Peter is fully and completely four.

We had Peter's official kid party at a local place that does art classes and parties - the art teacher was great and very patient, the space was a genuine studio so mess was no problem, and we had a good time doing our projects. The concept was maybe more Grace's speed but Peter and his compatriots caught on quickly. We had a little show at the end where each kid talked about his or her artwork, and they just ate it up.




I was story parent at Grace's school this week, and Peter is well-known among her classmates - they vied for hugs, said how glad they were he had come, and were generally tickled to see him. We noticed today how much the reverse is also true - Peter's friends know Grace and are excited to hang with a big kid.

Spring, a little

We investigated spring a bit today, April showers and all. I ran in the morning, then worked on revisions to Chapter Three, then took the house-crazed kids on a bike ride in the rain. Our avowed mission was to find things blooming in our neighborhood and take pictures of them for the blog, but the camera was low on batteries and we only got shots of one magnolia tree [insert "Sugar Magnolia" earworm here] and one cute girl flanked by forsithia and daffodils before our ability to photograph gave out. We did also spot some dainty miniature iris, some little blue things that look like lily of the valley, and some actual lily of the valley. Our own yard has nothing in bloom yet, but some daffodils that are on the verge, and some teeny blue somethings (maybe the same blue something as at the neighbors'?) that are also just about to bloom any day now. One warm day and we'll be set.

In Graduate Girl news, I was looking at my list of things to do and realized I needed to order my graduation gown. In the absence of a tape measure, I decided I could measure my head with a ribbon and then measure the ribbon on the little six-inch ruler that's attached to the fish-tail-shaped fly swatter that we got recently intending to give it as a gag gift but then Peter got attached to it so we kept it, despite our lack of flies. Ok, good enough, one head measurement. Except when I called to order the gown, I also needed a chest measurement (I was tempted to ask the lady from the bookstore if she really thought we knew each other that well, but restrained myself) and a sleeve measurement. So I approximated these two with my ribbon-and-fish-flyswatter system, and then I actually ordered the thing. Now, my in-laws recently suggested that they and my parents split the cost of purchasing the gown, as a graduation gift to me, and I thought this was sweet and generous, and I have to say right now I had no idea *how* generous. [Parenthetically: Thanks, guys!] As I'm ordering, woman from the bookstore is quickly ticking off the prices of the tam, robe, and hood, and I finally ask her to just add it all up for me.

Ready?

Really, really ready? Because people complain about this all the time, the cost of the graduation gear, but apparently I lack imagination, because I was fretting over having spent not quite $70 on shoes to wear [which, upon further reflection, are not a good color with the maroon and black gown, so they'll have to be shoes to wear to summer weddings instead, and luckily I have a similar pair in black but not patent leather, so that's sad, but I digress.]

It was $834. Plus shipping. I swooned. I have never owned a single garment this expensive, including my wedding gown. (By a factor of about 50% on the wedding gown, I have to say!) I just took a deep breath, pulled out the Mastercard, compared it to the accumulated debt from paying tution for ten years, and sighed.

The only blog-relevant bit of this is that the photos I envisioned of my kids all dolled up in my cap and gown - oh, excuse me, my *tam* and gown - will not be happening, lest they somehow manage to damage the most expensive item of clothing ever owned by Graduate Girl.

I was visited by Jehovah's Witnesses!

They wanted to know if I was reading my Bible. To my credit, although it's because I'm busy and not because I'm nice or somehow reluctant to talk biblical literalism or hermeneutics with random Witnesses, I just said that I was, in fact, reading my Bible, and left out all the details about exactly *how* I'm reading it.

My desk, a thing of both horror and beauty [you can't really see it in the picture but the stacks of papers and books extend for a two-foot radius]:



Editing to add: I realized halfway through my day that most of what I'm wearing I either slept in or picked up off the floor before I put it on, or both (as in, I slept in clothes of uncertain cleanliness, and am still wearing them.) I did shower. I did also finish with the Mostly Final Edits to Chapter One, so I'm about 42% done with the Death Marching. Maybe more. My hero today is Colleen, the unbelievably nice lady at the Dissertation Office who sent me a copy of a document that explains practically in child-speak how to format the footnotes properly in Microsoft Word. [If you, like me, were so naive as to think that surely, surely *footnotes* can't be all that tough to format... well, you're just not a person of this fast-paced technological world.] She not only knew exactly what I meant when I emailed asking for it, she sent it within minutes, which made my Anxiety-O-Meter a little less dramatic.

These boots were made for walking...

Peter took my cowboy boots for a spin this morning and had a grand old time. My own favorite moment from the last two days was telling somebody a little indignantly, "I wear cowboy boots non-ironically!" and then I added a little defensively, "They're very comfortable." Which is true. And speaking of comfortable - you know you've got a tired boy when he plays so hard at the park he falls asleep sitting up, with traces of the sandbox still visible on his person.

Spring yardwork

Today the kids and I did a bit of yardwork, for the first time this spring. I'm sure the neighbors are relieved! We mostly raked, but did some pruning, too, and it was so exciting to see what survived the winter (mostly everything!) and what might be blooming soon (daffodils.) It was a nice break from the last three days of dress shoes and theology, although the papers yesterday went well. One on Sankta Lucia was especially well-recieved, and the other one, on Tillich's WWI sermons, elicted an odd story from an audience member (warning: NSFW!) His (graduate school?) roommate wrote a dissertation on Tillich's relationship with Some Psychoanalyst Guy, whom the roommate was convinced was a Special Friend. The guy even wrote to Tillich's widow asking whether her late husband had been Special Friends with Some Psychoanalyst Guy, and guy recounting the story to me reported that the response, from Tillich's children was "frosty." Um, yeah... ya think? But there was a good paper on the connections between Blackwater and ultra conservative Christians and Michigan politics and (oddly) University of Chicago economic theorists of various stripes, and the presenter kept teasing me about being a Chicago person, to which I kept replying, "DIVINITY school!" meaning, not an economist, thank you. At the end of the paper I told him that in defense of the UofC, I did have a bumper sticker on my car reading "The real Jesus forgives your Jesus for being a greedy Republican warmonger" which got a huge laugh from the audience. The paper was really, really grim, though, and involved references all sorts of secretly obtained internal Blackwater emails. One audience member joked that this was the last time the paper's author would be seen alive, and he laughed somewhat nervously.

Anyway, back to plants: the beebalm is coming up!


Iris are returning!



The mailbox garden, which involves (if I recall correctly) our first attempt at allium, which are like really tall chives minus the herb bits. Like really tall chive *flowers*. They are in fact related to the whole chive/onion family, but apparently not edible.



Plus, while raking, I found $10. Grace said, "Either we really DO have superpowers or it's just a coincidence!" Finally, cute kid hard at work on some kind of insect-keeping contraption:

We ebelskive...

Now *this* is brunchy! We had a great time using Peter's new kitchen gadget this morning. It's fairly easy to use and the resulting little pancakes require neither syrup nor butter, and not even silverware, really. We'll expand into filling the puffs with jam or fruit compote or whatever the next time we make them. But even plain, they were a smashing success, and Peter observed, "Nana is da best."

More Peter birthday

About the cake: in case you can't tell, it's a colorful train winding around a big hill on which construction is ongoing. Really. In my defense, the birthday boy loved it, and I've never pretended to have cake-decorating skill. It did at least taste great.

He was delighted with all his gifts, especially the Legos and the ebelskiver, this cool Danish pancake-making device that he's been obsessed with for months. Rashly, I promised I'd use it when making his lunch today, but I'm not quite sure I can pull that off.