Dirt under my nails

How many puddles can he find on a sunny afternoon following a night of thunderstorms and rain?

Unless you count that third one as a pond or a lake, then I guess he can find four.

And in the garden this afternoon we found buds on all our new trees and bushes, and we even started pulling weeds. I know spring is near when I find myself going to bed (or about to go to bed) with dirt under my nails.

We spent our early morning inside, though, doing laundry (he changed his bed all by himself!), reading books, and practicing piano. He drew pictures while I ran on the treadmill (I can't wait for warmer weather), then we compiled all the Africa exploration paraphernalia from all over the house and put it in a folder, which he decorated and labeled before putting on the shelf. The topic was well lived and we had a great time exploring the continent, but I can tell when interest is waning.

The timing is good because I had planned on introducing another Five in a Row book this week, The Clown of God by Tomie dePaola. I specifically chose this book and marked it on the calendar for this week, because the FIAR guide linked it to the topics of aging and, basically, retirement. Since we are going to my (still very young!) dad's retirement dinner on Friday I thought it would be a good book to help Calvin understand the concept a little better. Then I read the book. It's a dark book, actually, and it deals not really with retirement, but with depression and death, two things I don't want Calvin to associate either with my dad or with retirement. But there is a fortuitous side connection here. When I first read the book to Calvin yesterday (thankfully without mentioning my earlier plans for comparison) I mentioned the setting of the book as being Italy during the Renaissance. He promptly demanded to know where Italy was on the map (somehow he already knew it was in Europe), and then launched directly down the Renaissance road. Apparently I've mentioned the time period before, and he associates it with knights and castles and is even more excited about the prospect of exploring those than he was about being in Africa (although maybe the difference is his increasing familiarity with the exploration process, since each topic we've explored has trumped the last on his excite-o-meter).

Our Monday afternoon visit to the library, which usually is just an afternoon of sorting in the book sale room, ended up a major harvest of books on the new topic, all of his choosing. More was added to the castle tonight, too, and he's already talking about expanding it further, and creating armor to wear around the house. His excitement is infectious, which is a darn good thing if I am expected to keep up with him for all these activities this week.

Sunday—castles in the sky

It is thundering outside, a delicious reminder that spring is really on the way even after an afternoon of hail mixed with snow mixed with rain. A few weeks ago the snow would have won, but tonight the rain is prevailing, and our dog will never forgive the mixture of frightening sounds—hail on the window, thunder in the sky, a crackling, popping fire on the hearth.

Except for Jon, who taught three piano students today, we did not leave the house. We set up a tent and box fort layout of the Emerald City in the play room and made believe, we drew pictures, we read books, and Jon and Calvin made a castle out of cardboard, paint and string—a castle with a working draw bridge. There will be more on that later, but it's not quite done yet.

I spent much of my day mired in the process of cataloguing our books. Calvin's constant questioning and my desire for easy research and integrated learning has made it clear that a good list of our books, complete with in-depth subject tagging, would be a very helpful tool to have. A little software research, a couple of trials, and a quick download led to me spending the today immersed in the books I love but am a little tired of at this point. Or maybe it's my typing fingers that are tired. I have a feeling this will be a long process but when I'm done I'll let you know how the program is working.

Super Moon

We all took naps in the afternoon so that we could stay up "late" for a moon hike. In reality I think my nap made me more tired and I ended up in bed early, but early for me was post hike time anyhow. The super moon rose at just past eight o'clock and we were bundled and out in the field near our house by then. It was amazing—beautiful and large—just off the horizon, and beautiful as it rose into a hazy sky. It turned out to be a good thing that we'd hiked into the field the day before because we knew then where the deepest mud was.

I spent a lot of the time being frustrated with the camera. The shutter wheel is broken, making it unreliable, and while it really doesn't stick all that often it picks the most inopportune times to do so, like during time sensitive shooting as the once in a lifetime moon makes its run skyward. But it was fun to be out and enjoy the warmer weather of spring and the stillness of the night.

The sun descending in the west,

The evening star does shine;

The birds are silent in their nest,

And I must seek for mine.

The moon, like a flower

In heaven's high bower, With silent delight,

Sits and smiles on the night.

from Night, by William Blake

Rain boots

New rain boots.

They took us to the park.

They took took us through the muck to the path,

where we drew and observed nature.

They took us into the meadow,

through fields of muck where we could track the raccoons,

and the dogs and the deer ("look, mommy, this deer was here after that dog." "Good, little boy, we'll become trackers yet").

They took us down to the pond, where we found an animal foot path, a muskrat lodge (look closely!), and beauty in general.

New rain boots took us lots of places we couldn't otherwise have gone. And since you can clearly see that Calvin still fits in last year's awesome rain boots, you might have guessed by now that the new pair belongs to me.

Dogs, hogs, logs

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.