Musings on Mud Season

I hate this mud. Since we moved, we are living with a lot more mud ... a feature of living with a lot less poured concrete.

Can it be that having grown up in the city my whole life that I never realized that Late Winter/Early Spring could be called "Mud Season"?

Every time we go outside we get muddy. It's hard to arrive at work spotless, if I have to climb out of my car to open the gate to get off the property. We just weren't prepared for this, so we are tracking mud all over and making more work for me to do keeping the floors clean.

One of the reflections I read this week spoke directly to this (in fact it gave me the term Mud Season), and I thought:

yes, we are not just peacefully sleeping and will awake with lovely flowers in the spring. We are struggling, wallowing, wading through muck, trying to get to spring the hard way. And yet, it is the muck itself that later becomes the fertile source of the flowers, the joy, the hope. How to love the muck now? Or, if I can't love it, how do I accept it? I will struggle. Life will never be an endless summer, so how do I learn to ride gently through Mud Season?

The Reading Life

So many books, so little time!

Our read alouds have been:

Blackout by John Rocco. What happens when the power goes out in the city? Why, you can see the stars.

Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore. Everyone on the street thinks Sid is their cat, so they feed him. But really, he is going from house to house, getting six dinners a day.

There are so many groundhog books to read for Groundhog's Day, we couldn't get through them all! But we did read:

Groundhog Stays Up Late and Brownie Groundhog and the February Fox

You Will Be My Friend! by Peter Brown is about an exuberant bear and her over-enthusiastic efforts to make friends.

When I Was Young In the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant is a lovely description of a simpler life.

My Light by Molly Bang is all about the various ways we collect energy as electricity, and how it all comes from the sun originally.

We had a little Bernard Waber kick and read three of his books in one night:

Lyle Walks the Dogs, Fast Food, Gulp Gulp, and Courage

We're also reading out loud a fun longer book: Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos

Theodosia is a fun heroine, sassy and smart, and she lives in a museum of antiquities, plagued by the curses on the old Egyptian artifacts ...

And the kids have gone through a few great audiobooks:

Miranda the Great (Hypatia LOVED this one)

Harriet the Spy (Carbon loved this one)

The Indian in the Cupboard (Carbon said it was "a bit boring at times" but it has inspired lots of play storylines here)

Everything on a Waffle (another favorite for Carbon)

Happy Reading!

Scrap Arts

This post is terribly behind, since we actually went to see ScrapArtsMusic weeks ago, but I've been meaning to post about how cool it was.

It wasn't good timing, because we had tickets for right after Hypatia's birthday party so we were all really tired, but the production was very cool. The local performing arts hall put up an exhibit of visual art made from scraps and recycled materials, and that was a great compliment to the music made with strange recycled materials.

Seeing the performance taught the kids that you don't have to have a drum set to do percussion music - and they have put on a few of their own ScrapMusic performances at home.

It's not easy to take the kids to see live Art - it can be expensive, we have to manage their behavior a lot, and sometimes they resist going and sitting still. We have to pick the right stuff for them to see, and that can be hard as well. But it was a huge part of my childhood to see live music and dance, and I want it to be a part of theirs too. It's hard to put a value on the Arts - that's probably why it's so hard to fund them in schools - but it's precisely because they are transcendent and priceless. Giving my children Art is like giving them Nature - how do you define that and how do you do that, but of course you must have it in a childhood.

Lent begins

The public library has supplied me with some lovely books for my Lenten reflections, and today I am sitting with the book Spring: A Spiritual Biography of the Season.

"Spring is the season that simultaneously calls us to celebration and to a sober sense of gratitude for the time that we have been given. The grace of renewal should lead to gratitude for the newness, and it should lead to an acute awareness of our need for renewal."

Our Schoolroom Re-Do

The pictures aren't great - one problem with the schoolroom is that it doesn't get a lot of light, and there are no overhead lights in there. We need to buy and install some track lighting on the ceiling, but until then ....

This is my new set up for our schoolroom. I realized the kids don't want to sit at a desk to do their work - they love round tables where we can all be working together. So I moved the desks to the edges, and brought in a round table. If you peek under the round table you see two boxes - they are super cool organizers that each kids has for their art supplies, pencils, scissors, paper, etc.

My husband had his desk out in the living room, and we moved it into the schoolroom instead. If he needs to work in the evening, he can go in there and shut the door.

Our big desk is still in there, but it may become more a project table. I'm about to cover it in seed starts, in fact.

The room has these built in bookshelves and a window seat bench, and I finally got some cushions ($20 at Goodwill for them all) so that it's nice to sit there. The kids love it.

I'm pretty stoked about the reorganization. My sewing stuff had to move out of the room, but I think this is going to be so much more inviting and useful for the kids - and maybe we'll manage to keep our dining room table clean and not always covered in school projects!

You can sort of see how it was before in my old First Day of School post.

Feeling drawn to Lent

This year I'm feeling powerfully drawn to some sort of Lenten practice. I have no Catholic background, and I've never had a Lenten practice before, but this year it just feels right to do something.

I don't want to misappropriate the traditions of another faith - and because I don't believe in the literal resurrection of Christ or in the doctrine of atonement, Lent has to mean something else to me. With all respect to Catholics, I am not "doing Lent" in the sense they would understand. When I read about Lenten practices, however, what I get is that it is about self-reflection, self-preparation, and embracing that which is most life-affirming and essentially true.

So, my Lenten practice is about pulling into myself a bit, finding what is essential, true, and life-affirming, and living with more intention and attention to that truth. It is spiritual spring cleaning.

It is not a self-improvement regimen, or a 40 day diet. I am planning on giving up sugar and meat for the 40 days, but not to lose weight or anything. I am giving them up because it is a sacrifice (the sugar) but mostly because it will turn my diet in a direction that feels more life-affirming and treads lighter on the planet.

Besides giving up those food items, I plan to spend time daily reflecting on intentional living, voluntary simplicity, and sustainable lifestyles. If I can also get my daily meditation/yoga practice going again, that would be a bonus. But primarily, I see myself wanting to strip away some of the distractions and materialisms of life, and find something more essential and more true.

I'm sure I'll be blogging as I go. :)

Breaking Ground

We have some Big Dreams for our gardens: tons of fresh produce to eat, herbs, berries, fruit, a big sprawling cottage-style flower garden with "magical" bits (the kids want fairy doors, statuary, a fountain, and more). We've been dreaming together and pinning ideas to our Pinterest board.

But in the meantime, you have to just start somewhere. You have to break ground.