to do today

~take her easy. acupuncturist says i'm depleted today. lovely. but resting can be lovely. maybe i'll read a novel. both, i mean, thrithe (!) kids are at a little summer program today, at their preschool together. first time ever for olive. my big girl. she was so ready. third kid. tired mama. it works out nicely that i can rest, though, huh?

~sew a tiny bit. olive is turning three on saturday. i must make her a little dress. maybe i'll just cut the fabric today. that's mellow.

~invite olive's playmate over for a saturday birthday thing.

~bring in the clothes that have been hanging on the line for 5 days now. they were ready to come in last friday morning, but i was in a hurry to be somewhere, and said to them, 'i'll get you down this afternoon.' that afternoon it started to rain. it stopped raining 4 days later. ha! they are some clean clean clothes now. magical now too, i hope, with all that yummy rain energy soaked in, and then rainbow and sun dried.

(it's been pollen week here. the pine trees do these poofs of pollen powder all week and everything is covered in this yellow dust. that's what's on the huge amount of rain water there in: the black wheelbarrow . not the red wheelbarrow.)

~share this. we were at the library the other day. we had just been to the grocery store and the kids wanted some yogurt. so we got some to eat once we were at the library, outside. after we were done, i couldn't find a co-mingled container recycling bin. i asked where one was. i was told to go to the cafe area in the library. we went there. the lady working there took a look at the yogurt cups and said they have to be washed out first. i said okay, but thought to myself, 'not true.' i went on to feel myself get kind-of pissed at this woman, as i carried our yogurt cups home with us. of course i got really curious about the truth: is washing your recyclables out necessary? i've always thought they get worked through pretty intensely in whatever process they go through to be made into 'new' materials, and washing them isn't really important and a waste of resources. i mean our cups were empty. we scraped them with our spoon. i dont put containers with stuff in them still in the bins ever. well, it turns out we were both right, according to this article i found. hmmmm. that was pretty humbling to read. i am so quick to get pissed. i really want to work on that, and give people the benefit of a doubt more. i jump to holding my stance and judging the other as wrong, way too easily. really. i do. what a pattern. and i'm married to someone who does the same thing. and i have a sister who does the same thing. and it gets kind-of intense sometimes. i'm curious how one goes about creating a pattern that's more about giving others that benefit of a doubt. at least more of the time! SO curious!! enlighten me anyone who's got this very desirable pattern engrained in their neural pathways somewhere!!

~pick up the munchkins. feed them. take them to swim class. pass them off with kisses to dad for the nighttime routine.

~go to a gillian welch show tonight. such a hard day, i have ahead of me. ha. it was a toss up, and a really really hard one, between her and erykah badu. they are both playing tonight. my energy, and all my friends' energy wasn't big enough for the badu show. but my energy is in just the right spot to sit back and soak in some gillian. i wonder if can take pictures?

best toy

there are all these reviews about keva or kapla or citi blocks i've been reading where people say they're the best toy their kids have. that they get played with the most of all other toys. they say buy as many of them as you can afford, cuz you just build till you run out. so far this is happening over here too! these people are not working for the companies undercover. max got a set of 200 for a birthday present. i had seen them at his new school, and the whole class practically gathered around for a long time and built built built. i thought it would be helpful for max to get to know them a little better before school starts, so he would feel more at home with some of the newness of a new school. and just to get his creative juices running too. even though you only see him here, doing the equally fun job of deconstruction, he is an awesome builder too. so i just ordered a few hundred more. we have all summer birthdays here, and i guess each kid will get some keva planks as one of their gifts!! so fun.

zhi insisted he get dressed properly for this task. so my daughter.

the sword went so cleanly through on the first whack that just a few blocks were knocked out of the middle and the tower still stood! it was crazy. (there is as much skill to be acquired in taking it down as putting it up! max is a natural.) he fixed that of course.

oh what a way to start the day

drip drip drip. red juice all over. sticky mess.


blood draw. and the 'nice' lady who i swear did this on purpose because of the way she she said to me, very seriously but so casually at the same time, 'you're not gonna like this. i popped the needle out before we were done. i'm going to have to poke you again.' but first she had to clean up all the blood that got all over the table. i wasn't looking when it happened so i had no idea. i said to her, 'shut up.' i really thought she was kidding. like she could tell i was a girl who has a hard time with blood draws and she was just fucking with me a bit. uuugh. i looked down and saw my blood all over and just about lost all the composure i was working very hard to maintain. i offered to hold the cotton ball on my skin so she could use both her hands to clean. nice of me. then when she stuck in the next needle, she did it SO hard, i became convinced she is evil and takes out her pent up frustration on her bloody victims. that was 8 am today. i am still recovering. drinking tea and looking at pictures of the last days of the kids' school year. feeling so sentimental. i'm surprised i don't have on sad music. but what would feel even better would be some harder angry music. grrrrrrr. what to do after your blood is spilled? what is the earth doing about her own blood spilling all over the gulf right now? how is she feeling? she's been having her blood drawn out and spilled and burned continuously for decades. and i buy the stuff. i am so trapped. i swear i am forced to go along with society and use her blood this way. i don't know how else we could live. someone show us how. oh it hurts my heart. if she gets pissed, we best go running to mars. we are screwed if mama earth gets pissed. i almost wish she would. and i wish she could be selective about who she takes it out on. like the tycoons only. the greedy tycoons who have enough money to single handedly turn our world into a solar powered planet. but they won't cuz then they'd be like you and me. i don't really know if that's true, but i bet it is.

oh kay. here we go. gonna move beyond this minor catastrophe i had this morning. or at least try real hard. but now i am pmsing (female blood panels are done on the 21st day of your cycle, i bet that lady fucks with all the premenstrual women knowing it will set them off) and the kids are bugging. oh no. turning a hormonal mood around is like stopping the oil gush. hard. dangerous. takes a lot a lot of effort. must. be. done. i'm gonna come back here and report on how i turned it around. i am going to do it. be back soon.

and this article just caught my eye, probably only because i had my blood tested today.

okay....back with my plan of attack......

got these notes down from the thief and the cobbler video that my kids are obsessed with this past month.....so, what i did, is i listened to my kids, and began the process of scribing down how the story goes as we watched the video and paused it every 30 seconds. they are getting a nice lesson in patience and process!! the songs word for word. many of the lines word for word. we are making our own rendition of this story! i am out of my hormonal rage. woohoo. for now!! taking a break for an appt. for max now. maybe when we're done, if it's worthy, we'll share a bit!! i am excited....

remembering bouncetown!! and reminding myself...

reminding my sweet surly self, that i laugh. my ups and downs, which i literally had an abundance of at bouncetown (up, down, up down, bounce bounce!!), are life. life is not static. life is up and down. the waves come in and go out. my breath. in. out. i love to bounce. bouncing is a key!! you don't have to smack the ground. if you get yourself on some bouncy surface, ups and downs are the best. you actually want to come down, cause it feels so good to feel yourself on something. and then to spring off. i am just now realizing that the season spring has this double meaning. life is springing up. i can't believe i never thought of that. ohohohohohoh. then at some point, after bouncing for hours, you're ready for still ground, and you take yourself to it. and, when the still ground isn't working for you anymore, i am learning, i am wondering, if maybe you just need to find your bounce. god damn!! didn't we know everything as kids. everything.

clearing out the frustration

i don't know what i am. i mean i do, but i don't. i am not a teacher. i am not a therapist. i am a mother. i am a woman. i cannot be everything to my children. i take max to therapy pretty much every day of the week, because i cannot be everything to him. i cannot be his pt, ot, speech therapist, rolfer, and all the rest. why is that hard for me to swallow? he needs so much extra support. that is just hard. and i am currently having a hard time jiving with his new speech therapist. i can't stand making him do tongue exercises with a stick dipped in jelly. jesus. it's so gross to me. i put that one on david. nothing against max's tongue. i love his tongue. it's the stick and the jelly. and then all the other practicing she wants him to do at home. and the physical therapy practices. and the writing practices. and the this and the that. it's so much. he's just a kid. the girls don't need any of this. it is seriously challenging to fins a way to support max in a way that feels under the radar, so that he doesn't feel singled out. it's not possible. he is way above the radar. so i take him to lots of people to help him. but, what do i do for him? them? other than shlep? i feed them. i love them. i show up. i kiss. i dance. i sometimes get firm. i adore. i get angry. i love. i love.....i am a little too hard on myself. working on that. yesterday i fed them soup from a can. soup from cans rocks! while we were eating it, i read some from a recent issue of the sun. the readers write, the beach theme, the first one. here it is. it made me cry. it softened me so well. it made me think and think and think. did anyone else read that? uuuuuuugh. it made my heart so happy. i cried happy happy tears of relief from a perfect stranger's story. thank you for writing that story perfect stranger. oh, it made me love life. life's ups and downs, and how they blend into each other and influence each other, and they essentially ARE each other.

our hallway is now a scooter track. ha!! the girls got their birthday presents early from their grandparents....so they all have scooters now. see those rock walls? we need some padding gear. that is a hard wall.

i hit my head SO hard with a flying rogue stick in the garden the other day. i have a sore sore spot on my forehead. it feels so strange. it doesn't look too bad though.

everyone worked on a sewing project yesterday. i helped. i guess i do that. but i was kind-of bitchy. but i thought of that time i saw the mama hiking up the trail with her little ones, and how she was cranky and impatient with them. when i saw her, i didn't judge her, but instead, i was inspired. i thought to myself, 'look what she's doing! she's out hiking with them! she's doing something awesome! yeah she's cranky, but whatever. she's rockin it up the mountain with them. she's doing her best!' i was really so inspired. obviously, cause i've written about it twice now. i am so glad i thought of her yesterday. i gave myself a pat on the back yesterday while impatiently going from one kid to the other sewing sewing sewing. at least we were sewing! they were fine. they didn't seem to care at all that i was feeling bitchy. they were psyched to be sewing. i'm so sick of beating myself up for having bad moods sometimes!!!

that new picture in the header is them while we were sewing. see! they don't care at all. as long as i keep doing my best, whether that means huffing up the mountain, or stopping to rest, they are fine. aren't kids the best! aren't us mamas the best???!!!!

and so, to clear some anger out, random mama anger, or maybe just random human anger, i went outside, turned on something musical, and made some fists. punch punch. and then i found myself doing cheerleader moves. ha! they often involve the closed fist. punch punch. we need a punching bag!!! i'm gonna be on the lookout for one now.

there's some nice filtered water flowing out of our faucet there. we just had to get a new reverse osmosis unit. david figured out how to install it. i did one errand after the kids' bedtime to home depot while he was working on it. that was funny. home depot after 9pm is funny. i wanted a friend to go with me, but no luck. that would have been even funnier. every time i go to home depot now i am so weirded out by all the people looking at the pesticides. we are in fucking boulder!!! who still uses pesticides? i have to bite my tongue so hard when i walk by that aisle. anyways, our new filter is the best. the water is delicious.

and here we are, back on the wagon. i fell off the clothesline wagon right around max's surgery. but it's good to be back on. LOVE my clothes lines. and our new apple trees right there with them making it feel so much better. yesterday marked max's 3 month post operative date. i am going to make a nice new post for his blog, with some amazing video we made yesterday. it really is amazing. i still shudder at the reality of him having gone through such major surgery. but the results are so beautiful. he is so cool. so so cool.

8

i am trying to find some space to write, while the three wild ones try to sabotage the plan i made by bringing them to the trident with me, out back, to play in the world's cutest sandbox below a cascade of soft smelly pink roses. i never noticed before how a rose has a PERFECT five point star on it's backside. ok, they've got themselves engaged now, phew.

max's birthday was maj maj magical. a day i love. even though the day of his birth was probably the scariest of any of our lives, it now feels, 8 years later, like the best day in the world. to me anyways! there is nothing that makes me happier than seeing him happy. and on this day this year, we succeeded in making him happy. it's not like it's a hard thing to do, but still, it felt so good. i stayed up a little late the night before and made him some pretty darn cute summer pants. i love it when they turn out styley. he looks like a skater dude in them. he rocks that style well. and then seeing him in them on his *new* scooter was too much. but i can take it! bring it on max. bring on all your style. we can TAKE it!!! little man. little 8 year old boyman. what what what? you still love your stuffeds, you still play like a baby sometimes. and yet, you are growing so much. he actually did his first self~led reading on his birthday. he had one of his super hero work books out and he was just looking through it, and he asked me if this one word said 'hulk'. i said, 'why do you think it says hulk?' he goes, 'it has H U L K.' and then he sounded it out, and he was totally reading! i've never seen him do that before. he is pretty darn delayed academically, so at 8, he is just now mastering recognition of each letter in the alphabet. writing, he can only write his name, and it is pretty wild looking the way he does it. so this is SO huge. our little boy!! i am so excited about this. and his first word read, is freaking HULK! how perfect is that?

we were a little nervous he'd be too timid to ride it with his balance issues, but luckily, he took right to it. it was beeeyootifull..... he even had physical therapy on his birthday and his therapist said it was a brilliant idea! the challenge it gives him for balancing and standing on his right leg is just perfect. woohoo.

the birthday 'cake' was an apple rhubarb crisp. it was so so good. i need to make it again, like 15 times cuz we have so much rhubarb. you can freeze it though, right? maybe i'll do that too.

i felt kind of like a mean witch insisting on making this for his 'cake' because he was whining about it so much as i MADE all three kids go out and pick a rhubarb stalk. (i knew that the next day was his party which he insisted be at bouncetown, where he'd have a dynamite cake from our bakery, so i wanted something more homey for the actual day~of~his~birth birthday~candles. and just for the record, his party at bouncetown was awesome! he knew what he wanted, and i'm glad we listened to him. as tacky as those places are.).....ok. back to the horrible tortuous task of gathering rhubarb: the girls were into it, but you'd think i was asking max to go gather toilet water to drink. i did not back down though on my demand that they all pick me one freaking stalk of rhubarb. some things, as mothers, we just KNOW need to happen, and i KNEW they each needed to pick one. it made no logical sense, yet it was crucial to me that they do this. the girls were psyched to help with all the other steps in the making of the crisp. and then when it came time to eat it, he LOVED it and wanted more more more. phew again. i know i am improving in life s l o w l y, because this is the first year i've used our rhubarb! well, last year i tried to make some rhubarb cocktail drink thing, but i sweetened it too much and it was gross. but we actually ATE it this year. i feel accomplished. we topped it with whipped cream that i added some almond extract to cause we were out of vanilla. try it, it is so so good!

seeds in hair. so cute.

there's my carrier, in waiting for the next batch of tea, with the nettles all nice and dried in the basket next to it. i am trimming my nettles bush so carefully this year, hoping to keep it healthy and making nice new leaves all summer long. is this possible?

and lastly, for the max birthday post, i discovered this baby peach tree growing by the compost area that afternoon. so exciting!! and look what's around it. a hair band. what is that about? it grew right in the center of a hair band! that is just funny! when it's a hundred years old, maybe the hair band will still be around its trunk! i put a tomato climber wire thing around it so we won't step on it. yay!! a new baby! peach pits are so fertile sometimes in compost heaps! a new peach tree for max~~ i love you max. what a happy birthday you have. thanks so much little wizard for sharing it with us.