Nikkkkkkkkkaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy

Supposedly the magical day is Tuesday!

Popcorn for breakfast

Today the kids had popcorn for breakfast. We popped corn on the stove then served it in cereal bowls with milk, just as G&N learned from Alton Brown’s Good Eats. Talk about child-led hilarity. They seem to like it, but I am not sure if they’d tell me if they didn’t.

I told R-dreamer about it, and she remembers the same experience at a Farm school when she was young. She told me it made such an impression that she begged her mother for popped corn for breakfast the next day.

~G~ says “It was kind of weird feeling on the top of my mouth. It was a little tasty. It just needs some sugar on it. The TV show said it was healthy, and the guy who loved Popcorn ate popcorn all of the all of the time!”

Cheesecake and Chones

That was the theme of this week’s Wednesday with Friends. Why yes, they are related, but thankfully not directly. At least not immediately!

Why I blog

As tagged by the lovely Niki. I used to think blogging was a huge waste of time, and somewhat egotistical.

1. Since before my children were born, I have journalled. Never very consistently, and somewhat dully, since when I did write it would be with great emotion about something going on in my life at that time. It would pop up in my journal without any context or seeming relation to what had just gone before. After the birth of my daughter, I committed to keeping a journal for her specifically, so that we could both watch her grow. By this time, I had moved my journal to electronic format, but I kept hers in a lovely paper book. However, even with one child I found finding the time to write it all out tedious, and inserting photographs, as all parents are wont to do, even more annoying. So within the first year I switched hers to Word.

When ~N~ was born, same thing. Soon it became insane, and maintaining three journals in electronic form was just as unpleasant for me as one in written format. Further, our lives were so entwined it didn’t make sense. It seemed contrived to try to break out parts of our days to write to them individually, and typing the same thing into each journal just wasted time in my opinion.

2. The pictures became the most efficient way for me to express myself anyway. There is little need to write a two page missive when a sequence of three shots carries the story so much better. I enjoy photo entries so much, and they really do speak more than words.

3. Even before we moved to Washington, we had family and friends far away. Even people who do not have direct access to my blog benefit from a handy cut-and-paste into an email. It’s so much easier to have everything in one place, even for me, and it becomes a powerful record of our life here. Even in the short two years I have been actively blogging, I have watched the children grow and change dramatically and I value capturing that metamorphosis.

4. Blogging has given me access to a form of Internet community I really enjoy. The blogosphere is filled with as many opinions as there are people, but unlike chat boards, you can be very specific as to who and what you allow to cross your personal mind’s eye. When I was preparing for my last two births, I read blog after blog, grateful for the generosity of the women who shared their home birth stories and images, as they bolstered my own courage and informed my expectations. I pay that forward with my own published birth stories. With our homeschooling journey, it is the same, but I get to do in the now and actually exchange practical ideas and philosophies in real time. Even with activism, we in the blogosphere actually learn from one another, alert one another, and bolster our scattered communities with a unified purpose when we need to.

5. I have also found that the blog has strengthened our shared experiences with our real time community. Writing about our adventures engenders a fondness and a shared memory that we all get to revisit from time to time. Going through the archives often brings a smile and a “Oh yeah, I remember that!” Because I know they are reading everyday, it helps me to update on things that have happened when they may not have been around.

Before blogging I didn’t really realize how varied and full our lives are. I simply found myself so caught in the day-to-day race of diapers-cooking-cleaning-laughing-loving-learning that I lost sight of how much was actually transpiring. I value this record now, and I like to think it serves a purpose greater than just my personal journal for our lives.

Hmm. To tag? I tag Danelle78, simply because her blog name is the titular question, and Mack, because she needs an excuse to update her blog, and MelissaTulip, because I’d be interested in the answer!

Another new thing learned

An acute allergy attack looks a lot like skull fracture.

You’d think in the land of the Wolfmeisters that we’d be used to allergy issues, but it was “the wrong child” whose eyes swelled his face into bruised distortion last night. Mere seconds after he’d slipped on a wet bathroom floor so badly that his feet came to rest on the sink, his eyes started to swell shut. I know they weren’t swelling before, because he was going into the bathroom to check out a scratch on his cheek that I’d just pointed out to him.

“It sure looks like an allergy attack, but to what???” We gave him benadryl, we held him all night and we made sure he wasn’t sensitive to light, in pain, or incoherent.

“It sure looks like an allergy attack, but that was a hard fall… why on earth now? And why is it bruised???” He swore he didn’t hit his eye on the way down, and he tells the story the same way each time we ask it. We thought… maybe Romulus? He’d been on ~N~’s lap just prior to the bathroom incident…. he got a haircut earlier….. maybe?

This morning, when 12 hours of sleep and an adult dose of benadryl hadn’t reduced the swelling on ~N~’s left eye, we decided to take him in.

My last bit of cool, seasoned parental calm went out the window when I considered the consequences of “what if I am wrong?”

We called the Pede on her cell phone and she saw us the first hour the office opened. They checked his orbital bones, palpated his head and checked for any fluid building behind his eye.

Just a bad coincidence that it started just after his hard fall. After dissecting the situation here and with the pede, it was Romulus’ haircut that caused the drama. Our poor poodle was so disgusting that every bit of the pollen from this spring was embedded in the dog’s dreadlocked hair.

Yes. A bad coincidence. But it had me scared. It had me praying for something instead of my normal, private “thank you” pulses to God. For this 24 hours it was a cradled, sleeping head and a whispered “Please help my child.” It’s easy now, with the full knowledge that everything will be fine, to think that this is melodramatic. But when you’re there, in the unknown, it’s all you can do to steel yourself against dark waves of fear. As it stands, gratefully, he will be Just Fine. The swelling is going down incrementally.

Now I can go back to being thankful again.

Nursing fashions

Click the link above to see more. I love these paintings.

Happy Earth Day

We tended our trees and fortified the big, back garden.

Tidying

Updated pix on

Life is Good

Lotsa Lotsa

and

Easter

We scaled the secret staircase

Remember this post?

We went from the beach to the top of the cliff up the secret staircase. Even the kids made LOTR jokes because we felt like Frodo and Sam following Gollum into Mordor. Thankfully, only the steep climb was even remotely like the film. We hadn’t attempted it before yesterday because I didn’t think D-baby could manage it. In some places, someone had built footholds into the cliff, as you see in the picture, but most of the time it was like a very narrow game trail with an unforgiving drop off through the blackberry thickets to the rocky beach below.

The big kids were fast as lightning. What’s narrow to a 35 pound person? The toddler, however, had more of a struggle, but only because his legs were so little. He loved every second of the climb. I used my walking stick to dig into the trail ahead of him, as I arched overhead, and he used that as purchase to keep going. It wasn’t great for my back, but baby was way-safe and I got to ignore the vertigo I get on high, narrow things. The big kids kept stopping to enjoy the view and expound “Whooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa look how high we are! ” which, spaz that I am, would make me look. oooooooooo don’t look, ~L~

It was a beautiful climb, though, beautiful, beautiful. When we go back without toddler, we’ll be able to see all of Gig Harbor from some points. The problem is this: it doesn’t lead into the Harry Potter woods. I am proud to note that it is exactly the same latitude as the HP woods, but I forgot about the cul de sac that abuts the woods just before the cliff. We crested the rise and abruptly found ourselves in someones back yard (sound familiar?), but fortunately there was a construction site just next door. The kids wanted to go down the way we came (“um, no kids, I will talk to the neighbors before we’d do that”) We skirted the existing house and walked the edge of the construction site to get to our street, far above where we’d normally take the path down to the beach. To those who know the walk, we were in the cul de sac with the beautiful Rainer view and the rental house I constantly lament).

G: That was COOL! I have to peeeeeeeee!!!!!!
N: Let’s do it AGAIN! Right now!
D: DO it again! This way! This way!
G: I have to peeeeeeeeeeeeeeee (runs home)

The compromise was that the boys and I went into the Harry Potter woods and took the forest loop back to our property. When we got back to the property but were still in the forest, we saw a beautiful red-crested woodpecker. The boys and I just stood and watched it for minutes. After the boys had been in arms for as long as I could stand it, I started taking pix. He was pretty far away, but you can make him out.

I think P-Daddy was invigorated by our escapades. After digging in the garden bed with Daddy, D-baby crashed out and G went into a painting odyssey. P-daddy took ~N~ on a walk and did the HP loop themselves. This time, a pregnant doe crossed their path (in our yard, people!), pretty much unperturbed by their presence.

Later, as we were releasing into the rose garden the ladybugs we bought at home depot, ~N~ exclaimed “I have had an AWESOME day!!!”

Me too, baby boy.

Life is Good

It is. It really really is.

———————-
Explanation:

So we actually drove in the van. We’ve been given the green light to drive it locally, but with a failing head gasket and a scary engine whine, I don’t do it. At all. So for two weeks I haven’t driven the van. This day, however, I had to because I was tired of not depositing a big fat check that’s been on our desk for at least that long.

So, we drove to the bank, then the Petco to get crab food, then Home Depot (in GHN, these stores are all within a quarter mile of each other) to get the soil amendments we need for the new bed and flowers for G’s garden, whcih suffered a biscuit plot.

It just felt good to be OUT like citizens again. D-baby was so inspired by our journeys that he started volunteering for Home Depot. The checker was so amused by it she could barely talk, but I got the camera out. (Guy behind me was PISSED, too. Butthead.)

On the way home, we saw that the tide was so low on the Purdy Spit that people were hard to SEE at the edge of the water. That inpired our own beachy adventure. Life is good. Yes, yes, yes. No schedule but our own.