wonder at the old moon comes back nightly
March 29, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
tricksy
March 27, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
henry’s one true love is the granola bar. i’ve often regretted buying them because it’s all that he wants to eat, it’s the snack of choice that he pulls from the pantry shelf, it’s the food of which his body is made.
i’ve tried making them myself and he always snubbs them and acts as though i’m feeding poison to him. at long last, however, i’ve found a super healthy recipe that he says are, “sooooo delicious, mom. thank you for making these for me.“ personally, i think they’re rather yucky, i can taste the flax seeds too strongly and know that there are no refined sugars involved so the sweetness doesn’t cut it for me. but i never eat the granola bars, anyway, and am more than happy to spend a little time and a very little money making the food that he eats most out of something that isn’t marshmallowed and buttered.
fingerprint
March 26, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
hooray for something new. expect some tweaking, but i’m really excited about this new design we’ve got going on over here!
the weather is nice and pollinated with green powder that finds safe passage into the place that tickles out a sneeze, though, so we’ve been out and sneezing in it and tweaking may take time. if you notice anything weird, please stand up and say.
snappy and zippy
March 21, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | 1 Comment
henry has been taking pictures of everything since i got a new camera. he thinks that the point and shoot is his and i’m happy to let him explore with it. he’s mostly careful and remembers to wear the strap on his wrist so as not to drop it. it’s the same camera that went for a swim last summer as jude was loading everything he could carry from the sunporch into the wading pool. the thing works well but doesn’t stay charged for as long as before. i don’t think much worse could happen to it, really.
henry rides in the car and says, “what a shot!” at the leftover sunrise in pinks and greens, the long curve of train track as we wait for the traffic, the trees that flower white and are a-buzz with giant bumblebees. we’ve been reading almost daily his new book about a photographer that travels the world taking pictures of artists. he got the book last week in his kindermusik class and now thinks he’s the hottest thing with a camera.
here are the latest. i’ve not posted pictures by henry for a long time, over a year, maybe longer. i’m too lazy on this sunny breezy day to look it up. if you’re still in hibernation you might search the archives for me. my favorites are the windows and sunshine, the almost-missed light fixture in the study, and the anthropologie catalog on my messy desk.
beautifully marked in currants
March 18, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
yesterday was ernie’s birthday and we have the leftover cake to prove it. “can we eat cake for breakfast?” henry asks. globs of green sugar sprinkles in irregular heaps on the icing (sprinkled by jude) are the pieces of choice. i always forget to make small cakes that will be eaten in one or two cake eating sittings; the main event with the lighting and wishing and blowing of candles, and another time later on, maybe in the dark before bed, or the next day after lunch on plates in the yard, the dog sniffing the grass for crumbs.
instead i make the cake as large as the recipe written by women with pudgy stomachs that lean over the counter, giving them a flour line on their aprons when they back away, or by men with round red cheeks who eat seafood regularly and know how to fry butter brown without burning, have written it using two round cake pans (slow) or a thirteen by nine white ceramic dish (fast). and then the cake abounds and is often thrown away after being poked at for a few days with a variety of utensils, henry with a spatula, jude with a butter knife. there is also no place to keep leftover cake, especially when it’s made thirteen by nine fast style, except for on the counter, which means that the regular dragging of kid sized chairs to the counters is increased.
on friday the boys woke up around five so by evening they were too tired for early birthday dinner for poppy. they gave him their present and ate hot dogs and tater tots before crawling into bed and in and out of dreams about the cake and the bouncing house of the next day. so we made early birthday dinner for ernie since the actual day would be too hectic for slow cooking and eating. as usual, i made the vegetables and ernie dealt with fish and the bleeding meat. last night the kitchen still smelled of scallops as the weather has turned cold again and everything has been closed back again.
ernie’s birthday was green and cold and busy. i taught in the morning and tried to take a nap with jude when i came home but henry was repeatedly asking for string cheese and granola bars so it was an annoying interrupted sleep. later we went to a family music festival where i took pictures and looked for my kindermusik students and drank/crunched on free slush. ernie took pictures too and followed the kids from the bounce house to the free slush to the drums and to the bounce house again. before we left for the festival henry was found standing on a stool in the bathroom combing his hair so that “he’d be handsome for the bounce house.” two hours of jumping and slurping and banging on drums. it’s nice to go somewhere that is as tall as the kids and no taller, somewhere that they feel like they are the reason for all of it, and where those feelings are rightly validated. it must be what people feel when they go to disney world or land.
forgetting the way back
March 16, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | 3 Comments
it started to rain last night as i was trying to fall asleep. we’ve had the windows open for the last few days, the curtains breathing in and out over the beds, my head, the nightstand, the half read copy of watership down, the basket of matchbox cars. the laundry room windows bring the green grass scent into the house speedily, almost fast enough to make me forget that most of our yard is gray with gravel and sand, red with carolina dust. no plants. no one planted anything near to the house. in a way, the emptiness and dust are a relief — nothing hideous to yank out from its white roots and toss into the pile of leaves and onion grass. and at the same time, it’s too bad that plants cost money and that they take time to grow and hide the indiscretions of the yard.
as i try to sleep i talk to ernie about things that he says should be putting me to sleep immediately. he doesn’t obsess over things in the way that i do, nor does he obsess over the same kinds of things that i do. he doesn’t spend as much time looking at the dust and gravel and the dinginess of the shed to develop improvement obsessions. it’s clear that i need to do more in the day.
martha stewart understands, or at least the current editors of her magazine understand. and the tree people of the arbor day foundation understand as they offer the hard refuse membership gift of ten free trees that should be sent to us soon. sometimes it’s amazing what ten dollars will buy (do it!). of course, i’m a little scared about the size of these trees since the trees were free and the shipping was free. i have seen tiny redbud trees before, after all, grown up from wind and rain and sun in a place that they didn’t belong, small, but green and healthy. i imagine a dogwooded bonsai-sized infant tree greeting me at the door (in orphan on the church-step fashion) and nine others smiling in a line behind. nonetheless, i’m obsessed with the idea and the day of arrival, the locations for planting, the anticipation of their branches reaching for stars and sun and wind and bird in flight.
the gray rain still falls and the dust has turned to puddles where the raindrops fall in great plunks to look like bubbles from my position at the window. the daffodils are all but done blooming. spring is here and there, the sun is shiny and bright most days. i don’t feel springiness myself, driving down wade hampton and north pleasantburg in broad daylight depresses me. at night the sky is clear and the lights of the traffic glimmer and seem clean and silent. the drear of the rain is more alive than the blaze of sun on metal and concrete and i am glad of it today, noticing for the first time the brightness of yellow and green on the hydrant at the curb across the street and the purple weed of flower sprawling out across the front grass.
you can do what the birdies can
March 7, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | 8 Comments
when henry was one or two i wanted to buy the dvd of Peter Pan but was unable to find it because Disney releases a limited amount and then you can’t find them anywhere. well, you can find them from japanese distributors on ebay — scary!
i was very happy to learn of a remastered “platinum edition” (what does that mean?) of the movie to come in march. ernie took the boys to buy it last night where they also got to choose a collectible figurine at no additional cost (best buy). henry, of course, chose captain hook. the peter pan looked weird, anyway (?). the second disc of special features is fun for the kids and has some interesting factoids about other peter pan storyboards that disney considered. the difference in the old version and the remastered is incredible.
go and buy it!
as long as they go fast from whence he came
March 6, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
we wake up in the morning to the sounds of animals whining and calling out to be fed. i am tired, but i feed them anyway. henry then needs a granola bar, jude, something else as his tastes change from day to day. before i am fully awake most of the house is munching on something. ernie sleeps a few minutes longer before someone with a full mouth wakes him up.
the sun starts his business a bit earlier these days, even though the mornings are still cold. henry believes that light in the sky means that it’s time to be awake. i remember standing in my room for long hours while the sun was still in shreds over the fields, behind the trees. i could hear my parents laughing in the kitchen. it wasn’t fair then and i’m sure it won’t be fair when summer becomes the day to day and the sky is still blue and pink when the boys are lured to sleep. i understand the need to laugh in the kitchen these days, though.
the wind and the dog make messes with the leaves that we still need to bag and send away. the boys carry bricks in their wheelbarrow from one side of the yard to the other and lay them in patterns in the grass. i beat at gravel with a variety of tools and wonder what people think when they cover a yard with gravel and say goodbye to grass.
a girl at the park chases her kite in slow motion across a field. it dips and nods and then falls, sticking in the mud as long legs rush to inspect, to wind, to cast off again. the sky is clear and the rainbow of kite is saturated in the sunlight. we watch as the wind carries it away into a speck. the girl is laughing in her green jacket.
i am still in a blogging slump of sorts, having crazy days and sleepy nights to manage, i find myself saying nothing of interest or nothing at all. i’m not sure what it is, but hopefully it will end soon.