1.

A bonus post for today! But this one’s mostly for me: another little addition to our family collection of All About Weeds stories.

Strangely, I can’t find the first All About Weeds story in my archives. I’m sure I must have written about it here! But maybe not. Maybe it was pre-Bonny Glen, a tale posted to a homeschooling message board instead. I suppose it must have been, now I think about it: my Amazon history tells me I purchased the book on July 13, 2002. And it entered our lives as a library book some time before that. Which fact (its being a library book) provides the drama of the first anecdote, actually.

2.

We’d moved to Virginia only a few months earlier (on New Year’s Day, 2002, as a matter of fact). When spring arrived, O glorious mid-Atlantic spring with its abundance of dogwood and redbud blossoms, I was in a mania to know every single plant growing in our yard. Among the books I checked out from the adorable train-depot-turned-library in our little town was a rather dusty tome about weeds. I did say every plant.

I flipped through the weed book but I found it rather dry, and besides, I was sidetracked by what would become a years-long obsession with Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards. (Chip, meet block.) All About Weeds sat neglected (so I thought) on a table for a day or two, and then I returned it to the library.

Soon after, Jane (age sevenish, I think? heavens, that was a long time ago) came to me, came to me all in a dither. Where, she begged most earnestly to know, WHERE was that fascinating weeds book?

When I told her I’d returned it to the library, she was crushed. It was the BEST BOOK EVER, I was informed (in tones conveying, yes, both capitals and italics). Full of the MOST INTERESTING information. 

And as my shopping history testifies, so persuaded was I of the merits of this superior tome that I purchased a copy for keeps.

3.

The best and perfect weed book makes a number of appearances on this blog, even if its origin story has been lost to the archives of some distant Yahoogroup. “Bonny Glen Firsts” (published in 2011) tells me it was in fact the second book I ever mentioned here:

Second book mentioned (though not by name): All About Weeds, a Jane favorite for years. Seriously.

(Ah, there you go. Not mentioned by name. I’ll have to dig up that post.)

I find it mentioned in a March, 2006 post called “The Tide Is Going Out“—an early exploration of my tidal homeschooling concept.

The other day a neighbor asked me if we take a spring break. I laughed and said, “Yes—the whole spring!”

We’ve had such a pleasant time the last couple of months, immersing ourselves in some good books and other forms of study. Now the outdoors is beckoning, and our daily rhythms are shifting. Spring is calling us, urging us out of the house. We are a bunch of Mary Lennoxes, unable to resist the rustlings and chirpings, the spikes of green, the gypsy winds.

I keep finding cups of water on the counter with tiny blossoms floating like fairy lily pads: the first bluets and starry white chickweed flowers. Chickweed, so Jane tells me, is an edible plant and quite tasty. (“Like sugar snap pea pods, Mom.”) She has begged me not to uproot the vast patch of it that has taken over a stretch of our backyard mulch bed, just uphill from the strawberries. Another weed, a purple-flowered plant the children call “cow parsley,” is popping up all over the lawn, much to their delight: they suck the nectar from the itty bitty orchid-like blossoms and proclaim it better than the honeysuckle they’ll seek out later in the summer.

Jane, who had been binging on math during the past three weeks, seems to have shifted her attentions to botany. I find myself tripping over her tattered copy of All About Weeds everywhere I go, and upstairs, the microscope is much in demand for the viewing of leaf cross sections. An experiment involving scarlet runner beans has become the centerpiece on the kitchen table.

So there we are, four years later, and Weeds is still in constant use. It seems wee 2002 Jane hadn’t been overstating her affections.

A month after that, April 2006: “Things to Do While Your Mother Is in the Hospital” (delivering your baby sister). This one—which is the post that sparked today’s story and this entire trip down memory lane—made me laugh pretty hard. (Not at poor Rose’s plight. At The Book’s role in her recovery.)

If you are seven…

…get stung under the chin by a wasp.

If you are ten…

…recall a passage from that scintillating classic, All About Weeds, describing the sting-soothing properties of yarrow, and concoct a poultice of newly emerging yarrow leaves with which to soothe your little sister’s wasp sting.

Well done, young Jane!

4.

Which brings me to today. Huck’s birthday post keeps turning up melt-my-heart tidbits in the “related posts” widget at the bottom of the page. I was clicking along a little baby-picture rabbit trail when I happened upon the “things to do” post above. Rilla, who was aww-ing over my shoulder at her adorable baby brother’s toddler antics, was transfixed by this glimpse at what her big sisters were up to on the day she was born. She read the post breathlessly, pausing only to interject “Oh, I love that book!” at the bit about “that scintillating classic.”

The chip doesn’t fall far from, er, the older chip.

5.

We found the book, you know, during last week’s grand shelf-cleaning. It has been returned to its permanent spot on Jane’s bookcase.

1.

I wrote a quickie booknotes post last night in the five minutes between work and family movie time, but I took it down a short while later because it was too quick, too silent about events I actually have quite a lot of words for. Choice words. Not all of them fit for my kids’ ears. I’ve been speaking them elsewhere and seem to have annoyed a fair number of people. Well, that’s too bad. I suspect I’ll be saying more, not less, in days to come. Perhaps not always here, in this space which is a happy little retreat for me. But maybe here too. There is so very much to say.

(Deep breath, fingers twitching.) Not this minute. Right now, I need to work. So I’m going to just open a space for a family story or two. If you want my activist voice, come on over to Facebook or Twitter.

2.

A couple of days ago, a Girl Scout rang the bell. It’s cookie season, as you know. I turned her down with regrets, because, frankly, five dollars a box is too rich for my blood.

An hour later, another ring, another sweet kid, another set of regrets.

THREE MINUTES LATER, another doorbell chime. But this time it was our neighbor, Guy—who seriously is the nicest guy—holding out three boxes of cookies.

“I can’t say no to a little girl,” he said, thrusting Do-si-dos, Samoas, and Tagalongs into my arms. “But I also can’t eat these cookies.”

My children would like to raise a statue in his honor.

3.

My son wrote the following about me in an email to a friend: “She used to cook dinner or all the time until Dad [took over the meal prep] and now she only Cooks now and then. Her Specialties are sandwiches and leftovers.”

I may need to add that to my resumé.

4.

I had garden-y things to add to this post but my five twenty minutes are up. Tomorrow, maybe. And I’m going to re-post the one I took down yesterday (it’s not much of anything, trust me, just disconnected sentences about what we’re reading) now that I’ve had a chance to explain why I was quiet (here) over the (tumultuous) weekend.

We’re in the car on the way to piano class. There’s a heavy sigh from the backseat—a bone-deep sigh full of longing.

“Sometimes,” says Rilla, “sometimes I wish I were a mantis shrimp.”

I’ll let you sit with that for a moment. I was baffled by this remark but Beanie knew at once what she meant.

“I know, right? Twelve color rods!”

And then they explained to me that human eyes have three photoreceptors, giving us sensitivity to red, blue, and green light. Mantis shrimp have twelve photoreceptors. Rilla was staring out the window, wishing she could see the world in more colors.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that this is a recreation of the Jamestown fort. As my friend Lori said on Instagram, “the Ikea stepstools are a dead giveaway.”

The settlers are getting along all right so far, despite a stagnant water supply and a rather heated dispute about whether the fort should, or should not, have an anachronistic radio tower. I mean, why let a perfectly good tomato cage go unused?

One young settler expressed consternation over the gap in the walls of the brick storehouse (due to the discovery of a brown widow at the bottom of the old brick pile), but his older compatriot pointed out the storehouse needed a doorway, after all. Crisis averted.

–Did it rain last night or is that condensation
–Wait, I thought “morning dew” meant poop
–Various spellings and meanings of do/dew/doo
–Ice/water/steam, water vapor, why condensation happens
–Is that guardrail crumpled from a car crashing into it
–Why are they called “action figures” instead of dolls
–Where do you think the monkey will be hidden this time
–Are peanut butter crackers sweets
–Sewing, pros and cons
–What to spend birthday money on: probably K’nex
–That bus is too long to be Steve’s
–Why does Steve ride the bus
–What does “qualifications” mean
–Qualifications for being on American Ninja Warrior
–Really nice job parking, mom

Last night I was chatting with Jane on Slack—she had a story for me about her Victorian Lit class—and Sherlock Holmes came up. She asked if I remembered how old she was when she started reading them. I was guessing around age ten or eleven—was it before or after our move to California?—and she remembered that she first encountered Sherlock on a Jim Weiss story tape. So: Virginia probably. Then she pinged a burst of laughter—

lol lol lol i just searched bonny glen + jim weiss

“Jim’s Sherlock Holmes stories inspired Jane, at age eight, to tackle the Arthur Conan Doyle originals.“

Good old blog comes through again. Our family memory bank.

Of course this made me wince, knowing I’ve dropped the ball on daily posts yet again. I do have a lot of tidbits stashed in drafts, but those aren’t searchable.

We’ve talked so much about how our collective shift to social networks changed our blogging habits, both as blog writers and readers. One of the more subtle shifts, I think, began to happen even before we jumped on Facebook: bit by bit our blogs took on a more formal tone. On Facebook and Twitter, we’re looser, less polished. Personal blogs used to feel spontaneous, immediate, diaristic. A few of them still do, but I think on the broad spectrum of kinds of writing, a blog post is usually closer to essay than tweet. These social conventions fascinate me. These days, more people are likely to read and respond to my writing on Facebook than on Bonny Glen, yet I feel freer about slapdashing an unpolished thought over there.

I used to worry about losing things on Facebook or Twitter. I’d post funny kid quotes there and then, zip, they’d be carried along by the current and disappear. I wanted to archive all those memories here, and I worked out elaborate systems for saving things. I even had a side-blog for a while that was nothing but kid-related tweets I wanted to save. Later, I got savvier and set up IFTTT functions that automatically archive all my Twitter and FB posts in Evernote. This is both handy and dandy, but it’s a clunky substitute for the searchable family chronicle that is this blog.

I’m laughing at myself because I’ve traveled this loop before. There’s such an obvious and simple fix: just post the kid stuff here. Because odds are that one day Rilla will ping me from college—probably via a tooth implant that will trigger my phone-necklace to display her text on the back of my hand—wanting to know when, exactly, was her heavy origami phase. So, for the record: April of 2017, right after you turned eleven, I walked into my bedroom after tucking in the boys, and you pounced on me with a square of pink paper. Which is why I had to write your sister, ten minutes later, to apologize for disappearing in the middle of our Slack conversation.

Lissa: [9:00 PM]
Sorry, Rilla came in with an urgent need to teach me how to make an origami piano

Jane:  [9:00 PM]
that sounds entirely reasonable

Beanie’s take on the Romantic poets: “I was into childhood before childhood was cool.”

***

Have just been informed there are two crane flies in the patio room. Their names are Bert and Arugula.

***

My kids have been setting up this game of Catan for so long it’s an entirely new generation of settlers from the ones who left the homeland.

***

—writes funny tweet
—nah, that’s 100% snark, doesn’t further convo
—okay, I’ll just send it to Scott instead
—he asks me to marry him again

***

Neighbor just rang our bell. Dead crane fly in her hand. “Thought your crew might want a close look!” She gets us.

***

Huck: Can I get some short jeans?
Me: Short jeans?
Huck: Yeah, like Rilla is wearing.
Me: Ah yes! Jean shorts!

***

One of the sweet kids whose classroom I visited on Thursday wrote a thank-you note to “Melissa Lively.” Wondering if it’s too late to change my pen name.

***

Personal aesthetic: buttered toast.

***

Beanie: You and Rose think in words. Rilla thinks in pictures. I think in colors and sounds. I’m not sure what Jane thinks in. Me: Elvish runes, probably.

***

I completed a downright lyrical grant application for a wetland restoration project in LA County today, but my proudest accomplishment of the day is photoshopping* a pic of Adam Driver dropping a cup of coffee on the ground.

*very poorly
*not actually in Photoshop
*in Powerpoint, all right? Look, I was busy.

***

In the car on the way to piano lessons, there’s a heavy sigh from the backseat. Rilla: Sometimes…sometimes I just wish I were a mantis shrimp.

Me: “Our family uses a lot of hyperbole.”
Rilla: “Mom, I would NEVER do that.”

Tuesday, 23 February 2010

So today Rilla asked if we could play a game where I pretend I’m her mommy. Um. OK. About ten minutes in, she said, “Can you pause the game for a second? I need to ask you a question when you’re my REAL mommy.”

Me, singing in a loop: People are people so why should it be etc

Huck: Do you want to be singing that over and over?

Me: Not particularly

Huck, eyes lighting up: “Oh baby pleeeeease, give a little respect to-oo-oo-oo me!” There, does that help?

Rose: Remember that time in Warcraft when you tried to pickpocket a bear and instead you aggro’d it?

Me: Yeah?

Rose: That’s exactly what it’s like to have a little brother.

Eight years ago I was far too discreet to name the book that caused Scott to threaten me with the worst possible revenge.

And now I have no idea what book it was.

Thanksgiving is one of the three days a year on which I do the cooking. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that this morning my family is developing a treatment for a cooking show.

“I know! It’ll be called ‘Ms. Frazzle’!”

“Tagline: ‘This gravy isn’t my best.'”

This morning, two days after the photo above was taken and about a week after taking a spill on his bike, Huck burst into my studio at his usual sunrise moment and announced with excitement, “Mom, look! My leg is almost totally better!” He lifted the injured knee almost to his chin, Karate Kid-style, to demonstrate. “Now it only hurts when I do THIS!”

She may be thirteen now, but the puppydog eyes retain all their power

Yesterday I got on a housecleaning jag and without really meaning to, I found myself going full-throttle A Bowl Full of Lemons on the basement and laundry room. Except: as I told Scott later, during the laundry-room deep-clean I faced my most difficult parenting challenge yet. In nearly 24 years as a mother, I’ve never been put to the test quite like this.

Our laundry room is in the (finished) basement and has one small high-up window. When we moved in, the house had been professionally cleaned and was immaculate except for a spiderweb in that particular window—a large web, quite old, thickened with lint and age into a heavy cobweb the size of a saucer. No sign of a spider—the original webspinner was probably long gone—but we left the web just in case. Nearly two years and seven million loads of laundry later, the cobweb is the size of a cloth napkin. There’s no spider. There never was, not in our time.

But when Rilla saw me on a stool, vacuum hose in hand, she begged me to spare the cobweb.

I’d just finished hoovering up every speck of dust and lint from the rest of the room and I was all set to decobwebify that window. And wash it, even!

But Rilla implored. “For science!” Heh, she knows my weak spots.

So I gritted my teeth and left it. For now, I said ominously. She grinned, unfazed by my direful tone.

When Scott came home later, I told him the story.

“So you left it there?” he asked. “WHEW. That thing is cool.”

“That thing is the size of a wedding veil.”

“Like I said. Cool.”

Well, he does all the laundry, so I guess if he wants a year-round Halloween theme, he can have it.

(For the record, if I believed that old circus tent was still the home of a spider, I wouldn’t have needed any persuasion to leave it alone. No Aunt Sponge or Aunt Spiker here.)

Illustrated by Chris Gugliotti

Yesterday’s post sent me on a happy rabbit trail of reading other posts in my archives bearing the same “These People Crack Me Up” tag. My kids crack me up.

Some of the gems I found:

Disgruntled 3-year-old reporting on her big brother: “Mommy, he keeps telling me to knock it off! The ploblem is, I don’t want to knock it off.”  (That IS a Ploblem, 2009)

***

Huck: “Mommy, be prepared for me to shout, ‘It’s Christmas, it’s Christmas, woohoo!’ tomorrow morning. It will probably startle you.”  (Early Warning System, 2015)

***

“Mommy, whenever you’re not with me, I want you. I want to be with you all the time. At night when I’m sleeping, or when I’m cuddling—I always want you! Or else…I want candy.” (The Birthday Girl Tells It Like It Is, 2006)

***

Me: Hey, looks like someone forgot to sweep up the dust pile.
Rose: Wasn’t me. I never sweep.                     (Exonerated, 2014)

***

Huck: “I bet all the kids with this coloring book are doing this with their moms right now, too.”

(Yes, I melted.)   (Huckisms, 2015)

***

Meanwhile, Scott’s been sending me old photos from a cache he found. Mah babies! Funny and cute.

***

I keep forgetting I set up an IFTTT to automatically save my Instagram posts as drafts here. I know it’s redundant for a few of you, but I worry about losing (eventually) things I post to platforms that aren’t my own. I have such an urge to archive everything.

In my house this morning: a breadcrumb trail of Angry Birds cards leading from my bedroom, down the hall, through the kitchen, through the patio room, to the wide-open back door.

Me: “It’s freezing in here!”

Huck: “That’s what the trail is for. To show you what a cold day it is.”

I’m still laughing!

Feb 4, 2018. Wilshire Park, Portland, Oregon.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m scooping things up from Facebook memories.

Feb 3, 2009 (A couple of weeks after Huck was born)
Just said goodbye to my parents (sniffle) and now I’m alone, possibly for the first time, with my OH MY GOODNESS six children.

Feb 4, 2009
Off to a busy start. Speech therapy, piano, Journey North. Nothing like diving right in!

***

Feb 3, 2010
This moment caught: 9yo sketching amaryllis, the 2 boys playing w/ trains. 11yo reading about B. Franklin. Teen reading Gulliver. 3yo sings.

***

Jan 27, 2013
Kids tearing through the room, shrieking, swords aloft, while Scott softly strums the ukelele, singing sweetly: I Wanna Be Sedated

Feb 4, 2013
Aw, how cool is this? The Journey North Mystery Class coordinator wrote me to say thanks for sending so many new families their way. Thanks to YOU guys for joining the fun! You know who you are.

***

Feb 3, 2014
In my statcounter this morning: search hits for “done with downton abbey” and “downton abbey season 4 not believable.”

Feb 3, 2014
Dear new lady in yoga today who said to me, “You’ll understand once you hit 30”: I LOVE YOU.

Feb 4, 2014
Sticky short film preview: “Exiled from the tropical paradise where they evolved, a tiny population of remarkable stick insects dodged extinction by hiding under a single windswept bush on the world’s tallest sea stack for 80 years. Thanks to a dedicated team of scientists they’re now living safely in captivity, but when can they go home?” (2020 note: I never did see the whole film. Must remember to look it up.)

***

Feb 3, 2017
In the car on the way to piano lessons, there’s a heavy sigh from the backseat.

Rilla: Sometimes…sometimes I just wish I were a mantis shrimp.

Feb 4, 2017
Just read the 2009 NYT obit for Eleanor Perenyi. Have decided that being remembered as a “writer and deliciously opinionated amateur gardener” is a worthy life goal. I’m sure I have a book of horticulture essays in me somewhere.

Feb 4, 2017
This one’s too long to paste: a detailed note about books I was reading/half-reading after two frenzied months of reading Cybils YA Fiction nominees. “Books I have read 1-3 chapters of since January 1st, most of which I do mean to finish eventually.” (Note to self: would be fun to do an update of this post. Which ones did I actually finish?)

I’m in a weird place right now where reading is concerned. I do this sometimes–read the beginnings of too many things and find it hard to settle down to finish something. I could have read three books in the time I’ve been pinballing between a dozen.

I try to be patient with myself when this mood hits, once or twice a year. It’s very common for me to rebound from Cybils reading this way—that fierce two-month drive to read a staggering volume of books. It’s compounded this year by—oh, let’s just say by many factors unique to 2017.

***

Feb 4, 2018
This one reminds me it’s time to visit Wilshire Park to see if these beauties are back in bloom. I’m guessing yes: we’ve got crocuses popping up all over the neighborhood.

Another delicious flashback from my FB memories. This was a mere three years ago, in February 2017, on a shopping run with Huck. 

Topics covered during a six-minute drive to Trader Joe’s:

—Did it rain last night or is that condensation
—Wait, I thought “morning dew” meant poop
—Discussion of various spellings/meanings of do/dew/doo
—Ice/water/steam, water vapor, why condensation happens
—Is that guardrail crumpled from a car crashing into it
—Why are they called “action figures” instead of dolls
—Where do I think the monkey will be hidden this time
—Are peanut butter crackers sweets
—Sewing, pros and cons
—What to spend birthday money on: probably K’nex
—That bus is too long to be Steven’s
—Why does Steven ride the bus
—What does “qualifications” mean
—Qualifications for being on American Ninja Warrior
—Really nice job parking, mom.