Sunday, March 24, 2013

This is the spring...

Where I am not going to start fifty tomatoes.  I am not.  I swear.  I promise.  At the most, one row of tomato plants.  Hold me to it. 

Also, I went to church!  Finally.  It's hard with a new baby.  I wept my way through the Palm Sunday service, as I usually do.  The triumph and the perfidy.  This year, Peter's humanity spoke to me.  He must have been so frightened, even though he wanted to be brave.  I can't manage a lot for Lent of late, but Holy Week remains special.  Also, the preacher preached from the pulpit that it is our Christian duty to stand up for the rights of our Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender sisters and brothers.  The Episcopal Church: Love God, Love your neighbor, change the world.  I love it.

Jesse stayed home with a recovering but epically cranky David and cleaned house.   I must say, he did a fabulous job, and the house was pretty presentable for a lovely visit with my best friend from high school, her husband and three children.  So, yes, he's kind of a keeper. 

Friday, March 22, 2013

Family and Baby Love

Still no pictures.  This morning, I woke up with Sammy cuddled up close, his hand around my breast.  This last baby is making my heart hurt...I love him so. 
We had sort of a dreadful day yesterday.  David is finally on the mend from a horrible sickness.  It may have been the flu...the day before, I took him to the doctor, promising him ice cream and candy if he would just cooperate.  It was terrible and innapropriate, but I didn't know how else to manage with the baby and him.  He did it, and was remarkably compliant, although chattering nervously the entire time, so that I couldn't discuss anything about Sammy with the doctor.  He did begin to freak out about the otoscope, and so I asked the doctor not to use it.  He didn't have ear pain.

Anyway, we were definitely housebound yesterday.  David still had a bit of a fever, and was incredibly, incredibly cranky.  And I was/am still incredibly tired.  It was back to newborn stage sleepwise with David waking up and really needing to sleep with his mama...and so homeschooling was uninspired, and it was incredibly cold.  I was counting on spring, but we are having below freezing temperatures all day long and it sucks. 

I read aloud a whole bunch of The Tale of Despereaux (it's so great), trading chapters with Elsa for No Fighting, No Biting...that is usually how I get her to read to me, by bribing with my reading something more compelling.  It is hard--the only books that Elsa can read yet are boring for a child who has been hearing complex chapter books since she was four.  Also, I made her do some workbook work which never really feels good.  I just felt uninspired, and well, nervous...am I doing enough? Would she be getting more in school?  I started this with some kind of conclusion in mind, but it got lost in the mess of a baby needing to nurse, and more homeschooling, and floor sweeping and chicken feeding.

Today, however, was awesome.  It was still cold, and we didn't go out, and Sammy is no longer content to stay in his bouncy seat, so Elsa and I are constantly trading off, holding him, playing with him...he is on the cusp of sitting and I think that will make things easier....I have to say that my body is no longer up for wearing a baby all of the time.  I just can't do it.  Anyway, Elsa decided that she wanted to make sculpey clay models of all the gods.  First, we tried to remember them--then counted them...then made a list.  Then she worked for at least two hours...I had to make her stop to go outside for a little bit.  It just felt right.  



Today was better though..

Monday, March 18, 2013

Boston trip

Soon, soon I am going to get it together to take and post pictures again.  Or not.  Right now, Sammy is sleeping in his carseat (the trip out to drop Elsa off at Farm School is usually enough to make him drop off), and Elsa and David are gone.  I have two hours a week like this...alone with only baby.  I should get my knitting.  I should get my coffee.  I should do the breakfast dishes.  I should figure out what to make for dinner.  It is cold and rainy here--come on spring, we are ready.

Anyway, the kids and I took an amazing trip to Boston last week to visit my parents and to do some homeschooling adventuring.  The trip was a spectacular success, although flying alone with three children is not the MOST fun.  The flight up was particularly hard, with a certain four year old becoming intensely upset about having to put his backpack through security, and also about having to ride to his grandparents' house in a flowered carseat.  It was a lot easier (except for my own rather intense anxiety) on the trip back down.

Boston (or Hingham, the town south of Boston where I grew up and where my parents still live) was lots and lots of fun.  The kids got to go sledding, because in the first days, there was snow which we did not get enough of to do.  We checked out the very old graveyard and a house that was built in 1630...especially enjoying the closet behine the fireplace where slaves escaping on the Underground Railway may have hidden.  We went to the beach, where we found lots of shells and other things washed up because of the Northeasters that they had up there, and talked to a guy who was using his metal detector to hunt for treasure on that beach.  We got hot chocolate at the coffee shop (I have to say that the Dripolator is a better coffee shop).  We went to the Boston Science Museum, an enormous museum where David spent pretty much the whole time playing in the model rocket ship.  Elsa say a lightening show and looked at more exhibits.  We also went to see the model train museum.  I have to say, my parents really pulled out all the stops on showing us a wonderful time.

However, if you ask Elsa what she liked best, she will tell you without hesitation that she loved riding the subway.  The activity on Friday was... riding the subway.   We took the train in to South Station, got off, and hung out in the big depot.  Elsa and David had a cupcake, and Elsa bought a Boston Celtics bear with her rabbit hutch cleaning money, I nursed the baby, and we returned.  On the way back, it was rush hour, which was a little tough for David, but thrilling for Elsa as she got to hear people talking in different languages, and tried to stand up, holding the pole.

It was a really nice trip, and I am glad that I did it.  I had been feeling bad about how much we have been staying home lately, It has been a combination of having, you know, a new baby, and David going through a particularly intense phase.  I know his intensity is going to serve him in good stead when he gets older, but it can be hard for all of us to handle when he is still such a little package.  So, I feel good about that huge adventure. 

Yesterday was beautiful...today, not so much.   As soon as it gets nicer, I am going to figure out how to keep the chickens out of the garden so I can plant my peas....it is nice to be home too.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

This and that...

There is a sweet little baby boy lying on the bed next to me.  He is so sweet and so chunky and we love him so much.  I have no pictures.  I should start taking them again--Jesse takes them with his phone sometimes, but he isn't, you know, here a lot.

Things are going along.  It has been a kind of cold and wet end of winter here, which is wearing me out a bit.  My children have produced an absolutely enormous pile of drawings.  I am trying to come up with a proper metaphor...mountain is cliche, but they can sit at the table and draw for hours.  Hours.  I have no idea what to do with them, either.  I sort through them, and can occasionally bring myself to throw one away (Elsa, in particular, can draw the same picture over and over again).

I have lots of tidbits.  A possum got into our chicken coop the other night. late.  I think we were saved by our, ummm, falling apart chicken coop.  I heard a big crash...I thought one of the kids had fallen out of bed...and then the sound of some angry hens.  I rushed out, and the big wall of the coop had fallen off, and there was a glittery eyed possum and no hens in the coop.  Goneril was clucking furiously all around the yard, and the rest of the girls were nowhere to be seen.  So the wall falling off allowed them to escape, I think.  Anyway, I chased the possum off and got poor Goneril back in the coop, and hunted around a little bit for the others, then went to bed, thinking we had lost them for sure.  But, lo and behold, there they were, the next morning, pecking at our windows and pooping on our patio. 

In one way, I felt like a real farmer, chasing predators away in the middle of the night.  Mostly, though, I didn't.  I felt like a complete non-farmer, as I fretted all night about our chickens...how frightened they must be, how much I was going to miss them, what a terrible chicken owner I am not to have been able to defend my chickens from all harm. 

Homeschooling is going pretty well, when I am not, again, fretting about whether I am not teaching Elsa enough and causing her to miss learning everything, even though she has the most amazing breadth of knowledge...as far as I can tell, anyway.  And her reading is getting better.  I have completely abandoned the Waldorf style curriculum I was using, and am just making her read to me and do some phonics and handwriting workbooks, and math workbooks too, as well as just kind of talking about math.  Mostly, I think it is fine and she is thriving.  Sam is the sweetest, easiest baby ever, but he still requires a good bit of maintenance (even easy babies need their diaper changed--or to be held over the toilet or however one does Elimination Communication, to be nursed, to take naps and to just not be in their bouncy seats.)  Elsa and David and I did some stuff about constellations and stars--we read a whole bunch of constellation tales, and I just got D'Aulaire's book of Greek Mythology and we are reading through that.  It is a beautiful book.  Anyway, one of the tenets of Project-Based homeschooling (which I am not really doing) is that if the kids are playing about what they are studying, they are really immersed in it.  If that is the case, and I think it is, they are immersed.  David now, much of the time, wants to be referred to as Zeus, the god of "Funder."  Actually, he wants us to say thunder, he just can't manage it.  I bought a whole bunch of peg dolls, and they have been making peg doll gods.

Which brings me to the Nature Table.  We are setting it up for spring, and I am trying to reconcile my ideas to how it should be, with cute little Waldorfian things that I make to Elsa' ideas, which are many peg dolls colored by her to be the various tulip and daffodil family.  Really,  I know it is great that she is taking over that function, but it looks a little different than how I want it.  That does seem to be a theme....

I am getting excited about the garden, although I am not sure how much I am going to be able to get done in there...trying to remind myself that Sam's babyhood is a short season, and it is going to okay if I can't do much.  I do think when he gets bigger,  I may try to get more serious about homesteading.  There are classes that I want to take...I think that is just the way it is going to have to be for this suburban girl.  I would love to be more of a do it yourselfer, but I am clueless and want some support.  And when Sam gets a little bigger, it will be possible.