Mesopotamian feast

Spring visited today. Temperatures reached almost seventy degrees and the sun was out for much of the day. Even after a winter as weak as the one we just had, a day like today still makes me long for the freshness of spring. Along with the warmer weather, another cold is visiting our house, complete with snuffles and the glassy-eyed stares of the slightly infirm. We've been fortunate on the illness front, though, so we won't begrudge the season a few snuffles and we're trudging right along.

A couple of days ago I read My Father's Dragon to Calvin. It's a short book, and only took about three days of bedtime reading to get through it, but he was so impatient for the next two books that he read them on his own yesterday, and read them again this morning. Today he declared a strong desire for a Boris the Dragon, and he's sure this is something I can produce with fabric and a sewing machine. Unfortunately my ability is limited to items of two dimensions only. A stuffed dragon may be beyond my skill.

We have swimming lessons on Wednesdays and I figured that the warm, moist pool would be good for snuffles, and since he wasn't coughing or sneezing, and the chlorine to boot, we kept to our obligation. Lunch with Gram and Grampa after, and a romp in the sunlit park. As my father pushed him in the what Calvin calls the "big comfortable swing", Calvin closed his eyes and actually rested. He swore, again and again, that he was busy dreaming of his dragon, but I think he was actually tired. Colds will do that.

A day like today just calls for outside play. Calvin turned our driveway into a map of Boris the Dragon's world, and our neighbors came over to meet Iris. The only thing less than perfect about today, then, was our dinner, and that was something I'd expected. As we explore the world around us we like to try ethnic recipes, and being in ancient Mesopotamia right now, it was there that we ate. Tough beef with about a million different kinds of onion (shallots, scallions, chives, garlic, leeks, and white cooking onions) in the slow cooker (since I don't have an ancient stone fire pit), turnips stewed in beef broth (it called for blood, but I couldn't find that) with more onions, and some couscous I threw in on the side.

We had a good time researching the menu, making a shopping list, collecting the ingredients, and cooking the meal, and it was fun, edible even, but not at all thrilling. Jon and I tried two ancient brew beers with dinner, but even those didn't help much. We had dates and apples for dessert, and we're glad we tried it out, but thankfully there aren't many leftovers.

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.

Frost warning in effect

I cannot keep talking about the disappointing weather, about the gray skies falling far short of a spring awakening. I cannot dwell on the late blooming of our flowers and the prolonged season of indoor amusements. There are only so many indoor amusements, you see. So I won't keep dwelling on them, but will put on extra layers and venture into the unwelcoming outdoors anyhow. So there. We have edged and cleaned up two of our garden areas so far, as well as watering the new trees. Now I hear that there is a frost warning for tonight, the third night of May, mind you, but I won't dwell on it. I'll just worry a bit about my flora. The sun was a visitor today, though, a relative novelty as far as things go, and that always adds to a day's enjoyment.

Yesterday morning Calvin announced to me that he wanted to learn about ancient Rome. I think I've been waiting for this for a while, longer than I've been waiting for the Dinosaur inquisition that never came. He is interested in ancient Rome, in part because of Pompeii (the volcano kick is still alive and well), and in part because my parents just came back form their Spain trip with stories of the Roman ruins they visited there. As soon as he mentioned this new interest we broke out the encyclopedia and I asked him what more he wanted to know. Then we started reading the Aeneid for Boys and Girls and today we picked up the appropriate Magic Treehouse books when we were out running errands (have I mentioned how much I love the 25% discount homeschoolers get from Borders?). And that's the road we are following at this moment while we wait for spring to actually show up in full regalia.

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:

River deltas

When we went out to check on our rain gauge yesterday we found no rain in it. None!

That's a mistake not likely to happen again for about a week. We got so much rain today that when we went to check it this afternoon, taking advantage of sunshine that decided to come late for today's party, not until about five, I couldn't take a picture because I was too busy holding my pants up to keep them out of the water oozing around my feet in our lawn. I shudder to think (remember) what it was like before we did all that work in the backyard and rerouted the drainage. Calvin tells me it might have been like a big river delta and I think he might actually be a bit disappointed by our new and improved drainage.

Jon's dad tells me that this spring has been significantly wetter than usual, and our neighbor, the one with the white fence that works so well in so many of our garden pictures, tells me that it is supposed to remain cooler and wetter than usual right up through June. To me this is the slayer of hope. Every week I click that 10-day outlook button on the weather page hoping to see at least some numbers in the 70s in the near future. Now I guess I can stop clicking, then if we do get some decent weather it will be like a fantastic surprise.

Today we woke up to skies so dismal that we had to turn lights on in the house. We read books to each other and played a newish (to us) game called Where in the World, but artificial light in the morning is depressing, so we packed up and headed out to run our weekly errands. A pharmacy and two grocery stores later we had a week's worth of food and supplies and the rain had just stopped and no lights were needed in the house. We scanned and stored our purchases, practiced piano, played with Legos, Playmobil, and dinosaurs, and marked Calvin's favorite volcanoes on a world map (yes, I said favorite volcanoes). I ran, Calvin read Nate the Great in a weak afternoon light. Then two hours later the sun actually came out and we braved the squishy yard (the one Calvin thinks might have been like a river delta had we not broken our backs in hours of labor last summer) to read the rain gauge.