Pre-soccer Saturday scone time.

This is what happens when a mama wakes up hours and hours before she needs to: baking! and coffee! and novel-reading! before 7am.

Iris bloom, plus curb shopping for a birdbath...

The iris are blooming! I think these are the ones my dad sent me, rather than the ones I dug out of someone else's yard last summer (with permission - I'm not quite that gurilla, at least not yet). They're lovely and look very pretty next to the purple salvia, which do really well in that especially-sunny bit of the garden.



While I was running Sunday, I noticed that someone had put a slightly chipped bird bath out at the curb for garbage pick up, and I admired it. A few hours later, we had nothing particular going on, so I dragged Grace with me to pick it up. I loaded it into the car while she melted in embarassment (new for her: she used to be excited about free curbshopping.) I responded by arguing that I was practicing some of the 4 R's, as described by her school: reuse, reduce, recycle, rethink. (Remember when R's stood for stuff like reading? I'm not unhappy with the tradeoff, partly because writing and arithmatic don't actually have any business being grouped with reading as R's - and yet, somehow... it seems strange that the public elementary school is so evangelical about recycling.) This very sensible argument had zero impact on her embarassment, so I guess I'll have to leave her at home or let her skulk in the car during future outings.

At any rate, the bird bath is attractive, and it fills a bare spot that used to be occupied by an equally curb-shopped Adirondack chair I used as a plant stand which gave way this spring.

The really, really, extrasuperfancy final dissertation copy...

I took Peter to the Dissertation Office today to drop off a properly formatted version of Chapter Four, which for reasons I can't fathom was not what I initially submitted. Margins! Pagination! Bears, oh my!

To amuse him while we waited as they checked it over (measure margins, verify that every page is properly numbered and there), I let him do some self-portraits and mama-portraits with my cell phone.





Then we went and spent a small fortune on books (for work! some of them) and out to eat, as is our habit.

Memorial day biking

We did a 3.6 mile bike loop today, with much more success than when we tried it last year. Peter's legs have gotten longer and he's a good little rider, although his energy was flagging a bit at the end. There were a lot of walkers and a few runners and rollerbladers on the trail, so we practiced saying cheerfully "On your left!" and then not running people over, which does not come naturally, it turns out. Grace is speedy and rode really well - I almost talked Mike into letting me take her to Bike the Drive yesterday (bikes on Lakeshore drive!) but it's a 15 mile loop and that feels like a long way for a 7 year old. Maybe another year.







In garden news, the spiky not-an-iris that took me a long time to identify as a yucca is finally happy enough to bloom. The flowers, from what I recall from various bike rikes through the neighborhood, are not that pretty, but a happy yucca is a good yucca. In iris news, we've got a few buds going, and it's clear that there are two types of iris here - one shorter and purple, one taller and (I think) yellow. I'm hoping that a few more give buds, but either way, they're looking good. There are also a few lilies that survived our tender loving neglect (and in Peter's case, some stomping) and look to be headed for blooming in maybe a month.

Bidding a fond farewell...

...to Lucy Cutie Duckie, whose sudden and mysterious absence, along with the absense of any ducklings, we are optimistically interpreting as a successful hatching and departure into the wide world of a new duck family. Her nest is kind of funky and interesting - a couple of eggshells are still there, but nothing like the debris you'd expect from eleven eggs.



Garden-wise, we're getting some more color, although we're down to one lovely allium, the others having been enthusiastically harvested by Peter.



But the salvia and the window boxes are looking good, various shrubs are flowering, and things are budding in a promising way. Our mystery trellis vine is growing so well I'm now firmly convinced it's a weed. Peter and I might swing by the fancy garden place for a geranium today, since I think that's what's missing from our front porch.

Coffee date

Peter expressed a strong unwillingness to go to school yesterday, and I had some stuff to do in Hyde Park, so I figured what the heck. We had a nice little coffee date at Starbucks and then I dropped him off with Mike so I could wrangle the microfilm of MLK's dissertation (which I located and read, but was unable to save as PDFs *or* print, despite the intervention of nice library employee kid, who could work the microfilm machine but not any of the fancy options like saving and printing. Still, King's dissertation! It included a page I wasn't required to turn in, an autobiography with a photo, which was both touching and eerie. And this was a microfilm of the actual copy, signed by his advisors, so it was kind of amazing to have it right in front of me.) Then I went to a seminar on one's first year of teaching (one of the science guys, himself childless, predicted that if you're on track to actually *get* tenure, your kids will "forget your name," making me thankful I'm not in the sciences.) The liberal arts folks on the panel seemed horrified, and one of them opined gently that she doesn't get paid enough to work seven days a week, twelve months a year.



The real take-home lesson, though, was Don't Wear Pretty Pretty Death Shoes and expect to be comfortable walking. Break them in first, already! The prettiness of the shoes is somewhat mitigated if your feet are actually *bleeding* from wearing them. Only somewhat: these were really cute shoes. However, lesson more or less learned...

Kids up a tree!

One of our favorite picture books is "Cat Up a Tree!" which involves cats and trees and distressing bureaucratic disinterest in cats! up a tree! the best line of which is when the cat benefactor, Nana Quimby, calls the post office, she is told that they don't rescue cats up a tree, but to call back if the cats are sending a letter and need a stamp.

We did kids up a tree at preschool and then the park today. Yay, spring!

Fancy gown, fancy flowers.

The fancy fancy graduation gown finally arrived, and I relented and let the kids try it on. "Let" is maybe less accurate than "induced," but it was fun. It's very elaborate and heavy and pretty and velvety, and I'm actually kind of excited to wear it at graduation.

In garden news, the big allium are blooming and only one was sacrificed by Peter to a project of making pretend bird food. Small allium are budding, and to my great excitement the iris are budding, too - I'm eager to see their colors. The salvia have just started blooming but the buds look promising, and we've mostly replaced all of the things that didn't make it through the winter, minus one rosebush and that's on the docket for tomorrow.

I made the tactical mistake today of wearing a dress (Target clearance, $12) instead of my usual grubby jeans, which Peter wrongly (but silently!) took to mean I was headed to work. So when I went to drop him off for the morning at his babysitter, I casually left the keys in the ignition since the dress doesn't have pockets. If you can see where this is going, you're about 30 seconds ahead of me: yes, Peter locked himself and the keys in the car. Finally I wrangled him out after the babysitter was wise enough to take another child to preschool as her schedule dictated; he and I sat and talked about keys and my keychain and cars and locks and doors and Omaha for quite a while. All was eventually well, and during my precious babysitting hours I did a dizzying number of errands and some of the more wretched cleaning jobs.

Ah, cute photos:

More reports from the suburban trenches.

We went today to Grace's elementary school for the 60th anniversary celebration. It was a slightly teeth-gritting experience, as these things tend to be: long on small-town nostalgia, slightly short on interesting content for the non-alum. Moment One: as we're walking there (having parked in the downtown area and walked, per our instructions), we encountered a group of four or five men who were enthusiastic members of the class of 1974. Now, this is an *elementary* school, so by my calculation they were about 12 in 1974, making them now in their mid-forties. One of them was taking pictures to commemorate the big "reunion" and asked us if we were headed there, and I said yes, so he included us in the big group shot. Despite us not, you know, knowing them. Their conversation was peppered with descriptions of a couple of moms I know as "the best chicks" back in the day. Oh, my.

Moment Two: the stage for the "program," because of course ther'e's gotta be one, included a group of folks right out of central casting. There's the genial local weather guy, on hand as the celebrity alum; there's the superintendent (I think) who insisted on being called "Doctor" and who gave a mini-lecture on pedagogy that the weather guy teased her was an imitation of Oprah; there's the overly tanned, overly blond wife of a former student, mother to several more, apparently a former PTA queen whose zenith in life was to be a member of the state legislature. There's the hugely pregnant assistant to the local mayor, there to read the town council's proclamation of this hallowed occasion, who manages to make her own pregnancy seem patriotic in her brief remarks about family and community; finally, there were several former principals and a former superintendant, who got huge applause from the crowd, many of whom were still intimidated by their long-past authority. The weather guy noted that he couldn't call his former principal by first name, but could call the current principal by hers, since they were elementary school classmates! And so it comes full circle.

The best part of the "program" by far was a group of about six or seven former students whose 5th-grade choir had attained local fame by being selected to perform at the visiting production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat. This was 15 years ago, but they and their former music teacher really did it up right in an encore performance. I can't quite picture myself performing at a gathering at my elementary school when *I* was 26, but then, I don't sing. They did a nice job, somewhat overshadowing the current 5th-grade choir, who performed gamely but looked a little hot in their uniforms and intimidated by the crowd.

Lest I sound like a total Scrooge, we did stay for a couple of hours, chatted with friends, ate cake, and had a nice time. But oy, vey: other people's nostalgia.

In utterly unrelated images, Mulch! Mulch with kid! And Peter with the fabulous Dorothy.

We plant, continued.

We put in a modified version of our vegetable garden, with many fewer tomatoes and some (future) carrots and lettuce planned. Lots of basil, more or less by accident, and other herbs. I finally dug out all the weeds and repaired the rabbit fence, so it's looking pretty good. Peter helped me dig out and replace a hydrangia which should bloom this summer - it has what look to be buds forming already. They're so pretty, I can't wait. Two of our three original hydrangias look pretty good, and everything else is really flourishing.





Pictured are some fancy purple basil (a fuzzier photo than I realized!), lots of the ordinary kind of basil, a stray mint shoot from last year, some rosemary, and our little wagonload of herbs and tomatos.

We plant.

Tomorrow marks the offical "safe" time to plant here, so we (like most of the rest of the folks around here) loaded up on plants. We went to a cool nursery a ways out of town - you take Joe Orr Road and turn left. But since it's out of our usual way, *finding* said road was a bit of a challange. Once we finally got ourselves pointed in the right direction, it was a surprising change from the usual business of suburbia to farmland in about a quarter of a mile. Much hilarity ensued at the actual nursery - vines to swing on! (Yes, to the yikes.) Peter exclaimed in a patch of hibiscus, "It is like a real forest!" and two college-aged girls cooed and awwwwwed over how cute he was. Too bad they missed the vine episode, which was decidedly less cool.

We bought a few replacement plants (hydrangia, rose) and a few additions of good things we already have and need more of (beebalm, coral bells) plus herbs and some assorted vegetables - nowhere near our usual huge tomato bonanza, but we'll do some carrots and lettuce and beant to make up for it. Plus lots of basil, some other herbs, and some odds and ends, all of which have to wait until I can finish weeding the vegetable patch and repair the rabbit fence, but I hope that's tomorrow.







Also tomorrow, I'm running in the Y-Me 5K downtown, which should be good early healthy fun, followed by bagels somewhere unfancy since I'll be sweaty. Then home to plant, which is not a bad way to spend the day.