Blue horse, red heart, green flower

Okay. Well. Our last four days included a vicious bout of possible food poisoning (me), a tummy bug (one of the kids), and an ER visit (another one of the kids). Cut to the good part: everyone seems to be back to good health now. I’ll just add those experiences to the seemingly never-ending list of chapters in That Book I Really Should Write One of These Days about My Family’s Medical Dramas.

Today, I think I’ll just focus on today. Because today was home, and home is good. Home is especially nice when you’ve spent a couple of days away from home at, say, a hospital or two.

Today was our morning walk, and morning smoothie (Scott’s been adding strawberry kefir to mine which makes it sooo yummy), and piano lessons, and reading The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse to Rilla and then spending the longest time talking about Eric Carle’s art—the textures he squiggles into the paint, the shapes that make his collages, the way the horse looks blue at first and then you look closer and see the  purple and green and turquoise and navy. After that book, Rilla needed to paint; it was primal, cellular. I don’t remember why we leapt suddenly to sponge-prints, but I realized she’d never tried them before, and I rummaged under the sink hoping to find a new sponge. Such luck: three of them. Never mind they were the really good kind with a scrubby side. If I don’t jump on a project immediately it probably won’t get done. I cut one of the sponges into a heart and she spent a happy hour making Valentines.

A very good morning.

In the afternoon there was a very earnest little boy digging through every pocket for a “green flower” he’d picked for me—a bit of clover. And a bee in the living room, the shooing-out of which somehow led, mouse-cookie fashion, to my washing the windows and scrubbing the sills while Rose told me stories and helped with the screens.

Jane is catching up on Downton Abbey so she can finish out the season with us.

The most taxing thing I’ve had to do all day is think about what book to read next.

A very good afternoon.