Bird and Little Bird

Visiting Home.

We are back home again after a trip up north to see some dear friends get married. The wedding was held in a little Vermont village, and my girl had her first chance to try her hand at flower girl responsibilities, along with her best friend, whose dad was the groom. Annie 2.0 flew out for the festivities as well, and spent the last week with us. She caught a flight out early this morning, and waking up to find her suitcase gone from the playroom rug was a bit sad for all.

 

It was a funny thing, going back to Vermont. I don't think I realized just how homesick I was for the good old Green Mountain State until I crossed the border back into it. As much as I love the adventerous spirit with which we are tackling urban living here in Massachusetts, the rolling green hills of sparsely populated Vermont speak to my soul in a way that few places ever have. I probably cried (just a little!) about four times the first day we were back there. And had to keep reminding myself how much I like living near the ocean. Ocean, ocean, ocean: my new mantra.

 

I thought a whole lot about home during those days in Vermont, and what it means to make a home somewhere. I decided that there is a reason that we often talk about home being wherever the people we love are at. It is somewhat about the comfort of family, and the power of community and friendship- sure. But, I think it is also a bit about the difficulty of attaching your feeling of home to a particular geographic location. At least for me. My life at the moment is one where the house number associated with home will change here and there for awhile longer. We aren't yet settled in the physical place where we feel we belong, or where we can imagine that we will stay. And it will be a few more years before the option of rooting ourselves more permanently even exists. I guess that this means that at least for now, the members of our little family will have to be home for each other.

That, and we are going to need a lot of trips to the beach to fill the Vermont-sized hole in my homesick heart. Ocean, ocean, ocean...

Summer Reading Round-Up

I meant to write this post yesterday, which is to say that I meant to write it last week sometime, but somehow that never happened. There is gas main construction going on in our neighborhood, resulting in things like having no water for seven hours at a time, so we have been doing less at home and hitting the road for various adventures instead. The tour of Massachusetts beaches continues, in other words. But we have all been reading a lot, so I thought I might share a bit of what we have been reading, and maybe see what you all have been up to as well.

For her part, Mariam finished up reading the Mysterious Benedict Society books this summer, as well as reading a couple of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I think that she just finished Little Town on the Prairie. Annie 2.0 arrived for a visit this weekend, and brought along Wildwood, which M. has been wanting to read. They started reading it together a couple of nights ago, but I might try to catch up so that I can read it with Mariam when Annie heads back to Oregon. Mariam has probably read almost a book a day all summer long, including everything from The One and Only Ivan to a pile of Nancy Drew mysteries and about half of the Series of Unfortunate Events books. She loved The One and Only Ivan and was really excited when she heard that the book had won the Newbury Medal for this year.

 

For my part, I have gone deep down the natural history hole, as I am wont to do. A few weeks ago, I read the new David Quammen book, which I found totally riveting. I am like a certifiable squealing David Quammen fangirl, a fact which is so incredibly nerdy I can't even believe I just admitted to it on the Interwebs. But there it is. I have read everything the man has written and engage in Internet stalking to find out when new books will come out. I can't believe I was so slow to read his latest; I blame it on the residency match/move situation. And laziness.

Tim Gallagher also has a new book out, about his trek to Mexico to search for the likely extinct imperial woodpecker. I'm about half way into that one right now, reading it along with Dawn, who was the one that told me about it. I'm a big fan of Gallagher's earlier woodpecker chronicle, but somehow missed the fact that there was a new book.

Last week, I read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, which I also really enjoyed. It is part natural history, part memoir, part call to being present and grateful in daily life. It is very well written and strangely engaging, considering that a lot of it is about snails. I would definitely recommend it to my friends and neighbors. I've also been browsing The Seaside Naturalist, which is a truly fantastic reference for any of you beachgoing folks living on or visiting the eastern seaboard. I picked it up at the local Audubon center and have looked at it almost daily since then.

And for Z.'s part? More with the pigeon and the bus. Yes. Still.

I don't believe I've got anything on deck, so if you have a great read to recommend, do leave it in the comments for us all to see! I love to know what everyone is reading.

Yarn Along (Sleeve Stitches and Puzzle Pieces).

After weeks and weeks of idle threats, I finally got over my warm weather knitting aversion long enough to pick up the stitches on the underarm of my Tea Leaves and start in on the knitting of sleeves. I really need to make myself some kind of highly visible signage to remind me that sleeves are very satisfying to knit up (or down, as the case may be) once you actually start, so that I will do less of this nonsense where I put them off for many, many days at a time. I think that my hesitation is often related to the previously discussed frustration with the number of stitches a pattern will tell you to pick up when starting a sleeve. This pattern suggested eleven. Eleven! I picked up seventeen.

In other news, our dining room table is mostly covered with puzzle pieces pretty much always these days. After years of trying to get the big kid to attempt more involved and intricate puzzles, she finally went all in on the idea. The new favorite summer activity is listening to the Mysterious Benedict Society series on audio while drinking lemonade and doing puzzles. Written out like this, it doesn't sound super exciting. But I don't know... I feel like the girl knows how to have a pretty good time.

Yarning along with the kind and lovely Ms. Ginny today.

Old Friends, New Places.

At the end of last week, I gathered up the small folk and we headed up to a nearby wildlife preservation for a short hike. The plan was to meet up with a former student of mine and his parents, in town for a visit to family on their way home from a longer trip to the coast north of here. It ended up being a really nice visit. It had been years since we had seen our friends, and actually, that former student is now sixteen. I taught him in first and second grade. Yikes.

 

The little turtle pond at the refuge was ridiculously full of all kinds of animals. Turtles poking their heads out of the water every few feet, dragonflies zooming past, tadpoles the size of my hand. Mariam was mesmerized by this. And possibly a little overwhelmed. There was a lot of stuff in there! But it was very cool to see the buzzing and bustling diversity of life in the little pond, especially because it is so close to such a densely packed urban area. They put up traffic signs along the side of the road here that say "thickly settled." Which I guess is supposed to translate to: "There are a lot of people all over this place. Be careful, eh?" Somehow, I find this kind of funny.

As we were leaving, we came across this cicada. I occasionally find the empty molts of these guys in the yard here, but this is the first time that I have seen one all put together properly.

 

So, I don't know. Is this the part where we talk a little bit about how many people keep things like china in their dining room cabinets, but I am amassing a small collection of empty bird's nests, eggshells, and dead insects instead? No? Okay, nevermind then.

Carry on.

On Walden Pond.

As it turns out, if you go to Walden Pond, and then write about it, you are pretty much obligated to use the above title for said writing. True story. Which is to say that we drove out to Walden Pond yesterday morning, something that we have been meaning to do since just after our arrival here in Massachusetts. And, I must say, Thoreau had a good thing going. Walden Pond is truly beautiful, and may be the among the best places we have visited here so far.

We initially thought that we might walk around the pond, but the weather was that sticky kind of hot that makes walking seem unpleasant, so hiking plans were quickly abandoned in favor of pond-side relaxing and swimming. The kids thought it was both bizarre and wonderful to swim in water that was clear enough that you could see the little fish swimming along with you. We saw this makeshift turtle habitat on the shore of the pond, and briefly discussed its veracity with another beach-goer who was walking by. We came to the conclusion that we weren't sure if the sign was telling the truth or not, but that we liked the idea that it was, so would go with that.

We also found handful of empty insect galls in the wooded area surrounding the beach. I'm not sure who came out of these, but they were perfect, papery little spheres. They seemed delicate at first, but upon further inspection, they were sturdier than they looked. I would have poked around in the woods a bit more, but the baby kept running off down the shore and required chasing, particularly because his swim trunks are a little bit too big for him, causing a good deal of tripping when he gets going too fast.

Which is essentially one big metaphor for life at the moment. Oh, toddlerhood!

Proper Beach Going.

Yesterday afternoon was hot, and not a little bit humid, and after some amount of debate about exactly which direction to send ourselves in, we decided to head for the beach. I sort of had visions of finding a tide pooling beach, because that is very much my thing, but instead, we landed on a sandy swimming beach about forty-five minutes from here.

 

The idea that a person might find a beach that is both sandy and warm enough to swim at is still something that I am getting used to. Being from Northern California, this is a bit of a novel idea. There are sandy beaches there, but none with ocean water that is warm enough that you would want to touch it on purpose. And, most of the beaches we visited often in California were rocky beaches better suited for trying to spot tiny creatures than to wading around anyway.

 

The big kid immediately knew what to do, and was hard at work on a sand castle within minutes of our arrival. Z. was less sure, and had to stand around and stare at everything for some time before he was ready to even think about touching the sand. It was pretty funny, actually.

 

The tide was high when we arrived, so there wasn't much to be found on the beach in the sea life department. But by the time we were getting ready to pack it up and head out the tide was receding, and some little bits of seaweed and the occasional shell were starting to appear here and there. I gathered a small handful of shells to bring home. I didn't think to take a picture of them before Mariam promptly took them and stashed them in the Lego bin she had brought along to carry various important items (such as a small looking glass and a stuffed walrus).

In all, a pretty good day. I think next time, I will totally go for it and bring a beach umbrella. Because I was a little jealous of the folks with beach umbrellas. They looked pretty comfortable. But I think next up is a tide pooling beach, because that is really the kind of beach going that I do best.

For those of you familiar with Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Southern Maine: do you have a favorite beach to recommend?

The Requisite Nerd Post.

In the event that you are a longtime reader of this blog, you will already be aware of my intense, if sometimes overly enthusiastic, affection for natural history museums and taxidermied specimens of rare or otherwise interesting animals. And, you have clearly decided that we can still be friends, despite having already suffered through more than a handful of posts similar to this one. Because we're good like that. So, thank you in advance, dear reader, because indeed, it is time to talk about woodpeckers. Again.

Even before we moved to the Boston area, the Harvard Museum of Natural History was on my list of places to visit. I had read in a book some years back that although it was a modestly sized musuem, they had some great exhibits and that they are also one of the few museums to have on display that which I consider to be the Holy Grail of museum specimens: the Ivorybilled Woodpecker. So, a couple of weeks after we moved here, on a particularly hot day, I loaded the kids into the car and we hit the museum.

 

It was a perfect activity for a hot day when we were feeling restless but also in need of a break from being out in the sun or running post-moving errands in the car. Museum going with a toddler, however, is essentially a sport that has clearly been overlooked for inclusion in the Olympics, so there was that. We provided a good number of the people of the greater Boston area with some fine entertainment that day, no doubt, what with me chasing Z. up and down the aisles and saying things like "Ooh... look at the dead monkeys!"

I digress. The point is, that the musuem was pretty fantastic, and definitely someplace I'd like to spend more time visiting. And, they did indeed have a nice looking taxidermied Ivorybill. I am deeply aware that I have essentially turned my life, and occasionally this blog, into an East Coast tour of dead bird specimens, but I am without regret. There is something about viewing such a spectacular bird that is a pretty good reminder of how vast and beautiful and wild the world can be, and how important it is to preserve some hope of it being that way in the future too.

Some Scenes from the New Scene.

We have now officially been in the new house long enough that various friends and relatives (hi, Natalie!) are requesting photos of our new place, and we are far enough into the process of settling in that I no longer have any good excuses not to oblige. So, here are some views from the homefront.

I recounted The Couch Debacle in some detail here and there over the last couple of weeks, and now that the couch that didn't fit is no longer knocking on my mental door at unanticipated moments of the day and night, I can enjoy the couch that did fit. It isn't super fancy or anything, just an Ikea Ektorp. But, it came in a box, and I put it together my very own self and therefore have confirmation that it can be made to fit through any doorway I ever have a hankering to put it through. And this fact makes me love it so much. I can't even tell you.

For his part, the small person pictured above would like to be abundantly clear that no one should be allowing the pigeon to drive the bus.

Before the move, I set aside some of my favorite pieces of Mariam's artwork from the last few years so that I could hang them in the new house. A few of these already had a spot above the fireplace in Vermont, but I framed a couple of new ones and added those as well. Longtime readers will know of my incredible affection for that shark that she painted in kindergarten.

 

This guy spends only slightly less time above the fireplace than Mariam's art does.

 

We have a little room off the kitchen here that I suspect was intended as the formal dining room. But there is also a room between the kitchen and the living room that seems like a more natural space to use as our dining room. It is larger, and more open. So the smaller room has become a play space, mostly for Z. His teepee is set up in here, along with our playstands and various bins and baskets for blocks and toys. The idea for the wooden crates came from Pinterest, actually. I think this fact is somewhat hilarious because I generally regard Pinterest as the place where ideas go to die. Or, to circulate rapidly, with no one ever doing anything with them, before they die.

 

There are more rooms, and other spaces, and different views of some of the same stuff. But my camera and I are learning to be friends again now that I am living in a house with very different lighting conditions from the place in Vermont, which had almost as many windows as walls. So, I need a few more days of snapping away here and there before I can show you the rest. And I promise that I am telling you the truth and that the lack of pictures of the dining room table is unrelated to the amount of stuff piled on it.

Ahem.

In Praise of Dinner Table Geography.

I find that more often than one would perhaps expect, it becomes necessary to locate the Bahamas on the globe. Or perhaps the Phoenix Islands. Or, you might even need to know where Tasmania actually is. You know, in relationship to say, Antarctica. And probably, you will need to know this during dinner. Because that is when these things come up, see.  And if you are nine years old, you will not be able to wait until after dinner to have the answers to your pressing questions about world geography. By then, you will have moved on to other things. Like tracing your hand a half dozen times in the service of drawing decidedly unseasonal pictures of turkeys. Therefore, it is important to have at least three globes table-side, so that geography issues can be addressed in a timely fashion.

It's really just best to be prepared.

Not That Kind of Kiwi!

A couple of weeks back, I received an email from the folks at Kiwi Crate, asking if I was interested in trying out one of their project crates with Mariam. I do occasionally get these sorts of queries, and no offense to anyone out there in marketing land, but I turn them down almost without exception. I just don't want to be on the hook to pretend to like something that I actually didn't like because someone sent it to me for free. I generally only accept a book or a product if it happens to be something that I have had my eye on for awhile anyway, or that I had actually considered purchasing. So, I said yes to the Kiwi Crate, because I really had been wanting to try one out for quite some time.

 

Our crate arrived just a few days after I said that I was all in, but because of things like having to go to Ikea in search of storage furniture far too often, it took us a little bit to dive in. Plus, if I want Mariam to do a project of some kind, she really has to think that it is her idea, or the experience tends to be less than stellar. So, I waited around for that to happen. And, when it eventually did, we were both really pleased with what we found inside the crate.

 

Our box was a "nature explorer" themed one, which is a pretty good match for the interests around here. There were two projects inside, and each one came with a great little step-by-step instruction booklet and absolutely everything needed to do the project. This included awesome little details like a star-shaped hole puncher and a battery-operated tealight, both intended for a lantern project in the box, but both also usuable again for future endeavors. I love that kind of thinking! Other than the lantern project, the other project in our crate was to create a little nature collection box. The box is outfitted with dividers to make labeled sections for storing different sorts of nature artifacts that a kid might collect. Mariam thought this idea was fantastic, her only complaint being that there should be an area in the box for feathers because obviously, collecting feathers is the best.

In all, we were pretty impressed with our little Kiwi Crate. Definitely enough that my curiousity has been satisfied and I am going to consider a subscription of some kind. I assumed that the crates would be fun, but I found myself impressed by how cleverly put together they really are, and by the fact that the crafts in our crate were things that Mariam could actually use once she finished them. The crates are designed for kids ages 3-7 with various levels of adult help anticipated, but at 9, Mariam was still interested in the crate and could do the projects without any help from me at all. Kind of great for keeping her busy (and quiet!) while I put Z. down for a nap.

Yep, I think that Kiwi Crate gets a big thumbs up from our house.