lxforever

“…immense charm and understated humor, giving Eve an often unearned confidence as a woman who has never done this kind of work before, and yet, is fully assured within herself that she will achieve her goals.”

—Review of Killing Eve

“There is a house built out of stone / Wooden floors, walls and window sills / Tables and chairs worn by all of the dust / This is a place where I don’t feel alone / This is a place where I feel at home”

—Cinematic Orchestra

“I know I tend to make it about me / I know you never get just what you see / But I will never bore you baby”

—Taylor Swift

Lots going on. The yin and yang. The up and down. The family and the Family.

As usual I can’t get into it much. Last weekend I had a couple of long drives bookending a peaceful visit with family, driving by (over…they’ve changed the freeways even) the original House and thinking…we’ll probably never need to go back there, now. The House already sold, of course, and other people live there happily, but there’s something unmooring about that last link loosening. Harder on all the kids than me, so I’ll leave it at that. But I’m so glad I went. “You’ve been so good to us / you’ve been so good to me.”

And yet here in this house we’ve been having the most ordinary and most wonderful weekends and times together. Picking up sticks, riding bikes, blowing bubbles, cuddling and wrestling on the couch, duck-duck-goose card shark games, snacks, practicing math and reading with the cutest gameified exercises, jumping at gymnastics and holding coaches’s hands, “pup-it” shows and egg hunts and wide eyes. And the big weekend in the Dells with the waves and the cousins and grandparents and all. It’s going so fast. They’re growing so fast.

And I’m working on a big project at work and having some pretty high-inducing success and I love it.

Life for the living is good. We only wish we all could stay living.

To conclude this somewhat strange update (which was unintentional, as I came here to write what I am putting below initially), I will provide some lists.

A list of things I made yesterday:
-Blueberry muffins
-Cherry smoothies
-“Lunch” for Kindergartener1 and Toddler2, but really, just a Lunchable plus individual serving sized guacamole cups and piles of chips (after which I got a suggestion from Kindergartener1 to recycle the individual serving sized guacamole cups)
-Pizza dough, on a whim (NOTE: I am getting pretty good at this, after years of practice, the making of bread products, I mean)
-at least five bowls of cereal
-Pizzas (well—not really—I had help, and Kindergartener1 had an absolute ball painting tiny dough circles with tomato sauce and ‘decorating’ with cheese, cheese, and olives) which were according to Kindergartener1 were “the best pizzas EVER!” even though she didn’t eat much of it and probably just because she made it

…I think that’s it. We have leftovers/Larabars/Crisp & Green for all the rest.

A list of exciting things that happened in the world of math and reading for 5-year-olds last week:
-Level G in reading (???)
-Lexia Core 5 level 7—which evidently made it hard to fall asleep because that is so exciting

A (somewhat depressing) list of things we really need to do to our house soon to keep it basically functional outdoors:
-have piles of mulch delivered, for piles of money
-PAINT, possibly in the most fancy way possible since whoever did the previous paint job was lazy
-replace the sagging mini deck off the back
-beware the creature eating our old mini plastic slide at night

A non-depressing list of all the things Jeff (plus family members on occasion, especially Toddler2 who was very proud) did yesterday to make the house even better outdoors:
-clean up alllllllllll the planting beds!!
-pick up alllllllll the sticks!
-water the surprise new tree the city just planted unceremoniously
-a disturbing amount of other things that took a disturbing amount of time and I am so glad he did/does that

A list of things in Toddler2’s bed:
-two rubber duckies, from the bathtub
-four+ ‘gummies’ aka pacifiers aka those will have to go away soon
-a tiny stuffed owl—instrumental to sleep, evidently
-TWO blankets, never just one
-TWO tigeys, never just one
-a stuffed animal ‘won’ by a kind stranger at the Dells (an Ugly Doll)
-a ‘gummy stuffie’
-some other animals I can’t even remember

This journal was posted on Sunday, April 28th, 2019 at 7:32 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.