happy birthday to you...

It's not yet officially your birthday, but man oh man, are we all ready to celebrate! We, your family, Primrose, have waited a long time to sing this to you in person: happy birthday to you...

This day is certainly for you!

Morning preparations. Dress up the baby!

We move the party to the very excellent venue of Jeni's Splendid ice cream -- a neighborhood shop with remarkable ice cream flavors and a crew happy enough to let you use their space for parties, so long as you clear out before they open to the public at noon. [Jeni's is a Philadelphia style ice cream, meaning that it uses no eggs; the richness is in the magnificent grass-fed milk and cream, and the flavors paired with it.]

Here she is -- the just-about-four year old! And her three month old sister.

("That stays there, okay?")

Proud parents...

All those cousins, here to celebrate.

Happy Birthday, sweet sweet Primrose!

Lots of ice cream...

... for everyone!

Seconds and thirds are just fine!

The "two older girls..."

More ice cream, please!

And in the afternoon we are back at the house. Selfies are becoming a favorite for Primrose (and me!). We take one, look at it and laugh and laugh!

"Oh, how quickly they grow..."

(one more present: baby cacti to care for....)

Here's someone who deals well with a lot of excitement...

And now the cousins are here again!

Cousins, grandchildren. Call them what you will. Treasures, beloveds.

So much happiness in one day! We waited a long while for this. A seemingly interminable while. Finally. A most beautiful evening that could go on forever. (Lot's of emotion, can you tell?)

With love, always and forever...

Chicago Friday

If I lived in Chicago, I would do this so often! I'd come to my daughter's house just to hang out.  Especially when she is still on maternity leave. I'd say good morning to Juniper...

I'd watch her do her tummy time...

I'd eat breakfast at their table, all the while keeping an eye out on the little one; she bathes in the kitchen sink, I munch on granola.

Lovely moments, all of them!

Yep, that's what I'd do: evening hangouts at my older girl's home, mornings here, with my younger girl. With school pick ups of kids, a cup of coffee here, a glass of wine there. Or the other way around.

Of course, no one's life is really like that. Time is precious, for her, for me. Schedules permit too little down time for anyone and most especially for working parents.

Still, today I have this lovely image of being that ensconced in the trivial routines of an average day. A chat with my son in law about an article he'd read, a discussion of the superior qualities of baked goods for lunch, and the freewheeling cuddles, stories and games with their ever magnificent children.

Toward noon, I break from the small routines to do something I haven't done for years! Not since I twisted Ed's arm to gift me a session for Valentine's Day (or was it my birthday?) many many years ago. What is it?  Oh, a session with a local massage person to work some magic into ancient limbs and muscles, kneading and grinding and knuckling them into some kind of a divine wonderfulness. I have a friend back in Wisconsin who subjects herself to this every single week. She says it's life saving. Me, I don't want to find out that there are even more expensive life saving items or strategies out there, so I prefer to think of it as a luxurious treat that happens once in a blue moon. And it happened today and it was superb! My muscles feel so coaxed and cajoled into a state of relaxation that I feel I could move mountains once again. Or at least play with a baby on the floor without groaning when the time comes to get up.

Lunch, from Kasama, a Filipino eatery in Chicago's East Ukrainian Village. Exquisite baked goods.

And in the evening my daughter and I walk over to pick up Primrose at school. It's raining, it's windy and freezing cold, but as is her habit, we walk. An adventure to be sure!

And at home, Primrose and I return to our play module, starting off with one story line, but ending somewhere altogether different and unexpected.

Dinner, en famille. Delicious food from the Valle d'Aosta region of Italy.

Bed time should  be early, because tomorrow we need our wits and energies to be in top form. It's the birthday  celebration for the (nearly) 4-year old among us! But, there's this lure of downtime together with the older guys once again. When the children are asleep. 

In other words, when you visit your adult kids and their families, there is no such thing as a good night's rest. It's simply too much fun to be... awake.

Thursday

Time to pack a bag and head down to Chicago. We have a birthday before us!

You want to be there for all your kids' and grandkids' birthdays, but of course, that's not always possible, especially if the offending child dares to live in a place that's a bit of a drive from where you are. Still, you aim to be there. You expect to be there more often than not.

But Primrose (whose birthday it is in a few days) really takes the cake among all grandkids, in terms of birthdays missed by me! She was born early, so I missed her birth day. Both Ed and I made it for the celebration of year one. Then along came Covid and suddenly we were all stuck zooming instead of hugging and dancing and eating cake and ice cream. 

It stands to reason that I am not going to miss this one, her fourth, and indeed, I'll come plenty of days ahead of the family celebration, so that I can settle in and while I'm at it, I can check in on Juniper!

And so very soon after breakfast...

I pack up the car and head south.

Hello, very youngest member of the family!

And hello, soon to be birthday girl!

(I walk over with her mom to pick Primrose up at school. We're "south," alright! First flower sighting -- a Helleborus, aka Lenten Rose.)

(Juniper, looking awfully cute in the stroller!)

(At their Chicago home, with everybody!)

The kids and I play while the parents get ready to go out on a hot date. Well, a date without kids. Which I suppose makes it both hot and calm.

After Primrose and I eat dinner and Juniper insists that she feels left out of that process, I put on the latest Pixar movie for the older girl and attend to the needs of the younger one, and then I let the younger one doze, while I read to the older one, and then I switch fronts once again.  This may sound complicated, but in fact, both girls are sweet and good and awfully patient, in the way that children often are around ancient grandparents. 

I check in with Ed, who, by 9, still hasn't given thought to dinner, which only goes to show that time alone is absolutely necessary so that you can then fully appreciate time not alone.

Later, the parents return and I retreat to my quiet space downstairs and give a lot of thought to how lucky I am  for a million reasons which I cannot even begin to articulate.

Sleep well my friends and dream of peace.

Wednesday

Without question, today will be noted in the books as the nicest of all 2022 March days here in south central Wisconsin. A high of 64F (or nearly 18C!). The pressure is on to do something!

But first, a visit with the animals, who are frisky and a little nuts from the sudden rush of warm air on this beautiful spring day.

And breakfast, with daffodils, hyacinths, and cake.

After hearing from our AirBnB hosts in the Ukraine (remember, our travels there start... right now!), we decided to extend our "vacation" in their beautiful country for a few more days. I recommend it for all of you! There are still a great number of available apartments and houses and the rates are unbeatable. Too, AirBnB has waved all fees associated with the bookings. Come on, take a trip!

 

In the alternative (or better yet -- in addition!), take a hike with the two of us, over in the Brooklyn Wildlife Area. Put on your Wellies, it's muddy out there!

 

 

Nothing is budding yet. We are too early to spot green tips, either in the ground or on trees. But the air is magnificent and the smell of spring is strong!

Of course, Ed dresses for the season. Shorts and t-shirt. And I shed my glasses to test out a new way of moving around.

We always feel better, sprightlier, and altogether happier after a hike! 

It's another four days until spring, but in our hearts, we're rushing the season. Refresh, renew, leap forward, recognize hope. Yeah, even though it's only March 16th!

With love...

Tuesday

Time to bake again. Apple cake, which is a rerun. (Snowdrop told me she loves everything about it but the apples. Well now, what is left, I ask you...)

The house smells of cinnamon and nutmeg. The sun is out. The path to the barn is even more squishy-muddy and the chickens are exercising their territorial rights by seeking out the farthest corners of farmette lands. We are, at heart, explorers all.

Ed and I are happy to take a walk, happy to feel the warmth of the day (50F or 10C, so not bad, don't you think?), happy to be on the hunt for any color changes in the landscape. 

(right now: a golden prairie against a corn blue sky)

It will be another month before we lose the browns out there, but it's always fun to see the first rebels -- the crocus stalks, the green tips of future daffodils.

In the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop.

(conversation with the youngest chickens)

We're pausing with the longer books for a while so that I can push before her suggestive books about far away places. It's good to learn about cities you've never been to, don't you think?

At home, the brothers:

Back at the farmhouse, supper is simple. Cheeper eggs, cauliflower. We have work to do: we plan a vacation, starting tomorrow, in the Ukraine. A week in Kharkiv, a week in Mykolaiv, finished off with time in Kyiv. Airbnb homes, beautifully presented, not too long ago waiting for guests. Booked now by us, with the hope that our "travels" there will help.

With love and hope...

Monday

How can I have a snowball effect on what appears to be one of the prettiest March days yet?  There's no snow out there (thank goodness)! And still, the analogy holds.

The morning was as normal as apple pi (haha!). The chickens were all over the place, happy to be on dirt rather than on snow or ice. 

All good. But at breakfast, the phone calls begin. Not for me, for Ed. 

Long conversations, attempting to resolve a company problem in logistics, leading to an endless stream of phone calls. We'd made plans to go on a longer hike, but he was so wrapped up in his series of calls that I could barely convey to him that I had to dash out for one appointment or another, and could he please attend to the ice cream sandwiches coming with the groceries, because they were about to be delivered and I had to run. Yeah, yeah, bla bla bla.

One of my appointments was with an eye doc. The eye problem that emerged while I was away grew over the weeks and though I suspected I could deal with it on my own, I thought a little medicine boost might hurry the recovery along, so I went. And yes, I got some ointment or other and yes it will probably resolve matters rapidly, but in the meantime, the doc said I really should have eye cataract surgery already.

Hey! (this from me) Just last year, the doc at this very clinic said I had ways to go!

I'm telling you (this from the doc today) that you dont have ways to go and if I were you, I'd do it sooner rather than later.

So I thought about this and about the possibility of me being without glasses in about six months. I looked at my face in the car mirror, glasses tossed momentarily to the side. Horrible! The frames are everything! I had asked the eye doc why it always seems that old people had smaller eyes. Do eyes actually shrink with age?  And he assured me they did not, it's just that the face sort of closes in on them. 

Oh yes. I can see it. Too, my permanent frown above my nose is nicely hidden by glass frames. Shed the glasses and it's front and center. No! That cannot be the new me!

(Ed's response? Gorgeous, you can wear your frames without any glass in them.)

In thinking about this very inconsequential matter, I managed to distract myself from the world's problems for a good hour. But, between my appointments and Ed's phone calls, we had taken a big bite out of our afternoon and there was no time left for a long hike, despite Daylight Savings Time. Added to the list of the most trivial problems you could possibly imagine, was the fact that Ed had put away the groceries and so now I don't know where anything is. 

Sometimes you need snowballs to get your mind off of the news of the world. And though you should never stop feeling compassion for all who are in such deep trouble right now (and that pool is large, extending way beyond the Ukraine), nonetheless, you have to also acknowledge your good fortunes, including those that lead you to have a stream of lucky days, full of trivial and inconsequential issues that have no impact on the well being of you or those you love. This is, after all, what we all wish was ours: a day without calamity. A day where hope is budding within plain sight.

Here's my tiny bud of hope, right in my own back yard:

And toward evening, at a time when I should start in on dinner, Ed, who has been hanging on the phone for hours, listening to horrible music, waiting for the IRS to pick up (they never did), turns to me and asks -- can't we go for a walk? A short one? I think we need it. 

We walk just to the turtle pond and it feels grand. There is the sound and movement of birds all around us.

 

The pond is still partly iced over, but the path is squishy and muddy and wonderful. 

 

 

 

The snowballs recede, the golden tones of a beautiful evening take hold.

Yes, the moon is there, over all of us. 

With love...

 

Sunday

House cleaning is one of those jobs that no one likes. Either you have a day set for it, or you do it randomly, as the mood strikes, but I bet anything you're not keen on it. (Or you pay someone to do it. Lucky you. I have always thought that money saved from not paying for cleaning could then be used for travel. You make your choices.) 

Ed and I do not have the same attitude toward house neatness and most of the time -- like for all the huge differences that make Ed Ed and Nina Nina -- we find a way to wiggle to the end of the day without any trouble. In fact, we both tend to be amused at how different we are in our approach to our surroundings.

Sometimes, however, either he or I toss out a caustic comment about a cluttered space (never our own cluttered space of course) and then the race is on to see who can throw out more snide remarks in the space of an hour about the other one's personal habits.

This morning was like that. I can't even remember who started it. Was it me, about his pile of junk next to the couch, or him, pointing a nasty finger at my pile of papers on the counter of the kitchen. Before long, we had escalated to me saying things like "if only you had finished the writers shed, I would have had a place to put those papers," and him waving his accusing finger beyond the papers, like to the spices accumulating next to the stove, and the stack of kid books next to the orange couch. Luckily, he did not go so far as to point a finger to the sun room where I let the kids leave their toy "arrangements" way past a time that other people would regard as reasonable. It may have degenerated into me going after the sheep shed, where feathers still remain from a bird unfortunately brought in by one of the cats some time ago.

We are breakfast together, but it was a quiet meal, each of us probably harboring some thoughts about how unreasonable the other person at the table was being.

By mid morning, he vacuumed and I scrubbed and the sun came in, first from the east windows, then from the south and we put away our cleaning utensils, and the house looked great, and we hugged in our happiness at getting the house cleaning behind us. 

 

And now came the time to trim the young orchard.

Talk about a complicated job! We only sort of know what we are doing. Take out most anything that grows toward the inside. Okay, I get that. But most our fruit trees grew in weird and unconventional ways and working around branches that are oddly shaped and definitely not something you'd find in a magazine presentation of a great orchard is a challenge.

Nonetheless, the weather is brilliant. It's as if that Spring Forward really did push us into the spring season. It feels like we made it! Like winter is history!

I do some modest yard clean up too. I attend to the pruning of lavender bushes and I rake a little here, a little there. And as I begin the task of creating this year's "splendid garden," I wonder to myself -- will I work as hard at it now, when I am both older and the pandemic isn't keeping us locked into our personal spaces so much? Ed and I have one large gardening project set for this year and two moderate ones to supplement what we started last summer. After that, will I slow down? And read a book on the porch with a glass of lemonade more often than I did last summer?

I didn't say I came to any conclusions about any of it. I just thought about it.

And in the evening, the young family is here for dinner. It's light when they come, it's even still light when they leave. I put away my winter placemats and brought out my flowery-berry ones and oh, did that feel good! Before you know it, we'll be eating on the porch.

Well, maybe not that soon, but we are on our way!

(We're also toasting my daughter's recent job promotion...)

 

 

(No picture of Sparrow! Snowdrop and I were charged with giving him a haircut and he was feeling not in the best spirits during and after! Here's Snowdrop, waiting with her ribbon rewards for good haircut behavior. None were awarded.)

All this and spring days before us. We are lucky and grateful.

With love...

Saturday

It's a day of recovery for me: I do get tired after vaccinations and having had a vaccination yesterday -- boing!!! I'm tired. Ed did the morning walk to feed the animals and I slept in until 10, and after that, I napped! 

Talk about mimicking the habits of an old person! And, too, how quickly your ambitions can change in the space of a week: just seven days ago, my Fitbit was bouncing with congratulatory messages as I zipped past 20 000 steps each day. Today, I didn't even hit a 1000. (This has been my lowest step count since I purchased the darn guilt machine.)

So what thoughts run through your head on days when you are recovering? Of course, these days, Ed and I spend a lot of time talking about the crisis in the Ukraine. We tend not to read the same literature on the subject and at breakfast me share nuggets of information and of course, we speculate about what comes next. That's a given. I'm sure you do the same (or at least give this more than a passing thought). One has to. It's like the pandemic: you can't hide from certain realities. At the same time, you have to return to your own future and think in more mundane terms about what groceries to buy and what to do on your spring break vacation. I have mine all planned out (both groceries and spring vacation)! But I attended to tweaks this afternoon, after I poured a gallon of coffee into me so that I would stay awake until it was time to really go to sleep!

You could point fingers at me and call my day one of great laziness. Don't you think that "recovery" sounds better? Outside, we are having one of the final days of really cold weather. Inside -- I'm on the couch and proud of it! (Here's a fact: I think this is my first day since moving here that I did not leave the farmhouse at all. At all!)

But tomorrow, I will regroup and move forward. See you then!

(Lovely evening light, as only early spring can deliver...)

Friday

Sometimes you just have to reset and restart, or even do an about face. You plan on X and Y happens. That's surely what my older daughter had to do last Friday when the school called her and told her Snowdrop was sick and needed to come home. (Not Covid. She'd already had that.) And that's again what she had to do today, as another school called and told her Sparrow was sick and needed to go home. (Not Covid. He'd already had that.) A trickle of adjustments follow. Snowdrop was supposed to visit with her other grandparents this afternoon (as were her brothers). That's not going to happen. I was supposed to take care of details that will set the rest of the month for me. That's not going to happen either. Reset, about face.

But all this is not unusual. Covid has made us tense about being sick, even as young kids inevitably parade through bugs and viruses all year long and especially in the colder months.

Today, by the way, is a colder day of a colder month. I did not need a thermometer to tell me that. Happy, the rooster, always trembles in the cold. This morning he was trembling.

That's one reason to bake. Warm smells, warm kitchen, and a snacking cake to get me through the last of the winter weather. Plus I need to use up a tub of ricotta cheese and a basket full of soft blueberries. Let's make this totally woodsy and atmospheric. I light a sapin (fir tree) candle and put out a sapin honey for the fruits...

Ed invites Friendly to the table. I put up with Friendly because he and Ed really like each other. Personally, I think that cat's too needy. Sort of the opposite of Ed. Perhaps therein lies the match.

Eventually the skies clear and I pick up a happy Snowdrop at school. (She is a child who is quick to pop a smile and tell a happy story from her day. It's always about friends.)

 

 

 

We have a longer play time at the farmhouse... 

 

 

 

 

 

... and it is nearly dinner by the time I drop her off at home. (Remember: one brother's down, but the other? Not at all. At nine and a half months, Sandpiper never sits still. Ever.)

 

And then, just as the first star lights up a darkening sky, I drive home.  

Oh, but it surely is grand to be moving toward these longer days, to be made magically even longer this weekend (Daylight Savings). Now, I'm not making any plans for tomorrow. If nothing is set, there will be no reset, right? I'm just going to wait and see what the day brings. Watch it bring a boat load! Shush! 

Happily counting the days (9!)  until spring!