Weekend fun—Father's Day edition

The garage sale is over and life can return to its normal fast pace. When the sale ended yesterday we were surprisingly left with only three small boxes of leftovers, one of which went to the basement, for sentimental or practical purposes, while the other two were eventually spread between a handful of Freecycle users. And the guest room at our house now actually has a bed in it—a real bed not a sofa bed—so people should come visit us now (but not too often if you want me to get any sewing done in there).

A weekend should be full of fun and adventrue so yesterday, at Calvin's request, he and his dad started another science experiment, this one about bacteria and fungi. I watched the boys swab Ollie's mouth and Calvin's mouth during a break in garage sale doings. That's an experiment that will take all week and we'll be visiting our growing friends every day.

And this weekend we celebrate dads everywhere. I should have something more profound to say about dads and father's day because I've been fortunate in my lifetime to be surrounded by men who are wonderful fathers, but I just hope they all know how very beautiful that role is in life, and how very important. My own dad is in Chicago and Jon's was busy as well so it ended up being a (delightful) party of just the three of us. A party of three that moved furniture, weeded gardens, played in the sprinkler, blew bubbles, and had a camping style dinner. With the fire pit finished and no need to drag it all out to the driveway every time we use it, I think we'll be enjoying fires more often. Tonight we roasted sausages, apples, and carrots for dinner, then finished it off with s'mores. Then we watched the birds play in the newly weeded garden while we waited for the bats to come out, and enjoyed a bedtime story by the fire as well.

And that brings our weekend to a close. It felt long, and we accomplished much. That's the best kind of weekend. Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.

Garden sale

What's almost as good as the monthly library book sale? The annual garden club plant sale. Local plants, cultivated locally by local gardeners. With all that new garden footage in the back yard to fill we did quite a bit of shopping today, and then we spent the warm, sunny afternoon planting our fifteen some odd new plants (which cost us but a song and supported a local club). We also stopped by the locally owned garden center for some dirt, and explored their ornamental pond while there, something we do every year...because it's always home to a frog or two.

And normally after a day of planting I'd be thankful for the rain that is gently falling outside right now, watering the newly installed plants, but really, I think we've had enough rain this week.

Can't sleep for all the excitment

I woke up in the middle of the night last night, or perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, to crashes of thunder and the percussive sound of hail on the windows and roof accompanied by a driving rain. I have always loved a good storm. I prefer them earlier in the day when I can enjoy them more fully, mind you, but even being awakened I just burrow further into bed and let them lull me back to sleep. More recently, however, I find myself postponing enjoyment of the display while I run a mental checklist first: are the rain barrels set? Did we bring in all the toys? Are all the windows shut? And when all things are accounted for I think of what a measurably peaceful thing it is to be able to enjoy the storm from inside our sturdy, protective shelter—what a wonderful thing that invention and hard work have brought people to this—and then I enjoy the storm all the more.

When we woke up this morning the sun was actually shining and the clouds were moving off. The best part about the morning was seeing that the edge garden faired the storm so well. Until we got the more recent plantings in it had suffered storms with massive runoff and erosion. We're on the right track.

We created a volcano felt set today. Then he says to me "next we need to make a Roman gods felt set." Right. At some point the whole "mom can do anything" illusion is going to wear off.

And while we created felt, and later while we read books, we also watched birds. A Baltimore oriole came and sat on our hummingbird feeder today. What a delight! He couldn't eat from it, and he left, but we wedged an orange half in the tree hoping he'd come back, and on a walk a little later we found him hanging out in a puddle on our walking path. We also saw a gray catbird, so that made two new birds today.

But we spent most of our day preparing for an upcoming trip—store trips, meeting with the lovely person who stays with our dogs, cleaning, packing. When on earth did packing become such an ordeal? Clothes, books, toys, electronics...and finally we were done, but it took the little boy twice as long to go to sleep. I think I still get pretty excited about some things, but rarely does anything like that keep me from sleeping anymore. Not even beautiful thunderstorms.

Arbor Day

We have a new seedling today, for which I have J. Sterling Morton to thank. While Earth Day seems all the rage right now (making it more or less unforgiveable that we failed to observe it officially in our house this year), Arbor Day seems to get far less attention. Earth Day, in fact, is the newer of the two holidays, having started in the 1970s. Arbor Day began in Nebraska nearly 100 years earlier, in 1872. Maybe Earth Day is more popular than Arbor Day the way that any teeny bopper star will outweigh a centenarian in general popularity. But I love trees, and while I try to be kind to Earth every day, I plant trees far less often, and that makes Arbor Day feel like a more special pseudo-holiday for me.

As an aside, the first person who points out the seeming incongruity in my tree and book collecting hobbies gets a cookie. An organic cookie. And you can check out this video if you want, just for fun.

We celebrated Arbor Day by picking up our free douglas fir seedling from the Village of Dexter, where Calvin also helped decorate the new community bird house, and then we went to our local nursery. we are quite fond of trees, and having moved into one of those house-farm subdivisions, the kind with just one tree per yard (planted carefully in the front), we have spent the last three years improving our lot in life. Since moving in we have planted at least one tree per year, usually in the fall, but this year we are adding a river birch, which transplants best in the spring, so Calvin and I brought home a new river birch, Betula nigra, to continue our process of treeing the back yard. We are smitten with both of our new additions.

We also spent some time really looking at and sketching trees, which, contrary to preschool belief, are not green circles perched atop brown sticks. Imagine.

Reminders

We began a new adventure today. We put the middle ages to bed over a week ago (although I only just posted the finishing touch today), and we've been exploring Spain a little, but other than the connection we have to people who are there right now, and Calvin's near obsession with Don Quixote (which really had more to do with knights than with the country), Spain as a subject just isn't imagination grabbing. Then Calvin talked me into a new book yesterday, Dinosaurs Before Dark, and I figured we'd be going further back time. As it turns out, dinosaurs are interesting, and the volcanoes are even more so. We made a special library trip today to pick up armloads of books and a couple of videos on both subjects and he spent most of the afternoon immersed in volcano studies. One of the books he picked out is an earth science experiments book. I can't wait. I've had my vinegar and baking soda stocked up and ready for a while now. Maybe even years.

And today was the first day in well over a week that made me want to get outside. It was even warm enough to sit on the garden swing and read. We discovered that flowers are coming up, the trees are budding, and the deer have been visiting. I'd guess this means they're hard up for food, since we are not right next to the woods and they only rarely come out this far. Thankfully everything we have looks un-nibbled. Don't look too closely at all the weeds and whatnot. They are just those yearly reminders, one of those nagging reminders of work that must, absolutely must get done. At least it is enjoyable work, but unfortunately it requires two hands.

Checking the rain gauge—we got upwards of an inch of rain over the past few days.

And we ventured back out on our neighborhood path today.

And Cookie is thankful that the front door is open once again, but don't try to look through the glass. That's just another of those nagging reminders that surfaces in the spring.