Keeping it real

Theo was very feverish yesterday evening. When he gets ill he becomes extremely loving and I, for one, can do no wrong in his eyes. Last night I was sitting on one end of the couch and Theo was on the other murmuring, "Mom, I love you, I love you sooo much." Then he kind of squirmed around in discomfort and ended up with his nose right by my feet. He made some comment and I said, "Oh Theo, do my feet smell? Should I move them?" "No Mom, they smell like roses..." Eli happened to be walking by right then and he snidely remarked, "Oh please Theo, even if you love someone, you have to admit that their feet will smell every now and then."

Soft

No, not Lucy..... The snow! I went down to Hidden Falls to ski today. Today. December 4. That shouldn't be so surprising, but I just read somewhere that this is the earliest skiing we have had in 16 years! So as I was skiing I was trying to figure out what felt so different about it. Then it hit me, it was soft snow. I was cutting tracks through fresh virgin snow- even when I turned around to follow my tracks back to my car, they were already recovered and I had to break trail once again. Last year, one of the only skies I had was up at Telemark. The snow was so hardpacked and icy that Jackie, our Peruvian houseguest, on skies for the first time, fell and busted her tailbone. I have real serious high hopes for this winter.

The Wonder

This fall Eli has been trying to teach Theo to read. Just the other night he was using the ketchup bottle as his teaching tool. Theo seemed to be making the barest hint of progress. Eli looked over at me, sighed and said, “Oh Mom, isn’t it just a wonder how the whole world just opens up to you once you learn to read?” I agreed. Later, when they had moved out of the kitchen I took a close look at the ketchup bottle. Sadly, no secrets of the world were revealed to me. Maybe tomorrow I should try the mustard container.

Oh boy...

Mary, Theo's teacher came over laughing when I picked Theo up from school yesterday. She explained that they had been talking about royalty and she had said, 'Zachary, we could call you the King of Cardboard.' Then she mentioned that Etta could be the Queen of Art Projects. Then, from the back of the room, Theo shouted, "Well, Lucy sure is the Queen of Cuteness!"

Costa Rica

Jon and I just returned from a wonderful week in Costa Rica with Jon's brother Tim and his wife, Erin, and our pals Kerri and Jeff. We spent the first days down in the village of Dominical at a wonderful small hotel. If you are ever looking for lodging by the ocean, check out Cuna Del Angel. It was perfect. We filled our days with whale-watching, surfing, hiking, and a river rafting trip. I loved it all. Our evenings were usually spent with a cool drink on the hotel's patio, watching the sunset, and the toucans, and the sloths, and the howler monkeys. After four lovely days of lounging in the south, we drove north of San Jose to the Sarapiqui river area. We moved into our first hotel around sunset- it seemed nice enough, but very very quiet, and dark- kind of moody. In a non-romantic way. We had picked this place in part because their website boasted of a great chef who catered to vegetarians. So we eagerly sat down at an elegant table and awaited our meals. The waiter entered and grandly lay before us a large platter of....dry, toasted wonder bread? Not what was expected. In the morning we headed out to the other hotel we had considered because they advertised lots of trails through primary rain forest. All four of us (Tim and Erin flew back home after Dominical) fell in love with the forest, our guide, the hotel, and the lovely patio overlooking a rushing river. We quickly canceled our previous reservations and settled in at Selva Verde Lodge. Highly recommend it. Sadly, we only had one day to spend there. Overall, I'd go again in a second. Even though there are so many places to go in the world, I think there is still so much more to do in Costa Rica. And it's not terribly far away, it's in the same time zone, and the people are so amazingly nice. Go!
The absolute best part of our trip was, incidentally, returning home to St. Paul at midnight to find little love notes from the boys on our pillows.

'She's perfect....'

This morning as Theo was getting dressed for school I said, "Theo, you're looking cute today." He replied, "Mom, you know who is cute? Lucy. She's so cute I just have to tell her that everytime I see her. She's so cute. She's perfect. Sigh...And she's so soft too." Like I said earlier, we are going to be in trouble with this one. For the record, Lucy is adorable. I do not know if she is soft or not.

The Amish Envy Club

A friend of mine has come up with the best idea for a club that I've heard in a decade. I'm not much of a joiner, but I do enjoy my book club, and my husband's recently launched (ha) a model rocket club that is much more fun than it sounds. But the Amish Envy Club is tops.

Here's how it works: You gather together 3-4 families of fun people. Each family gets to utilize all club members for one day of the year. We all work on a home-improvement project for each family- plus watch the kids, and contribute to not one, but two feasts (dinner and supper). As in any good club, there are rules. The Amish hosts for the day need to have the project ready to go by 9 am- all trips to Menards completed, tools assembled, work space cleared for takeoff. Any subsequent trip to Menards will cost the host points in the 'Ammy' competition, and probably put them out of the running for the coveted year-end award. I don't know if it's true, but I hear this year's Ammy award is going to be a goat. To be passed on to next year's lucky winner...

Ammy points are awarded for anything you do during a project that will make you seem more Amish. I think we should get something for just having a son named Eli, but no dice, in this club we only go by middle names. New names are essential to any club worth its salt, really. But we plan to get ahead in the point system by introducing kid projects like carding wool, or perhaps biking to the next project with big orange triangles on our backs. The possibilities are endless.

We got the Amish club off to a start by having a potluck planning meeting. Not much planning got done, but the children got used to each other (ok, we definitely lost points by allowing our vast weapons arsenal to be opened- resulting in a few injuries of a minor sort. BUT LET IT BE NOTED THAT THE WEAPONS ARE ALL HAND-MADE WOODEN NUMBERS!!!! That should bring our point total right back to about even. Right?) and the adults had numerous laughs. At one point it got so raucous that I was forced to use my inhaler. Laughing has not caused an asthma attack since back in my camp counselor days. That's a crying shame, to be sure.

Our first project was this past Saturday. We all gathered at the Spencer’s in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood. The project was to move plumbing and begin the process of adding a basement bathroom. It involved a jack-hammer- we do go in for power tools. Predictably, the guys in the group gravitated to the basement for the first shift. Not because they thought they were better suited for the work, but because they were slyly trying to avoid the work shift when the sewer pipe was severed and noseplugs might become necessary. Nice try guys. Anyway- work got done, laughs were had, friends were made, and we ate and drank very well. Jon and I came home tired, but excited to make a plan to put 6 other adults to work for us some day soon.

I hope you all aren’t thinking that we are being disrespectful to another’s culture. Truly, everyone in the group is very thankful and appreciative of the Amish barn raising tradition. I admit that the Ammy’s might be going a bit too far, but we are doing it out of jealousy- not spite. An Amish Envy Club can not get too big for it’s britches- 8 adult workers is about as much as any project in our small, citified houses can stand. And four weekends a year is a great starting point. It took us a full month just to land on a date that would work for all four families for this first project. We have three more Saturdays to try to pin down. But if you are eager to start your own branch of an AEC, please contact me and I can send you the by-laws and other chapter start-up information!