balancing act

One of the tips this time (solicited advice, to be fair 🙂 ) was to go visit the Learning Is Fun store.

We hit the store immediately after gymnastics, and oh, it was wonderful. There were bookcases upon bookcases of neatly arranged quality educational materials, all organized by topic. There was a solar system section, with oversized books, wood puzzles, and hanging mobiles. The game section had something for every age and every learning hurdle. I had a hard time convincing myself not to linger at the anatomy models and skeleton floor puzzles.

It even smelled invitingly creative, like fresh paper and glue.

There also were several other women about my age there, with their hair smartly highlighted and funky glasses perched on intelligent noses. I had fun pretending I had it all together, too. It was a little odd that none of them had their children with them. In fact, there were no other children at all in the store. Were these women taking a break to pretend they had it all together? Or maybe they were all teachers, with a day off?

I left without dropping a penny, but our five minute visit was enough to raise my thoughts to higher levels.

It’s time.

I’m re-instituting our daily schedule. Again.

earning her letters

I reinstitute my schedule about once every couple weeks (or months, depending on the season). It’s easy to beat myself up about not following it better.

It’s easy to beat myself up about a lot of things.

learning... filling buckets or lighting fires?

The first thing on my schedule is to pray. I need it.

The kids need it, too.

hard at work

By the way, it takes a lot of coordination to use scissors. Sometimes it helps if you stick out your tongue.

extra help

Go on… give it a try!

works for him

If you pray, would you mind… could we be on your list this morning?

This schedule really makes everyone so much happier.

I’m going to try it with my tongue stuck out this time and see if it goes better.

runs in the family

Thanks.

P.S. While you’re here, please be sure to check out my sister’s very first gardening post! We’ll hear from her as the mood strikes… which will be more often as the weather gets warmer! It WILL get warmer, right?!

We have reached new heights of winter denial. My sister (following more than one family tradition) is writing about gardening, and I am typing her words as a four-foot drift continues to grow outside my back door. I think there’s much of the same back home.

So, without further ado… please join me in giving a WARM welcome to Gerber Gardens! Take it away, sis:

I’m moody today.

Perhaps not the best way to start a blog, but I’m just coming from a January weekend with temperatures in the high sixties. It’s now Monday, there is a layer of ice on everything, and the forecast says that by Wednesday, the temperature will be negative five (and no, that’s not the wind chill). Welcome to Kansas weather and the roller-coaster of being a Kansas gardener.

Fellow Kansas gardeners will now nod their heads in understanding.

“Ah, yes, we all fall for the January-warm-spell trick.”

The temperatures begin to feel like spring, and avid gardeners, ever hopeful, put on their spring boots and head outdoors to dream of this season’s pickle-perfect cucumbers and four-pound tomatoes.

Burpee catalog list

… but now it’s icy, and we’re supposed to get four to eight inches of snow.
… sigh … So put the mud boots away and forget trying to get the rototiller out. Even frost-tolerant spinach seeds won’t grow in this.

Every year gardeners fall for the same trick. Their dormant daydreams begin to flow, they take inventory of their seeds, and they forget that it’s really the middle of winter in Kansas.

in good company

I say, God bless the heart of a gardener, always hopeful, always eager, always willing to accept and nurture the slightest signs of life.

Welcome to my gardening blog. I’m Annie, younger sister to Debbie, wife of Drew, and mother-to-be of my first child, whose name is yet unknown. I come by my love of gardening honestly, with my mom teaching us early on that bindweed must be pulled up slowly to get the most root, and that peaches taste best with warm, July juice running down your arm.

I suppose I should add that my reason for writing this is that I have found that gardening awakens in me the philosopher, the scientist, the hippy (in the sprouts-on-your-hummus-sandwich and whole-grain-sesame-seed-granola way), and at times, even my favorite aspects of myself. So, I hope that you enjoy my successes and failures during this gardening season, and I’ll try to keep my following posts QUITE a bit shorter.

gardening books... for starters

Happy snowy week, all… Keep the garden dreams toasty warm.

Any mother of young children should know better than to have a long, involved conversation on the phone.

Especially when potty training. And most especially when potty training three preschoolers at once.

When all three kids are on relatively the same biological schedule, it can become difficult to keep up with, the… uh… immediate aftermath of each potty training “event.” Occasionally it happens that one trainee may escape without having been properly fumigated yet.

Welcome to a morning at my house. Aren’t you glad you stopped by?

Thursday morning, as I finished my phone call, a diaper went missing… the culprit cheerily shrugging shoulders in response to my shocked queries.

“WHERE IS YOUR DIAPER??!”

(Cheery shoulder shrug.)

“Um… I dunno!”

Things like this never happen in isolation. While I’m cleaning up one crisis, another is being pasted on the wall in honey, or scrawled in loving heart shapes on furniture. This morning, a second trainee simultaneously attempted an independent potty training run – success! And then struggled (unsuccessfully, do I even have to add) to make a clean break from the toilet seat… quite possibly the grossest part of potty training.

Somebody help me…

On a morning like this, it is entirely possible – although completely unprecedented and unexpected – that an unwiped wanderer might be discovered…

perched…

on…

my pillow.

Oh my.

A new to-do item landed itself a spot at the top of my Thursday list: Burn bedding.

Some days I feel like every clean, delicate, feminine nerve ending that ever resided in this body has been frayed, frazzled, and cauterized. I really do try to read reflective meditations on rosy pictures of motherhood. I make it my goal, in theory, to aim for the ideal. Most days, though, a sense of humor is the highest form of meditation I can muster.

Thursday morning, I threw everything in the wash, loudly resolving to send all my kids to the bears, who, sensibly, take care of these matters outside.

Apparently this disturbed my sensitive eldest daughter (not implicated in any of the morning’s business). She ventured up, as the washing machine began its “heavy-duty” fury.

“Mom,” she said, obviously trying to determine whether to worry or to laugh.

“Mom, do I make you happy?”

Oh…

How a child can turn frazzled nerves into a melted mound of mush.

If only she could know.

beyond words

I tried (after we were all clean, presentable, and reassured) to embed a slide show of the photo book of our meandering hike (can it be any other kind of hike, with toddlers?). Until I figure out how to do it, regular photos will have to do. These are all clickable, for larger views, for those who really love lots of pictures of the kids. 🙂

space to breathe...

to begin... as family...

to find... focus...

How is it that environment so affects state of mind?

to gather... old flowers like thoughts...

raising up... tangled mess...

confidence... to explore...

ascending... to joy...

together... to journey...

the path... homeward...

Thanks so much, again, for keeping me company this morning. A bear hunt turned out to be just the thing we needed to clear the air… and our thoughts.

Here’s to a CLEAN and refreshing week!

Come plant your feet in the sand…

happy toes

kick back with a piña colada… (er, popsicle)…

beach photoshoppage

and relax in our castle in the sun!

the stage is set

I was so grateful last week for every comment from people who cheered me up, cracked me up, and couldn’t stop short of showing me up! 🙂 So many people said kind things about the photos… I got nervous! It reminded me of my mom’s story of her oil painting lessons in high school. Her instructor raved over the paintings, but she didn’t know how she had done it, and she was afraid she couldn’t do it again. So… she quit! Her amazingly detailed, textured paintings hang in some of our houses. As far as I know, though, she never tried oil painting after the beautiful first few.

I am trying to remember I’m just doing this for fun… in spite of my fears of failing entirely.

just for fun

The photo of the day. The catchlights in her eyes make me HAPPY.

The rest of the photos will be fun for a family album. In fact, I’ve already scrapped them into a photo book. Come sit by our pile of sand and flip through the book – Every one of these faces is precious to me.

start the party!

photo book pages 2 & 3 (old news)

I was debating to myself whether our umbrella was really too big for these purposes. My son piped up, “Oooooh. No, it can never be too big!” Wonder where he gets that…

beach boys

You can click on the pictures and squint a lot to see what I wrote – but it’s basically the same things I’ve written here.

When my ever-supportive husband heard what I was planning for the week, he asked, “HOW much sand did you buy??!” (It was around 200 pounds.) He was there to witness the castle demolition, which got smiles from our oldest daughter – her Daddy’s girl.

feeling happy

getting into it

boats and sea turtles

The keep-the-popsicle-out-of-the-sand thing was too much for our two-year-old.

popsicles (aka transition out of the sand)

Why do I always feel let down when it’s all over? Maybe it feels like you’ve visited, and now you have to go back home…

and you're leaving me with the cleanup! 🙂

Next week, I am avoiding messes… accepting the cold reality of January… and venturing out on the mountain for some vitamin D and fill-flash shooting! (If you’d like to stick around while I clean up, you can see – or skip – my extra miscellany post this week.)

Now… what to do with the sand…

Speaking of disconnected, this post is all about covering a few things that don’t fit anywhere else.

1. I cut my daughter’s hair last week and immediately felt the heart-pangs of regret. First, I’m not good at cutting hair – I should have taken her somewhere. Second, I removed far more of her precious baby hair than I intended. And third, she looks SO terribly grown up.

haircut by fire

but she LOVES it!

I tell my kids, after a hair cut, that the best thing about hair is that it grows. Sort of like renewed mercy. There is always hope.

My son desperately needs a hair cut and is actually begging me to do it. Do I dare?!

2. I promised last week that I would post my experiments with a free trial download of Adobe Lightroom. The “free” part is dangerous, and Adobe knows this. It’s how I ended up buying Photoshop a couple years ago (after downloading the free 30-day trial of Photoshop Elements, followed by another 30-day trial of the full version).

I ran out of time to do anything post-worthy, and I have a LONG way to go to fully explore this software. But this blog is all about keeping me going with learning something new. A promise is a promise, so here’s a first super-quick try with an admittedly poor photo:

running out of time

If I decide I need to add Lightroom to the arsenal, I have less than six months (yay!) to take advantage of the huge student/faculty discount.

3. I also promised I would post my experiments with shooting fully manual. It’s really fairly easy to change the camera settings, and it’s nice to have full control.

window wishing

It’s not so easy to monitor the exposure myself all the time. I was rapidly checking the exposure and trying to change settings while keeping the autofocus on a child who had moved already since I last checked the exposure. (This is why I chose my most quiet child as the subject.) If I had known photography was an active sport requiring the use of my reflexes, I would have reconsidered it as a hobby!

Next week I’ll be covering soup can alphabetization, via mental imagery. 😉

4. I got up early this morning and got better at manual shooting (part of the reason I posted so late this morning). I discovered that I can see the exposure meter and settings in the viewfinder, making it much easier to change settings quickly. This is SOOC (straight out of camera) from this morning. Kinda cool…

setting moon at sunrise

I’d love to get a photo like this with a silhouette of one of the horses. But if you click on this picture and look really, really closely in the lower LH corner, you can see our miniature goat, Cream! Coffee is there, too, but he’s too black to see.

Edited: Here they are! 🙂

Coffee & Cream in moonlight

On the upside, the mashed peel helped pick up the granola from the sofa crevices.

While I leave my family dissecting my grammar (apparently a preposition is not something to end a sentence with 😉 ), I’ll move on to the high point of the week for me – the photos I took for the blog! I should be able to get out of the snow-packed driveway this afternoon, finally, to get sand for our beach-in-January. In the meantime, we pulled out the finger paints.

The day started out so beautifully organized:

anticipation

And the kids did such a lovely job:

picture perfect

You expect, of course, that finger paints will not stay on the fingers:

the serious artist

synchronized painting

Tip: If you do this with kids who have colds, wipe noses well, before you start. Eww. Once the colors mix together, you start to wonder…

mixed media?

I realized how much I needed to count on Crayola’s “non-toxic” and “washable” promises:

can we get this in banana flavor?!

Toward the end, “art” went by the wayside, in favor of experiencing the moment. Finger paints are kinda slippery:

mud-wrestling style

picture of success

pleeeease can I take a bath now?

This is what I feel like at the end of most days:

the masterpiece

But it is a GOOD thing to set aside my own worries and make a child’s day happy.

so let's get started already!

Thanks so much for making MY day by “coming” to keep me company on the snowy mountain this morning. And you didn’t even have to sit on my eau du bain-ana sofa. (Leaving that tangled mess for the French-speaking family members to dissect… 🙂 )

sunrise on the foothills

We cranked up the heat in the house, found summertime clothes (they picked their own), and got the bubble maker running:

thinking warm

a fragile proposition

feel the summer

barefoot

catching wishes

swimming in it

This was my first attempt at off-camera flash, just getting the pieces to work together and not worrying too much about the details of lighting arrangements yet. Honestly, assembling the bubble maker was the hardest part of the basic setup. It would go a long way toward peace on earth if I did not buy things involving batteries, Allen wrenches, or instruction sheets!

In spite of all the mistakes I am seeing in the above pictures (chopped fingertips?! oops – and this setup is going to push me to shoot fully manual if nothing else will), the bubbles brought some cheer to the household. There were several other strikes against the post-holiday blues this week, too… gentle things, for a rough time of year:

1. A friend of the family posted a series of sweet, funny pictures of my parents’ place, with creative narration.

2. My perpetually optimistic husband got us started on the P90X workout videos. He rocks. I think it was on the 25th frog squat/leap that I started feeling more like a giraffe on Jell-O than anything else. The trainer was hysterical, without meaning to be… He did say one encouraging thing, though, not just for workouts:
The important thing is to keep showing up… just keep pressing play.
Gentle words from steel and brawn.

3. A family friend and professional photographer spent some time giving me tips, and an advanced amateur acquaintance invited me to join a skill building challenge group. It will take a few weeks to start implementing these things, but their kindness was a much-needed, well-timed boost.

4. It’s my mom’s birthday – TODAY! I posted last week that she got a baseball glove and funky socks for Christmas. Just an example of one of many reasons I appreciate her so much.

5. My daughter learned to wink, which was pretty hysterical as well. (Family – and those who know you are – Does this remind you of someone we know, showing us how he really does wiggle his ears?!) If I can enjoy my daughter’s attempts at something new with grace and humor, I can do the same for myself.

wink

My younger sister’s friend (a kindergarten teacher) made plaster handprints for all the little ones. We missed my older sister’s family for this.

memories in plaster

And then she took this awesome picture with her new camera, and gave me permission to post it:

handprints on the stairs (taken by above friend)

Snuggles:

brother's beautiful family

pro at getting his picture taken

a pink Christmas for her

Horseback rides were next:

like old friends

his favorite picture

Yes, we have miniature goats. They keep the horses company. And I admit… I like them. 🙂

seriously funny animals

Lots of games… An explanation of the one below: Which one word, placed before or after each of the four listed words, makes each phrase make sense? (E.g., man, melting, shoe, storm all go with snow: snowman, melting snow, snowshoe, snow storm.) How about these:
1) thumb, boy, Uncle, cat
2) shirt, cat, gate, wind
3) horse, side, worthy, Red
4) stop, camel, bone, bare

game on the go

There were a multitude of other activities that were un-photographed or that will stay in the family album: reading the Christmas story, late-night laughs, a hike to a gold mine, playing piano. My brother suggested a shoe pile picture… we missed your shoes in the pile:

missing the rest of our family

from the choice of wrapping paper…

retro wrapping

to the gifts that were on the wish lists…

vintage (taken by my sister)

never old

to the complete surprises that were sure to be a hit…

budding ballerina

boat builder

boy+train=total absorption

It even shows up in the way gifts are opened (how did he know he was getting dumbbells?!):

no fair shaking presents!

Friends & family, old & new…

husband's brother

sister's best friend

expecting him or her