Mark this date on the calendar. Matthew ate lasagna…
…and asked for seconds.
(Nearly 16 years of parenting has taught me that next time we have lasagna he will refuse to eat it and claim he’s never eaten it and that it will poison him. But today I will bask in the glory of everyone having eaten dinner without complaint.)
Recipe here, for posterity.
But it was. My whole site. And while I haven’t blogged in a while (yes, I know it’s been an embarrassingly long while, time is relative) this blog has so many sweet memories of my kids, and just life in general, that I couldn’t let it all be lost to the circular file of the internet.
So. Does anyone have any idea how hard it is to dust off 16 years of cobwebs from web and php programming knowledge? It’s hard. It almost broke my brain. But I fixed it. Kind of. Maybe it’s time for a fresh blog start?
Everyone has gone back to work and school and Matthew and Murphy are both napping. It’s so quiet after two weeks of everyone being home and together. Matthew spent the morning running to the window every time a car went by, saying “buh? buh?” and looking for the school bus. I’m apparently not as much fun to play with as his sisters!
Most years I’m eager for the return of routines after the break, but this year I would gladly have kept everyone home for another week or two!
We tried to use my (very old) telescope to watch the transit of Venus earlier this evening. We dropped a UV filter from my camera in the end and covered the (white) reflection plate with black construction paper to try to tone down the intense sunlight, but even with all that…the pictures were not so great.
This is probably the best one – you can see a little “chip” where it’s just starting to cross in front of the sun.
Carolyn drew a chalk picture of what we were doing. That came out much better!
When we moved in, we had big overgrown bushes in front of our house. They’ve only gotten bigger and more overgrown over the past nearly-13 years:
And now they’re gone!
I have a nice, clean blank slate (well, minus the overgrown burning bush that I couldn’t bear to have pulled out – we’ll try to trim it back aggressively for the next couple of years and see if we can’t tame it a bit) to work with. Time for a trip to the garden store!
Annuals…check!
Anna-sized gardening gloves…check!
Amazing insects…check!
A good time was had by all – even the caterpillar. We put him on his very own leaf.
My craft room has once again become cluttered and messy – I swear that the craft supplies have a big party every night and scatter themselves about randomly. So the craft room is the “Room of Doom” at the moment.
What’s the “Room of Doom” you ask?
Well, I made a nice poster to hang on the messiest room in the house:
It is amazing how well this works. If I hang it on the entrance to a messy room, the kids obey the sign and pick something up when they go in. I don’t have to nag them to pick up, they both know what the sign means. Even better, if I hang it on the door to one of the kids’ bedrooms, everybody picks up when they go in. (This has a really nice side benefit – both girls have offered to help the other clean her room when it’s declared the “Room of Doom” and followed through.)
I’ve been using the “Room of Doom” sign and changing it’s location as needed for the past couple of months, and it still works. Is my house still messy? Of course! But it’s slowly getting better, because we’ve all gotten into better tidying up habits as a family.
Of course, declaring my craft room as the “Room of Doom” really just means that I’m intending to pick it up myself. Everybody else in the house knows better than to go in there, even when it’s clean. But what can I say? The sign works on me, too!
Ahhhh. A do-nothing day. The very best kind of day!
She clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky and it was so blue and pink and pearly and white and flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself and knew that thrushes and robins and skylarks could not possibly help it.
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
I just drove home from work, feeling rather tired and thinking I’d go to bed relatively early tonight. As I passed the back entrance to the school campus, I had my eyes peeled since I’d seen deer on my way into work along this road. Just before I reached the top of the hill, though, I heard sirens coming towards me on the other side of the road, and I pulled over immediately.
Up over the hill comes not one, not two, but three emergency vehicles, lights flashing, sirens wailing, horns blaring, and I thought perhaps Armageddon was starting.
Then came a school bus.
And another fire truck.
And dozens of cars flashing lights and honking horns.
Apparently, one of the high school sports team just won a major event tonight. I’ve heard these escorts from afar (well, I live like two streets over from the school, so maybe not so far) but never actually seen one in progress. It was overwhelming.
And so now I’m really wide awake. Adrenalin sucks. (And I didn’t see any deer, which is good, because I felt like a deer in headlights myself.) Guess I’ll go find something good on TV and knit for a while…