A Chill in the Air and Looking In

The “deep dark” has officially descended. What we in the PNW call the end of the daylight. Many people now will leave in the dawn light and come home in the dark.

Halloween and daylight savings time are behind us now and we are in November, cold and windy, looking forward to the respite of Thanksgiving break and all the cozy things.

I feel a drawing inward during this season, I don’t get too down, though I know those who desperately seek the sun or at least some blue light to get by. It feels more like a slowing, measuring my time in more careful cadence and choosing what will get me out of the house.

Things can feel more difficult to accomplish during fall and winter and yet I also find I don’t feel the push to accomplish things as much as I do in spring or summer.

The flannel sheets are here to stay, the last leaves are still clinging to the trees until the next few storms knock them all off and the trees are bare. There is so much comfort for me in the routine of the seasons, watching the river ebb and flow as we pass it each day, breaking up the school day with cocoa breaks and frigid outside air.

As each year goes by, I become more aware of the passage of time, of how many autumns will pass until we have a college student, how few hikes remain as they all grow older and become busier. Last night we snuggled up to watch a movie together and I tried to capture the feeling in my memory, because someday it won’t be the same.

The husband is in trial right now and he works from dawn until bedtime until he is done. I’m so excited he gets to do what he loves, but we all keenly feel the loss of his presence when he is absent. We are looking forward to more cozy days together until the inevitable Christmas party season hits in full force with gatherings, friends and merriment.

May your Monday be filled with warmth and if you have children, I wish you good luck this week as we recover from daylight savings time!

The End of Summer

Summer slowly comes to an end. Not with a bang, but a slow turning of a winding road. The mornings take on a decidedly cooler air, the dew sparkles into being. Oh, and the spiders. If anything heralds the coming change of season, it must be these tiny builders, strutting to and fro, industriously building their beautiful webs. I have stumbled into no less than 5 spiderwebs in the last week, and though fall is not yet upon us, spider season is.

I look back with pride at the revelries of our summer together, we have traveled seaside and wayside, found sand everywhere on our person (as one does) and enjoyed the abundance of delicious fresh berries and barbecue and picnic lunches on the grass and sand. We have watched outdoor movies, and watched indoor movies when the heat drove us in. The lakes have been jumped into and swum in, the smores have been roasted and gleefully and stickily consumed.

I have had the joy of celebrating a milestone birthday with friends whom I love in one of my favorite cities, treasured time with my family and sipped a glass of chilled wine in my backyard as the heat of the day waned. It has been a wonderful summer.

As I look out my window, I can spot the yellow pears dotting the still green grass. The tree is laden with bounty and drops its abundance more each day. The leaves of the chestnut tree sway gently in a low breeze, the promise of sprinkles of rain in the grey sky.

Each summer comes and goes in much the same rhythm, and yet I am more conscious now of just how few we have left to complete these adventures as a family unit. Strange how as I age, my children do too. What a blessing to experience the exuberance of each summer with them.

We are ready for calm, for routine, for the cadence of our school days together, for a drawing in. They started school this week and the lamentations were many. Getting back to work and school can be difficult but brings its own ease, in time, in knowing the pattern of our days.

As Ecclesiastes says:

“There is a time for everything and a season for everything under heaven…”

So, we close the book on a wonderful season with thankful hearts and an expectation of more to come as life goes on and the world keeps spinning.

For now,

E

Just Another Manic Monday

The time in our corner of the world is 4:16pm. Are we still at school? Why yes, yes we are.

Sometimes in a homeschool setting the day looks a little different than a normal school day. Today we started on time because I was fully awake from a 6:30am workout class. Breakfast was had, children got dressed and we began our day.

It takes about a month for us to get into a new routine and I am still struggling a bit with 2 boys in the same grade who require a lot of oversight and a less than eager 1st grader who doesn’t love sitting around waiting for her turn.

Today has been surprisingly productive. We managed to be good listeners and get a bulk of the work done before leaving for piano. Like nesting dolls I’ve put activity within activity (this is a great life hack for multiple children). While 3 of the kiddos go to piano for 1.5 hours, I take the other kiddo to a 30 minute swim class and run an errand before picking them all back up. On Tuesdays we reverse this as 1 kid is in her homeschool co-op, another is at tutoring, and I take the other kiddos to 30 minutes of swim lessons.

Is this crazy? or efficient? I guess we will know someday, but for now it eliminates leaving the house every single day and some driving for me. The kiddos will probably stay in swim through the beginning of next year, they are pretty decent swimmers except The Little but they are working more on techniques now that are helpful.

It is now 4:23 and I’m wondering what the heck to make for dinner. I picked up food today in anticipation of making clam chowder for tomorrow, but for tonight it might just be waffles or quesadillas. I am fully on board with breakfast for dinner on a busy day.

Well, since the kiddos have lost all focus, I should wrap it up and finish our day. A few more science notes on our packet and we can go move the skeletons we are learning about!

Adieu.

The Junk Drawer

You know how everyone seems to have a junk drawer? Well, in our house my children seem to think that all drawers are eligible as junk drawers.

When I eventually check the boys’ drawers in their rooms to make sure they are in fact, putting clothes in the right drawers, I find a plethora of Lego pieces, Pokémon cards, books and action figures. Why?!

In my kitchen (which is about to be demolished in our main floor renovation) I gave myself the task of sorting through 4 drawers one night. Best to chip away at clearing the kitchen over a few days. I have cleared to date: 4 drawers, 2 cupboards and the rest are in happy disarray until I can get to them.

So, the junk drawer(s). As I sorted through 4 drawers from the kitchen, in order of ACTUAL junk drawer, bag drawer, assorted lid/Tupperware drawer and an additional container/Tupperware drawer, here is what I found:

floss

Lego pieces

a basketball attachment for the bike pump

a bajillion batteries

walkie talkies (with no batteries, ah the irony)

phone charger

recipe card

a VERY old pacifier

a Monopoly piece

twine

chalk pencils (never opened!)

Swiss army knife

multi-tool

eraser

pencil sharpener

placemats

magnets

1,001 crumpled up napkins (okay not really but use your imagination at the pure stuffage of crumpled up clean napkins)

This happy list was spread throughout all the drawers, with no rhyme or reason to which it went.

Here’s what I thought when I was done:

1. I have been a pretty great mother. I know, I know, you are wondering what on God’s green earth this has to do with the state of my junk drawer(s). Well, I’ll tell you. When we moved into this house my children were 4 and 2 (2 twin boys) and I was excited to make it mine and decorate and fill it with love and all the junk they needed. However, as time progressed, I learned to let go of the perfection I had in mind for how it would look and instead focus on survival and thriving and making it a comfortable place for my little people. Survival (for me as a mom) meant that sometimes when they finally went to bed I sat down for the first time that day and watched an episode of Friends rather than clean my drawers out. I survived toddlerhood (and then a few years later voluntarily went through it again, a story for another day) and then began to learn to thrive as a mother. Now thriving by no means meant an easy time, what it meant was that I truly embraced my role as a stay-at-home mom and educator of my children, but in doing so I often threw our schedule to the wind and we went exploring, or hiking, or to the children’s museum. Never did I wake up in the morning and think, “today has to be the day where I clean up my junk drawers”. Instead, I thought about feeding my children good food, making sure they were read to and played with and educating them. I don’t regret it.
2. What a wonderful story these junk drawer(s) tell. Lost and found toys, batteries for projects and long dead flashlights to read books in bed at night. Many, many water bottles and lids abandoned as they learned to drink water from cups and fetch their own beverages. And the napkins! How many times did we go to our favorite coffee places for treats after a hike or on our way to the grandparents, each time given a profusion of napkins which I desperately wanted to re-use and thus were stuffed into the drawer. The food storage containers and Tupperware tell tales of “leftover” nights for dinner, and packing lunches for our outings, each child with their own color lunch container. These drawers tell a tale of abundance and perhaps a little too much “I’ll use this later” attitude, which was very unrealistic at the time, and yet it didn’t seem to sway me.

I am very grateful that at long last I have cleaned my junk drawers, but to everything there is a season. For me, the season of having my home as I envisioned when I had toddlers, well it has come to fruition. The Husband will tell you I have not always been patient with all the projects that have needed doing around this old house, but finally my home has matured and embraced what it is, just as I have.

Here’s to all the junk drawers out there, thanks for holding all our broken promises and bitty pieces that don’t fit. We will pay you back someday.

A Rainy Day

In Washington, we love the rain. We complain about it and have many names for all the ways it falls down, but we love it like an old friend.

It is nearing the end of July, midsummer, and we have had some glorious sunshine days, heat and warmth and splashing about in the various bodies of water near where we live. But today, we are having a glorious day of rain. I can hear it splash on the road as the car tires kick it up, watch it dripping off the leaves of the tree outside my window. We need it for the farmers and gardens and for the wildfires too.

Yesterday I decided to carve a little peace out of the chaos and did some deep cleaning in my closet. The chaos is of my own making, but so it goes.

The house is in disarray, the main floor undergoing its great metamorphic change of choppy layout to open, and light filled. I have been dreaming of the ways I would rearrange this main floor for many years now and it is finally happening, much to my delight. Today I can hear the sounds of screwdrivers pulling up the 800+ screws which attach the old subfloor to the cross-floor underneath, and the occasional murmur of conversation between our builders. It’s been a bit crazy with living in the house while renovating. I don’t believe I have ever purged this much stuff, well at least in the last 10 years or so since we moved in. It feels good to rid myself of flotsam and jetsam, but I’ve also felt a bit like a cornered animal with everything moving from its place into the more orderly spaces of the house.

With all the busy building I have felt a little overwhelmed with my daily tasks as a mom, granted, I’m not homeschooling right now (thank goodness!) or it would be significantly harder to focus in the midst of the hammering and banging. My kitchen is in pieces, my dining room is in the living room and my dining room table is currently covered in dishes from the kitchen and things from my laundry room.

Yesterday as I started clearing out kitchen drawers and cupboards, I realized I needed a tub to store my china temporarily. I went up to my closet, which really is a whole room off our room (old house layouts are odd aren’t they?) to find a tub as it has become a de facto storage room until we get to it. Eventually I hope to make it into a walk-in closet and my office.

As I sorted through tubs to find one to use, I realized that as unhelpful to downstairs as it was, I could make some decent progress up here and it would make me feel better and have a sense of completion. So, I spent a few hours sorting to make room to move my desk over under the eave next to the window (on my plans this is where it would be in the walk-in closet eventually).

Well, what a wonderful feeling to have a clean desk, pens organized, fresh lilies, and a place that isn’t the overburdened dining room table to pay bills, WRITE, and generally get things done out of the circus of the main floor.

I haven’t written in some time, I always want to, and things come to me often, but I have certainly not been intentional in setting aside space and time to make this happen. Isn’t it funny how sometimes we take a detour and get sidetracked from an original task, and yet the side journey is what makes us the happiest?

Sometimes the best laid plans are actually to follow a new path that beckons, or to lay aside what we think is very important to focus on something that brings us joy.

This is me, finally writing again, encouraging you to not be so focused on getting the task accomplished that you can’t enjoy the benefits you may reap by having a little wander on the way.

Bonne Chance!