Pumpkins in the sun.

We're now no longer snowy, just a bit chilly. I took the kids on a bike ride yesterday morning after the usual scouting for mittens and warm pants. It was beautiful - hawks were circling, the leaves are changing, and even though it was cloudy, it was so good to be outside. Then in the afternoon we carved their pumpkins, the preparation for which has involved a lot of drawing and re-drawing the ideal jack o' lantern faces. Grace stuck with her plan, while Peter had several possible designs and then improvised a new one on the spot. I just drew a face - I think it looks a lot like last year's, although I haven't gone back to verify this. The sun came out in time for some pictures of kids and pumpkins on the porch.

Today no one wanted to go on another bike ride with me, so I had an hour outside to myself on a gorgeous, 60 degree day. Cycling is easier on my knee than running, plus it's much, much faster so I got to see a good bit of my usual trail without working very hard at all. Next weekend I'll see if I can coax Grace to ride to a nearby lake with me; if we met Mike and Peter there we could all bike around the lake a bit and then Mike and the kids could drive home.

Our other weekend fun (really) was harvesting the last of our carrots. The kids were thrilled, the adults realized that teensy carrots are what you get if you plant midway through the season, but we kept at it. They were tasty, and we left the smallest ones for the resident bunny rabbit. We finally got around to some transplanting, too - I think some of our hostas are a good 20 years old and were sorely in need of attention. We relocated some unhappy ones, divided some of the huge ones, and filled in some spaces in the bed in our front yard that were bare. I moved a hydrangia that wasn't getting as much air circulation as it needed to another part of the front yard, which is filling out nicely. I still need to find a new home for one sad peony, and in a perfect world I'd also have time to shift a bunch of purple coneflower from the shady part of the backyard to the sunny part of the front yard, but you do what you can. Next weekend we'll put in our tulip bulbs, and maybe a few other things if we're inclined. I'm excited for spring already, making mental notes about which vegetables we're going to start inside, which ones we'll just plant outside from seed, and where I'm going to put the lettuce this time (in a little bed under the stairs that's mostly sheltered from the sun.) If only each week had one more day.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

We are not in the woods, and neither dark nor deep. But it is snowy here. We did not transplant, we did not put bulbs in, we are not quite done with fall. But winter has made its first foray into our yard, and luckily the kids rejoiced. (Peter rejoiced at 5am by waking me up and then going back to sleep with his knees poking my spine, which led to me giving up the ghost of my sleep about 5:30 and puttering around with coffee for a few hours.) I am deeply satisfied that we already bought them snow boots; any additional mittens and hats will just have to appear somehow.

I had planned to run the Chicago Marathon tomorrow. Instead I'm at home with an irritated IT band (tendon between one's knee and hip, the frequent victim of overuse injuries.) I am heartbroken, but realistic, and have scheduled the appointment with a sports injury doctor which I should have made a few months ago, in the hopes that I can heal up and start running again soon. (The primary symptom of an injured IT band is crippling knee pain about 2 miles into your run, which is as much fun as it sounds. It's even better if you're doing an out-and-back and you feel fine for, say, the first seven miles, and then suddenly you're a long way from home and unfit to do more than walk. Yes, that's the voice of experience.)

So instead we went to the talent show that's part of Midland's homecoming festivities, and it was good and our beloved babysitter was on homecoming court so we got to see her all dressed up. Today was still and yet more homecoming fun, but we're skipping the game because of a. the snow and b. a basic lack of football aptitude among 3/4 of the family. Peter was especially delighted with the chance to eat cotton candy, win prizes, eat more, win more, and see the dance team. Grace had more fun at the talent show, I think, but either way work events that are family-oriented are a nice change of pace.

Sometimes, Mama goes out of town.

Recently, I've been working on a project with some of my students. We're spending a couple of weeks reading articles and watching documentaries about tattoos, and then they're each going to conduct an interview with someone who has a tattoo with some religious or spiritual significance. Naturally, the kids have talked about this with me, and apparently have also listened intently.

Then this last weekend I was out of town for a conference, and Mike was Solo Parent. Now, Solo Parent cannot be expected to maintain the man-to-man coverage that Dual Parents have; Solo Parent does zone defense.

Sometimes, zone defense permits a certain... latitude. In this instance, the kids decided that Peter needed some tattoos. Luckily, they don't drive or have connections to good tattoo artists. Unluckily, I guess, they have markers.

These do not include the one on his butt, drawn (as were the others) by ever-helpful Big Sister. As I have told my students time and again as they contemplate their tattoo interviews: sometimes, people have images on private parts of their bodies. We do not take pictures of those.

We are hawkish outliers.

We attended our second Hawk Festival today, and although there was a Boy Scout whose mother is a member of the local raptor rescue group who was clearly well-versed in things hawklike, it is safe to say: we were the only family sporting a much-loved toy perigrine falcon, plus a hand-made, custom-ordered pink perigrine falcon tshirt. (There were many, many raptor tshirts, but not on children, and not pink.)

The kids enjoyed the finale, which was the release of a golden eagle back into the wild. She was gorgeous, and fierce, and huge. I've never seen such a big bird up so close. The nice folks from the raptor rescue group are grooming the kids to take over that task when they're adults, and honestly, that seems like a really cool job. Although I am not ready to have raptors in my basement just yet, thanks very much.

It was Grace's third encounter with a real perigrine falcon, and she was delighted.

First day of school.

Last Wednesday was the first day of school. They do it up big at our school... a brass band, a huge crowd, lots of noise and fun. Our kids took it in stride - Grace is a veteran of first days, and Peter has been at the school often enough to feel perfectly at home. We'd met their teachers, lugged in their school supplies, and found their classrooms, so the first day mostly involved finding their spots on the playground, milling around, and then watching as each class in turn marched into the building. The kids got quiet and purposeful, the parents got a little teary, and then it was Game On.

I spent their first few days in Minnesota at a conference, but they reported each day on the phone that school had gone well, and they seem perfectly settled in and happy to be doing their respective kid jobs. We're sad for the end of summer but excited for a new school year to be underway. I start back on Wednesday, and am not quite ready yet, but the day will come and I'll get my act together.

Bess Streeter Aldrich and our venture into small-town Nebraska.

We went today to Elmwood, Nebraska, the longtime home of writer Bess Streeter Aldrich. She started publishing as a married adult and mother, then got serious about her writing when her husband died and she had four children to support. We haven't read much of her work - only an article from 1933 first published in the Ladies' Home Journal - but that short bit suggested she's witty and funny. The kids' school is named after her, and we've been meaning to visit her home this summer, and today was the day. There's a (large) mural of her in town, and the house was donated in the mid-1990's to a local organization that also runs a small museum dedicated to her work. The house was beautiful; she designed much of it herself, and it's full of charming details like closets and built-in cabinets for china and a second bathroom (apparently unheard of in 1922, when the house was built.) The garden contains every flower mentioned in any of her stories, and much of the furniture is original. Students in a local school figured out what her china pattern had been, bought a set, and donated it.


I was most struck by her desk. The house is fairly large - the bedrooms are upstairs, and the main level includes a sunporch, a living room, formal dining room, a more informal eating area, a good-sized kitchen, and then her "study." In most houses, I suspect this would have been family space; it was a beautiful room with a great fireplace, and quite large. Her desk, complete with hidden typewriter compartment, dominates the room, and the guide told us she positioned it so that she could keep an eye on the children while they played outside as she wrote. This was a serious writer, who took her writing seriously. We played outside a bit, and then drove home - we might go back at Christmas, when the house is reportedly very beautifully decorated.

Tomatoes and cosmos and sunflowers, oh my!

It's August, which is, officially, Tomato Season. And we are Tomato People. The bowls you see here are each a random day's gatherings, and minus what the teeny bunny who lives in our garden eats (she's not so bad, and we can spare the toms.) We still love tomatoes, and all is good.

Gracie's cosmos and Peter's sunflowers are also looking gorgeous - it's funny to see something more than ten feet tall that started as a seed (and in the case of the tallest sunflower, a seed casually flung in the middle of a tomato cage.) They're blooming like crazy and we're really enjoying these last few weeks of summer. Next year, I think we'll be a bit more organized about our gardening - fewer misplaced seeds, more variety, some raspberries, that kind of thing. It's always the way of things - next season calls to you even as this season is doing its wild, crazy, bountiful thing.