Tuning Back In

I am sitting here at the keyboard in our silent little Orange Blossom Cottage, listening to the occasional far-off whooshing of a car off on the freeway and otherwise, nothing to be heard but the distant burble of the fish tank. 

I have been distant myself, more than I meant to be. Somehow, two years blipped past and I wrote not, shared not and burbled along in the my own little corner, trying to keep the wheels turning, doing dishes and laundry and dishes and laundry as life kept on. Situations kept on oozing into different shapes and the kids kept on growing into new versions of themselves and I kept stacking up post ideas and drafts and snippets of things that drifted across my mind. Things I meant to write about and needed to think about and ought to post about and would love to share and the the pile was so tall that I think it might have slid sideways and toppled down on top of my writer self. Writer-Me may have been here in this dark corner of the house waiting to post, buried sheepishly beneath all those intentions for quite some time now. It's nice to be back.

I am homeschooling 9th grade this year, head-on into high school with enthusiastically interested and yet unabashedly inexpert energy! Ru is reading wonderful classic literature: C.S. Lewis, Ivanhoe, Shakespeare, Defoe and Churchill and the things he is understanding and connecting together impress, delight and underwhelm me by turns. He is still after all, a normal 14 year old boy. Sometimes, he is brilliantly fresh and insightful and sometimes he just misses stuff. I am leaning in toward the promise of life being long, there being seasons for everything, subconscious knowledge still counting and my own role being just a beginning in the long line of teachers and guides he will have in life. My job is not to equip him with the whole body of knowledge, its just to keep his fire going, teach him some habits of discipline, and whet his appetite for the reams of things there are to know and learn. 

Everyone asks me if I am scared to be teaching high school and the truth is I'm not. Its closer to compatriot learning, he can understand and write about and read the things that I am interested in. I can imagine growing into adult friendship and an grown, peer to peer, life-share path. I am sure he will grow up and leave and differ and have areas of his life that he doesn't let me into but, I feel like he is increasingly a whole and separate person looking back at me bringing his own new things into the room and the conversation. Its encouraging and emboldening to me to know that I don't have to know all the things because he is going to be such a different person from me, living in such a different world than the one I grew up in. I also feel encouraged by the fact that his own freedom is allowing him to enrich his own high school experience and by turn our family and the rest of the students below him. 

“Our children should feel that they can peacefully say anything: questions, doubts, criticism, points of view. They should feel that we are genuine interested in what they do and think. We should not deprive them of privacy, but all our words and conduct should encourage an open relationship. One cannot overestimate the value of such relationships.”
― Sister Magdalen

So, that's a little peek into the velvety corners of my inner world in the dark of the night here in California. I hope that you are all well. I have missed you. I hope to pick up the loose threads here and weave onwards, mending the holes and filling in the gaps.  

Reading Stack and Summer Lull

This week we are back in the swing of our own life again, finally. Part of the challenge has been not only settling in after a bunch of travel but also just changing our own set-up here at home. A is at yet another new job (he adores change and stimulation) so we have a new schedule to digest and wrap into our life. Its also a new season and the school year approaches which, as they say in You've Got Mail:

"...makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address. "  

So, that right there is justification for self-organization and assessment and the sort of things I spent the morning on today: making up a new daily schedule, printing off my weekly goals, re-writing the kids chore chart (everyone gets a new chore at their birthday and everyone had birthdays). I am hoping to be absurdly organized and get the chore chart laminated and slapped with a matching dry erase marker in the next week. I have printed attendance charts for the coming school year (state law here in California for homeschooling) and have subscribed to a printer ink program so that we won't have any last minute panics about papers that are finished but need to be printed the night before co-op. Its a good time of year.

We are also in the middle of the lull season. We have had our travel and our excitement and now its time for things like grilling in the backyard, taking slow evening walks, watching the weed patches for caterpillars to raise and checking to see if friends can come over to play. Its the rest in the garden when the extremely fuss-free daylilies bloom, the dramatic peonies and foxgloves are over and the zinnias aren't ready yet. The roadsides are all chickory and oatgrass, no blooming trees anymore and not much else in view besides the gentle endless sun and the tiny basking fence lizards blinking at each other.

We are reading several read-alouds since I can't seem to ever get enough sitting around together reading at this time of year and the kids are just as excited as I am about all the options. We are listening to Pollyanna in audio form from the free and delightful Libravox collection and also reading the third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner From Azkaban which occasionally gets too exciting and full of plot tension to for relief we retire to Swallows And Amazons which is the best for firing the love nature and sense of capability in little boys, not mention a love of sailing....also on the stack at the moment is Dandelion Cottage, a vintage favorite about a group of little girls who play house with an abandoned cottage in their northern Michigan village. The boys always wish we could find a nearby house that's empty when we read the next chapters, and they start eyeing up the empty lot nearby.

 We recently finished Girl Of The Limberlost (added to my narrow list of favorites) and More All Of A Kind Family (book 2) all about our favorite, laugh-out-loud Jewish sibling set, total fun and lots of interesting cultural discussion to boot! We plan to read the rest in the series of both books.  Ah! So much good fun, take-you-away storytelling and interesting stuff to talk about together. We love our read-alouds. The new schedule at our house means we start breakfast early so I am stretching it out a little so that we can linger at the table together making up for the early start with a little reading at the table while we sip our tea and coffee and digest a little. Kind of lovely to find you have the time for some new little nugget of enjoyment. Shift and tweak, it isn't all difficult and grinding.

Springtime Shifts

Its been a good winter....again, and I am loping on into a New Year, February already a new notch in my belt. There are big fat buds on the apple tree that leans over our fence, the snails are out doing war  with the cole crops in my garden every night and the acacia trees are flouncing along with their yellow blossoms all down the freeways. Its the first of the really solidly spring blooms...before the poppies are spilling down the hills like orange sprinkles or the bottle brush trees are a standing in fierce crimson array on every street corner. So wonderful to live in a place where winter means green, and lush and damp fog laden moss. I have to get my tail down to the redwoods again, haven't been for a couple of shameful months...the trees call in this kind of weather.

I have noticed that in the waste space along the freeways there are some old forgotten orchard trees...I saw them for the first time last year and assumed they were cherries but missed a chance to go see them close up because we were so busy with baseball. They are just opening to peak bloom right now and I managed to park and run over to check some out on a side street near an overpass. They are not cherries, but maybe some kind of plum or peach. I am curious to see what/ if any fruit develops as the summer goes on. Lovely to feel homey enough where I live to be able to start picking out little curiosities like that to keep tabs on.

I am starting to feel pretty settled. I have places for most everything in the house, I am starting to feel like our possessions are trimmed down to an amount that more closely match this space. I have people to call in case we are trouble, know the neighbors, have the mailman's name down and even occasionally run into folks we know at the grocery store. Its such a good feeling to nest in more firmly and feel the amazing mix of wonder at the novelties but comfort over the known.

Spring is coming and I am working on tuning up my life and schedule...working out all the little ways things can be tweaked and adjusted and let go and removed. Isn't it wonderful to remember that we are the stewards of our own lives?

Here's What's New Right Now:

• I have been making meals for families with new babies or sick members at our church and homeschool group as a little way to contribute to the community. 
• I am cutting back on fruit and coffee and going back to a more strict interpretation of paleo eating.
• I am trying a new sleep schedule (to bed before my husband) to try to get 8 hours and still have morning quiet time alone.
• Minimization has come back into my life in a firm manner.
• Watching the boys play piano is inspiring and I have been planning to get my fiddle back out for tune up and learning.
• I am painting weekly now thanks to standing babysitter dates.
• We are not doing baseball this spring.
• Taking Zumba in addition to yoga.
• I am signing up for another year with Classical Conversations.
• We are planning a big trip to Italy this spring!
• I cut a bunch of length off my hair after it kept breaking and breaking. 

What are you shifting and changing in your life this season?

Dying The Tub Purple

We almost dyed the bathtub purple today during a lesson on the Phoenicians which was exciting. Whew. Yay for bleach. Seriously, I know it t'isn't green but it gets anything out. The shirts we all dyed purple are out in the washing machine having their first wash and after I finish writing I am going to dash out to the garage to lay them out on the heaps of boxes (we still don't have a dryer or a clothesline hooked up) and we'll see how they really turned out in the morning. Dido would be proud! (the Phoenician queen who founded Carthage, not the singer....although maybe she'd fancy purple shirts too....who knows!)

I love it when I have the energy, and thought and time to actually get to the cool projects like this. We all enjoy the whole learning business a lot more if becomes less about galloping through our required reading and more about dabbling and trying things and exploring our way through more hands on experiences. This is the kind of teacher I want to be.

"sidewalk" orange from one of our strolls through the neighborhood

So, there's that proud fact. There's also the fact when we left the house for a walk so the shirts could have their dye soak....a certain child took it upon himself to go stir the bucket full of dye one last time and sprayed the tub with a grapey drip stain. That's how it got purple. I was aghast when we got back from sidewalk windfall harvesting oranges, apples, limes and jelly-palm fruits (Oh, California!) and found out that all this time the shirts had been soaking beautifully but so had our newly be-speckled tub. Boo!

The good news is that although I was super pissed (not my proudest teacher moment) and the child in question quickly lied to me...I calmed down and he got brave and confessed...which meant I had to calm down even more and remember to be kind and a safe place for that scary admission of guilt. So, he helped me clean it off the wall trim and I scrubbed the tub and it ALL came off! What a thing....plus, the bathtub actually got properly cleaned. Maybe tomorrow someone should spray something all over the inside of the van? Man, do I need to get to cleaning the car.

In other news... We are settling in well...this morning Aaron, I and our van all became registered Californians at the DMV (best license picture every!), the kids are excitedly involved in 4-H and see their piano teacher for the first time this coming Wednesday, we all have library cards and have scheduled a "Library Day" once a week on our calendars, I even have several new friends who have first names I really remember and although I'm not to the last name or phone number stage with most of them....I feel hopeful. I have begun hauling anything I am wondering about back outside to the garage. Yes, that means that the garage is completely overwhelming and insane but it means that I have slightly more room to think and process the house and what should go where. Its amazing how quickly it gets overwhelming. The list of things I actually missed while we were waiting for our absurd about of possessions is impressively small:

• My juicer
• My hair dryer
• My spices
• The coffee maker
• My cowboy boots
• My hiking shoes
• My guitar
• The kids crayons and paints
• My good chef knife
• My field guides
• A full-size shovel (the previous tenants had left a trowel)
• A washing machine
• My sundresses

I was talking to a sounding board kind of friend the other day and realized that I need to take almost everything back to the garage and only unpack and bring in the things that I truly want and think we're going to happily use. There is so much extra. Must cull and must own what we actually mean to. Pinterest board about Brilliant Yard-Sale-ing in the works! I will not hold on to all this STUFF!

If you are local and interested in coffee with me....please report below. I need socializing.

Saffron Robe Unpacking

Moving is so much hard work y'all! Whew.

I am a tired lady. The boxes are taking over my life. I hide in the book I got from the library sometimes, in my phone sometimes, and out in the car on a drive sometimes....because seriously....

Where did all this stuff come from? There is no end to it. I want to cull everything down to four wooden bowls and a saffron robe. We'll share the robe. No need for excess.

These are all my husband's socks....that spot on the right in the drawer is where is socks are meant to go. 

Argh...on the upside, tonight the nine year old made dinner because I was stressed and drowning in boxes in the hallway and his chicken wings and jicama was delicious and hilarious and so helpful. I also managed to make the boys bedroom completely livable today, including a trip to Home Depot for plywood (45 minute wait to get the pieces cut to size! Patience lesson + assertiveness lesson!) I also signed up the older two for piano lessons, scheduled a piano tuner and didn't do any laundry at all. I did however successfully get paint matched for our kitchen cupboards so that I can spot treat as needed in the future and cover the spots where I took the hinges and doors off of one section. (open shelving! Yay!)

See!?! Took the upper doors off! So pretty!

I know that I will manage to spend time with kids in a fun way again soon. I know that I will feel like it is a home again and not a junk heap soon. I know that the chi will return to normal flow soon. I know I will work out in the garden again soon. I know that I will actually walk through the garage again soon. I know that I will someday feel like I can breathe at night and lay down my head with genuine relief soon. Its soooo hard to go to sleep when the house is finally quiet and just "relax" and get some rest when I see every box behind my eyelids! Argh!

In other news, Ru is cooking well and reading well. We have somehow slippingly drifted over into the land of chapter book reading and obsession with returning to the library asap and never getting enough story. So lovely to see it really happen. So much leap of faith breath-holding in parenting and homeschooling. You want to believe that you're kids are of course amazing and brainy and footsy and success material but you also feel so utterly responsible for the whole outcome and all the ingredients and the process and and and..... Its hard to do all you can and let go optimistically. Its so easy for me to trust that "all I can" is a reasonable contribution and that I am not forgetting something or screwing up in some obvious way. I worry about their flaws and weak spots and annoying little ways....although I hope I don't show them too much of that. I do try to make sure that they know I am in their corner always and that they can make it. I'm just their mom and I do worry! These little successes taste like extra rope, a little margin, some safety net of possible "fine-ness" in the ways of the world. Tangibility feels meaty and full of heft.

We had rain this week! I am believing that the drought is going to be over. That this is part of the cycle of nature, just like the wildfires and throw us humans all into panic. I am believing that the hibiscus we planted will live and that the little sprouts that are coming up the front flower bed and something cool and that the 40th year of my husband's life (tomorrow everyone!!!!) will hold wonderful things for him.

I love you babe. I'm going to try sleeping, even though you're snoring.

Chickens and Togetherness

This week it is spring, edging into summer. The roses are opening...the lawn needs constant babysitting and we wake up every morning to birdsong and open windows. Its beautiful and chaotic and relieving and its smells amazing outdoors.

A is finally back home after nearly a month away from us on the other side of the country. Its been both ridiculously hard to have him gone (we're staying very connected emotionally) and also so amazing to find our stride and realize that we as a family can actually hack insane things like living on two coasts periodically. Pom misses his Daddy more than he ever has before when A travels and he during this trip he did things like breakdown sobbing inconsolably at the sound of his voice over the phone. Its touching to see him getting more verbal and also more clear about his own feelings and about intangible things like missing someone who isn't present: 3 years old approaches.

The chickens are laying well and may be driving the neighbors crazy with their egg calls which thankfully happen when people are mostly at work and houses in the neighborhood are empty. We have to remember to check the coop twice a day to make sure that we don't end up with any silly broody hens or egg eating, because there are always 6 a day now. I have started bringing the girls a cabbage a week to entertain them and give extra summer vitamins. I am also tossing any weeds from the garden into their pen for eating and am impressed with how much them do actually seem to be able to tear off and consume. Chickens are funny because they don't have any teeth or sharp cutting tools and are mostly adapted for eating loose seeds and small bugs that can be gulped whole or else ripping off bits of leaves attached to rooted plants. When I toss in whole weeds I think a lot of them just get trampled since when they pluck on them the whole plant comes along, but if they get into a tug-of-war everyone can actually pull off pieces and sometimes I see a hen use her foot for a tool to hold down the food and help tear it apart.

My sister Lockbox is engaged! That's the other bit of really exciting news around our house. Lots of our idle talk these days is diamond admiring, dress discussion and flower arrangement planning. So much ethereal planning to savor and witness. A wedding is a pretty deliciously cheery occasion, and more importantly I am so pleased for my sister and her man. They're so happy together and the new brother is infinitely approved of.

I have taken a season off of doing a lot of personal watercolor painting this past semester because I was teaching a middle and high school class for our homeschool co-op but now that the school year has ended...I'm free to paint by myself again! I'm so glad I taught, it was empowering (never taught art before!) and fun. I'm hoping to start back to my artist group that meets on Tuesdays this week and cannot wait to get back to the brushes. I might need a trip to the art store for more fresh paper!Yum!

Missed Sap Seasons

 Its Sugaring Season here in Southern Connecticut. Yet again, I have considered but then skipped tapping the maple trees here on our city lot. Only one of our trees is a sugar maple but we have several other maples, red and Norway on our city lot and any maple, as a learned a couple of years ago, can be tapped for sap! Maybe next year. I have to buy a few spiles and buckets and stop making plans to run away to the tropics screaming during the exact week that the sap runs hardest where I live. Heh. We leave for Florida soon.

 We are taking a class at one of the local nature centers (the kids and I, although I have to admit that I am a tag-along and the class is supposed to be for my sons) and today it involved a hike through the snow and sparkling sunshine to inspect the woods, chew birch twigs together (Mmmm!!!! Wintergreen!) and take peeks into the first few filling sap buckets. Next week we are promised tastes of maple syrup since they will be hopefully getting enough sap to start boiling it down. Even without any action, it was super fun to visit the sugar house and pat the stove and sit together on hay bales around it. Maybe next year is the year that I will put on my giant canning stock pot and keep the stove at a simmer while I lug buckets of pale golden water indoors triumphantly. I'm quite keen on the idea....I just keep forgetting every year. Maybe I should put a reminder in my electronic calendar that will go off mid-January and tell me that I want to tap trees. "Order Spiles and Scrub Out Canning Pot" it could say. Laura Ingalls, move on over.

 The boys and I got out our first big teeny piece jig-saw puzzle after dinner tonight. I was giving them lessons on sorting out the edge pieces and examining the cover illustration for small clues on the gray shag rug in front of the fireplace. So much fun. Dee took to it like a duck to water, I had to pry his little engineer hands off the project when it was time to take a break for the night. A's family are great puzzle lovers and my ended family love puzzles quite a lot although my own natal family group didn't do them much at all. I think my Mama found them tedious or boring or maybe the baby was always losing pieces and the dog was always eating a few and somehow that rattled her..... Anyhow, its kind of a new pasttime for me and I feel really happy about bringing some piece of A's childhood into our family activity.

 Joke books are huge this year, especially with our newly confident reader who is suddenly devouring everything written within reach. He's incessantly reading his new joke book that he got for Christmas and loving his new handwriting book which has him doing jokes for copywork. Such a hilarious, brilliant otter idea for a kid like mine.

Well, its time to go to bed. The quilts and down comforter are calling and my good man is waiting. I hope you all have a snug night and wake to a day full of challenges and excitement, little gifts and new lessons. I am thinking of you out there as we pass the middle of the week, as my tiny nephew recovers from his surgery this morning, as my garden sleeps under the snow, as I plot lesson plan in my mind, as the mending sits waiting in the downstairs closet and as we all recover, rest and rejuvenate under the half moon. xoxo!

Delicious Words

"I want to practice some words that are not my name, Mama. These are the words I want to know how to draw...."book, pineapple, candle, star and flower." -My Preschool Student

I feel like I'm doing something right. 

Library Day: What Are We Reading?

Today is Library Day...and there are ever so many things to research as always.

Top Topics To Hunt For This Week:

• Arizona Travel Tips (We're going for a weekend in March!)
• Watercolor Projects (I'm teaching a class for Middle and High School students.)
• Lego Ideas (Everyone's obsessed)
• Crystals (Today is Science Day...we had a gorgeous snowfall....and crystal study came to us)
• Gardening (The seed catalogs have started to arrive!!!! YAY!)
• Jewelry Making (We moved on from ice crystals to rock crystals and suddenly we were looking over our rock collections and pondering pendants.)

Epsom salts crystals....so pretty!

Crystals from our collection.

The winter time is the ideal time to library our little heads off. So much wonderful cozy, indoor enthusiasm and so much dark and snug time to read. Reading is one thing I'm really going to throw myself into again this year.

I had a less prolific reading year in 2014 and I miss it a lot. I have so many books on my list and a stack of them that are waiting in the wings on my bedside table but I need to knock a few of my in-process tomes out of the way first.

I'm currently reading:

The Rosie Project
Parent Effectiveness Training
The Bible's Cutting Room Floor
Sex at Dawn
The Gifts of Imperfection
Eating on the Wild Side

No duds in the batch...although some of are the type I need a break from periodically because they require some processing.