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

It's Autumn Again

We are already two and a half months deep into first grade! Which means...Halloween costume conspiracies are thick and heated. A few months ago the twins were definitely going to be Star Wars characters. But now they are obsessed with Harry Potter. Teddy's biggest obsession to date has been garbage trucks, so we were thinking of making him into a garbage truck. Though just today he climbed into an oatmeal box and called himself a train, so I think we'll go with making Teddy a train costume from old cardboard. He also loves water fountains, which might be more straightforward.
We only have a little over a week, but I think we'll pull something together.

Just as a recap of Halloweens past, here are some of our former Halloween costume links for you to enjoy:

That time I made the boys into ceiling fans
When they were astronauts
The epic dinosaur costumes

Here are some other fall-ish things we've been up to around here.

Cubs baseball

Our fall baseball team this year is the Cubs! It's perfect because the real Chicago Cubs are in the playoffs right now. In fact, they are currently in the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets (who I am still mad at for beating the Nationals), and last weekend our Little Cubs played the Little Mets, which was cute.

Teddy preps the field

Good game, Cubs and Mets!

Snack time: the highlight of the experience

Outside time

We've had marvelous fall weather and have been able to spend quite a bit of time outside, doing predictably fall activities like collecting leaves and acorns, and the less common feeding of Sun Chips to fish, and casting spells on everyone with our Harry Potter wands that we made from chopsticks and hot glue.

My grand plan was to have the boys paint acorns and put them in a glass vase and use them to decorate the mantle. We didn't quite get to the painting phase, but we did have a spirited acorn-collecting competition and I put the best ones in a vase on the mantle. I'm sure it is just a matter of hours before they are blasted off the mantle and scattered all over the living room, but for now they feel festive to me.

We've been to our favorite local spot to enjoy nature, Popcorn Ponds. It's just down our street. We collected leaves, saw a giant toad, turtles, and spiders, threw countless seedpods into the water, and fed chips to an exuberant school of fish.

Tree ate Ted's shoe

Biking

Cal and Clark have been biking. We'd always felt deficient as parents when we watched them try to pedal bikes of any sort. We just don't have the space to store bikes and we don't live in a place that is conducive to learning to ride a bike. But my sister is a bike gal, having worked at a bike shop for quite awhile, and she helped us find good quality second hand bikes, and my in-laws generously are letting us store them in their garage a few miles away. The boys are already riding them! Instead of training wheels they rode around on bikes that were too small for them for a few days and then tackled the big ones. No sweat. Bikers. Bam. Just like that.

More outside fun...

This is probably the first selfie I've pulled off with all of our faces in it.

Pumpkin-getting

Our fall would not be complete without a visit to Hartland Orchards, our favorite farm ever, to get pumpkins and eat caramel apples and kettle corn. We went last weekend.

Out of the whole pumpkin field, Teddy found the one little
green one, and that's what he wanted more than anything else.

We got some normal ones too.

Watching the caramel apples being made...

Just add nuts

We got to bring Aunt Bean this year!

Teddy was not into the whole caramel apple idea.

Cal gets Clark's feet in his face when he tries to catch him going down the
slide.

Teddy went down as many times as we let him and all by himself.

A good day for us all

Drink-making

On Brian's birthday I made caramel apple martinis as well as butter beer, which, I trust all of you know, is from Harry Potter. I found various recipes on Pinterest and sort of combined them. Both drinks were extremely sweet, but amazing. I made a version of the martini not so sweet by using half regular vodka and half caramel vodka.

Here's the butter beer.

Butter beer: I didn't exactly measure it, but I put a bunch of ice cream in the blender with a bunch of cream soda, a couple squirts of butterscotch topping, and some ice. Put it in a cold glass from the freezer to make it seem especially Hogsmeade-ish. 

Tip: Make sure you don't fill the blender too full and be sure to give the mixture air as it mixes so the cream soda doesn't explode the lid off. I have good reason to believe it will. To give it some over-21-kick add a couple ounces of butterscotch schnapps.

The boys drank all the butter beer they could get their hands on.

Caramel Apple Martini: 2 oz. apple cider, 2 oz. caramel vodka,

1 oz butterscotch schnapps, shake with ice, pour glass rimmed 

with caramel sauce, garnish with apple slice.

Pretty!

Fall Snack Experimenting

Today I made apple pie granola bars. I have a recipe that I've used for straight-up granola bars with brown sugar, honey, cinnamon, and vanilla. But, being inspired by fall flavors and such, this time I decreased the sugar and honey and added applesauce, caramel dip, all-spice, nutmeg, and finely chopped and peeled apples. They turned out well, though I doubt anyone would call them apple pie flavored unless they knew the ingredients. They also didn't harden as well as I hoped, but they will be a staple of the lunch boxes this week.

Cutting straight and/or even lines: not in my skill set

Reading

Brian has been reading Harry Potter to the boys and they are beyond obsessed with the books. They are always talking about the books or acting out scenes from the books and their own scenes, loosely based on the books. We have to draw a line and cut them off from Harry Potter talk occasionally. The boys have started real homework! So they're reading even more than usual these days, which is great.

We've read a bunch of fall and Halloween-inspired books as well, but as this post is getting long and tedious already, I'll save my book reviews for the next entry-- which I promise will be soon.

Until then...go play in the leaves or something.

Clark, in full hockey gear, reading to Teddy

Balcony, Baseball, and My Best Boys

I interrupt this blog drought.

Main reason: I've had pneumonia for six days. After a couple days of increasingly worse chest and back pain, and a fever, I went to the emergency room at 3 AM on Friday. They ruled out heart problems with and EKG, took a blood test that showed I might have a blot clot in my lung, and did a CT scan that showed I had pneumonia. I don't know how I could have gotten it. I've had no congestion or cold or anything. Turns out pneumonia is incredibly painful and draining. Brian was predictably awesome about taking care of the boys and taking them out so I could rest. I'm still only able to walk around for a little while at a time without feeling winded.

This morning when I woke up I suddenly had an idea: a good way to spend some winded time would be writing a blog entry. Then I rolled over and saw a hockey goalie helmet on my bed, which wasn't as weird to me as it should have been. Neither was the distant, raspy sound of the Darth Vader helmet telling me my powers were weak. I don't know the power of the Dark Side, it told me.

The boys had gotten up before me and, using a broom, gotten Cheerios down from the top shelf in the pantry and made themselves breakfast. Fortunately I spotted the lidless carton of milk without its lid on it by the edge of the table before the boys knocked it over and learned the power of my dark side.

It's a lovely morning and Teddy and I had a nice time watering balcony plants and then he drove his stuffed animals to Gammy's house:

Then we made a bubble bath in the cooler, which consumed the better part of an hour:

Just add blue food coloring...

We smelled the flowers and herbs.

We watched for buses and garbage trucks. ("BAH-good-j trucks" Teddy says.) And saw a loud fire engine. A bee prompted some Teddy-Mommy snuggling.

And Teddy got a dry shirt and snack.

Even though breathing in deeply isn't something I can do, it's been a lovely morning.

While I'm at it, here are some pictures from our Reston Little League end-of-the-season picnic yesterday. Brian was awarded the Coach-of-the-Year award for the second year in a row! I'm proud of him for all his work and I love to watch him with the kids, who adore him. They've all improved and his coaching has somehow become even more creative and fun to watch.

Marlins Rookie Ball representatives: Andrew in the Fastest Runner competition, Clark, Arlo, Charlie, Shan (not pictured) All-Star game players, and Calvin in the Farthest Thrower competition. What a great season we've had!

Cousins discovering Italian Ice

...in their baseball gear

Blue ice tongue

Running off the Italian ice

National League Rookie Ball All-Stars

The Pledge

Players introduced

Watching Big Brother Clark the Shark in the batter's box

Okay, I've caught my breath sufficiently. Blog drought reinstated...but hopefully it won't take pneumonia to prompt me to put together another entry.