We had a free Saturday morning

and a glance at my calendar tells me that between soccer, baseball, camping, vacation, holidays and other scheduled events, this just may be the only free Saturday morning we have had or will have this summer. Something seems wrong about that.

At any rate, we had a free Saturday morning. Justin went off to learn how to flyfish. The kids had birthday money burning holes in their pockets and on a whim, I decided I would take them to some garage sales. Off we went, first to a huge sale held at local church. And my kids went crazy. Books, webkinz (codes unused!), videos... one of the women helping to run the sale followed them around laughing at their delight and helping them carry their treasures.

And we did find some real treasures. This puppet theater which matches Grace's room and personality perfectly:

This Cinderella castle playset which she wanted to bring home from Disney as her souvenier but which was well out of her price range:

I found these adorable, unworn wellies which have no practical purpse but are well, adorable.

And these lamps, one for the pink girl's room and one for my scraproom.

And these chairs, perfect for camping.

Charlie's treasures were harder to photograph - a screen size U2 poster that I have no idea where we'll hang, dozens of Goosebumps books, 2 bright yellow bean bags for hanging out and reading in his room.

All in all, it was a morning, and a pocketfull of birthday money well spent.

Random raspberry ramblings

I received this print (My Brother) as a birthday gift from my father this year and finally decided where to hang it yesterday. It makes me cry every single time I look at it - in a good way. It's my first P. Buckley Moss print, we don't have much art to begin with and her style is not my first preference but this print speaks to me in several ways. First is the relationship between the brother and sister. It's how I see my children. It's how others see my children - it's the reason my dad bought the print. It's not always how they are but more often than not we can find him pushing her on the swing. The two of them playing tag in the yard. Lost in some fantasy world in their little fort. She has him wrapped around her little finger.

It also speaks of home to me for a place where I never really lived. I was born in central Pennsylvania and for the duration of my childhood, my parents regularly loaded us up in the car and headed "east" - where they felt most at home. My grandfather retired there and I followed soon after when I went to college. It's where I met my husband. Where we went to celebrate our first anniversary. Those rolling hills and old stone barns unlock a special place in my heart. We're heading "east" in a few weeks to go camping and I'm so looking forward to it.

And our berries came in early this summer. They usually show up around Grace's birthday but they've been ripe on the vine for several weeks already. I'm going to spend the afternoon picking berries because they are also out of control - it's the biggest crop we've had in the 8 summers we've lived at this house. I picked just enough to make desert yesterday and managed to ruin two white shirts with berry juice in a matter of minutes. My little secret is that raspberries are my least favorite berry.

The arrival of the berries means we're heading into what I hope are the lazy days of summer. The bulk of our travel is over, the weather will hopefully warm up this week and we will finally make it to the pool. I'm sure it won't be long before the kids are bored and I'm ready to pull my hair out but in the meantime, I'm enjoying the idea of one more summer at home.

He is married to a scrapbooker

This morning Justin headed out to the local farmer's market to get some fresh corn for our holiday picnic. And because the farmer's market is just up the road from the farm pond where he likes to fish, he stopped there for a few minutes to try out his new lure.

I had just finished making the kids' lunches when his car raced up the driveway, he ran frantically into the house and grabbed my camera bag. He called over his shoulder on the way back out "I just caught the biggest fish ever!" He ran back to the car, turned around, called for the kids to come with him (because someone had to take the picture of course!) and they turned around to make the 20 minute drive back to the pond where the fish was (I'm assuming impatiently) waiting on the end of his rod to be released back into the pond to be caught another day.

I love that my craziness has rubbed off on all of them. I love that he didn't hesitate to make a 40 minute round trip to get the camera so he could record this memory. And I love that the memory will be something even more than catching the biggest fish ever.

This blog has not been abandoned

A random review of the last 3 months in photos:

I think I might have mentioned this here already but back in January, I had a dream that I woke up and it was June. I was heartbroken about everything that I had missed with my children and kept asking what happened to the other months. It's clear by now that this is one of those dreams that is going to stick with me - a little life lesson from my subconscious.

I reflect on that dream quite often, even more in the last few weeks since it was actually June. And now that June is gone too, I can safely say that I did not miss all of those months. We were busy living them. Because of my personality, I think I am more prone than some to fall victim to mommy guilt - I live with a constant sense of failure about everything I do wrong or don't do enough of or don't do at all. Sometimes it's good to be reminded about the things that are right.

I am not Bakerella

and after today I can also say that I am not Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray or Donna Reed.

Pioneer Woman had Bakerella out to the ranch a few weeks ago and they made really cute cakepops. It looked pretty simple so I thought I would make them for Grace's not-really-her-birthday birthday celebration at school.

It turns out that it may be simple but it's also really messy and it's kind of precise which is not my thing in the kitchen. It also turns out that my cupcake pops look remarkably similar to my regular cupcakes. That is to say... messy.

Another thing about these cakepops is that they are made with something called cakeballs which are made by baking a cake, crumbling it, mixing in a container of prepaped icing and then rolling the mixture into balls. I'd never had cakeballs before today and they are kind of gross.

But I guess the important thing is that Grace is thrilled and so excited about taking these to school that she can't sleep.

Another adventure I had in the kitchen today was setting Charlie's lunchbox on fire. He asked for a hot lunch, I boiled some water, cooked some noodles, and then for some curious reason unbeknownest to my conscious self, I tossed his lunchbox on the burner and walked away. The smell of it burning drew me back to the kitchen where I was able to throw it in the sink before it burned our house down.

And finally, extending my stellar parenting skills into the living room, I sat down to read Grace this library book and by page 5 was sobbing while both children looked on in alarm.

This is a heartwarming story about a little girl exchanging letters with her Grandpa. Except Grandpa is sick and can't visit like he promised, daddy gets laid off, mommy gets pregnant, the family gets evicted and then Grandpa dies. I cried and Grace said "but mommy, he was really old."

This was one of those days where I had to tell myself several times "this is what I do." And be thankful that no one can fire me.

Twi-crack (or how did I become addicted to this crap?)

This is a post I've started and abandoned in my head a dozen times over the last six months. Started it because it's something I want to talk about and abandoned it because it seems so shameful. But a series of e-mails I've exchanged with a fried over the last few days is drawing me out of the Twilight closet.

This friend has spent the better part of the last 8 years keeping us safe from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction and important things like that. I count her as one of the most intelligent people I've ever known and was not surprised that she was immune from all things Twilight. Another friend and I kept insisting she read it but she held firm until last Saturday when she decided to "dip her toes in." If you know anything about the Twilight phenomenon, you know what comes next. It culminates in the groggy, middle-of-the-night e-mail I got last night saying that she had just finished New Moon, lamenting that she doesn't own Eclipse yet and it contains profanity.

This sums up the Twilight enigma for me perfectly. How can a frothy, poorly written (more on this later) teenage romance novel so completely suck out the brains of formerly well-read, intelligent, professional women? It's a question for which I've not yet found an adequate answer.

I think it was my friend Brandy who first suggested I read Twilight. I recall she said something like "it's not as good as Harry Potter but it's good in its own way." I ignored her. I was not going to read a teenage romance novel. I think I had visions of Judy Blume's "Forever" in my head. And then one morning I must have been emotionally vulnerable from reading some mass-produced spy thriller drivel and I happened up a scrapbooker's blog (Layle Koncar to be specific) where she gushed about discovering Twilight. I popped into a bookstore over my lunchbreak and picked up the first 2 books.

I was at the bookstore the next morning when it opened so I could buy the 3rd book. I read those books twice that first weekend. Then I gave them to my mother. She read them quickly but her initial response was "eh." (More on this later too.)

At first I kept my shameful secret to myself. But one of the things about being a Twilight crackhead is that eventually you'll want to talk about Twilight and to do that you either have to convince people you know to read the book or you have to go onto Twilight message boards. I was not quite at the message board level of addiction so I set out to convert my friends. My mom hadn't come over yet. My husband read it for me and declared it the worst book he ever read. Things weren't looking good.

Stephanie was my next target and I had low expectations. She's also smart and well-read and all of that so I figured she would laugh at me. I think I mumbled something about it under my breath while we were eating lunch and then was afraid to bring it up again. But she read it. And then started recruiting our other friends to read it. Soon she had created a local Twilight moms army.

Next up was Kathy. Kathy is the sort of person who can cut to the heart of the matter with the most droll witticism or dry observation that normal people will still be trying to figure out 2 days later. She is also the only person I ever met who actually thought organic chemistry was fun. But she gave the book a chance and overnight she was hooked too. Now I didn't have to keep my secret a secret any longer and about this time, Stephanie convinced me to go get Breaking Dawn at midnight the night it was released. That was a jarring experience. In complete honesty, most of the other Twilight people in the world scare me. So I almost went back underground with my addiction. Then the movie came out.

Have you seen the Twilight movie? It's pretty bad. Actually, it's shockingly bad. Some college students with cameras and a few thousand dollars could probably give it a run for its money. But here is the part of my confession where it gets really ugly and starts delving into scary territory. The movie gives a face and a voice to the characters and one of those characters happens to be the Byronic hero Edward Cullen played by Robert Pattinson who is my one true celebrity crush now and forever amen.

So I went to the opening day of the movie with the local group of Twilight moms and then started reading the books again when I got home at midnight. The next day I asked my mom to go see it with me and to my surprise, she agreed. To my further surprise, she liked it. She called me at 11:00 that night to ask if she could borrow my books again. At this point I sensed something was going on.

When a few days later I decided that I needed to read the books again (we won't even talk about how many times I've seen the movie at this point), my mom went out and bought her own copies. Have I mentioned my mom is a 50-something marketing executive for a huge multi-national corporation? She is also not a teenager. She is converting on her own these days. Just today she relayed a story about the Twilight discussion she had with our optometrist's wife and medical assistant. She uses her English degree to make a fairly convincing counter-argument to anyone who says the books aren't well written. She called me in anger when she discovered "Midnight Sun" on Stephenie Meyer's website - she couldn't believe I was holding out on her.

There are scores of Twilight fan sites and message boards out there, including one devoted entirely to the Twilight mom phenomenon. But like I said, most of these people scare me. Perhaps I'm just more comfortable keeping my addiction relatively close to home rather than discussing "the sadness of Edward" (it doesn't keep me from reading about the sadness of Edward though.) Perhaps I just don't want to see myself as a manic-eyed, messy-haired, borderline psychotic fanfreak. And yet, I sense, I'm already there.

The Great Garbage Truck Mystery

I tried to take a picture for this post but discovered that my camera battery was dead. Good thing too, since my photography class starts today.

Please keep in mind that except for some very brief trips to the doctor, hospital (not brief but still), grocery store, and court last week, I have been in the house with my son for 8 days now. So this is the most excitement I have had in some time.

The garbage truck has been sitting in front of my neighbor's house for an hour now. Blocking our driveway as well. And there are men in haz mat suits standing at the intersection onto our road. And a very strange looking garbage truck just rolled up and ran over our garbage cans that the garbage men left in the street. What? What is going on? Do you think we'll ever find out?