Lovelihood

The ivy, yes, tends to get a little out of control. But its trumpet flowers are pretty.

Finding an intact sand dollar was a childhood preoccupation of mine, as fruitless as coming up with a four-leaf clover, which I also hunted for. The Mr., having been reared in land-locked suburbia, didn't even know what a sand dollar was, but somehow came up with this perfect specimen yesterday.

It's a three hour drive out to the coast to visit the beach, starting off on the interstate, then through craggy hillsides with evergreens flanking the two lane highways, broken up with depressed sea-side towns whose mottos unironically quote their most famous grunge-star son. The water, as it is all along the Pacific where I grew up taking the occasional day-trip to the beach, is cold enough to dole out sharp, biting pain, before your legs get numb enough to allow you the pleasure of spending a day at the beach, which even on the coldest day is a treat by virtue of it being such a trek to get to. Naps come easily on the drive back to town, dinner is hungrily consumed, coffee purchased for the remainder of the drive home. It was a lot like one of those Volkswagen commercials, complete with VW vehicle. Until the part where we sat in traffic waiting to clear past a rendering truck spill. Still, there was the beach.

The Boy required a wallet. A growing boy accumulates money and so he needs something to put it in. I'm happy enough to oblige with a simple felt and laminated linen affair, with enough space to carry all that a just-this-side-of-kindergarten boy might need to paint the town pink.

A by-product of those s'mores cupcakes was a half-mixing-bowl batch of unformed marshmallow that, instead of folding into a pan to set and cube, I piped into albino snakes that I later snipped into hot-cocoa appropriate nubbins. Perfect for storing in mason jars until an appropriate hot-cocoa occasion arises.

Bear, putting on her supermodel pout as she hurtles toward me. That, certainly, is not the face of a baby, or even a toddler. She's full-on a kid.

Sure. Once I've eaten my pre-prepared oatmeal out of the jar, I could clean it out and put it back into storage until ready to be refilled with oats or cake batter or play dough or whatever else I'm planning to store in it. Or I could affix one of those solar panel garden stakes to a mason ring and screw it onto the jar for a firefly-less effect, perhaps doing a poor enough job with the hot glue that water seeps in, creating a reflecting surface for the LED bulb that turns on reliably every night.