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The Years I Know I Will Miss
When I hold a newborn baby I remember infant Hawkeye, miniature Scout, Mosely Elliot, wilde little Fox, petite Piper. I remember them all. But my mind doesn’t stop remembering with the lavender-scented downy heads of our newborns. I can still smell the baby spit-up endlessly residing on my shoulder. The cottage cheese-like crud that built up in the chubby neck folds and reeked of formula on sticky hot July days. I can’t forget the sleeplessness that seemed to settle on my brain like a fog for half a decade. Half. A. Decade. At least, people. At least. And of course I would not trade the first year magical experiences…
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And she’s all new for the new year.
Ta-da! These last two weeks it’s been silent here on the blog. Primarily because it was the holidays and I wanted to hang out with my family and not with my screen. And partly because I had a few blog tricks up my sleeve and I wanted them all to be accomplished before I started writing again. And here they are. My kind and generous husband lent his creative skill to my page here and has helped me spruce up the look a lot. I’m quite pleased. I’m anxious to get back to a regular routine – of both writing and standard wake up times and meals and such. It…
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next ….
New and exciting changes for this blog are just around the corner. Wait for it ……….
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the overflow
For her birthday Mosely wanted to have two friends over to spend the night. The next day the girls played all day without arguments or fussing. They graciously included younger siblings in all their games. Together they cycled through playing with the new paper dolls to playing house to pretending to be kings and queens to Legos to playing school to stuffed animals to the little critters that live in their doll house. I was downstairs baking cookies when I thought I heard singing. Stopping at the foot of the stairs so I wouldn’t disturb the moment, I recorded a bit of what I heard. It’s quiet, but it’s the…
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Happy Birthday Mosely.
Mosely is officially ten, no matter how often Kevin keeps telling her she’s not allowed to reach the double digits. She used to be one. All smelling like baby formula and looking like a living cartoon with those enormous cheeks and liquidy brown eyes and soft fluffs of hair. Last night she blew out her ten little mismatched candles on her chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter frosting. (She is a creature of habit – it’s always chocolate cake for her.) (I’m still using the exact same chocolate cake recipe that came from my friend’s mother – a friend I have known since seventh grade!) She celebrated with her sweet little…
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In the Rearview Mirror …..
One thing I love about blogging is that it’s as if my memories are all filed away neatly and in chronological order. Even the memories I have forgotten. These days we’re living right now with kids seldom involve poop and spit up and although I can distinctly recall the smell and the horror of both, I mostly spend my current days not really thinking about the poopy spit up days. Which is all to say – it all moves so very quickly. But this same month, four years ago, life looked a lot different. And since I had the pleasure of looking back – I’m going to invite you to…
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before I sleep …..
The count down to Christmas always comes as a shocking surprise. And the minutes and the weeks fly by and I fall into bed most nights wondering what on earth happened to my day. Magic tricks and snapping fingers and these days are evaporating. I don’t have the mental capacity to string together a tidy post but I do feel the urge to ramble on a bit. We spent a lovely morning enjoying the company of Oma and Papa Dale. We used our gnome idea but instead of a gnome we placed a little red cardinal in a tree. (Virginia’s state bird.) We named ours Virginia and the matching red…
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Gnome For The Holidays
We live here. Our children’s grandparents live there. It is sometimes difficult to connect in a daily manner from state to state with one another. This weekend we celebrated an early Christmas at our place with Papaw and Grandma. And we gave them a little gift in an attempt to bridge the gap of all those miles between Ohio and South Carolina. Meet Columbia and Columbus. They’re gnomes. They match one another exactly. (And their names coordinate – get it? The capitals of each state.) We all composed a little rhyme that set up the story of the gnome twins. Then the kids and the grandparents walked along the driveway…
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it’s a numbers game.
Otto can count to about twenty before he loses all sense of reality. After that his numbers sound hilariously complicated. “I love you more than forty two million two twelve eighteen six ninety pancakes.” (That’s a lot of love, folks.) I’m going to borrow his math skills for the night. Today my name (if you know me as “Momma” or “Mommy” or “Mom”) was said six thousand fourteen two nine twenty nineteen times. At least. I believe I was touched by small hands, oh so many small hands, about eighty seventeen four thirteen times. The volume level in our home was about sixteen nine thirty three eighty times too loud…
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instead of this ……. that –
I don’t think I’ll tell you about how Otto Fox threw up at lunch today. Instead, let’s just ponder how cute he looks in a fall sweater.
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The Christmas Chain Took Us To Bethlehem
It’s hard to focus on school this month. This Christmas season feels shorter since Thanksgiving landed later in November. The kids and I just want to play and craft and bake and we don’t want to add or memorize or diagram sentences. (And this gloomy cold rain is not helping our (I mean, mine) attitudes either.) But we keep trying to persevere anyway. Only a few days late, we hung up our traditional Christmas chain. And so far we’ve watched a Christmas movie with snacks, decorated our tree (finally!) and this weekend we whipped up those infamous monster cookies and took in a new local event to our family –…
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Thursday. From My House to Yours.
This morning I woke up and I thought, “I just don’t want to teach school today.” It’s certainly not the first time that I’ve thought that. Or thought similarly on other topics. “I just don’t want to do laundry/cook meals/get out of bed/wash my hair.” And most mornings when I feel that way, I just do what I have to do anyway. Like the rest of the world. I don’t want to make dinner, but I do it anyway. I don’t want to get out of bed but I do anyway. (Sometimes I let the laundry and the hair washing slide.) But today, over a breakfast of Whatever Any Kid…
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Just one more Virginia post. Just one more.
I know, I know. It’s just a place. It’s just a state. I’ve written this before, but after a trip to Virginia it takes days to shake the mountain scent off of me. And as I acclimate once again, I write. It’s how I process. And so I jotted most of these words earlier this summer in a journal, after my last bout with Leaving-Virginia-itis. It’s still true so I’m sending it through today in my current bout of Leaving-Virginia-itis. ——– Can you love a place and know it’s not for you? Of course you can. It’s surreal to visit your own former house as a guest. Displaced. But comfortable.…
