Ordinary Time

First your aunt finds this very cute children's museum and you spend several hours there.  J. and H. at the bubble table L. (Her hair started out being done... I don't know what happened.) The restaurant kitchen was a huge hit. This is L. There was a vet's office, complete with bear with trailing entrails. TM spent a lot of time making bubbles. A. helping L. do the climbing wall. This sign was posted all over. G. borrowed a bear from the vet's office and carted him off to the restaurant to share food with him. After the museum you walk down the street and get ice cream, despite the cold weather. G. and B. G. chose vanilla. L. did not. I'm sure any parent can name that ice cream as Superman. (What else would L. pick?) When you get tired of waiting for the little people to finish your ice cream, you start to wrestle. Then you walk to the park and play a bit. Or climb on statues as the case may be.

We got back late last night from a five day trip up to J.'s aunt's and uncle's summer house in Michigan. I can't say the weather was entirely cooperative, but we had a great time, never the less. I don't have much time this morning... there's the bags of wet laundry that really must be dealt with, not to mention the 35+ pounds of blueberries sitting on my kitchen counter. I'll share some more highlights tomorrow, but in the meantime, here are some pictures of a hike we took in the woods our first morning there. Hiking up the sandy trail K. A brief pause to search in the sand for... ant lions. Quite a few people scampered up this hill. Which turned out to be a little too steep for smaller people to make it down on their own. J. is helping G. K. did just fine. L. and B. B. carrying L. down. And we ended with a walk along the beach to get back home.

"'I'll ask my mother about it,' she said. 'She's one o' them that nearly always sees a way to do things. It's my day out today and' I'm goin' home. Eh! I am glad. Mrs. Medlock thinks a lot o' mother. Perhaps she could talk to her.' 'I like your mother,' said Mary 'I should think tha' did,' agreed Martha, polishing away. 'I've never seen her,' said Mary 'No, tha' hasn't,' replied Martha. She sat up on her heels again and rubbed the end of her nose with the back of her hand as if puzzled for a moment, but she ended quite positively. 'Well, she's that sensible an' hard workin' an' good natured an' clean that no one could help likin' her whether they'd seen her or not. When I'm goin' home to her on my day out I just jump for joy when I'm crossin' the moor.'" We've been reading The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I suppose I shouldn't really call it a fiasco because it has ended well, but it took a while to reach the positive conclusion. Here's the story... When my parents were in town a couple of weeks ago, they decided that what we really needed was new dishwashers which actually washed, rather than the glorified dish drainers we were using. So, of we went to the store to buy some. There was a sale and the sales woman was very nice and we bought two dishwashers. Remembering a previous fiasco with our washing machine where it was installed, incorrectly, and J. had to re-install it, I decided to save the installation money and just have J. do it. (Let me tell you, words cannot convey his excitement over such a project.) The dishwashers would be delivered the next week and we were all very excited. The dishwashers arrived as scheduled and J. came home from work ready to put them in. The sales woman had made sure to include two installation kits, so I thought we were set. Considering

Well, the horizontal tree I told you about a while ago has finally fallen. The other night, J. was up late and happened to hear some very odd sounds coming from the front of the house. Odd creaking, cracking sounds. He looks out of the window and realizes that the tree is slowly falling. So he runs and grabs the van keys and moves the van out of the driveway and down the street. When he returns, the tree is down and touching the ground. Except for the fact that J. was running around the front yard moving cars in his pajamas, the whole thing seem rather anti-climactic. There wasn't even a heavy wind... just a heavy tree and a trunk which could no longer hold it up. So now it sits in our driveway while we try to figure out what to do with it. I guess we'll have to have a tree service come and cut it up and take it away. B. did saw off some branches so we can get the van in the driveway. It doesn't look all that different from the street, so the child have been interested t

"From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom. And the people became impatient on the way." Numbers 21:4 (ESV) This is the verse which struck me as I was sitting in a meeting last week and we were looking at adult education material. This is actually the beginning of the story of the story about the snakes and the bronze serpent if you're having difficulty placing it, and it was that part of the story that the materials focused on. But I couldn't really get past the word impatient, because I realized that was what I have been feeling. The Israelites did have a tough lot at this point in their history. They were wandering around the wilderness, seemingly endlessly, there was little water and they didn't like the food. Life just didn't seem to be very good for them at the moment. Of course, there were all of those miracles they had witnessed just a book previously, but that didn't change the food they had now. And

Piggy-backing on the post I wrote earlier this month about play , I thought it might be good to remind everyone (and when I say everyone, I am often just talking to myself), that sometimes homemade toys are better than fancy ones that we buy in the store. Over the weekend two homemade toys have received the majority of play around here. And this was real play; play that lasted for at least an hour and in which the children were focused intently. The kind of play that warms a mother's heart and allows her a moment or two to catch her breath.  The first homemade toy of the weekend was this stove made out of a cardboard box. B. was given by a family for whom he was babysitting a set of play kitchen pots and pans to give to G. and L. They loved them and so I decided they needed a stove to cook on. (Our actual play kitchen is still living outside .) Here's the stove. They loved it. The cooked and baked and served me food. Food which was created out of small scraps of shre