Dogs, hogs, logs
Thursday, March 17, 2011
cortneyandjon in cookie, nature

I think some days are just destined not to go well. It seemed almost a shame, or actually definitely a shame, to waste such a beautiful day in that way, but if we could pick our bad days, I'm not so sure they'd be bad days then, just days spent hunkered down and reading. Or at least that's what we do when we meet with a bad day.

Sunshine in the morning today beckoned us to the zoo, but a project I had to finish for someone kept us housebound for too long and then grumps invaded the morning instead. We stayed home, we practiced the piano, we read book after book after book, we ate lunch. It was all pretty meh. Then Calvin announced that he was going to write a poem. I think he was revelling in a new found ingenuity, in an ability he didn't know he had. To get him to write poems in the past we've played a game, drawing a set of matching words from a stack of cards and taking turns writing alternating rhyming lines with a certain measure of hilarity, but here, today, he was writing all by himself. Dogs, hogs, logs. It was a hilarious if not auspicious beginning, and with that kind of magic a day can be turned around.

We did get outside today, too, and found time to commune with our favorite birds, the blues, the chickadees, a cardinal, and the little red capped woodpecker we see every time we walk along our neighborhood path. I think he waits for us.

And in other, sad, sad news: our camera is failing. What a short life it has had, at only four years. Canon lovers everywhere would chide us for having chosen a Nikon, or perhaps it is just denouncing its overuse, the hundreds of pictures it has been forced to take on an almost daily basis. Whatever the cause of its protest there are likely to be fewer pictures for a time. I have yet, for instance, been able to capture a shot of Calvin's finished poem. It will have to wait until tomorrow.

Article originally appeared on Cortney and Jon Ophoff's Family Site (http://www.theophoffs.com/).
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