Thankful and then some

My little boy is just. so. cute.

If he weren't mine I'd prolly snatch him.

This year has been an inside-out, backward kind of year for me. You know the day when you run all your errands and run into friends you haven't seen in forever and run out of toilet paper and run back into town, and frankly, you just run, and then after dinner your husband says, "Honey? Your sweater is inside out. And backward." You know that day? Yeah. That's been my year.

Beautiful.

Rhubarb and strawberries and cherries oh my

My second-year orchard is tiny and valiant.

My rhubarb plants, in the ground three years now, are finally ready to provide me a pie or two. Or even some rhubarb champagne. Left to ferment until it's alcoholic or consumed sweet with ice, it sounds delicious. It calls to mind my responsibility in our family as the keeper of my grandfather's massive oak wine press. In San Francisco and Calistoga he used to press grapes for sweet wine for my grandmother. She preferred it sweet, he did not. Making it thus was an act of love from a man whose love language was service long before love languages were named.

My strawberry plants are blooming but not yet fruiting. The plants themselves were gifts from my father's garden. I'm so glad to have them as he recently removed his amazing strawberry beds in favor of, I believe, more herbs. Grandchildren across the county are still crying over this choice. I guess the cousins will have to visit my little farm to taste Grandpa's berries... that is if the deer don't get them first.

Gardening is probably a love language all its own.

This afternoon for instance I really, really needed a time out. You know the kind I mean. After a full morning of school under the influence of spring fever and a full afternoon of flute lessons and fruitless bathing suit shopping with two pre-teens, one first-grader, a preschooler and a baby... followed by a walk that no one wanted to take and then a dinner that no one wanted to eat.... Let's just say toward the end of my day I wanted to some alone time in the garden.

I dug into the newly weeded raised beds with my bare hands. They were probably still a little too wet for planting but I would not be denied.

Little lettuces. Little spinach. Little happinesses all in a row.

This year I am satisfying both my instant gratification and my delayed gratification needs by planting six packs of starts surrounded by seeds and seedlings of my own planting. Brilliant, to my way of thinking. It's easier than labeling and faster than succession planting and, bonus, it's fun.

I returned to the house in time to love on the baby, the preschooler, the first-grader and the pre-teens before bed. Isn't that the best kind of time out, after all? The kind that re-sets one's attitude?

Today I'm grateful for my garden, for my orchard, for the weeds that overrun my flowerbeds and necessitate another mommy time out (or five) this week. I'm grateful for the legacy of gardening and for the love of plants.

What are you grateful for today? Is it garden-related?

Groovy, again

This is another of those "groove back" conversations.

The ones where I ask the room at large whether there's a groove to, in fact, recover.

I have never been that groovy a gal. At least in my own estimation. In spite of more than a decade of ballet I can't really dance all that well. I'm not even very graceful, to tell the truth. (A broken hip and a bad knee and a collection of other clumsinesses are testament to this vicious cycle.) And although I was told in my youth that I had perfect pitch I subsequently damaged my hearing and can't currently carry a tune. (Don't mind me though because I still do sing. Show tunes especially. It's good to embarass your children.)

I like routine and I love tradition. I dig a good garden furrow as much as the next farm girl, I do, and I've earned all the lines on my face through laughter and tears and too much time squinting at my handsome husband on a baseball field.

So even though the riff on a groove is cool in concept it's never really worked for me. And it's not that I think a groove is the same as a rut, although sometimes it seems comparable. I consider it more of a fault line, really, this shifting, mobile area of life that flirts around somewhat like a dance but less predictable. I fear the jolt when the comfort zone is inexplicably disturbed by the moving plates of life.

Pretty soon my baby turns 1.

Pretty soon my oldest turns 13.

I don't have time for a groove. I'm too busy looking up at the blue sky, looking down to see where my feet are placed, balancing on a beam of life with my arms wide open.

That grass? Over there?

Um. It looks pretty much like the grass over here.

Truthfully I've never understood the prevalence of the old adage "the grass is always greener on the other side." It might be an overdeveloped sense of empathy, but for as long as I can remember I've been pretty sure that other peoples' proverbial grass is as full of weeds as mine. Moss. Dandelions. The occasional prickly invasive thistle.

(I think moss is pretty. Dandelions leaves are full of Vitamin C and their flowers look cute in a tiny vase when plucked by a preschooler. And even thistles attract birds and butterflies.)

By the same token I've never been overdue with a baby before. I do think the baby is better by far than the pregnancy, even if you are one of those blessed mothers whose pregnancies are blooming and full of health and energy (so not me). And so I'd like very much to see the baby. Thanks for reading. For sticking in there with me while I stuck my head in the blog sand for a week or so.

And without further ado:

If the littlest Suite doesn't make his or her appearance this weekend I am going to let the doctor induce us. Did you know that it's considered by the Obstetrics and Gynecology Board or some such authority to be dangerous to be overdue as a mom of "advanced maternal age"? More to the point, it is making me more than a little crazy. I have started to obsess (started?) about unintentional home birth since we live more than an hour from the hospital. (I have some anemia issues that will not allow us to have an intentional home birth.)

I have figured my dates down to the millisecond. This is gross oversharing, I know, in light of my grandmother's generational belief that pregnancy and all discussion of such subject should be focused much closer to the result than the conception. I have also spent time agonizing over the proximity of several local EMTs and nurses, mostly men, who have reassured our family that they are "all trained up" in this delivery business. Yikes. I have to be perfectly truthful that I've felt sorry for myself that my midwife friend and former neighbor Jayme took this very inconvenient year to spend an extended vacation with her family in Hawaii. (How could she?)

I have been embarrassed in the local general store by a line of loggers, one would have to assume hardened woodsmen, astounded at my girth enough to move out of line with their post-four-p.m. six-packs. I have overheard at the girls' spring concert that I might "drop the baby in the bleachers." I have been on the church's prayer chain and oh-so-mortifyingly discovered this tidbit of news yesterday while on a walk past the Rebecca Lodge's Thursday senior citizen luncheon. I have listened to Jayme's phone advice about herbs and supplements and patience and such nonsense. I have heard from my redder-necked friends about trampolines and pickup truck rides. I have walked until the walking is a meditation but certainly not a labor induction.

I have also conveniently remembered from my first post-bacc job as a reporter at a small daily where I rotated through the vitals page duties with the other newbies: More than four times as many babies are born on the full moon as on any other day of the month. Saturday's the full moon, friends.

Keep me in your thoughts. I promise to return to the blessedly patchy grass of random rural ramblings and the all-too-often mommy blogness as soon as I'm a mom of five and not the only farm girl in Western Oregon to ever be 11 months pregnant.

Don't ask how I know

Vinegar water and a half-hour's elbow grease will remove an entire tube of pink lipstick from the tongue-and-groove wainscoting.

But no amount of eagle-eye care can guarantee that all of the purple glitter is out of the alfredo sauce.

(I think that's why they're called the "terrific" twos.)

When good dolls go to the spa

You know those days... those days when your husband comes home, looks around, and says (without words), "What did they do all day?"

Well... yesterday might have been one of those days. Sure, we had drop-off and pick-up and a storm warning and its accompanying grocery store run and feed store stop. I hadn't been to the grocery store in a month, friends! Then we took a stab at chores and school.

But what we really wanted to do was to untangle those dolls' hair.

Don't you just love/hate the internet? You truly can learn anything on there.

A little Downy (another love, even in this time of homemade laundry soap and homemade cleaning solutions), a little near-boiling water, and an hour or so later Sophie and Stacy have beautiful flowing tresses again. Ready for braids and adventures.

A little rain, a little Scrabble, a little bread

The girls and I have been writing in the rain. Doesn't that sound dreamy? Good old Oregon downpours beating on the skylights while the animals all huddle in their shelters and the family snuggles up with their notebooks and pens and a slice (or three) of oatmeal cinnamon swirl bread.

Even Grace (5) has been learning to play Scrabble with us. Word to the wise: "Kid spelling" and Scrabble can work just fine as long as you don't have any 9-year-old spelling gurus unwilling to go with the flow.

Don't worry. It's nothing a little more koko and toste won't cure.

Why NaNoWriMo

Gracie sat down at this massive carved desk from the 1930s and began banging on an imaginary typewriter.

"I'm the great American novelist," she said.

Where do they get this stuff?


"Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

"Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that's a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down."

Birthday Fairy? Are you there?

My niece Kayla told me there are no fairies. She's 9 so I suppose she knows.

But just in case? This greenhouse, cute as a bug and Earth-friendly as all get-out, would surely fit in the southeast corner of my garden.

How many fairies would it take to deliver that, do you suppose?

(Just your everyday side note: Do you think anyone likely noticed me as I trespassed my big red Suburban onto these nice (completely unknown to me) people's front drive to steal a photo of their newly delivered beauty? I'm not sure because I sped away quick-like when their big (huge) dog came charging out.)

Who's Got The Button?