New GEMINI––Finally!

I'm pleased to introduce GEMINI Issue #13: Down on the Farm.

It's been two years since the last issue, and I'm feeling a bit sheepish about that. But I didn't expect to produce one at all while I was in school, so this is a bit of a bonus (and it's reason #3 that I have not been blogging much the last few weeks).

I've had certain family friends asking about when the next issue will come out, and M has been bugging me to get another one going (he likes to read and reread the hilarious things he and his brothers say). Once he saw me working on this one, every evening we were home he'd say, "Want to work on your zine, Mom?" "Why aren't you working on your zine?" The pressure, I tell you!

So, here it is, designed to please.

Inside, you will find:

Not one, but two stories about the Great Chicken Saga of 2012 (never-before read details of ferocious wild animals and familial strife).

Crudely-drawn cartoons.

An illustrated update of the boys.

My surprising birthday purchase.

A delicious, seasonal, healthful recipe.

And of course the all-favorite kid quotes.

Humor!

Poignancy!

All for only $4!

You can order via PayPal on my sidebar over there------------------>

AND, you can leave a comment on this post between now and midnight Wednesday, June 26, 2013, for a chance to win a free copy.

Info on past GEMINI issues here, here, here, here and here. 

Ninety-Five Pages Later...

I finally stopped moving around commas and sent in my final Third Semester Project (reason number two, right after baseball season, that I haven't been in this space much lately). 

Mother, Nature: Women Writing at the Confluence of Family and the Natural World

So, maybe I went a teensy bit overboard (it was only supposed to be 35 pages), but I really didn't want to narrow my topic, and my mentor was perfectly happy to read all 95 pages, so I just dug in went for it. And I really enjoyed the whole process, from reading the books, choosing quotes, taking notes, reflecting, making connections, and putting it all together in a way that made sense. I know, weird right? Maybe I should have gone into academia. Ha!

Anyway, it's done, and I'm so very pleased. It is weird to think, though, about putting so much into writing something that no one will actually read. I never thought about that as an undergrad, that my teachers would be the only ones to ever lay eyes on my papers, though that was probably a good thing.

In any case, I printed out a copy for myself and found this fancy report cover in our school supply cabinet to put it in, so I can at least put it on my desk and admire it for a few weeks.

Weekend Things

I woke up super early Saturday morning, and, after working on some homework, I went for a walk in the woods with a pair of binoculars (in my pajamas). I didn't end up looking at any birds, other than a couple of song sparrows hopping on a downed willow tree in the river, but just walked and listened, in a sort of sleepy daze. When I got back to the house, I switched binocs for camera, and documented a bit of the excitement going on in our yard right now.

Siberian irises.

The chicken memorial peony.

Peas! C likes to brag tell the story that he was making maple syrup one weekend, and planting the garden the next. It's true––I thought he was crazy planting peas the first week of April, but now they're almost as tall as me.

And blooming! After a day of sunshine, this lonely blossom had lots of friends.

M had his last baseball game Saturday. It was a playoff and they lost. I have to admit to traiterous relief. E and Z have two more games this week, then maybe our life will start to get back to normal, although I don't expect it to really calm down until the kids all go off to college I get back from Ireland.

In the afternoon, we went to the neighbor's field and picked wild strawberries.

Which are small, but so perfectly sweet and tart and so very strawberry that they're absolutely worth crawling about in the grass in search of them.

We've had so much rain over the last month or so, that I just felt compelled to walk around barefoot in the sun taking pictures of things. My lazy garden has come alive with divine-smelling bearded iris.

And poppies. I adore poppies. They remind me of the old lady who lived next door to us when I was little, Mrs. Birch, and of my grandmother. They grew all around the town she lived in high in the Rocky Mountains (rumor had it that it was so cold there, nothing else would grow).

As the day wore on, and after I got a reasonable amount of housework done (by paying E $2.50 to vacuum and mop), I felt a little projecty, so I threw together a little fabric banner, like this and hung it on the playhouse.

For Father's Day, Sunday, I dragged treated C to a trip to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.

Do I not need this for a writer's cottage???

E and Z, as usual, spent most of the time trying to fall into the ponds catch frogs.

I spent a lot of time trying to get M to smile nicely for a photograph, since he forgot to get his picture taken on school picture day. With only a day-and-a-half left of school, I needed to get it done quick.

I also got a Father's Day picture of C with his boys.

And finally got one of Mama and her boys.

You would never guess it from this picture, but the boys spent most of the time we were there bickering and fighting (ah, fairy houses, the great peacemakers).

Also, E and Z seem to have regressed back into three-year-olds, only with bigger vocabularies and a wider range of interests, asking questions about everything all day long. I finally declared "no more questions" at about five o'clock. It didn't stop them from asking, but I stopped answering.

We missed the peak of rhododendrons and azaleas in the garden, which was a little disappointing (we'll have to make sure to get there Memorial weekend next year), but lots of lady's slippers were still blooming everywhere. So amazing. I've never seen so many anywhere.

I was so happy to finally get some things done that I wanted to do this weekend (I feel like I've been spinning my wheels for months!). I also finished this book and started this one (prep for Ireland), and C and I watched this movie, which is the best movie I've seen in a long time. I wanted to watch it again.

The only thing I didn't get done was to make this jam (people keep eating my grapefruits!).

How was your weekend?

Frolic

Last weekend, the boys and I spent a day at the Fiber Frolic. Watching the sheepdog demonstration is always a highlight of the event.

As is, of course, all the gorgeous fiber.

 

And a whole booth of fantastic vintage notions, beautifully displayed (from here).

Maybe it was the heat, but there didn't seem to be as many sheep and alpacas as usual (and I didn't see any llamas), 

but the boys were fascinated to watch this alpaca being shorn.

They always try to talk me into buying a bunny ("Pet this one mom. See? You're not allergic. You didn't sneeze or anything.").

We managed to walk away without a rabbit, but I did come home with a gorgeous skein of grey angora rabbit yarn, which needs to find its way into a project very soon.

What We've Been Up To

Whew, I've finally made it to the library, for the first time in weeks, tonight, catching up on a bit of uploading and downloading and corresponding and writing and a quick blog update.

Since last time I was here, we've had a LOT of rain, some beautiful spring sun, and a couple of wonderful taste-of-summer days (I will NOT tolerate anyone complaining about the heat, yet). It looks like we're back to the rain again, with Tropical Storm Andrea (ha ha) headed our way.

The lilacs have come and gone, which always makes me sad (especially when it rains most of the time they're in bloom!). The irises and daylilies are blooming now.

We've done some more projects:

Z, working on this kestral.

E's "Tom Lighthouse's World" trading cards.

Fun with the recycling bin: marker spinning top.

Fun with the recycling bin: antenna fishing pole.

Homemade playdough.

We've caught dragonflies,

Weeded gardens,

Picked spinach and radishes, and planted three new birthday blueberry bushes.

We've done cartwheels,

Blown dandelions,

Watched turtles and birds, walked in the woods, and plucked off ticks. We swam in the lake, had two sick kids, gone on four field trips, had two field days, and played lots and lots of baseball.

Okay, I haven't played much baseball myself (nor have I had any field trips or field days), but I've watched an awful lot of it.

This weekend, if it doesn't rain too much, E wants to go gold panning, and Z wants to go fishing. M has a baseball practice, and I have a school budget meeting. I hope to do a teensy bit of sewing and a lot of reading, and take a new picture for my banner...brrr that blizzard is making me cold.

What have you been up to?

Projects

In theory, I'm a big fan of projects. I read the Project-Based Homeschooling blog obsessively, I always have a ton of projects of my own going on at a time, and I love when my kids come up with something, like a toilet-paper roll marble-run or a pizza-box airplane. But when they come home from school with project assignments, I tend to panic and feel like a python has wrapped itself around my esophagus.

Maybe it all goes back to the time when M had to make a model of an avalanche, while C was away at his grandfather's funeral in Vermont, we were in the middle of a blizzard (if not avalanche) of our own, Z had a high fever and we were out of children's Tylenol. 

Whatever the cause, when E and Z came home from school with project assignments the Friday before we left for camping I wanted to scream. With two weekends fully booked and nearly every night devoted to The American Pastime, I had no idea when we would get them made. Especially since Z wanted to carve a prairie falcon for his.

With some drill-sargeant-like time management (one night when baseball practice was cancelled and Saturday afternoon, while M was hanging with his buddies), we managed to complete both projects in time.

Z was not receptive to the idea of carving soap, but after a bit of discussion, he did acquiesce to relief carving, rather than 3-D, for this, his first project. I happened to have a set of little chisels in the basement, leftover from that time I was going to learn to carve, but never got around to it. He did great, and I hardly helped him at all, other than the suggestion of enlarging the bird photo from the book and tracing it for his pattern (and a little painting right at the end, when he ran out of enthusiasm for all that blue). Once he asked me to do the details around the wings, but it turned out that he handled the tools much better than I did, and took them back from me after two attempted feathers.

For something completely different, E wanted to make a stuffed animal road runner. I recommended felt, for ease of use and no unravelingIt ended up being not so much stuffed as flat...and I might put E to work making my Christmas ornaments next year.

I ended up helping him a lot more than I did Z––cutting out pieces and sewing around the tricky parts, like beak and feet, and I glued on the background when E, too, ran out of energy and enthusiasm right at the end. It's interesting how much more I helped with the work I know how to do and am comfortable with, while with something neither of us knew about, Z took the lead. It will be a good lesson to keep in mind for future projects.

They both seemed to have fun and were proud of their results, but I'd really love to make time for them to do more self-directed project work.

Birthday Wrap-Up

We survived the Big Birthday Weekend.

Friday night, we celebrated E and Z's day with pizza and cake (by my baker friend––the first time I ever that I didn't bake my own kids' cakes!) and a friend of theirs among the crazy sculptures at our favorite farm store.

Saturday, M had his band members over and they played some Nirvana and AC/DC in the basement while I made my free-range-organic version of one of his favorite meals––hot wings. I had the genius idea (if I don't say so myself) of serving root beer floats instead of birthday cake. Easy and delicious!

And, yes, I actually did make a purchase from vanhalenstore.com.

Which just shows you the lengths I would go to to make this boy happy.

Sunday we went to Boston and visited the Science Museum with my sister and brother-in-law, who were in town for my niece's graduation. Unfortunately, she was sick, so we missed seeing her (and she missed her own commencement ceremony!). Other than a broken switch in the driver-side window that left us driving a wind tunnel from the New Hampshire tollbooth on, we had a great time, and now we have a membership, so we will go back at least once in the next year. I forgot to take my camera, which turned out kind of nice––I could just relax and enjoy watching the kids do the museumy things, without worrying about documenting it all.

Monday night, M's actual birthday, after a quick picnic in the park of gas-station sandwiches and pizza, we all went to M's baseball game, where he scored the only run of the game, by hitting a double and then stealing third and home while the ball was still in play. Can you think of a better birthday present for a twelve-year-old?

After we got home and got the other two boys in bed, and M finished his social studies homework, he and I went out to look at the stars. He had been supposed to sketch the stars and moon over the weekend, which he failed to mention until Sunday night, as we drove home from Boston under the clouds (we should have gone to the planetarium!).

We took a blanket out to the neighbor's field, and lay down, he with his head on my hip, and watched the face in the gibbous moon (looking more like a lady than a man), peer out around a cluster of clouds and grow a rainbow halo. We found Castor and Pollux, Spica and Arcturus, waited while the Big Dipper emerged from behind the clouds, and wondered where Saturn should have been at that hour.

Afterward, walking back to the house, drawings in hand, M, my newly-minted twelve-year-old, said, "Thanks for bringing me out here, Mom." I love that kid.