I explained sarcasm to the kids this morning, since it seemed appropriate for characterizing the weather (81 degrees, Real Feel of 88, before 9am? I have to mow!).
Katherine processed my explanation and then said, thoughtfully, “You use that a lot.”
Yes, yes I do, honey.
Erin
Hiking last Saturday apparently wasn’t exciting enough, so this weekend we went whitewater rafting on the Cache La Poudre River. I’m pretty sure that if it hadn’t been for the guides, we’d all be in hospitals now and there might well be a few more philosophy job openings next year.
Sydney comes back in a week, after a five-week absence. After a hello hug and a few deep, swoonish sighs in his direction (which will make him laugh), I’ll have to face the fact that the school year is barreling toward us. And I’m sure there will be one or two (dozen, thousand) things that I managed to mangle in his garden, so he’ll be busy even before he starts preparing to teach.
Before the madness starts, and now that I just sent off an article that I’ve been working on for a month (good feeling), I thought I should record for posterity that while Sydney has been away this month THE KIDS AND I HAVE HAD A GOOD TIME.
Scratch that: A VERY GOOD TIME.
I’ve had plenty of moments when I wished for my partner, but mostly they were prompted by my wanting him to have this kind of slow time with kids/house/garden/reading, which is awfully hard to come by during the school year. However, since he’s apparently having a great time in Colorado, even those haven’t been terribly numerous.
The kids and I have counted butterflies in Louisville, made mountains of potato salad and pasta salad with the herbs in the garden, refined our smoothie-making to an art, hosted other families for dinner, read several chapter books, learn to hide cherry tomatoes where the cats can’t play with them, and scootered/run nearly every inch of Wilmore. And the kids have played well on their own while letting me mow, paint, and cook.
If Sydney were here I would have simply called for help instead of repairing the tomato stakes, getting rid of Big Bugs (seriously, why do people live where there are cicadas? gross!), learning to use a drill (after staring sulkily at it for two hours), or tackling the never-ending mowing. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have been forced to sit down and just cuddle and care for my kids like I have this past month.
Not all of Sydney’s long-distance adventures have gone so smoothly, so I am grateful for this one–which has been helped by my not teaching at the same time, our being in a permanent home, and our kids being older and more fun. Seriously, why couldn’t they always be this playful, imaginative, and independent?
Erin
Sydney’s jungle has begun. These morning glories are a good ten feet off the ground, and they’re much more of a purple than blue, despite what the picture indicates.
By the way, Sydney has our good camera, whereas I’m currently working with a webcam. It’s not that Colorado is that much clearer than Kentucky.
Erin
As Erin has mentioned in earlier posts, I’m spending the month of July participating in an NEH institute in Boulder, Colorado. That means a great deal of sitting Monday through Friday. On Saturdays, however, we go hiking. The institute director characterizes these as “easy, gentle hikes” for those not used to hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps his description makes sense for native Boulderites. For the rest of us, “easy, gentle hikes” mean aching legs, feet that feel like they’re ready to be made into burger patties, and, most of all, much gasping for what little oxygen is to be found.
The views are glorious, though. Yesterday we went to Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked in the Glacier Gorge area and I managed to take a few pictures in between the more important activities of gasping for air and birdwatching. The many wildflowers — and many vividly coloured — were a striking feature of the hike:
After about three miles and a thousand feet of altitude gain, we reached The Loch:
The same lake looking back after another few hundred feet up and even less oxygen:
The Loch was followed by the Lake of Glass and then, finally, by the Sky Pond:
At this altitude there was still quite a bit of snow around, including some watermelon snow. And, yes, the watermelon snow did have a faint smell of watermelon.
When we bought our house, I knew immediately I’d need to do some painting. Things were just a bit beaten up and there were a lot of hastily patched nail holes throughout the house. I love the green in our kitchen, but our bathroom was a very unflattering shade of yellow-cream. When I told a friend yesterday I was spending the summer painting my bathroom, she looked at me with concern: “Erin, that’s a half-day job!” But I’ve never painted before. I have painted the vanity, inside and out, the closet, the walls, all of the trim, and the floor, replacing fixtures as I went. I’ll have to leave the counter and bathroom mirror (yes, this is a ’70s house! how can you tell?) until I have more funds, time, and a helper, but the kids were suitably impressed when I started painting striking black patterns all over the floor. Yes, I was scared and no, it’s not perfect, but the rather loose pattern has nicely obscured the blah linoleum squares underneath.
Erin
When asked what her family was doing while she was caught up in writing Beloved: “Writing is always a displacement. It’s like walking underwater. And everything else looks a little dim and a little far away. It can last for a long time. You miss things, and friends who don’t understand get mad at you. Friends who know that you’re really not responsible during those times come back. But children make you pay. You have to pay them for that neglect.”
Erin
In the past week, we’ve moved up from daily thunderstorms to severe storms, accompanied by sizable hail and high winds.
Two days ago, I was comforting a sobbing Katherine as we watched a river form between us and our neighbors across the street, and another river cut by the side of our house and sweep through our corn patch. We’ve since repeated that scene, minus the hail, two times. No, our car probably wouldn’t have made it through the water if I’d tried it.
I found myself balancing on a bucket, wielding a drill for the first time in my life, trying to screw boards to the six-foot-high tomato stakes in Sydney’s garden after the whole thing came down during a storm. While I worked, mosquitoes tapped roughly a third of my body’s blood. I’ve since learned a bit more about drills since I got towel bars for the bathroom today. I now have sturdy towel bars on the walls (yes, I used a level, and no, I probably still didn’t do it right) and no fingerprints from trying to hold the screws while I got them in the wall. Did you know that screws get hot after being drilled into a wall? I do–now. I also have rippling forearm muscles from the screwdrivers, which will, I’m sure, come in handy in the classroom.
I hurried to mow as much of the lawn as I could between storms, but when the air suddenly filled with sound, I grabbed Nathaniel and ran to the garage just before we got pelted with heavy rain. Half of my lawn is now freshly mown and the other half–well, we’ll see when it dries off long enough to mow it. Forget lawnmowers: Sydney, can we get a scythe?
Yesterday afternoon, as I sat in my office at school, I suddenly realized I could not see across the street, where the kids’ school is. The sky had turned black and there was no traffic on the road. The kids reported that they had been forced to go to the school’s basement and watch “Mary Poppins” during the storm. Oh sure, nursery: show the kids junk on a regular basis, and save the one movie of which I approve for the apocalypse?
This evening I got a call from our elderly neighbor, who asked if we had a pet turtle who got loose. When I went over to investigate, a turtle roughly a foot in diameter was nestled in her flower bed. I pet its tail, but didn’t want to mess with something so large without, say, a shovel. She called again later: she got the city-hall guys to take it away, and they said it was a snapping turtle that likely came up from the flooded city drains. Since I spent most of last night dodging Katherine’s thrashing elbows and legs (she was sick, so I foolishly let her sleep with me) and watching lightning make patterns on the wall until Nathaniel came in bright and early to take over once Katherine settled down to sleep, all of this struck me as just a bit surreal.
Why, yes, I do have the lyrics to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” running through my head this week . . .
Erin
Blowing a hole in the idea that young people are building skills that the older ones could never dream of: “Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.”
No, this doesn’t mean you hate technology: “Even a passing familiarity with the literature on programming, a famously arduous cognitive task, will acquaint you with stories of people falling into code-flow so deep they lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep. Computers are not inherent sources of distraction—they can in fact be powerful engines of focus—but latter-day versions have been designed to be, because attention is the substance which makes the whole consumer internet go.”
And yes, that guy two rows up just made you bomb your test by using his laptop for the last three weeks of class:“Allowing laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class—it lets each person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.”
“Anyone distracted in class doesn’t just lose out on the content of the discussion, they create a sense of permission that opting out is OK, and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their peers. In an environment like this, students need support for the better angels of their nature (or at least the more intellectual angels), and they need defenses against the powerful short-term incentives to put off complex, frustrating tasks. That support and those defenses don’t just happen, and they are not limited to the individual’s choices. They are provided by social structure, and that structure is disproportionately provided by the professor, especially during the first weeks of class.”
https://medium.com/@cshirky/why-i-just-asked-my-students-to-put-their-laptops-away-7f5f7c50f368
Erin
When my kids get a bit sick or tired, they latch onto the weirdest things. This past week, under the influence of a stomach bug, Nathaniel kept a firm grip on me and wailed that when he grew up he would have no one to marry and so would be “all alooooooone.” Why marriage is suddenly so important to him, I don’t know. I pointed out that his father and I would still be there, but that wasn’t helpful, and when I suggested that maybe he would meet someone at school or work, he ticked off the girls in his preschool and then cried harder than ever. Weird kid.
Katherine, meanwhile, was inconsolable this afternoon when we got a hailstorm that created a temporary river in our yard and caused some damage to Sydney’s garden. She wailed that she didn’t think we should even have a garden, that it’s too “expensive” to have plants outside, and that she hated rain. The incessant rain of the past two weeks seems to be getting to her. Two hours later, when the skies had cleared, the river had stopped, and things looked relatively normal again, she begrudgingly admitted that the world had not ended, but she still didn’t look thrilled.
Erin
Alan Schmierer