Piper Finn Willow
Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans; it's lovely to be silly at the right moments. - Horace
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friday afternoon thoughts.
When I started composing this post in my head, I was in a MOOD and all of the ideas in my mind were very very funny to me. I think the mood has passed. Of course, that mood was likely induced by the physical funk I am still in post-Guatemala trip (I came home with a lovely sort of head cold type situation) as well as the fact that we all three have just hit the ground running as soon as our plane landed in Greenville. Bergen and Piper have had school and work and I have had the same. I plan to share lots of trip photos and thoughts…
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Bergen Hawkeye, HomeLife, Keiglets, London Eli Scout, Mosely Ella Claiborne, Otto Fox Wilder, Piper Finn Willow
teens. parenting them.
I feel like I haven’t talked about too many hard things over here lately. I think it’s because – they’re all hard things. This year has been full of hard things. And yet. We’re all okay. At my house. In this moment. We’re okay. Nothing is currently on fire. You know what I mean? Everything feels hard. And nothing is really that hard. That’s how cliche extreme my brain feels lately. The teen years are vastly different than the toddler years. (I mean, sort of. They’re both years where some kid is always hungry. And where some kid always needs you. But just – differently, you know. Teens are messy…
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she’s right, he knows her name.
It was maybe three weeks ago when we woke up to faucets that wouldn’t turn on. Water that wouldn’t flow through our pipes. We didn’t know it at first, but it was an issue with our water pump and we had to replace the entire unit. (Which is hidden deep down inside our well.) That weekend Piper and Otto had gone camping with our friends and they were just returning, all campfire and dirt smelling. Piper wanted a shower. But there was no water at our house. There had been none for hours. She talked about how she just wished there would be enough water for her to take one…
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five finds (asleep with a book, love anyway, i like big sinks)
BREAK WEEK! Whenever it’s break week I think – how am I still so busy when I removed one gigantic to-do item from my list? And by the end of break week I’m wondering how I ever have time to actually homeschool my kids. It’s been a great week – although I could have done without the endless rain. I had big thoughts for this week. I always have big thoughts for break weeks. I dreamed of a two day adventure to Charleston, a day trip to Congaree, time spent in the mountains of North Carolina. But we pretty much didn’t go farther than fifteen minutes away from our house…
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five finds friday: Dickens and Twists and a cake baker and a cuddler
It’s the end of another week full of . . . . well, full of everything. In the literature and writing course I teach my students are assigned copywork each week. The copywork is a quote or a short poem. It’s their task to write the quote down each day for a week. Then, when we meet together during class, the first thing we do is dictation. But really, for these students, it’s not even dictation – it’s just from memory. They write the quote down on a blank piece of paper – attempting to recreate the quote perfectly, with identical punctuation and spelling. Last week I assigned the longest…
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Beautiful Coloring: A Timberdoodle Review
School is back in session and I haven’t even snapped one single legitimate back-to-school photo for some reason. Maybe because not every kid is always dressed in photo worthy attire at the same moment. Or because our first days have been sort of anti-climatic. (This morning I started the day out by artfully dropping a glass bowl full of hummus – shattering the glass across the entire kitchen floor. Despite our careful clean up both Bergen and I have received glass splinters in our feet already today. It was even hummus that I used real tahini in so it tasted top-notch. I don’t know which made me more sad…
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Five Finds Friday (surprise! & the warmest socks & the silliest picture)
We all know why this week sped right past all of us. Yes – it’s already Friday you guys. Here we go …… FUNNY Humor plays a vital role in my life. If it’s not outright sustaining, it absolutely is what makes certain days feel endurable. (Is endurable a word?) Our friend Abby has endeared herself to my children through several methods. One – she sends stellar care packages that have rather specific instructions on the outside. Instructions such as “For Kids Eyes Only” and “Whatever You Do – Don’t Let Your Mom Open This Box”. Two – she shows up in surprise ways and says yes…
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birthdays and broken dryers
A lot of good went down this weekend at our home. The house has once again been redeemed from its brush with Reorganizing and Rearranging With Lacey and the rooms are in basically pretty good order and walking around at night in the dark is no longer a fear-inducing obstacle course. One of my friends with a pretty high tolerance for disorder stopped over during the height of the insanity and commented something like, “Wow. Even for you – this is crazy.” (Yeah, it wasn’t a compliment at all, of course.) School ran pretty smoothly and we are already half way to our first six week break. (Whoever suggested teaching…
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the life jacket decision.
This summer we were swimming at a lake. Piper Finn has really advanced in her swimming abilities since last summer but the lake has murky water deeper than all of our heights combined and she still has limited experience in deep water swimming. I required her to wear a life jacket if she chose to venture past a specific spot in the water. I’m the mom. I made a mom decision. Piper did NOT agree with my decision. In fact, she pretty much thought it was the WORST. Her life jacket was cumbersome. It was heavy. Everyone who could swim well was not wearing a life jacket and she…
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probably too late.
Most nights my eight-year-old shares the bed with me. (I know what we all think about this. But only one child sharing the bed is a vast improvement over this time last year, when all five were sharing the same square footage. She’ll transition to her own bed permanently eventually I feel almost certain.) At any rate, there she was, lying in bed and watching me through the open door at the bathroom sink. I was looking in the mirror, applying night cream to my face. “Oh, are you still trying to put cream on Mommy?” she asked, her voice all sweet and interested. “Yes. I am. What do you…
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sleep education
I love how when you are teaching homeschool and you are studying one topic in particular, you hear references to it throughout everything else you are reading. (It’s sort of like when you buy a new car or get a new pair of shoes and you think you’ve never seen them anywhere before and suddenly they are showing up everywhere. Or if you are on a road trip and you just lost at the alphabet game because the word “antique” was only on one sign during the last two hundred miles but after one person wins then you see signs at every exit for quilts and quizzes and quarries. What…
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a little weekend whatnot and such
Some seasons of life feel like they are rolling through via slow motion. Some do not. Right now everything feels a bit like Fast Forward with the windows rolled down and the radio turned up really loudly. It’s not bad. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s busy. That’s what I am saying. (And. I know it can change faster than I can flip to a new radio station. So there’s that.) This week we had a handful of fun family moments that really should each have their own blog post. (Who knows? Maybe they still will.) My brother and his family are visiting from New Zealand and I cannot get…
