Monday

Why is it that kids can never get excited by big projects like cleaning up the playroom? I use my most enthusiastic voice. I offer incentives (the doll house will look amazing once the furniture is properly inside instead of scattered hither and yon!). None of it inspires energetic enthusiasm. I get, instead -- can I watch TV? 

It's easy to clamp down and say -- no way can you watch TV while I clean up your play space! But that takes it away from a game, to a battle of wills, and guess who is likely to win that one! (Hint: the kid whose nose is stuck in the next in a long series of Captain Underpants.)

We make a deal: she straightens up the chaotic doll house and gets ten minutes of big screen time. As always, when she cleans up, she rediscovers how much she loves a toy from her past.  For a chunk of time, she is lost in stories of her own telling.

Oh how quickly they grow!

And speaking of growing, yes, I did do garden clean up this morning and I mowed the farmette paths with the tractor mower too, so things are looking pretty spiffy for late August (if you don't look down at the weeds).

(It's not the last lily standing, but it is the last nymphs and shepherds bloom, which, for me, is significant.)

(the rare clump of late bloomers)

(tall and a magnet for giant grasshoppers -- I always knock off a good handful)

(short and pretty)

(single)

(not single)

(a whole bunch)

(the now subdued lily field)

(the small meadow in the new peach orchard)

The morning is cool, but not nearly cool enough to give up on a porch breakfast! (I must sheepishly admit that we eat breakfast awfully late, so it's a good ten degrees warmer than when I first step out.)

And then I pick up Snowdrop and after a bounce around the farmette lands...

... she loses herself in her books. Not the tempting stuff I leave out for her, but in her favs. When did kids learn to voice such strong preferences anyway??

In the evening, I'm mowing those paths and Ed is working on some aspect of his machining project/invention that I just barely understand and we eat leftovers because, you know, it's Monday! The reheat-whatever-is-in-that-plastic-tub day!

And the play room? It looks very very neat. You would not recognize it!

With love...