Robotic Friend

It was a rough night last night. Too hot to sleep and punctuated by 5,000 child-nightmares so I was bushed and way too grouchy all morning. At naptime I laid down and had a small catch-up and when I came back downstairs Dee showed me what he had been quietly working on with paper, markers and a roll of masking tape.
"He's a sort of friend-robot, Mommy....not really a working kind or a helping kind. He's just a friend."

The Photo Booth Lives On!

We had a big party over the weekend and there was an accidental benefit that I didn't expect. One of the ideas I had for this party was setting up a little makeshift photo booth. Amid the furor of trying to get the house ready and set up all the goods before the party-goers arrived, a very sweet friend knocked on the door and very impromtu, threw her soul into helping me not lose my mind and instead turn out a thoroughly successful bash. In the process my little photo booth idea went from wincingly unplausible to super fun.

My pal rocks and she realized that I needed more interesting costume finery in the booth for people to play with for their shoots. So she went home and came back with a trunkful of fabulous disguise booty. She is a really cool friend. I dare you, find a friend like that.  So then....and although I forgot to write up an instruction sheet, demonstrate how it worked or encourage people to try it out...and my poor little photo booth idea was virtually ignored during the party....it was still ultimately a big win.

Party is long over, all the decorations have been packed away and most of the cake got polished off...but that bin of photo booth paraphernalia has just begun to live! Thank you photo booth, you made my boys discover dress-up.

Hee hee! Too bad we have to return all the fabulous accessories...time to start our own collection I think. I dig this parade of characters and I don't want them to go away anytime soon! And I think the photo booth will make a return appearance at another party someday. It was an idea too good to do just once. 

Titanic to Promising

I was having a bad morning. The kind of bad morning you're bound to have after Monday comes barreling down the road and hits you head-on, after a fabulously happy weekend. I headed in to paint with my friends with a bad attitude. I felt a little like somebody gave me a brain-ectomy and replaced all my wits with over-cooked spaghetti, given me a teaspoon to bail out The Titanic with and then waved blithely from the distance as they set a fuse to crackle slowly towards the ship. So overwhelmed and so hopeless and so alone. I am wandering through new parenting issues that feel super over-the-top and I periodically feel so alone in my marriage and am even feeling at-sea in my housekeeping routine (which, darn it, I was so on top of a week or so ago). Blast Blast Blast.

Image via Wikipedia

So, anyhow...there I was heading in to church...wondering if I should even be there...thinking that I might not even stay and in walks my sweet landscaping friend. So sweet, this friend. And with her gentle way, she flourished an onion-skin paper my direction and suddenly, there on my empty watercolor sheet (uninspired and unproductive in the painting department today) there was the most beautiful garden plan.

A plan. A solution. A stunning work of art, featuring my yard. And just like that, my day turned from ridiculously over-the-top sucky to absolutely survivable...yea, foreshadowing promise.

I feel like I felt when I had my portrait drawn by an artist friend as a surprise.

I feel like my life and my self and the world I am trying to live in and create are beautiful or at least look beautiful to some people or could be beautiful. So much of the time the problems we wade through every single day and the mind-numbing road blocks that zing stunningly up in the way start to feel like they mean something...I forget they mean nothing more than the fact that I'm alive.

Bits of Lovely

Everything is okay again....because I found mushrooms. Heh. I do like foraging a lot and boy do I instantly feel like all is well with the world after running into a giant cluster of wild food accidentally. This particular mushroom is most often called Chicken-of-the-Woods but when I was growing up I was taught to call them Sulphur Mushrooms because of the particular shade of yellow on the underside of the caps.

And our farmer's market opened....well it opened last week but I was just days from delivering and not quite up to attending so, we went for the first time this week and caught the strawberries debuting. Mmm....am so happy to be back at the market. It was very fun to have some of the farmer's recognize us and be excited about the baby....one of my favorite vendors gave me two peonies to take home as a baby gift! People are so nice. (And you all know how I feel about peonies!)

We had a two week check-up with the babe and he's even bigger....up to 9 lbs and 12 oz. now from his birth weight of 8lbs 14oz. I feel like a very good mommy. 

And then...our incredible neighbor came over and brought a picnic lunch for children, a grown-up mommy lunch just for me and dinner and then took my boys out to the yard for playing with a giant kick-ball, bubble blowing with huge wands, fed them and her own daughter with the picnic she brought and then read them all a storybook as a wind down so I could take them right in and tuck them in for naps. Why am I not friends with this neighbor? I must get to know her. Seriously folks, people are so nice sometimes that it hurts.

*grin* My giant iris bloomed for the first time! Isn't it pretty? I've always wanted to grow one of these and this is my first blossom. Am very proud.

This is what happens when your mommy is a blogger. Your splash sessions in the bath with your kid brother get all paparazzi'd. Heh.

And here was the crowning bit of lovely. This afternoon Ru comes up to me....

"Mommy. I have an idea. Lets write a book. We are such good helpers to you that we should make a book about it and call it "We Help Mommy" and then we can send it to all our friends and aunts and uncles and we can be in it and we can make words inside."

Awesome. We're authors! Just like that.

"What do you say Mommy?"

I think we may have a book project in our future. Heh. Stay tuned. I am envisioning a really fun rainy day project.

Spring Is In Full Swing!

Well, life is as jolly as it gets around here. Dee has been given his own little dolly baby by my good friend Pintura who smuggled it out of their house and snuck it into my backpack this morning at MOPS. She has an excess of baby dolls at her house (two daughters seems to do that to you) and we needed one for a sweetly paternal little boy who has been wrapping everything and nothing in little baby washcloths and cooing them around the house in cradle hold. Just the perfect trade. Everybody wins. He's been super cute all day, carting "Baby" around with him announcing that now Baby was sleeping and now he was giving Baby milk and now Baby was "cying!" Sweet little man. He's going to make a top notch big brother.

After MOPS the boys and I cruised up to the farm for milk and eggs and a visit with the farmer's baby chicks and then we whizzed to Nutmeg's house for a little yard romp with Sprig and a cold glass of iced ginger/orange/lemon tea...MMmmmm! Hard to believe that its warm enough for ice tea already but, today was quite warm...on our way to pick up A from work the car's thermometer said 89 degrees at 5:00 in the afternoon. Awfully fun but, pretty surreal in the same breath.

And as Nutmeg quipped..."It isn't time for iced tea. This is an illusion." It will be back to spring instead of summer in a few days if the weatherman is right. True, true...and yet...who can resist the joy of flip flops and a sizzling back patio lounging session with a cold glass in their hand...seasonally appropriate or no.

We're neck deep here in magnolias, cherry blossoms, bradford pear blooms, forsythia, daffodils and flowering quince. The world has become a frothy sea of floating petals and misty  floral wonder. Every night when we're driving A home from work now I say, "Look! Look! Look at that!!" I hope it never gets old and that every spring I am stunned by the breathless beauty of it all. So far, so good.