Being Aunted Into Calm

 It was a slow day today, full of laundry on laundry, slow sifting through the camping boxes, ferreting out the sand and stray dirty socks and dead batteries and putting everything slowly back where it ought to be, neatly folded and washed. It feels incredibly good to just keep the washing machine on a continuous hum and spend all day with my arms buried deep in warm, fresh clothes. Everyone is shifting sizes again so there is more than just a massive amount of dirties to catch up with, there's all kinds of hand-me-down business that needs doing too. I've been back and forth to the storage boxes for each size in the garage and I am also accumulating a box for my sister, Foxy that will go sailing off to Michigan to the littler cousins.

 My aunt and I shared a Face Time chat this morning after breakfast over hot tea for me and coffee for her. What a beautiful thing it is to have technology and also those who love us deeply. I took her on a little mini-tour of the rose garden outside my front door and told her all about the angst of being a wuss camper. She was her usual bubbly self and listened to all the things that tie me up in knots and smiled effusively and told me that it was of no eternal account. And the strange thing about it is that being loved, and listened too meant that her dismissal lifted the tangled net off my shoulders. By the time I hung up I was laughing more and freer, able to shift the guilt and weight of my To Do List and my personal division. Isn't it great what perspective, wisdom and a little well placed love can do?God bless the aunties of the world....

There isn't a lot left to this week and I am almost through with the nesting back into our life. Next I must sit down and begin madly planning things for the school year. Our schedule is a writhing mass, waiting to be addressed but for now, the Schedule Beast can quietly growl. I have had tea and aunting and I on my way to the garden for a ripe fig from our tree with my man....we shall step gently over the two tents that are still spread out, airing in the backyard, between the tipped over tricycle and the two hockey sticks and upended lawn furniture.

Back Home....Reboot!

And then there was the time I went meandering off to the Pacific Northwest and fell into a giant black bloggy hole and didn't post at all for three whole weeks! Whew! I didn't mean to do it, I really thought that I would be clicking along in the evenings recording all our adventures and staying in touch like I did while we were in California this past fall. Sometimes you can do it, and sometimes life has other plans.

 I managed one measly post and found that there was a bug in the app I use for mobile blogging (I don't have a laptop that I can take on the road so blogging on the phone is my go to, when not home). Anyhow, it turned out that the app wouldn't work properly and refused to allow more than one photo per post. It sounds kind of silly now, but I think I felt like posts with only one photo weren't worth it. So, I just went AWOL. I think I meant to do an explanation at some point in the trip to let my readers know what happened to me but I never really did.

Whoops!

Anyhow....three weeks on the road and now we are home. Whew. It was such a long time away that I heard A telling a friend the other day that he had forgotten which direction the light switch flips in his own bathroom. Strange to feel those muscle memory habits fade because you've been away so long. Home feels just slightly odd.

I am feeling daunted by the massive weeds in the garden, the gigantic house to clean and keep renovated, feeding and caring for all our animals and the enormity of keeping four little boys occupied and happy without a daily itinerary. I know there were tools that I had set up to manage all these things. The boys take care of some of the animals when they are in the swing of things, normally I am not slogging through jet-lag so I get early before the family and have a little jump on the day and normally I keep up on the weeds day by day and they don't get out of hand. I'll get in back in hand, I know I will.

I am rebooting my healthy eating, trip food is fun and celebratory but not particularly the way I want to live. I am resuming my standard of one sweet treat a week, aiming for organic, and eating the triad of meat, produce and dairy while trying to have three colors of produce at every meal.

We've also been playing games together, the boys are actually decent players at Uno, Set, Go Fish, War, Monopoly and a beginner version of Scrabble which I like to call Camaraderie Scrabble....no competition, open hands and lots of cooperative help about coming up with words that we know how to spell. Also, I realized why my grandma kept the scrabble tiles in a ceramic jar with a lid. You can't have too many tiles, they are always scooting away under the couch, and I can understand why...not only are they small but they just feel so good to handle....all silky and meditatively smooth. I'd like a jar of them just for running my own fingers through in the early morning while I drink my tea. :) Our little garage sale set of Scrabble is now a bit shockingly short on tiles so I think a bonus purchase will be in order. They have to sell the tiles alone someplace online, right?