During this blustery spring evening I am sitting here with my tea in a quiet house pondering all the thoughts and activities that have happened in the last few days. The blizzard outside makes me think of the storms in "The Little House on the Prairie" books where the wind is blowing the snow so thickly and wildly that you can't see two feet in front of you! But the lovely drops of moisture on my windows fill me with joy as that means that the extremely thirsty ground is finally getting some relief. Though it is hard to believe that this morning it was beautiful, sunny and warm!
We celebrated Easter this year in a wonderfully low key way. We had a nice meal together on Good Friday and than on Sunday we had a fire and a wiener roast outside for lunch. We hid 7 little Reese's pieces Easter bunnies for each kid down by the trampoline. It was just enough of a treat that they were satisfied but not too much that the candy lasts until the next holiday!
Another very exciting event in the life of Jacob was his decision to purchase a light sabre with some of Grandma's Christmas money. After several different trips to different stores and some studious research, he decided on a blue one that made all the authentic sounds (with batteries :). Low and behold, John managed to fix the old light sabre we had bought at a garage sale last year by rewiring it and so now we have two working light sabres! Thus, many light sabre battles have ensued in the past few days and I'm finding it to be quite a humane weapon as it keeps the kids relatively far from one another and they don't seem to hurt each much! Bonus! Jacob was quite funny when he told John during one of their epic battles,"DAD, it is really RUDE to cut off some one's head!" I agree, extremely rude. Jacob looked pretty cute on Sunday and I wanted to take a picture....but I didn't :( He decided he wanted to wear his white button down shirt with his tie, his black jeans, and his spiderman runners! And mom forgot to comb his hair.... so there he was in all his finery with his hair sticking up in the back of his head! Oh well.
This week I spent Wednesday making a meal for a family from our school who just lost their baby. It has been kind of strange and sad because there were three of us moms pregnant in the school and the other two have both lost their babies, one at 19 weeks gestation and the other at six months. I am the only one still pregnant. And every time I see them I think of how hard it must be for them to see me still pregnant and how hard it will be to see me with the baby, if all goes well. The mom that I brought the meal to showed me some pictures of their little boy. He was so incredibly tiny and yet perfect. His tiny little head with a little wisp of hair, his fingers with their little fingernails....The kids have had a lot of questions about why the baby died and if that could happen to our baby so you can tell that they are thinking about it.
Mikaela has her school musical performance next week so I got to be part of making the costumes and the practicing today during my teaching day! It is really neat to hear her singing the songs around the house getting all excited about performing. It reminds me of the excitement that being part of musicals always gave me as a kid....And it is cool to hear from other parents how beautiful her voice is and how good she is at remembering the words and actions to the songs! And I am just glad to see that her memory works for something.....certainly not spelling or grammar. But hey, if I put the spelling and the grammar to music, maybe she would remember it!
She has been doing remarkably well with our first sojourn into journalism for language arts. She wrote an article in the third person about being scratched by the cat last week and she really enjoyed it! I was thinking afterwards that journalism would be a career that would really suit her extroverted, curious personality.
Who knows?