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.

Valentine fun, plus photos from way before.

First, goregous girlcousin fun from January. We had lots of good games and smiles and thoughtful conversations and it was *such* a pleasure to meet Elise and to get to see how grown up and beautiful Lindsey is.

Further down, there's a close up of some scones (on a pretty Spode plate, that has some matching smaller plates, which are now (huzzah!) the Valentine's Day China.) The recipe is from Natural Home magazine and was both easy and really good. I might add more cherries, and tarter cherries, the next time I make it, but my scone-savvy children ate these right up and although the dough was a little sticky the finished product was perfectly scone-like.

http://www.naturalhomemagazine.com/Holiday-Ideas/My-Healthy-Valentine-DIY-Project-Recipe.aspx

We had a Big, Bad Storm yesterday - public schools were closed, my school was closed after noon, there was a ton of snow and wind, and so today is calm and peaceful and beautiful. I took Grace snowshoeing (Peter lasted about five minutes) and we went up and down several blocks. She had a good time, I had a good time, and then for no particular reason I ran seven miles in the snow. It turns out that this revealed several things to me: 1. Powder is just awesome to run in. 2. You do lose the trail sometimes, though. 3. Ice cream headache? Happens in non-ice cream situations, where you don't even have the delicious ice cream to make you feel better. 4. Stashing your water on a snow-covered bench in 30 degree weather is a great way to get really, really cold water. 5. Sometimes, your hankie freezes up in your hands, which makes blowing your nose its own little adventure. 6. Fleece running tights are God's gift to Nebraska. 7. Despite what you'd think, your feet don't get all that cold. 8. It's ok to skip the last mile. Finally, 9. The people who do 5K snowshoe races are on to something brilliant. It's now on my list (although it's going to have to be next winter.)

This - is a man with a plan.

For a couple of weeks, Peter has been excited about a plan at his preschool to make cool helmets out of old milk containers. I have to say, I was not prepared for it to turn out quite so... awesome. And fierce. Peter is full of guy noises lately - lots of random pretend gunfire/karate moves/vehicle noises. It's like living with my brother again, which is both heartening (because I like him, and he turned out well!) and amusing, because it seems to be deeply embedded in the Y chromosome. I was still a little nonplussed until I chatted with a buddy of Peter's from school recently, who showed me his Lego ship really proudly, and noted that "this is the place for the pilot. And this is a gun. And this, and this, and this, and this [rotates ship] and this and this and this is a gun. Those are all guns." So it turns out that both the nigh-obsessive interest and the accompanying soundtrack is part of the little guy lingua franca, and as far as I can tell it's part of the adult guy lingua franca as well. I refuse to blog on anybody's bodily noises, but rest assured that Peter is also fluent in that area of communication (both the various acts and the meta-conversation on those acts.) It's all good.

Non-chronological fun!

So I'm skipping over Christmas pictures, although we'll do those too, right to Birthday of an Eight Year Old, the First (first birthday party, and first 8yo). She's so big and tall and capable and gorgeous I can hardly stand it. There were gifts, and grandparents, and good clean cake fun, about which I must say the following: I made one hell of a beautiful cake, for a change. Usually my layer cakes are not things of beauty, although they're way tasty. This one was way tasty, fun to make (buy good chocolate! chop it up! make it into frosting!) and, if I may, *gorgeous.* It was like the pretty pretty princess of cakes. It looked like a layer cake ought to. I was pleased.

Upcoming blog fun: gorgeous nieces! (Prettier than cake, even.) Birds of prey! Out-of-order Christmas pictures! More running highlights as Mama starts training for a half marathon in the spring! More kid pictures as they continue to be cute in front of the new camera! The possibility of entertaining pressure-cooker stories as we get more adept with the new/old kitchen gadget! In short, all sorts of domestic fun, mitigated by meandering pedantic musings about whatever. It's a blogger's life, and it's a good one.

Dala horse fun!

So, it turns out that the Cultural Identity of Lindsborg, Kansas is to be Like Sweden, Only With One Main Street. On said main street, there are about a dozen Dala horses (for the uninitiated, they're beloved Swedish cultural symbols, of which we have some in our house that are little and wooden and painted and some that are printed on pajamas from Swedish pajama maker Hanna Andersson). These Lindsborg Dala horses are all painted according to a different theme, and so we had good reason to take pictures with each and every horse. This collection is but a sampling of fun Dala horse posing (caution: do not sit on the Dala horses! They are fragile and expensive!), all of which took place during the lulls in organized Santa Lucia Festival Fun. We were lucky that the day was warmish and sunny, and not really freaking cold as the weather has been basically every day since. Clearly Jesus, via the weather, was tacitly endorsing our Lindsborg pilgrimmage. Or, something like that.