Mother's Day, "What Could I Have Done More for My Vineyard?", and an Announcement

Mike gave me this fun ring watch for Mother's Day. Isn't it delightful?

But perhaps even more generous of him: He gave me hours of labor. (And of making the kids labor.)

Between time constraints and the eighty million projects needing our attention, I had resigned myself to the probability that I wouldn't be able to have flower beds this year. 

 

But then Mike and the kids spent the better portion of two Saturdays taking rocks from the beds, shoveling the tractor-scoop fulls of soil and compost that Mike kept driving over from by the barn, hurling rocks out of those piles, and spreading soil out. 

Mike came with me to choose out a million flowers for my annual flower bed by the front porch. Cosmos and Zinnias, lantanas and dahlias, marigolds and snapdragons. 

And a few days later I found black-eyed susan, coneflower and poppy starts for my perennial garden by the garage. 

Since then, many of my green, lovely, leafy starts have been wilting and dying. (Weep.) Was it "transplant shock"? Was I overwatering? Was I underwatering? Was there too much manure in all the loads we mixed in from the farm? I'd researched full-sun plants and chosen varieties I knew were hardy (knowing how hot west facing areas can get in our summers here). I'd bought worm castings and carefully added them to each and every hole to soften the transition for my little plants. 

By Sunday night--when freezing temperatures had crept into our forecast and Mike and Jesse had helped me haul buckets and rocks and posts and tarps to put over every already-struggling plant, I was thinking sadly to myself, "And it came to pass that the Lord of the vineyard wept, and said ... What more could I have done for my vineyard?"

Not enough dunging, Mike teased.

Perhaps I ought to have tried grafting, Abe suggested.

Who knows, but our two nights of freezing are past, and we shall see what remains to thrive. I suppose nobody ever became a master gardener in a day. :(

Above are some gardening-weary kids at Costco where we fed them all pizza and hotdogs. Below we have Daisy pulling the truck from its stuck location in the pig pasture.

But! There was more to Mother's Day than ring watches and hours of potentially fruitless gardening! Daisy and Mette made a delicious dinner (and Daisy made eclairs!--those and lemon pie are probably my two favorite desserts [odd for someone who generally wants pure chocolate base to everything]). And we drove it all down to my mom's for a Mother's Day dinner at Polk's End!

That was a happy way to spend Mother's Day!

And, because a Mother's Day post seems as fitting a place as any for this type of news: After decades (literally decades) of announcing my own pregnancies, we have entered a new stage of life. 

Now I am announcing a daughter's pregnancy! 

Goldie and Wyatt are expecting a baby boy this September. 

As I unpacked things in the new house and wondered if I really still needed toys in the kitchen pantry and board books on the bookshelf, it was fun to think, "Well, of course I do. Just as my kids are beginning to outgrow some of these things, grandkids are coming along to take their use up again.")

And to end, a lovely mother's hairstyle (compliments of Starling).

The Thick of It

There's an old Backyardigans episode where they keep singing, "Into the thick of it! Into the thick of it! Into the thick of it! ... But we can't see where we're going."

It's been on a catchy-little repeat in my head lately.

Mike and I were discussing this--the thick of it (specifically the thick of parenting) just the other night. 

"You know," I'd mused. "I really felt like those years when we had so many kids that were all so little was really the thick of parenting. But I don't know. Maybe we are more in the thick of it now. I mean so many little kids was really physically and emotionally exhausting. But in this stage there are just ... so many things! Older kids who are somewhat independent but still need help, grappling with decisions our kids make that we no longer fully control, kids wrecking cars, kids on our car insurance, younger kids still demanding so much, ..." and I went on for quite some time listing things that currently fall into the wide scope of our parenting.

It certainly wasn't nothing. 

And I don't really know if we were more "in the thick of it" when we had four kids under age five (and six others to boot) or more in the thick of it now. Perhaps it's just a different thick of it. But we are certainly in something. (Which I suppose should come as no surprise having opted to have 10 children. And yet ... I continue to be surprised. And to wonder a wee bit over all the information the Lord chooses to keep to Himself when He initially asks us to do certain things! Ha!)

Anywho. ...

A few bits of things:

Daisy, Goldie and I chanced upon a group of birders (birders!!!) (complete with their long lenses and binoculars) the other day! They were responding to reports (from whatever their birding sources might be) of a rare bird in the area, and they were kind enough to humor me bringing up our love of the Merlin Bird app and to even agree that the unusual bird it recently suggested I was hearing might truly have been that bird (as, according to one particularly friendly birder, it was migratory season and therefore a more likely time for rare birds to be passing through). 

I refrained from asking them if they were familiar with the "Costco Grackle"--a bird seen, from what I can tell, exclusively in the Costco parking lot.

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Jesse attempted to ride Pig the other day. I don't know what possessed him to do it, and, from what I could gather, he failed miserably, but I was proud of his prowess!

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Mette is determined to win "The Great American Award" in school this year. She's already memorized the Preamble to the Constitution, all 50 states, and the Gettysburg Address. (Isn't the Gettysburg address one of the most inspirational speeches ever given? It makes me want to weep wondering if we will ever again have presidents capable of such noble thought!)

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I mentioned car troubles in my paragraphs on "the thick of parenting" above. We have had just a ridiculous spate of them! It seems we cannot go so much as a week without someone denting something or breaking the AC, or getting a flat tire; and we've had numerous cars in the shop. This all seemed to culminate in my totaling our van a few weeks ago. (I also totaled another man's truck in the process. All my fault. Just turned right into someone I somehow didn't see.)

It was a very rattling experience. And I'm so glad everyone was OK! But ... I'm awfully sad about the van. For now we found an incredibly cheap 8-passenger vehicle that will do for the time being (though we have to take two cars even to church on Sunday as we often still have 9 of us together), but I miss being able to so freely fit all of us and all of our stuff! We have had this van since Jesse was a baby!

At least Shannon sent us consolation cookies afterwards. (Perhaps that is how we can account for Starling recently praying, "We thank thee that we had a good time in our car accident."?

Summersby:

Cute little stinkers on a Sunday morning:

A trip to AutoZone:

Twinning:

Loaded up with straw from Uncle Lynn:

Hans with Ellie. (At the start of the past several school years Hans has had to bring a bag filled with things that tell about him. He always includes this picture of the stuffed animal he's had since he was born.):

Starling seems to be loving school, but she also seems to be worn out and incredibly emotional. On the night of Abe's wedding for example, she began deeply sobbing on the drive home from the reception over the thought that maybe her car would be covered in shaving cream and what not (just like Abe and Kenya's was) someday. When we tried to reassure her that she didn't need to ever have that happen to her car, she wept, "But I want it to! It's beautiful but you guys won't like it!" She also sobbed piteously when we went to check on the house progress recently and saw that they had put mismatched windows in several bedrooms. She felt a) we should love the windows as they were and b) we were being mean to the workers by not loving them done incorrectly. 

Dear little soul:

Me and my into-the-thick-of-it partner:

Sheetrock going up and these two enjoying the view:

A sweet little picture Abe took of Hans after he'd given him his first pocketknife the other day:

Back to School. For EVERYONE.

Speaking of repeating cycles (as we were ... in a previous post), I ought to mention that the kids went back to school. 

Goldie, of course, is still missionarying away (and will be for another six months). But Abe is back at BYU for his final year. Daisy is back at BYU for her fifth year (first year as a graduate student!). And all seven of the remaining children are scattered about (quite literally if you look at how far apart their schools are situated) throughout high school, middle school and elementary. (I should have liked, after all the frightening newness of last year, for this going back year to all seem perfectly familiar. However, it was Anders' first go at middle school. And Starling's first go with school at all. So it still felt like lots of daunting newness this year.)

Anyway. The return to school seems worth always mentioning (if for no other reason than to post the first-day-of-school front porch photos), but particularly this year seems worth noting as it is the first time in nearly 24 years (!!!) that I have a block of time in my days with no toddlers or babies at my feet.

Penny and Jesse drive to school--and drop Anders at his school on the way (it's weird that he was heading to school with all the little kids every morning last year and is suddenly heading off with the teens this year), but I made them all take the bus the first two days so that Anders would be familiar with it for days when they need to use it.

I don't really know what to say about this rather landmark moment. A simple "woohoo, my kids are all in school" doesn't feel true to my feelings. There's some sense of loss and of stages of life slipping out of my hands. There is also a feeling that this phase is a gift, and I ought to appreciate and make really worthwhile use of it. There's this constant desire to keep them safely in Eden forever warring with this business of letting them stretch onward and outward--tasting the bitter to better know the sweet.

But I think mostly there's just sort of a feeling of ... awe? shock? wonder? 

It's not as if my kids are raised. We have miles to go before we sleep and all that. But, as I take my kids to school these days, I see many young mothers with a kindergartner and perhaps a 2nd grader. They'll have another toddler in tow as well, and I see that they are just at the beginning of all this mothering business. For most of them this will be a fairly short phase of all of their children going through this stage at roughly the same time. And it just boggles my mind--it seems impossible--that I was them twenty years ago. And yet I have been in that stage continuously ever since. Just ... welcoming new babies, having toddlers underfoot, navigating new phases with our older children (graduations, and missions, and college) all while buckling car seats, and being woken all night, and nursing babies. Parenting very small children has been such an enormous part of my life experience. And, with this new phase of kids in school (mind you Starling is only there for three hours), but with this new stage, I sense a little bit the miracle of how far I've come--just day by tiny day, a step at a time, as we've managed to do this impossible and wonderful and exhausting thing for 24 years. 

I don't know that I'm making any sense. But this is one of those times that is causing me to reflect on all sorts of things that I was, for so long, just so much in the thick of, that I couldn't yet see them from this slightly new perspective. I even feel like I'm viewing my own self over the last 24 years from an outside perspective. 

Anyway. Perhaps more later. Perhaps not. I don't know. We shall see. In the meantime here's little kindergartner home and eating a pear. (She likes to pack a little lunch to take to school in her backpack just like her siblings ... even though she doesn't actually stay at school long enough to eat it.)