Lemony Webbles

A game to play!

Can you spot the deer I saw in Busey Woods this morning?

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Professional naturalist, baby!

The Little Red Hen

Here are the promised highlights from Georgia's play. She told us afterwards that she was so nervous that her legs hurt and her lips were trembling. She did look a little pale, come to think of it, but I thought she was just tired. She says she never wants to be in a play again because she likes the rehearsing but not the performing. I thought she did a great job. Of course, her friend Hannah, who played the title role, stole the show. She's a remarkable, sunshiny kid and she waves to me from the bus every morning with a big smile on her face.

So without further ado, here it is...

We all laughed nervously about the fox getting pecked and bopped. Hmm.

Yell-Oh!

There's one picture I need to add to the best of fall list. Here's Billy playing ultimate frisbee in the Fall Rec League. His team, the Yell-Oh team, won the champEEnship. These devoted fans were very proud.

Dear Grandma Patty, this is for you! The best of the fall pictures.

OK. First things first. We got ourselves some Amiapop. Maya and Georgia were both very impressed that their friend Amia was on a bottle of pop. It was at the first Panera we checked.

I never posted Georgia's birthday pictures from back in mid-October. Here are a few. We had a sweet little family party with cousins and Georgia had a really good time and was not overwhelmed. The evening ended with storytime- my favorite activity.

Here's one Billy took of Teresa that I really like even though she's not smiling.
She's so funny though. Here's the knock knock joke we taught her. It's the one where you answer 'banana' a bunch of times and then answer 'orange' and then they say' orange you glad I didn't say banana?'.

Teresa: Knock knock!
Billy: Who's there?
Teresa: Bana!
Billy: Banana who?
Teresa: Orange!
Billy: Orange who?
Teresa: Bana say!

One sunny afternoon we transplanted some hostas and day lilies from Heidi's yard to ours. Here's Teresa surveying the area.

Then I dug up the yard.

Maya, Matthew and our friend Christiana played with the worms I found while I was planting.

Teresa is pretty grossed out by actual dirt so she entertained herself on her mini jungle gym..er..folding ladder.

And here's the last one. Georgia often asks for french braids in the morning for school, and now Maya's getting in on the action.

been listenin'

With the kids, to Jessica Harper's "Hey, Picasso" album. Pretty good children's music with good beats and real instruments. Each of the songs is about a famous European painting (Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, that sort of thing) and it's really fun to look at the paintings with accompaniment.

Mostly by myself, but sometimes with the kids, to Common Market. It's a great hip hop album that Nathan and Katie gave me to warm things up in my hour of need when the kids were sick and winter was looming large. The more I listen to it the more I like it. Hip hop can be so strengthening to my resolve to be authentic and optimistic for the future of poetry and music. There are several very touching tracks about mentoring young people and women that even make me tear up a bit. Very sweet stuff. Equally sweet is the "I've got your back" attitude that Ra'Scion raps about. I want my kids to grow up with this music.

on my walk...

For the last couple days I've been taking a walk in the mornings after seeing Georgia off on her bus. Hopefully it will become a habit. In twenty minutes I can get into the woods a ways and back home, which is such a blessing. Yesterday I saw some white-tailed deer there when I came over a rise. There was a buck with a big rack of antlers looking at me when I came upon him and a doe and another buck who shied away behind him. He did not back down, however, or step away one bit. He stood his ground with head held high. I stood still, thrilled and curious, and returned his gaze. Then he started flicking his tail and a few seconds later started pawing the ground. I began to get the message that perhaps I was a threat and that he was talking about charging me, so I turned around and walked the other way. Billy said later that perhaps it's mating season and I replied that with my big yellow umbrella I may have seemed quite the threat to his rack of antlers. Now that I plan on stepping into their world, I think I better learn how to speak deer.

Update: OK, from reading just one page about deer behavior, I'm sure that buck just wondered if I was going to pose a threat to his family, and whether or not he had been busy sparring with the other buck for dominance or not, was just signalling to the other deer to run away.

Georgia getting on the bus

Here we are waiting for Georgia's school bus, as we do every morning.

Georgia (excuse me, princess Georgia) getting on the bus on Halloween.

There's her little face peering out from the bus window. She always looks so small there.

But she's really quite the big girl. Her 'Little Red Hen' play is going to be performed this coming Monday at 1:50 at Wiley school, if any of you want and can come to see it. It's a very inconvenient time for us to pack the audience with her many relatives and friends. Don't worry. I'll get as much as I can on video and I promise to post at least one choice bit here with that newfangled YouTube.

Maya says 'Aroj!'

Maya: These tortillas are really good! You're such an artist!

later and unrelated...

Maya: Aroj! Did I just say a Spanish word because that sounded like Spanish.
Me: You mean arroz? The word for rice?
Maya: (gives me a 'you're crazy' look)
Me: Well, what word were you trying to say in Spanish?
Maya: I was trying to say the word for the feeling of so much fizz on my tongue and it heard like Spanish! Aroj!
Me: I gotta put that on my webble.

A picture for today

I took this picture to show everyone Maya's cute pink cast, but I think it's a bit upstaged by the whole 'which are the dolls and which are the children' thing.

Teresa paints

I've been meaning to post about Teresa's experience at the Children's Museum in Bloomington a few weeks ago. She discovered paint. And she was instantly hooked. She spent betwen two and three HOURS painting that afternoon. And she was very serious and deliberate in her artistry. It was beautiful. I tried my hardest to keep up with her- refilling her paint pots when she emptied them or muddied them beyond recognition, cleaning up spills and pours and her face and arms and trying desparately to stay out of the way of the flinging paint. It was washable, but how do you get even washable paint out of Birkies? Ah well. It was a big day for her.

from the front

After the exhaustion and sore muscles of caring for sick kids have eased from sleep and showers of presents from good friends and family (Thank you Bishops! And Anne! And Michael! And Frank! And Heidi + David!) comes an appreciation and keen awareness of how this experience has deepened my love for my kids and how I would do anything for them, as has been tested by my having to do things grosser than I thought I would EVER do. (I imagine Billy would add a big Uh-huh here as he did five loads of throw-up laundry in the middle of the night last night, and reports to not have actually made progress.)

Wellness update: Teresa's feeling much better today, all her meds kicking in and all. She should be recovered soon. And she's talking up a storm to make up for her quiet sick time. This morning she kept up a monologue from 4:30 to 5:30 of all the things she wanted to do as soon as she could, including walking in a flower garden with Maya and Daddy and reading all her favorite books. Maya caught the stomach bug from Teresa, but since she's had it before, she seems to be getting better quickly since emptying the contents of her stomach last night. Georgia continues to be sweet and helpful through this ordeal. Good job Georgia!

mama hen

I'm so proud of my girls right now. Georgia is all excited about drama class at school and tells us all about the play they are preparing- The Little Red Hen. She's learned all the songs and has transcribed a couple of them for us so we can learn them too. And she is so disciplined about getting up in the morning when her alarm clock goes off and getting ready for school- more so than I ever was (or am)! She can do so much when she puts her considerable will to good use.

Maya has shown us how brave she is. She fell down an entire flight of stairs in our house and broke her arm on Halloween right before trick-or-treating. She cried for a while until we got to the ER and then she told everyone that it was feeling much better thank you very much. X-rays told a different story, though partially in keeping with hers. She has a bulge fracture on the ends of the two long bones in her forearm (the ulna and radius, I've learned), right where they meet the wrist. Yeah, I had no idea what a bulge fracture was either. Apparently, since children's bones are still soft, they don't always break when stressed, they just sort of squoosh out of shape a little. So that's what happened to Maya, and it's not a very serious fracture. That's why it didn't hurt very much. But she has to wear a cast for three weeks anyways. It's cute and hot pink, of course. She was very brave throughout the whole thing and didn't fight any of it even though she cried bitterly several times at the idea of getting a cast. Now she just thinks it's bothersome, but sort of cool sometimes. I think she had some angels watching over her that she fell all the way down the stairs and didn't even hit her head once. She said that she did somersaults all the way down. Now those were some gymnastics lessons put to better use than I ever could have imagined. And it's a good thing too because Teresa was also on the staircase when Maya fell and if she had been log-rolling instead, it would have been so much worse! As it was, Maya just tumbled right by and left Teresa standing there, halfway down, looking stunned.

Of course, Maya wanted to go straight from the ER to trick-or-treating, which is exactly what we did.

Now Teresa's story is that she's been talking up a storm and today she said this sentence to me: Matthew. Tummy. Heidi. Play bumpy slide. I wanna go bumpy slide. I wanna do it again. Devyn.

I was very impressed. And that was just the middle part of a long monologue where she talked about all the things she wanted to do and places she wanted to go. The whole thing was made even sweeter by the fact that she is working really hard at getting over a bad stomach bug- I'm gonna guess it's rotavirus, which laid Maya very low at this age- and has a very difficult couple of days. She's managing it a lot better than Maya did because nasty things weren't shooting out both ends at the same time like they did with Maya. With her, it's been one end, then the other. Less dehydrating that way, so I think she'll make it without professional assistance. Thank heavens! I was bracing myself for the worst. I can't remember the last time one of my kids started throwing up and didn't end up in the ER. Yeah Teresa! Beat that bad bug!

(Yes, it's been a stressful week for me.)
Even our jack-o-lanterns look stressed.