It's about the weather again

Yesterday was so dreary, so dark, that I wasn't able to take any pictures. And last night was the season finale for our one and only weekly show. How depressing.

We checked our frog (rain gauge) this afternoon. Three inches of rain in two days. I'm worried about our new trees, but the gardens look so beautiful when the sun comes out and they're still wet with rain, and that is the kind of weather we finally got this afternoon. Finally. Though we spent the morning reading, writing in our journals, playing games, and visiting the library, we spent the afternoon with the windows open, watching the birds while we waited for the outside to dry a bit, and then we broke out of our prison and toured the gardens. We played more games, we made granola, we made play dough. We read books in the garden. And the house is still open, long after dark.

Can anyone say Bengay

We are all so tired tonight that we can barely move. Our day started early, which is always easier when the sun is out. I was at the library by 8:30 to oversee set-up and the first two hours of selling at the book sale and the guys were off for errands. We met back at home at 11:30, and that would be a quiet day if it had ended there. Instead we took up our earth moving tools and headed to the back yard where we remained, sans breaks for lunch and drinks every now and again, until the pizza we ordered arrived at 7:30. Or, actually, we came in fifteen minutes earlier to shower the dirt and grime off first. And thus we are are all so tired that we can barely move. At least Jon and I feel that way. Calvin is fast asleep.

There is much to show for our day, although when my hands are that dirty I don't take pictures. All the gardens are edged, weeded, and turned, the lawn is mowed, the hummingbird feeders are out, and the seed feeders are all full (although that is a constant job) and two new cypress trees, a service berry bush, and a lilac now fill out the back garden. Our work is done there! At least as far as major plantings, like trees and bushes, go. And that is if the birch we planted last fall comes back to life this year, though as of now it's seeming sluggish, maybe even unlikely. But while the evening sun faded we stood on the deck basking in the glow of our hard work. Today's hard work, last year's hard work, and the hard work from the year before. The yard is really getting there.

And another thing to show for our day. I came home from the book sale this morning with a fifth edition, second state, copy of the Wizard of Oz. Printed in the late 1920s it has eight color plates of Denislow's original illustrations. A real original, a real collection piece. Calvin is in love (and so am I).

If my hands stay cleaner tomorrow I'll come back with more pictures.

I needed Eeyore's help

For two days now we've been quietly going about our way. I didn't write last night partly because, for the second time this week, I fell asleep on the couch almost immediately after Calvin went to bed. But also I didn't have much to say. That's not to say that we haven't done anything, it's just that it was all life as usual, all that incredibly enjoyable, fascinating, soak-up-the-world kind of life as usual, but still life as usual. And the sun came out, and the weather was warmer, and we put on sunscreen and spent hours in the gardens, or going for walks. Yesterday we sat on the garden swing and read the Aeneid. Today Calvin read to me from The World of Pooh while I set about the tedious task of digging out all the thistles growing in the garden (if only Eeyore had been there to help, Calvin tells me).

We're in a sort of combined exploration mode. We've been playing around volcanoes for a while now, and when my parents got back from Spain and mentioned the Roman ruins, and Calvin connected those with what he knew about Pompeii, the leap from there to here was a done deal. So the Aeneid it is. And a bit of the Iliad, and some Roman myths, and the ruins, and the system of government, and the army. And Pompeii and Vesuvius, of course. He wants to absorb it all.

And there was a brief return of the Egyptians, too. That had mainly to do with proximity, the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians all being on the Mediterranean Sea and whatnot.

Jon found a Britannica Kids app for the iPad that had great photos and videos of volcanoes, as well as mapping features and a few tame games (and by tame I mean they aren't video games and they aren't "learning" games, but things like puzzles).

But like I said, the real glory of the past two days has been the weather. Between rain falls the sun has been demanding of our time. Demanding that we spend our time with weeds and plants and birds and bubbles and joy and laughter, and the sweet smell of the damp, warming earth.

We set a record this week. Four days out of the last seven we have spent almost entirely outdoors. Three days out of the last seven we have thrown our windows open to the fresh air. It has been a long time coming, and I daren't say the wait is over, but I am slowly releasing a long held breath in the sound of an elated sigh.

Cutting with scissors

Sometimes you just have to read a book and you don't even have time to actually get all the way into the house before you do so. Good thing I cleaned the floors recently.

Calvin is still on his Nate the Great kick. It's all you can do right now to get him to put down a book and participate in something lively in body as well as in mind. I'm not really bothered by this. In fact, I'm a little in love with his love for reading. That being said, with days of rain in the upcoming forecast I thought it prudent to take in some of the sunshine that was peeking through today's cloudcover, so I promised him dirt followed by a bath, and that did the trick. So we spent all afternoon cleaning up the the garden along the side of the garage. Which is the smallest garden space we have. There is plenty left to do.

We counted over fifty worms as we worked, gently depositing each one back under a pile of dirt. "Hidden from bird view" as Calvin put it. We swept out the old and the dead and broke up the dirt, which is actually clay, for the benefit of the living. I think it's funny that just yesterday I was laughing with Jon about how Calvin understands many bizarre things, like medieval feudal systems or number concepts up through the thousands, but has never practiced things, like cutting in a straight line, which is on a number of preschool "achievement tests" (which are things I pay little to no attention to), and then today he used my gardening sheers to gently and precisely trim back plant parts. With supervision, of course, but actually without help. I've always heard/read/been told/adopted as belief that he would learn (or just know) things as they came up. There was no need to push for skill procurement just for skill procurement. I guess here is my proof.

And to show off our work, some before and after shots:

Make that arbor weekend

Two (more) new trees in the ground make a total of seven now in our back yard. It is beginning to feel like the oasis we had in mind three years ago as we stood looking at a yard of grass, grass, and more grass. I don't find grass overly appealing. When it's soft it's nice to lay in or walk across barefoot, but to keep it soft all summer long requires copious amounts of water and fertilizer, which in turn also calls for continuous mowing. Everything about lawn grass seems rough on the environment.

We didn't actually take out a lot of grass today, but I got to spend a lot of time looking at the gardens we have put in, and remembering the yard as it was three years ago before all the back breaking labor of sod removal. I can imagine, when our house was built four years before that, the workers unrolling sod blanket after sod blanket to carpet the entire relatively large lot, but I doubt they imagined how much work we would eventually go to in order to undo theirs. I need to mention that we've had lots of help along the way, mostly from our parents. Today, for the task of putting a ten foot tree with a 24 gallon root ball into the ground, we have Jon's dad to thank. And Calvin, who had a wonderful time getting muddy, muddy, muddy.

So that was our weekend, spent mostly in the yard and gardens, mowing, edging, weeding, and planting two trees (not to mention settling Calvin's seedling into a pot so it can get a little more size before we put it in our ground), and finishing just in time to enjoy the sun that finally came out in the last few hours of Sunday.

These last two photos are courtesy of Calvin cam.