Date Night

Eva spent the evening with her long lost best friend Harmony, so Sam and I got our first night alone together in months.  He requested pizza lunchables and strawberry Jello pudding packs and a picnic dinner at the park.  There were no other kids or families in sight, but that didn't stop us from having a blast swinging on the big boy swings and racing down the super high yellow slide and rocking the school bus.  When there isn't a demanding toddler pulling on my pants leg, I kind of like this guy.  He is definitely my favorite date.  So nice to have a night to remember how much we enjoy each other.

Halftime Chores

 Harvesting

With the cool temps and the falling leaves come football and halftime chores: cleaning up the yard and the house, making herb butters and oils, harvesting the last of the carrots and tomatoes and peppers, and getting ready for the change in seasons.  This September I've had a few helpers.

 Cleaning up the bird feeders

 Patching the bare spots with Grass seed

 Cleaning and organizing the sandbox

Future engineer

Roadside

Another installment for The Next Family:

The Mazda that I purchased three months ago is dead, stranded at an odd angle next to the stop sign on the county road that turns to The Berry Patch.  I was revving up and passing a Honda, keeping my eye on the clock and thinking we were probably going to be late, when things went wrong.  Now we’re definitely going to be late. Across the highway hundreds of small orange pumpkins cover the field, and beyond that the dead stalks of corn that has been harvested but not yet cleared sway in the wind.  We are still ten minutes from town.

“What are we going to do, Mommy?  Who are you calling?”  Sam asks.

He is in the back, his fingers covered with powdered sugar and sticky banana mess.  He is buckled into the passenger side and Eva is tucked into her car seat behind me.

“I don’t know, Sam. I’m just trying to find someone to answer their phone,” I say as I try a third neighbor.  Nobody answers their phones at 7am.  

As we were passing the Honda, Sam cheered the way he always does but then our Mazda revved and sputtered and I grabbed the gear shift.  It was in Drive but we were losing speed.  I pulled over to the side of the road and pushed the Info button on the dash.  Remaining Mileage and the clock are on a toggle.  Empty.

When my dad died almost a decade ago I laughed at my mom and told her she’d have to start watching her fuel tank.  Dad used to rescue her at least once a month.  I’ve never run out of gas.

We live in a small subdivision twenty minutes from town, a rural neighborhood filled with families that have bonfire parties and go to Country music concerts, mothers that play bunco together once a week and fathers that go away for fishing weekends together.  I was invited to join a bible group a few years ago and I occasionally get a facebook notification for a Pampered Chef party, but mostly we don’t fit in.  The only reason I have Mr. Jeff’s phone number is because he changed a flat for me once.  He is the neighborhood fireman who takes care of preschoolers during the daytime and mows my lawn in the evenings and somehow fascinates my 4-year-old who thinks that Mr. Jeff is the strongest guy there is. 

“Mr. Jeff has real guns,” Sam once told me.  “Did you ever see them?”  How does he know these things? 

Eva starts jabbering loudly and I crawl out and close the door behind me.  Cars are whizzing by.  Nobody even slows down.  When I was in college the timing belt of my red pontiac convertible went out during a trip to Michigan, and within thirty seconds two different cars pulled over. 

Tears are building in my eyes as Mr. Jeff’s phone rings a fourth time and I compose a voicemail in my head.  But then he answers and I ask if I woke him and he says he was just getting up anyway.  His wife Sarah gets her cell and calls another neighbors’ cell and within fifteen minutes the neighborhood comes to my rescue and the optometrist’s pregnant wife pulls up and hands me two big red plastic gas containers.

When we’re back on the road again we pass a soybean field that has started to turn golden in the chilling fall air, and Sam talks about the Packers and the Badgers and how he wouldn’t want them to play against each other because then he wouldn’t know who to cheer for.  My hands smell like gas and my shirt is damp from sweat, and I exhale and let a tear run down my cheek.   

This week it would have been my parents’ 47^th wedding anniversary.



You can see all my previous blog posts for TNF here.

Battle Choice

"I would not like if the Packers and the Badgers battled each other.  I don't know who I would root for.  Who would you root for, Mommy?  I think maybe I would root for the Packers because they are the bestest and the Badgers don't always do attention and they need to listen to their coach more."

How great is it that we don't have to choose.  Tonight we pick the Packers over the Bears and Saturday we'll be hoping the Badgers defeat Utah.  I have never enjoyed watching football so much in my life.  Sammy yells and jumps and gets excited on every single play, and Eva sleeps through it all.

"I'm never going to play football," Sam tells me as he's pulling on his pajamas in front of the tv in my bedroom.

"That's a good idea.  I think it would hurt.  They hit each other pretty hard."

"And I would not want to break my bones," he says.

"No," I say.  "That would not be good."

Grass and Goldfish and Sparkly Rocks and Lunchables

 
Last night Sam and I sat on the living room floor and drew water and feathers and snakes and animal fur, adding pictures to the nature checklists we were making.  And this morning when the kids poured out of the car and ran to the trail, Sam and G were quick to point out grass, the first item they could circle on their lists. Sam instructed me that he had to circle the things they found.

"Circle means yes, and X means no," he said.

Sunny blue skies made it tough to find a cloud to count for their checklists, but as the temperature climbed out of the 50's and we started stripping off layers of clothing, the boys ran and circled tree and leaf and bird and flower and rock while they looked at various animal scat and frog bones and milkweed pods and sparkly rocks and wild grass seeds.  The girls snacked on goldfish and apples for a while before playing that irritating toddler game of getting in and out and in and out and in and out of the stroller.  By the time we arrived at the promised "picnic bench" at Delta Point, everyone was ready to sit and snack on the lunchables and juice boxes.  And despite Sam's initial whining about having to walk all the way back and how really, really tired he was, we had fun looking at sparkly rocks and bright green grasshoppers and little bluestem while the girls rode in the stroller and shook bags of goldfish and sang Happy Birthday E.  During the last stretch we let the girls walk again, and we were always rounding up or carrying one of the four kids, but we still managed to enjoy the sunshine and flowers and a great heron perched on a log.  The girls were delightful together, and Kate and I actually got to talk.  By the time we scared up the white egret just before the parking lot, we were all tired and grateful for a fun hike with good friends.  I don't know if E and G made it home awake, but thanks to a stop at The Berry Patch, Sam and Eva made it home and we had a quick lunch before all three of us napped together for the first time in months.

 

Is there still treasure?

“What sports did Grandpa Jim like?” my son asks. We are standing in the kitchen and he is pulling the scissors out from the drawer, cutting the plastic wrap off a frozen raspberry fruit bar.

“He liked all sports,” I say.  Sam hands me the wrapper and I place it in the can under the sink.  “But I think baseball was his favorite.  Baseball and basketball and football.” 

We have just snuck inside during Eva’s nap after spending an hour outside in the sticky humidity tossing basketballs into the net from different distances, the point values for each shot marked on the driveway with chalk.  Sam was upset when he couldn’t make the shots as easily as he had yesterday, and his voice was getting whinier and higher until finally (thank God!) he made a 5-point shot and declared himself the winner.

Later in the evening we lay in bed next to each other, Sam’s blanket pulled up to his chin while the ceiling fan throws a slight breeze down on us, and Sam asks me if pirates are real.

“They used to be,” I say.  “But pirates like you see on TV don’t exist anymore.”

“Is there still treasure?”

“Yes.”

“Where did the pirates go?  Are they all dead?”

“Yep.”

He stops and thinks for a while and we both stare up at the fan. 

“Some day when we’re all dead and not here, who will be here?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I tell him.  Lately he’s been almost paralyzed with fear of being alone so I tell him that we’ll all be together.  “You and Eva and me and TT and Auntie Ann and Zack and Sarah.”

“Will Grandpa Jim be there?” he asks.

“Yep.”

“And we’ll all be together.  Our whole family.  And I’ll get to see Grandpa Jim.  I wish I could see Grandpa Jim.”

“Me too, Sammy,” I say.  “Me too.”

And as my son rolls over to face the wall I think about the morning before last when Sam finally learned to catch, when he lit up with excitement and screamed “My first catch!  I made me first catch!” and he wanted to do it over and over and over again.  Or the way he wants to show me how long he can dribble the big plastic ball in the basement having suddenly mastered the rhythmic bouncing after days of practice. As I lay next to my son listening to the ceiling fan, my eyes fill with tears.  “Grandpa Jim” died over 8 years ago, and I cannot remember the last time I cried about him, but I rub Sam’s back and listen to his breathing while he sleeps, and I miss my father just as much as I did eight years ago.

This post was written for thenextfamily.com

Cleanup

Fall garden cleanup has never been so fun. While I stripped the rotten tomatoes and cleaned the weeds, Sam and Eva harvested (and ate) cherry tomatoes, peppers, carrots and cucumbers while occasionally stopping to reorganize the zucchini section.