We all had a wonderful 4th of July holiday this year, with swimming, friends, barbecue and yummy food, and fireworks of course. I didn’t feel like pulling out the camera until nighttime. Maybe it was the good conversation, maybe the perfect temperature of the swimming pool …

After dark, the Fire Sprites appeared and colorful shenanigans ensued. Some of them were so fast and so flighty that it was nearly impossible to capture their images. Often, the best I could do was to photograph their fiery flight paths and trails of sparks.

And then some of the Sprites became so tired from all the flitting about, they fell asleep. Yay America!

Thursday was a big day for both of my children. Lucas attended his first swim meet (we had missed the first two meets of the summer due to illness) and Asher finished his second session of swimming lessons by jumping off the diving board.

Here’s Lucas (in the black shirt) doing a great backstroke. He is is becoming a stronger swimmer thanks to all this practice! This, and having fun, are our two big goals for this experience. I am also hoping that this is the right amount of team and competition for my beginning athlete.

He’s new to diving, as are many of his teammates. They are given the choice to dive from a standing or seated position.

Here’s Asher floating calmly with Miss Brittany. He has come a long way in the four weeks he’s been taking lessons. For the first time, on Tuesday, he didn’t ask my “WHY do we have to do swimming lessons?!” He just came along quietly and did the work. I think he’s finally settling into the routine of it, so I signed him up for another session! (We have to be there anyway!)

The coup de grace! Asher jumped (was helped) off the diving board with his noodle. He was cheerful until he had to walk the plank; then his face was full of grim determination. Jay was there in the water to reassure him and make sure Asher didn’t slip out of his noodle. He popped up quickly, blinked, and made his way to the ladder. We cheered like crazy!

Asher got a certificate for completing the session and a lolly. BIG treat!

Lucas reported that the swim meet was pretty cool, but there was a lot of sitting around and waiting for his turn in the water. They did a warm-up swim, then each child raced in three events, with multiple heats. In between races, they rested. During a regular practice, the kids swim for 45 minutes with only very brief rests.

Lucas’s swim meet culminated in ice cream sundays. Daddy came to see the kids swim, and so did two grandmas, so my kids had quite the cheering section.

Four more weeks to go.

Last Friday night I had a feverish dream inspired by a blog I just discovered: Twig and Toadstool (http://twigandtoadstool.blogspot.com/), where they spent a lot of time preparing for and celebrating the Summer Solstice. I was feverish because I was ill with a virus, but the inspiration worked its way into my dreams all night long. All night I wove a sun; each time I woke and fell asleep again, I slipped right back into the weaving. I could feel the yarn in my fingers, the sticks, the wool. And so, when I awoke, I knew we had to MAKE this thing I had dreamed about.

I gathered some sticks from the local schoolyard and supplies from home, and did some shopping on Monday. I fastened the center together by wrapping it with floral wire. I also wired the edges in an effort to keep the sticks from shifting during the weaving. I think it worked well.

And then before and after our Solstice dinner outdoors, Lucas and I worked on our giant sunburst, which is a lot like a Ojo de Dios (God’s eye), but has eight rays and not four.

Lucas was a big help with weaving the center, especially. Isn’t it beautiful?

We took a break to eat my yummy corn salad, spinach salad, and Daddy’s amazing tri tip.

Sunshiny squashes, organic tomatoes, and iced tea graced our table. Must be summer!

Here comes the SUN! The art project took all evening, but we finished before the sun went down. Lucas held it up high in the sky so I could photograph it. Then we hung our sunburst on our house, where we can see it from the patio. We spend a lot of time there when it’s warm, and our boring beige paint looks better with some colorful art.

We used $1 ribbon spools in red and orange, a bit of mama’s thick cotton rug yarn, raffia, yellow fabric scraps (with rocket ship pattern that you can’t see) tied into a long strip, and acrylic yarns in yellows, gold, and orange. I wish I had had an excess of yellow or gold wool roving on hand to use in our sunburst, but I didn’t. We also had on hand several colors of nylon twine (including safety orange) but elected not to use them.

Honeydew melon with mint and lemon sorbet served as a delicious dessert. I don’t know how that watermelon ball sneaked in there. Chef Daddy deserves the credit, I presume. He’s brilliant, as always.

Asher didn’t care for the art project much, but enjoyed snipping bits and pieces of yarn with scissors, and running around with sticks (guns/weapons/swords/knives. Can’t stop him despite my pacifist leanings!) Besides preparing dinner, Ian made a finger-woven chain to add to our sunburst, but for a while, it was “Action Inja” Asher’s headband.

So, welcome Summer! May it be full of frolicking, fun, fiestas, and good fortune. May it be full of right action, deep breathing, generosity, and abundance. May it be patient, low-stress, and l a z y -good. Blessed Be.

This man is my best friend and the most wonderful father in the world. We love you, Daddy!

My kiddos are enrolled in swimming team and lessons this summer. For eight weeks we will go to the American River College pool every afternoon, M–Th, so Lucas can be on a swim team. This team is noncompetitive; although they have “inner squad meets,” they are really only racing against teammates and their own times. This is good for many reasons, not the least of which is that we don’t have to give up every summer Saturday to competitive meets. Ours will take place on some Thursdays, during the normal practice time.

Lucas missed practice three days last week due to being ill, but this week he has rallied and is back at it, apparently giving it his all. He’s got new swim fins and new goggles and new shorts and a new rash guard and a new backpack to carry it all in. He’s a well-equipped boy. I think he’s enjoying it a lot, although it will be nice when he makes some friends there.

Asher, on the other hand, hates his swimming lessons. He has now gone to six of them and is no longer spending the time in the water with his instructor screaming (as he did his first two days). Nevertheless, he is not a fan of this experience. I can tell he is learning and becoming more comfortable in the water, practicing the skills (face in, dip underwater, streamline arms, kicking, etc.). I’ve even caught him smiling a time or two. Every morning, though, he wakes up and asks if we’re going to swimming lessons. And when I say yes, he asks, “Now?!” Since they are at the end of the day, I get to answer “Later” about a hundred times every day. He worries about it all day. Here’s a picture of him going underwater, which he would never choose to do.

His instructor is pretty and fun and she jollies him along through the twenty-minute lessons. And the point of all this is not to torture my child, but to teach him that he can be OK in the water and (hopefully) get to the side if he falls in. I remember Lucas didn’t care much for swimming lessons at this age either. Now he is a fish!

So, sports. Not really my thing, but I’m making an effort to be a “Swim Mom” this summer to give Lucas what I hope is a good, gentle introduction to a team sport experience. I’m doing my best to have a good attitude about the whole thing. Thank goodness the bleachers where the parents wait are in the shade!

I’ve discovered I like sharing our delicious children’s books, so here is another one I treasure.

Earth Mother by Ellen Jackson is the gentle story of the goddess going through her daily routine of tending to the earth and the earth’s creatures.

With dignity and great reverence, she nurtures even those things that seem insignificant, giving the beetles shiny jackets and sharpening the thorn bushes. She brings the rain and cradles the otter in a tangle of seaweed, rocking him on the waves.

“Bending low, she placed a piece of summer in a flower’s seed.”

“She spangled a tree with fireflies. She spread spiderweb lace on the grass.”

I love the illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon, award-winning (Hugo Award and Caldecott Medal among others) illustrators who have been married for five decades and collaborating and making art together all that time. In this story, Earth Mother is radiant on every page; the patterns in her clothing change with every scene, sometimes they are geometric, other times feature frogs or mosquitoes or men. Flowers break out of the square frames on every page. But the real test of any picture-book illustration is whether it supports the author’s story and theme. The Dillons accomplish this brilliantly, in my opinion.

Along her way, Earth Mother meets a man, a frog, and a mosquito. Each of them complains bitterly about one of the other two, and gives thanks for the abundance of the third. Each would like her to rebalance their proportions.

“Thank you, Earth Mother,” said Frog. “Mosquito and her sisters fill my belly and give me life. But why have you sent Man to catch and eat me? Man is bad, bad, bad. Sweet, delicious Mosquito, on the other hand, makes me happy. If there were more mosquitoes and no men, this world would be perfect.”

The interconnectedness and interdependence of the three creatures is beautifully explored. All the while, Earth Mother maintains her calm serenity, simply sighing because they do not see how perfect the earth already is.

I

This morning, Asher and I counted ten snails in a three-foot by three-foot area. Fortunately, they were in a neighbor’s yard and not mine. As we walked to school, we found shapes all over! Circles and rectangles and triangles and squares and even half circles. We found them in pavement, in lawns, on houses, on mailboxes. Two water department access openings in one lawn made two eyes and another circle was the nose, Asher noticed. We saw a brown squirrel hop up a telephone pole, using his claws to grip—hop, hop, hop—like a lumberjack with spiked shoes and a belt, and then he sat on the top of the pole. He booted a bird off this tall perch. Asher said, “Silly skwool!” We also worked on the concepts of near and far. As we get nearer to school each day he says, “We’re nearer, Mom. We’re getting nearer.” Counting cars went like this: one, two, three, four, eight, sixteen. (Sometimes it goes in the traditional order you would expect.) We made Important Observations. For example, one neighbor has a flowerbed with flowers of every color of the rainbow—even blue! Asher observed, “That tree is like a man. Why’s he all tall and fuzzy like that?” My hypothesis: “Because he’s a tree?”

II

After school, Asher begged to have a snack and a “couple minutes out of the bed.” That’s his delaying nap tactic. Fine with me. I know that if I try to put him down too soon after coming home, he’ll fake it. He’ll go through all the motions of going to nap, listening to three or four stories and snuggling close with his hand down my shirt, and then he’ll bolt the minute the last story is done. So today, we sat in the window seat and watched as the weird thunderstorm pelted the garden with rain, blew the trees about, and pounded on my flowers. Asher asked for some celery with peanut butter. But we were out of celery, so I gave him carrot and some peanut butter. He’s 3 and he isn’t set in traditional food pairings. And with rain pouring down, what else was there to do but pull out the camera?

III

Dinner was freezer pot sticker dumplings and organic broccoli—because sometimes you don’t get to the store for, well, too many days in a row. While we ate, Lucas and Daddy did math. We practiced our 12s times tables, the last set that Lucas has to recite to get the final star on his math chart. The after-dinner discos of the last few nights have been brought to us by They Might Be Giants and Schoolhouse Rock. My favorite? “Conjunction Junction,” which we heard tonight. Lucas wanted “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here.” Ian’s partial to the patriotic songs, but then he’s weird. He played David Bowie (of course) singing the Door’s “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).” Asher’s question: “Why those creepy people singing, Dada?” Somehow the subject leaped from David Bowie to the film “Labyrinth.” Which Lucas has never seen. Nevertheless, he immediately registered his deep hatred of muppets. I might finally have hit on the key concept, might just have pulled out the lynchpin in the whole muppet phobia. “Lucas, you want to someday see ‘Star Wars,’ right?” He emphatically nodded yes. “Dude! It’s full of muppets! YODA is a MUPPET. Muppets are cool.” We’ll let him process that and see what happens.

Yesterday, our fabulous surprise adventure that started with a gorgeous nature walk ended with a surprise trip to the movie theater—our first as a family since 2005, when we made the mistake of thinking that 3-year-old Lucas was ready for this type of thing and tried to see a kids’ movie on a rainy Thanksgiving Day in Eureka, California. We managed to stay only ten minutes that time, before the noise and the frenetic film content thoroughly freaked out our kid. (Oh, the GUILT!) Needless to say, we learned a valuable lesson about Lucas and media that evening and we’ve been rather hesitant to try the movie-going experience since then.

But, you know, he’s 8 now. And begging for bigger boy experiences. (He is really wanting to see Star Wars, which is the BE ALL, END ALL for all second-grade boys (even Waldorf boys), and man!—if he were any other kid … ) Although I wish to protect my son from media influences that might upset him or be too mature for him, I also don’t want him to be the only kid he knows who has never been to the movies!

So, Ian and I decided to give the theater a try, reasoning that Lucas is much older now and Asher … well, Asher just isn’t as sensitive as his older brother. He also seems more media-savvy, and is quite keen to watch anything at any time. Moreover, he’ll follow along with just about anything Lucas does, which I suppose is the karma of the second son.

We didn’t tell the boys what was up until we pulled into the theater parking lot.

“What’s this place?”

“This, dear Lucas, is the movie theater. We are going to see a movie.”

“All RIGHT!”

We saw How to Tame Your Dragon and it was great fun! Some parts were very intense and I wondered if we’d be leaving before we got to the end of the film, but my kiddos stuck it out! Lucas laughed out loud a bunch of times and Asher didn’t seem at all fazed by the scary dragons, fire, dramatic flying/falling scenes, or angry Vikings (with mysterious Scottish accents). I was happily impressed with the film’s story, and as we left my boys were chattering about which types of dragons they liked best.

[My, my! Movie tix for our family of four: $33!!!]

A tidal wave of work is coming my way, so the projects I presently have in hand consumed some of my weekend. This isn’t really so bad, except the weather was heavenly and my darlings headed off to the zoo without me on Saturday. I realized after they left that I’ve missed rather a lot of Asher’s zoo trips. This must be corrected soon.

Two strategy guides are hitting my inbox this week. A development task that was pushed off in favor of helping another editor with an urgent deadline is now coming due. My novel edit is due on Friday. Whee!

And still … I walked away from all of this to join my family on a little surprise adventure. We have a lovely book called Best Hikes with Children Around Sacramento and today we tried out a short, easy hike in Granite Bay at a place called Miners Ravine. It’s only a half-mile loop, but it sure was pretty! Honestly, California in the springtime—even in the Central Valley—is fantastic.

The bees were out in force! Many wildflowers were tickled by their buzzy paramours today. I took lots of wildflower/bee photos. Cuz I’m that kind of girl.

I don’t know for sure, but I think this white bubbly stuff might be spittle bug spittle.

We found a granite rock with lots of acorn grinding holes used by the Native Americans of the area—Miwoks, I believe.

Isn’t the automatic timer on the camera cool?

Purple lupines and pink clover.

Lucas found a treasure! And see his gappy grin? He lost another top tooth last week. The seventh, if I’m not mistaken.

We came across a shadowy pond with yummy reflections of the live oaks overhead and ceaseless ripples from bugs’ movements.

This granite boulder was enormous. Wherever Lucas goes, Asher must follow. ‘Twas ever the way for brothers.

It was such a great day! I’m glad to be taking advantage of this cool, comfortable weather while it lasts, and am very much looking forward to trying more local hikes recommended in our book. Our adventure ended with another exciting surprise, but I’ll save that for a different post.

I

It starts with a bed-a-bye snuggle, sometime before the morning music …

somehow, there we all are.

Four abed, snuggled under, breathing.

Daddy’s the bravest. He rises before the rest.

Then mama feels guilty, smells coffee brewing, and slowly emerges from the nest.

Big boy bounces up, right up!

Mama and big boy go to his room to pull out clothes for today’s many adventures.

“But I’m not ready!” he complains.

(Mama doesn’t blame him. She’s not ready either.)

So they sit together on the green carpet. Perhaps a cuddle?

Arms enfold ten wiggly elbows, ten knocking knees.

“Either this lap used to be bigger, or you used to be smaller.”

(Giggle)

And there she is, just an arm’s length away,

Emily Mouse, doing her “evening” chores, having a before-bed drink

of water from the upside-down blue bottle.

Gently, Mama says, “Maybe Emily misses you,” thinking, it has been a good long while

since you held your mousie friend.

OK. He reaches for her, cups her gently in two astonishingly large hands

lined and crackled with dirt,

graced with broken nails

and calluses—

curious hands

that move a bit too fast.

White mouse whiskers, sniffing, twitching.

“Wow,” mama says. “We have had Emily for a whole year.”

“Yep.” White mouse moves over dingy T-shirt,

is corralled back into workaday hands.

To herself, Gently now … careful …

“How long do mice live?” Mama wonders cautiously.

“Two years, or a little more.”

Hmmm …

Emily’s fur is stroked, ears scratched by one nubby index finger.

Even. More. Gently …

“What do you think that means?”

…

Blue eyes flash, then seek refuge in the green carpet.

She will die someday. Sometime.

“Maybe soon.”

“Let’s give her lots of love until then, OK?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“And lots of petting. And kitchen scraps!”

“Yeah! I wonder if we gave her a whole sweet pepper, would she eat a hole and crawl inside it?”

“I don’t know. Let’s give her one and see.”

Eggs are ready. “Time for breakfast,” says the Daddy.

Littlest boy sleeps on …

…

II

Lucas and Grandma leave.

Existential dilemma faced and dressing for a rainy school day accomplished!

Phew!

Mama sips coffee

until …

“MAMA!”

Sleepy one emerges into a quiet house.

“My jammies are wet. I want a kiwi.”

Never before. “A kiwi? Really?”

“Yes.”

Well, then. Diaper change and then Mama goes looking …

Hallelujah! A kiwi. One.

“I have to peel the fuzzy brown skin off.”

“And then I eat it up.”

It vanishes before Mama’s eyes. Three gulps tops.

Then the cold eggs follow.

Mama sits by his side.

“I’m ready for some holding now,” he says with certain faith, and climbs over.

A small egg fills her lap.

“I’m a baby bird in my egg.”

Ah. “And I’m the nest?”

“Yes. And the Mama Bird.”

Pecking. Peck. Peck.

“I’m pecking!

“I’m hatching! Hatch!”

“Hello, Baby Bird! Welcome.”

“You’re my Mama Bird?!”

“Mmmm-hmm …”

“I hatch again!”

(Repeat)

“Are you ready to fly, baby bird?”

“Yes!”

“Let’s put on your red rain feathers.”

“Hurry, Mama Bird! Let’s fly!”

All the way to preschool.