This is 40, Installment 2

When I think of old people I think of things like floral sofas, and mauve or pea-green toilets. I think of white and orange Corelle ware in a kitchen with a wallpaper border around the top of the walls. Maybe it's just me. But another thing I think of is routine. And finickiness if that routine is not upheld. Glasses down on the nose. Scathing glare at the kids on the lawn.

One of the things I've discovered lately, and I realize it's a bit late in life to discover this, is that routine provides great comfort. It's not that my life is organized, let's not go that far, but my daily routines have become so predictable and...comfortable as I've gotten older. The flexibility and sense of being scattered that is essential as a parent of newborns and toddlers is not here anymore. There is still a sense of it as a mother of three loud boys, but as far as daily routines, I have more of them than I remember having before.

I won't bore you with the details of my morning routine, but they happen in the same order or things get weird. Order of operations is essential. Here are two that absolutely must happen:

Make my bed- If I don't make my bed it haunts me all day and I don't feel like a real person. Never before the past couple years has this been the case. This includes putting my pajama pants under my pillow. Thanks, Mom.

I must drink morning coffee. No change here. But if I'm at home I have to drink it out of a certain little tea cup and if at work I must drink it out of a mug, not my travel cup. My coworkers think this is strange, but it's so much more comforting to hold a warm mug of coffee than a sterile, uncaring travel mug.

I will continue to find comfort in this routine, and in the revelation that its comfort brings. Why have I been so spontaneous in the past? Why so fun and imaginative? All I really need is to go to the bathroom at the same time each day and I will be just as fulfilled.

I've found my mauve bathtub. And I like it.

This is 40.

Place

I took a break from everything. Mothering, teaching, managing meals around our family's various activities schedule. It’s been great. I took a LONG weekend (nearly a week) to spend some time with my parents in Idaho. My dad had open heart surgery a little over a month ago and my siblings and I have taken turns going out to stay with them. I think I planned it out just right though—my brothers and sister have done all the hard work of getting their farm and house ready for winter and I mostly just spent time with them. 

Part of me is still here in in this place.

Sunrise from the deck

My dad is limited in what he is supposed to do, and my mom is limited in what she can do only because she is, contrary to what some might believe based on what she accomplishes on a normal basis, human. And she has to keep Dad from doing too much. They are the hardest working people I know, and they live off their land. They can make anything grow. Anywhere. They have two big gardens, a gigantic berry patch, and a large orchard. 

This is their retirement. They live on a hill above the lake I spent my summers at when I was a kid-- just up the hill from where my grandparents lived.  

Have I been a little anxious about how all my boys are holding up back home? A little. And I miss them. I’m so thankful for Brian being so supportive of my decision to come out, and for taking care of the boys all week. But this is the place I need to be right now. And it’s so quiet.

We always come here in the summers, but then it is busier. There are all the summer boaters and swimmers and it's very much a vacation-y time for me and for my family, as well as for most other people at the lake. Now it is quiet and chilly. There are a lot of fall colors in the orchard and in the brush along the roads. I’m rockin’ my flannel shirt. The deer smell hunting season coming. Most everything in the garden has been harvested. The old raspberry canes are stacked up to burn. All the apples and pears have been picked. I picked the last apple tree the other day and helped my mom and dad press cider and make applesauce.

The earth is getting ready to sleep under blankets of snow.

I got to watch playoff baseball with my dad, the one who taught me to love baseball when I was little. The highlight of that was seeing the Yankees get eliminated. I got to go kayaking on the still, blue lake, roast s’mores over a fire with some cousins, and visit my grandparents’ graves. I picked herbs from my grandma’s herb garden for her and Mom picked various noxious (but flowering) weeds and some pine tree branches for Grandpa, from his fields and woods. I went to water aerobics with Mom and some old ladies. It wiped me out, except for my biking legs, that held up fine. :)  

I helped my mom cook a ton of tacos and burritos for their church’s Awana kickoff night. I did a fair amount of paper grading at the table while watching sunrises. Now that I type this all out, it seems like I did a lot. But it felt very laid back and peaceful, and like I said, quieter than my normal life.

It has put me in a poetic mood, but I haven’t come up with a poem I’m happy about sharing yet, so I’m sharing one I wrote the summer before last about being in Idaho at my parents’ house. The power of place interests me. How people can become so much a part of a certain place. I have lived in Virginia nearly as long as I lived in Idaho, but there’s something about those formative years that leave an imprint on a person. I do love Virginia and could (and should, actually…good idea) write a poem about Virginia too. But for now, here is what I wrote about being part of a place and a place being a part of me.

Here

In summer dry air
In cool blue mountain shade
In prickly yellow wheat fields,
always whispering, never heard

It’s Here.

In quiet gravel steps

In calm rows of cabbages and corn

In dust ribbons rising behind trucks,

dancing away, never remembered

It’s Here.

In slender pine tree needles

In silver blue green water

rippling on a lake born of glaciers

always moving, never changed

It’s Here.

In still moonshadows at the garden gate

In crickets’ midnight songs

In silent zig zag lights of a car descending a mountain

always inching, never stopped

In pink purple clover blooms

In tangled orange honeysuckle

In ditches of milkweed and teasel,

always growing, always spreading

I’m Here.

I’m the little girl in braids

you almost see

skipping under sweet cherry trees

shoulders pink from sunshine

Always Here, never gone

And now, when my plane leaves from Denver, I'll be on to my noise. My beautiful, beautiful boy noise, which is another place where a very large part of me is.

apples from the last apple tree

cider!

applesauce

Our Month of Fun Things

I have a beautiful and blessed life. I love my life. I just have to share what our month has been like, because it amazes me what we've had come up the past few weeks. 

First of all, in April I broke my ankle when a line drive hit me at a softball game. But didn't know it was broken, so limped around on it for three weeks in pain before finding out: The x-ray didn't show the break, but the MRI did.

Calvin has had the most remarkable month of all, though: He...

• Fell out of a tree, ripping up his chin, and cutting up his eyebrow and mouth and knocking out his tooth: needed a stitch and antibiotics for the tooth.

• Got a horrible case of poison ivy all over his face-- swollen almost beyond recognition, the day before      his field trip. That lasted about a week and a half.
• Got lice and consequently a shaved head-- thankfully this seems to have been taken care of quickly (fingers crossed).
• Has a very sore throat that might be strep
• Has had almost all of his baseball games cancelled due to rain.
  
  The kid is holding up remarkably well, even though he made several questionable decisions in the baseball game he played the day after his stitched up eyebrow and skinned up chin: slid headfirst twice. He rationalized it by the fact that he was safe. I'm not sure why sliding headfirst was necessary, but that is a debate I don't want to get into again.

Meanwhile, Teddy's eczema flared up and resulted in a staph infection, and then steroid cream, antibiotics and lots of baths. He also got lice. I could not bring myself to shave his head, so I'm guessing it might take a little longer to cure, though it's looking good so far.

I found out that my ankle was broken and cannot put weight on it-- this has been for the last week and a half. I have at least two more weeks to go without weight-bearing. Then I got lice. Thank you, first grade.
Clark joined in on the party by also getting lice. Though aside from that and a few baseball rainouts and a particularly bad flip into the boards in a hockey game, he's had a relatively smooth month.

Brian hurt his back and neck somehow, so he's had a hard time doing normal things as well. Since we've had record amount of rain this spring, we've barely gotten any baseball games or practices in, which has been frustrating for him as a coach especially. But he has risen to the many challenges and been great about picking up the slack around the house, and scheduling make-up scrimmages so the kids can have a bit more baseball this spring.

I started this blog as an outlet for myself to write, and especially to record parenting things that might seem frustrating at the time, but in which I could see the humor by writing about them and sharing them with readers. This month seems to fit the bill. I'm still in the midst of hobbling around doing 47 loads of laundry and combing hair with lice combs and trying to do normal household things with one leg, but writing this has made it seem less exasperating and a little more comical. I'm also buried in a super messy house while ironically maintaining a blog about a clean and less cluttered house. I know it will pass, but I still feel a little fake about it. 

I've been shown once again how amazing our friends and family are with all the help that they've generously given us. I couldn't have survived without them.

My Inner Astronaut

Since the boys have been hardcore obsessed with space for the past four months, I've accidentally picked up some space knowledge I didn't have before. I can tell you how much interest I've had in astronauts, space shuttles, rockets, planets, space robots, and the moon in the past: zip. Zero. But it's amazing how two little obsessed boys who make everything into a space shuttle, including every elevator we ride in, (yes, they do the countdown each time, even when the elevator is full of strangers) can change what you think about. Also, thinking about space is infinitely more interesting than thinking about ceiling fans. 

This morning I wrote about this curious learning phenomenon on DC Metro Mom.

Eating astronaut granola before seeing the shuttle (they eat anything I call "astronaut")

Welcoming Discovery

This isn't going to be much more than a photo story, but I want to let everyone local get a glimpse of how awesome the Smithsonian's Space Shuttle Discovery welcome festivities are before they're over tomorrow. We went today and it was amazing. The boys love the Udvar-Hazy museum anytime, but this four day welcome party blew their minds. Our friend Eddie who works at NASA gave us all NASA space shuttle program shirts for Christmas, and we decided to pull them out for the occasion, even though the boys' are just a shade too big. If you're local, and especially if you're local and have kids, you should get to this tomorrow! The boys are obsessed with NASA's Robonaut thanks to a National Geographic Kids magazine and online videos, so they loved seeing R1. We thought it would be R2, so we were a little disappointed, but next week at the Science and Engineering Festival at the Washington Convention Center, they will have R2, the robonaut the boys are in love with the most. There were a ton of cool exhibits and hands-on activities for kids. Here are some pictures.

Mars suit

looking at 3D Mars landscape

Robonaut 1-- almost as cool as R2

transporting Teddy Bear Astronaut from Earth to the space station

space shuttle simulated cabin-- 2/3 scale

driving a Cessna "to New York, but we're still in New Jersey"

the Space Shuttle Enterprise from the observation tower-- NY bound

They survived the airplane simulator!

Free Caps Tickets!

Last Friday we were excited to score some last minute tickets to the Capitals game. For non-locals who don't know hockey, that's Washington's pro hockey team. It's a big deal around here, decent tickets are expensive, and they're actually a winning team who has been to the playoffs a lot the past few seasons. I wrote about our unplanned, spontaneous family adventure today on DC Metro Mom. Click here to read it!

No Manure at the Farm Museum!

I didn't know what to expect from a farm museum, and was a little leery of manure. Most readers know that I'm not a very farmyard, barnyard kind of gal-- I mean, I could hold my own in a pair of overalls with a bale of hay, but I really do not want to. Nevertheless, when a friend suggested it, I accepted. Today the boys and I took a trip to Heritage Farm Museum with some friends, and had a fun morning. It's in Sterling, very close to Reston. I wrote about our trip over on DC Metro Mom, so go check it out and enjoy the following photo story that goes with it.