From the First Day of Spring

It's 2 am.  I am blogging.  I am still awake and it's not typical, but once you start the process of boiling down sap, you're committed until a dark and viscous liquid is sealed tidily in jars on your counter.  The jars are situated empty next to the stove right now and we're all just waiting, the jars, my boy, and I.  We're waiting for the liquid to turn a little darker and run a little thicker so we can call it syrup and plop our weary bodies in bed.  Until then, I'm telling about the week at 2 am.  Forgive me if my mind is more jumbled than usual. 

So Monday.  A boy came off the bus and found a place next to his brother to unwind in front of a mind-numbing show.  I was out doing something in the kitchen.  A few minutes passed and the boy reappeared with a goofy smile on his face.  "Guess what, Mom!  Look!"  He held his open palm up so I could examine the treasure he was grinning so wildly about.  It was the tiny white tooth that had been wiggly since before Valentine's Day.  He shoved his tongue through the gap in his mouth and opened wide so I could admire the bloody hole.  It was his first lost tooth.  We marked an envelope for the tooth fairy and placed it under his pillow.  The next day he got off the bus all excited to tell me that he could feel the adult tooth coming in already.


These paper-maché eggs full of sweet treats appeared in the mailbox one afternoon, one for each kid from their kind and caring west-coast grandparents.  It was a fun surprise.  Cracking the eggs was the perfect activity for three children who thrill at the prospect of destruction.  Consuming the candy was the perfect activity for the three sweet-tooths that they are.


I do my weekly grocery shopping at Wegmans.  It is a unique grocery store.  I think every shopping experience after you have come to appreciate the offerings of Wegmans is bound to be somewhat (or maybe a lot) disappointing.  One of the many things I love about Wegmans is their produce selection.  I never fail to discover something new when my eyes are open.  This week it was purple potatoes.  I bought two of each-- red, butter, and purple-- and made a mashed medley later in the week.   The red and butter potatoes, though colored on their skin, both had white flesh, but the purple was oozing an even richer hue on the inside.  So the mashed potatoes ended up being light purple.  

We are dog-sitting, house-sitting, horse-sitting, cat-sitting, and chicken-sitting while my parents are out of town.  It's a big job.  Our favorite part is hanging out with our old pal, Cocoa.  She visited our house and made herself comfortable in Gerret's bed with an adoring girl who couldn't hold back a string of clearly excited,"Cocoa! Cocoa! Cocoa!" (The girl's newest identifiable word)

As previously mentioned, our collection of sap was (and is currently being) reduced to a much smaller collection of maple syrup.  We are still learning to be the most efficient that we can be, which is why it's 2 am and we're still awake.  We have more to learn, obviously.

Earlier this week, Nolan and Gerret colored a printout of the Easter bunny to be entered in a contest at a local drug store.  Gerret was pretty quick and careless about his effort.  Three colors scribbled all at once over the entire page and he called it good.  Nolan conversely spent well over an hour researching, detailing, and creating.  His was a master piece, the finishing touch being a bright, beautiful rainbow arching over the scene.  I hoped his hard work and ingenuity would be acknowledged, but there were a lot of entries and I knew some would be from older kids.  We stopped in the morning of the contest to see all of the entries displayed on the wall behind the counter.  As suspected, Nolan's definitely stood out, but there were also a handful of others that could draw one's attention.  The wall was covered in smiling bunnies decked in brilliant color.

I came inside from our sap boiling fire for a minute this evening and just happened to be near my phone when it rang with a T-burg number.  It was the manager from Kinney Drugstore.  After identifying me as Nolan's mom he told me Nolan's picture had been selected as the winner.  His prize was $5 to the store.  You can imagine Nolan's elation and Gerret's deflation when I relayed the news.  We re-inflated Gerret and took at trip to the store to claim Nolan's prize.

And so all is well here in NY where Spring finally made an appearance today and just in time for our long day out stoking a fire.

The Short Story

So it might seem a little late to be talking about last week, but a commitment is a commitment, so here's a list of what went down:

1. My parents' 30th anniversary!

That Was Then
 (photo of a photo courtesy of my phone (hence the pixelation))

This is Now 

2.  First Day of Spring

3. Wednesday Afternoon at the Sciencenter

4. Trip to Syracuse

        You can read all about it here where PTB wrote about it.

5.  Back to the 80's: The Totally Awesome Musical

3. Sunday Hike Around Foster Pond

because Sunday afternoons are made for hiking

Week End Report

meet Captain

It was Captain Treasure's birthday and we celebrated it for him for Family Night.  He watched from the spot on the living room wall where he's been scotch-taped since December.  Gerret made him a large and glorious pirate ship out of recyclables.  We played Simon Says and ate cookies.  It was a riotous party, the five of us and the foam gingerbread-pirate-birthday-boy on the wall.

ship of recycled goods

Decidedly independent, Auburn eagerly learned to self-feed with a spoon.  Her maneuvering may be a little awkward, but is hilariously successful and she stubbornly insists on feeding herself now.  Speaking of obstinacy, now that she is a full time walker, she refuses to be carried anywhere ever.  Her refusals take the form of some violent twisting and flailing.

With some encouragement from Nolan, PTB grew out a beard, but I heard it'll be gone by tomorrow morning.  So here is the memory.

Finicky March panicked and forgot about morning thaws, meaning the sap unalterably froze mid-flow in our spiles and we haven't collected in days.  We didn't even have enough sap to merit a fire today, but we did start seeds in a south facing window instead.  A few varieties of tomatoes and peppers, cauliflower, pearly blue broccoli seedlings, and CABBAGE!  So here we are again approaching another attempted garden.  Maybe this year we'll get it right.  Maybe next week a thaw will bring us buckets full of sap.  One can only hope.

They Grow, I Groan

I was swept up in the current of a surreal feeling tonight. I was folding boy clothes, little boy clothes, but the clothes weren't feeling so very little as I pulled them from the basket and stretched them long. They seemed much too long for my boys, but I knew they weren't actually.

Nolan's recent growth spurt had me passing size five down to his brother (who aptly filled them) and loading his pants drawer with a mixture of sizes six and seven. He is between the two, a tall boy for being one of the youngest in his grade.

It's hard to fathom their exponential growth. Weren't they just babies? Weren't their little man clothes so cute and small? And tomorrow will I be folding full-grown man clothes for my exponentially growing boys? So it seems.

A Huge Ball Exploring the Mall

Ok.  Another week.  Is this getting old?  As 2012 faded and I felt the weight of a bright new dawn, the one quantitative goal I could muster was that I would blog more often, specifically "at least once a week", which has turned out to be exactly once a week of sloppily summarizing the previous week.  I'm not sure that's really what I was going for when I made the goal.  It seems the new year was really begging for something a little less ordinary and more creative, but I don't know how to turn this train around now that it's going forward.  Full steam ahead.

So last week.

The nursery school held their annual Special Person Night full of toys, crafts, snacks, songs, and special people.  As his special person, Gerret hoped to bring his grandpa, lovingly known around our house as Cookie Boppa.  Cookie Boppa accepted the invitation and off they went on a dark and muddy Wednesday evening for some fun at the nursery school, Cookie Boppa as himself and Gerret dressed as Bumblebee.

Project by Boppa and Pooka

Thursday, we played at the house of a neighbor who has two kids exactly Gerret and Auburn's ages.  The boy Gerret's age is in his class at school.  The younger brother, twenty months old, showed Auburn a good time.  She was especially enthusiastic about his basket full of balls of different sizes and textures.  I decided the next day to buy a ball of Auburn's own.  Just $2.69 for a ball that she could fit inside.  She loves it.















At last we begin the process of thawing.  For the next few weeks the pattern will be freeze, thaw, freeze, thaw, freeze --every night and every morning.  This means it's time again to tap our Maples.  PTB tapped mid-week and has been collecting sap ever since.  We plan to boil our first batch this coming Saturday.  We are still on quite a steep learning curve as we figure out what is most effective and efficient in this whole endeavor.

Saturday night I needed to drive a youth from church to an activity at a chapel an hour to the south.  I didn't like the idea of leaving my family for so many hours, so I convinced them it would be a fun adventure to come with me.  This made me feel responsible to somehow produce a fun adventure.  When McDonald's didn't end up having an indoor jungle gym like I was hoping, I suggested we go down the street to the mall, which was twice the size of our local mall.  We don't get out much, we're not really part of consumer America on a regular basis, so the stores, smells, and people of a mall are quite foreign to us, which makes for a perfect adventure.  We rode the escalators with glee (and a bit of trepidation from one of us).   We tried out most of the exercise equipment in Sears.  The kids rode some kiddie rides.  We saw some strange and marvelous sights, did a lot of walking, and at last collapsed on a neatly made bed in Bon Ton.  My children stretched their limbs out over the white quilt and laughed and rolled around.  I wasn't about to stop them, but a Bon Ton employee approached us inquiring if we needed "help" with an expression on her face that said it was time to go.  So we left and played tag outside the chapel until the activity ended then we drove an exhausted hour back home.

The music department at Cornell offered an organ concert to the public Sunday afternoon.  Auburn stayed behind with her aunts, but we thought the boys could handle the experience.  It was a two part concert in two different chapels on campus with two different kinds of organs.  Gerret fell asleep and Nolan was bored to literal tears, but PTB and I appreciated the unique opportunity.  There was a real power to be felt in those chapels and such beauty.  It was honestly phenomenal.

Onward

Auburn waits for me in the morning to come rescue her from her crib.  She hollers out once or twice, prompting me to roll out of bed and stumble down the stairs.  I dress myself, use the bathroom, get the boys moving, and get the dining room set for breakfast.  She stays in her crib, loud and loquacious, sometimes lazily laying on her back with her feet high on the rails; sometimes sitting upright, blanket in hand, peering between the slats. I listen to her cheerful voice singing a heartfelt conversation.  It bounces from one wall to the next and out to greet her scurrying mom.  Oh, but she is not babbling for me, her conversation seems to be directed at herself, filled with meaning and hints of the day's adventures-- she seems to be planning, contriving, and then smiling.  Sometimes even laughing.  Back and forth she sings, then laughs, then stops to suck the edge of her blanket.  I am only a distant observer.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Monday morning, I was bustling around, peeling boys from their beds, calling out orders about clothes and toilets, breakfast and shoes, pulling on my own pants.  All the while, Auburn, the original alarm clock, was waiting, patient and verbose, behind crib bars.  In retrospect, I know exactly what she was talking to herself about that morning.  She most certainly was making a plan for the week and for the rest of her life.  She was probably also giving herself some sort of pep talk.

She must have decided then and there in her morning monologue that she was ready to take up walking as a permanent mode of transport.  She must have been singing, "Today is the day, girly!  Let's get off your knees, dust off your hands, and march!"

I picked her out of her crib that morning, set her down, and march she did, right across the kitchen floor and into the living room.  And she never looked back.

blurry because she is IN MOTION!

As for the rest of the week:

PTB and I surprised the boys while they were at their grandparent's house by moving all of their furniture from their bedroom upstairs into our bedroom downstairs and all of our furniture from downstairs painstakingly up those steep stairs.  It was decided (by us, not them) that it would be better for our family to have them downstairs for various reasons, so we switched rooms.  The room downstairs is quite a bit smaller than the one upstairs, requiring the re-assembly of their bunk beds.  They enjoyed their first week in a new room with Nolan on the top bunk, complaining each night that it's too warm up there.

Gerret and I made homemade Thin Mints for the family night treat this week.  They mimicked with near perfection the ones made by the Girl Scouts of America.  They also took hours to make, dirtied an inordinate amount of dishes, and left trails of chocolate over the stove top and counter, but Gerret didn't notice the mess.  He was pretty pleased with the result and looks forward to making them again in the future.

Winter persisted.  It snowed a little every day this week.  We haven't seen anything warmer than twenty-something in a while.  The roads have consistently been slimy, slushy, sleety, or white most mornings.  I keep checking the weather in Virginia or the Carolinas and then day-dream about what people who live in those places are doing.  I always imagine them frolicking in green fields, soaking in warm rays on a back porch, and grilling burgers at the park while the kids peruse the playground.

Don't worry about us though, we are hardened against these biting winds.  Our only hope is that the eggs don't freeze before we collect them.