Literal MInded

Violin Teacher: Your elbow is not invited to this party.
Luke: What does that mean?
VT: Think about if your friend invited you to a party and your parents decided to tag along, even though they weren't invited...
L: Well, unless the friend was my neighbor, I wouldn't be able to go to a party without my parents anyway because I can't drive yet. They would at least have to take me there.
VT: Ok...what if your friend's party was in a super cool fort that he had built and it was just big enough to fit you and your friend? And then, your parents not only tagged along to the party, they also got into the fort? And broke it? Wouldn't you be mad?
L: Well...no...I don't really like parties...or forts.

(I'm pretty sure he likes forts AND parties, he just likes bedeviling people even more.)




VT: You can use those crayons. All I ask is that you color on the wood floor instead of on the rug.
Weston, after frowning at her for a moment: Can I just color in the coloring book? It will be hard to clean the floor...

Splendidly Seven!

Luke turned seven a month ago--hey look, this might be my latest birthday post yet! He had his first "big kid birthday party" this year at one of those arcades with mini golf and go-karts. I think he smiled the entire 3-and-a-half hours (why yes, it was the longest birthday party in history and we should be hearing from the Guinness Book any day now) that we were there.

A few days before his birthday, a new kitten joined our family. Notice I didn't say we got a new kitten? Because we didn't. No, a new kitten got us. He found us in a friend's yard and climbed right up McMoose's pants, so obviously we had to bring him home. (Big mistake.) Luke is alternately terrified of and fascinated with the kitten, who was named Cat Vader at the children's insistence. (Luke has since decided that this is not how Sith naming works and really, he should be called Darth Cat, but too late.) Vader has the rather rude habit of greeting us by biting our ankles and a few times, I've found Luke perched atop his desk or the dining table, grinning and crooning, "Aww, you're so cuuuuuute!" to the ferocious little beast pouncing about on the floor in front of him.

When we go anywhere, I know that I should plan for some time to save insects along the way. A couple of years ago, we started moving earthworms from the middle of the sidewalk to the grass because he didn't like seeing all the ones squished by bikes and people. It has now progressed to moving every blessed insect he finds on the sidewalk or bike trail when we're out. Just today, we had to stop to save a roly-poly beside the car in the parking lot, a millipede from the violin teacher's driveway, and an caterpillar from the sidewalk. On the flip side, he feels no remorse killing ants that come into the house, citing the argument that when we're outside, we're in their home, so we should treat them with respect, but when ants come into the house, they might eat all our food, so they've got to go. (Other insects get a pass, apparently.)

Most of the time, he's patient with his brother, who admittedly takes advantage of that fact to annoy Luke half to death. He loves baby animals and tolerates baby humans, especially when their ages are compared with Another Baby. Anyone younger than Another Baby gets a pass for annoying behavior; anyone older is sighed at for their childishness.

His favorite extra-curricular activity this year has been to join Cub Scouts, with McMoose as his...adult-helper-person. (Sorry, but I will never remember what they're called. Pack leaders? Den masters? Troop wizards? Whatever.) He got to go camping with scouts a couple of times, which he loved without reservation. He enjoyed T-ball for the first half of the season, and then was mostly annoyed at having to continue to go. Instead of paying attention to the game, he and a friend mostly tried to push each other off the bench and engaged in general tomfoolery.

He's still enjoying violin lessons, as well--though he would very happily do without the daily practice. When he asked to take lessons, I said okay in large part because I wanted him to learn that some things are difficult, but with practice, they get easier (or at least more doable) and he's learning that nicely. His teacher asked him to practice a piece three times a day this week and he responded, "Just three? Wouldn't it be better if I did it seven times a day?"

So far, seven has been a pleasant, comfortable age and I'm looking forward to experiencing this year of growth and learning with him.

Evidence of Photographs

It's been an incredibly long time since I've posted any pictures here. And also, my phone recently threatened to quit me unless I found alternate storage for some of the pictures and videos that were on it, so I now have access to said pictures and videos from my computer. (I had access before too, through the cloud or whatever, but my brain firmly refuses to grasp the concept of cloud computing. I have had multiple people explain the concept, I have read several explanations online, but just...no. What? Clouds? And pictures in clouds? But not real clouds? But where do the water droplets go? There are no water droplets? So then how is it a cloud? What kinds of droplets are there? Who? So I'm currently not on speaking terms with the cloud. I'm sure I'll come around to it eventually, but by then, we'll probably be storing data in a virtual Hundred Acre Woods or something.)

((On a somewhat, but not really related note: we have Amazon Prime Now in Raleigh now, which means that we can order $20 worth of things and then have it delivered to our door 2 hours later. If we're in a hurry, we can pay $8 for shipping and it'll be here in an hour. One. Hour. I can't even get the kids together, find matching shoes, and drive to the store and back in that time. The other day, we ordered a book at, I don't know, midnight? And when we woke up the next morning, it was waiting at the door. What is this crazy new world we live in? And more to the point, when did I get so old?!))

Getting back to the point: Pictures. Here they are.

Luke with his new favorite book, written by his new favorite author. As a result of all this favorite-ness, I decided to read the other Michael Crichton books we have on our shelves, so as to decide whether they're appropriate for him (they are decidedly not) and he told me with great concern that he thought they might be too scary for me.

I don't know why I ever try to get this kid to smile for a picture. This is, obviously, his new favorite picture face.

Took the kids to an open gym at the local community center. This was their game of choice. It's all fun and games until someone gets hit in the face with a ball.

We took the kids to their first football game in December. This is the closest thing I have to a nice family portrait this year. Whoops. Why are the children dressed to go hunting, you ask? Well...because you try finding summery orange and maroon gear in Mississippi in December because you packed a bunch of hoodies and then it ended up being 80 degrees.

He winds up like this every time he jumps. Inevitably, the jumps are so enthusiastic that he fails to land on his feet. He has a similar wind-up process before running, but involving one arm back and one forward. I die of the cuteness. He's like a little cartoon person!

When you find an enormous bee, what better course of action than to climb it?

A blue morpho butterfly landed on Luke at the butterfly house at a local museum, which was really cool at first because we got to see it up close and they both got to hold it. It got considerably less cool when it refused to leave Luke's hand and kept flying back over to him, despite his best efforts to put it on a branch and run away. The attack of the blue morphos!

Beauty

I was recently sitting with a group of family members and someone asked about the most beautiful places and things we had ever seen. I loved hearing everyone's answers about the places they had seen and the sights and experiences they would carry with them, but when it was my turn, I found myself having trouble coming up with an answer. The most beautiful place?

The valley in Vermont with mountains all around, where you can watch the fog retreating back into the clouds every morning, where everything shines in shades of green, where the words Emerald City are never far from your mind.

Flying into the Chennai airport in the middle of the night, when you can see the lights of the ships off the coast and feel like they're leading you home.

Glaciers off the coast of Alaska viewed during a midnight sunset in July from the deck of a ship.

A path on the campus of Virginia Tech, where there is a bend in the sidewalk and a sudden, unexpected patch of wildflowers that seem always to be happy to see you.

A field covered in a foot of snow with no one around and quiet as deep as the ocean.

A beach in India that's clean and empty, where you can sit and close your eyes and listen to the ocean and feel connected to everything that has ever been, will ever be.

A stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that's littered with tiny, trickling waterfalls and twisty roads that leave you wondering whether you should have stayed on the interstate while being simultaneously grateful that you didn't.

A coffee shop that's actually a double decker bus and is decorated with colorful bits of glass on the tables and walls.

Home at the end of a long journey. My bed at the end of a long day. My children first thing in the morning. A fire in my fireplace on a cold night. Steam rising from my morning coffee. A cardinal at the birdfeeder. The first seedlings that grow in my garden. A book and a blanket and a cup of tea. Secret, undiscovered places that make you feel like you're the first person there ever was. A sky glowing with stars that reminds you that you're not.

There's beauty everywhere. How do you decide?

 

Goats

Most of the country was watching football last weekend--good game? fun commercials?--and on any other year, that's exactly what we would have been doing, too. But this year, we went to see some baby goats. Because come on, how do you pass up newborn goats? Now see, the email that arrived from the goat farm said that new goats were being born and that the farm was planning an open barn event, but what I didn't realize is that new goats were in the actual process of BEING BORN. At the moment of the open barn. So that was...an experience. My favorite part of that experience, by the way, was this exchange:

Luke: Is that goat eating MEAT?!

McMoose: Um. It's eating its placenta.

Luke: What's a placenta?

*Every kid in the vicinity stares at McMoose as he explains what a placenta is.*

 

My takeaway from that experience is that (a) baby goats are surprisingly large and if I had to choose to be a non-human animal, I think I'd prefer to be a kangaroo or a panda, both of which have teeny tiny babies and (b) next year, we'll stick with the March open barn, by which time all the goats have been on the outside for at least a week. (And (c) I'm crossing "Farmer" off my list of potential future occupations because no.)

Hello

I've been having this conversation with myself--and usually, it's confined to my own head, but sometimes, when I'm driving, I start to actually mumble aloud and Weston says, "Mama, why are you always talking to yourself?" and then, to convince him that actually, he's having a perfectly normal childhood, I tell him, "No, I wasn't talking to myself, I was just singing. A song. From violin class! Yes, I was singing my new violin song. Didn't you recognize it?" I'm pretty sure he knows the truth, but he plays along.

Where was I? Right. Having a conversation with myself. About privacy and children growing up with all of the minutia of their lives broadcast and preserved forever and all that. You know how when a new politician comes on the scene and all of a sudden, random blogs about politics are trying to talk to that person's best friend from third grade about how, as an eight-year-old, that person was convinced that people of the opposite sex had cooties? And then, the blogs claim that clearly, that means that the politician-wanna-be is sexist and would therefore try to turn the world into a real life Handmaid's Tale? (Stay with me. I know it's hard.) So what happens when the children that we write all about on every form of social media we have grow up and want to be politicians? Or teachers? Or, I don't know, other people who have to seem/be civilized? But there on the internet are stories of the time when they ate a pine cone or went through the phase of randomly blurting out, "Poop!" at inappropriate moments. Who's going to want that kid-turned-grown-up leading their country?

And then, my conversational partner (still me) chimes in to point out that by then, it won't matter because all the kids of that generation will have embarrassing back stories that were published somewhere on the internet. In fact, adults who don't have these bizarre digital trails might be considered suspect. Maybe?

So here I am, sporadically writing barely-intelligible things once again. In the end, it's probably less damaging to the children to be written about in a minuscule corner of the internet than to have their mother mumble to herself while driving around town.

Walk in the Park

I used to consider myself not an optimist. Not a pessimist, perhaps, but a realist with pessimistic tendencies. The glass was more than half empty. Entropy wins. This, too, generally does not pass. Then, kids happened and now, the glass is more than half full, especially when it spills all over the table. Maybe the world isn't destined for increasing levels of chaos after all. And this, too, shall pass.

A year ago, I was dropping Luke off at carpool in the mornings, knowing that he wouldn't interact with another soul for the next seven hours, except during his 20-minute recess. I was driving back to the carpool lane seven hours later, fully expecting that he wouldn't be there--either because he had wandered off the parking lot or just because he was wandering the hallways of the school. (The latter happened on a weekly basis, the former, luckily, lived only in the dark corners of my imagination during the forever-long minutes when I was sitting in my car, waiting for them to locate him.) I was wishing that someone would magic away the looming choices that were staring us in the face.

This morning, after spending a couple of hours at the park, we had to leave to get Weston from preschool and Luke was grumbling because he had to leave a newly-found friend.

L: But why do we have to leave already?
Me: Because your brother likes to be picked up on time.
L: Ugh. Can we come to more park days with my new friend?
Me: ...He comes to almost every park day we go to...
L: Really? How come I've never played with him before?
Me: Because you're usually busy playing with your other friends.
L, after considering that for a minute: ...You know, I think I have the most friends of anyone in the world.

Hey, look. It passed. We made it through, after all.