Hey Dude, part 1

Lots of catching up to do. The school year went by in such a blur, and I can't even account for all of those hours I was planning to be productive while the kids were otherwise engaged. Wouldn't it be awesome if I had written the Next Great American Novel? Nope. Harper Lee has a new novel coming out though, so probably I am just waiting so I don't have to compete with that.

My parents did an incredibly wonderful and generous thing and took us on vacation last week. We went to a dude ranch near Bandera, Texas, and had such a very fine time. I picked the place based on online reviews, and was a touch apprehensive when we drove up and everything was Exceedingly RUSTIC. It turned out that everyone and everything there was so Exceedingly Wonderful, that the rustic became charming and perfect within a couple of hours. The kids fell in love with the horses and the cowboys and the ranch dogs (the total opposite of Sasha they were) and the goats and donkeys and the creek and the barn swallows and fireflies. I fell in love with the lack of phone service or wi-fi, and also that 3 times a day, a bell would ring alerting us that someone other than me had prepared a meal for us to eat. Here are some pictures:

 

Let's make this a series, shall we?

Harper does things that merit notice

Harper has again been named a finalist in the PBS Kids Writers' Contest. She got in the top 30 (out of 800 entries!) with a charming tale entitled Little Lost Owl. A burrowing owl gets blown away from his family and gets taken in by a family of barn owls. My favorite moment is when Mrs. Barn Owl offers the little owl something to eat, and two of the choices are "caterpillars or voles." WHAT will he choose?? Harper suggested that it would be the Best Prize of All if the winner got their book published, instead of just receiving a bag of public broadcasting paraphernalia, and the hope that they might win at the national level and get an ipad. I could not agree more, dear one. I suspect you might get published yet.

She also had her piano recital on Sunday, and played "Ecossaise", the first song from Book 2, with enthusiasm and confidence. The Grandparents Pate were here to celebrate all of this with us, which made it even sweeter.

I got a fitbit for Mothers' Day. I casually asked The Husband what they even WERE a few weeks ago, and he was so terribly excited that I was expressing any interest in Something Technology (maybe you will remember I am a General Luddite) that he went and bought me one. I feel a little bit like a character in Brave New World, and also I should confess that after I put the kids in bed just now, I realized I was only at around 8,000 steps, so I went outside and walked around the block until it started buzzing on my wrist and having the little 10,000 steps party. Am I enslaved already to The Machina??

We harvested our first strawberry from our little raised-bed garden. I referred to it as the "$100 strawberry" because that is about how much it cost to start a raised bed. I cut it into three tiny pieces and the kids proclaimed it The BEST STRAWBERRY EVER GROWN. Unfortunately, the wild bunnies in our neighborhood tend to agree, and have figured out how to circumvent the net I have wrapped around the bed.

Also known as.

About once a day, something will strike me as odd, and I will think to myself, "That would make a good blog post," but then I get Embroiled in The Daily, and the odd thoughts get forgotten. But here is an example: today, someone in my neighborhood was on our neighborhood Facebook page trying to sell a puppy she could no longer care for. The breed, she wrote, was RARE. So she was selling it for ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED dollars. For a USED puppy. Also all of its Fancy Puppy Accessories, which included several sweaters. DOG sweaters, mind you. Not even cute human ones from Anthropologie.

This year has just flown. So much faster than the other ones.

 This week Helena did a Great Americans presentation. We had a difficult time choosing her Great American. I got a cute picture book full of great American women (A is for Abigail by Lynne Cheney) and Helena chose based on who had the prettiest dress. I checked out a biography of Shirley Temple Black and also a couple of her movies, which we all enjoyed. Then, two weeks before the project was due, Helena decided she did NOT want to be Shirley Temple, even though she liked her movies very much. So, she decided to be Betsy Ross, which was convenient since Harper had just done a presentation on Betsy Ross. (That flag deserves an entire post. We tried, and failed, to use the sewing machine. The day before. We broke the sewing machine on the third stripe. The rest was hand-sewn using stitches that were about three inches wide. Which would have made poor Betsy WEEP.):
Alas, Betsy Ross was already taken in Helena's class. So, we (I) decided on Abigail Adams. She was a model of fortitude, perseverance, and was also a wonderful Writer of Letters. We practiced and practiced, but when it was time, the actual presentation was done using a very tiny voice, and there was some hiding behind her pictures:

Why yes, she is wearing panties on her head! You can do that when both your husband and your son become president of the United States.  I had tried to make a bonnet for Betsy Ross, but it was pitiful. So, the night before Abigail Adams, I sewed the legs shut on this ruffled beauty, and voila! A lovely colonial bonnet. Desperation is the mother of all kinds of things.

Hudson was Gideon sometime last semester. We spent lots of time on that as well, then, on the morning of the presentation, one of the sisters accidentally(?) removed the sword from the carefully prepared "take to school" costume bag, and we got to school (perhaps you will remember it is a 45 minute drive away from home) and Gideon was sword-less. Perhaps you will also remember that the Big Deal of Gideon is when he gets to hold his sword aloft and shout, "A SWORD for the LORD and for GIDEON!" Hudson simply could not recover from the lack of weapon, and his presentation was done in a quiet, sullen monotone. The pharaohs, the Moseses,  Esther, Mary, and especially Cleopatra wondered at his melancholy surliness.

Arise.

Last year we painted eggs in the general time frame of Easter and I never got around to posting the photos. I wish I had a picture of what I looked like blowing the insides out of the eggs because it was pretty. One of Harper's was Texas-themed-- a bluebonnet, a lightning whelk (the state shell of Texas, but of course you knew that), and a mockingbird. When I found them this morning, I thought I would hang them from Easter lily we got at church yesterday. Well, they had stuck to the inside of the egg carton I had stored them in, then I realized the leaves were too floppy to hold delicate eggs. I sighed and took a picture anyway. Next year it will be PERFECT and ON TIME and there will be an appropriately sturdy hanging apparatus that will display the glory of the risen Savior AND their artwork. In the meantime, reality is okay too.

 It was drizzly outside and the husband was with the band during the actual photo booth time, so this is best family shot we got. Hudson's button job is awry. In fact he was so opposed to this shirt that he almost managed to sap me of my resurrection peace before we even left the house. Next year it will be PERFECT. In the meantime, reality is okay too.

The eagle had landed

We saw a pair of bald eagles on our way home from school. I spied the male sitting atop a power line pole, couldn't be sure I wasn't hallucinating, took the next exit, and looped back around at possibly unsafe speeds. We took the minivan off-road to get closer, and confirmed that this was, indeed, the symbol of our great nation taking a little rest in Sugar Land, Texas. Then we scrambled out as traffic whizzed by at 70 mph. I got out my awesome telephoto lens and got this National Geographic-worthy photo:

 We got pretty close before Mr. Bald Eagle decided we were taking liberties with his personal space. Just as he flew off, Harper-the-keen-eyed spotted his mate fishing in a pond about 50 yards away. Squint carefully at the far edge of the pond at the white and brown blob. Again with the stellar nature photography (how do other people manage actual good pictures with an iPhone?? Also while terrified that their kids might get flattened by a passing 18-wheeler??) Know that in real life, she was majestic and in-focus:

It was all very thrilling and fun and slightly dangerous, especially getting the minivan from the hilly grasslands and back onto the racetrack/tollway after the eagles had taken flight. The kids were cheering and encouraging me to "peel out NOW Mommy!" Ornithology: better than a theme park.

The finer things.

Yesterday Hudson got in the car after school and said, "Tate and I were making food into insults today! For example, I would say STRAWBERRY! At him in a rude voice, and he would say, "CHEESE!" Back at me in a rude voice. It was AWESOME and hilarious." Then he started naming some of the other "food insults" and there was HOT DOG and SALAD and MEAT LOAF and SANDWICH and ORANGE and then, BUTTER BOURBON.

Me: Wait, what?
Hudson: "Or maybe it's butterSCOTCH?" He is unsure.

 Clearly we need more exposure to candy and less exposure to spirits at our house.

Mind the gap.

Helena lost both top front teeth within 48 hours two weeks ago. The first one came out with Daddy's help, and the second one came out with help of a conversation heart from her Valentine's candy. She was pretty distraught, but then the Daddy told her that the Tooth Fairy gives FIVE dollars when you pull a tooth yourself a mere day after losing another tooth. After the kids were in bed, the Tooth Fairy let the Daddy know that she did not actually have FIVE dollars, and neither did the Daddy, so he spent some time digging through an old stash of loose change and Helena was the proud recipient of twenty quarters. I should also point out that when the first tooth had fallen out, the Tooth Fairy wrote a note and put a dollar in it, but then forgot to take it upstairs and switch it out for the tooth. Which meant an elaborate explanation (via another letter) that involved The Hobbit. So, three letters later, Helena was having such a delightful time with Tooth Fairy (or "Toofe Fairy" in Helenese) that she began leaving little trinkets and pictures in the Tooth Fairy pillow (they all use the one I made for Harper because I have a crafting to-do list that is buried somewhere under the pile of felt I bought in 2012 to make a Christmas tree skirt) and expecting elaborate responses every single night. I finally had to tell her that Tooth Fairy loved her very much but had been called away for Tooth Duty somewhere in Southeast Asia and would return next time Helena actually lost a tooth.

The little space left behind by the two teeth looked exactly like the top of a heart, but then I forgot to take a picture until one of the grown-up teeth started peeking out. It is still very cute.

 

Speaking of Valentine's Day, I want to put it here in the written record that all 3 kids had separate parties at 3 different homes in various and fairly far-flung regions of the greater Houston metroplex on the same day. They all had a terrific time, but getting them to and fro was MADNESS. I did not have any love left in my heart at the end of that day. My conversation heart would have had a little black cloud on it and maybe even a bad word.