Here and There: Christmas Collage

sunday going home

(karelyn and grandmom)

(after grandad adjusted her seat and filled her tires)

It's been a beautiful fall.  I took the girls to my Mom's house Sunday to ride their bikes.  The lane to their house is about 1/4 of a mile long.  My sister and I used to ride our bikes back and forth and back and forth.  I don't know why I didn't think to take the girls and their bikes there before, but then again this has been the first year both girls are on two wheels.  It's a most definite thing that next year I need to get a bike and join them....that and a bike rack.  After this my Mom went shopping with my sister and the girls and I took their dog Elijah for a walk through the woods.  Karelyn told me this morning that Grandmom's was one of her favorite places to go.  It reminds me how lucky I was to grow up there.

from the week

Debbie: The Young Philosopher and the lovely Miss S home from university last weekend. I want to be 18 again so I can have my hair done like that. Are plaits and felted spiky bits too much when you are in your forties? Thought so......

weekend update: weekend at home

I usually enjoy having Saturday afternoons/evenings to myself when the girl's visit with their father (my one day solo) but this weekend his family was away so I had them all weekend long.  It was a rare treat for us to have the whole weekend together.  I felt as if I wasn't trying to squeeze everything into one day.

It was truly our first fall weekend.  A blustery crisp day on Saturday and we trekked out to the far part of the lot by the edge of the woods and built teepees.  Last year I was surprised to find they had built a teepee by themselves, but they built it in the middle of the yard and we had to take it down for mowing.  This time we built one each, Karelyn's in a mossy spot at the edge of the woods, and Emily's in a little section off to the left side in a little grouping of trees.

The tropical storms we had a month ago had left us a multitude of fallen branches so we lugged as many as we could from around the back path, looking for the perfectly pronged first branch to get the whole thing started.  Nothing fancy here, no canvas, no string, just a nice collection of branches forming out a little secret spot for each of them.

Karelyn of course couldn't keep shoes on her feet (she never can) and had her toes nestled in the cushioning moss.  While they finished up I went inside to bake the oatmeal cookies Emily had made up earlier in the day and there was no better feeling than taking three of the first cookies out of the oven out to sit in the teepee and eat, warm and cinnamon tasting, sitting on the soft moss.

Later we went out to dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants, and we were in luck they had a fire going and we got a prime seat in front of it.  So after a light dinner we filled up on dessert (chocolate cake for them pumpkin cheesecake for me) and headed home to curl up on the couch together and watch a movie.

Today I realized something.  My life is pretty amazing.  This IS the life I have always wanted for my girls and they are happy.  Happy to spend the day scouring the woods, happy to bury their feet in starry night moss, happy to stir up a batch of cookies in the kitchen, happy to run leftover cookies, and chili and cornbread up the path to my grandparents next door, happy to spend time in my grandparents living room, Karelyn dancing in my grandfather's hat, Emily lying across the couch her head on my grandmother's lap her feet in mine.

Perhaps I should not always be thinking of the future, perhaps the best thing is to just enjoy the here and the now.  I have the rest of my life to become.  Right now I think I am content to just be.

8.4.11

Jennifer- My Sister and her Boyfriend's Birthday Celebration at Mom's House

(or that's a lot more candles than we used to have)

home alone.

All your weekends sound so lovely.  I think it's interesting how you look at your own life and you think well okay, this is what we did and yes, it was nice, but to someone else where it is quite different from their own life, it sounds wonderfully enticing.

We had a woman come into our credit union today leaving to go to Italy.  And I said "OH! I am so jealous will you eat for me" and she just looked at me and said, "The food in Italy isn't any better than here".  And I just thought, oh but it must be.

It's funny because I am just a girl who still lives in her hometown.  I never have really travelled anywhere.  I had the opportunity to go to England in high school with our church group but didn't make the grades at school, so I wasn't allowed to go.  My parents have a house in Canada so I've been there and I've visited about ten of the U.S. states, but other than that I stick close to home.  I would love to travel one day.  I would especially like to go to Europe, everything is so OLD there.  I would like to go to the Caribbean Islands sometime.  I would like to go to New Zealand.  Africa, to see the elephants.  Patagonia, for it's beauty and it's reputation.  I think everyone in my family has been to Ireland but me.  My sister several times and to Scotland too.   My brother has been to France.   He also bicycled all the way across the United States with friends.

For now I stay close to home with my babies, it seems that is what you do.  That and well, single mothers aren't floating in cash for elaborate vacations are they?   I am reluctant to go anywhere without my girls.  It's just this funny thing I have.  I left them for the first time ever this year on my four day trip to Colorado which was a HUGE, scary thing for me to do.

The girls have left me right now.  They left this afternoon for a week at the beach with their father's family.  The ocean is about three hours from here.  So they are off vacationing and I am here, at home, at work.  I flew home from work and managed to see them five minutes before they left.  It was hard to watch them go.  I went up and sat with my grandmother on her porch afterward; she was watching them go as well.  I was okay then.  I came home to read my book then realized I left it at work in my hurry to get home, so I cleaned out a closet, did a load of laundry, cleaned up all the leftover toys from the downstairs.  Then I sat down and cleaned all the photos off my desktop and loaded the edited ones online.

I don't think I've managed to do that much in a week.   I didn't even manage to put some words on the page Monday, I was so spent.  I am actually looking forward to some quiet time and some decompressing.  No one to cook dinner for, no one to get after to pick up, no one fighting with each other.  It will be odd though here as soon as I go to bed.  No one to tuck in or look in on.  Going to bed without having them safe in the next room leaves me feeling....incomplete.  I wonder what the dog will do, she always climbs the stairs and settles in between their beds.  I hope that she doesn't make her way to mine, she licks her paws and it drives me crazy to hear that in the night.

So now, I will sign off.  Make that climb up the stairs.  It is amazing to think that no one will wake me in the night with a bad dream, or a tummy ache, or a foot cramp, or just checking to make sure I am still here.  I better savor it, because it will all be over soon and life will be back to normal.

My weekend: chasing rainbows and chilling out

rainbow: just before it disappeared 

There was no country drive for us this weekend, as Saturday was one long round of torrential downpours, not really the weather that makes me feel like heading into the country. We spent an entertaining twenty minutes or so chasing a rainbow on Saturday, though. We were just driving home from shopping locally and a lovely rainbow appeared, but we couldn't park the car on the road we were on. We drove around for a while, trying to find somewhere we could park where there was a good view of it. It was disappearing by the time we were able to stop, as you can see from the photo. Something similar happened last Thursday, when we drove to the river in the hope of finding a break in the heavy clouds that would be large enough to catch a glimpse of the lunar eclipse, with its blood red moon. Sadly, we had no such luck. Next time.

On Sunday we spent the afternoon and evening at my parents' house, with it being Fathers' day. We have a tradition of having a meal together on our birthdays and other special occasions, this time we had a barbecue. It was really nice to be all together - my parents, me and the Prof, the Young Philosopher and his girlfriend and my brother. 

I look forward to the weekends, when the Prof is home from work. During the week I am mostly on my own and often don't go out, so the weekends are when I tend to do more, or go out and about. This past weekend was a quiet one, though. It was nice. I did lots of reading, and finally got around to writing our wedding thank you letters, which was a job that was seeming bigger and bigger the longer I thought about it. Does that happen to you? For the rest of the week I am planning more reading, some writing, and plenty of rest as I have a few things coming up that I need the energy for. What plans do you have for this week?