Home

It is good to be home. Even piles of laundry and depressing weather cannot attenuate that feeling. And the limited backyard view, after a week of truly limitless lake views, feels strangely contenting, although I could easily be persuaded to accept the latter in exchange where a soft, sandy beach is also present. I think the homecoming has been softened by the return of rotten weather (since who wants to be on the beach when it's raining and not even fifty degrees), and by a day of undemanding schedule. Sometimes it's good to have a day that isn't calling you outside with sunshine. Those days are good for things like laundry, reading, and games. We played Carcassonne again today, and Camp and Mammoth Hunt.

We spent a lot of time with books today, returning to the Aeneid, which had been much neglected on our trip, and with some favored picture books from our shelves. And I made some headway with Shogun (because when they say epic, they mean it). Upon taking a walk through our yard in the morning we discovered signs that the oriole had returned to enjoy the oranges we left out for him, so when we were out we bought an oriole feeder. We equipped it with both orange and nectar when we got home and then ate our lunch picnic style on the floor of the playroom in hopes of catching sight of him. We didn't see him at all, but we did see the hummingbird visit his nectar feeder, along with our usual finches, red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, sparrows, and doves at their seed feeders. We refilled the suet for our starlings and woodpeckers, but saw only the first of those two today. The bluebirds, who have been strangely absent for a few weeks, were back on our deck in the mid afternoon. Bird feeding and watching has become an important part of our daily activities. It's something I've always enjoyed, and a love that I have now passed on to Calvin. We have four several feeders in our seed front garden, where birds can perch happily without leaving gifts in our preferred play spaces, and nectar feeders on our front porch and in our nectar garden in back. Almost every morning, while I am enjoying coffee and a crossword and Jon is still getting ready for work, Calvin will tiptoe from the front window to give me a "feeder attendance call" for the day. I expect those now as much as I expect bad news in my New York Times updates.

I have no pictures of birds from today. Sometimes it's fun to just sit and watch them. But around noon, as we came out of our library, we were treated to the only blue sky moment of our otherwise gloomy day. A helpful five minutes, since I had been charged with capturing a good photo for the new library brochure. This is one of the fifty I grabbed while there today.

River deltas

When we went out to check on our rain gauge yesterday we found no rain in it. None!

That's a mistake not likely to happen again for about a week. We got so much rain today that when we went to check it this afternoon, taking advantage of sunshine that decided to come late for today's party, not until about five, I couldn't take a picture because I was too busy holding my pants up to keep them out of the water oozing around my feet in our lawn. I shudder to think (remember) what it was like before we did all that work in the backyard and rerouted the drainage. Calvin tells me it might have been like a big river delta and I think he might actually be a bit disappointed by our new and improved drainage.

Jon's dad tells me that this spring has been significantly wetter than usual, and our neighbor, the one with the white fence that works so well in so many of our garden pictures, tells me that it is supposed to remain cooler and wetter than usual right up through June. To me this is the slayer of hope. Every week I click that 10-day outlook button on the weather page hoping to see at least some numbers in the 70s in the near future. Now I guess I can stop clicking, then if we do get some decent weather it will be like a fantastic surprise.

Today we woke up to skies so dismal that we had to turn lights on in the house. We read books to each other and played a newish (to us) game called Where in the World, but artificial light in the morning is depressing, so we packed up and headed out to run our weekly errands. A pharmacy and two grocery stores later we had a week's worth of food and supplies and the rain had just stopped and no lights were needed in the house. We scanned and stored our purchases, practiced piano, played with Legos, Playmobil, and dinosaurs, and marked Calvin's favorite volcanoes on a world map (yes, I said favorite volcanoes). I ran, Calvin read Nate the Great in a weak afternoon light. Then two hours later the sun actually came out and we braved the squishy yard (the one Calvin thinks might have been like a river delta had we not broken our backs in hours of labor last summer) to read the rain gauge.

Deja vu all over again

They promised us sixty degrees today. Sixty! And it may actually have been a balmy sixty when I went to the library just before eleven this morning, but it was a nippy fifty when we went out to the store just two hours later, and much chillier low forties by dinner. Bah. Calvin had wanted to walk in the field today, and I think we would have done it if it hadn't been damp on top of cold. That phrase gives me a strong and unfortunate feeling of deja vu. He decided, as we came home from the store, that he'd rather stay in and play games. We played Mammoth Hunt, with help from Cookie and Torso Boy, and we also tried our hands at Connect Four.

Piano, Oz, chopping carrots for dinner (soup, which actually turned out to compliment the weather nicely), taking turns reading to each other, quiet, individual play and reading—cold, wet days with tempestuous winds are good for something. And with his bosses out of town, Jon worked from home today. Since we have commandeered the office when he works from home he usually does so at the kitchen table, making him central to all of our goings on. We do a pretty good job of ignoring his existence while he's working, but I left Calvin to draw quietly across from him when I went to the library and he spent the entire hour I was gone doing just that. When I came home he presented me with a cornucopia of castle drawings. I don't have pictures of them yet, but they are coming.

After dinner tonight, while we still sat at the table, I asked Calvin to read to us. He skipped off to select his own book from the other room and came back with the Giving Tree and read it to us, fluently and with feeling, while we reclined in our dining chairs. Then we went on with the rest of the evening. The surprise of hearing him read like that is beginning to wear off. I could get used to this autodidactic nature of his.

The soul of Sunday—family

A rare treat. Jon, who usually teaches (piano) at the institute on Sunday afternoons was with us all day today. We soaked up cuddles in the morning, snow play at noon, errands after lunch, games at tea time, live music during quiet time, and a coincidentally timed extended family dinner in the evening. Family, family, and more family, and still there is never enough. Every Sunday could be like this, please, although in the future I would add more sun.

Camp

Qwirkle

Spring bird houses to decorate our table

Charley Harper on the iPad

Slinky

Sunday is really the end of the week

Because I have a hard time seeing any day as lazy as our Sunday being the jumping off point for anything.

It's still the weekend (see, not a new week) so we're still soaking up daddy time around here. Piano lessons for both of us learners. Calvin has graduated to the next book so he's on a roll right now. He learned a piece by Haydn today so it was an all Haydn all afternoon kind of day (it's sad, really, that the sound of our day doesn't come across in the photos we share).

There was a lot of Lego time, and a lot of game time, too (mancala, Qwirkle, and the Mammoth Hunt, altered a bit for Calvin's skill level).

We started looking through our books on Africa and did some related coloring.

We had a fire, we had hot chocolote, we read books, we ate comfort soup for dinner. What we didn't do was get dressed. And now that we're rested and relaxed, we're ready to start a new week. Tomorrow.