The Good Stuff: A List

• The sign outside the Methodist church in my grandparents' town:  "Church Parking Only- All Others Will Be Baptized."

• The two fat ripe strawberries I found in my vegetable/weed garden yesterday:

I ate them both standing over the kitchen sink, strawberry juice running down my hands, the way God intended.  Absolutely delicious.  

• The new pillow Derek's mom gave me a month ago.  I'd been waking up with neck pain every morning for weeks, and although I could more or less take care of it with some yoga, I'd rather just not have any pain to begin with, because I'm needy like that.  Becky offered me the special pillow, I said "Yes, please" and tried not to get too grabby, and from the next morning on, I was hooked.  Haven't had a painful morning since.  

Profile shot of Magic the Puffy Dragon Pillow

I figured, given the shape, that I'd have to sleep on my back to get any relief, which is a problem because I am not a freak who can stay in one position all night.  Also I might snore/ breathe a little bit heavily on my back.  Quote from my friend Kim when we were teenagers, after thousands of sleepovers over the course of a decade:  "Sometimes it's so hard not to smother you in your sleep because you breathe SO LOUDLY."  

• Caedmon keeps offering me a single piece of Kix cereal, which he calls a "kick."  "Do you want two Kix, or one Kick?"  I refuse to correct him, and even went so far as to physically cover Adelaide's mouth when she tried to, because our kids say fewer and fewer of these cute little people things.

Of Gourds and Grandparents

If I wanted to recap our Kansas trip in a linear fashion or even one that made any sense at all, I'd tell you about how we spent three consecutive nights in three different houses, and I would start with the first night, then second, and so on.

Instead I want to talk about gourds.


Our final night in the state of sunflowers was spent at the home of my grandparents.  I've talked about them of the heavenly gardens in the past; this trip their flowers and all things growing were just as divine, and just as bountiful.

Grandparents' bounty now in Iowa.

Grandma once again came through in loading all the empty spaces of our car with gourds and crackers and sweet potato vine and pizza, among other equally random things.  When I went to display this bounty to Derek back in Iowa, I was quick to add, "Keep in mind that she tried to send me home with live ducklings."  Which she did.

I need to have her offer living, breathing animals every visit, now, because I think I could get away with wheel barrows full of plants and rusting metal as long as I preface it with, "Hey- I said 'No' to ALL the things with lungs."

I likewise did not come home with the preserved barn owl we found in a box in a shed while gourd-hunting.  Self control, thy name is Kristy!


While there I told my grandma that I'd felt like the kids and I were this massive tidal wave of energy that had just swept across southern Kansas, leaving exhausted family members in our wake.

Grandma laughed and said, "No, no, no," but Grandpa said it was "a good invasion."

And invade we did.


Atticus invading Grandma's chair- while Grandma was still in it:

Caedmon invading the gazebo with Grandpa:

Adelaide invading the smoke tree:

See her back there?

It helped that after years of herding a multitude of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Grandma has a black belt in redirecting excess juvenile energy, as evidenced here, where you see Atticus and Adelaide shelling peas from the garden and liking it.

I told you she's good.

I almost had to drag the three kids (okay- all four of us) away to return home to the north.  Atticus in particular was loathe to leave ("But it will be a hundred years before we get to come back!"), so I handed out promises that we'd try and return sometime in the next few months.

Fall sounds like a perfect time for a good invasion.

Whistling While They Work

Our kids' final day of school was last Friday.  Because Derek was out of town for the weekend, I packed everyone up and we headed south for a whirlwind trip to see aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and pigs and cows.  I'll be telling all sorts of fun stories about that excursion soon, but today we need to discuss something far more pressing and exciting:  It's summer vacation.  And do you know what 'summer vacation' means to me?

My work force is back.

Listen, we do not live in a particularly giant house, nor do we live in a particularly fancy or fussy house, but there are five people living here, and it takes a lot of elbow grease to keep this place from descending into a quagmire of nastiness.  Summer vacation means four extra elbows here all day to help keep entropy at bay and do all the fun summer things like clean the windows and mop the floors and wash the towels.

Me with my three favorite scrubbers.  Look how excited they are to clean for their mother.

This does not, of course, mean that they aren't going to be doing fun things with their time off of school.  There will be many library visits and trips to the public garden and maybe even an afternoon or two at the pool for those days when I'm feeling up to keeping three children from drowning for three straight hours (read: rarely).  But our kids are, well, kids, and while fun things during summer are in order, I've spoken at length in the past about the word "bored" and what its utterance means around here.  I am not my children's camp counselor, nor am I their activities director, so unless I want them to grow up into useless slugs, I will not allow them to spend their collective childhood as useless larvae.  And if you think this is an overreaction, let me tell you about that time a year or so ago when a sweet college girl approached me at church about volunteering in our children's department.  I handed her the exceedingly simple application, and in return she didn't so much as reach for a pen, but instead looked at me with a facial expression so vacant I expected to see a buzzing motel sign advertising the same right there on her forehead.  It turns out her mother had filled out every application and piece of paperwork that had ever dared to drift into her precious jewel's path up until then.  I had to teach a nineteen-year-old girl how to fill in basic personal information.  I don't even want to talk about the reference section, which took up twenty minutes and 90% of my patience.

Oh, and before you go thinking that perhaps I was being too hard on her, perhaps her mental faculties are of the sort that she will always need help filling out applications?  Let me reassure you that the charm oozing out of this girl before she realized that I am immune to fluttering giggles and wide-eyed smiles told me otherwise.  I was nowhere near rude, but instead just as firm as I am with our children, and hey- she now knows what a reference is.

As for our kids, they cleaned out from under their beds today, and two kitchen drawers have been organized.  Tomorrow Adelaide gets to clean all the kitchen cabinet fronts, Atticus will be vacuuming upstairs, and Cade gets to help me clean out the art cabinet.  Then I'll make popsicles for all to enjoy while listening to Hank the Cowdog audiobooks because that is their current idea of a dream summer afternoon, and I'm not completely heartless.

SUMMER VACATION!

A Mannequin, SOS, and Batwing List

• I'm beginning to sympathize with the boy in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, except instead of freaking out villagers, I told Caedmon that mannequins come to life if you squeeze their hands just right.  And actually, it was Adelaide's idea in the first place, I just jumped in to elaborate, making the story more believable and giving it a bit of weight.  In our defense, we were at a sporting goods outlet, Derek was in the dressing room, and we were bored.  Plus Caedmon kept reaching up to shake the mannequins' hands, so the story kind of wove itself into being; Daughter and I just gave it a (slightly whimsical/menacing) voice.  Caedmon didn't even act that freaked out, and I figured he'd forgotten the whole thing until a few days ago when he made a sharp left turn in an otherwise normal conversation and suddenly asked, "Mom, were you just teasing me about squeezing those guys' hands?"  I clarified, asking him if he meant mannequins, which he did, then admitted that yes, I had been teasing.  Mannequins don't really come to life if you squeeze their hands.  (That we know of.)  Caedmon gave me a bit of a talking-to about teasing and how I basically shouldn't do it, then I didn't give it another thought, until I realized today that he's continuing to insist that Adelaide is still eight because he thinks I'm teasing him about her turning nine.  Nothing I say will persuade him otherwise.

This lady is my kind of people.

• Adelaide has started her own blog.  She's been talking about it for awhile; everyone got the chance to create one in a class at school, but I didn't know if anything would actually come of it until the other day when I passed over the laptop and she began laboriously typing the address.  I'd been a little unsure about letting our daughter have a steady online presence, but once I realized that she wouldn't be posting anything at school, only at home, my fears were more or less assuaged, not to mention the fact that anyone who is funny enough to name their blog "Social Outcast's Spot" has a voice that needs to be heard.  She's posted once, and my only input was to look it over to make sure she wasn't saying things like, "Tender nine-year-old midwestern morsel, here.  Here's my address, here's my favorite kind of candy, and here's the time and place that I'm probably most vulnerable.  Toodles!"  Thankfully she seems to have more sense than to put anything like that out there, but just in case I said the previous sentence to her pretty much verbatim, to which she rolled her eyes and gave me a mini-lecture on how I constantly underrate her level of intelligence.  First Caedmon, then her; I've been getting a lot of dressings down from our children lately.  I can't imagine why.

She gives me this look a lot.

• I received a text message after school today regarding an Amber Alert for Iowa.  I made the mistake of sharing this with our children, who proceeded to ask me ten thousand questions for which the only answers I had were "Dodge Neon.  Two-door.  Blue.  I don't know."  Caedmon refused to come inside for his snack but instead proceeded to sit on the front porch, hollering through the screen every time any car drove by that was not just blue but anywhere on the cool side of the color wheel.  He did the same thing on our walk to the library, alerting the other three of us by yelling, "A blue car!  THOSE COULD BE THE PEOPLE THAT STOLE THE KID!"  Every car to whom his ire and suspicion was directed did, of course, have their windows rolled down.  Not one was a Dodge Neon, or even blue, for that matter.  Still:  Although it was State of Iowa officials who found the missing persons, Batwing was on patrol.

Outside Stuff

We live in that big swath of the country that's been getting rain, rain, and more rain.

This isn't unusual for us around here, as our spring is generally marked by more rain than sun, and thankfully we've experienced minimal flooding this year.  All these rainy days bring back memories of splashing in puddles and slipping around on the trampoline in a downpour and mopping water off the bare wood subflooring in the house my parents were building because it wouldn't stop raining and there was no roof yet and my dad was afraid the wood would warp, all while Mom sat in the car and watched because she was too sick and weak from a brutal round of chemo to help.  Ah, childhood.

I empty it and the sky fills it back up.  Every day.  

I got a few plants in before the rains came down and the floods came up, but not many, as it's also been a chilly spring and I didn't think the soil temp was warm enough for the flowers I'm growing from seed.

Sunflowers and zinnias and sunflowers and delphinium and more sunflowers.

Thankfully it warmed up a bit for my mom and Mark's recent visit, and the rain even abated for brief amounts of time.  Not while we were visiting the local public garden, of course, but that's what butterfly houses are for.

Atticus spent the first ten minutes in the butterfly wing clinging to me and quietly panicking anytime a butterfly brushed by him.  Five minutes later, he was mad because none would land on him.  I don't know how to explain this other than that it's just so Atticus.  Caedmon was less interested in the butterflies and more interested in making friends with the volunteer that worked in there, getting her to show him the supply closet and telling her all about his super powers.  That is just so Caedmon.


Today we're enjoying a respite from all the rain, so Caedmon and I did important outdoor things, among them beribboning Hermione and planting flowers.

I added it up and our children's teachers spent approximately one million hours with them over the past school year.  This means they deserve a beach house in which to spend their summers forgetting the atrocities perpetrated against them over the course of the past year, but what we can afford are flowers.

Step One:  Go to your small local hardware store.  Wander around their greenhouse, and by 'wander,' I mean turn in a tight circle because that is how tiny it is.  Step Two:  Ignore the nice employee's suggestion to get each teacher a $4.50 potted flower, because what am I, made of money?  Step Three:  Buy the $1 3-pack annuals for each teacher.  Step Four:  Go to Target and hit the dollar bins for buckets.  Resist the urge to buy all the cute things.  You must be strong on this step.  Step Five:  Get home and remember you don't have potting soil.  Dig around in the compost heap until you find the least egg shell-y parts, and fill the buckets with those.  Step Six:  Plunk the flowers in there on top of the egg shells and compost and call it a day.

 Fortunately I know that if anyone can understand living on a budget, it's public school teachers, and at $2 a pop, these fit nicely into ours.  Thanks, teachers, for all the wisdom and compassion and patience and kindness!  Here's a plant that will die in 3-4 months!  Love from the Crislers! 

Patchwork

My mom and Mark came for a visit over the weekend.

Those are two grandboys and a bunch of quilts skulking around her.  This is not an unusual sight- particularly the quilts. 

In my family, if you get married or have a baby nobody tunes up a brass band or bakes you 1,000 casseroles or performs some ancient blessing.  My grandma, aunts, and mother will, however, attempt to smother you in warm, quilted love.

The three quilts on the left were made by Mom; the three on the right by Aunt Kay.

Those quilts up there are only the baby quilts our children received in thanks for being born.  After Derek and I got married, we received four quilts over the space of around two years, because quilts take time and between my cousins and sisters and I there are eight of us who need a quilt commemorating every major milestone.  And those wedding quilts are no joke:  Big enough to cover a queen-sized bed, in an assortment of color palettes and designs.  At one point Derek wondered aloud if all these quilts were an attempt to pad the walls.  This was not an unreasonable query.

And not to worry:  The men in the family aren't left out of the quilting venture; they're frequently drafted into service building quilt ladders.  I know this because there's one beside me right now, holding all my wedding quilts.  These men are also excellent at not touching the quilts at quilt fairs (touching of the quilts being strictly forbidden at such 'dos- but you knew that) and waiting outside the fabric shop not judging how long it's taking nor how many dollars are flying out of the women folks' hands.  They know that this is all in the name of art and heirlooms, or were perhaps ever so gently made to understand the first time they were foolish enough to challenge their resident quilter.

Never fear, Quilters!   I only opened those blinds all the way for the purposes of this photo; I don't want sunlight fading those colors any sooner than necessary.

I worry, at times, about my lack of quilting ambition.  I come from a robust line of quilters, and am perfectly proficient with needle and thread and sewing machine.  Shouldn't I be doing piecework in my sleep?  Feel the overwhelming urge to peruse quilting patterns when someone announces they're expecting?  Suffer guilt when buying a *gasp* STORE-BOUGHT BLANKET?  

The aforementioned robust line of quilters- at least, the two on the far left; that's a great-grandma and her sister.

Then I remember my fabric hoard (it's just so pretty); The Incident, aka that one time I found Adelaide attempting to use my rotary cutter for a craft project and I went the teeniest tiniest bit Mommy Dearest not because I was worried for her safety but because it was my rotary cutter; plus my mom didn't start quilting in earnest until my sisters and I were old enough to leave her in peace for thirty consecutive minutes.  My time may yet come.

Until then, I'm just going to enjoy the fruits of my mom, my aunts, and my grandma's labors, draped so lovingly around our house and its inhabitants- after all, this is Iowa.  It's cold up here.

Speaking of which, Mom?  I'm pretty sure I never got a quilt for moving to Iowa.  A small oversight, I'm assuming...?

A List for Friday

• Signs your children are growing up in the age of technology:

Caedmon loves to draw pictures, but he will often ask if you want just a picture, or a picture and an audiobook.  If you go the audiobook route, it means you are possessed with infinite patience and/or have twenty minutes of your time to sacrifice to a meandering story about super heroes and lightning coming out of fingertips and hot lava.  There is always hot lava.

Recently when he posed this choice to me, I went the audiobook route.  I don't really remember why I did this to myself, but I'm fairly certain guilt was involved.  Caedmon drew his picture full of swords and lightning and stick figures with disturbingly large fists.  He wrote a bunch of random letters and a few short words on the reverse of the piece of paper; this was the audiobook portion.  Then he brought the paper over to me, allowed me to view his masterpiece, then flipped it over and prepared to recite a tale of lava and derring-do.

Before he began, however, he said, "Oh, wait, there's an Ad before the audiobook can start.  But you can Skip it if you want to."

Methinks we've been watching too many YouTube videos.

Caedmon loves audiobooks, but will still deign to listen to a paper version.

• Signs your children have fantastic teachers:

In Atticus's kindergarten class they have this thing called "magic words."  There is a list of a few magic words every week, and every time the kids hear or use one of these words, they are to tug on their ear.

Atticus thinks this is pretty much the greatest thing ever.  I think this is pretty much the greatest thing ever, because it has him using words he didn't previously, all while wiggling his earlobe with his fingers and looking meaningfully at me with a smile:  "He is such a RASCAL," *smile wiggle wiggle*, or "I was FRIGHTENED the frisbee was lost," *smile wiggle wiggle*.  

I love the way he says these words in an announcer's voice, enunciating each consonant, but there was the week I learned I overuse the word "finally"; I worried our son's ear was going to fall clean off from all the tugging he had to do.

Atticus also has a fantastic coach, although it isn't his ear that sees plenty of action during soccer- it's his tongue, which evidently must bask in the light of day for him to successfully kick the ball.

Click to embiggen all these to see his Soccer Tongue.

Two Soccer Tongues!

And here's Atticus and Derek, looking very... coachly.  I say if "kingly" is a word, "coachly" can be, too.

• Signs your family has faces more suited to those strange mugs with faces than to a glossy magazine cover:

You know, this kind:

Looks like a Crisler

These are the faces our family makes whilst playing mini-golf together:

Neither Adelaide nor I are able to remain composed when we make a bad putt.  And when you ask Caedmon to make a "pirate face," because we were playing at Pirate's Cove?