the mud

Every morning as my son gets ready for school I have to remind him of several things: Did you brush your teeth, comb your hair, put on CLEAN socks, make your bed, clean out the backpack, take your lunch, take the jumpropeforheart forms, take out the trash, take snack money, remember your instrument, get your test signed?  To which he replies, "It doesn't matter, mom."  He's not being totally defiant.  I think he looks at me in my tired tirades and just thinks, "She doesn't get it.  She doesn't get that the hard part about school is not remembering all these things, it's getting there and getting in line with someone you may or may not like and getting in a seat and getting your work out and getting the work done before someone says time's up.  It's about being kind and being ready to answer and being ready to defend yourself or someone else and being on task and being a good listener and being careful of others and being careful not to make m...

Ready for sunnin'... Ready for sittin'... Ready for sipping'... NOT ready for swimmin'... But will be soon!

So, this is our master bedroom.  Pretty bland and boring.  I love my bed, which we bought about 8 years ago from a catalog.  But the old shams and blanket just weren't what I envisioned for our master retreat.  The old wreath too.... it's gotta go.  So we began with a paint color.  I'm all about free paint and Ace Hardware had free quarts of paint on Saturdays during the month of March.  I thought I would only need one because I was only painting the wall behind the bed, but I add to go back the following weekend.  If you remember the rest of the room is wallpapered and we are not into self-torture trying to get it all removed.  So we're working within our limits.  Painting one wall. I found this lovely color at the paint store that coordinates with the wallpaper and the window treatments but isn't too dated.  (Or so I thought...)  It's a pale aqua blue called Crystal Lake, ironic because that's the name of a lake near ...

It is one of the rewards of being human - we can grow things.  We can plant and harvest and enjoy the benefits of what we sow.  I so enjoy watching my children grow.  I enjoy watching my garden grow. Last fall I planted bulbs that I hoped would come up and they did: So beautiful and so strong!  All winter those little bulbs had the nourishment they needed to thrive and this spring they decorated my front yard and it was so rewarding! But sometimes, I don't want things to grow.  There is a really old tree stump out our front door that was cut down years ago.  That thing still wants to grow, even though I have taken the hatchet to it about twenty times now.  I have pounded away at the stump as hard as I could until there are splinters of wood everywhere and no dirt covering the roots and I think surely that will be the end of that.  Yet each morning it is still sprouting up new green things that I don't want to be there....