Ladies, grab your doilies and head over to The Sparrow’s Nest for this week’s "Oh! Pretty!" stop. (this week’s, this month’s, this year’s!)  I have to confess to sneaking into the kitchen in free moments to go see what is brewing over there lately.  WAY too much fun.  Mrs. Wilt represents those of us who were born in the wrong era, who think a hat would go nicely with that, who like stuff with chipped paint, who embrace the civilized life. And believe me, here in a house heavily populated with boys, plunked down in the middle of the wild west, we can use all the ‘civilizing’ we can get! : )

The pages are chock full of her delightful mix of helpful homemaking hints, childrearing ideas, beautiful handwork ideas, and inspirational photos.  If you are a fan of ‘pretty’ you will love this one.

I know a girl
She puts the color inside of my world
She’s just like a maze
Where all of the walls all continually change…

from: Daughters by John Mayer

My darlin’ girl turned 12 last week. Hard to believe but these kids have a way of aging without even asking. ; )  Here she is with her bday purchases.  I didn’t get the pics uploaded so here goes:

I was reading Sallie’s post on her A Gracious Home blog.  She linked to this article: Sorry but my children bore me to death .  She warned readers that it was appalling.  I wasn’t prepared to be as appalled as I was however. The author drones on and on about how "mind-numbing" conversing with her offspring is and that they "have got used to my disappearing to the gym when they’re doing their prep (how boring to learn something you never wanted to learn in the first place). They know better than to expect me to sit through a cricket match, and they’ve completely given up on expecting me to spend school holidays taking t hem to museums or enjoying the latest cinema block-boster alongside them".  And what is so much more stimulating to her than the look of utter joy that crosses a child’s face at the park or when they strike it rich at Monopoly: "…thoughts of my own lunch and which shoes I plan to wear with what skirt. "

Whatever.

Frankly I find shoes mindnumbingly boring.  Food is a close second. You eat it, it’s gone.  Kids are forever. Although if you are unsure of the purpose of life then you are likely to be perplexed when faced with the ultimate reminder of same – children.

It’s ironic because all I could think of while reading was yesterday. A day not unlike all the ones that came before. We were rolling through downtown on the way to the midwife’s office.  We were late. Why are we always late??  Maybe because the goats got out of their gate at the last minute and the milk jar spilled and the baby had a diaper disaster. Any number of explanations!  Anyway, as I drive I am telling the girls to brush out their hair before we get out of the van. I see through the rear view that Kieran is sporting his new boots and tattered felt cowboy hat.  He is very pleased with his outfit but it IS one of those bite-your-tongue-mom moments. We call home to ask the big boys to check and see if the goats were successfully corralled and I miss my turn.  While I am backtracking the little ones notice Daddy is following us and they wave at him through the back window.  As I am thinking how crazy wonderful my life is at any given time I hear the words of Phil Vassar’s song on the radio:

The kids screaming, phone ringing

Dog barking at the mailman bringing
That stack of bills – overdue
Good morning baby, how are you?
Got a half hour, quick shower
Take a drink of milk but the milk’s gone sour
My funny face makes you laugh
Twist the top on and I put it back
There goes the washing machine
Baby, don’t kick it.
I promise I’ll fix it
Long about a million other things

Yeah it’s ok. It’s so nice.
It’s just another day in paradise.
Well, there’s no place that
I’d rather be
Well, it’s two hearts
And one dream
I wouldn’t trade it for anything
And I ask the lord every night
For just another day in paradise

Finally we arrive and shuttle everyone into the Victorian house turned midwifery office. The midwife squirts gel on this body of mine that has been down this road 8 times before while I say a silent prayer it will come through for me one more time.  We all squeeze around the ultrasound monitor and suddenly appears this teeny tiny hand flexing and stretching and truly all I can think is "Man! Does it get better than this???" 

I am firmly convinced "happy" is a verb.  As my friend Elizabeth says it is a decision we make everyday to wake up and do it all over again. Not only to do it all, but to do it with the acknowledgement of the blessing hidden inside every trial.  We have to decide if this is "monotonous, lonely, and relentless" or if is it an embarassment of riches.  We are swimming in blessing if we just open our eyes and embrace it. Shame on us when we neglect to notice.

It is toasty here at the ranch.  We don’t have a/c and for 10 mo out of the year it is really unnecessary since it cools down so dramatically at night.  Not so during the day however. To give you an idea of just how hot it got in July check out Brendan. And dont worry – no blades in that fan:

So we have spent a great deal of time doing this:

Hope you are all staying cool!

BOOOM!  That was that last thing we heard when the lights went out last night.  Now, lights going out is not generally a newsworthy item in our corner of the world.  Winter snow, spring winds, summer storms and random acts of God regularly shut the grid down around here. Usually it’s up and running in short order. It was cloudy when we began dinner last night.  By mid-meal we were eating by candlelight and the rain pounded the metal roof above us.  The storm was intense, as prairie storms often are, and soon we had a wall of water all around. The lightning was incredible. With this much sky you see a LOT of it.

So, the rain falls and the house finally cools and little people are put to bed by the flickering light. Around this time son number two calls from a cell phone saying his ride home got stuck on the road about two miles down. (Like many rural Coloradans we live on a dirt road.Rain navigation is a challenge)   Dh got the 4 wheel drive and tow chain and went to retrieve them.  The poor guy who brought him home from work was sitting in his car in over a foot of water. The ditch filled quickly and so did the car. : /  Allen got them out and down to pavement again and came home with Zach.

That was when he noticed that we were the only ones around us who had no lights.  That is not a good sign when you own your utilities. A call to the power company confirmed it was likely a direct hit to our pole.  The one on our property.  The one they charge you to repair. : P  They were on their way.  Not to worry, they would be there in about two hrs. <g>  Did I mention our power company serves just about the entire Eastern half of the state?  Sometime around midnite we awoke to the power truck in the yard and the lights came on again. 

A couple interesting things happened.  First was waking up to Lake Starry Sky and other local attractions (see pics), such as the army of bullfrogs croaking across the road. I hope they are feasting on mosquito larva as I type! Lake Starry Sky is a temporary phenomenon.  The ground under the water is rock hard so today is the safest day to play in it.  With any luck it will slowly sink into the pasture and bring us lots of green grass. In the meantime it made for giddy kids and a well-pleased shutterbug of a mom. It was one of those ‘never forget’ mornings.

The second was realizing my emergency kit was sorely in need of restocking. Little people have been taking dead batteries out of flashlights and putting them back in the battery box. : o  Will be fixing that right quick.  So do yourselves a favor and go check your flashlights everyone! For fun you might want to join your kids in this virtual preparedness tutorial.  Looks like a lotta help around here. Ready Kids

Wishing you all a ‘never forget’ day.  : )

Nothing exciting here – just documenting my expansion for the girlfriends out there. : )   Here is today’s spread.  Am at 17+ weeks though the belly is measuring a couple weeks ahead of that again this time.  I think the white dress has the same effect on the midsection as white jeans used to have on the backside…..  Ah well.

Tonight is one of those nights you treasure. Sun sinking low in the sky, kids chasing bugs and playing in the water from the hose, not a sound for miles other than their voices. Not a sound in my head other than happy thoughts. It has been a hectic couple of weeks. I love to travel, though I love errands far less, and in general I am becoming very protective of home time. It is a precious commodity in a hurried age, little appreciated in our quest to do ‘more’.

Old friends and I have been discussing upcoming schoolyear plans lately and the recurrent question is usually "Is it enough?" Followed by "Should we be doing more?" Basking in the glow of the setting sun tonight the only answer I could come up with is there ‘more’ than this? Can you find this someplace else? Would it be better?

A thread on 4Real this week was contemplating the normalized child. In Montessori terms this would be a child who is collected, calm, focused. All good things. I have been thinking about this all day and wondering if it is even possible to impart those things to a child if we are not those things ourselves? I am not sure there is a book, method, or technique that could ever come close to imparting those qualities half as well as having a beloved parent demonstrating them gently, surely, day in and out. That is a stiff challenge however. It is much easier to instruct than to demonstrate. However, while we search for answers in methodology books or curriculum lists we often miss an unparalleled opportunity to quiet ourselves and give them more than we can imagine.

For a lot of my teaching and parenting years I was in the *more* cycle. So many opportunities abound for homeschoolers today. So many classes, support groups, clubs, teams. But inevitably it was the home team that lost when we became committed to those things. It is clear to us that for every day we are away from home it takes another day for us to recover and get back on track. It now has to be an awfully worthwhile activity to warrant upsetting that peace we have found while moving at a slower pace. I guess this is all part of my ongoing goal to do a few things well. Less really is becoming more for us these days. Not only are we enjoying the things we do immensely, but we are gaining quiet – inside and out.

Just a quick post.  Grandma is visiting so time is short this week.  However, Allen and the girls trekked to the half-way point of Pike’s Peak this past wknd.  Alannah had committed to going and then Moira wanted to join.  She insisted she could make it and she was right!  Though her feet took a beating. : /  We need to invest in some serious hiking gear, especially since they have decided to train for the 14-ers next. 

So here are a few shots from one of the most beautiful places we know. : )

Amy’s blog http://amyable.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/06/11/where-i-m-from.html  turned me on to the poetry contest Joy in the Morning is sponsoring:

http://joyinthemorning.clubmom.com/joy_in_the_morning/2006/06/writing_contest.html

It is based on George Ella Lyon’s poem here: http://www.carts.org/staff_poem2.html I am no poet but reading about where my friends are "from" got me thinking this week.  If you have done one of these do share your links with me!  I love reading about other women’s history. Here is my stab at it:

Where I am From

I am from snow covered and slippery in winter and zucchini laden and mosquito bitten in summer,

From saddle soap, braided manes, and counting steps til the jump,

From ‘Bless us O Lord’, homemade pickles, pie for every holiday, and the thrill of drop-in guests who linger around Grandma’s table,

From babies in hand-knit layettes with oiled hair,

From polkas at weddings and When Irish Eyes Are Smiling and old Aunties in cat’s eye glasses,

From ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’, washing windows, and ironing everything that doesn’t move,

From Betty Crocker, Franco-American, cream soup based hot dishes, and Kool-aid,

From watching smoke swirls from pipe tobacco and

Salem

cigarettes and ashtrays in every size, shape and color,

And hence – from bronchitis every winter and painful ears resting on wool scarves placed over hot water bottles; from pink penicillin and oxygen ‘tents’,

From antique sales, found treasures, and Country Living subscriptions in the heart of the city.

From Beach Boys at the State Fair and the kiddie menu at Perkins,

From latchkey kid and nightmares and afraid of the dark,

From beloved nuns in long black habits with Kleenex in their sleeves to guitar masses and always being a ‘reader’,

From Scholastic book orders, the free lunch program, and posters of Sean Cassidy,

From Gloria Vanderbilt, Zena jeans, turned up collars, GunnySax dresses, and new Bass shoes in August,

From CW Anderson, Cover to Cover on PBS, and Judy Blume books,

From ‘don’t believe everything you hear’, ‘you can find anything in a book’, and ‘question authority’,

From AFS t-shirts, Dutch dictionaries, and homesickness,

From pompon routines and Friday night videos on cable and Prince records played over and over,

From head over heels and waiting by the phone to twenty years of following the love of my life around the world,

From seeking the truth to finding the Truth,

From this is only temporary to this is home.

We are almost all packed up for our night at the hotel. We have talked about a night out for many months. In our ideal plan, however, it was a romantic escape involving my husband and I instead of a whole family trek to rented rooms on base for showers and laundry.  As it turns out the pump we replaced in the well pit was defective and we woke up to no water on Saturday. While we thought we had it fixed, it is now completely shot.  So, we have filled our stock barrel at a neighbor’s for the animals and will head into town shortly.

It’s funny because I have had several random thoughts the past couple weeks and this recent catastrophe solidified my hunch. A speaker I heard recently asserted that we must be "hard on ourselves and our children" in order to develop heroic virtue. Now I am as sold on heroic virtue as the next guy, but it seems to me our life provides more than enough opportunity to cultivate it without going out of our way to make things harder.

Some examples from just today – although Allen is more than willing to just pay someone to come do the work this time it is summer.  The well folks are booked several weeks out.  They gave us lots of constructive advice to run with and wished us well (no pun intended ; ) but noone is coming. At first I thought this was a farm "thing".  Then we discovered the only room open on base has a broken air conditioner. All this follows our dear mama cat’s mysterious death the other morning. She was awake nursing her babies when we began barn chores.  When we went back to her to get the hay she was lying there, gone already. A very hard morning for my girls. When it rains it pours. Let’s just say we have our figurative umbrellas open.

Someone said to me the other day that I must be a STRONG person. I would change the emphasis to read that I MUST be a strong person. We all must.  There is no easy button in life and in a family this size with a property this size the rewards are multiplied, and so are the sorrows. It is inevitable. How we respond is about all we get to decide some days. I have noticed that if I remain as kind and patient as I can muster then the tone is set and the children react in kind.  If I give in to the selfish impulse to answer them sharply, then they in turn become careless in their words to each other and before you know it we have hurt feelings and angry words compounding the problems at hand. I know this all too well since I have not consistently resisted the fatigue and frustration that accompany early pregnancy coupled with a few well placed disasters. But that is what apologies are for, right?

No, we definitely don’t live a charmed life in an ideal world.  But, we have something better – real life.  While it’s often lacking in creature comforts and little luxuries that would be delightful to have on days like these, it IS fully equipped with all the necessities to help us on our path to heaven should we choose to take advantage of them. Opportunities for heroic virtue just bustin’ at the seams. <g>