Work In Progress

we're still here.

things have been getting in the way of blogging.

truth be told, i'm growing bored with blogging. but i don't really scrap much anymore, so the stories have to go somewhere. so i keep blogging.

just, apparently, not very well.

and right now, the weather is amazing, so i'm getting pulled away from the computer by nice days, bike rides, weed pulling, sitting on the couch by a window that's open and letting in an amazing breeze ...

or by a little girl who asks me to play barbies outside, then she gets sidetracked by chasing butterflies and dragonflies and rolling down the hill ...

(click on the pic and you can actually watch her roll down said hill:)

and then i get sidetracked by how pretty she is ...

then i get sidetracked by boys who trudge across the empty lots to shoot at things ...

and the biggest guy tries to give the not-quite-as-big guy pointers on how to aim, how to stand up straight, and how to please stand up straight, and how to just stand up straight already ...

and then i start thinking about how the biggest guy's only real regret in life is that he didn't go into the military like he wanted to oh so desperately, and that he never got the chance to see if he could have made it as a sniper ...

and then i get sidetracked thinking about how neat our kids are, and thank god that mchotness didn't enlist because then we never would have met and fallen in love and made out and created those kids ...

and then i got sidetracked by mother's day, and the plan to go to the arboretum that was waylaid by a line of cars about a quarter of a mile long, waiting to turn into the arboretum; cars full of families and mothers who, apparently, had exactly the same idea. so we ended up at lake minnetonka, watching sailboats and ding dong people who had no clue how to fly kites. and then i look through the four pictures i took that day and get sidetracked by how giant my eldest is and the fact that he still has, according to his doctor, about a foot more to grow ...

(no, he is not standing on something. no, i am not sitting on something. he's that much taller than i am. shut up.)

and then when i finally do sit down to type something, i get sidetracked by my assistant, who chooses to sit right in front of the keyboard. it's really hard to type with your wrists resting on a cat, and i'm sure it isn't ergonomic. but you do what you have to do.

so i will try harder from now on.

so, we had spring break.

there's this girl

she came into the world yelling and full of personality. she made sure we all knew she was here, and she was going to play by her own rules.

 

 

she's still pretty much just like that.

 

 

she is sweet and creative and funny and full of every emotion you can imagine. and likes to switch it up without warning.

she loves foods other kids won't touch, but she won't eat a bite of pizza to save her life.

and she will go into full drama queen mode if you try to make her.

she could be outside all day, every day looking for bugs.

every book she brings home from the library is either about animals or fairies. and on the first library day of the new school year, she managed to find a book series all about animal fairies.

score.

she and her brother adore each other, and have since day one.

 

 

the downside of that is she's convinced she's a 12-year-old boy, and should get to do everything he gets to do, right down to airsoft guns and burping.

it's hard to believe she's seven already, as of 4:07 this morning. she's still my little girl, and i refuse to accept how quickly she's growing. i know the days are numbered when she'll let me brush her hair and pat her bottom and snuggle up with her to watch her favorite shows: miss spider's sunnypatch friends and how it's made. soon, she'll be an emotional (wait ... she already is), eye-rolling (oh ... she does that already, too), door-slamming (uh ... yup) teenager who intermittently tolerates and ignores her parents. maybe not ... maybe we'll get lucky. i fear the day the boys figure out how gorgeous she is, and fear even more the day *she* figures it out. if i could keep her mud-strained knees, bruised shins, tangled hair, digging for bugs-ness forever, i would.

because right now is pretty great.

and today, as per her birthday wishes, i am having lunch with her at school - arby's ham & cheese sandwich and those "potato things" (??) - and reading "how the grinch stole christmas" to her class, she'll have a possible playdate with a friend down the street after school, dinner at india palace, and a pumpkin pie with candles on it for dessert.

because for all the things about her that are tricky and frustrating, there are twice as many things that are simple and perfectly her.

 

happy seventh birthday, miss harper. love you big.

 

her first dance

on saturday evening, harper attended her first dance.

she wore a beautiful new dress and shoes, had her hair styled into a braid, and wore her special-occasion-only dangly earrings.

her date wore a coordinating pink tie.

he surprised her with a lovely wrist corsage - her first flowers - of bright pink tea roses and shiny doodads ...

which matched her miss piggy excuse moi pink glitter nail polish perfectly.

she rewarded him with a happy hug and kiss,

and then off they went, to eat indian food and attend the father-daughter dance at the high school.

they had a lovely time, and harper returned home full of glee and giddiness.

i love that my daughter's first dance was with her daddy. i hope all of her future suitors are as good and decent and loving as he is.

while the boys played xbox ...

for five hours on saturday (and yes, it was as pathetic as it sounds), i took harper to buck hill to meet her girlfriend for an afternoon of tubing.

 

 

emma's mom works at the hill, so her father-in-law and i watched the girls until she got off work, then we all stood around for another hour, watching them go up ...

 

 

and down ...

 

 

and back up. and down again.

 

 

they'd go together, then they'd go solo, whooshing down the hill with big smiles on their faces, then giggling as they dragged their tubes back to the lift.

 

 

 

definitely a better way to spend a saturday than wrapped up in a virtual world.

(though my boys told me that was just *my* opinion. i then refrained from telling them that i was actually right. silly boys ... never learn.)

seems like just yesterday ...

i was recovering from 35 weeks of nausea, vomitting, heart burn; two weeks of inexplicable water retention and weight gain (23 pounds in 10 days ... yikes); 20 hours of relentless contractions; and one hour of pushing. and i was holding my perfect little nine-pound newborn son.

 

 

i thought time had sped up. in a blink, he was six months, a year, 18 months ...

 

 

and before i knew it, he was in preschool. then real school. then his sister was born.

and suddenly ... he's 12.

and my 9 lb, 21.5" baby is now 5'7", 114 lbs, and the next time i take him shoe shopping i know we'll be buying size 11s.

where did the time go?

to be fair, he's still my baby. he came over to me yesterday afternoon and said, "mom, i have something for you." then he wrapped those long, skinny arms around me and melted into a snuggle.

oh. my.

best birthday present ever, my boy giving ME a hug and then staying for more.

he's such a good kid.

to celebrate his big day, we watched him swim in a meet in wisconsin. (i know ... party! woot!) he did a good job, considering it was his first REAL meet against REAL other teams in a REAL setting, not his home pool. his first two races, he was in the final heats and did a great job. his last race ... well ... he lost his goggles during the start and sort of whiffed the rest of the race.

oh well.

 

 

 you win some, you lose some.

we headed home after lunch, everyone got a little rest, then henry opened his gifts: hoodies, books, a bible, and, from, us, portal bookends. oh yeah.

 

 

 

 

then a sitter came over to be with harper, and marc and i took henry to stella's fish cafe in uptown for a steak, then to comedy sportz for a show. henry has really gotten into comedy lately - funny shows, comedians, silly things floating around the internet - so i knew this show would be perfect. and i would much rather give my kids experiences than stuff. we all loved the show, and can't wait to go again. henry even threw out a suggestion that was selected by the referee for an improv challenge (the actletes were to imagine themselves in a situation where they would be surrounded by people, and what they would say to put their foot in their mouth. henry's suggested situation? health class. so funny.), which pleased him greatly.

today, apparently, the birthday celebration continues ... he and marc are on the couch, headsets on, controllers in hand, linked up with uncle matt in indiana, playing call of duty. for the rest of the day.

because, now that he's twelve, he does what the big boys do.

but he still gives his mom a hug.

and that's as it should be.

 

henry wrote a valentine's day poem:

 

cheeky little twerp.

though, for his artistic effort, two girls at school gave him hearts.

sigh. we girls are so easy to impress on valentine's day.

what is up with winter?!

this time last year, we had, like, 47 feet of snow on the ground. this year? nothing. zip. brown, bare ground.

so depressing.

yesterday, i took a walk. it was 38 degrees outside and lovely.

today? wind chill of -9.

minnesota has bipolar disorder.

however, the chill in the air (i can call -9 a "chill." i'm a minnesotan; it's legit.) today reminded me of photos i haven't yet shared.

the new house is just up the hill from a lovely lake. there are houses all around it - some modest ranches, some tiny little shabby fishing shacks, some two-story homes that were obviously built after a shack was torn down. and in the winter, when the lake freezes, it becomes covered in a village of ice fishing houses. which is fascinating to me. there is a whole new neighborhood ... one with codes of conduct, of first rights, of traffic patterns. because all of those fishing houses have to get there somehow, and usually the pick-up truck or small rv that pushed it out there is parked right beside it for the evening commute home. yes, parked. on the ice.

if you don't live up north, you don't understand.

have you seen "grumpy old men"? it's like that.

well, this year, because the weather has been so, shall we say, capricious, it took a lot longer for the ice to become solid and thick enough for ice houses. then it took even longer to become safe for cars to drive on. where last year there stood a veritable city of fishing houses and f150s, this year there is a smattering of ice tents and intrepid shanties, pulled out with snowmobiles and atvs.

we decided one saturday to wander down there and meet the neighbors. the kids had never walked on a frozen lake, as far as we knew (so much for the minnesotan thing. we're apparently really bad at it.), so they were thrilled, and bundled up to the gills for the adventure.

 

(for the record: my husband is 6'4". our son is not quite 12 and is in nearly a size 11 shoe. i fear for our grocery bill.)

the kids started to run out on the ice, and quickly discovered whose boots have good traction and whose don't. (henry's? great traction. harper's? adequate. mine? not so much.) then they started to count all of the abandoned holes, and quickly found chunks of ice and sticks to try to poke through the ice and measure the thickness of the hole.

 

(the thing i love about the above photo? see henry's feet? the way they are crossed and under his bum? he has sat like that since he was a toddler. and his dad sits the exact same way. makes me happy.)

we marveled at who on earth would find contentment sitting out on a frozen lake in a camp chair. then we speculated that perhaps it was the better alternative than what was at home, and we wished the chair much happiness and good fishing.

 

 then marc and harper got their robot dance groove on. turns out slippery surfaces make for the best robot moves.

 

 wonder if they'll bust out those moves at the father/daughter dance next weekend? something tells me no.

then henry and harper stayed with the 80s theme and tried breakdancing, spinning themselves around on their backsides.

 

 pretty soon we were back to wandering. see those three little dots just left of center?

 

 three guys, on camp chairs, fishing.

they DO exist.

about this time harper started to complain that her legs were tired ...

 

 and i may have rediscovered my ability to do the splits while trying to recreate this look ...

 

 and then marc struck up a conversation with a fisherman inside a camper trailer, parked on the ice. now i'm kicking myself for not getting a picture of that.

all too soon, marc's cheeks and my legs were frozen, so we made the journey back home. but soon enough the wind chill will be out of the air enough that we can wander down there again.

there may or may not have been a challenge thrown to walk clear across the lake.

someone needs to tell harper's legs that they'll have to make it there AND back.

true story.

to set the scene:

about a month before christmas, we started to hear: "all of my friends have a phone," coming from our beloved firstborn. then we started to hear: "if i had a phone, i could let you know if swimming got done early or if i needed to be picked up from someone's house, so you wouldn't have sit there or hurry up because things changed."

he was playing the "it would make your life easier" card.

smarty pants.

what he didn't know is that his father and i were already discussing a phone for those same reasons. i don't stay when he has swimming, but in this day and age of a general lack of public and/or pay phones in schools, i didn't want him to be at the mercy of asking strangers if he could borrow their phone, thus announcing his parent wasn't there to get him and he was all alone in the big, bad world.

what he also didn't know is that we'd already been phone shopping. we'd gone over the various options ... cheap phone with no bells and whistles, pre-paid phone, less cheap phone with maybe one bell and half a whistle.

then we realized that we could reactivate marc's old old iphone and stick henry on our family plan. cheapest idea of them all, for the most part, because if the phone was stolen or broken or otherwise incapacitated, we wouldn't be out a dime. the only setback is that henry would be out a phone. which would teach him a lesson.

win-win-win.

so christmas came, we sent henry on a little treasure hunt, at the end of which a phone rang while he was standing in his room. he found it, answered, and took 30 seconds to register that he was talking on his present.

needless to say, he was thrilled.

a month later, this newfound "freedom" and "grown-up-ness" the phone has given henry is starting to leak into his view of himself and how he can talk to his mother. he's started "telling" me rather than "asking" me. i don't like that.

this is the text i received from him yesterday, and the text i sent back to him:

little punk.

as soon as he walked in the door, i put this child of mine ... who is now taller than me ... in a headlock. had to show him who is still boss.

he may have a phone, but he is still a child. and deferring to mama is something i will demand well into the days of him being a foot taller than i am.

adventures with snowflake: day 16-19

nothing like four days in one.

of course, that's kind of par for the course around here. i feel like i have to do four days' worth of stuff every single day.

gah.

but onto snowflake ...

friday morning, harper had to look a little harder than usual. but she finally found snowflake and gray kitty on a shelf in the kitchen with some christmas decorations. guess they were having a "snowmen at night" sort of adventure.

on saturday morning we awoke to donuts on the table. snowflake must have brought us breakfast ... and she had some for herself, as well ...

harp begged us all day to please let her try an elf donut. we finally said okay, seeing that snowflake hadn't eaten any all day. harper took one of the chocolate with sprinkles, popped it in her mouth, and said, "mom! elf donuts taste just like cheerios but sweeter!"

go figure.

sunday morning, snowflake and gray kitty were playing hard to get. or hide and seek. probably hide and seek.

harper was so tickled with snowflake yesterday that she drew her a lovely picture. and wrote her a lovely note that read "i love you, elf!" and wrapped it all up in 12 layers of wrapping paper. this morning, when she came downstairs, she saw snowflake under the tree ... with her present all unwrapped.

harper was giddy.

five more days.

i have to admit, i might miss snowflake a little.

oh - by the way - we went to see santa yesterday:

and table update: still no word from pottery barn. sure would like it if they would at least get back to us to tell us that we are screwed. seems to me that would be the polite thing to do.

i swear, "polite" doesn't exist anymore. it's sad, really.