Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Sometimes we take rambling neighborhood walks. Mostly I don’t bring the camera along because although I love it, it’s heavy. But on this gorgeous day last week I just had to! I wanted to get some photos of our neighbor’s spectacular tulips that completely line her whole front yard. At first the kids acted like it was a grueling forced march, but they cheered up before too long.

Asher has skills! I have mental pictures of 3-year-old Lucas balancing on these same rocks, wearing these same clothes. This is both astounding and comforting to me, somehow. Yes, I have been here—exactly here—before.

See what I mean? Could not miss the opportunity to view these girls up close!

This is our neighborhood beehive, in the (left) crack of this living tree. If it were a little higher up I might think we had found Pooh’s tree hive in the Hundred Acre Wood. I like watching the bees flying in and out on their busy errands.

Lucas at the Bird Tract Park—with obligatory found stick. “Don’t photograph me, Mom.” Hard to resist when the sunlight bounces off his hair like that.

And this? Self portrait.

Little bits of beauty I found in my backyard.

Friday was the last day of school for my kiddos. They seem ready for a break and they get two weeks off for Easter. Lucas has a cold again, with a nasty, nasty cough. It’s slowing him down. We’ll call this photo “aftermath”—this is what happens when Asher is given a little bit of red, blue, and yellow play-dough and then Lucas comes along with a tad of green.

Saturday started with me needle-felting a (spectacular—if I do say so myself) wool Easter egg on the way to brunch in Davis with Mimi and G.G. She’s such an awesome cook. We enjoyed eggs with roasted zucchini and Jarlsburg cheese, blueberry muffins, small sausages that were a huge hit with Asher, roasted potatoes, fruit salad, toast with homemade jam, coffee, and apple juice. Didn’t pull out my camera, though.

The kiddos explored the beautiful yard a bit. Lucas climbed a tree. We watched birds feeding at the birdfeeders. We admired Mimi’s new ceramic sculptures; she’s building an underwater scene in a corner of her yard, complete with sea creatures and seaweed and, soon, mermaids. The kids threw the ball for Maggie Dog. I ended up giving my needle-felted egg to Mimi and G.G. for Easter. (Wish I had taken a photo of it! It had a bunny and flowers and grasses.)

Then we went to the Explorit Science Center. I’ve been wanting to take the kids there for a long time. It’s a pretty great place with all kinds of hands-on science for children. Unfortunately, it’s also in danger of closing due to budget problems. Like all the great, local places to take children:  Effie Yeaw Nature Center, Discovery Museum, etc. We played with centrifugal force, parachutes, topography, water and soil erosion, gears, paper buckyballs, animal life cycles, saw skins of all types, watched live black widows, cichlids, and tarantulas, and learned all sorts of nifty facts. Until Lucas was worn out and I had to go home to meet my father.

Back at home, I opened the mail and found a fat royalty check that was such a good surprise. Feeling great, I kissed my boys goodbye. Dad picked me up and took me to a play at the B Street Theater: Becky’s New Car. It was clever and often laugh-out-loud funny. Such a treat! Afterward, we went out to dinner at the Buckhorn Grill with Roger and Rosemary, longtime friends of my parents. Rose told me all about scrap-booking and making aprons, her one and only sewing pursuit. Roger flies remote-control airplanes. I wonder if retirement will be that much fun for me someday.

And for the boys left at home? Pizza, of course, and some movie about Little Red Riding Hood. I came home later that night and found that Ian had cleaned the playroom (Yay!) and was playing Half-Life. We retired and watched “Friends.” Great day, no question about it.

Sunday began with some much needed house-cleaning. I swept up about a pound of dirt from the floors. Ew! I just can’t keep up with the boys—they bring dirt and sand in constantly. And because it was Sunday and Daddy was home, some Lego fun was in order, of course.

Went out to lunch at Sunflower and ran into Lucas’s classmate’s family. We enjoyed letting the four children play and chase chickens while the four adults chatted. Asher works so hard to keep up and manages too pretty well! And it’s great watching how well Lucas gets along with his chums.

I dragged the family to the nursery where I got some flowers and found a dwarf citrus tree for my giant pot that Ian got me for Christmas. I wanted something that would look pretty all year and ended up with a red valencia orange tree. I was originally looking for a lemon tree, but couldn’t find any that were small enough. They all seemed to want to grow to at least 10 feet. The orange produces “tasty” fruits with deep, dark red flesh and few seeds, and purplish red to orange red skins. It’s supposed to be compact, nice looking, very ornamental, heavy bearing, and hold fruit well. I’m hoping it will do well in the pot, given the tag says it makes excellent indoor plant; “just clip to shape.” Yay for finding nursery gift certificates from 2004!

My wisteria is blooming like mad all over the back fence and to a height of about 20 feet into the air. It looks fantastic. Today I walked out there to listen to the bees; they’re making a huge racket. I caught pics of a honey bee and this big, fat guy taking advantage of the flowers. I really hope the wisteria still looks this beautiful next Saturday when we have friends over!

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

The other day, grandma came over to help us with our worm farm. She gave it to me last May as a birthday present, and much to my surprise, I’ve managed to keep the worms alive all this time, feeding them kitchen scraps and coffee grounds. I wasn’t too excited about this part, however.

Grandma is less squeamish than me and has years’ worth of experience farming worms. While I worked on an editing project, she and two gleeful boys tackled the job of removing the compost, separating the worms into three groups (one group for the garden, one for the worm farm, and one for a new worm farm for her to take home), and restarting it afresh, returning the not-yet-compost food parts to the farm.

That’s a lot of worms, man! Good stuff!

Then she let the kiddos paint flower pots that she brought them. (Thanks for the pictures, Grandma.)

Unsurprisingly, some wackiness ensued. Lucas likes to impress …

And Asher really enjoys the hose, no matter the weather. In case you’re wondering, yes, they were dressed identically (their choice) but you probably can’t tell with all the mud.

The year has turned a quarter, and I’m loving the open windows and fresh breezes. I’m wearing a sundress! Ian and I had some much-needed time out together this weekend and it was wonderful. Some spring cleaning is in order, but you needn’t worry because we won’t try to do it all at once. We like to ease into these things a little bit each day. My dear hubby is currently tackling his pile of ironing.

I’ve pulled the shorts from older cousins out of the garage for Lucas to wear in the coming weeks and given away a box, a giant bag, and two grocery sacks of toddler clothes to two darling boys we know. Out with the old and too-small!

Lucas and I have planted some seeds straight into the ground, which is something I’ve never had much luck with before. We figure it’s unlikely we’ll have anymore frost, and since we’ll probably get several more rains we’ll take advantage of the free water. We planted some beans, red chard, spinach, poppies, nasturtiums, and morning glories, all from seed packets I had lying around. I don’t know if we’ll get lucky and get some shoots, but it was worth a shot and better than discarding seeds from past years.

We have gathered together some of our spring books to enjoy. Here are some favorites that we own.

• Spring: Poems, Songs and Stories, Winstones Press
• The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth, by Ellen Jackson
• When the Earth Wakes, by Ani Rucki
• Too Many Rabbits and Other Fingerplays About Animals, Nature, Weather, and the Universe, by Kay Cooper
• The Lion and the Little Red Bird, by Elisa Kleven
• The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes, by DuBose Heyward
• The Golden Egg Book, by Margaret Wise Brown
• Selected spring poems from The Chidren’s Hour Best Loved Poems, vol 5
• Flower Fairies of the Spring, by Cecily Mary Barker
• Best Hikes with Children Around Sacramento, Bill McMillon

Hope you”re enjoying spring weather, spring cleaning, and spring reading, too!

Did you catch that sky last night? After the rain, my little corner of the world was ablaze with the sunset spilling over every wet surface it could find.

And someone I know just had to splash about in the lava.

Beauty sometimes washes over even my suburban, sidewalk-lacking street. All you have to do is notice.

Yesterday at about 6:30 Pacific time: I’m finally one of those people on the airplane using a laptop. I’m maybe halfway through my flight now. The flight was delayed two hours and I didn’t leave SF airport until 3:45. My day has been fine, but a little long. It seems like more of this time should be productive, but there is a lot of waiting to move and when I tried to get Internet service in the airport, both Mozilla Firefox and IE said they couldn’t find the network connection. I could see the free public network, connect to it, but couldn’t surf. Frustrating. My boss has been worrying about my traveling today. The taxi company that’s supposed to pick me up at the airport knows my flight has been delayed.

I’m already missing my family. Yes, I’m having a small adventure. Yes, I got to see snow-covered Rockies out my window. That’s wonderful and I wish I was better at enjoying my time alone. It is a strange unease, though. Kind of like maybe I forgot to bring along two arms and a leg on this trip. There won’t be much time for fun or sightseeing, though. I’m working almost all the hours I’m in New Jersey.

I packed a tiny sewing project with me this time. A few pieces of felt, about six pins, needle and embroidery floss. And Mom lent me the niftiest little device—a little thread cutter with no visible (forbidden) blade. It’s a small brass pendant hanging around my neck. Pull a thread through any of the slots around the edge of the pendant and it goes in past the blade and cuts, just like magic! I am wishing I had had more time at home to cut out all the pieces of felt I need because I’ve already sewn the bulk of what I did bring and now I’ve run out of project. The whole thing was well conceived except for its duration. I didn’t bring along my knitting.

Today 8:30 pm Eastern time: I’m exhausted! After I’m done with writing this I’m calling home and then going to sleep. I didn’t get to my hotel until 1:45 am today. Got 4.5 hours of sleep and then hit the ground running for 8 hours of meeting today, plus a dinner. It all went well and I think this could be an awesome project. I’m kind of wishing that in this room full of PhDs and EDDs that I had more than a BA under my belt. This is textbook publishing, so that stuff matters—kind of. Anyway, everyone is warm and friendly and very knowledgeable.

Tomorrow we meet from 8:30 am to 2:30 pm, then head to the airport. I’ll arrive in Sacramento sometime near midnight—if everything goes perfectly and my two flights aren’t delayed. Rain tomorrow here, but snow in Chicago. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I’ve only seen a teeny-tiny slice of New Jersey, but what I’ve seen is very pretty. Bare, deciduous woods with snow on the ground, punctuated by gorgeous, big homes. No fences, not much yard, just woods.  I’m truly grateful to be here and to be doing this. I just miss my family and my husband’s strong arms around me. Tomorrow I will rock it, and then I will make a long trek home.