Life's been good to me so far

We had what is becoming our annual 4th of July party, yesterday, and I think we're all still (figuratively) hungover. We collectively slept until afternoon, ate leftover cake for breakfast, putzed around, watched shows, and then ordered chinese takeout.

It had been way too long since we had a party, as evidenced by the intense need for deep cleaning everywhere I attempted to look through outsider eyes. Good grief. I actually painted 3 interior doors and doorframes as part of my blitz cleaning/slave driving, early yesterday. I don't know why it takes a gathering to motivate us, but I definitely don't think anyone has taken the knobs off the stove to wash or scrubbed behind the toilets since the last one.

It is satisfying that, for instance, Aaron can sweep and scrub the kitchen floor while Annie sweeps and scrubs the dining room floor, Elise vacuums the library, Jake stands on bathroom counters washing mirrors, and Isaac takes out trash. We've also reached a point where I can delegate things that are actually a pain, like, "Jake figure out where that giant ice bucket is and hose it out, and see if you can find a good place to set it up," or "Annie and Aaron, go outside with the step ladder and figure out how to get this shutter off the bathroom window, Dad thinks he threw away the poles that propped it up before."

It was a pretty good and very long party. Grant outdid himself cooking. He made salsa and guacamole from scratch, and sea salt "freedom caramels," and chili to go on hot dogs. He made beef and portabello burgers. It was all awesome and appropriately (patriotically?) fattening, along with grapes, fries, watermelon, pickles, iced tea and cases of ciders and sodas and bottles of wine, and of course the requisite flag cake... Mia brought Miguel, and soon after Kathy and Rey came with their two kids. LJ brought his girlfriend Diana, and this guy Joe who adopted a kitten that appeared in our driveway (via facebook) came with his teenage son. Shaun and Cristy were here.

Along with eating like gluttons, we had a big pile of fireworks, a bizarre screening of Too Many Cooks followed by the first 5 episodes of Salad Fingers, and an hour+ long game of Cards Against Humanity. I went to bed around 5am after posting this gif on facebook:

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This was a long weekend for us. Annie stayed over at Izzy's Thurs-Fri, and Grant had Friday off. We took the four kids we had with us up to brunch and then Venetian Pool, before we went and got her.

Grant and I are also in a nonstop Sexathon phase that I am eating up in a very Thursday night, Friday morning, Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, etc sort of way. Mega epic and sometimes lazy, sometimes kinky, sometimes going on forever. Oooooom.

Tomorrow is back to reality with him at work literal hours away, and lots of nonsense errands and calls and studying and so on to do on my part.

I'm feeling pretty good about most things. Extremely motivated for positive life changes.

( I wrote this last weekend, then let time pass )

New entry, starting today:

We had a really great Independence Day :) Izzy came to spend the night with Ananda, and Miguel came to be with them for the day/evening. It's interesting having teenagers in the house examining my belly cast and the IUD display my gynecologist gave me and Grant's spray paint art and photography and so on ;) They think our made-from-recycled bike parts alligator and candles everywhere are so cooooool. Kristin brought her kids and my sister came with her crew. And it's also interesting how Kristin (whose kids are 9 and 6) was totally aghast at Miguel and Izzy (16 and 14) and how it can be real that my kids have friends that age - at one point she was like, "He is like, a DUDE!"

We had 15 chairs crammed in around our dining table for dinner(Grant grilled and I made oven-veggie-kabobs). Earlier in the day we made our annual flag cake, done up with berries, and told our normal annual stories about The Declaration of Independence, and fireworks harkening back to Bristish ships exploding in the night. When it got dark we went and watched fireworks, and then came home and did our own fireworks.

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Saturday, something strange happened, that inadvertently led to other strange things.

The first thing was, I had the house to myself - for about six hours. I honestly cannot remember the last time I was home alone for even 5 minutes, so it was kind of surreal. I'd been feeling very good about our house in general, since we spent a lot time cleaning for the fourth and I recently bought a few more plants, but SIX HOURS HOME ALONE??

I dozed. I read a lot. I swept and swiffered the floor, cleaned the tv room and library, watered every plant I have (that's dozens at this point). I kept low music playing and reveled in the otherwise-quietness. I dusted all my books and shelves (<---O_O). I had one brief visitor and one short phone call but for the most part I was just by myself in this great space where there are vines climbing all around the inside of the shutters and cats running around (and napping), and I realized I LOVE being home alone. I actually realized I might like to live alone, a LOT, in some alternate reality where that could happen without some sort of gutting tragedy.

To illustrate how unusual it is for me to be home alone, let me say that it reminded me strongly of when I was in high school and would have my grandparents' house to myself. Music, plants, cats, insides of shutters - there's a lot to call it up but yeah. That was THIRTEEN YEARS AGO!

I do go out alone fairly often and out with just-Grant at least once a week, but "out" involves, you know, everyone else in Starbucks or the creepy dude trying to kill us on the beach or at least waiters and south Florida drivers. It's not ALONE-alone.

As the evening rolled around and Grant arrived back home with all our kids in tow, I was already thinking of the week of overlapping camps - Ananda and Aaron's last week of music camp is Isaac, Jake and Elise's first week.

I'M GOING TO HAVE THE HOUSE TO MYSELF SO MUCH!!! A couple of the mornings I'll spend in class, and I'll be traveling back and forth part of the time, but wow. I'm excited.

AND, the other strange thing - something happened, while I was here alone, that I do not fully understand, but I realized that night that I felt content. Totally content, totally domestic, the way I used to feel several years and a couple of kids ago when I cooked big breakfasts every day and baked every afternoon and gloried in washing the diapers. This antsy angsty constant clawing restlessness that is always there, now, was not there. I was just centered, thinking...I love my life. Not "I love this and that about my life" or "I'm working to turn my life into something I can love" but just, enough.

Sunday, Gloria and Lj took my younger 4 to the zoo and Grant and I took Ananda to an art supply store (where I was able to get a lot of quality clay for the other kids very cheaply) and a bead shop and this very new age store full of hippie clothes I knew she'd love and then came home and just did more of this...existing in quiet - with clean staying clean. She and Grant both drew in other parts of the house while I made a salad, and read, and baked muffins, and played Vivaldi, and felt utterly peaceful.

It was pretty fucking fabulous. Last night AFTER BAKING I actually made a roast chicken and a sweet potato casserole, with sauteed mushrooms and sliced cucumbers, for dinner - AND red beans and rice with sausage, for Grant to take to work for lunches all week. It is really not my habit to cook half that much in a day anymore, at all, and I did this happily with this satisfied sense of loving my kitchen and being glad I understand ingredients the way I do now.

I don't know if it will last forever, but I will take it as it comes for now, by golly. I was happy enough to welcome all my noisy, messy kids back into the house and I'm sure I enjoyed our time around the table more than usual as we ate (and I do usually eating with them significantly).

The book I'm currently reading is The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown, purchased because it looked the best among the paperbacks for sale at BJ's - and it's pretty good. Attention holding and sometimes thought provoking. I would like to read more by this author.

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I just want to take a minute to say how much I've been appreciating having something of a support network in place, as a mother. I didn't, for a long long time - if I had a true emergency I could call Laura, but that was it. It never occurred to me to hire a babysitter until I'd been parenting for about 8 1/2 years. I couldn't really imagine having mutually beneficial interdependence with other families that I loved - but I do, now. If you don't have this - GET IT! It is so amazing. Take steps, force yourself out, join La Leche League, seek co-ops, talk to your neighbors, wade through all the false starts - whatever you need to do. It's so worth the effort.

Three times now Karen has taken Ananda and Aaron home with her own kids, from music camp they're all attending. It's 45 minutes north for me, but she lives really close to it. Once it was on no-notice due to car trouble; the other two times we arranged it and they slept over. Which means Karen made sure Ananda had a vegetarian dinner option, AND packed their lunches the following day, for camp. This warms my heart to a degree that is probably silly, but it is just so wonderful to trust someone that much, and have them there available. It's so awesome to have our little girls (Georgia is 6 months older than Elise) playing together while we compare how our homeschoolers are dealing with music camp and what we're gonna do about classes and lessons in the next year.

I'm trying to kind of "watch out" for Miguel, the 16 year old, because Cybele (his mother) is traveling most of the summer and he's home alone for the first time. She was crying-happy when I texted her 4th of July pictures, and full of questions about how he is. Then Miguel was at Karen's one of the nights A and A were, and they all went and saw a movie that afternoon. I keep prodding Izzy to make sure she goes and hangs out with him sometimes.

It's just priceless stuff, man. Even knowing/trusting Izzy to babysit for pay is great.

Saturday night Gloria spontaneously texts asking if she and Lj can take my kids to the zoo the next day? Wut? YES, YOU CAN! They were jumping around screaming-thrilled by the idea when I told them. I packed them a big bag and dropped them off with them at the zoo gate and came back like 7 hours later to hear all the awesome stories about the fun they had.

I've been doing a lot with Laura and Kristin too, watching all our kids mingle and grow up together. Jake and Elizabeth are the closest cousins ever. Aaron and Darrien have these absolutely ridiculous conversations about starting to develop body hair, and who is on the superior Minecraft server. It's assumed that when Kristin moves away in a few months we're going to visit regularly. Magic, I tell you!

I just pulled two rectangular chocolate cakes out of my top oven. I can't eat any, but they are for our flag cake and they. smell. GOOD. I'm keeping that one hot for oatmeal raisin cookies (that I CAN eat, by golly). My bottom oven has cauliflower roasting in olive oil and salt on the top rack and butternut squash cut in half and covered in butter, turbinado sugar, salt and pepper, on the bottom rack.

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We had two things to e-search, today.

One - there is some kind of fluorescent, highlighter yellow growth that looks like bits of styrofoam, in a plant we keep on the front porch. The first day Aaron pointed it out, I thought someone had actually thrown tiny bits of radioactive foam into the soil. But it just keeps getting bigger and so based on our Sesame Street criteria it is apparently alive. Today we found out they are mushrooms, more specifically leucocoprinus birnbaumii.

This is about where ours are:


But they will apparently be here soon:

Which is kind of awesome...in a poisonous sort of way.

Also they are known as "the houseplant mushroom" and are apparently so resilient and unstoppable that even if you empty a planter they've been in of dirt and put all new in, they will still come right back.

Two - "pachyderm", which I found the correct spelling of through a painful process of phonetic failures. Ananda has been asking me what this word means because in Horton Hears a Who, Horton has to do something "ASAP" and he says, "What does a-s-a-p mean? Maybe it's 'Act Swiftly Awesome Pachyderm'!" Anyway, yeah, "pachy" is related to a latin word for "thick" and derm is obviously skin related like the DERMatologist who froze her warts off, so technically pachyderm means thick skinned animal, but it's actually an outdated class of animals including rhinos, hippos, elephants and sometimes warthogs/pigs. Scientists don't group animals that way anymore but the word lives on unofficially.

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Since starting this we've polished off all the cauliflower, all the squash and a dozen of the cookies, with a box of almond milk - along with an entire JUG of salsa, and a whole bag of multigrain chips. I suppose this is because we just had nuts and canteloupe for breakfast. Geez Louise it's already 6, I have to start roasting a chicken soon! It is countdown to me wearing a hair net and serving people with an ice cream scoop, I am telling you.

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So, it has been 6 days since Aaron got a unicycle.

Day 1 - he could get on with help from people, then figured out how to get on leaning on things.
Day 2 - he set a goal to get from the library table to the edge of the rug in there, which is about 4 feet. It was somewhat easier on the rug. By the end of the day he could do about 2 feet.
Day 3 - he made it to the edge of the rug probably 4 times.
Day 4 - he was going past the edge every time, and onto the tile and continuing the next 4 feet to the bookshelf/wall.
Day 5 - he started taking off on tile, from the front door, with a goal of the bar - about 12 feet. Halfway through the day he made it, and then last night Grant took this video:

By the end of the evening, he was going 10 and 15 feet further down the hall, turning around while holding the wall no problem, and practicing turns.
Day 6 - today - he can go the entire length of the house including the turn and surface change (tile to wood) into my room, and all the way to my french doors. Then turn around and come back like it's nothing. He rides all over the house now. We were just outside and he can go three houses up, MAKE A U-TURN, and then come back to the van with a fair amount of ease. He also passed some bicyclists who were staring to beat all which pleased him greatly.

This is his favorite unicycle video so far. The first 3.5 minutes are outtakes which I just noticed with the sound on are set to ska music with some explicit-ish lyrics. After that is the main event. It is pretty nuts.

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Ok, we apparently have a third thing to e-search. "Can bubbles freeze?"

Wikipedia tells us that in temperatures below 5 degrees (-15C), they will freeze when they hit a surface but then the air diffuses out and they crumple in on themselves. At below -13 (-25C) they will actually shatter when they touch stuff. But you can't blow them with warm breath in that kind of atmosphere or else they will collapse as they leave the wand, because of the changein volume as your breath cools. Huh.

Wikipedia has so much more in it that Funk & Wagnall's ever did when I was a kid, it's free, and it takes up SO MUCH LESS SPACE!

Apparently you can use dry ice to freeze bubbles that can then be picked up and examined. I think this may be in our near future.

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Ok, so...I'ma finish baking all these cookies, and get a chicken roasting, and then figure out side dishes and read my kids a bunch of American history stuff re: the 4th of July until Grant gets home. And probably we will go see fireworks tonight at 9 at the stadium. WAIT! I have to make A and A have their quiet time. Annie does 30 minutes writing a book report and he does 30 minutes reading, everyday, and we didn't do that yet today. AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaalrighty.

-Freeze and berry up flag cake, while cookies finish
-read American stuff
-quiet time, which is when I get chicken roasting
-Grant, fireworks

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I don't know if I ever showed you guys the CRAZY ASS movie our friend Shaun did for film school, that has since been in a couple of film festivals, that Ananda and Aaron were in. They spent about a half a dozen days with the crew filming for their scenes. It is about 20 minutes long. They think they are pseudo-famous because it's been shown on the big screen and we have a professional looking dvd case for our copy with their pictures on the back. Anyway, it is a trippy lot of O_o, but very well done. If you'd like to watch it:

The Gifter from Shaun Wright on Vimeo.