moments from the week
a windy day at the river
Moments from the past week.
skate park penguins
the shade is growing
cookout days are here again
the sandbox hasn't fallen apart yet..
stop motion animating
Waldorf phone
Are you a crunchy-granola parent disappointed with your child's obsession with technology, because you want them to be building stick forts and playing in the dirt like the books say? Do you wish that phones and tablets had never been invented (except for yours, when you're in the bathroom or really tired because everyone keeps talking to you)? Well I have the answer for you! Introducing: the Waldorf phone!
wPhone
Lovingly crafted from reclaimed lumber, the Waldorf phone offers a blank canvas for your child to play out all their technology-related imaginative games without compromising your carefully cultivated hippy homeschooling persona. Available today!
I was motivated to make this delightful object last Thursday when Zion and Elijah were playing a game that involved each of them having an old dead phone. I budgeted ten minutes for its creation—that's how long there was until our morning meeting time when I started—and, while it actually took twelve, I think it was still worth it! When Leah saw it on the table a little later she knew right away what it was, based on the model of Waldorf dolls. Natural materials, "intentionally simple in order to allow the child playing with it to develop the imagination and creative play"... it ticks all the boxes. Now I need to make one for myself to try and curb my online checkers addiction...
see how he loves it
happy birthday Zion
Having three kids is hard. When you have four or five nobody could fault you for forgetting a birthday or two; there are so many! With three kids there's maybe no excuse, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. That's not to say that I forgot that Zion's birthday was today... only that, in the weeks leading up to May 4th, the importance of the day wasn't always at the forefront of my mind. Can I still blame pandemic brain? With all that said, though, I don't think we did all that badly in showing him a good day today. Good thing: turning ten is a big deal!
giant box of honey bunches? looks like a party!
Leah managed to get out last night to pick up some presents, and I stayed up late to wrap them, make a card, and hang up the birthday banners (the most important part of the whole celebration). He asked for cereal for his birthday breakfast, and since you can't put a candle in cereal Leah also brought home some donut holes (you can stick a candle in a donut hole about as well as you can in a pancake, our most common birthday choice). Then in the middle of the day the boys went to my parents' house for a celebratory lunch; this evening we're sharing socially-distanced cake with the group of friends who gather every Tuesday evening for what we're still calling Bible study. Then on Thursday he's going out for ice cream with the other grandparents. Not too bad! Parties with friends—online and in-person—will be along in good time.
Happy Birthday Zion!
morning workout
On Sunday afternoon I went out to Russell Mill Pond for a ride. I was looking forward to getting some time on the trails by myself—and I did, seven miles worth!—but the reason I drove out that way rather than stay closer to home was that I saw on a friends' Strava that the pump track was open. The pump track is what draws the kids to Russell Mill, but when we went earlier this spring our expectations were cruelly dashed: it was closed for the winter. But that red line snaking through it on a Strava map on Saturday let me know that it was maybe open again—and indeed it proved to be! I was excited to tell the boys and they were excited to hear about it, so when Leah suggested we go Monday morning we were enthusiastic. Of course, if we want to ride somewhere 20 minutes away and get back in time for breakfast we have to get up pretty early! So I made hot chocolate and brought it along in a thermos. I always wanted to tailgate at a trailhead!
warmth and energy
The waking up process completed, we got right over to the track to start doing laps. Harvey was a little tentative at first, having not ridden jumps all winter; Elijah was not tentative at all on his new bike and almost did a forward somersault on his second go around. Everybody soon settled in to an appropriate level, and we rode around and around for over an hour. We all got better, and then we got tired and got worse, but I think overall we all pushed our skills forward. And the best part is we were back home for breakfast not much after 7:30! Now to get some friends to come out riding with us...
jump!
home-made dirt
I don't count myself as being any good at making compost. When I read gardening books that talk about how to do it properly, I'm totally intimidated. Combine equal parts high-nitrogen and high-carbon material? Chop to one-inch chunks? Keep wet, but not too wet ("like a wrung-out sponge," we're told)? Turn weekly? I don't do any of those things. But I do pile up all the weeds and leaves and garden waste, with a little extra helping of food scraps, and let it sit for four to six months... and it turns out that's good enough, at least for our purposes! Twice a year we dig into the pile and pull out the dirt at the bottom of it; dirt that looks like a clumpy, straw-filled mess until we put it through a sieve made out of hardware cloth and sift out all the uncomposted bits. Then all of a sudden we've got the softest, blackest soil you could ever want! It's so gratifying to me, because that's how I want everything to work: don't worry about the details, just wait and it'll all come out fine!
Anyways, we've just prepped a couple beds in the garden so far: it's cool enough that I don't think the summer plants will grow at all if we plant them out now, even if there's no more frosts to threaten them (I count mid-May for our last frost date, so we're getting close!). But they're getting big in their cell packs, so yesterday I transplanted some of the tomatoes into individual three inch pots. I buy seed starting medium, but for potting soil it's just our compost mixed with some perlite from the store, and it looks just like the real thing. Since the one of the purposes of this whole operation is to save money, I appreciate not having to pay big bucks for dirt when we can just make it at home! Of course, watching the potting soil production Harvey was asking about the perlite: where does it come from, he wanted to know, and is there any chance we could make it or mine it or whatever ourselves? Ah yes, the self-sufficiency dream! We may be some ways off, but at least we've got home-made dirt.
cock-a-doodle
Lots of people, including us, got chickens at the beginning of the pandemic. For us the experience was old hat, but I heard that for some of the new chicken owners it was a bit of a challenge. I wonder how many of them are thinking of adding to their flock this spring? The subject comes to mind because this morning I was awakened by a strange yet familiar sound... which after a few repetitions I finally realized was a rooster! Actually, to be fair I don't think it was the rooster that work me up but rather the way the dogs were reacting to it; there was so much barking after each crow that it was clear the sound was new and alarming to them, unlike, say, the cry of the male turkey which we hear a lot more often.
So where did this rooster come from, and why haven't we heard it before? My first thought was that someone got chicks early this spring and one of them has now revealed itself as male—but I feel like they'd have to be really early to be outside overnight already. Could the sound have carried from a proper farm thanks to some unique atmospheric conditions? The closest farm is Chip-In, but they don't have roosters either—they're just about in the same neighborhood as we are and it's kind of a dense one, and I bet their neighbors wouldn't appreciate it. Personally, though, I don't know why not: I think they're a delightful addition to the ambience of a community! I wish I could wake to roosters every morning... especially since that means the dogs would have to get used to them.
moments from the week
birthday boy
Moments from Zion's birthday week.
ten is grown up!
candy run
you can't get ten candles in that..
training hard
pausing on a hike with friends
this can't possibly go badly...
being traffic
I don't love leaving the house in the car, but occasionally I have to—like this afternoon, when I ventured out to Costco to get more flour. There were moments on the trip, both there and back, when I felt like the whole idea of automotive transportation might be a mistake. Like on the way home when I contributed to filling the highway and causing a traffic jam. Traffic is back in Massachusetts the last couple weeks; I guess people are all vaccinated or trust the folks around them are. What's strange is that the stores don't seem to be any more full... I wonder where everyone is going? I did have a thought that maybe the volume of cars wasn't really what it was during rush hour pre-pandemic, but people just have forgotten how to drive on full roads; that came to mind when we returned to highway speed after five miles of traffic without any reason for the slowdown to be seen.
And I did see some specific moments of concerning behavior. On the highway on the way to the store I was in the right lane, as I tend to be, and there was a driver in the next lane over who was so slow one moment that I found myself passing on the right, and then zipped past me the next moment. When this happened a second time I looked over and saw them texting—or anyways doing something very absorbing on their phone. Yikes! Then a couple minutes later I stopped at a red light and was startled to hear screeching brakes as the driver following barely stopped in time to avoid rear-ending me. Maybe they expected me to run the light? All in all, it wasn't super fun, and I'm glad I don't have to leave our little local roads for another week or so!
little adventures
As I was thinking about plans for the week back on Sunday I was reflecting on how much easier outings used to be when the boys were little. How many times did we just walk down to the stream a quarter mile away and watch the water for an hour or so? And then of course there were all the hours we spent at the playground, or just walking and scootering to the center of town and back with the dog (remember when we just had one dog? the picture on the masthead does!). Now I feel like we've got to do something epic every time we leave the house, something befitting my crew of intrepid hikers and cyclists: visit somewhere we've never been before, or at least some woods that feel big enough to do some real exploring. All that time in the car! Well, maybe I actually don't really need to lead grand adventures; even for eleven-, ten-, and seven-year-olds small adventures can be pretty fun too. That's what I learned when I tried it today and got them all up and out for a picnic at the playground.
just like old times
We headed up after they finished up their weekly book group at 11. Our first stop was the skate park, where Harvey and Zion rode the obstacles in a relaxed manner and Lijah and I pushed ourselves (only I got badly hurt). Then we ate lunch, luxuriating in the beautiful cool late-spring air (or in one case being cold). Then we played tag in the field and tag on the playground, and when Zion tagged Lijah into a fence stanchion we took a break from that and Harvey and Zion timed each other doing climbing challenges. Then we went home. We could have stayed longer, too, but there was another Zoom class to attend. That's something that's different from four years ago, and sometimes I wish it wasn't. Another difference is that the boys are all much better cyclists (or cyclists at all!) so we only needed to budget ten minutes for the trip home, and I don't think it even took that. It would have been 25 in the old days. Maybe these days are the best of all worlds!
our reading lately
As I think I've mentioned, we managed to get through a year-plus of pandemic without any interruption to our chapter-book readaloud practice, even if it did lead us to read some selections that I might not have tried if we had all the variety of the library available to us. Most recently it was A Wizard of Earthsea, but Ursula LeGuin. It's a great story but the telling of it isn't straightforward; Harvey actually tried to read it himself six months ago or so and couldn't get into it. But as a readaloud it was a hit, for whatever reason, and with two reading sessions most days we got through it pretty quickly. I'm not sure how much of the exact progression of the story that Elijah was able to grasp, but he liked as much as anyone—enough that he's now doing a lot of playing wizards.
Now, though, the library is once again an option, and just in time for finishing Earthsea we took delivery of our first shipment of chapter books. So today we started The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes—different in every way from Ursula LeGuin but also very good. And more at Lijah's comprehension level. And when that's done, I've got other holds in at the library. Thank goodness!
we had a party!
All through the pandemic we've kept up with all our friend groups over Zoom. And of course we have our bubble friends over every week or so. But all that is nothing to the amount of entertaining we did before the plague hit. Well, now that it's maybe drawing to an end—or we're pretending it is, at least—we figured it was time to have a party!
what you do when you have a party
Well, it actually wasn't much of a party. Just our church community group, and only half of the families were able to make it. Still, that means there were ten people on our back deck not counting us (and really not counting Leah, who was in bed with a migraine). That's a big deal! It was delightful seeing folks in our space, more delightful even than I imagined it would be. The only problem was everyone had such a great time they stuck around past 8:30, and then there the cleaning up to do. When we met over Zoom I never had to put away chairs!
moments from the week
hold on tight!
Moments from the past week.
we went back and forth several times
playing wizards
Fawn Lake in the morning
our home has become a salon
the kids found some burnt sticks
someday they'll be able play with friends inside again...
instructions courtesy of Curious George
the garden mid-May
One thing I enjoyed about some of the hippy blogs back when blogs were still a thing was regular updates from their gardens. You know, like: here's what things looked like two weeks ago; this is what they look like now; here's what's growing... that sort of thing. I've always wanted to do that too, but I've never been organized enough. I'm probably still not, but at least I had a second Saturday, on the middle day of May, to take a couple pictures. So who knows if we'll see a followup come June, but here's what the garden looks like halfway through May.
still lots of dirt
From that angle there's maybe not too much going on. But it's not completely barren! The garlic is looking great, and we're picking plenty of asparagus and rhubarb and spring onions. And a couple beds are filling up. The peas, arugula, and lettuce mix we direct-sowed are coming up, and we transplanted out a bunch of kale starts.
stay away, rabbits
There's also the boys' bean seedlings planted for school way back in early April or something—not really seedlings because they were maybe four feet tall by the time we planted them out the other day! Now they're struggling to get used to the unseasonably hot and dry weather and suffering from sunburn, but they're so big I do believe they'll pull through.
Of course, at this moment the most exciting things of all are the baby berries! The first green strawberries are out and the blueberries are blooming beautifully, even after their hard winter. Plus there are tiny little pears and apples on the trees... Never mind that last year animals—squirrels, mostly, ate all of all of those fruits. Right now hope is still uppermost!
blue-tiful
civic duty
Back in the mists of time Bedford's Town Meeting met on a mid-week evening in the High School auditorium. Coronavirus made that impossible, and concurrent mosquito-borne plagues meant the town couldn't schedule anything outdoors in the evening. So now it's on Saturday morning at the football field. This past Saturday was the second one of the pandemic, and I was there!
along with a couple hundred other folks
Generally I think that 9:00 on a Saturday morning is a much better time for local politics than after dinner, especially since local politics isn't quick! On the town calendar the meeting was scheduled from 9 AM to 9 PM. Of course, the problem on Saturday morning is that there's always other things to do, but while those things I absolutely had to do kept me from leaving home til closer to 10. So I missed the ceremonial opening. But there were plenty of seats, each on it's little square of socially-distanced plywood. What there wasn't was shade, and after a couple minutes I found myself hunching over with my back to the sun, trying to keep my arms in the shadow of my body. And I was super glad to have my hat and gaiter-type mask, which I was able to pull up to cover my ears. Town meeting may be fairly collegial and free of any signs of overt party affiliation, but unfortunately there was no actual big tent. I didn't get an "I Voted" sticker, but I do now have Town Meeting tan lines.
Most of the articles under consideration were about budgeting and zoning—important, but not really interesting to a wider audience. But the question that aroused the most interest was a suggestion that we replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. You know I'm all for that, and given the back and forth in the town online newspaper in the weeks leading up to the meeting I wanted to be sure to be there to vote for the article. In person, too, there were lots of voices in opposition—some of which were just this close to outright racism—but when the time came to vote the for side won handily, without even a counted vote. I guess everyone who didn't like the idea had to say why, while those of us in favor were satisfied with just voting. So Bedford is now something like the 17th community in Massachusetts to make Indigenous People's Day an official holiday; that seems good!
We also authorized the by-right construction of Accessory Dwelling Units smaller than 1000 sq ft on conforming lots... does anyone want to hear more about that?
to the pond
I didn't mean to go to the pond this afternoon. But it was hot, and when the boys asked I just couldn't refuse them. So never mind the writing I had to do or the gardening work, off we went at 2:00 for a solid two hours of swimming and lying in the sun. It was actually our second pond trip of the week: on Sunday we made our first visit of the year. It's a delightful time to be there, since the ropes aren't up yet and it's not too crowded. In a few weeks we'll need to bring the boat or walk way around to find a place where we can actually swim, but for now there's always space right at the bottom of the ramp down from the street. And of course, the water itself is always delightful.
our pond!
Delightful, but also still very cold. As hot as it was this afternoon I didn't want to stay in for longer than a couple minutes at a stretch, and Sunday in the late afternoon it was positively cool out and after one quick dip I was done. Lijah wanted to stay in, but when he started turning blue and shivering uncontrollably we all thought it would be best for him to spend a little time lying in the sun. Harvey and Zion, though, are made of sterner stuff and spent the whole time both days in up to their necks—with no apparent ill effects.
I get to spend some time with him
We have our annual pass now, at long last, so you can expect more pond stories—or at least photos—all summer long!
wisteria week
Most of the year the wisteria on the side of our house is out-of-mind at best, and a downright nuisance at worst: like when it wormed its way through the boys' bedroom window last summer and broke their fan. But for a week or so every May we remember why we have it, because when it blooms it's just about the best thing ever. The look is amazing enough: it's grown considerably since the last time I wrote about it and the trellis is now a solid mass of blooms, with many more trailing off to the sides. But even better is the smell, a sweet perfume that's strong enough to fill our whole house (as long as the dogs haven't recently been playing in the swamp). It doesn't last long, but it's totally worth all the annoyance the rest of the year. We're sure enjoying it now!
too bad there's no smell protocol on the world wide web
moments from the week
real summer exploring
Moments from the past week.
cold? refreshing!
breakfast and wisteria
historic picnic spot
kitchen dogs
cookies and milk and cards
moments from the week
a party in person!
Moments from the past week.
fords give me a chance to take pictures
oops
ropes up, still fun
fire latkes
sundae on Thursday
the last distanced library pickup!
lost week
Last week was rough. On Monday morning—before breakfast, even!—I made a poor life choice going over a jump and smashed into a tree. Besides cutting up my face wonderfully, I did something to the nerves in my neck that left my hands numb and my arms sore. That slowed me down some, I can tell you! Then just as I was feeling better on Thursday it was time for our second Covid vaccine. Welcome, of course, but when I woke up on Friday I found that the post-vaccine fever had combined with the nerve damage to leave the about the most uncomfortable I've ever been. Sleeping especially has been really hard. And then on top of all that, adding insult to literal injury, the woodchucks and rabbits have been absolutely destroying the garden. It's extremely discouraging.
trying not to let the bastards get me down
But we're alive, and enjoying seeing more and more friends in person, and I imagine I may one day start to feel better again. My shoulders don't hurt so much I can't type, at least!