Infected

I've been MIA for several reasons:

1) there was the whole DamestarBaby Featured Seller weekend, where I think I spent a good portion of three days knitting and clicking between our Etsy shop, our Flickr page, our blog and our new website.

2) I went camping for a night, thinking that the moist ocean air would clear up the mild sickness I felt coming on. Not so.

3) my mild cough evolved into an intensely painful sinus infection, which then took a nasty turn into a crazy ear infection. I finally drove myself to the emergency room last night, and the doctor all but jumped back when he looked into my ear with his little light probe and saw this.
I told him my ear felt like it was going to explode and he said it very well could. Then four nurses came in and asked to take a look, for education's sake. I said go for it, I'm only here to help.

Soooo, bursting eardrums! That's exciting!

But now I'm on Vicodin (aaaahhhh) and so now the loud ringing and loss of hearing feels kind of like an enhanced state of being, since the pain is gone.

If it pops, I'll be sure and let you know.

Keep Your Life

ME: OK, Maz, we're going on a boat today, and that means you have to wear your life jacket.

MAZZY: So I can keep my life?

ME: Right. Exactly.

Mother's Little Helper

here are just a few of the ways Mazlyn has helped something get done in the last month...

she helped her sister get dressed for a play at the Clubhouse, then helped her up the stairs...
she helped her Dad with the construction of the Maximum Security Herb Garden
she drew this ladder in one of her books to span the tragic gap between a kid and his cookies...
she established a club: "The Atreyu Girls," it has a theme song and an official costume and I am proud to be one of three lucky members.

Meet Arthur

The largest coolest greenest softest weirdest caterpillar I've ever seen.

He's as big and fatter than my middle finger.

He(?) was intercepted trying to make his way into Jon's maximum security herb garden. Mazzy finally worked up the nerve to pick him up and we watched him for a while (it's hard not to)before we put him in his new home in a shrub in our yard. He's now busy wrapping silk threads around a branch and we're all very excited around here to see what becomes of him.

Crazy.

One Tree

My husband's best friend and his wife were visiting us over the weekend, and late last night we found ourselves deep in an alcohol-induced tell-all session. I love those. They can really go either way depending on what you're drinking and which day of the week it is, but being that it was good red wine on a mellow Sunday night, the conversation turned into a pretty sentimental reminder of what we love best about each other and why we chose to get married. Aaaawww.

So, I'll come down from my syrupy hangover cloud to share a love quote from another good friend's wedding:

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like a volcano and then subsides and when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part, because this is what love is. Love is not the breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promise of eternal passion, and it is not the desire to mate every minute or every second of the day. That is just being "in love"which any fool can do…Love itself is what's left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love, have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.

-Louis De Bernieres

How sweet it is.

D-O-Double-G

Knowing what it's like to have and raise both, I've always been really flexible on the child-dog comparisons. There are undeniable parallels in training a dog and raising a child. Like how you have to punish them for misbehavior within three seconds or they don't understand why you're mad, and how it's better to divert and distract than just to say "no," and how you have to establish your role as the alpha before they're three or else they think they might be in charge. I'm not trying to demean my kids but honestly, the means are similar, though the ends may be a bit different.

There are those, though, and some in my own family, who blur or disregard the line between dog and child altogether. The dogs get an open invitation to join the humans at the dinner table, they only get a mild scolding when they accidentally pee on the carpet ("oh, you silly thing"), they make their way into most family photos, and take away a significant haul on birthdays and christmas. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dreaded getting on a plane with the lady carrying her Pomeranian in a cute little plaid carry-on. I mean, come on.

I do feel like our dog has a role in our family: to teach our kids about responsibility and respect, to help me sleep peacefully when Jon is out of town, to clean up spills in the kitchen. But I don't feel bad about shutting her in her backyard, I try not to take her on vacation with me, she is NOT invited to dine with us, and she gets regularly ordered to lay down by every member of our family. She's a dog, and that's her place.

We do give her privileges, too. Like big bones to gnaw on and tennis balls to rip in half and baths (which fill her with glee). She gets to go in the kiddy pool, and if she's been really good, we bring her boyfriend over to visit.



I think one post about the dog for every eight or nine about the kids is fair. I'll spare you the puppy album.

We're not in Kansas anymore...

...but we were! For 10 days, the Joneses stormed the Midwest. And the Midwest stormed us back. The thunderstorms were a total perk for me, because I'm not a farmer and my crops aren't in danger. It was pretty funny, though, when a particularly loud thunderclap woke Mazzy up from a dead sleep and she popped up and said, "Mom! Did you hear the funder and the lightming?" And then fell right back asleep.

Aside from the memories and the photos, I brought back three things:

1) A deeper understanding of my Grandma, and therefore of myself.

2) A renewed respect for my Kansan kinfolk and their ways, which are so unlike my own, especially when it comes to their kids.

more on these two when I have more time, but here's number three:

3) Soulja Boy!



We managed to miss this movement when it happened, probably because we don't watch TV and I hardly listen to anything but NPR on the radio. So we had to go all the way to St. Louis, "The Lou," to catch up on the latest dance craze. You can see little Aiden's already got it down.

Anyhow, there's no place like home.