Lovelihood

The rain hat got made, cobbled together with pattern pieces on hand that were perhaps not suited for making headwear for my particular set of needs. Being mostly that it should protect my glasses, which it does not. Back to the drawing board with this one.

Walking into Trader Joe's is always a risky endeavor, what with all the attractively priced munchables and imbibables. Walking in with an empty stomach on the tail end of an errand run with credit card in hand is downright irresponsible. Figs beckoned to me in a way they never have before. Bear didn't much care for them. The mac and cheese bites, on the other hand, didn't last long enough on the plate to merit a photo shoot.

I don't remember a whole lot about my tenure in Kindergarten besides Marla Brignardello's mom's impressive Jell-O contrivances. But the homework packet The Boy brought home yesterday strike me as particularly of the now. Of the now in Seattle even. The material itself is what you'd expect. Writing things, counting things, coloring things, circling things. If there were a time when connect the dots would be appropriate for homework, Kindergarten would be it. What's interesting about the homework is the no pressure-ness of it. Do it. Or don't do it. Turn it in. Or not. Decorate it up with dinner crumbs and breakfast yogurt. Your call. Kindergarten, being the gateway drug to School, has been all about non-intimidating presentation. And I gotta say, I'm loving Kindergarten this time around.

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.