the sleppys

Friday night, the babies kept waking up every 45 minutes. Talon didn’t want to sleep. She only slept when I nursed her on the couch. When I went to put her down in her crib, she cried. I went to lay in my bed with her and let her nurse there but couldn’t sleep because I had to keep a hold of her because she could fall over to the edge. (We don’t have a co-sleeper net because Taylor sleeps on an improvised bed on the floor). Well, finally, around four in the morning, Talon fell into a deep sleep and allowed herself to sleep in the crib.

Our plans were to wake up early, have breakfast early, and be ready to go to the parade half-past eight. But I didn’t wake until seven, and we were rushing to make breakfast, change the babies, and get ready. In spite of waking half an hour late, we were ready to go five minutes after we had originally planned.

We piled into the van and rode a mile (yes, just a mile) to the corner where we park the van every year for the parade. This year’s parade didn’t top the previous years’. It could have been better and more organized. Not that I’m volunteering or anything. I think, however, one of these years, we’ll make our own float.

Our children collected candy that was thrown by the parade’s participants. It landed on the street, close to their feet, and the children gave it to us — GAVE it to us. Afterward, we walked to the park where, upon arriving, we saw the bounce house. Dad said, “We are not going in that thing.” No problem on my side; the fewer square yards to get lost, the better. I sat on a bench with the babies while Dad watched the three older children. We didn’t take our radios. After about twenty minutes, we lost one.

Taylor was jumping in the bounce house when I found her. She took a three and a half hour time-out in her room when we got home. Actually, she napped.

We went home to see the F-16 fly-over from our front yard. There were four F-16s from the Air Base down south. A few minutes later, we saw a pair of WWII era bombers that were flying higher and probably  coming from the airport on the west side of town.

For lunch, Dad grilled hot dogs, which we topped with cold, delicious sauerkraut. We spent the afternoon pondering and talking about the men who signed their lives for independence and concluded that wishing a “Happy 4th” had different connotations than wishing a “Happy Independence Day” and that the former is wrong while the latter is correct. For dinner, Dad cooked up cheese burgers, and we had them with baked beans and husk-roasted corn.

Around 8:30pm, the fireworks started at Black Point Marina, where we saw them from our front yard. We didn’t go outside until everyone had finished eating dinner, so it was half an hour into the display.

We came back inside to eat watermelon slices, but the fireworks kept calling us out. We stood out there for another fifteen minutes, and the air started getting thick with smoke (the Ridge Rats also do their neighborhood redneck fireworks display).

As we were coming inside, Kyle told me that his tooth was bothering him. I wiggled it and noticed that it was way more, uh, wiggly than it was even hours before. The corn must have done its part in wiggling the tooth. While I was in the shower, Dad came in to tell me that Kyle got tired of his tooth and pulled it out.

Pulled it OUT! We told Kyle that the Tooth Fairy would visit him not that night but the next night because she was watching the fireworks. (The Tooth Fairy doesn’t leave coins or cash; she leaves toys).

It was a lovely Day of Independence.

Why am I posting so frequently without a title? Because I have been putting my immediate thoughts on my facebook status and then realizing that I’m using fb as our family archives when THIS blog should be our archives!

That mentioned, I found Isis’ empty food bowl in her crate. Isis was standing over it. Taylor had given the dog her dinner. I looked more closely and found what looked like herbs in her bowl. It seems that Taylor, in her want to do things right, had sprinkled parsley on Isis’ food. (We put garlic on her food to ward of ticks). Taylor confused parsley with garlic. I thought that was really cute and sweet.

I found the dog with her snout in my bag. She didn’t get to a lot of the chocolate. Looks like she just smooshed it around my journal, my hairbrush, and my keys. It’s my fault, of course, for leaving my bag open in the music room, where I usually keep it  during the day. She knows she did wrong. She went straight to her crate with that guilty look.

Talon really really really looks like she wants to walk. She doesn’t want it badly enough, however,  because if she did, she’d be walking already. It’s just mind over matter. I take her down the corridor in the mornings, and she prefers to walk instead of crawl until I let go. Then she stands in thought for a few moments and prefers crawling. She has made attempts, real attempts, to walk. The last time, she walked to the coffee table, wobbled a little and fell forward, hitting her lip on the table leg. She didn’t hit it hard, and she didn’t cry. I don’t think that it was enough for her to stop trying.

Talon and Kendall fight over toys and food. I’ll give a piece of zweiback toast to Kendall, and she looks like she’s considering taking it. Talon just takes it. Kendall yells and gets mad. I give another one to Kendall, but she doesn’t want that one. She wants the original one that I gave her. It’s the same way with toys. Talon will be playing with a Little People person or a building block, and Kendall will snatch it from her hands. Talon is still where another toy will console and entertain her, but I don’t know how long that’ll last.

Ty has started learning knots. His first know is a bowline. He can’t do it without the help of the illustrations in the book. He learned the clove hitch, but still needs help from the book. I tell him that he should learn these things because he’ll be running errands for us in town when we move to the country. He’ll need to tie his horse to the posts in a way that he can untie the horse but the horse can’t untie itself. And he won’t have a book to help him along. That motivates him, knowing that he’ll have a horse and go into town by himself (or with a buddy).

One of my piano moms gave me about a hundred books that she doesn’t need anymore. She has two boys who are out of college who read and learned from these books. They are great books. Though I’m not a fan of coloring books in general, the coloring books that she did give me were of epic images: castles, Columbus’ voyage, Pilgrims, Civil War, Native Americans. And there were snippets of information that went along with each image, i.e. biographies.

Dad stood at the front entrance, looking outside at the rain, turned and asked the children, “You guys wanna play in the rain?” They were a bit confused. The rain this season has been heavy with lightning and thunder, but this rain was clear of that. It wasn’t the big, fat rain, but it was thick enough to wet one’s clothes.

They liked being out there. Ty ran laps with Taylor and Kyle while I kept calling out, “Be careful. Don’t run. It’s slippery.” For a good ten minutes, they played and splashed in puddles. After they were sopping wet, I had them change into dry, clean clothes.

Since the beginning of hurricane season, the temperatures have been reaching the mid 90s by the mid-afternoon and dropping down to the high 70s for a few hours at night. The humidity isn’t bad yet. Living on a corner, we have good cross-ventilation. We also bring in the relatively cool morning air into the house with oscillating fans.

But the night after the solstice was bad enough to wake me up about an hour after midnight, and the morning offered no relief. The wind (and fans) blew warm and sticky. It helped to suck on ice cubes. Standing in front of a fan was of some relief but only for the first few seconds. I thought of what Cody Lundin would do in our situation. So we drank water and stayed put. The sun shone and baked our cinder block house. Stripping off our clothes was not an option because the mosquitoes would eat us alive. That evening, we did our best to sleep. It didn’t help that the babies were waking up every hour and a half.

On Tuesday morning, after the babies woke me up for the tenth time, I stayed awake to record “Between the Lions” on the local PBS station. Everyone else started waking up early, too. I thought we could go for our walk earlier than usual, which wouldn’t have been a bad idea because the heat tends to get worse as the day goes by, but the skies were gray. The weather was obviously unstable.

As quick as you can say, “Something wicked this way comes,” cold gusts were picking up dry leaves from the ground and swirling them about like small funnels. A wave of cool breezes passed throughout the house. It started sprinkling. After a minute or so, it was pouring big, ol’ fat rain. Lightning and thunder added excitement to our dulled senses. The chill was wonderful. While the weather announcers in the local media noted the change, there are few people who actually LIVED the change.

Today, it’s not as chilly, but it’s pleasant. When we chose to go without modern marvels such as air conditioning, we are blessed with the great fortune of fresh air.

With seven people living on a part-time income, we have to use our resources efficiently to feed, clothe, and entertain ourselves.

We don’t have a mango tree, but our kitchen has processed at least a hundred pounds of mangoes in the last several weeks. Several of the families for whom I teach music have given me a bag or two of mangoes at each visit. I made eight small jars of chutney and froze them. I think we are down to four jars. I had only eight jars, so I made smoothies with leftover mangoes. And with the mangoes that I didn’t use to make smoothies because there were too many, Dad sliced up and put into our beans and rice. He added curry, green peppers, and other spices. It was delicious.  And we are still collecting mangoes because some trees give two (or three) harvests. Some trees aren’t ready for the harvest until weeks after the first. So every week, there are two or three families that are giving me bags and bags of mangoes.

As the babies are growing out of their old clothes and into Taylor’s clothes, I’ve been putting away their baby clothes. I’ve also been noticing stains and rips in both sets of small and medium clothes. So I’m cutting them. Yes, cutting them with scissors (and it’s wearing out my scissors!). I’m making my first freehand quilt. I’m just cutting pieces and sewing them back onto an old bed sheet that I cut into square foot blocks. They are coming along nicely. I was thinking of making a larger patchwork piece and using it as fabric for clothes, being that it used to be clothes. Perhaps it can serve as the skirt of a dress.

Last week was the first week of summer for the public school children. We at the Greenleaf School took that week off for catching up on housekeeping and play. Ty saw that one of his favorite television characters, Curious George, had made musical instruments using things around the house. Ty made a guitar out of a milk carton and rubber bands — It was more like a lyre than a guitar. He used Taylor’s kitchen pot lids as cymbals. And he asked me to help him make a water xylophone out of beer bottles. THAT was difficult. All of Thursday morning, I was tapping glass bottles with a spoon and adjusting the water level in an attempt to play a major scale. And all afternoon, I was suffering a headache from the high-pitched dinging. Albeit, it was worth it. The boy learned a bit about musical instruments.

The question is not, “How do you do it?”
The question is, “How will you use it?”

The Saturday before Mother’s Day, Ty played his first piano recital. His hair was tied back like Daddy’s. He wore a dark blue polo, black jeans, and his WTSHTF boots. As his teacher, I introduced him. He did not seem nervous at all, perhaps because it was his first public performance or because he is just a cool kid. He was the first student to play, which gave him the advantage. Ty walked up to the bench, squirmed a little to get centered, and began playing “The Swing,” a 16 measure piece written by the author of his lesson book. The audience clapped when he finished. He squirmed a little more to get centered to play an adaptation of Carl von Weber’s “Hunting Chorus,” which is in a different key. He did play a little too fast during one of the eighth note slurs, but only his parents and teacher noticed (having heard his practicing for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks). When he got to the ending, he played softer as the music directed with the dynamic notation. And softer. And softer. And he lifted his hands up above his head (to let the audience know that he was finished). He smiled at them, jumped of the bench, and bowed twice — to the left and to the right. He just kind of stood there, watching their watching him. A man motioned him to go over and collect his little music note trophy. Ty looked at it, smiled, and lifted it a little while looking at the audience… in a surprised, humble way. And he sat down.

“I got a flag trophy,” he told the girl who sat another seat over. The boy who sat directly next to him was at the piano, playing his two pieces.

After the recital, Ty saw that his three grandparents were there along with one of his uncles. We had lemonade and chocolate chip cookies with the other participants and their families.

• Mom had some blood drawn for the life insurance policy.
• Dad mowed the lawn (so now it looks quasi-normal).
• Dad saw two gulf fritillaries (orange butterflies) having, er, reproductive relations, and he invited Mom outside to see it, too.
• The children all played in the front yard for an hour, waiting for a neighbor child to come back from running errands with his father.
• Mom made friends with a neighbor who was walking her own 10 month old girl. She didn’t stay because I told her that the two babies were getting over colds.
• While we waited outside, Kendall took five steps all by herself! She took some more but no more than five after that.
• Dad and Mom saw the Atlantis/Hubble fly over - in the daytime. Weird but true.
• Ty and Mom painted all the pieces of the model fire engine that Ty received as a Christmas present.
• Dad grilled hot dogs for lunch, and we ate them with Senf und Sauerkraut. Delikat!
• The children went outside again to ride bikes with neighbor child.
• Mom started cooking a pot roast.
• Ty and Mom finished putting together the fire engine model.
• Mom ate a mango.
• We all ate a dinner topped with gravy made from the juices of the roast.
• “The Goblet of Fire” is on abc.
• The children are chasing click beetles.
• Yogurt and strawberries for dessert!

Earlier today , Ty built a clubhouse out of junk (to others) in our backyard.

Next, we watched the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch, both online and live from our front yard.

Now, our kids are playing space. They board the shuttle (get in the clubhouse), countdown (3…2…1…IGNITION…BLASTOFF), go on a spacewalk to fix the hubble (climb the monkey bars), and finally land safely at home (do a walk around the ’shuttle’).

Man this is fun!

Ty has been riding his two wheeler for a few weeks. Dad and I got together one Saturday and encouraged Ty to hop on his older cousin’s hand-me-down bicycle. First, we started pushing him in the side yard on the grass. I would throw Ty toward Dad, and Dad would catch Ty - and Ty would be on his bike. It’s not like I was literally throwing him. We kept telling him to pedal. It seems like he wanted the bike to go flying on its own because he wouldn’t pedal; he just looked down at the grass.

We did that for several minutes and called it a day. The next day, Easter Sunday, while my Dad was visiting, Ty hopped on his bike again and we helped him ride up and down the sidewalk. He got the hang of it quickly that time.

After a few days of practice, he was handling the two wheeler as if he’d been riding for a year. He might fall while turning sharply, but that’s rare nowadays.

On Take Your Child to Work Day, Dad and Ty took off on their bikes in the morning to our favorite park, which is nearly three miles away. They sat on the benches and ate their home-prepared trail mix, drank water from their canteens, and walked the nature trail. And they rode back. Of course Ty was tired when they came back (and so was Dad!).