Gratitude Sunday

Sunday's heartfelt tradition. A time to slow down, to reflect, to be grateful. A list of gratitudes. (Joining Taryn over at Wooly Moss Roots)

This week I've been grateful for:

* My husband and for all he's given me and my family. We spent two days together, just the two of us, for the first time in six months, this week. As hard as it was to be away from the littles, I think we both feel so refreshed in our marriage and blessed to have one another. (Check out this poem I posted in honor of our anniversary on Friday.)

I am not known for my ability to capture just how attractive people are in real life...and my husband always makes faces when he's being photographed.

* My parents and the crazy amount of "help" they've given our little family. This week they took both of the kids overnight while the hubs and I had our time away. They've done any number of other things for us (there isn't enough time or reader attention span to say it all), but I don't know if I would have made it as far as I have in life without their unconditional love and support. The joy they brought my kiddos this week has been just one small part of it.

My daddy (yes, I'm one of those adult women who still calls her father Daddy) and the kids. He and my mom are just so awesome with them.

* The little things. Like sushi. Really, really yummy sushi. And new fabric.

Delaney's in North Conway, New Hampshire

* Feeling smart and learning about awesome new things.

Poetry Friday (Which Was Poetry Sunday and Will Probably Become Poetry Saturday)

 'Ahidziskeii

It's not a grand thing after all,
just that warm comfort in murmuring "good night"
before I sink into that dark quiet
that exists when we're together.

Otherwise, when I'm traveling,
same same 'good night' on the phone,
and I listen intently (for wheat I'm not sure",
leave a light on for safety, drift off to sleep, half-listening;
a little noise and I'm sitting up in bed, surveying the room,
sometimes even the entire block from the hotel window. 
I rush to the phone and double check,
should  I dial o or 8-911?
I check the locks again, then lie back down 
afraid to sleep, yet wanting to sleep, knowing 
that fatigue will be obvious in the morning.
I've had so much practice. 

When we're together, checking locks doesn't occur to me,
local crime seems so far away (never mind
that we are in the heart of the city),
I insist upon complete darkness, and what I ams sure of 
is that if I turn over, your warm chest or arms will surround me.
That should I awaken, confused as to where I am (once again),
you will reach for me knowing exactly how to reassure me. 

And when we drink coffee together
in this bright California morning, 
mountains towering around us, I move closer to knowing
what the Creator means by "nizhonio 'ahidziskeii."
They are sitting beside each other in a house of beauty. 

Lucy Tapahonso

Five years ago today I married the man I love the most, who makes me smile the broadest, laugh the hardest, and can piss me off more than anyone possibly could (and still accepts my apologies and forgiveness). When I read the poem up above, I see my husband and I, together in our home, our own "house of beauty." It is his "warm chest and arms" that make me feel safe and protect our family. And when he isn't home, there is a hole in our world and things just don't seem quite right. 

Our marriage is quietly special and subtly sweet. There aren't any ostentatious gifts of affection or over the top gestures of love, just the little things bind our family together. Things like never going to bed without a kiss goodnight, or the phone calls to one another when we reach our destinations, or still holding hands as we walk into a store.

I want five years, twenty, fifty years and more with him, learning more about one another, raising our babies, and having our best adventures.

Back to School

I think I really need to start taking some grad courses. You know you have school deprivation when you easily pick up a textbook-grade paperback and flip through it like it's Us Weekly (you also know you've been out of school too long if you debate whether or not you ought to italicise the name of a magazine, both because you care and because you don't know the answer).

A few weeks ago I showed up at our library with a list of seven books. Seven books that did not contain characters that were married to sexy Scottish warriors, scheming dwarves (who also somehow manage to be sexy, in that smart guy kind of way), or have anything even remotely to do with Edwardian England (hello, Downton Abbey withdrawal). They were all books related to Waldorf education, either from a parenting or a curriculum/education perspective.

Over the next few days the books came in and I spent a lot of time at the library, schlepping small children, who both love books, but would have preferred to be outside (well, I suppose the baby didn't care, but E. most certainly did).

I don't know that E. would agree, but I'll say, so far, it's been worth it. I'm about halfway through the pile, having read three and a half of the books (I'm literally smack in the middle of my fourth) and I have learned so much. There is a sense of empowerment that comes with being presented with new tools in life, particularly in parenting. There have been so many areas where I have felt helpless and have known in the back of my mind that my way of doing things needed to be changed. Now I understand why I need to make changes, and I'm attempting to make those changes. It's not easy, but it feels so good to try and to see positive results.

I doubt all this sort of vague hinting about at what I've learned and am still discovering is terribly interesting, but I hope to eventually synthesize it into more bite sized (and interesting) bits here, if only for my own reference.

So, after I become an expert in Waldorf education, I fully intend to return to my "fun" books (including and not limited to presidents' killing vampires, more hot Scottish warriors, dragons, and maybe moving back in time to Victorian England, either with Austen or Dickens, not sure). Learning new things is undeniably good, but one does need a bit of variety, right?

What are you learning about?

Time Warp

What is your favorite age? If you could stay that age forever, would you? (Prompt courtesy of Mama Kat)


I have to think back pretty far to reach my favorite age. I have to bypass teenage pregnancy (which I'll never regret, but people DO look at you funny), my troubled years in high school, awkwardness in middle school, the misery of making friends after our move to Maine (I was the quintessential Mass-hole), and the death of my Grandma Ruth. 


Once you get through that mess, you hit about eight. That's not to say 9 through twenty-five stunk, it's just that eight was...well, eight was just about perfect.


We lived in Groveland, Massachusetts at the time, in a beautiful colonial on a quiet suburban street.

My dad and grandpa did a ton of work and an amazing job renovating this almost 300-year-old house, which you can read about here.

We lived in an actual neighborhood, something that is somewhat scarce in our current neck of the woods. There were lots of kids right around my age and we participated in the usual roving gang of kids activities, like flash light tag, secret clubs, and adopting a stray dog that spent a lot of time going through our trash cans.

Halloween! I'm the kiddo in the white turtleneck next to the scarecrow. All these kids grew up to be amazing and kinda gorgeous, by the way.

At eight, I was never bored. I spent crazy amounts of time outside. I had ambitions, ideas, stories, pictures, a voice. It's not to say that I don't have any of that now, because I do, but it was so pure and so uninhibited. There was no concept of, "What will they think," because "they" didn't exist. The only other people in my life were my family and my very best buds, and they all loved me unconditionally, so it didn't matter what I did - it would all be great.


At eight, you're all innocence still (or, at least if all is right in your world, you ought to be), but you are cognisant of the world enough to really be smart about stuff. It's a perfect balance of a willingness to see an unjaded and beautiful world as well as an understanding that maybe everything isn't perfect, but you can do something about it. Rudolph Steiner, who I'm reading an awful lot about lately, would say an eight year old is spending a lot of her time interacting with the world via feelings. Kids are discovering empathy at this age, and truly feeling the brunt of their emotions. They are understanding how emotions work and preparing to someday control them so they can be used to benefit others. It's an amazing time to experience the world. Maybe because I tend to feel so intensely is why I can connect so easily to eight-year-old me.


But would I want to be eight forever? No, of course not. I think most adults, when they think about it, wouldn't want to go back. There are wonderful things about childhood, but once you've tasted adulthood, you know there is no going back. Not necessarily because being a grown-up is so much better, but because what you've seen and done can't be unseen or undone. What we've experienced as children and young adults has helped us unfold into the full person we've become - and really, that's not such a bad person.

What I want to hang on to is some of that eight year old perspective. The world is a wonderful place. My family and friends love me (including some of those folks in the picture above). I am capable, smart, and beautiful. Flashlight tag is fun (heck, any kind of tag is fun). And you know what? If I want to be a ballerina, then, damnit, I can be.


How old are you, really?

Weekend Lovin'

I've often said to folks, "When my husband's gone, he's gone." Meaning, he works an hour away at a job that requires him to work twelve hour shifts doing some really tough stuff. When his days off turn up during the summer we're pretty relieved to have him home and are ready to go out and have some fun. Unfortunately, our kind of summer fun takes us to the great outdoors, and up until this month, the great outdoors has been pretty soggy in these parts, especially, it had seemed, on my poor husband's days off.

But finally, finally we've had some truly fabulous weather, and every day he had off the weekend we found ourselves out doing something just so nice.

Friday:

Out on "grandma and grandpa's lake" with my parents. The sweet sunshine, delicious food, jumps into the lake, and looking at beautiful lakeside homes. 

Saturday:

We were up at 4 o'clock Saturday morning to drive to Lewiston to watch the morning launch for the balloons at the annual Great Falls Balloon Festival. It was a beautiful morning that was followed by a yummy breakfast at a local diner. E. had a wonderful time and was very happy to finally have a chance to wear her balloon outfit. 

Sunday:

It seemed fitting that the week of our wedding anniversary my husband wanted to take the kids and I up to Frenchman's Hole in Newry, one of the places he took me when we were first dating. With a little grilling and some swimming later into the afternoon, it was a very pleasant and relaxing end to a really perfect summer weekend.

Abundance

This week I'm joining, for the firs time, the Make Your Home Sing link up party over at Mom's the Word. So very excited!

The season for blackberry goodness is upon us again. We have a ridiculous amount of blackberry bushes on one side of our property that have yielded a ridiculous amount of some of the most delicious blackberries I've ever had. In the past two summers that we've lived in our little house (with it's small surrounding jungle) these berries have never tasted so good. Big, juicy, sweet (with that lovely hint of tart) berries that quickly fill our bowls and bellies.

Every other afternoon, the kids and I have been going out and picking berries, setting some aside to make something special. E. is begging for blackberry pie, but I'd love to make this from Cinnamon Girl.

With the blackberries comes the extreme green of summer at our house. Everything is so vibrant and growing so well, but...I don't know what half of it is. And most of the other half are weeds, or there's just a lot of it (it being hosta, bee balm, day lilies, iris, some sort of weird monster plant that grows to enormous heights, and six-foot-tall thistle that I have a love/hate relationship with).

There's one particular part that is abundantly overgrown (pictured just above) for which I have high hopes. For the last two years I've been desperate for a vegetable garden. But our yard is woefully shady in most places, except for this one particular crazy patch of ground that's afloat amidst our lawn. So, while logic might dictate (or at least it does to me, a person with limited gardening experience) that we simply tear up what's there and plant a garden (I realise it's slightly more complicated than all that, but that's the gist of it).

But it can't be that simple, of course. Two reasons: that particular patch is over part of our septic system and those crazy monster plants grow non-stop, no matter what, and, as our neighbour informed us, the only way to really guarantee their demise is to rip them all up (thankfully the pull out easily), put down a layer of newspaper followed by a black tarp and leave that there for upwards of a year.

So, in order to unite my desire to have a veggie garden and to get rid of those crazy plants (all while not using potentially icky, septic-contaminated soil), we've decided to try raised beds over the layers of black tarp and newspaper. Win, win, right?

We're in the midst of phase one right now, which mainly involves me ripping up the crazy amount of weeds, and trying to figure out if I'm capable of ripping out a six foot thistle tree bush. After that we'll put down the newspaper and tarp and settle in for the cooler temperatures. Over the fall and winter I plan on beefing up my gardening knowledge and spending those chilly months being an armchair gardener, hoping to put my new knowledge into use come spring.

We'll see how that goes. Hopefully, come this time next year, we'll have quite the abundance of home grown veggies to fill little and big bellies alike as we do home grown weeds and wild blackberries.

Or I'll have a lone zucchini (possibly from our neighbours garden). Either way, I'll call it good.

Poetry Sunday

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

- William Wordsworth

I recently saw this segment of the ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood in the book You Are Your Child's First Teacher. With a child still so new in our home, this touched my heart in a special way. There is something about an infant that seems ethereal. He's not quite entirely there with us, sometimes, as though a part of his being is still mingling with God or some timeless force from where he came.

This is a seriously beautiful poem, and is quite a bit longer (this is only one small section). I would recommend reading the rest if you find your heart hungering for some meditation on the beauty of childhood. The rest of the poem can be found here.

Poetry Sunday is a day to find a piece of poetry that stirs your soul and makes your heart race in that oh-so pleasant way and share it with the rest of the world.