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Results For "Month: May 2014"

Shoots and Roots

Saturday 31 May 2014

This year, our garden is much bigger than previous years: more than double the size, in fact, which only means we’ve added two more raised beds. We had slowed down significantly the last couple of years because of the additional joys and responsibilities the Boy brought, but now that he’s growing, so is our garden.

Gardening is one of those things that reminds me how much I’ve changed as I entered adulthood, married, and become a father. As a teen, or even in my early twenties, I couldn’t imagine spending the amount of time I do setting up lines for beans to crawl up, hunting suckers on young tomato plants, looking at several sprawling cucumber plants and wondering if they can be enticed to climb (they can), examining leaves of radishes to determine what’s eating them — and doing all this willingly and even enjoying it.

Letter

Friday 30 May 2014

Someone — the administration I would assume — has put the kids up to writing end-of-the-year notes to various teachers.

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The next day, I told her, “That’s about the sweetest thing any student has ever done.”

Boys’ Afternoon

Thursday 29 May 2014

What do you do when the Girl is off with Nana and Papa (or “Papa-Nana” as the boy calls them) and Mama is not scheduled to come back until a full hour after her usual time? What are two boys to do? Playing with cars is a definite must, including lining them up, rearranging that lineup, and directing the Older Boy to play with this one, not that one while the Older Boy tries desperately to provide the Boy with yet another opportunity to practice sharing.

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Dipping your bread into your soup when there’s no one else to give you dirty looks — well, K wouldn’t do that anyway, but that doesn’t sound as good — is another must.

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Yoko

Wednesday 28 May 2014

Not sure I need to add anything to this.

Monday

Monday 26 May 2014

They’re usually just awful, Mondays, though I have a theory that Tuesday is in fact the worst day of the week. Yet sometimes, Mondays are not all that bad at all.

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But getting to that moment was a long story, beginning with a morning of work: I spent the morning in the raised beds; L spent the morning cleaning her room, with K and E supervising and occasionally helping (and likely, knowing E, occasionally setting L back a few minutes or more).

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The morning drifted into afternoon. L brought out more and more stuff — literally, there is no better word sometimes — to toss in the garbage while I spread cardboard over the open areas of our covered beds and covered all that with leaves (a highly effective way, we’ve discovered, to keep down weeds and retain moisture), and soon it was time to get the grill going, for what is Memorial Day without meat cooked on an open flame. And while you’re at it, go ahead and throw the corn on the grill. And for good measure, the potatoes.

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Once the dishes were in the sink and the kids were left munching on their leftovers and newly delivered watermelon, the real photographic fun began.

We passed around the little camera — such a perfect camera for black and white shots — and once L got hold of it, I rushed in for the Beast Camera, tempted to raid our collection of antique and semi-antique cameras as props.

But who needs props when you’ve got kids?

Sick Saturday

Saturday 24 May 2014

The Boy always stays sick. Or is it a dairy allergy? At any rate, he’s always coming down with something, and so when we took him to the doctor ten days ago, this weekend’s plans wobbled just a little: “He might not be up to camping,” K said. I was optimistic, though: “He’ll get better.” But as he was getting better, K started feeling worse. “Perhaps you and L can go on the camping trip instead of all four of us,” she suggested. Then Wednesday, L returned home from school feeling positively awful and slept from four to seven, then went back to bed at nine and slept till seven the next morning. Three out of four, that meant only one thing: Tata has to step up his game.

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Cleaning, diaper changing, cut bandaging, medicine dosing — I usually miss these things on a spring Saturday morning. This or that gardening/hardware/tool store is calling, or the lawn beckons, or the Leyland cypresses stretch out to remind me they need a trimming. It’s always something. This morning, though, it was just an ever-running laundry, new adventures with a fussy son, a cat in the laundry basket, and cold coffee.

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Enough to make me appreciate again all the things that K accomplishes inside while I’m outside on a Saturday.

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By the early afternoon, the kids had both rebounded almost fully. The Boy and I went on a little field trip while L was up the street at a friend’s house. By the evening, K was once again exhausted — she insisted on cooking dinner — and the kids were tired from their newly-rediscovered outside freedom.