Non sequitur?

Meet our oddly metallic purple and blue jumping spider. He was tiny and cute and very happy in our garden. Five years ago I would have rapidly fled the scene, but yesterday I used my own (gloved) hand to carefully coax him into a cup so we could get some pictures. This makes me happy.

And on an unrelated note, but entirely worth mentioning, about seven months ago Calvin became determined to play Monopoloy. At the time he knew his numbers, but we hadn't spent any time on math as a subject because it hadn't held much interest. The frustration of Monopoly without prior arithmetic sparked that interest and got us trying Math-U-See, which has served us well in its own way. Now, seven months later, Monopoly has made a comeback, and to drastically different results. The learning wasn't a rush—it was all on his own schedule, and of his desire and determination, and he is pleased with the results, or maybe he just takes them for granted. That warms my heart.

That is to say...life is going well.

Help from a friend

Please not the sump pump

The rain, the rain. We received almost three inches of just yesterday, and then more today. We did not suffer any truly violent weather, and in light of the happenings around the country I will not complain. My only concern here is for our new trees, who seem to be struggling to get established in such a deluge, and for our basement. I keep listening for our sump pump, which is running several times an hour, and thinking about the backup pump with battery that we bought not even a month ago and have not had a chance to install. Fat lot of good it will do us still sitting in the box.

I have precious few pictures from today and yesterday, mostly because of the dark, dark weather. Yesterday the thunder rumbled pretty regularly from two in the afternoon until long after my bedtime. I actually love that sound, and in the absence of violent storms this added some amount of enjoyment to an otherwise dreary day. Today it was just rain. Rain, rain, rain. We used the time to explore many things. We built with Legos: houses, castles, cars, carts, and everything under the sun. We played game after game: Carcassonne, Camp, chess, and other games that don't start with that same letter. We watched birds out the window. Very wet birds. We watched old school Sesame Street and a video about ancient Rome. We did many, many quiet things.

I am cursing the rain because of our new trees, and because I have several friends with flooded basements, but a rainy day can add just the right amount of melancholy to color a day for art, for books, for napping, for enjoying each other. Of course I say this now because the weather report shows sun, sun, sun, for the next seven days, if we, and our sump pump and our trees, can just get through tomorrow.

Getting up and doing

Most of our days start exactly the same way—with some quiet reading while we slowly wake up to the day's possibilities. I vaguely remember days, before Calvin was born, when waking up on a weekday morning meant rushing to get to get to work where I spent most of my time doing what needed to be done, then getting home in time to eat and retire for the night. Waking up in the morning to a day that can hold almost anything our hearts desire is a new and rather expansive feeling for me. What can we do? Almost anything! But the other side of that coin is that it is surprisingly easy to end up doing almost nothing. I (and now Calvin also) can get too lost in a book that we start in the morning and end up spending most of the day there. At the end of days like that, even being the book lovers that we are, I feel like we have failed to use our time well.  With all the rainy, dreary weather that we've been treated to this spring we've had more days like that than I care to count.

But maybe those days have their place, too. Activity in waves. We've spent much of the past couple of weeks (when we weren't on vacation) lost in books, our imaginations wending their way through other places and times, then today the sun came out and our energy to get up and do came with it, and so, after our usual morning, we got up and did. And it turns out that the things we've been reading make their way into the things we are doing, and vice versa. Plus, after so many languorous days we were ready for a busy one or two, and then again we'll be ready to recline in repose.

Today we played volcano games on the iPad, we made Roman face pots (an activity from our ancient Rome explorations), we played Qwirkle, we watched birds and Calvin wrote in his journal about them.

Qwirkle on the back deck, where we could watch the birds in our birch.

And at the end of the day we're still reading while we watch for our bird friends out the front window.

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.