peachy

56 pounds

that’s how many peaches whitney and i brought home from the river market thursday night.

a moment of weakness. a love of the peach. the unavailability of the peach in arkansas this season due to a late freeze. my sister and the cousins in town, who also love peaches. i love to share. the hot weather. the end of the summer fruit season coming like the end of the harry potter book, slam, bang. oh, i want to experience it, but i don’t want it to be over…

these reasons could all have contributed to my saying, “oh, yes, we’ll take an entire crate of each variety please…” as we poured peaches out all over the counters, i had just a hint of a twinge of, “maybe i bought a few too many…” but it was gone with the dribbling of peach juice down the chins of nine little monkeys…that’s how many cousins there are when we all get together. so we have had pancakes with homemade peach syrup, peaches in our cereal, peaches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. we left a few with friends and grandparents. the answer to any child’s wish for a snack, “have a peach!” and last night after dinner, we had ina garten’s peach crostata from her new cookbook. with ice cream. it just doesn’t get much better than that.

and we’re still going. we have many more peachy treats to make before we get to the bottom of our barrel.

finished

ok, i might have talked cole into spending his birthday gift cards to barnes and noble on the new harry potter book so i could read it. and i finished it tonight. cole and i have been racing. i won, of course. i mean, was there ever any doubt?

so, just so you know…i loved it. i feel great about all the different developments…don’t worry i’m not going to spoil it or anything. but after the first chapter, i thought… oh no, it’s going to be like those new action/adventure movies….lots of blood and violence and pretty much everyone is dead at the end except for maybe one main character, and sometimes he dies too. and who cares because you don’t really like him anyway. you’re more sad about all those side people getting hit just for the heck of it. i hate these movies. people dying in every single take. no suspense or character development. just blood baths.

anyway, i was very afraid that the last harry potter would be this way. no real story, just one long blood bath, interspersed with disturbing torture scenes. but there was story, good story, not that there wasn’t blood shed but there is meaning in it. ok, that’s all i’m going to say. and now i can’t wait for cole to finish so we can talk about it. at the moment, he and i are the only h.p. readers at the chino house…which is ok with me b/c i’ll reread with the next interested chino, since i’ve already forgotten all the details.

“cole, who is kingsley again? oh, and how about mundungus…which one was he???” thank goodness for his 10 year old storage compartment for knowledge. i’m cramming his with whatever i possibly can because there isn’t much room left in mine.

mountaineers

this is my husband taido on the right. and that’s my dad second from the left.  the other guys are friends…corey and rob.

even though i am irritated by his being gone for so stinkin’ long and spending all kinds of money on gadgets that weigh like two ounces less than something you can buy at walmart, i am proud of taido for chasing his dreams, climbing like a zillion peaks in just a few days and coming home psyched by it all.

he loves this stuff.

hip yoga

i am sure you will all be happy to know that after missing yoga on tuesday, i got to go this morning. i keep stealing whitney’s gym passes to go to a class there…because i am way too cheap to join the gym. but i really love yoga. and i really like the instructor at the gym.  in fact, one day, (when God gives me a whole new body…yoga instructors definitely have a certain body type) i think i would like to be a yoga instructor. i don’t know why that is exactly. but it just feels so good. and i would like to help other people feel that good.

at yoga this morning, the instructor showed me how to do something with my hips that i can’t even explain in words. but i have major problems in this area, maybe due to the bearing of ahem, FOUR children, so i appreciate whatever help i can get with their restoration. basically, we were lunging and holding our arms out parallel to the lunging leg. but my hips were like collapsed further forward so that they were level with my thighs, like they just fall that way naturally, like into an uncomfortable split. in fact, they do this in a lot of yoga positions, but i guess i hadn’t realized it before. or realized how much better it feels to have them pulled back up. until today. lupe comes over and adjusts my hips…pulls them up, away from my thighs. oh! that makes all the difference. thank you. so i’m sitting there thinking that even though this hurts, i am doing it right. and i think “i might have moved up a little bit in yogaland today and woohoo, look at me with my hips all up and straight like they are supposed to be!” and then we do a tree pose where you balance on one leg and i am hopping around the entire time trying to gain my balance while everyone else is holding perfectly still, you know, like a tree.

things that disqualify me from becoming a yoga instructor:

the aforementioned body type issue.

i pretty much loathe all other forms of exercise besides yoga and it’s all about balance…most people do yoga to recover their bodies from other kinds of exercise that tighten up their muscles. i’m just there to breathe.

i hate my own body…not allowed…no peace with oneself and all that.

i do not command a presence. have an aura. or an authority. in other words, i’m not sure if i could make everyone stop talking and start the class.

i have a very poor sense of time. a yoga instructor takes you from relaxed to more difficult and then back to relaxed again within a confined amount of time, and you hardly notice the time passing, or the gradual changes from less strenuous to more difficult.

i’m missing the yoga wardrobe. although i’m pretty sure the gearhead could hook me up.

i can’t remember the names of all the poses. “okay, now we’re going to do that one where you put your legs like this and hold your arms like…”

my name is not exotic enough.

10

i have a new mantra. well, it’s not new…is anything really new? but it got me through yesterday. anyway, here it is.

trust in GOD’s grace for what you haven’t done or for what you have done that is bad or for what you wish you could do. and don’t let all the haves, wishes, have nots, etc keep you from doing something that you want to do now. (like not posting b/c i want a picture of my10 yr old on this post…but i don’t have a current one handy)

as mantras go, i know that is kind of wordy. but whatever. it’s mine, so you don’t have to worry about its not being catchy or difficult to remember. maybe i’ll revise it when the good Lord restores my sanity. anyway, yesterday morning i had reached the end of the line. i actually said out loud…”ok kids, i am about to lose it here. i need some help! please don’t push me over the edge.” thank GOD i had called in a babysitter so i could go to yoga yesterday morning, because taido had called the night before as he got off his umpteenth peak at 10pm and said that he would be returning from his TWO WEEK LONG mountaineering adventure around dinner time. well, yesterday morning, dinner time felt like it was two more weeks away. the closer it gets the further it seems i tell you. so after pulling wet sheets off beds and clearing a path in the closet to the crawl space that our heat/air man needed access to, i said goodbye to kids and sweet sitter and left for yoga. breathe. breathe. and guess what? it was cancelled. cancelled! of course it was. it has been a rough couple of weeks and so of course it was cancelled. my yoga instructor is on vacation. which of course, she needs. don’t we all? and of course i had not been recently to get the announcement. there ya go. so i went to my other favorite place on earth. the library. and i wrote in my journal. i cried at a table in the library. and i just sort of soaked in the quiet. after a while i pulled out another journal i had thrown in my bag a few days earlier. i have a journal for each of my kids. i started them when they were born and wrote the stories of their births on the first few pages and then i try to write in them every year on their birthdays. the idea was that i would also fill in other special days or write in them when i wanted to remember something funny they said or did. well, as is often the way that these kinds of things go, i haven’t written in them nearly as much as i originally intended. in fact, cole’s last entry was from two years ago. nothing about last summer. nothing about last fall, when he and i fought almost every day. and the entry from two years ago was just a quick list of things he’d done that summer. the summer he turned 8. and now he’s 10. he turned 10 yesterday. usually, i would get so upset about not having kept up with this sort of thing that i wouldn’t write in it at all, but yesterday God smiled on me and gave me that moment of grace i needed. just that exact moment. i heard a voice inside me say that i couldn’t worry about what i had missed but that whatever i could give him today would be enough. one day i want to give my kids these journals, like maybe when they graduate from college or get married or something. so anything i write will be something. so i wrote cole a long letter for his 10th birthday. i told him how sorry i am for so much of the way this year has gone. his anger, my poor responses, his anger again, my poor responses again. i just poured out the story of our last year together and the small mercy that our spring of homeschooling has been to our relationship. i told him that i will always remember how simon could make him smile this year when no one else could, and maybe that is part of simon’s purpose in our house. anyway, it was not a major celebration. it wasn’t earth shattering. but it is a small gift for him on his birthday. the biggest gift came in the door just before dinner. and we all just took a deep breathe and said, “phew.” and tomorrow, we will party like 10 year olds do. on water slides.

book over movie, every time

ok…my son is turning 10 in just a few hours so we went on a date tonight to see the new harry potter movie… now…friends, i know i am not the only one who has been looking forward to the movie version of fred and george’s exceptionally wonderful exit from hogwart’s since reading the order of the phoenix. really, i think i went to see this movie just for that scene. and oh, they just could have done soooo much more. it was good. but it wasn’t great…like in the book… you read it and you just think, oh YES! what a performance! finally, that woman got what was coming to her. it is such a perfect sweet revenge moment. i just didn’t feel it in that same way in the movie. maybe it’s because i was expecting it. maybe it’s because i am just feeling a little twingy about heading into the double digits. i’m not sure.

helena bonham carter was amazing as bellatrix. we agreed that she freaked us out more than voldemort this time around. yikes.

and i think we definitely hated dolores umbridge like we were supposed to. oooh, she is icky.

still though, hermione is my favorite. she is by far the best transfer-from-book-to-movie character in the series with alan rickman as snape being a close second.

ang

friends, meet my sister. it took talking about card playing to get her and my brother into the comment chain on my blog. but now she has joined blogworld, so watch out. also, you will soon learn (if you didn’t already know) that most of my cooking genius starts with something i had at her house. she is a brilliant chef, caterer and mommy, among many other things. enjoy the yummies from her table at her new food blog! you won’t be sorry…

mid-american dream

for lack of a better plan, mother and i drove to hot springs yesterday…in the rain. we thought it would stop eventually and we could go see this garden that she’s been very excited about. of course, it did not stop. it has rained and rained all week. so instead we went to mid-america museum. now you would think that having grown up in arkansas that i would have been to this little gem of an outing before. we spent many weekends and even whole weeks at lake ouachita during my childhood, and this place is not far from the marinas we frequented. but, alas, we never got to go. other families would load up and go somewhere while it rained and rained at the lake, but we stayed in our tent (and later inside our houseboat…which was really a party barge that my dad and uncle enclosed themselves with siding in our backyard…which, by the way, is a whole ‘nother post…) and played cards. my family could play cards for days, i tell you…days. there was no way in hell my dad would EVER have loaded us up and taken us to the mid-america museum…or mid-america anything. it just wasn’t happening. “deal another round. have another coke. can you believe we still have ice? now that’s an exhibit. ice after four or five days at the lake in 90 degrees. that’s a feat, i tell you!” (can you hear him??) so you can understand why we never made it to the museum. we would beg to just go to a restaurant to break up the monotony. “we got food in those ice chests, honey! are you hungry? there’s still potatoes in there from last night. and ketchup to go with them…shoot!”

well, after a disastrous lunch at a restaurant. i have four children. one of them is 1. he does not cooperate at restaurants, especially ones that don’t have high chairs, which is generally a sign that, ahem, maybe they don’t want you there if you have children. we decided it was not going to stop raining for us to go to these gardens and so we’d better head over to the museum. yipee. i was finally getting to go to the blasted mid-america museum. i have been hearing about this place for my whole life. i can still remember the commercial on t.v. with kids’ hair standing straight up touching the plasma ball. woooo. well, i’m soooo sorry if this place is like your favorite, but i have to tell you that it was a severe disappointment. for several reasons too depressing to mention, my perspective is a little off this week, which might be skewing my outlook on life. but i’m not sure that on the best of days i would have loved this place. first we climb into a “simulator” which shakes a little while you watch a screen that plays a sad video game run (ours was “glacier run”) and i guess you’re supposed to feel like you’re riding the run. mmmm. it was hot and crowded mostly. the simulator…and actually the whole museum. the kids ran around and experienced the place while mother and i took turns trying to keep simon from crying, which is basically done by keeping the stroller moving AT ALL TIMES…even if it means running over a few children. after about an hour of wishing someone would just put me out of my misery, we ended our time at the museum with the LASER SHOW…oooooooh. i’m still so amazed that i don’t know what to say. i sat in the back nursing simon and trying not to fall asleep. however, the man running the show was great. he takes his job very seriously. please do not block his booth with your stroller. he might need to get out to refill his giant coffee cup. it takes a lot of caffeine to push buttons on a computer in order to make some colored lines appear on a screen AND play music at the same time.

i really wish we hadn’t gone, not because it was sort of lame but because the mid-america museum has lived in my mind for such a long time as a place i ought to go one day. and now, the next time it rains at the lake, i’ll be dealing the cards. without so much as a sigh for the hope of getting off the lake with other families to go to experience a simulator AND a laser light show in the same day! scoop me some ice out of that cooler and deal another round. i’ll be staying in.

the highlight of the day was that we stopped at starbucks on the way home. i had a coffee frappaccino with an extra shot of espresso, also known as an espresso frappaccino. i’m telling you…that’s the way to do it. if there had been starbucks in hot springs when i was younger, i think we might have actually gotten my dad off the lake on rainy days. but i can’t be certain. we do have coffee presses now, and the coolers will keep the cream fresh for days.

heart work

while sitting in church on sunday morning, i played a game with myself to try to get the pit in my stomach to settle down. i had already cried through our pastor’s prayer for a family who lost their 19 year old daughter in a car accident on saturday, and i was driven to distraction by the fact that at the end of the service, an announcement would be made regarding a family that i love dearly who would be soon leaving our church to go and work at another church in another town. far away from here. actually i think it is another country.

this “game” is one that i’ve mentioned before that we have to play around our house a lot. it’s called “for what are you grateful today?” this may sound like a trite way to band-aid a bad mood, but i believe with all my heart that gratefulness, particularly gratefulness to God, is the antidote to despair. so, while harold was preaching, and i’m pretty sure i need to listen to the sermon online since i was slightly less than present, i made my list.

1. long skirts and dresses. i can actually be comfortable, not shave my legs and not look like a total slob all at the same time.

2. a good haircut. now i can’t talk about who cuts and colors my hair because that would make me sad again, but i have a great haircut, the advantages of which include not having to wash or fix my hair for days and its still looking passable. this opinion, of course, is subjective, but never the less, it goes along with not having to put forth too much effort to be presentable which ranks extremely high on my list of things for which to be grateful.

3. the river market…you knew it was coming. i tell you, it was the bright spot in my weekend. gobs of corn, arugula for days, a gallon bucket of blackberries and piles of vegetables, most of which i chopped and roasted yesterday to put in my orzo pasta. and i’ve finally found whole wheat orzo at amazon, yet another thing for which to be grateful. ooh and my oven, which can roast 4 pans of vegetables at one time…i love that thing. it’s the details that make me happy.

4. movie therapy. i watched two movies over the weekend that i loved. miss potter and the painted veil. i could write an entire post on the painted veil, but i can’t do it without ruining the ending. i feel that this movie will certainly be my favorite of 2007. both stories were so beautiful. one about a writer and one from a book that was well-written, so the characters had the sort of depth and richness that can only come from being based on great writing. as i thought about both movies during the church service sunday, i wrote in my journal, “i am meditating upon the truth that it is bettter to live in the middle of something wonderful for a short time than to have a whole lifetime of the unexceptional. so live fully while i live—love with abandon, especially my husband–my marriage is a such a precious gift–if i neglect it, Lord, let me be sent to the middle of a cholera epidemic.”

5. book club. i’m reading a book right now for book club that i would never have picked up on my own. it is gripping…in a way that keeps me up at night reading. one more chapter and then off to bed… i can’t say what i think about it yet, b/c i’m not done, but i will be by friday at 7. hopefully.

and that pretty much sums up where i am this morning…hopefully. hopefully, the sad events of last week will fade from being so so sad at some point. but today i’m holding on to little weensy things that make me smile or even just distract me in the midst of mourning, which it is the time for. tomorrow there will be a very sad funeral at my church, after which i will come home and have some whole wheat orzo. it won’t fix the sadness, but hopefully a little whole grain and vegetables will remind me that God provides, even in the details.

plastic poison

i am not crazy i am not crazy i am not crazy…

just so we have that clear. i have been mercilessly mocked for my reactions to this article, posted here several weeks ago. but i keep coming across confirmation.

i have switched to SIGG water bottles, and i discovered today that i can even get simon his own! which i am definitely considering after reading this and this. Also this PDF document is a great breakdown on toxins in plastic.

so…even though several men i won’t name (because they were, ahem, watching my children for me), fed my children all kinds of poison last night. AT LEAST, the cokes were in glass bottles! what a relief.