The road to blogging more often is paved with...Idleness? Is that an actual character in
Pilgrim's Progress? We are reading
Little Pilgrim's Progress aloud right now. The kids protested, but they seem to be enjoying it. We finally finished the Wilderking trilogy, which took forever because the last few chapters kept causing me to weep and lose all ability to croak out any words. The series was delightful, and very funny, so I think I wasn't prepared for the battle, as it were. We also read the third Harry Potter. We have been reading one per summer. I don't actually think they are very good, but I decided they were enough of a Cultural Thing that reading them together, and slowly, was probably the right course for us. I have been letting the older 2 read them on their own as they age with the kids at Hogwarts, so Harper had read book 6 within the first couple of days of summer, and Hudson book 4. Harper has read an additional 30 or so books since then, and Hudson has been strolling through Calvin and Hobbes, the Happy Hollisters (or, the Hippy Hallisters, as we call them) and The Lord of the Rings. Helena has finally started to really enjoy reading on her own. She also likes the Hippy Hallisters, and just whizzed through
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane one morning this week.
We've been watching The Great British Baking Show, which means everyone wants to bake all of the time. Harper made some ginger cookies (so many ingredients, so messy, but good), Helena made banana bread, and today, Hudson made pound cake. I have been trying to read a little poetry aloud every time we sit down for our treats, which has met with occasional success. So far, we've read some Frost, some Tennyson, and today, Walt Whitman joined us for our pound cake.
We adopted a replacement Sasha the weekend after Father's Day. We finally settled on the name Boo Radley. It is APT. He is strange and grumpy and terrified and possibly more emotionally crippled than Sasha ever was. We are trying to love him into our Kingdom. Helena gave him one of her stuffed animals, a small hamster named Harrison, and I am sorry to tell you that fatherhood has only served to emphasize Boo's irrational paranoia and fear. He hides his baby away in his bed, and keeps one paw on it while also growling in a very menacing way if anyone (other than me) comes into the room.
Our house has been back on the market for around 10 weeks now. We've had over 40 showings. I found this note on Helena's toy bin last week:
I think she has coined a portmanteau of 'touch' and 'tough.' I pretty much feel EXACTLY THIS EXACT WAY when I think about 40 sets of strangers forcing me to clean my entire house at their whim and fancy, then insisting all of us march out of it for hour-long increments, inevitably at the most inconvenient of times. Father's Day? YES. Fourth of July? Definitely. I am thinking of making some cute bunting to hang in our entryway that says, by way of greeting: "WE PUT THE 'REAL' IN REAL ESTATE!" Think that would help?
