Wednesday morning at 10 we met two families of friends at a local farm to go blueberry picking. JediBoy and I arrived first and had fun hanging out in the parking area and watching airplanes, since we were quite close to the airport. Once our friends arrived, we had our empty buckets weighed and waited for the wagon to take us up the hill to the ripest berries. As we were waiting, the kids found a teeny toad, and plopped it in JediBoy’s bucket for observation. They let the toad go as we heard the tractor coming over the hill.
We spent a delightful hour picking (and eating!) lots of berries. The kids ran around in the rows, helped us pick, and ate berries until they were quite blue in the face. It was hot and muggy, but beautiful.
After picking berries, Heather invited us over to her house to swim in their pool. I was very indecisive, because I’ve been suffering from incredible inertia lately, not wanting to go, do, or leave the house. But JediBoy’s pleading blue eyes did me in, and we were off. We had a great time playing there. JediBoy has been very water shy and was skittish getting into the pool, but once he saw how to float with a ring under his arms, and that he could propel himself around the pool, he was happy. We had fun with the four kids and eighty-seven floaties, with kid-swapping and baby-dunking and pool-peeing (Ben climbed up to the top of the ladder in order to turn around and pee back into the pool!), shark-chasing and squirt-gunning and cooling off.
As we spent some unwinding time inside after swimming, I started to feel a headache coming on. I’m exceptionally prone to headaches from sunshine, and we’d been outside most of the day. I led a very reluctant JediBoy (Heather wants to give me one of her three for a while, but honestly JediBoy would rather go live with them) out to the van and we drove off into the sunset. Yep, a 21-mile drive heading mostly due west, during five o’clock traffic, when I already had a headache coming.
By the time I got home, the pain was intense. By the time PisecoDad got home half an hour later, it stretched from my right temple into my ear, jaw, neck, shoulder and back, and, as a free gift, I was nauseous. Bad enough on a normal day. But this was the one day in ages that Heather and I had planned to go out to dinner with another friend, and I had to cancel. Grr. I spent the whole evening angry at my body. (I’m sure that helped relieve tension.) PisecoDad went out to the store and came home with Disney’s Sword in the Stone for JediBoy, and the two of them watched that to pass the evening.
Roller Coaster Day.
Today started out groggy and grumpy, at the bottom. We didn’t do much of anything this morning. I tried to pass the time quietly, reading and going through some paperwork. JediBoy played lots of intricate games of daring-do outside my window. I was saving my energy, and this time it worked.
From 1-4 we were at the bowling alley with Leigh and her family for the summer bowling league party. It turned out to be two hours of free bowling followed by an hour of pizza and soda with a visit from a pro bowler. Try explaining this to the four kids who were expecting pizza when they walked in the door! The first hour of bowling passed very pleasantly - the kids have very different styles and they’re very entertaining. The second hour was more like pulling teeth, and turned into an impromptu lesson on how to tell time, or, more importantly, how to determine the number of minutes remaining before three o’clock. When the pizza was served the kids were thrilled and JediBoy wolfed down four pieces! They did some random bowling after that - not keeping track of anyone’s game, just each one bowling whenever the urge struck. About quarter of four, the pro bowler set up some fun trick shots - six-in-a-row, the big split - bowled with two balls from one hand, the 7-10 split - bowled with one ball in each hand, the 100 pin shot, bowling under chairs. JediBoy was very impressed!
We’ve had a quiet evening since then, talking about JediBoy’s fall soccer team (we found out today that he’ll be on the gold team, sponsored by a local pizza joint - fitting), and going for an after-dinner walk, where we saw a spider climbing down an inchworm’s silk to eat the worm. JediBoy asked some questions about what was going on before our eyes, and then said, in an astonished tone: Mom! You don’t have your camera!
I didn’t. Shame on me.
But in the past two days I’ve had several discussions about online privacy vs. sharing, building friendships, the importance and beauty of our children, etc. Up until now I haven’t shared JediBoy’s face on the blog, but his own requests to show up here coupled with my urges to show you what we’re doing have showed you all of him except that. I don’t feel that we’re really protecting any last vestige of real privacy (of which it seems there really isn’t any) by hiding his beautiful blue eyes and adorable grin.
So here he is, free at last.
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