Last weekend we put down the TV remotes, turned off the computers, cleaned the house and washed all the clothes, and packed up the truck with a tiny subset of our belongings.  After we went back and back and back in the house for one more thing, I began to wonder:  How much stuff do you really need to go camping?  At the same time I worried about not having enough, about really getting out in the woods and desperately needing one thing we'd left at home, about being pregnant and having to use a latrine in the dark over and over every night, about, well, I mean, about having to rough it.

Sleeping in a tent?  Eating all our meals outside?  No shower-for any of us-for a week??  How does this amount to a family vacation?  Well, I thought, with a touch of the mother-martyr, at least it will be fun for the children.

And, as you can see, they did love it.

This caused me much anxiety:

Wherever there were rocks, there were little boys climbing.  There's nothing to show you he's about 10 feet off the ground here.  Nor is his father shown, who is laughing his head off, nor am I shown, who am walking away, a nervous wreck.

Ah.  There I am.

There were hikes, there were tide pools, there were morning trips to museums, (what a bunch of smoky-smelling, dirty museum patrons we must have been), and there was always our little corner of the woods, with our picnic table, our tent, our circle of camp chairs around the fire pit.  There was no TV, no phone, no (gasp) internet access, but there was each of us, and each other, our circles overlapping more closely than they usually do.  We laughed together more easily, made decisions on what to do next more easily, paid more attention to each other, somehow, and again I began to wonder.  What was it about our everyday lives that we'd stripped away that allowed us to be together so completely like this? 

Every night Father Bird and I would sit near the dying coals of the campfire, something warm to drink in our hands. The circle of light cast by the propane lantern lit up the undersides of the leaves of the spreading sycamore tree that formed the edges of our little world, and beyond it everything was darkness.  We'd listen to the whispering and chattering of the four children in the tent, laid out in brightly-colored sleeping bags in a row.  One night the boys all lay hushed as their sister told them a story.  Another night, a sweet impromptu song about sand dunes was the last sound any of them made. After they'd settled down, we'd wash our handful of dishes and creep into the tent ourselves, to zip ourselves into sleeping bags and listen to the crickets and the pounding of the waves on the beach.

Eventually it had to end.  With a resolve to go camping more, ("Once a week," our son requested), we filled the back of the truck up with dirty, half-used camping supplies and came wearily home.  There was a general rush in the direction of the running hot water as soon as we came through the door, a frenzied putting-away and washing-up, and all of us collapsed, sunburned and satisfied, on the couches to watch TV, open laptops, and move back into everyday life.  

And I realized it hadn't been the rough experience I'd feared (It may have had something to do with the fact that there were flush toilets instead of the much less lovely pit latrines), in fact, it had been something vastly different.  This morning Father Bird left for work again, I have a regular "to do" list again, there are the usual quarrels going on over who's going to have computer time first, and I'm left pondering.  Which, really, is roughing it?

~MB~

Over the last several weeks, my immune system, bless its poor, misguided heart, has been desperately trying to reject an invader.  It just knows that it's a malicious intruder, and that my life is on the line if it doesn't kill all intruders. 

I love my immune system.  It's just trying to do its job.  How can you not love something that only lives to defend you?  It's sweet, really, romantic.  Only problem is, it's tried this same thing four times before, and failed.  For photos of the previous results, please see raising baby birds. 

Not that I mind a failure.  The four failures I've got are an awful lot of fun, and who doesn't want 25% more fun?  It's just...I and my immune system are stuck in the same body, and it's been giving me an awful lot of grief because it didn't get the "Failure This Time Is Okay" memo. 

This is where my little wintertime friend up there comes in.  My one true mug.  I have other mugs, to be sure, but this one has been pasted to my hand for the last weeks.  It's held tomato soup, chicken broth, breakfast cereal, and many, many cups of soothing peppermint tea.  (Not all at the same time, because, ugh...that doesn't even sound good to me.)

Oh, how I love the happy, chipped visage of my companionable mug.  Day after day lately has found me filling it up with one warm thing after another, trying to soothe that vigilant immune system, trying to make it until bedtime so I could sleep more of the first trimester hours away.  It holds a whole can of chicken broth, something I've been grateful for many times during the last weeks.  And it always, always smiles.  

Now, however, it seems that the clouds are clearing.  Romeo, my wonderful immune system, seems to well and truly have failed again, and is receding to his corner (or maybe he lives in a guard tower) to sulk over his defeat.  A week ago, when I began to think I might start to feel better soon, I took my sewing machine out of the house for a cleaning, mostly to keep myself from starting up new projects before I'm fully out of the woods. 

Yesterday the sewing machine shop called to say my machine is ready to come home, I've got a new stack of fabric (a trip to the fabric store alone was therapy indeed), my children are, miraculously, all still alive, and so life will be getting back to whatever normal is again very soon.  But before I move on, I'd just like to say, thanks, mug, for the nourishment, and the reminder. 

Keep right on smiling.

~MB~

These curls:

These beautiful, bouncy, soft brown curls, are on the back of the head of a boy.  That doesn't seem right, does it?  Is it fair that such beautiful hair should come to someone who, all his days, is probably going to keep it short?

Because, honestly, this guy needs a haircut:

But how, how can I?

~MB~

What if I told you you don't have to? 

This article makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd done the same experiment with other subjects, such as language arts.  My suspicion is the results would have been very similar...

~MB~

I remember sitting on the couch as a child, waiting to watch TV as my father paced up and down the living room looking for the remote.  At first he'd mumble.  "Can't find it anywhere," he'd say.  Then, "Why do they do it?" a little louder.  Then came, "It was RIGHT HERE yesterday," as he began to gesticulate frantically.  And, finally, as he pulled his own hair and his eyes bugged out, "They DO it to MAKE ME CRAZY!!"  Before long, he'd inevitably find the remote, hidden in some place where he'd stashed it so we couldn't find it and make him crazy.  He'd be sheepish, we'd be wide-eyed, and we'd all watch some TV together.

This afternoon I was gearing up to start on a late Easter dress for my daughter.  I drafted the pattern, cut, starched, and ironed the fabric, cleaned and threaded up my sewing machine, and then...

Then I opened the little door on the front of the machine that hides the bobbin case.  It was empty.  Somebody has walked off with my bobbin case.  Somebody will die for this.

As I began to tear apart my (admittedly disorganized) sewing area, then the areas around it, I tried to think like a child, to imagine how long a little shiny metal object could hold the attention of a preschooler, and therefore how big my search radius should be.  Had he stood near my sewing table and gazed at it before dropping it and moving on, or did a sound on the other end of the house cause him to clutch it and run in that direction?

But as I growled, as I mumbled threats aimed at people who bother other people's stuff, and the people who don't keep this house as clean as they could, another nagging thought began to bother me.  What, I thought, if the bobbin-removal scene went differently?  Of the thousands of little daily interactions with children, how could any mother begin to rember them all?  What if I saw the child take it out, wagged my finger, took it out of his hand, and...heaven forbid...put it somewhere safe?

Given the choice between losing my bobbin case to the simple curiosity of a child and my own calculating efforts to outwit them, I'd far rather take the child.  Finding something they've lost is simply a matter of covering enough ground, maybe of doing a little cleaning (which somebody should have done anyway).  Finding something I've put away safely is much, much worse.  Suddenly the search moves from being a one-dimensional proposition to being an anything-goes game.  What did I think was a safe place that day?  Behind the cookbooks in the high cabinet above the stove?  In the bottom of my makeup bag on the shelf in my closet?  In the pocket of a pair of jeans that's certainly been through the washing machine since then?  Before, it was just dropped and forgotten.  Now it's been hidden.

And so, as I walk up and down my house today looking for a little shiny loop of metal, I hear in my mind that voice that maintains, "They DO it to make me crazy!", all the time knowing that in the end, I'll find the bobbin case tucked away somewhere "safe". 

Because whether or not they've actually tried to make me crazy...it's worked very, very well.

~MB~