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Jul. 9th, 2012 02:29 pm( 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
