Blue Yonder

Sense of Adventure

Last year, we had a standing lake day, every single week. Mondays meant sun, splashing, and the smell of charcoal as the sun dipped behind the hills.

All during the fall and winter we looked forward to the return of lake days, but, somehow it's not worked out to be as easy to lay by the lake this year.

The heavy rains have meant flooding, which means closed lakes. Lots of other factors have kept us from our favorite summer haunt too, so as you can imagine, when Daddy said Tuesday was lake day, we all got crazy excited!

And then, the sky turned black. The thunder sounded. The lightening cracked. We were so mad that we just flat refused to believe it. We packed up all our gear, coolers, floaties, snorkels, towels and such, and went anyhow.

Which means, we sat in the car for an hour listening to Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs (a favorite) and drawing on foggy windows.

Eventually though, the clouds broke, and the fun began.

We got a new tube, rocket thing. And while they were awfully excited to try it out, the actual doing of the thing proved a little scary at first.

James had a total hissy when they fell. It completely freaked him out that the boat keeps going, and you stay put, floating. His brother had his back though.

After watching Luke belly laugh and zip around a while, he decided to give it another shot. It didn't take him long to decide that he loved it. I was so proud of him for getting back out there. What a kid!

Of course Daddy had to show 'em how it was done back in his day :-)

He's going to feel that tomorrow!

Lake day was SO worth the wait!

Sense of Place

You already know that I have a deep rooted resentment of the encroaching, homogenized suburban sprawl. And you know that I long to run around in the woods, get dirt under my fingernails and fall asleep to the sound of crickets under a big ol' unfettered moon, but you might not know that I'm also crazy in love with the city.

Especially mine.

Austin is quirky, cool, everchanging and well, weird!

We do our best to get our boys away from the cookie cutter world of Home Depot and Old Navy, and into the heart of our hometown, walking the streets and seeing the sights, when we can. Well, okay, we do try to avoid Leslie when we're with the boys. I'm not ready for that discussion yet, and we haven't taken them to Eeyore's Birthday Party because I'm not nuts about the idea of my kids on a contact high (they eat enough as it is), but we do like to cultivate their sense of place. They are Austinites, born and raised.

Summer is one of the best times of year for getting a feel of what Austin is all about. Our town will host THOUSANDS of live mucisians over the summer (which is why you see these things all over town.) There will be movies made here, celebrity sightings, street festivals, art shows, and more winged black creatures than you can shake a stick at!

So, in effort to foster that unique Sense of Place in our little fellas, we declared it officially summer with this year's first trip to The Austin Symphony's Annual Concert in the Park Series.

It's a laid back evening of good music (this week was swing!), set to the tune of Austin... kids running around, socialites mingling with socialists, rasta guy kickin' it with Miss Junior League. I love it! Our family, including my husband's folks, spread out our sheet, ate a picnic dinner and melted right into the rest of the funky vibe.

And I only had to assure them 50 times that YES, we would be going to Amy's afterwards. Cuz, you know, towns have tastes too. Ours tastes a lot like ice cream - sweet, cool and just plain delicious!

(oh, and I think I just hit an all time personal record for number of links in one post!)

The Sense God Gave a Pig

"Are you a boy or a farm animal?"

"Do you live in a barn?"

"Okay piggies, lemme hear ya snort!"

I've actually said those things, I'm ashamed to say. I have wasted no time in instructing my children in the fine art of sarcasm.

I never thought I'd be a neat freak. The only time I ever cared wether or not my room was clean was if I was in the throes of stalling. As in, "yeah, I'll get right on that Algebra homework after I dust my ceiling fan and wipe down the baseboards."

My Dad though, he was (and still is) a SERIOUS neat freak. He likes the carpet to show the tell-tale lines from the vacuum cleaner, and the trash cans to be empty at all times. As a kid, I thought he was nuts.

And while I'm still not exactly that fastidious, I do understand the lure of a neat and tidy nest. You can just think better. You can find what you need. You can walk around in the dark of the night, barefooted, without fear of being fatally wounded by a miniature Tyranosauru Rexs. It's kind of nice.

My kids don't get this at all. When I start to clean they ask me, "Why are you doing that? Is someone coming over?" I could analyze that, but I know better, so I won't.

In an attempt to appeal to their inner neat-niks through witty prose and illustration, I bought this clever book, "Pigsty" by Mark Teague. It didn't work. They thought it would be cool if pigs lived in their rooms.

So, sometimes, I just try to tell myself that mess can be good. I try to let it go, and know that there will come a day when my house will be neat and tidy, and it will not be nearly so full of fun and laughter and beautiful chaos. Heck, even a pig knows that sometimes it is better for your health and well-being to just get a little sloppy.

Plus, I have the satisfaction of knowing that one day, chances are, my boys will be daddies too, and they will wonder how they turned into their sarcastic, "keep your food in the kitchen please" mother. I will smile, and tell them to look to the wisdom of the pig.

Sense of Accomplishment

So, because themes make me feel a little bit less like the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants wreck that I really am, I've decided to, in keeping with yesterday's post, make this week's entries all about "senses" that I'd like to cultivate in myself and (with any luck) my band of merry men. (I am the reigning Queen of the Run-on Sentence.)

Today, we framed some recent drawings from my artists in residence, Luke:

(We're calling this installation "Birds In Flight")

And James:

(It's a windmill that for some reason makes me think of Hayao Miyazaki's work. The sweet yellow frame is a recent Goodwill find)

I'm not sure why it is exactly, but I swear their chests stuck out a clean two inches farther after their drawings were put in those frames. They gained status as "real" art I guess. Really, I did it because I had some empty wall space, and a cool new (old) frame, but it worked out in such a way as to give my men something all men need, the feeling that their work matters.

Don't we all need that?

So, I suppose, the doodling I did while on the phone today...

...if I actually turn some of them into emroidered designs, as intended, actually make them into coasters or handbags or some such, actually sell them at the craft fair, will it work for me the way the frames worked for my boys? Will it bring that sense of accomplishment?

We may never know... I'm not so good at following through on my doodles and daydreams.

Oh, and speaking of random, two asides:

1) Something is still wrong with my blog. Some people have a hard time getting to it at all. Some are having a hard time leaving comments. I have an open ticket with Typepad, and Carla (I love you Carla) is doing her best to see that it gets straightened out. Sorry for the technical difficulties.

2) My boys and I are hitting the road this week. We decided to go see my grandmother for a few days. We're feeling a need for red dirt, blueberries and tall pines.

I know, you are preparing to wrend your clothes and fast, cry out in agony, but please, put away the sackcloth ... I've left some rambling, over analytical and yet half baked, way too wordy entries on standby. They will self-post while I'm gone. I'm smooth like that.

And plus, truth be told, I'm afraid you'll go away if I fail to entertain you on a daily basis :-)

I'm not at all sure I'll have computer access from the woods though, so I may not be real responsive to your emails and comments until the weekend.

Have a great week!

Sense of Wonder

This illustration is from a book I picked up at Goodwill, "Mark and Michelle on Vacation," by Marcel Marlier. It is FULL of gorgeous 70's era illustrations of a little boy and girl exploring the natural world, alone, pink cheeked and romping through dark woods, over rocky crags, even paddling themselves down a murky looking creek. There is something at once endearing, inspiring and a little alarming about it. Where are their parents?

Flipping through it reminded me of a class I took in college entitled, "Mad Women in the Attic and Children Lost in the Woods." It was an English Lit class designed to bring to light these common portrayels of women and children in literature, and to discuss the reasons behind them. It was fascinating. So much so that I still think of that class from time to time.

I remember that I did my final paper on the use of the word "creep" in the brilliant short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper". I can't look at wallpaper of any kind without thinking of it! (Go and read it, you won't be sorry!)

With that in mind, I began to amuse myself by imagining what a course based on the life and times of a suburban stay-at-home mom and her banshees would be called. I think something like, "Mad Woman in the Laundry Room and Children in Need of Woods in Which to Get Lost."

That's not a jab at my children, it's an honest assessment of their situation. They are woodsless.

I love my home. My husband grew up in it. I think it's really cool that my boys sleep in the same room their Daddy did, roll in the same patch of grass he rolled in, use all the same spots for hide and go seek. When their Daddy was young though, our home was at the end of the known universe. There were a whole lot of trees, and not much else around, accept maybe a few of these:

(this photo is one of my Mom's) She's the source of my love of photography.

Now though, we are flanked by rows of homes, a new toll road, every chain store you can imagine, and the final insult, a spanking new three story office building behind our house. It used to be a field where we picked blackberries.

(these were from a pick-your-own farm last week)

What's a girl to do? I tell you it does kind of leave you feeling trapped by the wallpaper, having no wide open spaces in which to roam.

I am reminded of something I read from David Sobel, "If we want children to flourish, to become truly empowered, then let us allow them to love the Earth before we ask them to save it."

One of the things I want most for my boys is for them to cultivate their sense of wonder, to never cease to be amazed, to stop and notice the world around them. And so, I pull over at the end of our street to let them watch the wild rabbits chew grass, even when we're running late. I point out the Grackles that are building their nests of plastic bags in the Wal-Mart parking lot. And one caterpillar-turned-butterfly at a time, I ask them, for just a moment, to get lost in the (metaphorical) woods and to let me come along.