a Kira’s worth

(One of these Wednesdays soon I’m going to get back to Kate’s Blog Carnival.  I think I’ve about got my Madhouse mojo back, so come visit again!)

Both my girls are fairly petite. They’re oh, maybe 10th percentile height, and plummet-off-the-chart on weight. This doesn’t disturb me, though every once in a while I think that it might be nice if Megs makes it to 40 pounds at some point before she turns 7 in November.

For years I didn’t own a scale, but after I hit my mid-forties it seemed reasonable to start keeping a little better tab on my weight. Plus I’m on that quest currently, if you recall, to carry a half-dozen or so fewer pounds up Grandfather Mountain in September.

Anyway, it’s gotten to be something of a routine, weighing myself in the morning (only after I pee, c’mon, you know you do it too). And then Megan wants to weigh herself too, which means that of course Kira has to as well.

Megan hovers around 38, sometimes spiking 39, and Kira has been consistently 28 since July, when she had an official weigh-in.

So it amused me that when we went blueberry picking this morning, the combined family effort tallied up at exactly 28lbs: one Kira in blueberries.

For a mere 75 minutes’ worth of picking, I should add; how incredible is THAT? They were growing in huge grape-like clusters, weighting down the branches, a nimiety of numminess.  I swear I only picked from like three bushes in the whole time.   (They grow five different kinds of Rabbit-Eye Highbush, they said, in case you’re wondering.)

And in case you’re wondering what a Kira of blueberries looks like:

plus one quart being eaten at this very moment

And in case you’re wondering what I’m going to DO with a Kira of blueberries, I have to confess I’m not quite sure. Anyone out there got any spectacular blueberry recipes to share?

forgive me, St. Francis

It’s 10pm and what I SHOULD be is headed to bed in greedy anticipation of the Elizabeth Strout novel I haven’t had time to list on my Currently Cracked page. Instead, I’m in the throes of total mommy guilt and dismay.

I got so righteously peeved at Megan’s bedtime fit over losing the little bag with her front tooth in it — the one that the Tooth Fairy, in her Benevolence, had acquiesced in allowing her to keep for an extra day so as to show her best buddy; the bag that of course I had TOLD HER AND TOLD HER was likely to be misplaced if she insisted on toting it around with her from place to place all day, and with ALL. THIS. STUFF everywhere that never gets put away, no WONDER she couldn’t find it — that I went on a wee rampage after lights out.

I cleaned up the entire sunroom/playroom. Which has been the stage over the last two days for a lot of imaginative play. Among other opportunities for strewage, she and her next-door BF have been playing Animal Doctor, which means every single box and basket has been emptied of its rightful contents and pressed into use as an infirmary bed for a stuffed animal. And out of cardboard bricks they built a vehicle, virtually to scale, that took them and both their little sisters “on an imaginary trip in an imaginary car to an imaginary place.”

In a full-on vent of exasperation, I stacked the bricks in two boring pillars. And began razing the veterinary hospital, heartlessly dumping the infirm and sick onto the floor along with their toilet-paper bedding, determined to put all the dishes and dolls and puzzles and blocks back into their rightful boxes and bins and baskets.

And then saw the casts fashioned of yarn, wrapped tidily and tightly around broken limbs. Realized the smaller animals were two to a bed, due to conditions of severe overcrowding at the hospital. Several had bottles propped to their mouths; others, strong enough for solid diets, had bottle caps with beads in. Head injuries received pillows; blankets were dispensed for the chilled. They’d clearly taken in strays and hopeless causes, paying no heed to the status of their insurance.

And I lost all heart for my storm, wishing I’d left it whole, this wonderful thing they’d created over the last two days. I’d completely wrecked it by the time the scope of its design broke through my ire; it wasn’t as if I could put it back. But part of me wanted to do exactly that.

Instead, I went about the process of picking up every last perler and puzzle piece and Lite-Brite peg, fluffing pillows and re-positioning furniture, I suppose because I had to pretend that it was important enough to be completed.

Saturday, she was wet

So it probably would’ve been smart to check the radar BEFORE the ride.   But I was busy wakin’ up and such.

This is what it looked like AFTER, when I thought to amuse myself by glancing at it:

blowin' on through

Lord but we rode through, and through, and THROUGH that mess.

Midway into our chosen route there’s a great five-mile gradual descent that is, under ordinary circumstances, a complete blast, effortlessly flying along with a big grin on your face.

It was torture.  Chattering teeth, goosebumps, and numb fingers, riding the brakes to keep from building too much speed.  We huddled for twenty minutes or so at a tiny rural church trying mostly unsuccessfully to warm up a bit.  Bless them for their small covered porch, with benches thereon.

Rural, as in no cell coverage, because all four of us agreed that if ever there was a time to bail on a ride, this was it.  “Bailing” being a particularly appropriate term. We had one long slow ugly climb behind us, and a steeper one in front.  And as the one familiar with the route, my input was that the descent after that climb wasn’t anything we wanted to be doing on wet roads.

So here’s the obligatory grime-line photo:

note the raisin toes

And here, sadly, is another photo from the day:

you get the idea. there's more.

Yeah.  Rookie move.

Given my comment as we discussed our (foiled) bailout plan, you’d think that even though it stopped raining just in time for the climb, and the sun came out shortly before we summitted, all four of us together, and I was feeling so good and just plain happy… YOU’D THINK that I’d've exercised extreme caution on the descent.

Oh, I wasn’t screaming down it; I wasn’t being a comPLETE numbskull.  But by the time I realized I was going just that hair too fast, I was into the apex of the turn and braking would have been even dumber. And while a more skilled rider might have been able to pull off something to pull out of it, I performed what my buddy Frank — who’s watched twenty or so years of them — termed “the classic Tour De France slide.”

Right.  Yeah.  Except those guys ARE flying.  And they have, you know, a podium, paycheck, prestige, that sort of thing, all potentially waiting for them at the bottom of their descent.  Me?  None of the above.

I am grateful beyond words that each of my ride buds was able to avoid me and stop safely as I went about the process of removing skin from various parts of my body.

And thankful that my bike and I were both only scuffed, not seriously damaged, so that after a short assessment and brake straightening, we could remount and head for home.

And I realized on the way that it was the first time the MPM has ever seen me return any the worse for wear from a ride — meaning it’s been at least 10 years since I’ve hit the pavement.  Time to start the clock over.

If you don’t count the particularly unattractive saddlebag look from the swelling below my left hip bone, I’m surprisingly fine today, fetchingly adorned with a young fortune’s worth of Tegaderm, treatment of choice for road rash.  (I’m sure it’s a petroleum product, Reeechard, and I am grateful for it.)

And because I’m just a little twisted, perhaps, I’m gonna say that save for about 30 feet of it, it was a great ride. 

family-photo Friday

a newfound skill

We were visiting my bestest CL, whose sons are like cousins to my girls, and adventurous in spades.   We envision instigation of daring enterprises and adventures for years to come.  This maneuver was demonstrated after lunch one day by her 6-year-old… and attempted forthwith by Megs.

puzzle princess

Kira’s been on a puzzle tear for several weeks now.

(I tend to avoid the whole P word, largely though not entirely due to its arrogation by the Disney machine, but what else could I possibly caption this?)

grime time

I convinced myself that the radar looked pretty innocuous. Just a few cells, nothing to get all worked up about and wimp out on the ride. We’re in the valley between a couple-few ridges, and those storms always break up when they come across the mountains.

Or not.

We took cover briefly — when it came down so hard it felt like someone was chucking handfuls of pebbles at us, and we plain lost our visual on the roadway — but mostly we just rode on.

Those aren’t mere grime lines, but grime RIDGES, where it collected at the top of my socks…

screen it

My friend B has many talents, but prime among them I’d have to count vision.  Not the 20/20 kind — she’d be the first to ask you to read her cell phone screen to see whether or not she needs to answer it — but the ability to walk into your house and see something different than what you see. Or to see beyond what you see, is maybe more accurate.

She walked this week into the room off our kitchen that passes as a pantry-cum-catchall and announced that I needed to make it into a usable space.  A sitting area, maybe.  Or a screen porch.

She tossed that out, casual-like.

So.  If you’ve ever seen a shark bite on chum, you have a good visual of my reaction.

Oh, it’s not the southern sweep of annexed outdoor space I truly crave, but I am nothing if not reasonable, if not amenable to compromise, if not willing to accept and wholeheartedly embrace a slightly pallid version of my true technicolor dream.  My first (and former) house had a screen porch, and I’ve missed it sorely.  I do love to sit and relax somewhere and be connected to the smells and sounds and texture of the outside world, but since I am the official Mosquito Magnet, our very pleasant patio just doesn’t work for me much of the year.

But jeez, I said to B, where would I put all this stuff I store here?  She glanced around and announced that I was spoiled.  Spoiled by space.

Hmm.  You think??

In all its cringe-worthy glory.

Somehow all that stuff, as stuff is wont to do, simply accumulated to fill the depth and breadth of available space.  Laws of physics?  Wanton partying and irresponsible sex going on, and the stuff simply begat more stuff?  I’m leaning toward the latter:  the Tupperware had an all-night rave, the coffee grinder got it on with the banana tree and the pizza rack was doing the nasty with the garlic roaster.  And no, I don’t even want to THINK about what the party beer tubs were doing with the coolers.

I do know, however, that they weren’t drinking the booze, because the bottles are covered with dust.  Time was we had a fair number of liquor-drinkin friends, and that was simply the stuff of weekends.  As a result, we own a full stock of all the regulation booze, and some frou-frou too.  Three, six, nine, eighteen bottles I counted.  Virtually all of which have been idle for better than a half-dozen years, though come to think I did make some killer bourbon spiced pecans two Christmases ago.

It’s not a great space for a screen porch — it’s a little narrow, and frankly on the petite side overall — but I think it’ll suffice.  There’s room for us to have breakfast out there.  And access from the front yard will cleverly provides a detour around the catastrophic level of clutter that might, just might, be my living room at a given moment, thereby providing me that place for the casual-dropping-by conversation:   “Won’t you step around to the screen porch?  I’ll meet you with an iced tea/mimosa/margarita.”

Not that I got a bee in my bonnet about it or anything, but I spent the two days following B’s pronouncement on a cleaning/purging/reorganizing bender the likes of which would make Martha herself proud.  And the first contractor came by today to take a look, and another is due shortly.

So come sit on our (screen) porch.  Just give us a couple months.  And if all y’all come at once, just know it’s gonna be pretty cozy.

porchin it

Our neighbors — fabulous beyond words — have a sign over their steps that reads “Come Sit On Our Porch.”  Somewhere along the way (and long before the practice of verbing became rampant and dangerous) they coined the phrase “to porch,” meaning to do as the sign says:  gather, visit, perhaps sip or nibble.  Over the last two decades, I’d hazard a guess that thousands of people across the generations have porched at their place.

If I don’t corral my wandering brain,  this whole post will end up being about them and their porch, but that’s not my intent.  Straight course there, sister.  Eye on the compass, now.

There’s something about a porch.  It’s neutral space.  The interior of your home may have just qualified to receive federal aid as a disaster zone, but if a casual acquaintance stops by to, say, drop something off, you can step out the door, gesture to the chairs on your porch and say, Won’t you sit a spell?  (Or whatever you say there in your part of the country.)

And because it’s neutral space, the casual acquaintance doesn’t feel that they are intruding onto your personal domain, so they say, Why, I’d love to.  They sit, you visit, and perhaps by the time they leave the acquaintance on both sides has even been deepened some past the casual.

Our house, across the street and built in an entirely different decade, is porchless.  After we moved in the MPM and I kicked around the idea of slapping a porch on the front, but we shortly learned that there’s no “slapping” involved with constructing on the grade of our yard.   No, it was a serious cement-pourin’ proposition with a starting pricetag of 25K+ — and, of course, no hope of ever realizing any of that investment on the back end.  Your kitchen remodel, your bath remodel, those dollars you can look to recoup.  A porch?  Bah.  No one ponies up for a porch.

So the drawings are around here somewhere, but the porch plan has been officially tabled.

And on a cool summer morning such as this one, when the time feels lazy and sun and the cicadas promise heat to come, that just seems a sad cryin’ shame.

B2B

I’ve made reference before to the fact that once I publicly announce I’m going to do this or that, it’s a hell-or-high-water proposition, so I tend not to make many of those sort of pronouncements. But I’ve signed up, paid my money, made the plan, so I might as well dish: I’m planning to ride my third century ever (that’s 100 miles, for those of you not hep to bikin’ lingo).

It’s on September 20th, and when it first came across my radar some months back it was by the innocuous title of “Bridge To Bridge,” or B2B. Unlike “Mountains of Misery,” the very first century I undertook, back in 2005, one might be lulled into thinking that this could be a stroll, or roll, in the park.

Well, until one finds out that the actual title of the ride is “The Bridge To Bridge Challenge” and that it ends with a climb up the legendary Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. Um. People cry on this climb.

Earlier this evening I was looking for a bit more information and ran across a bulletin board with some chatter about the B2B, upon which one encouraging soul had posted simply this phrase: “Prepare to die.”

Lovely.

So, well, there’s public pronouncement #1. I have got some serious miles to schedule for the next month. Long slow nasty climbs, my faaavorite. (Watch that the sarcasm doesn’t drip on your toes there.)

Public pronouncement #2 is that I weighed myself last week and the very accurate scale showed 137.4LB, and I have determined that the notion of carrying 5 fewer LBses up Grandfather Mountain has some distinct appeal. I’m not exactly the dieting type, but I’m saying HERE OUT LOUD that I’m going to make an effort to eat a few fewer desserts, especially in the middle of the day, and (sigh) give some second helpings a good leaving alone for the next 5 weeks.

But you can be sure I will be eating LARGE on the evening of September 20th. Reeechard, who is the causal agent of all of this proclaiming and anticipation of misery and such, has been running potential post-ride menus by me, the likes of:

Blackened salmon with a mango/black bean/poblano relish, rosemary risotto, and some grilled asparagus with garlic and kosher salt.

With Peach (if I can find some ripe ones) or Apple something with a big dollop of ice cream.

Large, I tell you. LARGE.

appendage

For those who care enough to click or scroll back to Sunday, I’ve loaded up just a few photos from the last YS trip… wish I had some good ones of the band to share, but I discovered it’s startlingly hard to capture six musicians all looking photogenic at the same time.

summer Sunday

So here we are, back in Yellow Springs, because I couldn’t stand the thought that it would be Thanksgiving or maybe later before we’d see everyone again so we squeezed this visit in between two events back home we really didn’t want to miss.  We leave tomorrow, and the time has gone by so fast I think we must be bending light or something.

(update:  photos added!)

Usually we come and just, you know, hang out for days and days doing not much of anything notable, but this has been an event-full visit.  Among other things, we managed to time our time here with my fabulous aunt’s annual whirlwind stopover and a gig of my brother’s band, The UnderCovered.

Toward the end of their first set they blew the place away — to the degree that I find myself wondering if it’s even still on the map — with their rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” complete with soaring soprano and, um, french horn.  This, my friends, is not your average rock’n'roll cover band.  And I may be a teeny bit prejudiced, but I’m going to state categorically that it was one hell of a show.

I love this photo of my big bro havin' himself a big grin

I hated to leave without hearing every last song, but it was past midnight, we had a teen-age sitter, and I’d resolved to run in this benefit 5K the next morning. I should maybe note that I’ve run exactly twice since the beginning of July, and my last finish line for a 5K was ten years ago. While my time reflected both those things I did manage sub-8s so I wasn’t comPLETEly mortified.  In a town of 4000-some, they had almost 150 women show up to run or walk in this first-time event, which is pretty darn remarkable.  As were the girls who came up with the idea.

Simply Women 5K Run/Walk

That afternoon we headed to Art on the Lawn, which probably began as five folks sitting out on a Saturday with some paintings for sale on a card table and now is a huge event covering most of the substantial grounds of the elementary school.  I bought some totally cool pottery soup bowls there that you will be jealous of, so do check back to see the appended photos.

too hot for soup... fits one humonstrous tomato

And then this morning, while Megan had some one-on-one time with her grandma, I took Kira down to a local cafe to enjoy one of their Famous Breakfast Burritos, which I have Beth to thank for introducing me to.  (Which is funny because I grew up here and she didn’t.)  About the time it arrived at my table a fellow wandered in, promptly walked over and snagged a guitar that was hanging on the wall, sat down and began playing perfect Sunday-morning-breakfast music.

After a bit another woman came in carrying her own in a case, got it out and tuned up and they were off into some nice harmonies, right there at the next table, utterly entrancing Kira.  I love this town, I really do.

The MPM is outside now loading up bikes and such, Megan is off having her Sleepover Night at the grandparents’, Kira is asleep here next to me and I’m starting to think about the chores and responsibilities that await me 7 hours’ drive down the road.   The garden weeds were looking pretty scary even before the rain and hot days we’ve been absent for, so I’m thinking I may be in machete territory by the time I get out there Wednesday morning.

And even though school for Megan doesn’t start until like the middle of September, classes start and the MPM returns to campus in less than two weeks, so it really feels like it’s time to start singing the swan song of summer’s end.

Boo.  Hoo.

finding the floor

About 5:30 this afternoon found me outright sobbing on the MPM’s shoulder in a too-hot kitchen.  I’d just come down from like the twentieth confrontation of the day with Megan and been gut-smacked with the thought that I really, really can’t do this every day for the forseeable future; I can’t, and yet I must.

Hence, despair.

“This” being contend with the grumpy, defiant, slant-glancing, stubborn, contemptuous, attitudinous child of six years and eight months who lives with us and is, in fact, our own flesh and blood.

e.g.:

We have a very few rules here at Casa Fraught as pertain to the daily endeavors of said six-year-old.  And I swear to all that’s holy and a number of things that aren’t that we get pushback on Every. Single. One of them.

One rule — summertime only, instituted this year — is that her room is to be tidy before she comes downstairs.  “Tidy” simply means there’s to be no crap on the floor that doesn’t reasonably belong there.  I don’t dictate what’s done with said crap, and I don’t care if the top of each of her dressers and bed tables is a jumbled craptastrophic pile of crap.

Well, truthfully I do care, but — again — I don’t dictate.  I just want to be able to walk, and vacuum if the mood overtakes me.   I’ve already conceded, and informed her, that when she’s a teenager she can make choices about her room, but while I’m charged with maintaining the general sanitary aspect of that square footage in our house, we are not entering into negotiations about the tidy-floor rule.

But lo and beat your head against the wall, this relatively minor expectation for conduct is turning into a major, major battleground.  She feels she should be able to keep her room as she wishes; clean it when she wants, or not, as she wants.  And while it’s my rule, and I think it’s a good one, there’s a teeny voice in my head that says, well, why not?  It’s her room.

And then there’s the other voice that says, Because it’s good to learn the habit.  Because chaos means lost items, and lost items mean my time searching for them (i.e., library books).  Because clutter Makes Me Crazy, and I’m the mommy.

Words of wisdom?  Voice from the trenches?  How do you do it at your place?  Compare/contrast to family of origin?  What works??