Poor little neglected blog.

I think this is the longest I’ve gone without posting since the summer of 2005, when Wonderboy was in and out of the hospital. Nothing like that happening now; I’m just busy writing. Writing writing writing.

But I keep meaning to jot down daily notes, at least, since this blog has become our searchable family memory. What will I forget because I didn’t write it down? Rilla lost another tooth. Jane got some exciting news and is preparing for a busy summer—more on that later. The cover of my second Inch and Roly book is finished; I should get the go-ahead to post it here soon. I guess those aren’t really the sort of things you forget, except maybe the particulars of the lost tooth. We’ve seen a lot of lost teeth in this family. Rilla’s first one—did I write this here?—Huck pulled it for her. Not on purpose. He was wiggling it, inspecting it, and he inspected it right out of her mouth.

The butterfly picture up there: she’s been filling a notebook with these drawings. She copies them (copies, not traces) out of our field guide. Her older sisters, and just possibly her mother, too, are immensely proud of her artistic prowess. She can draw circles around me. And squares and triangles too. (Ba dum bum.) The finished drawing above was carefully labeled “PiPEViNE SWALLOTAiL.” With hearts dotting each i, of course.

Things we read this week—

More Brambly Hedge

Jamberry

Dear Mr. Blueberry

The Flying Garbanzos (oh how all my children have loved this goofy book)

Good Dog, Carl

Big Rabbit’s Bad Mood

Angus and the Ducks

Bink and Gollie

Other things I am forgetting. I’ll do a proper Rillabooks post later if I can, but I wanted to record the list before the books are scattered back to the ends of the earth.

Rose is reading Adam of the Road. Beanie: Caddie Woodlawn. Jane recently finished 1984. And a million other things.

I still can’t read fiction and it’s killing me. Thank goodness for garden lit and essays.

Oh! I have a post on poetry up at GeekMom today. Poetry is one of the things still happening regularly around here.

Another thing is spring cleaning! I have LOTS more to say about that—it’s all due to Lesley Austin and her beautiful, beautiful Wisteria & Sunshine forum. The house, which normally falls to pieces when I’m deep in a manuscript, is positively gleaming. I even did the floors. There are more rooms to go but I’ve done the bedrooms and bathrooms (and hall closet and pantry) and that is a thing that has never, in seventeen years of child-raising and novel-writing, happened during the crunch-stage of a manuscript before. Of course it means last week I neglected the garden, and oh, that’s right! I went over a week without blogging.