Decorating On A Really Tight Budget: Rich People Edition

What A Great Weekend That Was

It was the Victoria Day long weekend and so my husband and a good chunk of the men I'm related to went on an arduous, multi-day long canoe/portage trip. And I was left here ALONE with my three increasingly miserable - more on that later - children and my non-driving in our emptied out town for DAYS AND DAYS.

I knew it was going to be awful. How could it not be? My kids had plans which - one by one - fell through and as the weekend went on they became increasingly discouraged and dismayed. And meanwhile, my husband caught a giant pike that came out of the water with searing red gouges on its side. Overhead, an angry hawk EAGLE angrily circled, and the marks showed themselves to be where the mortally wounded pike had wrestled its huge body away from the hawk EAGLE (my husband read this and told me it was an eagle and that there's a big difference between the two. ALL RIGHT.) in the sky, falling to the water where it was caught and wondered at as it gasped and died.

"Becky will put this on her blog!" my dad announced.

My kids started off the weekend sleeping in the schoolroom, and then each night found them closer and closer to my bedroom, until the final night which found my daughters crammed into my bed, radiating waves of heat, and my son sleeping right outside my bedroom door. Everything fell into quiet chaos - meals became disarrayed, unordered, bathtimes fell by the wayside, people fell asleep at random times. And this was not a positive thing, a liberating throwing-off of oppressive shackles, but a first misstep by me that was impossible to correct, a giving-in.

My husband and his fellow insane canoe-ers saw a rotten moose floating in the river, unharnessed from the winter ice. They took pictures - of COURSE they did - and even in the pictures, you can see what drove the moose onto the thin ice, onto its doom. Wolves chased it and it fell and for now it floats in the water, unpleasant to look at and even, I was informed, far more unpleasant to smell.

The kids and I watched the most recent Jackie Chan movie. All in all, it was probably the highlight of my weekend.

"And here's when we camped on Ant Island!" my husband said, showing me all of the pictures of gross dead things and horrifying manly sights when he finally, finally came back. "It looked like a great place to camp and then there they were: ant hills as big as a man. Good thing for us they were friendly." And then he chortled - sunburnt, exhausted - and I laughed, tentatively, like some startled mole brought unexpectedly to light.

I survived!

Hooray for me! We're having another thunderstorm right now, because I guess the weather has decided that come 3-5 o'clock, it's time to break out the BIG OL' STORMS right around my house.

In further storm-related news: today's post!

And now I am going to hide under my bed because THUNDER IS SCARY.

We're Just Lucky

Crayola sent us a TON of art kits to review, and I just did over at my review blog.

In other news: ARGH! There is a thunderstorm outside and I'm supposed to be walking to meet the kid! Goodbye cruel world!

The End Of Spring

It's a funny thing - last week we were in the middle of rainy, SNOWy spring and suddenly this week has surprised us with radiant almost-summer, the trees heavy with blossom - my yard alone is lush in yellow and white and heavy pink flowers, sending waves of perfume and bees - and light green leaves everywhere and flowers in every old corner. And everytime I go outside I stand breathless for a moment, caught with delighted surprise by the sudden lush beauty, the sudden golden loveliness that is my dumb old yard.

But the days will wear on and someday soon I doubtlessly will go outside and walk right by the staunch daffodils and the old, old crabapple tree heavy with blossoms (still) and the tall, tall tree with a bird's nest right at the top and I will barely notice it, will walk through this short-lived miracle and hold it as commonplace.

My kids and I spent much of the afternoon outside today, it being a lovely day - still and warm - and they dug around in the bush, looking for old loot and finding pieces of cracked china and small glass bottles and I sat in a yard chair in the shade of a flowering tree and read a book. And there you have as nearly as I will ever come to complete and total happiness, fragile and passing.

The Baby ran past me as we walked outside, dashing behind the wall of young trees and in between them I could see flashes of her and her pink dress, her too-thin white legs swinging out like a pendulum that only moves forward, like a clock that is counting down the days until her fine-tuned heart, her little glowing self, is just a daily occurrence to me. The days are turning, the world spins round, the flowers come up every year again without fail. There is happiness that catches you suddenly in its grip, unearned, running by as fast as a child whipping through the trees.

We Are Having Technical Difficulties

BULLETIN BULLETIN BULLETIN
Here is today's post!

My computer is barely working! And I have a bad cold so I feel like asking to borrow a friend/the library's computer would be just RUDE. But I haven't been absent for any DIRE reasons - we haven't heard ANYthing about The Baby's EKG, so I'm assuming that everything is fine.

My post for today is going to be up at 5 Minutes For Parenting. I'll link to it directly when it's done and up.

I've reviewed a bunch of things recently - dishwasher cleaner, laundry soap and cookies - so if you're interested, those are up at my review blog. And if you're a wine company wondering if I would be interested in reviewing your products: YES I WOULD.

Mother's Day

This morning I took my five year old daughter to get an EKG.

She's small for her age, wearing a Kai-Lan hat from the dollar store and her tough-guy jeans and her face was white with terror because no matter how many times people have reassured her that this test is no big deal she still has had too many tests in her short little life and doesn't believe them now. Poor baby. Poor little girl.

It went well enough, I guess. We had it done at the local hospital, where the friendly lab tech tickled the Baby as she placed the stickers on her narrow chest. The Baby was scared even after the test painlessly started, and so I distracted her by reminding her of the McDonald's french fries and Barbie toy she was getting as soon as the test was over and now the lab tech probably thinks that we have the worst diet in the world, but The Baby finally relaxed and the test was over. When it was done, the lab tech winced as she gently tried to take the stickers off The Baby - yeouch - and recommended a hot bubble bath at home, filling her hands up with real stickers - Winnie The Pooh and Minnie Mouse and cheerful fish - and it was over.

And now I hope I never have to take another child of mine for an EKG again.

Happy Birthday.

Here is a sign that you are growing up - you got a giant gift bag of cute clothes from your grandma for your birthday and instead of tossing it all carelessly on the floor (like a certain male child in the house would do), you inspected each piece with quiet delight and ran and changed your outfit. CLOTHES are now a good gift for you.

Eleven!

Should this be a melancholy post? I don't feel melancholy. I'm wildly proud of you, my pretty, stubborn kid. I had a phonecall from your frustrated math teacher last week - smarten up, kid! - and the teacher huffed that she "just didn't get you." And while you should stop driving your math teacher nuts - I'm not kidding! cut it out! - there are probably worse fates than being a mysterious, cool blond. Although - and I am NOT MAKING THIS UP - you WILL need math later, no matter how elusive and cool and Grace Kelly-ish you are.

When my babies were first here, I loved them as my babies, as these tender, helpless people with my grandmother's eyes and their relentless need. But as they get older, as they take on their final, adult forms, they take on their human flaws and their human goodness and I love them as people, as their individual selves. I love you both with the permanence and the depth of a new mother for her sleeping baby, and with this new thing, this bemused, human love.

Two stories:

When you were in first grade, you could not jump rope. Your minor muscular issues make you uncoordinated enough that it was endlessly hard for you and my heart did a swift, aching break to think of this cruel needless hurt. If you were me, you would have spent the rest of the spring sullenly on the edges of the other girls, watching them play what you could not - but you are brave and resourceful in ways I will never be. Instead, you cheerfully brought one of your brother's Tonka trucks from home and cheerfully joined the boys pushing their trucks around in the sandbox, while I watched from the edge of the schoolyard, startled and proud.

When you were even younger - three or four, I think - they worried that you had massive hearing loss, and you had to go through the hearing test that involved you sitting by yourself in a dark room with toy musical animals in the corners. CLANG CLANG CLANG went the monkey with the cymbals - and I braced myself for this to terrify you and instead you laughed, your eyes wide with delight.

You are brave in a way that it never occurred to me someone could be, plucky and resourceful. You are stubborn in ways that shock me, laughing and reserved and tough and tender.
You are the child of my youth, this slender young arrow, this child at the very last of childhood, this laughing girl dashing off into her blue sky birthday, into this very day that is waiting for you.

The End Of Love

My husband - and you totally already know this if you follow me much on Twitter and/or are my Facebook friend - found a picture of the two of us taken the weekend we met TWENTY YEARS AGO.

TWENTY!

And it's quite the picture. For one thing, we're both wearing "vintage" clothing - he's wearing his grandfather's sweater and I'm wearing a blazer from the 40s - and for another, I still had my BAD BAD HILLBILLY TEETH, and I'd totally forgotten how awful my teeth were until my very early 30s. Whoa. And boy oh boy, do we ever look infatuated.

That part of romance is easy. I don't idealize the early days of relationships - nerves! - but it's pretty simple when the other person is mostly made up of our idealized idea of what we'd like in someone else and wondering when that first kiss is going to happen and the heady rush of new sexual attraction - all fun stuff, but nothing I want to spend the rest of my life going through over and over and OVER again. It turns out that I much prefer being married.

We weren't married for all of those 20 years between that picture and now, of course. The first eight years were stupidly dramatic and alternately ecstatic and miserable and the next 12 were spent having baby after baby after baby and being grindingly tired and at first being desperately, terrifyingly poor and then merely just never having quite enough money. And, of course, my severe illness and hospitalization and the Baby's ongoing health adventures and when you add it all up, it doesn't sound like a happy marriage but it - oddly enough - is. What we think will make us happy turns out to be a shockingly unreliable predictor of actual happiness.

It's been even worse on my husband, since while I'm home with the kids and can occasionally nap, he's worked long, long hours AND still been kept up by wailing babies and furnaces that quit in the middle of the night and he also handles ALL of our finances and is generally the household grown-up. And I often worry about how fulfilling he finds his life, and so I was startled and moved to learn that he always tells his friends to have their kids now, to not wait for the "perfect" time, to throw themselves into the mess of domesticity and that happiness will likely be found someplace in there.

Eleven years ago today, I knew that I would be having a baby the very next day. We knew she was a girl, knew she was breech and knew I would be having a c-section. My mother kept complimenting me on my calmness, which amused me - I was a very thin veneer of calm in an attempt to keep the vast oceans of panic and terror from surfacing - but I don't remember much more of that day. It was, I could write, the last day before motherhood started in earnest, but I'm not sure how much of that statement is true. We had already needed to make some serious, parent-type decisions, already named her, already knew that time of her arrival and all that was wanting was her, was our little dark-haired baby who is now - almost unbelieveably - very nearly 11.

Time flies, they say. Childhood flies even faster, fleets away, leaves you suddenly bereft when you realize that it's been eleven years since the day before you saw your first child for the first time, twenty years since the day you met the boy who would one day be her father. We thought we were adults, thought that we were ready for love, but we've actually grown up alongside our children, have outgrown our youth, have earned our love for each other over and over again.

Time changes things, changes babies into shrugging tweens who dash out of the house with their bookbags swinging, changes me into the mother of a houseful of school-aged children, changes my lover into my husband, into the father of a houseful of loud, bad kids, into the responsible man who kisses me goodbye while I'm still asleep and drives to work in the dark.

There is an elderly couple at our church - improbably ancient, a shrunken old lady and her still-handsome, still straight-backed husband - and they would walk into church every Sunday holding hands. Their love has survived time, survived children, survived the messes of health and domesticity and at the end, the very end, they have their gentleness for each other. It is the end of love, this finish line, that I want, decades and decades more, worn and perfected, a water-smooth rock, something final and lasting in whatever forever there is.