waiting

It's amazing how much time in life you spend on waiting. Perhaps the best skill you can pick up is one that allows you to wait productively, or at least enjoyably. Some would say it's all in the journey after all.

Once again it is a day of waiting: Sandpiper, born yesterday, is ready to come home, maybe. Not sure yet.  And so we wait to hear when the family's discharge time will come. Today? Tomorrow? We do not know.

But really, I'm not thinking about any of this just at the moment. It's early in the morning and I'm thinking how I really would do anything for my kids, including stay in their house and watch the little ones, even if sleeping there upstairs means that I will have their three cats join me in bed. I do not sleep well with animals (though at least these, unlike Dance, do not feel compelled to nibble on my feet), but the cats think me to be an adequate substitute for their usual bedmates and so there they are and there I am. 

The kids wake up early (what a surprise) and join me in the grand bed and from there it's one busy morning. Baths, breakfasts, laundry (what the hell was that goop that spilled out during the last wash, coating everything with sticky, slippery curdles of... something??), feeding their cats and injecting one, the most skittish of them all (of course it would be him) with medicine -- the usual stuff. At least there is no school on Wednesdays and so we are not rushed. 

Very quickly Snowdrop and Sparrow realize that Gaga at the farmhouse -- nice and laid back, with nothing to do but cater to their play needs -- is not the same as Gaga at their house. There, I am busy and they must fend for themselves, leaving them to gaze out the window and ask somewhat wistfully -- when will our babysitter be here? I say -- not for another hour and so they take the reigns on their own time of waiting and settle in to draw.

Great stuff comes out of this time and I even hear a bunch of "I love yous" coming out of little months, making our time together a happy time indeed.

When the sitter does come, I quickly pack up and head for the farmette. It's really a perfect day -- a sunny, crisply warm day, a breezy day of the nicest kind. We will not pay attention (for now) to the fact that we are getting blasted with cold air starting tomorrow. It'll be the coldest late May weather I ever remember having. Nearly frost at night! We will have to cover tomatoes. Wish us and more importantly, farmers across Wisconsin, luck with all our tender shoots! 

But today is perfect and as I drive up to the farmette flower fields, I am deeply appreciative of (and enchanted by!) all that's growing out there now.

(my first sweet day lily!)

(the siberians...)

(and of course -- the peonies)

(hey, don't forget the tubs of annuals!)

It's late, but still, Ed and I sit down to our breakfast on the porch. (The peony is from the farmette gardens. It's rare that I pick flowers for the table -- I love admiring them among their plant friends, growing outside, but when they fall, or are overabundant, I will indeed snip them!)

Waiting never felt so good!

And now it's time to get some work done. Ed did manage to tow in the new used tractor mower and so we mow down one last row -- a very short row -- for the last three trees that may or may not survive their long refrigerated wait, but still, we plant them, enjoying the breezes, the green landscape, the day of May perfection.

In the afternoon, I return to the kids. Happy kids after a day of outdoor play.

(In front of a poster welcoming Sandpiper)

We learn that Sandpiper and parents are indeed coming home today. Well now! All is ready!

We wait.

At 6:30, some 25 hours after being born, he is here.

You can imagine all those photos we all want to take: just him, him and sibs, him and his whole family, him and grandma, him and sibs and grandma. I reconcile myself to doing just a few. There will be time for more. I'm happy to wait.

Sleep well, Sandpiper. Worry not: your family will take good care of you.

With love...