Trip Photos--The Beach Life

Okay! Here we are with our second installment of carefully chosen and edited photos from our family trip to New York.

Or rather, the random and totally unedited photos I managed to get that one day I remembered to bring my phone down to the lake.

We went to the beach every single day but one during the 16 days we were at Blackrock. It's not very hard to do when you just have to walk downhill about three hundred yards. Despite some unfavorable weather and water conditions on some days, the children got in the lake every day but one, as well.

I include Poppy in this.

As with every other item of clothing, swimsuits for little girls are way cuter than swimsuits for little boys.

Little boy, big lake.

A.'s brother and his family came from Tucson, so there was lots of cousin time on the beach.

And, of course, Captain Cubby directed many voyages in his custom-built craft.

Poppy preferred being captain of her own small vessel.

There are no photos of A. and me in the water because we avoid it as much as possible. A. might have gone in twice, and while I spent a lot of time standing in shallow water with Poppy holding my hand, I didn't even put on my swimsuit the entire time. I never went in deep enough to get my skorts wet.

I know. We're the worst beach-goers ever. What can I say? I like land.

We'll leave it there with this collection. What will the next collection of photos be? Stay tuned to find out! (Sometime.)

An Update with Fake Photos

Due to a stupid technical thing that I won't even go into, the photos on my phone are not on my computer at the moment. I thought about just painting some word pictures for you, but decided that some old pictures that I awkwardly relate to our current activities would be better. Sounds fun, right?

Here we go!

The drive was not too bad, in that there were no unnecessary delays or really bad weather or illness or anything else that can so easily turn a not-so-bad trip into a REALLY BAD TRIP. I didn't even have to break out the ancient Game Boy.

Poppy even slept really well in the tent with me the two nights we were camping:

She wore her zip-up footie pajamas when she was actually sleeping in the real tent, and thus was the only one of us to not get extraordinarily itchy bug bites all under her clothes when we were camping in Missouri. Footie p.j.'s should be required gear for summer camping in the south.

We arrived just in time for garlic scape/strawberry/mulberry season (they always get ripe at the same time), so there's been a lot of berry eating going on.

Just like this, only with a lot more red stains.

It's been a remarkably wet spring and summer here at Blackrock, but we've had mostly good weather since we got here. This means lots of beach time.

No matter how sunny it is here, however, the light never has this white glare that we get in New Mexico.

Unfortunately, I am finding it much more difficult this year to take children to the beach, because now Poppy is very much a walking, active child who wants to be right out in the water, preferably right out where her brothers are. This is a big change from last year when she couldn't even crawl and was thus always safely stationary on the beach.

So I have to spend the whole time we're down there in the water holding her hand to keep her from going in over her head. Jack still can't swim, Charlie is not a strong swimmer, and I genuinely worry about what would happen if one of them needed my help while I was holding on to Poppy. I would have to just throw her up on the beach and hope for the best, which is . . . no, thanks.

For this reason, I told A. that I need a second adult with me when we go to the beach. So beach time is family time now.

That's okay with me, though, and it does mean that with everyone down there, there's no reason not to have a beach picnic for dinner every night. The children approve.

I made a conscience effort to do this because I saw that our forecast is calling for much more rain this week. In fact, it's raining now.

I'm going to the Not Quite As Small City today for my big thrift store excursion*, so I won't be here to entertain the children. I'm sure A. will have no trouble, and at least with the rain, he has a good excuse to not go down to the beach.

* "So, Kristin, what did you do on your vacation?" "I went to a thrift store to buy soap dishes and a coffee mug." Just like Club Med.

Locusts on the Beach

Yesterday morning when I took two packages of pork chops out of the freezer for dinner, I thought to myself, "That's too many pork chops." The package of six wouldn't have been quite enough (yes, for the five of us--A. eats a LOT of meat), so I took out a partial package of three as well, figuring on leftovers.

But then I ended up feeding eleven people, and it wasn't enough after all.

The reason I fed eleven people was that A.'s friend Jodi showed up on our beach with his three children plus his son's friend on his pontoon boat around 3 p.m., which naturally turned into cooking dinner down on the beach. A. and Jodi's friend Matt came down, too. So there were eleven people total to feed--three men, six boys (ages 12, 11, 8, 7, 6, and 3 years) , one girl (age 3 years), and me.

Jodi brought a couple of pounds of spicy Italian sausage and a few partial bags of chips. I contributed the nine pork chops, six small fish from the previous day's catch we hadn't cooked yet, a box of Triscuits, a sleeve of other crackers, cucumber and carrot sticks with ranch dip, and a bag of cherries.

Then I watched it all disappear under the swirling crowd of children on the beach.

Seriously. It was kind of amazing. I would set something down on one of the cottonwood stumps we use as tables and minutes later, it was gone.

The vegetables and dip, crackers, and cherries were all gone before the meat was done.

When the meat was ready, we piled it on a pan and set it on the picnic table. Everyone got a pork chop, and then the boys had a junior pissing contest over who could eat the most spicy sausage.

The fish was done last. They were all whole, small fish. I just put them all in a dish and threw them in the middle of the table to be devoured by the feral pack of children. The boys picked them all apart and discussed the possibility of using the cooked eyes as BBs in their BB guns.

A short time later, I actually managed to scavenge all the necessary ingredients for s'mores--mostly thanks to the MiL, as I do not routinely have graham crackers and bars of chocolate on hand--and offered those up to the ravenous horde. Every last marshmallow and bit of cracker was eaten.

Then the party boat departed, just like a plague of locusts moves on after devouring all the available sustenance in an area.

In all seriousness though, it was really fun. I can't blame the kids for being so hungry. They must've burned thousands of calories swimming and hitting with sticks for five hours.

Perhaps I've found the next great diet: Act like kids at the lake.

Just don't eat like them.

Lucky Friday the Thirteenth

Charlie was born on a Friday that happened to fall on the thirteenth of July, which means, popular superstition to the contrary, I will always consider it a lucky day for me.

This year, his birthday was also on a Friday. It was another lucky day, kicking off with french toast requested by and prepared (with some help) by the birthday boy.

Photographic evidence of Charlie's luck comes in the form of the number of fish caught by A. and the boys on an early morning fishing trip to the village dock.

That's a hell of a lot of fish for an hour of fishing: rock bass, blue gill, sunfish, and perch. Some really big ones too.

And here we have the triumphant fisherboys with their catch.

I suggested taking the fish right down to our beach to clean and scale (thereby avoiding fish guts and scales all over the patio right outside the house door), which then turned into cooking the fish on our beach for lunch.

Along with some (literal) grilled cheese I made with pita breads and that the birthday boy refused on the grounds that they weren't "normal" grilled cheese. True, but annoying.

 Poppy even ate some bits of fish.

In this photo, it looks as if it all ended up on her shirt, but I'm pretty sure she swallowed some.

Then we all went to get ice cream.

The boys watched some cartoons when we got home, because they were all tired and needed to be out of the sun for awhile. An hour or so of Transformers perked them right up, though, and they spent some time running around doing . . . stuff. I don't know what, exactly. Building with Lincoln Logs? Picking black caps?

Whatever. They ran around while A. did some mowing.

Charlie helped me make pesto, per his birthday dinner request. His dinner request also included "a fancy dinner" up at the house, instead of the original plan of a beach cookout.

Well! You want a fancy birthday dinner? Blackrock has you covered. (Exhibit A.)

His only specifications for dinner were pasta with pesto, green salad with ranch dressing, and vanilla pudding for dessert instead of cake. Grandma made the pudding, and to the original dinner order I added Italian sausage, peppers and onions, green beans, and sparkling cider in fancy glasses for the boys.

We set the table nicely, including a tablecloth that was just the right size and that the MiL remarked was handmade lace, causing A. to panic and say, "Take it off the table then! It'll get ruined!"

However, since we weren't eating anything particularly staining--i.e., anything with barbecue sauce--we used it anyway and it was fine.

Terrible photo of a lovely meal.

Then we all had pudding, Charlie opened his cards and gifts, he went on a solo canoe ride with A., played some kind of ninja game with his brothers, and had to be dragged to bed to end his fun birthday day.

It was a good day. A fitting celebration for a good kid.

Scenes from a Blackrock Summer

Eating snow peas picked from the garden . . .

Playing in the woodchuck wading pool (a.k.a., the utility sled) . . .

And trying desperately to stay cool.

The New Dog That Wasn't

Do I know how to set up a cliffhanger or what? Not intentionally, though. I just got busy with our wild spring break at Blackrock* and never sat down to tell you about the dog.

Now I will.

A. took all three boys for a walk on Friday after dinner while I was doing the dishes, and when they came home, Cubby burst in to announce that a brown dog had followed them home. The brown dog was shortly thereafter in my house, because Charlie let it in.

Woah there, cowboys. What just happened here?

What just happened was that this lab/pit bull-ish mutt more or less moved into the family.

We assumed it was a stray. It wasn't wearing a collar. It had been running on a road near us literally on the Canadian border that's pretty unpopulated. We thought it had been dumped.

The dog certainly was happy to be part of our crew. It played with the kids as long as they were outside before bed, so we had the opportunity to note that it wasn't aggressive in the least, which was good. When the kids came in for bed, it sat on our front steps for a couple of hours, then started scratching at the door.

A. felt sorry for it--"it" was actually a female, so "she"--and gave her some dinner. When it was time for us to go to bed, A. decided to put her in his garage/office, because it was going to be near freezing and the dog didn't have much of a coat.

The next morning, I let her out hoping it would find her way home, if home was nearby.

She didn't.

I made up some "Found Dog" signs and posted them at the dump, the post office, and the general store. We knocked on a few doors on the road the dog had been on, but there was no one home anywhere. When it was time for us to leave at 3 p.m. for Blackrock, no one had called, the dog seemed unwilling to go anywhere, and A. didn't want to leave her to fend for itself.

So we brought her along to Blackrock. By this time, the children had named her Friday. Because she was found on Good Friday. Also, like Robinson Crusoe, though they didn't get the literary reference. What are they teaching kids in school these days?

Friday the dog seemed quite happy at Blackrock, as all dogs are. She and Sky became fast friends and played non-stop. She found some ancient deer bones to gnaw on and sniffed out some rabbits in the hollow.

And then, on Monday, her owner called.

Turns out he lives on the road she was found on. He said the dog runs off a lot (which begs the question of why the hell he doesn't put a collar with tags on her). And then A. had to tell him that yes, we still have your dog, but, uh, we're 250 miles away. And we took her with us.

Kind of embarrassing.

Anyway. Friday's name was really Emma. The children were sad to hear that Emma-Friday would not be a permanent member of our family. I was not too sad when her owner came to pick her up after we got home today. I really don't feel the need for another dog at this moment. Although I'm afraid this whole episode may have accelerated our timeframe for getting another dog.

But at the moment, I'm enjoying the peace of having only one old dog to deal with. And the old dog is pretty happy about that, too.

* It really was wild. One night A. and I left the kids with the MiL and went to dinner at a Turkish restaurant. At this stage of our lives, that's equivalent to tequila shots in Rocky Point.

Easter at the Madhouse

Happy belated Easter, my lovelies! Did you all have a pleasant day filled with chocolate bunnies, hysterical children, and even more hysterical dogs? No? Just me then.

I do not have photos (sorry, Mary in MN and Mom), but let me paint you a word picture and you will perhaps understand why.

We acquired a new dog on Good Friday. This is a long story that will be told soon, but the end result was that we made the 250-mile drive to Blackrock on Saturday in a minivan crammed with two adults, three small children, and two dogs. Because of some work A. was frantically trying to finish up, we didn't end up leaving until mid-afternoon, which means we arrived at Blackrock around 9 p.m.

After throwing the children in bed, I assembled Easter baskets--the contents of which were brought in the Minivan of Insanity, with additional items provided by the MiL--and fell into bed at 10:30 p.m.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, A. got up to go to an early Mass in the Small City and I got up to hide the Easter eggs that the MiL had kindly purchased, boiled, and dyed for me.

I mean, that the Easter Bunny had left.

But then I did a mental full stop. Because how was I supposed to hide the eggs outside with three dogs running around out there, all of whom were hungry and would probably very much appreciate a hard-boiled egg breakfast? But if I didn't do it soon, the kids would be awake. But maybe they would sleep in (HAHAHAHA--I'm so amusingly optimistic sometimes) and then if I shut the dogs up to hide the eggs they would have to stay shut up for too long.

The mental effort of thinking about all this made me too tired, so I didn't do anything. Except I did put the eggs in the shop so I could sneakily grab them at some later point and hide them when the kids were distracted and the dogs were inside.

Is this sounding far too complicated for a simple Easter egg hunt for 11 dyed eggs? Yes. Yes, it was.

In the end, the kids woke up 10 minutes after A. left (OF COURSE) and I didn't hide the eggs until they were getting ready to go outside awhile later. The MiL was preparing to feed the dogs, which meant they were all inside, so I ran out to the shop and grabbed the eggs. Jack followed me out, letting the new dog out as well.

I herded them both back inside and told Jack to help Grandma feed the dogs. Then I ran back to the shop to get the eggs again.

Charlie came out next, letting Mia out at the same time. I shooed them both back in and told Charlie to help Grandma feed the dogs. And I grabbed the eggs yet again.

This time I managed to frantically throw some eggs around the flower beds before racing back inside to intercept the children and casually mention that hey! You think there are any eggs outside?

And just as I was getting everyone's shoes on to go outside, there was a dog fight in the kitchen (my fault--I hadn't told the MiL not to feed our two dogs in the same place) and poor old dog Mia ended up with a bloody ear.

Anyway. The children found the eggs, and while they were showing Grandma their eggs outside, I hid their Easter baskets inside. And cleaned up the drops of blood on the kitchen floor.

So that was our Easter morning. You can maybe see why I wasn't prancing around happily snapping photos of our photo-worthy egg hunt.

Holidays at Blackrock may be crazy, but they're never boring.

Complicating the Uncomplicated

This morning I was washing some dishes in the sink after making a vat of applesauce, and I noticed that the water didn't seem nearly as hot as it usually is. Huh. Weird. We always have hot water here.

Now, the hot water at Blackrock was a highly variable thing. The amount and temperature of the water depended on the time of day, the season, and how much hot water was used that day. Quite frequently, we wouldn't have any water at all, hot or otherwise. But here, the water comes reliably from a well and the water heater heats on demand, so there is always water and it is always hot.

Such is my Blackrock-trained mindset however, that as soon as I realized the water was lukewarm rather than hot, I immediately thought, "Oh God. The water heater isn't working and it's going to take forever to get someone here to fix it and I'm going to be boiling water on the stove to wash dishes and . . ."

But then I stopped myself. This is not Blackrock. Maybe I should think this through with a more rational, modern-house mentality.

First I turned on the hot water in the bathroom to make sure it was a whole-house problem, and not something to do with the kitchen supply. No hot water there at all, so to the hot water heater I went.

I thought maybe there was some kind of thermostat on it I could check, or something obvious I could try.

Indeed there was. Like the bright-red on/off switch right on the front--at, ahem, child level--that was turned to "off."

After I flipped it back on and was rewarded with the whoosh of the hot water heater immediately beginning to heat the water in the tank, I called Charlie in for questioning. He of course vehemently denied touching any switches, but said Jack had been in there a couple of days ago.

Yeah, sure.

I explained to Charlie that he should never, ever touch any of the switches on the machines in the utility area, and that if he sees Jack playing with them, he should tell me so I can make sure nothing got messed up. He assured me he would.

It's nice to be in a house where there are simple solutions to problems that were often major at Blackrock. If only I could find a solution to the monkeying children problem . . .

An Embarrassment of Riches

The floor covering of choice at Blackrock is Oriental rugs. Partially this is because the house pre-dates wall-to-wall carpeting by about a century, and partially because A.'s family lived in Saudi Arabia for a few years and accumulated a good stock of rugs there. In any case, every single room in the house has Oriental rugs covering the wood floors. I even contributed a couple several years ago.

Even the kids' rooms have Oriental rugs, because there are so many rugs in the house and some have been here for so long that they're in pretty bad condition. Which of course makes them perfect for kids' rooms, because you pretty much want anything in contact with small children to be disposable in some way.

Anyway.

Our new house has no Oriental rugs. But it does have laminate wood flooring everywhere. This makes for an unfortunate echo effect that makes me want to pull my hair out. Three screaming children in an echo-y house is no good. The first thing I determined to get into that house were rugs to absorb sound, and lots of 'em.

I knew there were a few rugs at Blackrock (like the aforementioned worn-out ones in the kids' rooms) that could be borrowed without affecting the overall collection at Blackrock. I was pretty sure there were some extras in the attic in Addy's room. So today I crawled into the very back of that attic and started pulling out Oriental rugs.

Do you know how heavy those sumbitches are? They're thick, woven 100% wool. They are heavy. I dragged out four before my back gave out. There are still at least four more in there. That's eight total Oriental rugs just shoved out of sight in the back of an attic. I think if I were to walk through the house and count them all up, there would be around 36 Oriental rugs of varying sizes.

Thirty-six. That's insane. Useful, though.

Harvesting for Happiness

Yesterday while Jack was napping and the other two were outside planting peas in an old burn pile (or something--I could never be accused of being a helicopter mom), I wandered out with a large colander, a pair of kitchen shears, and a carton to do some harvesting.

First I picked some mulberries, because I like to make sure my hands always look as if I just finished butchering something. Then I used the shears to cut off all the garlic scapes, and while I was in the garden, I harvested some of Cubby's snow peas*.

As I was heading inside, I noticed a single white peony still on the bush and decided it would be much better appreciated inside the house, so I cut that too, along with some roses so the peony wouldn't be lonely in a vase.

Will the roses smell like garlic, or the garlic scapes like roses? An interesting query.

I decided to put the roses and peony on the kitchen table . . .

So bijou**.

But then I needed some flowers for The Long Table, so I cut some of the feral day lilies growing along the edge of the gully. Plus some ferns, because I like to pretend I can create actual arrangements instead of just random flowers in a vase.

The lilies looked nice yesterday, but closed up at night and haven't opened again yet, so the effect is not so good at the moment. So much for my actual arrangements.

Half an hour of picking and snipping, and we had food and pretty flowers. And a mood booster for me. Wins all around.

* I stir-fried these two together for dinner last night and it was really good. Winning combination, should you ever happen to have both in sufficient quantities to try it.

** I learned this word from the movie The Matchmaker with Janeane Garofalo, a movie I loved years ago but haven't seen in about fifteen years. Can't remember anything else about the movie, but that sure is a good word.

The Raising of the Boat

Several years ago, A. went through a boat-building phase. He would make boats out of boards and plywood. They were very sturdy, but also very heavy and thus, difficult to drag up onto the beach away from the water. This is why they all got pulled into the lake during storms and wrecked eventually. One of the smaller boats was pulled into the lake and then appeared on our neighbors' beach a few days later. And there it stayed, mired in the gravel and filled with rocks.

A sad fate for a once-proud vessel.

Then, a couple of days ago when my family was all here and down on the beach, the children all meandered down to the boat and started playing in it.

What's more fun than a boat full of gravel?

I believe it was Cubby who suggested they should try to dig it out. The kids started burrowing industriously with hands and sticks while the adults watched and made no effort to help because, well, it was hot in that sun and what were the odds that the boat could actually be dug out and would float if it was?

But then my sister-in-law started to help Cubby dig out one of the oars he had almost freed, because she's nice like that, and before I knew it, there were actual shovels on the beach and my brother was showing them how it's done.

This is what a beach vacation looks like a Blackrock.

And about half an hour after that . . .

Heave ho.

They actually loaded all four children into the thing and towed it in the water down to our beach, so I guess it even sort of floats. A great testament to the strength of the boat. 

So here's to the boat builder who built a boat that could withstand four years of being partially submerged in rocks, and especially here's to the tenacious crew who raised her from her watery grave. 

Family is fun.

Blackrock B&B

A few weeks ago, my brother e-mailed me and was all, "Hey! We're thinking of coming to visit when the Eldest Sister and Eldest Niece are visiting. Is that cool?" And I was all, "YES, YES IT IS COOL!"

My brother has not been to Blackrock since A. and I got married here thirteen years ago. His family--wife and two daughters ages 8 and almost-4 years--have never been. None of them have met Jack, and all the cousins on my side of the family have never all been in one place. So of course, of course it is cool.

This means that as of tomorrow, there will be six more people sleeping in our house for two nights. And this is about the only time I have been thankful to have such an absurdly large house, because we have beds for them all. Bedrooms, even.

Allow me to take you on a tour of our hospitable home.

Would you like a private room shaded by a verdant magnolia tree?

Please, enjoy the ambiance of A.'s childhood bedroom. I'll even promise the bed will be made before you need to sleep in it.

Or perhaps you'd prefer a charming dormer room in close proximity to a bathroom?

You'll be sleeping next to the wireless router on the windowsill, handy for any work that follows you on vacation.

If you would like a room with en suite bathroom, then the downstairs guest room is for you.

Of course, it's also the only bathroom with a shower in the entire house, so you're liable to be disturbed at 7 a.m. when A. needs to shower to get to court.

And if everything else is full up, there's always the parlor with a mattress on the floor. 

At least it'll be a real mattress, since we still have the one we replaced a few months ago. Good thing we couldn't figure out how to get rid of it yet.

Twelve people, two nights, one house. It's going to be total insanity. I can't wait.

Days and Nights at Blackrock

Days filled with boys wielding sticks, dogs chewing on moldy bones, and a very dead red squirrel that got caught by the tail on a ripped-up gutter drain and was hanging upside down inside the drain. It had to be hauled out ever so carefully by the tail so it didn't fall right apart and stay in the drain forever.

That last one was way gross. I got to do the rodent removal, since I was the one who spied the little tuft of fur sticking out of the hole. I'm glad we have one less squirrel on the property, but it was a bad way to go for the squirrel. Not so pleasant for the clean-up crew, either.

Nights filled with . . . wait, am I sleeping? What a novel thing, to sleep at night! Except for that one night when the travel alarm clock went off at 2:58 a.m. because Charlie had found it somewhere and was pressing all the buttons and then obediently put it back in my room where I told him it was supposed to be. I nearly had a heart attack when the thing started beeping, but at least it didn't wake Jack up in the next room.

Today is Cubby's last day of school. Next week is Charlie's. We'll shortly have even more of the boys with sticks around to entertain us.

Perhaps "entertain" was not the best word choice.

Happy Friday, my lovelies! Go forth and be merry!

A.P.D.--Let's Talk Bathrooms

I just finished scrubbing my bathroom with a scrub brush. I only did about half of it--the wall behind the toilet and about 2/3 of the wretched shower tiles, which are the two most mildewed areas always--because it took 45 minutes of intense scrubbing and that was as much as my hands and wrists could do without giving out. An hour and a half of such labors would render me crippled for life.

I keep thinking maybe my problem is that I just don't do it frequently enough. But then I also think that I just can't imagine wiping down every surface of my bathroom every single day, which I think is what I would need to do to keep the mildew from taking over.

Bathrooms in old stone houses are mildew-making factories. Just FYI, if you're on the market for an old stone house.

So please tell me, my lovelies: If your bathroom is mildew-free, how in the hell do you keep it that way? Do you clean it every day? Do you scrub it hard every week? Am I just lazy, or do I really have the most mildew-prone bathroom in the whole country?*

* Don't answer that last one, because it may be a combination of the two and, well, I kind of know I'm not winning any awards for zealous housekeeping. But who wants to scrub walls when there are potatoes to be hilled and tomatoes to be staked?

Ah, the Resiliency of Nature

Bats used to be a large feature of life at Blackrock. Not a particularly welcome one inside the house, where I found them far too often, but we had a nesting colony of hundreds in the attic, so they were everywhere.

Then they disappeared, almost certainly due to the White Nose Syndrome that killed off so many in such a short amount of time in the east. I didn't particularly miss them, because, let's be honest, a bat looks like a nightmare come to life.

But then, A. and the children discovered a small bat sleeping in the nook of the huge copper beech tree on the front lawn for a few days about a month ago. And just a week ago when A. ascended the porch roof to take the storm window off the upstairs hall window, he found quite a large deposit of guano on the roof there.

And then this morning, I found one in the washing machine, almost exactly six years after I first found bats in the washing machine*.

So it looks as if the bats are recovering from their plague. Hooray. I guess.

* And just like last time, the MiL removed it for me, because she's much braver than I am when it comes to bats.

Interior Design with Boys

Blackrock has no shortage of antiques and spectacular pieces of furniture, but my favorite of all is what we call The Long Table. 

It is, as you might expect, a long table. But such a table. It's long (I think you've gathered that by now), and it's wide, and it's really, really old. Maybe as old as 17th century, although we don't know for sure. What we do know for sure is that they definitely don't make 'em like that anymore.

The Long Table is in the living room, and it makes a very nice display area, as you can see in this very old photo in which it was the punch bowl station for a really big party we had.

Obviously a pre-child party.

One of the things I love about this table is that it's so large that it can look uncluttered even with a few things on it. When it's relatively clear and properly dusted, it's all shiny and smooth and very pleasant to look at.

Unfortunately, the flipside of having a large clear surface is that it's like a magnet for junk. Don't know what to do with that pile of papers? There's plenty of room on The Long Table! Need to get that big library book out of Jack's destructive reach? Just put it on The Long Table for now.

And then it becomes a Long Table of Crap.

I try really hard to keep it clear, though, because it's good for my mental health to have at least one surface in the house clear of crap. A couple of days ago I set myself the task of putting away all of the random stuff strewn over all the tables and desks in the living room and then dusting. My reward for accomplishing this was to cut a bunch of lilacs and put them in a pretty vase in the center of The Long Table.

Ahhh. So tidy, so nice, so serene . . .

So short-lived.

Does something look a little . . . jarring to you in this tablescape?

Those are very important battle ships that could not be dismantled at pick-up time last night. And so they were carefully put away on top of my shiny, uncluttered, flower-bedecked Long Table. 

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.

Have Mud, Will Travel

Once a boy can walk more or less unassisted at Blackrock . . .

It's a whole new ballgame . . .

A really, really dirty ballgame . . .

Get that laundry soap ready, Mom. Nothing can stop me now.

I Hate It When I Do This

Cleaning out our woodstove, no matter how carefully it's done, inevitably results in a layer of fine ash on every surface of the dining room. This is why I usually plan ahead to do my dusting the day I clean it out (or, um, the day after, if I'm lazy).

We haven't been using the woodstove all that much, though, with the periods of warm weather we've been having, so I haven't been paying as much attention to it. I dusted yesterday. Then I realized today that it's going to be cold again starting tonight, and the woodstove needed to be cleaned out for the coming continuous use.

So I cleaned it out. And now I have to dust again. Dammit.

Because It's Been Too Dull

I was just thinking I could use a little more excitement in my life. Good thing A. saw a bat flying around in the Pit of Despair last night! That should make my required multiple trips in and out of the cellar today to do laundry and get more jars for maple syrup much more entertaining.

Will it stay safely immobile in its daytime hiding place? Or will the dark of the Pit of Despair inspire it to swoop around during the day, while I'm trying to get jars? OR, will it be inside one of the jars, which has happened before? OrOR inside the washing machine, which has also happened before?

Who can tell! So much to look forward to!

Wish me luck.

A Small Taste of Freedom

Sometimes in this frozen wasteland of upstate New York, and particularly at frigid Blackrock, when the winter is spent swathed in layer upon layer of wool, the children just need a little freedom. Let them shed their socks indoors, no matter how frosty their feet become, and they will play happily.

Until their cold toes remind them that, oh yeah, this is not summer. And they have to put their socks back on.

But that little taste of toe freedom makes for a satisfying half hour, anyway.