Why We Live Here - #3

Strawberries.

And not just that they grow around here but that they grow 21 steps from our front door.

And not just that they grow 21 steps from our door but that M's mom planted them.

And not just that M's mom planted them but she comes over and picks and prepares them (M helps too) so we can eat them at all hours and in all forms.

Oh and don't forget the peas, too. Mmmm.

Weekend Wrap-up

Weekends around here are always a bit chaotic. But it’s a familiar chaos that we’ve grown to, if not love, at least appreciate. But this past weekend was more. Chaotic. Than usual.

First, I thought I’d check out the surplus sale that one of our local universities has every year. I figured I’d get there 15 or so minutes early to be ahead of the crowd, which actually put me about halfway in the eventual ½ mile line waiting to get in. I was hoping to pick up some bikes cheap but by the time I found the bikes someone had already swooped in and picked up everything interesting. Oh well, I only had about 20 minutes there anyways because then it was on to….

Soccer Fest. We survived it. Barely. Older Boy had 3 games, each about 25 minutes long, at 8:30, 11:00 and 11:30. I brought all the kids with me so for most of the time they sweated, got sunburned, whined and waited in lines to get in or on the huge inflatable slides and bouncy rooms that were set up in strategic places around the edges of the soccer fields. I also lost the Girl, too, when she, apparently, got out of one of the bouncy rooms about 5 feet from where I was standing (and had been for hours) and inexplicably wandered off in the wrong direction. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, which was probably part of the problem. I didn’t see her wander off, of course; it probably happened when I was trying to find the boys who were off either waiting in line for or in other bouncy rooms. So I’m craning my neck to see which of the zillions of kids in their gaudy polyester soccer jerseys is mine, and by the way, what color t-shirt did Younger Boy have on and where is that Girl? By the time I concluded that the Girl was really lost the boys were both in their bouncy rooms so I couldn’t set off to find her until they emerged. They weren’t impressed with me or the situation.
“Boys, your sister is lost and we’ve got to look for her.”
Older Boy – “Is it time for my next game?”
“No, its time for us to try to find your sister.”
OB – “I don’t want to go look for her.”
Younger Boy – “Yeah, the lines are really short here, you go look Daddy.”
“No, we are ALL going to stay together and shout your sister’s name until we find her or we collapse from heat exhaustion.”
OB – “It’s not FAIR! We didn’t lose her, you did!”
YB – “Can I have a hotdog?”
We found her, eventually. She saw us from a distance, squinted, came back towards us until she was about 10 feet from us and then, of course, burst into tears. When she finally calmed down enough to sob out some words she asked,
“Daddy, why did you get lost? I was trying to find you!”
Then we ate hotdogs and later….

I went to the mega home center to get a new screen door to replace the one the kids tore off the hinges by going in and out, singly, NEVER together, one billion times. Taking it out of the van and wrestling into the garage I noticed that the bad smell in the garage that I’d been denying for some time could no longer be denied….

So I traced it back to one corner and concluded it must be coming from the old sewing machine I got at a thrift store last year that had never smelled before. I opened it up and it sure smelled bad but maybe it wasn’t the machine itself but one of the garbage bags of clothes underneath and around it that I was supposed to have put up in the loft, um, ages ago. Yep, one of those bags was pretty smelly. As I gingerly pushed aside some clothes in the bag I saw fur, so I screamed and ran to find M of course.
“M, I think I found the source of the smell in the garage. There’s FUR in one of the bags of clothes”
“Fur?”
“Yeah, like some animal crawled in there and died or something. Come and take a look.”
“What kind of animal? What did you do with it?”
“A DEAD animal and I didn’t do anything with it. I don’t want to touch it.”
“ “
“ “
“Well at least drag the bag out of the garage so it doesn’t stink it up anymore. Which bag was it?”
“I think it said Girl 6-7.”
“Aw man, those were GOOD hand-me-downs.”
So I dragged it out to the driveway and left it because it was getting late and I’d already spent too much time obsessing over ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ that day.

The next morning when M went out to get the paper she confirmed that there was something dead in there alright and now there were flies. And she was preaching in a couple of hours so what were we going to do with it? The kids weren’t up and we hadn’t had coffee yet so we figured, what the heck, lets get this over with. We went outside in our pajamas and I dug a hole and then dumped the bag of clothes into a pile on the ground. I gingerly pulled clothes off the pile until M reported seeing the fur.
“So what do I do now?”
“BURY IT!”
Some people set aside special clothes to be buried in but this little possum was buried with girls size 7 pants and two shirts. R.I.P. stinky little fellow. And speaking of stinky little fellows….

Younger Boy has finally shed his training wheels and can ride a two wheeler. In the rain. With no shirt on.