Lovelihood

If there was any doubt as to which season it was, today wiped it out of me. It was cool and wet as we walked to school this morning. And my trusty rain jacket of six years now, believe it or not, has no hood. And the last month had been so convincingly summer-like that I now have no idea where my rain hat is. So I decided to put my hand quilting aside for the night and begin work on a rain hat, for which I have no true pattern. Still working on it.

For the Boy's first Christmas, we opted, instead of lavishing him with toys and more toys (I mean, it's not like we were ever ones to hold back on toy purchases for him to begin with), to get him something we really wanted him to have. And what we wanted was a $400 dictionary and a cute little wheeled stand on which to display it and the included magnifying lens needed to illuminate the miniscule text. Of course, The Boy, who today still labors over words like "the" and "our," has yet to employ the power of the OED, so it'd been sitting in the basement this past year, still somehow gathering dust in its sealed-up moving box. We brought it up today, mostly to serve as a gaming surface in the absence of a coffee table. When not in use as etymological reference/flat checkmate conveyance? It tucks neatly into the functional, but never-used-by-us fireplace. Feels like bibliophilic heresy, but, you know, whatever.

Twice a year the Friends of The Seattle Public Library puts on its big sale. I love going if only to witness the spectacle of a former Air Force base force hangar filled to brimming with books and the people crammed in elbow to elbow, dragging along luggage and strollers to fill up with cheap reads. And of course, while I'm there, I might as well pick up a couple bags worth of books. Between these book sales and the book grab at work, I haven't actually had to resort to retail book shopping since we moved back to Seattle.

The Boy's came home from school (1) railing against the savagery of playground manners and (2) inflexible in his interpretation of how a chessboard knight moves. And it occurred to us that in the last move we jettisoned the multi-game set that included a simple board, double sided for chess/checkers and chinese checkers, and a throw-away set of plastic chessmen. So after dinner we grabbed a a quasi-respectable felt-lined wooden set from Barnes and Noble and had just enough time before bedtime to start a match. Required: one snapshot to recreate our progress in this particular game tomorrow.

It was a well-rounded day for Bear today. Sandwiched between working in the gardens at her brother's school and taking a few gleefilled spins down our sidewalk on her pedal-less bike, we fit in a spot of watercoloring. Bear's less interested in actually applying paint to paper than she is just running a wet paintbrush across the cakes, swirling and mixing, swizzling the brush in the water (which she inevitably spills), and abandoning the brush altotogether in favor of the more direct approach of finger-mixing the paints. So at the end of our session, it's really just my work set to paper. Her handiwork remains on the paint itself.

It is my birthday. But with the kids' day-long anticipation for this cake, a cake commisioned from the vegan bakery to accomodate a certain Boy's allergies, it's difficult to think of this as mine. Bear's "Happy Day, Momma!" mantra, on the other hand... that's all mine.

What's left over on Tuesday nights when I've got only one lunch to pack up into a frog-shaped bento box. Luckily, around here, everyone's willing to take a half peach of your hands for an impromptu snack.