monday.

i rang my dad this past weekend. he speakerphoned me as usual, and we filled a good ten minutes with daily miscellany, a thick layer of slack-key guitar in his half of the background. and somewhere around minute eight he mentioned how he checks my blog first thing every morning.

well, yikes.

that's like thirteen mornings of dashed hopes laced together--you could string half a crumpled lei of disenchantment right there.

so i've no idea what i'm about to post, but by golly i'm blogging.




this past week the older three kiddos spent hours of boyish bliss punching out and assembling these paper robots from aunt kristin. [for the record: i suggested craft glue, but the boys went with scotch tape, which is faster and unfailingly classy.]








the kit comes with a fighting ring and a pair of wind-up mechanisms that wheel the robots forward into battle, but i think the boys' favorite part was the careful construction and reading about each bot's profile in the combat manual.

ie super bot's strengths included 'mad public relations skills' and one of dozer's weaknesses was 'union mandated lunch breaks.' the boys read these to each other in their best television voice-overs, then dissolved in gales of hilarity.

i love it when my nerdish leanings rub off on the progeny. :)






then saturday morning bigger m and i rattled out through the backroads, searching for a particular cross country meet. we totally went to the wrong place twice but i didn't mind one bit: the day was all sky and gilded fields and sun winking down. and i know we live in the Dead Center of Nothing's Here, but sometimes the effortless beauty of this place can rake your lungs windswept and ragged.





grateful today:
for brisk, moody mornings
for hot chocolate with my younger littles
for giant pumpkins
for the wonderment of new parents
for friends who ask
and for a God with wide and steady hands.



ps good morning, dad. :)

last week, and then some.

last week the mister zipped on over to kansas for some sweet time with extended family, and while i was glad for him, i was also a little mopey for me missing out on all those good folk and their gorgeous kids. oh, for a pair of ruby slippers.

meanwhile, we were enjoying our very own in-house drama production, a play in two parts: i'd rather not do my homework but thanks for playing, mom, followed by an award-winning rendition of slow pokiest kid in the western hemisphere. a note on part two: the four bigger kids have traveled by school bus for a combined total of 21 years, four months, and never once have they come close to missing the bus. little m has enjoyed bus privileges for four big weeks and has gone pelting out the door to barely catch the thing nine times now.





he dedicates special energy to snail pacing when it's me hurrying him along in the mornings, which means that last week little m tore across the lawn at 7:10 every single morning (while i prayed in the background 'oh please let his bus be late, please let his bus be late' so as not to have to make good on my promise of if-you-miss-the-bus-i-am-not-driving-you-to-school-and-you-will-be-stuck-here-with-me,-kiddo).

friday he made it by a few flimsy seconds, which means i Needed A Plan.

so this week, i am pulling him from bed an hour early each morning, explaining, in my best mary poppins voice, that clearly he needs extra time to get ready for school. this shall hopefully prove to be a giant dollop of genius because, at the ripe age of six, he is two-thirds teenager and loves his sleep. (next week we shall return to the normal waking hour, but should he not walk out the door with his siblings on time, we go back to a 5:10 bugle call.)

i'll let you know who caves first.





kristin & browning (the mister's sister and her husband) came in for the weekend, and in honor of the occasion we simmered up some tomato soup. note to self: fresh tomatoes make All The Difference in whether or not i actually like the outcome. and k&b maybe need to move closer, because pretty much we can't get enough of those guys.





also, i thought it important to photograph this cheesy potato soup for you. at first it was a sad starchy puddle of bland, but then i grated in some mozzarella and the world righted itself. when in doubt, add cheese.





also-also, 'twas my aunt's birthday saturday, and she's just one of those people who pours our lives full of goodness from afar. so i was really hoping she'd get my package in time, and God worked it out so it popped up all the way over on kauai in two skinny days. bless you, priority mail.

plus also, we got to celebrate a second birthday and i love our new neighbors & their seven-year-old twins and my uncle sent me pictures from kenya and our kids' passports just came in the mail.

sometimes there's so much good going on that my feet barely touch the ground.





now you: what all is making you sing these days?