this plum tree is about 7 feet from my parent's back door, it's top leaves here level with the upper deck. This is what it looked like on Friday.

there was a constant "piff, whiffle" of leaves falling all weekend.

by sunday afternoon the tree looked like this: 

we got to see fall colors! I kept exclaiming at trees and pointing them out to the boys. Connor thought they were all very nice but fletcher was less impressed. "more yellow, mom. why do you like yellow so much?"

I made the trip north last week in two segments; thursday night and friday morning. I am happy to report that Van was amazing in the car. More than 20 hours driving total and he was fussy for maybe a total of 30 minutes. Thank heaven for small miracles. 

So we finally arrive and Mom's at work so I'm visiting with my sisters and I hear after awhile, my own voice (but slightly sweeter) coming from the living room and I pop out of the kitchen saying, "mom! you're home!" 

Does she even look at me? 

that would be a big fat NO.  Hello, I'm chopped liver, nice to meet you. 

Grandpa was determined the next day to get us all out of doors for the day so the kids didn't all congregate around a video game ("kids" referring to both his and mine. I'm not sure when I'll stop referring to my sisters as kids - it may never happen).  We explored a "ghost town", and then went down to the Helena swim hole. 

Dear Residents of Trinity County, 

I am very sorry about the swim hole. My son, being unused to nature, got over-excited and threw so many rocks into the water that it is now a small puddle. Please do not break anything while jumping off of the rope swing next summer.

Sincerely,

Me.

my oldest, after asking "what is star thistle?" decided that it was 

1. a lovely weed for picking (who IS this kid?)

2. impressive head gear. 

while I am trying to get a photo of the finished quilt and organizing my photos from the trip back home, please enjoy the "Twisted Princesses" series by a Disney artist:

sigh. I love Halloween time.  It means it's almost Christmastime....

well, i finished the top and mailed it off on friday to Mom to machine quilt it at her shop.  but there isn't a decent photo because my camera was IN THE CAR. 

so this is a corner of the finished quilt top, with borders, in the passenger seat of the car, at the post office.   good times. 

it looks far more christmas-y and far less autumn-y than I had hoped but it's still very nice looking and hopefully those two spots where my seams dont' even come close to matching up will "quilt out".  I'll take a photo when I get it back. 

speaking of which, I'm going to Weaverville to pick it up this weekend! Yay! Home! Forest! Autumn colors! Weather! The boys are beside themselves with excitement. I must say I am, too. 

My friend Betsey emailed me this morning.  

"You have to have another baby so I have an excuse to buy this for you!" she said. And there was a link to an Etsy shop. I thought to myself, "There is nothing anyone could purchase that would induce me to push another small human out of my body." 

And then I clicked on the LINK: 

shoot. 

A Haiku to Hannah:

She brings me treasures

vintage handmade lace (and cars)

what a good weekend. 

I don't have to get in the car today until 2:15. This is a minor miracle. Here I am blogging instead of driving the boys to school and the husband to work! And I've already got plans for the lace (made, we suspect, by Hannah's grandmother).  

quickly pieced together this top last week. The panel is printed so all I had to do was add the borders. I really love the Daiwabo fabrics!

and progress is being made on the autumn colors quilt I am making for the Fall Festival at the boys' school. We're having a raffle for it. I have to finish it this week so I can get it to my mom for quilting by the weekend - the Festival is in 20 days! 

readysetgo!

step one. Math. figure out how many strips of what widths etc. Cut.

It feels good to be creating something again. I've had a long hiatus.

this one's just for fun:
almost the weekend!

I'm fairly sure that I did not eat store-bought jam until I was in my twenties.  My grandmother and mother made jam as far as I can remember, and then when I moved away I was able to continue to get a supply from them for Christmases or I could snag a couple of jars when I went home to visit. 

But then the Post Office decided that email was cutting into profits and upped their prices and my relatives stopped sending me jam.  

For one who has never had to buy the stuff before, purchasing the appropriate texture and flavor of jam/jelly/preserves/marmalade (do you even know the difference between all of these? I had to educate myself. It was terribly annoying) can be difficult. 

Over the years, I have rec'd a jar of jam here or there from a friend or sister in law or stolen one from my parents' house when they weren't looking (the sour plum tree in our backyard really does make special jam).  But I've still had to buy several jars from the store and about a third of the time whatever I buy ends up getting tossed out because I've not gotten the right flavor/texture of jam/jelly/preserves/marmalade. 

Which brings me to Karen (Mrs. Dr. Goldthorpe there on my side bar - but I'm pretty sure her blog's private. I'm very sorry for your loss, she's a peach). 

Karen is a friend from college. She is tall and slender and athletic and she usually wore her hair in a ponytail and I always saw her in jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers.  Because of Karen I was completely converted to the jeans/t-shirt/sneaker/ponytail look (my does this post have a lot of forward slashes or what?) for some years while I chased small children around my home. It was helpful, but now I'm back to using the curling iron and wearing heels. 

Anyway - Karen had twin girls and painted her toenails for the first time and ventured into crafting.  She's good at what she's done so far, and I can prove it. Last week I got a surprise in the mailbox:

Mrs. Dr. Goldthorpe has recently moved to Montana and decided to see what could be done with the famous huckleberries that populate the state.  Let me tell you; good things could be done.  She sent me 5 jars but by the time I took this photo - 4 or 5 hours after I rec'd the box - one jar "pearberry" (what a scrumptious name!) was already halfway gone. 

But here it is on toast. 

I must say the Pearberry is possibly the prettiest jam I have ever seen. (or jelly. it might be jelly. i didn't actually educate myself. i just pretended to.)

Thanks Karen! Your sugary goodness got us through a seriously bad week of plague and mopeyness!

On the first day of school, my husband said,  "So, I bet he'll be in the principal's office by the end of the week."

But he was wrong.

It took 3. 

"We were playing soccer and then I whapped this kid, and so he stomped on my leg, and then I tripped him, and then he got up and pulled my hair, and then I pulled his hair...."

I'm a terrible mom. I had to leave the room so he didn't see me laughing.  Craig said, "Why did you whap him?"

"well... um. because. because...he was......CHEATING!" (it was obvious he had just come up with that one).

"what did the principal say to you?"

"Um, I don't remember."

sigh.

Confession: 

usually when I see photos of someone's kid all covered in food it kinda grosses me out. "poor kid" I think, "just clean 'em up so they can be happy!"

I have learned my lesson.

he's obviously happiest just. like. this. 

and he'll tell it to your face.  you gotta problem with that?

i've been trying to get more regular about posting - I have even done some sewing that I could pop up here for inspirational viewing. 

it's just that a 5 year old in my house has been sick all week, and a 6 month old in my house has been up screaming all night with a fever, and it's all I can do at the moment to not collapse in a heap.  

healthy thoughts in our direction would be appreciated. 

last saturday the largest employer in my little home town went up in smoke.  130 more people in this economic depression are out of work until.... when? 

the mill in another small town in Trinity county closed down in 1996. There is hardly anything left of that town now.  I hope the lumber mill can rebuild. And  quickly. My thoughts and prayers are with the families who are suffering because of this. Thankfully no one was injured.

this morning my son is hoisting himself up on his knees and elbows. I inform him that a baby his age is not allowed to be doing things that look like crawling.

“stop that.” I say, and gently nudge him over with my foot.

he gives me a screech-laugh and rolls back onto his belly to try again.  he keeps screeching and making happy sounds; like this business is something he’s done before and forgotten how fun it is, and is excited to have that fun again.

I felt that way a couple of times too, watching my older kids when they were toddlers. Playing in the snow and rolling down hills. I remembered how much fun it used to be, and jumped in with them. Didn’t work out so well for me though. The snow just made me cold and wet and rolling pell-mell down a grassy slope just makes me feel sick. 

this kid really is making progress, I think, and wonder if I’m wrong about the whole “you shouldn’t be crawling yet” thing. My oldest didn’t crawl until he was 9 months old but for the life of me I cannot remember when my second was crawling.  

So I google it. Because google has all the answers (well, okay, I just googled “Which church is the true church?” to see and apparently google does NOT have all the answers after all).   The general consensus is 6-10 months. Ambiguous much?

I look down at him. He is two feet further backward than when I started my google search.  

“you won’t be six months old for ten more days, buddy.”  I nudge him onto his back again.

as I walk away, I can hear him laughing.

There is one person who has not been entirely thrilled with the new school year:

Dear Mom, (he wrote, in his most recent letter of complaint)

What have you done with my 24 hour entertainment? Why are they gone for half of my day? As the Center of the Universe, it is my right to have persons available whose sole purpose in life is to make me laugh.  

You kind of suck at that. I need them back. Instantly. 

Also, you are boring. 
and don't even think for a second, Mom, that this fancy new contraption is going to make up for it.  I can see right through your pathetic attempts at getting hobbies and chores done instead of holding me.  Nice try. 

Lots of drooly kisses,

Van

so you can see that I'm going to have to step up and reevaluate my plans for the school year. I am not going to be the uber-housekeeper and getting-fun-things-done-er. I am going to be the entertainer, the holder, the sleep companion. What was I thinking? 

not that I mind, hear. A life of productivity is ideal, but a life of lazing about and playing with the cutest little cherub ever to squirm over the face of the earth is fine with me, too. 

My middlest child had his first day of Kindergarten on Tuesday.  He liked it. 

and my oldest started 4th grade. sheesh. 

they are at a new charter school; a german immersion program that is on its way to being an International Baccalaureate school. It's very exciting to be a part of pioneering such an amazing program. 
sure, the "office" is about the size of my kitchen (that's "small", folks), and we have no cafeteria or art/music room or blacktop or auditorium and sure we're using fancy porta-potties for the time being. 

but it's still pretty exciting. 

Another day, another article. 

This one is all about how Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has angered a large number of his regular customers by having an opinion. 

Well how dare he! And now some 22,000 Facebookers have sworn to boycott the chain because they don't like what the man has to say.  What, are we terrorists now? Are we trying to put a man out of business because he refuses to think the way we want him to? REALLY?!

Happily, the boycott has caused another group of folk to BUYcott the company in St. Louis - Mackey's customers tend to be liberal Democrats rather than conservatives - and try to boost the revenue by shopping in the chain's stores. 

It seems that this outburst is nothing but an excuse for two parties to sit around and call each other names.  How progressive of us all. 

Caitlin Flanagan's recent article in Time Magazine was, I believe, a well written and necessary story of How Life Really Is vs. What People Think is OK.  Marriage is an important part of our life on Earth and a necessary step in the path to raising a healthy and functioning family. 

Divorce and single-parent families have become the norm rather than the exception. The effect that these trends have, and will have on society are already bad and exponentially worse.  How does one affect change in this society? Is it possible for us as a country to reverse this or will we have to have a catastrophic crash-and-burn before things change? 

I have to admit it's hard to be hopeful after seeing statistics like these!

Many of you know that I'm hard pressed to read/watch anything that does not include a love story.  They are simply my favorites.   

Also many of you know that I was not thrilled with the Harry+Ginny story in the last movie.  It could have been so much better, and sweeter, and actually part of the story. But whatever. 

I saw this image in smallsize on Facebook today and I thought, is that... is that Ron and Hermione?!  and I quickly googled it and Yes! It Is Them!

and now I'm hoping that the 7th movie will do a decent job with the sweet love stories that are in the book.  Because this photo is fantastic!

eeeeeeeeeee!

I'm a convert!

After years and years of learning about how to be more eco-friendly and reducing my carbon footprint, I've decided to switch to cloth diapering.  It is so easy, and there are so many options now, that I feel there really is no reason not to anymore.   

Besides the environmental factor, the reusable diapers do not have the chemicals that disposable diapers must use in order to have the absorbency they need.  Healthier for baby, healthier for the environment.  Check it out!

randomly, today is national waffle day.

how embarrassing that I made pancakes for breakfast this morning.

when I was little and we had family gatherings (which was often) the grown-ups would always gather at the table after dinner to play some game or other. shortly after I got married, Grandma and several of her children moved to Alabama, and I never got a chance to learn many of those games. 

so we made Grandma teach us Mexican Train Dominoes while she was here.  We've played it several times since, and even the boys can play. Good times!

When I took her to the airport to leave, Fletcher decided to come with us.  He chatted up people in line, asked questions of the security guards, threw change at random in the gate area; and then when Nana got on the plane we walked to the window to see if we could find her seat. 

We did - 2nd window from the front. "See, there's her white jacket and she is holding her book." But she would have had to hunch way over to look out the window at us, so fletcher just gave a little wave and whispered, "Bye bye, Nana."  It just about killed me. 

Miss you already, Grandma!

"Adventures" with Staci. Also without. 

so. yesterday I headed up to a nice big park so my boys could run off a summer's worth of steam. and my friend staci came with us and the kids had fun jumping in the creek and getting wet from armpits to tennis shoes.  when the low blood sugar and cranky faces set in we decided to head to a place in Culver City to eat. 

a mile or so down the road my phone rang and staci said she'd pulled into the lot of a place called Numero Uno Pizza and it looked fine and maybe we could just eat there so I turned around and we all headed in. the 8 of us were the only ones in the restaurant. It was dingy, and filthy, and smeary.  and then the pizza came. 

on the restaurant's website it says, "The company has built a strong reputation around exceptional food featuring only the highest quality ingredients for our toppings including 100% whole milk mozzarella cheese".

really? hmm. "strong reputation" eh? well I got 3 words for ya. 

NEVER. EAT. THERE. 

and then. Staci hears about this place in Redondo Beach called Seaside Lagoon.  and she was going to head down there with her folks and didn't it sound amazing? sure, yeah, sounds cool lemme call Betsey and it sounds good to her too so we'll see you there yay! 

NO. NOT YAY. 

the first sunny day we've had in weeks had turned cloudy by the time we got there.  thousands of small screaming children ran and played in the shallow waters beneath fountains.  instantly the children were lost from sight. a trip to the bathrooms produced a smell that I hope to scrub from my memory.  betsey said, "at least the water doesn't stink" and we called staci to see if she had arrived yet. 

"no. we're running late. is it bad?"  yes.   "is it as bad as the pizza place yesterday?"  just about.

she laughed. "okay, I'm not coming." 

WHAT?!   so Betsey and I sat on the sand and nursed and talked smack about utah, gave the 10 minute warning and shot out of there like a bat out of some place cold, crowded and briny. 

by the time we got home the water had ripened on my children's skin and clothes and did, in fact, stink. (sulfer, maybe?)

this newfound friendship may be the death of me! staci, next time i get to pick. 

Little Baby Van has a tooth!  and he is determined to eat anything that comes within sight. He got really mad at me for keeping the newspaper out of his reach this morning. 

While Nana is visiting the boys have been sleeping in their sleeping bags. They are in heaven.

It's been a nice visit - despite three and a half days in the hospital for her (THAT was fun) - and the boys are just in love with Nana and full of information for her and questions too.  Connor sits and listens to her stories and our conversations and begs us to keep talking when we run out of ready things to say.  

I've been so glad to have her here, too! I can use my serger now! Still have to study up on all the things it can do but at least now I know how to thread the beast... Thanks, Grandma!

This summer has been a whirlwind! People visiting left and right and activities galore. I'm going to take a deep breath when school starts and hole up for a week to recoup! 

The boys experienced their first baseball game last Thursday - we went and saw the Dodgers play the Braves.  Con insisted on knowing all the stats for each team and all the players; I was unable to oblige with any help and kept pointing him toward the giant screen which would put up helpful facts. 

- and while the "all you can eat" seats were fun, those Dodger Dogs are not all that we were made to expect. I'm just saying. 

Been reading a few entertaining books which makes my last couple of weeks feel more normal. I find that I equate times of my life according to what I was reading then. So when I am not reading anything I feel a little lost. 

Lots of errands today and tomorrow, and then I get my Grandmother's company for a week here.  She's going to show me the ropes with my serger. Hallelujah! 

Progress.

if I'm lucky I'll have the last cushion done today.  A busy weekend and a busy August are coming up and this may be my last day of leisure for quite some time.  Never before have I looked forward to the school season as a reprieve! 

this puff pastry pizza is super easy to make - just take one puff pastry and fold up the edges a bit, add parmesan, zucchini and tomatoes and bake 20 minutes. Its gorgeous and scrumptious. 

and I was the only person in my house who would eat it. 

Hungry?

Are you hungry?
Are you so hungry? 

Those are his favorite words. 

I'm supposed to have finished this by now...

I finally got two of the couch cushions covered a couple of months ago - with the idea that by the end of that week the entire couch would be done. But no. I've still got the throw on the bottom two cushions to hide the chocolate stains. And the milk stains. And orange juice. And that one big rip that nobody will admit to creating.

this is the only before picture I have; I had already covered one cushion before I thought of taking the photo.  It's pretty simple to cover.  It's all very rectangular and really shouldn't  be hard once I actually get down to it. 

I just need to get down to it!

dang it. this new place opened up right across the street from our apartment andIloveitsomuch! I've already gone so many times (6, in 10 days...) that I'm on name-basis with one of the employees and she always gives me a discount.   if there is a Yogurtland near you, you should try it out. Especially if you have kids. You serve everything yourself and there are tons of flavors and toppings to choose from.  And at 30 cents an ounce it's far cheaper than any of the other new yogurt shops. 

YUM. 

today was shots day for littlest guy (middle guy gets 'em tomorrow).  the doctor kept expressing her disbelief at his size and I suppose she has reason:  at 18 lbs 10 oz the kid isn't even on the charts! Luckily he's also very tall.  Not so lucky for my pocketbook since I'm buying him a new wardrobe every few weeks. 

he's also learned a new trick! He can roll from back to front now, and spends all of his waking moments trying to do so whenever I lay him down.  before we know it, he'll be running all around the place. Sigh!

a week and a day ago my very dear friend and my son's very dear wife-to-be came to stay with us for a "long" vacation.  they are with relatives for the weekend and then back with us for only one more night before moving on. 

we've been so busy with them here!  when they lived here I pulled out several of my future daughter-in-law's teeth because I guess I'm good at it. Well on this trip, she returned the favor! Fletch lost his first tooth! (so what if it was an accident - as long as I didn't have to do it!) 

Van found that hair is very fun to hang on to.  She found this hysterical.

much enjoyment of the balcony. even on the cold mornings.

craig brought out the glow-bracelets and they commenced making their own fireworks inside before we headed up to the roof to watch various shows around the city.

One of Con's "cooking" projects, although this one was of the no-bake variety:

He wanted to surprise Elle for dessert one night  (got the recipe from Pioneer Woman). It's amazing how much ice cream will fit into those little pails!

Summer Activities! 

for family night this week my husband said, "let's all pick something that we want to work on for half an hour every day" (he's been needing to get a project done and needed some motivation and support, I'm thinking). 

Fletcher : I'm going to learn to read!

Connor:  I want to cook!

Me:  A hobby. Any hobby! 1/2 hour will be more time than I'm getting now...

Him: said project 

and so far so good. Fletcher is practically learning to read without us, the cute little guy; and Connor has baked/made something every day all week. 

3 of the 4 have been dessert-type foods but who's counting? 

today was the last day of swim lessons. we go back in august for another round and I'm glad. while my little one is no longer terrified to get his face wet at all, he still has a ways to go before I let him in the pool without his ring on. 

he did it! i'll spare you the photo of his look of utter disgust at having actually gone all the way under the water. but at least it was just a look, and not screaming panic. progress!