O' Warmth, Where Art Thou?

The promise of summer and warm weather always spurs an outdoor nesting of sorts--preparing the spaces outside of the home for enjoyment and play. Noah, most excitedly, has thrown himself into all of the tasks to be done--helping Daddy break ground for our first Canadian vegetable garden, helping to nail little wooden steps to his favorite climbing tree and offering building tips and advice from inside the window to the workers building the new deck below.

Despite the snow and freezing temperatures that the Canadian spring has sprung on us today, I am hopeful that we'll be able to get back to our nature nesting soon.

Natural Playscapes.

Moving from California to Canada has gifted us a real backyard--the fenced-in, green-grassed, tree swing kind of backyard--the kind of yard that inner-city and beach ranch living just don't make possible. Any plans to settle into our backyard oasis last year were a bust. Just 6 months after moving in, the birth of Fern in late May combined with summertime travels put a kibosh on planting a garden, composting, rain barrels, clothes line, hammock hanging and any other kind of backyard cozy-up. We built a sand box, hung a tree swing, and that was the extent of it. But, since spring has met us early this year and the warm temperatures have lured us back out for patio dinners and long swing pushing sessions, we have begun to ponder once again all that we'd love to do with the space.  

Aside from all of the functional uses mentioned above, I have also been envisioning ways to incorporate inspired playscapes--something in lieu of the traditional purchased play structure--and imagining what I could do with stumps, limbs and branches and began scouting out viable sources for wood. Luckily, a neighbor of ours was in the process of removing a tree to make way for a garden of their own and offered the wood for my outdoor endeavor. It's still very much in the making, but it's a start and already a hit with Noah. Stump jumping, reading and snacking in the fort and constructing roads and towers with cut wood blocks has been added to his list of favorite backyard past times. The imagination and ingenuity that a natural playspace has the ability to encourage with its limitless possibilities of creation is what draws me in the most. I love its impermanence and fluid construction--the ability for it to be one thing one day and something entirely different the next. I hope to add large stones, a fire pit (for the family), tree house and perhaps large logs on their side for sitting, balancing, etc. It's clearly been as much fun for me as it has been for Noah.

Happy Playing!

All In A Good Week's Play: Homebase.

lunch

fort

book

crawl!

breakfast

moose

stool

drool

Happy Friday, mes amis!

He Knows Clothes.

Noah has an unwavering affection for fashion...which is ironic, really, considering he is often known to many who know him as more often than not, naked. But, winter in Canada is here and clothes are just more than practical, they're necessary tools for preventing frostbite. 

A friend and I chuckled yesterday as we spied him eying a little guy's runners at the library storytime--silently coveting the double blue suede velcro clasps. There's no doubt about it, Noah Finn likes clothes. He changes--up to 10 times a day, everyday. It's gotten to the point that I have had to set some ground rules. For example, he gets up to two mama-helped changes a day after the initial morning dressing (correcting an inside-out shirt, getting his huge melon head through a tight neck hole, etc.). After that, if the mood strikes for new attire he's on his own. Crumpled and only briefly won clothes adorn the house floor from downstairs to up. I never know if they're dirty or clean.

I am not by any stretch of the imagination calling him fashionable. No, he has the typical three year old penchant for mismatched madness. Among his favorite duds most recently are pajamas, sweatshirts that he's long since grown out of and most recently, dress shirts together with rain pants. He rarely selects from more than just a handful of things that have usually been categorized by me as "play clothes".  All of the stuff that mama considers worthy of a trip out and about, stay perfectly folded in the back of the dresser drawer until they're outgrown.

Today he wore a pair of sized 18-24 months striped cotton stretch pants to his tumbling class. Thank goodness there were no busted seams during his somersault routine. Risk in the name of fashion is apparently the name of his game.

Homebodies.

lazy saturdays

first sewing project

measuring fern's caboose...

Wordless Wednesday: Happiness Is . . .

learning to button your own sweater

sleeping siblings

bum-sunning in the afternoon

irish brown bread in the morning

babywearing your monkey while talking on your train

new seasons for the nature table

Wordless At Week's End.

Fern, in Daddy's arm: 5 months.

Noah Finn, breaking bad in the backseat: almost 3.

Holding On.

Chilly weather, winds and rain have moved in and our little Indian summer is over, it seems, and surprisingly I am at peace with the dissipating warmth. I'm somewhat ready for the next season to carry us through the rest of this year. But as another year slowly creeps towards a close, gone are more moments that will never return. Ever since Dean celebrated his 36th birthday last week, I have been seriously waxing nostalgic. I climbed into bed with my sleeping Noah that night and cried. Having kids, and most notably a second, has unexpectedly turned me into a mushy, gushy, kissy, huggy, sentimental wreck. I can see, literally see, Noah and little Fern growing in their sleep. Every morning they are bigger, taller, more clever than the day before. The minutes and weeks and months and years are passing all too quickly and as I laid crumpled up in his little toddler bed, I saw Dean and myself 5, 10, 20, 30 years from now--grey, old and begging the kids to come home for Thanksgiving. We will have been together for 11 years on the 29th of this month. And the last 11 years have felt like a blink of the eye, a fleeting second buzzing past at lightening speed. How fast will this time ahead of us pass? Looking through our wedding photos tonight in an effort to finally put together an album--nearly 5 years post nuptials--has only compounded the urgency of my anxiety. We are dated. We are not really wiser. But we ARE older.

The husband of a mommy acquaintance of mine back in Los Angeles died a week ago this past weekend of a brain tumor. They have a 3 year old son and a 1 month old baby girl. When I learned of his passing, I was cooking dinner. Simultaneously I felt sick to my stomach and suddenly the task of preparing food for my family somehow seemed irrelevant. Time is so fleeting, so fragile, so frail, so frank. It is not nostalgic. It just passes without hesitation. It is an efficient and unsympathetic employee of life.

I have five grandparents, so the weight of the inevitable is growing heavy. Now that I have reached my 30's and have begun looking outside of those self-possessed 20's to notice those around me aging, I can't stop from looking ahead to all of the pending heartbreaks. I know that growing, aging, change and even death can sometimes be beautiful--at least in the sense that it is a natural progression of time's passing--organic--unstoppable--unavoidable. But now that I have arrived to a place of visceral awareness, I don't like it one bit. I want to fire time, or at least teach it some manners--encourage it to go about things a little bit slower, kinder, gentler--like a Southerner sipping sweet tea on a sweaty front porch. In the least, I am hoping that this sob way of viewing forthcoming birthdays and the arrival of 2012 is as fleeting as the time that I curse, or otherwise I need get better at living in the moment regardless of what the future holds because if I screw up the now, the then will really suck!

WWW.DaddyDean.

So, Dean's finally jiggy with the new millennium. Late, but better late than never (i.e. his Canadian schedule has afforded him time that his Cali one never did). He's got himself a website, a blog, as such. For work, of course. Pass it on: http://deanalannelson.blogspot.com/

Canadian Cuties.

Love Squared.

Fern (9 weeks).

Play.

Summertime Splendor.

Sweet Like Sunshine.