Lovelihood

Instead of a proper guest room, we have an all-purpose office/craft space/kid mess receptacle/place to flop down an air mattress. Which we're ok with, because we rarely have overnight guests. I'd originally had some notion that I'd fashion up some kind of curtain, modern and tailored. It never happened, and frankly, we prefer those rear-facing doors naked, letting the generous foliage out there take care of any privacy we'd need during heavy-duty craft/work sessions. But overnight guests tend to require arrangements for modesty. So today's naptime was spent in a quick and dirty hem job on some store-bought curtains. Which we'll probably pack up and store away until they're needed again.

Solstice, apparently, during which I idly took in an inane conversation at work about whether it was indeed today that is the longest of the year, or some point midway through the summer. It reached up into the balmy mid-70s today, not hot, exactly. But a rare enough warmth to get everyone, in the University District bisected by my bus, out in shorts and sundresses and scraps of fabric that I probably wouldn't have deemed fit for body coverage. At home, the kids were getting themselves tucked into their too-hot attic bedroom, The Boy insisting he needed more blankets, and Bear being warned not to remove her pants and diaper for the third night in a row. Afterwards, in between interruptions of the kids coming down for one last bathroom visit and to nurse head-wounds incurred from rigorous pre-bedtime play, the Mr. describes their post-dinner recreation of flower-gathering in the backyard. Summer's going to be good, here.

We were much more sentimental parents when The Boy was a wee one, having pressed his tender little toes into those plaster molds and affixing them dutifully in the frame. We have no such permanent reminder of Bear's baby feet. And at nearly two years, it's a little late to capture the teeny-ness of the ridges and loops of her footprints. So it's nice to bring home some paint-slathered footprints amongst the packets of colorings and scribblings that constitute the kids' day of schoolwork.

I'm gonna lay it all out here. May got the better of me. And, I just don't have the energy come June to work up much creative initiative. So we turned to the photo services to churn out some goodies for the Opas, and took today to engage in some let-Poppa-take-it-easy type of activities. A sort of sleeping in, cinema-going, take-out ordering order of celebration. Capped off with some post-dinner kid-wrangling. Lucky me, he's an easy enough guy to please.

I like the pastel crayons for the way they lay down rich, sturated coats, easy enough for a tenderly-muscled toddler to fill up a blank page. Bear likes them for the ease in whey they mark up non-traditional surfaces like carpets, Magna-Doodle boards and, now, the facing on a wooden drawer.

My latest project, horning in between quilt blocks, is a garment bag, hopefully manly enough for the Mr. to shuttle clothes to work for those days that he rides his bike in. Ambitiously hoping to finish by Father's Day. Lack of a long-enough zipper may prove a formidable obstacle.

Normally, the cat, skittish and kid-shy, runs to the basement whenever the kids are around and settles into one of the cozy nests she's created for herself down there. Today, with the little, screechy one down for a nap, the cat let down her guard and allowed for The Boy to sit near and even stroke and poke at her before coming around to full-on jowl-rubbing, gurgle-purring behavior. The Boy was rather thrilled.