Run, Mama, run...

An astonishing number of people today had signs saying "Run, [whomever], run!" This seemed strange to me, and slightly passive-agressive somehow, because - what, we needed reminders? It's a footrace. We've got *numbers on our torsos.* But then someone's sign near the end said "Run, Forrest, run!" and I finally caught the Forrest Gump reference, and mystery solved.

So Mama ran, and did pretty decently for the first half-marathon. It was hot, and hilly, and I still was within my target time by several minutes. The most fun moments were finishing the hills around mile five, feeling good still, meeting Dorothy and Renata around mile seven, and really from mile nine on was pretty decent all around. I averaged about an 11 minute/mile pace, which sounds slow, but worked out well over the long run. (Hah!)

People were pretty upbeat, there were tons of water stops where you had to all but defend yourself from eager water-purveyors, and one amazing woman around mile ten stood on the sidelines and said to the runners passing her, "You look so beautiful! You look great! You're doing so well!" and I got a little weepy because she had Track Coach Authority, and I felt beautiful and like I was doing great and like things would be Okay. Which they were! I sprinted the last 100 yards or so, wobbled off into the chute, wolfed down a banana, a bagel, and still and yet more water before Renata and Dorothy nabbed me at the place for meetups. After figuring out that we were stuck in a massive traffic jam because of all the closed streets, we had lunch at an Irish pub and then came home. I took the world's nicest tub and actually feel pretty good.

Renata took some "before" pictures, like the above, and some "during" pictures which are about what you'd expect, minus the momentarily confused guy on the right. We skipped the "after" for reasons of dignity. She was a total trooper, shuttling me around all day from start to middle to finish, and I am so glad to be here doing this fun thing.

I'm a pirate!

Peter had quite the pirate crew over for his birthday... we had a treasure hunt (for pirate booty), a pirate pinata (filled with more pirate booty), and a cake (decorated with Transformers, for reasons that remain unclear to me.) We now own pirate hats, a Jolly Roger flag for just in case, and many more legos and Star Wars guys. Even Mama dressed like a pirate, which it says something when you can whip up a pirate costume from things you already own (black kerchief for a hat, admittedly borrowed from kids, boots decorated with skulls, skirt and t-shirt, and that's about it, but I was piratey.) It came as an ironic blow that there were actual pirate stories on the NPR this last week, involving not-funny pirate antics and anti-pirate heroism. We're vintage pirates, not contemporary pirates, and that makes us cool rather than all vicious and terroist-affiliated. Until Talk Like A Pirate Day (September 19th)... arrrr, ye skurvy sea dogs.

Birds, and how.

So watch: I'm going to be all thematic and stuff.

First, we took the kids yesterday to an event at one of the local nature centers where they could see a bird of prey up close (a rough-legged hawk, this time) and hear a little talk about her. We like this kind of thing, such that it turns out each kid actually has a toy bird of prey to bring along for the fun. Grace's is a perigrine falcon and Peter's is a great horned owl (identified by the nature center expert) that used to be Mike's. We saw a turkey vulture as we were driving up that was, frankly, the biggest damned bird I've ever seen. {alert readers: now we're doing a transition. Yes, I'm finding myself teaching a lot of writing basics these days; why do you ask?}

Speaking of birds of unusual size, I had a thing happen to me today that wasn't quite my fault, but it felt as though it was a confluence of events that could be traced back to me. Let me describe it in order of phenomena observed. 1. That Christmas wreath on the side of the house could really stand to be swapped out for a pretty spring one! 2. We're ready for church but don't need to leave for a few minutes - how about I do that now. 3. Oh look, some bird poop under the wreath. 4. Holy $*#&! There's a bird nest! Oh, Jesus: I have just spilled baby birds and unhatched eggs onto the deck chair where I carelessly laid the wreath. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Birdies. Holy goodness, they're tiny [!!!] and totally vulnerable and you're not supposed to touch them, right? 5. Reinforcements arrive, in response to my incoherent shrieking about having murdered baby birds, and calmly scoop teeny birds (3) and eggs (2) back into the next and affix the damned wreath back onto the wall. 6. I mourn all through church about being a murderer of teeny birds. The kids are largely unworried and reassure me that the mommy will come back, perhaps because that's the kind of mothering they're accustomed to - I may bitch a lot, but I don't up and desert them. 7. When we get back from church, we confirm that the mommy bird has indeed returned, and all is well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. No photos of the tiny birds, though. They prefer to recuperate anonymously. Although we may sneak a few pictures as they get bigger.

Finally, Easter eggs, which... wait for it... come (as you might be aware) from birds! We got them at the grocery store, though, and dyed them up right pretty. The kids each did six, we managed to spill only one container of dye on the hardwood floors, and they produced a lovely rainbow of eggs, which the Easter Bunny obligingly hid while we were at church worrying (or not) about the fate of our teeny robins. The egg hunt was good fun and the plastic eggs filled with chocolate were almost as popular as the real eggs. One real egg was overlooked, our careful accountants noted its absence and set out to find it and restore balance to the universe, and were successful, at least egg-wise.

In which it is spring again!

So it's plants, plants, plants at our house - the ones I ordered have come in the mail, the ones already growing have begun to emerge from underneath the mulch of last fall's leaves, and we planted some seeds in our teeny terrariums. Peter chose sunflowers, Grace chose cosmos, and I'm hoping we get a good transplant success rate. We did lots of raking and uncovering today, and noted which trees and shrubs are budding - the trumpet vine is particuarly pretty, and Grace gave it a little pep talk. Tomorrow I'm going to plant the various things that came in the mail (only one casualty there) and hope that we don't get (another) late snow. I was reflecting today on how little I got to enjoy our garden last year - we moved in July, so I spent the month between moving in and starting work unpacking, prepping my syllabi, arranging afterschool care, and orienting myself and the kids to our new neighborhood. This year I get spring - lots and lots of new plants to make friends with, open spaces to fill in, larger plans to draw up, a vegetable garden to put in, and (blessedly) the time off from work to accomplish all that.

Next up for the blog: Peter's birthday party pictures (pirates!) and a report on tomorrow's long run (aiming for 12 miles, since my half marathon is coming up soon and my running has been a little off for the past two weeks.)

Happy sunny Saturday.

Today I did a quick run on the treadmill and then (after an appropriate period of sitting around with a book - it is Spring Break, people) the kids and I biked about a mile down the road and had a picnic at a little playground. We're going to do it again, all summer long, because it was so fun, although there were the usual moments of pursuading Peter to take on a task he's not sure about and I ended up pushing him back up the big hill to our house when we came home. Our other plans include putting some seeds in the teeny terrariums I bought last weekend and spending more time outside today and tomorrow, when it's supposed to be warmer - today was just slightly on the cool and windy edge of pleasant.

The photos are totally unrelated, but too fun to keep to myself. I forget the name of this superhero, but he was fierce and awesome.

Dramatic Garden Update

Today, I am home sick (with what turns out to be a Bad Case of Sniffles, but yesterday it involved high fever and aches and whatnot, and the hacking cough persists today, and yesterday at work people were looking at me like, hmm, maybe I'll sit across the room from you to not get coughed on! And then I came home.) So naturally, in the springtime, which is really probably months from now, a girl's fancy turns to... buying plants.

We've been getting garden catalogs for a few weeks now, and I recently got some Hot Birthday Cash (not to be confused with the Hot Birthday Amazon Gift Card, which is a whole 'nother thing) that I decided could be spent on plants. Usually I buy them at the nursery, tote them home, dig up the yard, and plant immediately, which is satisfying but also leads to a teensy bit of impulse buying of expensive plants. Which is fine, and it feels great to pick out the lush, gorgeous whatever that you simply must have and then take it home and put it in your garden, but it maybe shouldn't be one's primary mode of plant acquisition. For one thing, it adds up quickly. So I googled around enough to determine that the catalog currently offering a ridiculously good half-off-stuff deal is a legitimate business with a good plant reputation, and then I bought the following:

5 hydrangias, three pink and two purple
7 daylillies (from the mixed bargain bag, so whatever colors, which is fine with me)
2 butterfly/hummingbird gardens, which are eight plants each - a butterfly bush, something called "Keys of Heaven" which looks to be bushy with small red blossoms, some Mixed Monarda, which are a variety of bee balm that look to come in pink, reddish, white, and purple, some pink asters, something called White Obedient Plant which is a type of snapdragon, and Amber Wheels Gallardia, which are pretty yellow daisies.

For $82, that ain't bad. A person could easily spend $40 on a single hydrangia, not that I've ever done that multiple times, or anything. (Actually I stuck to the slightly cheaper varieties, but the fancy ones are tempting.) I'm sure these will be small plants and not full-sized blooming pretties, but still, it's a good start, and our yard has some spots that really need to be planted. I'm now even more excited for spring.

Mmmmm... cheesecake.

So I was planning to write about cheesecake (the literal kind) and also hockey (likewise, not a metaphor - are there even hockey-based metaphors?) but then we went to church today, and there were protesters, and it dampened my hockey-reporting mojo.

They were, admittedly, lame and stupid protesters, but apparently because the ELCA issued a new sexuality study this week that's not so homophobic as one feared, although there's still room for improvement, and because our church is openly gay-friendly, we got targeted by some lame and stupid protestors. I yelled at them that I was going to pray for them, because I believe in a compassionate God who might be able to bring even them to a kinder and wiser path, which message was probably not so effective given my BitchMother tone of voice. And then I hustled the kids inside and took a seat and was quietly furious, while Mike was loudly furious outside, with the stupid protesters. Our pastor, who is graciousness and hospitality embodied, invited them in for worship and potluck lunch after, but they refused to set foot in any church with a female pastor. (As she said to one of our fellow congregants: If only they knew! because she is out and awesome about it. Anyway.)

All of this precipitated a gentle conversation with the kids, about how some people grow up and marry someone of the other gender, but sometimes boys want to marry boys and girls want to marry girls, and we in our house, and in our church are fine with that... and Peter interrupted to tell me sadly that it's not allowed for boys to marry boys and girls to marry girls, that if they fall in love they have to marry secretly. (Which concept - of marrying secretly - he picked up from Star Wars.) So we talked about that, and then had potluck, and came home to finish making cheesecake, because *somebody* turned 29 this week. Again. (See? Not a day over 29. If possibly somewhat cranky-looking. Swear to it! Not kidding! Ok, mostly kidding, and the photo is not that flattering, I realize.)

I had Kid the Elder help with the cheesecake itself, and Kid the Younger help with the "glaze," which is a fancy way of saying the melted chocolate you pour over top.