End Of Summer Notes

We are going tubing down a river tomorrow morning and I should be in bed by now so that I will be awake bright and early to make everyone omelettes before we leave. (Boys who go places with no food are not boys you want to go places with.) Instead of sleeping, I am up folding laundry, contemplating the moving away of one more friend, obsessing about my homeschool plans and trying to decide how to wedge in one teeny stay in a rustic cabin in the mountains before the holidays. So many things going on and suddenly it feels like everything is speeding right up.

I told Ru and Nib that they could both sign up for fall baseball since we skipped out on the regular spring season. Argh! I am such a lazy mama....I don't wanna do it! I have the hardest time convincing myself to be ambitious enough to arrange friend play times and classes or activities of any kind. Nib has incessantly nagged me all summer long to take him fishing and I only managed to do something about it once when we were in Michigan sleeping 20 feet from my in-laws private dock. Better a little than nothing at all. Ha. But, seriously....I think I need to just take myself to a local bait shop or a pier and let some old men school me on how to catch the local fish and how in the world to fix up the fishing rods I have but have not in proper order. I am considering one of those cushy trout ponds for a personal boost as a beginning.

In all seriousness, I do want to have and to show ambition. I am not interested in avoiding all work and having my kids end up resentfully annoyed at their own inability to participate in anything because I dragged my feet for all eternity. I am however, loath to sign up for baseball. I love watching how they learn from coaches and build friendships on the team but I truly hate rushing off to practices and having our whole life filled with practice and games.

 So far, I have still not received a note about Little League starting up for fall season.....so who can say. We must not butcher our chickens before they're hatched.

I have been harvesting the little volunteer Sungolds in our garden for the past couple of weeks. I was a little nervous to see what would appear when they began fruiting since I know Sungold is a modern hybrid and not very inclined to end up true to kind. I have been very surprised by satisfied by how very like its parent this tomato has appeared. I have the same juicy, sweet/tart little golden marble fruits and have been merrily filling a folded over pouch in my shirt with them pretty much anytime I find myself lingering in the yard. I have also been picking arugula, some tender second and third flush broccoli and our first very late crop of peas. The peas never seem to make it inside to the house, the kids like them too much. I'm all for healthy snacking however, so there's not much fuss to make over the issue.

The boys and I are working more on nature journalling and have been pulling out our paints to sketch things up a little from time to time. I am still trying to use our journals for a chance to record and research new species to us since moving Out West. Speaking of new species to us...we recently revisited the trees I noticed this spring when they were blooming. I thought they were maybe apricots or peaches but this time of year I could clearly see that they are almond trees. So amazing to discover that there are so many exotic nut trees scattered around. I sometimes feel like I know a lot about plants and animals and that outdoors and that I can feel confident in my knowledge. And then I think about things and realize that I am still humblingly unknowing in many ways and make absurd sounding rooky guesses. I only just realized this spring that the leaves of apricot trees look nothing like peach tree leaves and that I had been walking right past them all my life and not noticing. And then, there's the almonds-look-nothing-like-other-nuts-they-look-like-peaches foul up that I made in trying to learn what was along the highways. I can't believe how much there still is to notice and know and understand....even about the common things. One new fun tool I have been playing with as I learn is the app iNaturalist. Its actually kind of amazing. You take a picture, it notes your location via gps and then identifies your find. Super empowering. The boys love it. We end up running around at parks snapping pictures of things I would normally just shrug at.

Summer isn't quite over yet, even though school is starting next week so I am looking forward to a few more beach days, a little blackberry picking, a pie or two, a rodeo and a music festival. Autumn will come in its time but I'm not quite ready. 

The Blue Belly Brilliance

The boys and I have long been nature lovers and over the past two years or so, I have been working on getting us all into nature journaling. As we have migrated West and lost our Nature Table space with a smaller home I have been working over new ways to deal with science. One way has been to work our nature journals into a more prominent place in our usage. Instead of just using them to draw assigned subjects as we studied certain topics (conifers, frogs and their life stages, snowflakes and how they form etc.) I have changed them to our identifying log.

 We try to take a walk every day in the neighborhood and we have successfully managed to work a weekend family hike into our new Western lives as well. These two venues plus just our general love of nature and honed awareness of the animals and plants around us have given us a steady way to use the journals. When we see interesting things that we don't know about (daily! everything is new!) I photograph and we observe and tell each other what we each can see about the subject. For instance, recently, Nib saw our first lizard! We were all so excited to see one in person and in one of our local parks, a short walk from our house. We all got to see it quite close up and I got some pictures with my iPhone.

Then later in the week, we got to the part where our journals came in handy. We got on the computer together and using whatever markers we could dig up from the photo we took and from our collected observations we looked up that lizard. The lovely thing about identifying things on the internet is that you can get so darn specific. We found several pages that were all just about lizard of the The Bay Area....no other creatures or regions to muddy the waters. Field guides are top notch for browsing and will work for identifying but the internet is a little like asking a noted biologist who knows your area's flora and fauna.

Turned out that Nib's lizard was a Western Fence Lizard also known as a Blue Belly. We didn't get to see our lizard's stomach and it wasn't breeding season so we had no clue they can be the dull grey brown on top and hide a streak of the most mermaidy blue-ish teal on their stomachs. Astounding that skin can be that color! We'll be looking in the spring to catch the show for sure!

The notebooks come out and we print our photo and sketch and draw it in along with a date of our entry and the date we saw the observation. Then some of us have been adding some other views or details from other photos online and we write in whatever fascinating information we read about our new discovery. For instance, this cute little lizard that Nib introduced us to in one of the reasons Lyme's disease hasn't gotten as rampant in this part of the country. A powerful protein in Blue Belly blood de-activates Lyme. When ticks feed on our new, reptile friends, these little, local lizards they are cleaned out and each tick becomes Lyme-free for life! What a wonderful thing to know about! The more I know about Nature the more laughable I think it sounds that we might map it all out and that we as humans are the truly sentient and brilliant species who hold the keys to all things in our little hands.

Nature journaling is giving us a place now to be motivated to indentify and know these know creatures and plants and the amazing stories they all have. We are learning and making dynamic, artistic record books about our unfolding knowledge. What a wonderful world!

Learning Art Failure

We are trapped indoors. There is a chill, dull rain pelting down and the wind is roaring over the top of our hill, dropping limbs, tipping over the rose trellis and driving all six of our poor hens to huddle damply in a clump in their coop. The boys aren't really trapped, truth be told...just me. I sit indoors and keep the washer and dryer going, towels at the ready, tea on tap while the boys play war in raging drizzle. Nothing like bone chilling cold, brisk wind and sideways rain to make you feel like playing survival, making knives out of sticks and living on a perpetual hunted march. I hang damp hoodies and jackets up, peel wet socks off and re-mop the muddy kitchen tile. We skipped math homework today. There was too much war. Its hard for me to interrupt their imaginative play, especially when they are all playing happily. We'll do double math tomorrow to make up for it. I promise.

Today we did manage to get some art time in. Wednesday is our art day. We are studying one artist at a time, learning a little art history (we just finished Matisse) and trying out the techniques of the greats. Today I painted a nature journal still-life of three bumblebees I found in the basement. I balanced Baby Pom on my lap and we spread watercolors and brushes and papers with dripping art all over the table. It makes me really happy to see how much the boys love to dabble in creating.

Dee is a perfectionist extreme and although excited to dabble and very pleased when something comes out the right way he really falls to sobbing pieces when he can't paint something the way he meant to. We all get that feeling. I am stumbling over teaching him to accept his flaws, love the process and figure out how to let go of the perfect result. I have some ideas: let him see me be artistically reckless and mess stuff up.

But his own inner criticism is so strong. I'm not sure how to soften his feelings, allow to be unhappy with his creation and be honest about his reaction but not be swept under by it. Raising boys is tricky. I want feelers so bad but I see the danger of allowing them to be ragers or pouty depressives whenever the spirit moves. Anyone have any tips about how to walk these mommy lines?

I keep drinking more tea and holding him when he cries and trying to understand and manage his angry. I do the same things for myself with just as reliable a result. Sometimes tea and a little self hug will do the trick and sometimes I cry and rage until I can't sleep at night. This is the real trick about parenthood, right? Teaching your children things that you can see they need to know....but you never really learned yourself. Physician heal thyself. The good news is that, at least some small percentage of the time, living childhood next to your kids for the second time does teach you things you never really got and gives you chances upon chances at things you never realized you totally missed the first time around. I love being a grown-up.