Let's roast marshmallows

For as long as we've lived in this house the three-day holiday weekends that bookend the summer season have been entirely filled with time consuming, labor intensive projects, mostly yard related (the summary of which can be found here). We've taken out umpteen square feet of sod, planted scores of native wildlife enticing plants, and spread copious amounts of dirt in new gardens. We've dug trenches, moved rocks, altered drainage. And every holiday weekend left us dirty, tired and sore. Today we did the one and only thing on our yard to-do list: we put in a fire pit. It took a handful of hours and a relatively small amount of back-breaking work. Now we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so we sit, enjoying the view of our new fire pit but wholly unable to use it since it started raining only minutes after we finished and took pictures, and has not stopped since.

Calvin helped with measuring and leveling—tools are fun—but once we started working the yard was so muddy he chose to spend most of the time reading, sitting in his play house, or playing with Legos instead. He's performing a re-enactment of the Battle of Troy right now, a slightly more gentle version of the Battle of Troy in which a magical horse makes sure that all the fighting is fair and safe and dragons are ready at any moment to step in and enforce the rules.

Calvin and I have a project we've been working on for a few days now, too. An indoor project, with lots of colored paper and glue, to keep us busy on all these rainy days. I suspect we'll finish it up tomorrow morning and I'll get to share it then.

The weather reports are promising warmth and sun for the remainder of the weekend once we get past the morning tomorrow. I hope they are right. Not only is that more enjoyable than the chilly rains we've had for about a week, but our yard, our whole region, needs the chance to dry out.

Please not the sump pump

The rain, the rain. We received almost three inches of just yesterday, and then more today. We did not suffer any truly violent weather, and in light of the happenings around the country I will not complain. My only concern here is for our new trees, who seem to be struggling to get established in such a deluge, and for our basement. I keep listening for our sump pump, which is running several times an hour, and thinking about the backup pump with battery that we bought not even a month ago and have not had a chance to install. Fat lot of good it will do us still sitting in the box.

I have precious few pictures from today and yesterday, mostly because of the dark, dark weather. Yesterday the thunder rumbled pretty regularly from two in the afternoon until long after my bedtime. I actually love that sound, and in the absence of violent storms this added some amount of enjoyment to an otherwise dreary day. Today it was just rain. Rain, rain, rain. We used the time to explore many things. We built with Legos: houses, castles, cars, carts, and everything under the sun. We played game after game: Carcassonne, Camp, chess, and other games that don't start with that same letter. We watched birds out the window. Very wet birds. We watched old school Sesame Street and a video about ancient Rome. We did many, many quiet things.

I am cursing the rain because of our new trees, and because I have several friends with flooded basements, but a rainy day can add just the right amount of melancholy to color a day for art, for books, for napping, for enjoying each other. Of course I say this now because the weather report shows sun, sun, sun, for the next seven days, if we, and our sump pump and our trees, can just get through tomorrow.

Choices

I'm sharing today. Another homeschooling mom, whose blog I try to frequent, recently shared a link that I would in turn like to share here. The article, "giving choices and setting boundaries", could be the written instruction booklet for how we've tried to approach parenting at our house. I was glad to find that we are in good company, and that someone has done the work of writing it down so eloquently. After almost five years (five!) we have found the philosophy of offering choices instead of demands to work very well, not because it leads to good behavior, but because it provides a sense of, and an ability for, independence. In the end that sense of individuality breeds self respect, which is what the rest of the world rather degradingly calls good behavior. It's a matter of perspective, or so my son tells me.

There was no rain today. None! We spent the morning on swimming, library, and a few other chores, but the afternoon we spent in the garden and then in the house with books and Legos, the windows open, the breeze blowing through, bringing the smells and sounds of a beautiful late spring day.

With glasses

When it was storming, it was storming, but when it was pretty it was the most pretty day of the week. That's easy to say, of course, because it's Monday. We did our weekly book sorting early so we could spend the rest of the day dashing between opening and closing the windows (open for breeze, closed for storms), and doing whatever we pleased. What we pleased turned out to be Legos, and the Wizard of Oz Sabuda pop-up. With glasses.

Antiquarian book fair

When we woke up this morning our backyard was practically under water. Surprise, surprise. The storm that flooded it (again) had woken us up in the middle of the night, giving us fair warning of what to expect, not that this spring's tendencies hadn't already done that. We have not seen the conduits in the neighborhood pond (drainage basin) for over a week now, the water level is so high. But in the wake of last night's storm was a brief respite, and our morning dawned clear and bright and warm.

Today was the Antiquarian Book Fair in Ann Arbor. It's been on our calendar for over a month now, an event we've been looking forward to, a chance to see, touch, and smell such books as we will probably never own, but love to hanker for. We leafed gently through a first edition Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Calvin found several early editions of other books from that series. Being an antiquarian book fair, not a library used book sale, we didn't expect to come home with armloads of great finds, but going seemed like a great way to share our love and respect for books with Calvin. He was the only child there and I think the ticket sellers were a little surprised, if not worried, by his attendance, but he was careful,, respectful the whole time, and clearly interested in the books. He asked several sellers if they had books by L. Frank Baum, and identified with genuine excitement, and to the surprise of many, such books as the Iliad and Arabian Nights. We can think of no better way to teach him the value and importance of things than to fully include him in our own enjoyment of them. And we did come home with a handful of pleasing finds, including the aforementioned Arabian Nights book, two d'Aualaire books (George Washington and Benjamin Franklin), and a 1950s edition of Winnie Ille Pu, or Winnie the Pooh in latin.

There was an additional joy to the morning, even aside from beautiful old books and beautiful weather, in visiting old haunts. The fair was set up in the Michigan Union Ballroom, the very place where Jon and I met, and later got married, so many years ago. The morning was warm with a gentle breeze, the sun bright, and, with many of the students gone for the summer, campus was quiet and clean. I realized this morning that, other than to attend Art Fair, when the campus is almost unrecognizable anyway, we have not taken Calvin to these places that are such giants in our past.

Now that the main University semesters are out for the summer the campus is quieter and more easily traversed, and while somewhere in the back of my mind I've been waiting for this before taking Calvin to the art and history museums, I'd forgotten to be aware that my chance had come. Now here it is. Seeing him on campus between the buildings that loom so largely through my past made him seem so much smaller to me, and this was only over by the Union, not on the main campus greens where I spent most of my waking, or walking, hours. Like taking him to the book fair, spending time on campus seems like a great way to share with him our value for that part of life, for continued learning, and learning, and learning. I feel fortunate to have the university, and all the opportunities it provides, so close by.

So we'll be back, although not likely this week. Since going to campus and visiting the buildings there means walking, the rain that is predicted for much of this week again is likely to put off our return for a while.