopper—some for here and some for GeekMom. The kids and I are enjoying our science reading, and Beanie, Rose, and Rilla are doing a bit of Spanish with me, and we had a Moon Week for Rilla which was delightful. Not this weekend but next we’ll be at the Good Vibrations Unschooling Conference: such fun.
The girls and I are also on a World of Warcraft kick. (TONS of math in that, btw, but that’s not at all the reason.) We crowd together on my bed with the laptop. Jane’s mother would be aghast at the violence, but Huck’s mother frankly relishes mowing down orcs. Besides, my avatar has a pet tiger. A pet tiger!
In other news: the morning glories are more glorious every morning. And the melon vine has two blossoms. And the other day I startled a little tiny young alligator lizard on the back patio, and it skittered up a wall and then fell off, landing in the parsley patch, looking for all the world like a toddler trying to run and toppling down on its bottom. Poor little thing, it was hilarious.
Scott had a really lovely guest post at DCWKA last week, telling about how he came to write the first Oracle stand-alone story. Have I mentioned I love it when he writes about his work?
Here’s a photo of one my favorite sights: big girl reads to little boy.
