First firefly spotted!

Out the living room window....Seems early, but I guess tomorrow is June first!

Pirate Georgia

poked herself in the eye last night or that's what she told us this morning when her eye was tearing. All day it was bothering her on and off and I waited for the pedi office to call me back. But they had no power so they finally punted me to Dr Zinn who fit us in at 5pm.

I thought I was being paranoid because her eyeball wasn't red and she was fine most of the time. He looked with two different otoscopes and saw nothing, but then he used a tiny drop of fluorescent dye and there was a little chunk out of her beautiful colored eye!

"There it is! At three O'clock!" he said. Dr. Zinn is so calm and kind; the girls loved him.

He said it should heal quickly, gave us a script for ointment and gave her an eye patch,

which got us a sticker wherever we went.

School cancelled

because of the storm two nights ago.
it was 90 degrees so we went to Laurel Lake in Erving.

It felt like summer.

I tried to ignore all the people smoking butts and enjoy the cool water.

Had to drag the girls away.

My first payment from Art and Soul

I decided to be excited, even though only one oil has sold and I made $4.20
She said business is really slow, so I won't be insulted.
It was nice to get a check in the mail.

This is my dandelion flower oil steeping in the window.

Somebody help me outa here!!

When I finally responded; this is what I found.

Making rose tincture

from the Rosa Rugosa in the front yard.

petals picked in the morning
placed in vegetable glycerin in sterile jar
2 weeks in sunny window
shake regularly

I left the tall ones for the bees

Driving home

after work is peaceful.
Sometimes I'm the only one on the road at midnight. Or the only other car is a quiet cop in the shadows by the side of the road.
The blinking creamie ice-cream light was a welcome summery sight last night.
I love to pull up the hill to my house and see the little apple tree lit up and the warm windows of light waiting for me to come turn them off....

Signs and Songs

" This number refers to balance, like the yin and the yang. Balance your spiritual and material focus by spending time and energy on both. All your needs are met as you devote yourself fully to your Divine life purpose."

from Doreen Virtue's Angel Numbers

OK I've been trying to avoid the number thing, because I still feel like it's nutty, but I have been getting 69 here and there (no, not in any carnal way). Then last night the number flashed in my head and I looked up to see the address at the restaurant where we were eating and, there it was, 69 Main Street. Then my bill was 69 dollars (after Rob meticulously filled out the perfect tip for the prompt but unsmiling waitress.) When I looked at the thermometer and got this (69 degrees both inside and outside) I laughed and said, "Fine! I'm a freak! Fine!" and took a photo.

I tried to remind myself what Noelle said during my reading: "Numbers are one of the ways that the angels speak to people and you need to let that fear go. You need to accept that this is real....Meditating will help with that."

So Balance....

I've been getting a bit fixated on the organizing I wanted to accomplish by summer, partly because it's actually happening! Rob painted the grubby closet/walkway to basement orange for me for mother's day. Hooray! That was the final thing on my painting list. I've been able to keep the house clean with the help of the cleaning lady. Another hooray!

The big triumph, though, was the making of Mother's day photos albums for Rob's and my mother for their belated mother's day gift. I have downloaded and filed all the photos and was thrilled yesterday to find out that I can download the photos that I lost (when the hard drive was erased) back from Kodak for no charge. Great! Now all the chosen photos are coming in the mail for the baby books, the photo projects and the photo albums. That feels like an anvil has been lifted off my chest. (The photo documentation of my childhood, as the third child, was less than spectacular. One of the promises I made when I was first pregnant was "I promise to keep up my children's baby books!" Like much of mothering, that has been more difficult than I thought it might be.)

It does feel as if alot of energy will be released when all these shoulds are done, but I know they will never all get done and I'll have to lighten up, too. It's hard to stop when you're on a roll, but summer will come and I'll have almost no childcare and the cleaning lady is threatening to fire me unless I buy a 300-600$ vacuum, so things may all just crash back in on themselves!

So maybe I should work toward bringing in a bit more rest and meditation instead of compulsively trying to complete tasks before summer arrives.

It was a revelation the other day when Kellie said in yoga class that sometimes when you are present with reality, it is uncomfortable and painful. Her suggestion was to stay curious and open. I realized that often when I feel that discomfort I think it away. If I feel sad, I find myself thinking, "Well, don't be sad! Come on cheer up! People have terrible things in their lives, terrible. People are living in the street, some people don't have running water or their children have been dragged away into a war. Come on what do you have to be upset about? Appreciate what you've got." or some such pep talk.

But instead; what an idea! Just be sad and breathe.

The birdsongs are incredible this time of year.

So jubilant and persistent. I stop several times each day and just let myself listen.

I heard a Veery yesterday at the dump.

One of the most beautiful and mysterious birdsongs there is....

Here's a link to the song, the song slowed down and the song in musical notation played by a piano. Amazing.
http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/birds/music/veery.html

Bigger box

For the chicks. They're getting bigger every day. This is their third box. Their chicken-to-go box we brought them home in already seems absurdly tiny.

Uggggh!

Lily got sent to the principal's office for having a big fight with her dear friend! My writing essay I had worked on for a long while got rejected. And I have a sore throat with a busy week ahead.

Ugggh!

I pulled this card from the Goddess Oracle when I asked for some wisdom.

http://www.kriswaldherr.com/decks/gid/index.html

(

(All contents © Kris Waldherr 2008. All rights reserved.Kris Waldherr, the artist who makes these cards said I could put them on my blog as long as I included this link to her facebook page:http://www.facebook.com/l/;KrisWaldherr.com. )


Well,

That's interesting.

I tried to be OK with being uncomfortable.

I tried to tell myself it would all work out one way or another.

I sent Reiki to the whole mess and prayed for peace.

Then I peeked at my horoscope.

Also interesting

http://www.freewillastrology.com/horoscopes/sagittarius.html

Sufi holy man Ibn 'Ata Allah was speaking about prayer when he said the following: "If you make intense supplication and the timing of the answer is delayed, do not despair of it. His reply to you is guaranteed; but in the way He chooses, not the way you choose, and at the moment He desires, not the moment you desire." While I don't claim to be able to perfectly decipher the will of the divine, my astrological research suggests that you will soon get a definitive answer to a question you've been asking for a long time. It may come softly and quietly, though, and from a direction you don't expect, and with a nuance or two that'll test your reflexes.

We'll see what happens.

Off to bed.

Rob's b-day

Began with a 6:30am wake up from the girls excited to feed Rob breakfast in the hammock as he had requested. I tried to send them away but Rob was up and raring to go. The lucky man was served fruit salad, egg and toast while laying in his hammock.

His dream: To be at drinking coffee at the coffee shop before 8am.

Who has that dream?

Not me. But it wasn't my birthday.

On our way out the door at around 8am we saw that fantastic and mysterious moth on the screen door. Look at those wings! It looks imaginary or like a gumdrop!

After our early morning coffee and some errands we headed to Picadilly Farm's open house.

Here's the view from the hay ride. Everything is getting green.

Rob skiped the hayride because of his allergies, but the girls and I jerked around the farm and admired the growing crops.
And maybe some of us got a wee bit bored.

Georgia and her friend admire the growing chicks.

I found a gorgeous Rhododendron bursting into bloom. I grew up with them in my suburban neighborhood and never liked them very much, but I realized that was foolish. What a beautiful flower!

Then Rob had a 2 hour nap and we went out to dinner at Fireworks! in Brattleboro. This plant looks like a firework.

A delicious Saturday, even with the early wake up!

Happy B-day Rob!

chick update

We've had the chicks a week now. They are getting bigger, their wing feathers are growing in, stiff and decorative, giving a hint to what they'll look like when they're older.
The girls have become a bit less obsessed with them; Georgia will leave the house, now. But they both still like to hold them throughout the day. We moved them out to the mudroom from the living room as their cheeping got louder and their poop smell got stronger.
Here's Georgia singing her favorite lullaby to "Muffin, or maybe not muffin."

Lily lost a tooth!!!

Finally! She, like me, is a late tooth girl so the rest of her class has been losing them for years. As a baby, her first teeth came in so late that I started to think we had a lifetime of pediatric dentures ahead of us.

Exciting for her, although the oozing blood taste totally grossed her out.
I wonder what the tooth fairy with bring.
Georgia is trying to wiggle her teeth so she gets a present, too.

Human Pendulm

The other morning we went to Brattleboro so Rob could get his coffee. The monthly WISDOM magazine was available in a pile on the floor of the coffee shop. I tend to look it over and see if there is anything interesting. http://wisdom-magazine.com/ I was trying to figure out if I should bother reading through the magazine when Rob said he'd take the kids to Sam's and look for on-sale sneakers, while I cleaned up our spot and ran to the bathroom

I took the magazine into the bathroom and did the pendulum technique that Noelle showed me. (During our reading I had asked her how to follow my inner intuition if my logical head always gets in the way and starts bossing.
She said a helpful thing to do can be to stand up and take a moment to be quiet and then ask yourself what a No feels like in your body and feel that and note it and then ask yourself what a Yes feels like. Go back and forth and get familiar with the feeling of each. Like other muscle testing or using a pendulum, you are tuning in to your own knowing. It is not a way to tell the future but it is an interesting way to listen to the quiet part of yourself that your logical brain might over-ride. During the reading Noelle said that if I follow by body's Yes I will be moving in line with my soul.

I had also been reading about this approach in the December Oprah magazine where Martha Beck was using muscle testing and had this to say:
http://www.oprah.com/money/The-Art-of-Perfect-Timing-Martha-Beck-Life-Coach-Advice_4

"One of the things that changed my mind about timing was the recent book How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. The calculating part of the human brain, Lehrer writes, "is like a computer operating system that was rushed to market." It's slow, clunky, prone to errors—at least compared with the brain region associated with emotions. This highly developed area "has been exquisitely refined by evolution...so it can make fast decisions based on very little information."

I've been using the Yes/No method alot over the last few weeks and have found it really really interesting. When my friend asked if I wanted to Emcee that party, I didn't think about it, instead I asked my intuition and it said Yes. Then I didn't get too nervous, because I knew I was meant to do it.

Sometimes I am surprised by the answer, like when I had a precious Monday between a children's-vacation-Monday and a jury-duty-Monday and I was going to maybe finally accomplish creating a comprehensive photo album for 2009 but instead Rob surprised me and took the day off work to hang out. I was so unfairly annoyed! I had things to do!

I asked my intuition if I should complete my momentous task or hang with my husband?

It chose husband!

I was surprised!

We had a nice day.

So I took that Wisdom magazine into the bathroom with me and I asked my body if I should look through it. My body said Yes.

There was an add for cranial sacral therapy that had appealed to me when I had flipped through the magazine and an article on homeopathics, so I went to those assuming I should read them. I asked, before I sat down to pee, "Is this what I am supposed to read?" and my body said No.

Well! I was surprised, how would I "know" what I should read without having looked at the magazine before? So, instead of peeing (I really can't do this technique sitting down) I turned each page of the magazine and asked, This page?" No "This page?" No. This went on until the end of the magazine where the classifieds were listed. There was some fear that my body would tell me to go to some guy in a suit holding his chin and looking intensely at the camera or the smiling blond woman offering me a colon cleanse

I finally got a Yes on a page filled with little ads. Then I went over each ad getting a "no no no no no no no no"
until I got a "YES" toward the bottom of the page.
I finally sat down to pee and read the ad with trepidation,

"Shamanic Drumming Circle
founded 1993. Usually second and fourth Fridays of every month, 7:00pm. Quaker meeting-house, Cambridge MA. Open to all, instruction available.
website:
http://www.cambridgeshamaniccircle.org/
Hmmmm

That sounded interesting and not too scary.

I came home and looked up the website and I like it. It seems open and practical and one of the two books they recommend is sitting beside my bed right now half-read.

Exciting. Now I just have to get there.

We'll see how that works itself out.

Working

alot this week.
I needed the money.
Lots of staying late and going in extra.

Trouble with the balance of life, time and money.
I work too much and then I get tired, grumpy and miss my family.
But if I don't work enough then I don't have enough money and I get stressed out.

A highlight of the week was when Nooni poked her head into the patient's room where I was trying to get the screaming baby calmed down and said seriously, "Dr. Hendry is on the phone for you. I didn't know if you wanted to take the call?" Rob, my husband, whose last name is Hendry, who is not a doctor, was on the phone. I said I'd call him back, but it made me chuckle.

It will be nice to pay off some bills.
It is taking more time and effort to organize my finances than I had hoped.
I don't like to sit down and look at what we spend and earn, so then I don't.
Uggh, I'll keep trying.

At work and I just heard the first birdcall. Loud. A robin?
4:10 am. That's early, birds.

Chick-Love

Georgia was obsessed all day. She sat on a cushion by the chick's cardboard box and held the chicks one at a time. She said she was, "at the doctor's office with my sweet baby chick, waiting for the doctor."
The doctor never seemed to come but she sat there with her hands gently keeping the chick on her lap.
After a while we figured out she needed a towel on her lap for this exercise.
As the day went on she fell mostly in love with Tessa Joy or Joy Tessa, who is a little smaller than the others. I took Georgia to meet a friend for lunch and, after ordering and drawing pictures of the chicks for a bit, Georgia started to pine for the chicks, "I want to go home. I want to see the chicks. I want to go HOME! What if the chicks got lost? What if they are not chicks? What if they are chickens?! I want to go home!" We made it through lunch but we had to cut the date a bit short and go sit vigil by the chicks for the afternoon.
I got a little worried that little Tessa Joy might suffer from not eating, drinking and sleeping as much as her sisters so I had to force Georgia to take a break and come outside, giving the chick some time to breathe.



Here is Lily with Sparkle after she got home from school. She had woke me up in the morning, urgently saying. "Mama. Mama!"
I had worked and got home at 1am so I was hoping to sleep past 6:30. Nope.
"MAMA. You have to get up. There are only 5 chicks! Chipmunk is gone!"
Ugggh. Already? The heavy reality of chick-mortality. Already?
I stumbled downstairs and sat by the box. No Chipmunk. Rob declared, "I've been down here for a while and I haven't seen anything. She must have gotten out a long time ago!" He is extra distraught because Chipmunk is his chick with the nice brown markings.

I am starting to come up with a plan to sweep through the whole downstairs. Hoping to not find the chick cold and fading in a dusty corner, when Lily picks up the toilet paper roll she had put in their box and holds it perpendicular to the floor and out plops miss chipmunk, splayed and stunned out of her sleep, but fine.
We rejoice! I try to sneak back up to bed, but am unsuccessful.

Chick Day!

We got a call from Bernardston Farmer's Supply at 8:15 this morning saying our chicks had arrived! We went to pick them up and below is what Georgia and I found. Cardboard boxes filled the whole room with cheeping!





Here are Lily's Barred Plymouth Rock. We chose two of them.


















Georgia's picked two Buff Orpingtons


















and then we chose 2 Auracanas.

























and placed them, cheeping, in our chick-to-go box.




















and brought them home.

I put their little beaks in the water to show them how to drink, as the book recommended. Then we adjusted the light, gave them vitamin water and some food. They drank the water and pecked the food. Thank goodness. Things seem to be going well.







Georgia is beside herself with chick-love! We were sad to leave them when Georgia went to school and I headed to work.

They were all doing well when Rob, Lily and Georgia came home and they spent the evening holding them.

I came home at 1am and all five were sleeping quietly in a little pile.
I can't believe we actually have chicks!

Violets!

We have been ferociously picking violets before the mower strikes! We made 2 concoctions from herbalist Susun Weed's book Healing Wise.

One is a violet and apple cider vinegar for summer salads. The other is Sweet Aunt Vi, which is a sugar, lemon, and violet mixture for grief and belly aches that we'll keep in the freezer and eat by 1/4 tsp doses.

I'm also making dandelion flower oil which is good for arthritis and aching joints. The flowers are fun to pick, popping in a satisfyingly way off the stem.






My friend, Kate, sent out this poem and it was perfect for the glorious spring days we've been having.

This World by Mary Oliver

I would like to write a poem about the world that has in it
nothing fancy.
But it seems impossible.
Whatever the subject, the morning sun
glimmers it.
The tulip feels the heat and flaps its petals open and becomes a star.
The ants bore into the peony bud and there is a dark
pinprick well of sweetness.
As for the stones on the beach, forget it.
Each one could be set in gold.
So I tried with my eyes shut, but of course the birds
were singing.
And the aspen trees were shaking the sweetest music
out of their leaves.
And that was followed by, guess what, a momentous and
beautiful silence
as comes to all of us, in little earfuls, if we're not too
hurried to hear it.
As for spiders, how the dew hangs in their webs
even if they say nothing, or seem to say nothing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe they sing.
So fancy is the world, who knows, maybe the stars sing too,
and the ants, and the peonies, and the warm stones,
so happy to be where they are, on the beach, instead of being
locked up in gold.

And to wrap it up here is the start of American Toad songs from the swamp. Oooh I love it! It was pitch black and raining so there's nothing to see but the toads sound wondrous. You can still hear the bright high spring peeper, the toads are the longer rising trill.

Crag Mountain

Last Friday we hiked up Crag mountain.
(This post is late because first our hard drive was destroyed by a virus just before I got my external hard drive out of its wrapper "I'll wait to back up everything until I'm really organized" oooops and then we lost power for 48 hours, which was actually peaceful and sweet. When the power flicked back on at 9:30 pm we pretended it didn't and went to bed ignoring the many emails and phone calls we needed to return.)

Back to Crag Mountain which is about a ten minute drive from our house but I've never hiked it before!

It was a tricky scramble to the top but we did it.

I wasn't sure if the girls would be able to make it, but they did. It felt good to look out over the landscape and see the Turkey Vultures soaring just overhead.





















I felt mighty and also liberated. Rob and I used to hike all the time and since the girls were born we haven't done much at all.

It felt great.








Then we went to the creamie, which is now famous!

http://www.recorder.com/story.cfm?id_no=7437891