If he spoke English, Jack would tell you that outside is where it’s at.
It’s where we will be for the next two days (the waking hours part).
Jack is so desperate to go outside and stay there that I can’t imagine the banishments to the backyard that I’m sure are in his future. The ones in my past always started with “I’m bored” whines and inevitably led to locked doors and orders to GO OUTSIDE AND PLAY. Right now we have to lock him in.
Rainy days are not easy.
When I was little, rainy days meant chocolate-chip cookies. I continue to live by that tradition, which I now recognize as one of my parents’ more universally pleasant coping mechanisms. But Jack is not old enough for cookie-baking. And luckily, the weekend forecast is sunny and warm.
Not bad for November, which is scooting dangerously close to the season during which I like to hibernate. If he were old enough, that would spell three months of cookies. As it is, I’m afraid I’ll just freeze while he frolics and plays, heedless of the wind and weather.
Reason no. 4,059 that it’s a good thing we live in Arkansas: We may get sheets of ice instead of blankets of snow, but our winters are dotted with out-of-nowhere 60-degree days.
Once upon a time, I adored Halloween. Loved dressing up, loved being safely scared, loved the carnivals and the candy and all the orange. I was a butterfly, a cat, a gypsy, a witch, and I dressed up as a princess-ballerina at least twice. But soon I lost the knack for recognizable costumes. By the time I was in middle elementary, I wanted to dress up as characters from books neither popular or classic, or famous people my parents liked (Tammy Wynette was my dad’s idea, which involved a jean jacket and a short reprise of Stand By Your Man.). Luckily I lost interest in costumes requiring narration, and by high school, listening to a Smashing Pumpkins album was probably the extent of my Halloween spirit.
Trick-or-treating in our small rural town, where a neighbor might be two miles away, was a cumbersome event of door-to-door driving. In the best spots, we could walk from one house to one or two others while Mom’s van crawled alongside us with the sliding door open. By the time Rach and I had outgrown it, the family trick-or-treating migrated north to towns with actual neighborhoods, blocks and sidewalks.
Jack is a year-and-a-half old, which means Halloween — an Official Time to Show Off Your Baby — was this year still more for us more than him.
Except for the squishy rat miniatures at my office party, which were definitely more for fun for him.
On Saturday night, we knew better than to expect any knocks on our door, porch light or no. But the little chicken suited up in his costume, courtesy of the BFF and her mother, just the same and ran around outside acting the part.
Occasionally I fall in love again with where we live. Where I’ve almost always lived.
This happened early Saturday morning, when we were headed out of town for the day and in a hurry. We drove south along the ridges of the Boston Mountains, over low valleys full of fog, just after the sun showed up. (It’s is a scenic byway for a reason.) It was almost a shame to keep moving, and I said so. I said I wanted to come back the next day, to see it at 0 mph and not through the car window.
D heard me. On Sunday morning, he had already been outside painting the house for awhile in the near-dark when Jack and I got up at 7:30. D took a break to come inside ask if we were ready for an early-morning date.
We were.
Because it is WINDY, folks.
Jack has graduated from a whistle to the woodwinds.
Well, to a bright orange plastic recorder, anyway.
When will I learn?
Never. Not when he’s so delighted and proud. Not when he holds onto it so tightly and for so long that it keeps him from following his father up the ladder, where D has been spending all after-work daylight. (It’s coming along.)
Nothing delights Jack more than pretending to fold the clothes, wash the dishes, mow the lawn.
In a few years, I’ll have to pull a Tom Sawyer to get this kind of work ethic.
It feels like fall. Fall as in forty-something degrees, fluttery breezes, gusting winds. As in falling things.
The acorns are pretty harmless, lightweight and brittle. We do our best to dodge the hickory nuts, which make unswept walkways treacherous and give the wind some extra whack. All day and night they fall onto the roof, roll down and off. It sounds like a tiny bowling game without pins. Even from inside I can hear the metallic ding as they land on the lid of the grill, the hood of the car.
Until further notice, we’re not leaving the house without hats.
Last week, nearby Fayetteville hosted a big motorcycle rally – apparently it gets third place in a national ranking of big bike gatherings – and because we’re situated above a scenic byway, we heard them cruising by all weekend.
Around our little town, businesses hoped all the traffic would spell revenue. Grandma’s House Cafe, which is just down the road from us and open exactly as often as Grandma feels like it, was hopping. Downtown, the gas station was getting business from the bikers and the locals attending the annual tractor parade. On Saturday, getting into the spirit of things, my mother-in-law and I drove down to buy corn dogs and potato wedges for our caulking crew.
One local business tried to get bites with some supplemental services, advertised on sandwich board signs on the highway shoulder:
NACHOS DRINKS MASSAGE GUNS
(Normally they just have the guns.)
Finally, after nearly all of the first 25 days of September were rained on, the sky cleared for a whole weekend (and counting!) of sunshine.
It was golden and cool and breezy, and the trees were dropping brown acorns and crunchy leaves.
The perfect weather, in other words, for caulking.
If you have to spend all weekend caulking.
(We did.)
Once upon a time, caulk did not so heavily populate my vocabulary, calendar, conversations, cuticles and sleeves. Because the husband and I decided to buy and live in a bit of a fixer-upper while planning its eventual transformation and making in-the-meantime repairs, I’d met caulk the noun. Now that we’re up to our necks transformation, I am intimately familiar with caulk the verb., which we recently addedto our DIY list of ways to spend time and save money. Every seam, every sill, every corner and nail hole must be caulked.
We’d estimated that between the two of us and Jack’s nap time, we could get it done by 2015. But then my father-, mother- and brother-in-law gave their weekend to our cause.
True to the new season, we ran out of sun before we ran out of steam. We haven’t yet switched our clocks back to what I refer unkindly to as substandard time, but on Sunday afternoon D’s dad was counting down the daylight hours and racing to finish before they ran out.
We almost did!
When it comes to eating, my son is just not that into in bite-sized; he wants the whole thing.
It started with handfuls of blueberries and grapes, then entire strawberries and bananas. By August he’d found bigger fruit to chew. He will eat a tomato like it’s an apple. Give him a peach or a pear and most of an afternoon, and eventually he’ll return the pit or the core.
Because he seems to have been spared an interest in putting non-food objects into his mouth, he got an early start. That means his teething toys have looked like this:
and our choking-hazard watch post has been pretty uneventful, with the exception of his brief Mulch Period over the summer.
Sometimes he won’t even wait for me to peel a banana or an avocado: He’ll bite his own entrance, then spit out the leathery skin.And if he learns that something isn’t edible in its whole form (we find root vegetables and melons with bite marks), he plays with it instead. Jack can often be found at home walking the living room/kitchen loop cradling a spaghetti or acorn squash. At dinner, he’ll reach across his plate for the whole baked chicken or the roast in the middle of the table. The other day I had to pry an onion from his hands.
Is it messy? Yes. Might we find a slimy, half-eaten nectarine in the laundry basket? Yesterday. It is a struggle to get through the produce department at the grocery store with a child who will try to jump from the cart for a mango. But for a kid who considers a pear a real treat, I will gladly take it.
