Bat vs. Bee

I don't much like bats. I don't know that I've ever seen a bat in MN, though I'm sure they are here, but I used to see them all the time in NC. The sun would start to set and they'd come out and fly around in their little erratic swoops and dives. Once one of them dove a little too close to my horse at the end of one of my lessons and I ended up getting pitched over the horse's head, and yeah, I don't much like bats.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, except we took it in a cave in Panama, and there were a lot of bats.

Our summer has been a little haywire, a little "batty", if you will, and I'm trying to flow with all the swooping and diving and I'm just ending up flat on my back a lot of the time.

 I don't know if it was the wisdom teeth surgery or what, but my personal rhythm is so "off" right now. Sidenote:  it sucks to get that surgery done when you are as elderly as I am. I arranged help for myself for exactly 48 hours and then I thought I'd be good to go. And yeah, NO. It hurt for weeks afterward.

Anyway, back to my point. I prefer to get up early...painfully early...to run and do my devotions and drink coffee and blog and generally get woken up and all my kinks shaken out before the kiddos emerge and I need to be a present and intentional mama.

I want to be a bee. Bees work hard, and they have really clean little hexagonal houses. Also their houses are always stocked with homemade sweets. What's not to like? So I make little mental schedules for my days, and I mostly don't really follow them, which leads to a lot of completely unnecessary and totally self-made guilt.
 
I just cannot seem to be a bee lately. I belong to an Internet group where we (theoretically) check in with each other in the wee hours to share thoughts about our devotion and to be kind of gently accountable for getting up early. They probably think I'm dead. It's been THAT long since I checked in.

And I don't even know what week we're on in the devotion because I fell off that train around about week 3.

 Of course, I think my standards might also be a little too high. I got up Friday feeling like "oh man, I'm so late. Again" and was then mildly surprised to see that it was 6:27 and in whose world is that LATE? I have been living with a surgeon for too long, apparently. Except you can never really have too long with your husband, but you know what I'm saying.

This morning I did make it up at 5 AM, and I got my run in, WITH my dogs, and I staggered back inside on jelly legs and with a sense of "all is right in the world" until I nearly sat down on Addie, who had apparently ditched her bed in favor of the couch in the playroom/office. Her mind is a mystery sometimes, though I'm very much looking forward to her explanation when she wakes up.

 So back to the topsy-turvy thing, it is slowly dawning on me that life with small children is probably always going to be slightly chaotic and that maybe that doesn't mean that I'm doing it all wrong. Maybe that's just the nature of the beast(s). Perhaps even when I  am on my schedule, weird things will just happen, and my task is not to figure out how to better regulate everything, but how and when to let life happen outside the schedule and the plan.

I guess it's like exercise, where you have to find the right balance between listening to your body's pleas for rest and pushing yourself to make it a little farther.  If you always choose one option over the other, you aren't going to be very healthy.

I feel like I blog about this all the time, though I'm not sure that is true. It might be that I just think about it a lot. My mental blogroll is about 4 times the size of my actual post count, after all.  So, here's to figuring out how the nature of the beast, over and over again, until it's eventually deeply engrained in my own nature. Part bat and part bee, which I think would equal a "beet".

Tiny Dancers

One of my favorite summer activities is a street festival that takes place on Thursdays on First and Third Streets in downtown Rochester. This is imaginatively called "Thursdays on First and Third". I heart Minnesotans, despite the fact that "wry wit" was effectively culled out of their Scandinavian forebears a looooong time ago. Never forget that these are the people that find Garrison Keiller funny.

The name might be overly informative and slightly dull, the but the festival is so much fun. There are always two live musical performances and there are dozens of booths featuring local restaurants and artisans. And the fare is not your typical fried Oreo on a stick and cross stitched samplers, it's more like organic sustainably farmed fish tacos featuring local greens and cilantro salsa and burnished copper wall sculptures. It's seriously great.  

My kids love Thurs on 1st (name simplified for ease of use), and so do Tim and I. I usually meet my girlfriends downtown for lunch on Thursdays and try to sneak back with Tim if he emerges during daylight hours. Which he usually does during the summer, if only because daylight lasts until about 9 PM.

Treats from the homemade fruit pop stand. Addie is telling G to back.off.my.sicle.

My children have no notion in the world that running around a lamp post is kind of an odd thing to do.

Ads and G and I have been talking a lot about dancing lately. Addie is very into ballerinas, and princesses, and dancing ballerina princesses in particular, and if they can also have fairy wings and ride unicorns, then so much the better. Subtlety, thy age is not three.

Love this girl!

"Watch me stomp like a dinosaur"

I "blame" part of this obsession on this lovely book...and I actually do love this book and think it's illustrations are beautiful. Then Addie's "honorary aunt" Edith bought her the accompanying matching game, and the obsession was fully cemented. This was one of those presents that is a little "too good" as your child wants to play with it constantly. But there are worse things, and Addie did learn how to finally say her "Ls" as she said "Lilac". Though I do kind of miss "Why-wac".





Graydon prefers Giraffes Can't Dance, probably because of his current obsession with all things animal. Ask him what any animal says and he will moo. He's hasn't gotten the finer points down yet, but by goodness, he knows he likes animals.

I confess, I think the message of GCD is a little odd, because it's all about a clumsy giraffe that learns to dance and wows the other animals by being true to his inner rythymn. And yes, that's a great message, but is it really one that small kids need to hear? I've never met anyone truer to their authentic self than those of us under the age of five.

Still, between the two books, we've been talking about dancing a lot. And Thurs on 1st gave us a great opportunity to shake it out to the tunes of Jelloslave. If you're like me, you're picturing a college grunge band that took one too many jello shots. Nothing could be further from reality, as Jelloslave is actually an ensemble band of cellos and ecletic Indian instruments. Check them out here.

http://jelloslavemusic.com/

Not a great picture, but you get the idea.

 

 The kids freakin' loved it. Graydon and Addie got out the stroller and went right up front and danced like no one was watching them. They didn't care that there was a huge crowd of people cracking up at their moves. Soon enough a group of kids was up front dancing and I was smiling so hard that my face hurt. It was really beautiful and so much fun.

Busting a move

Still working it out

Giraffes may not be able to dance, but toddlers can.

And twelve dancing princesses could not be nearly as cute as twelve dancing kiddos.

The Impossible Dream

...getting a good shot of both my children at once. I guesstimate that it happens once out of every 100 attempts. I have about 10 seconds before the photo shoot degenerates into a wrestling match.

 

I also have this enormous backlog of pictures and blog posts right now, and I'm not quite sure what to do with it, honestly. It's just way too much of a hodgepodge to put in one big post, even one big picture post.

I think I actually do stick to my goal of blogging twice a week...success!... it's just that I'm not publishing that quickly...fail! Mostly because all of my blogging takes place pre 7 AM and that's not always my most coherent time.




Anyway, I'm not gone, and I am blogging.

And much like throwing meat to hungry lions, I thought I'd throw out some recent Addie and Graydon pics before my parents and siblings destroy me. My musings on life are well and good, but they really just want to see the punkins.

It might take me another month or two to get a decent photo, but in the meantime, at least they love each other. Most of the time.