A glimpse of life right now...

• Owen is 15 days from turning 5. Everyday I look at him and marvel and the boy he is and is becoming. On a crash course to being a kindergartener. Wow! How has this happened?He is such a fun kid. Curious and clever and creative. Today he had taken his drawing table apart because he and Daddy were going to build something with the pieces. Daddy wasn't home yet and I wasn't really gung ho about this. Then he decided he'd wait for Morgan to get home and they would make a plan. When Morgan walked in Owen yelled up the stairs, "Daddy! You are just in time!" I heard Morgan tell him he would get the rolling pin and then I saw Morgan coming in from the garage with the rolling pin and twine. I don't know what was *built* but I'm sure it was fun. It is one of my missions as his mama to preserve his curiosity and creativity and that will become more difficult once he enters school. I know how school can work for children who are creative and curious and ask a lot of questions. Sometimes is isn't kind. Some teachers only want children to fall in line and keep to the task at hand. I hope he doesn't get those teachers. I actually hope no one gets those teachers. School can have a dark side. I've seen it as a student and as a teacher.
  
• I'm becoming more working-mama and less stay-home mama. I was offered an additional position at work. Something that will afford me more creativity and more hours. I'm nervous and excited and overwhelmed by the opportunity. I feel like it's something I will regret not trying. I also feel like it's daunting to balance more work into my schedule. A schedule that is always changing.
  
• I've been reading a ton. Averaging 4-6 books a month. Some very good. Some not so good. This week it's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I finished it last night and it is now one of my top 5 favorite books. I started The Paris Wife last night. As attached as I am to real books I really enjoy reading on my Nook.
  
• My creative pursuits have been on the back burner. I've done no scrapbooking for at least 6 months. My craftroom was a dump (seriously) for 5 of those 6 months. I dumped my stuff in there after the last retreat I went on and then things just accumulated and piled up and I didn't do anything creative. Only necessary things like wrap gifts or dig to find envelopes for something or gather supplies for Mom Scouts. I need to get back to a routine of creating something. Even if it is just a mess of something!
  
• I'm so ready for spring. It keeps peeking out and then sneaking away again. My front garden is starting to come up. The bleeding hearts are about 5" tall. The hydrangeas are sprouting leaves and the hostas are all poking through the woods chips. The little purple flowers that come up early have been up for almost 2 weeks now. I have no idea what they are but they are a lovely sight the beginning of April!
• We have 7 sunflower seedlings growing in the kitchen. Hopefully the ground will be ready for them in a few weeks! Owen has really enjoyed watching them grow.
• I am on week 2 of another cold. Or perhaps allergies. I don't think it's allergies but what the heck hangs around for so darn long. Yesterday I did wake up from a full night of sleep and was able to breathe through my nose again. But it still runs most of the day and I have a cough that is largely unproductive. I think the cough bothers me the most. By 3:30 in the afternoon I have a headache from coughing so much and blowing my nose.
• Morgan's new job, which I suppose isn't so new anymore, is going well. I'm immensely thankful for that. He needed a change and it is seeming to suit him nicely.
• We are still in the process of finding the right school for Owen for next year. Or hopefully all of elementary school. Spanish immersion seems to be our front runner for which we have 2 choices. One his is currently registered for and seems to be a wonderful school. It is a charter school and the one downfall is that it's 16 miles away. So the transportation will require some creative logistics. The other immersion school is in our district but we are on the waiting list for that and while there is a good chance O will get in we don't know when that may be. I also don't get the same good feeling from there as I do from the other school. Lastly, he's registered at a nice, regular elementary school in a bordering district and also at our neighborhood school. Interestingly, the only one he would be bused to would be the immersion school in the district. This is just another one of those things I have to let go of and it will all work out. Such a hard thing for me to do!
• Something super fabulous happened recently. I got back in touch with one of my favorite friends from college. My first semester at River Falls my roommate was from England. She came over with another girl who lived next door to us. The other girl, Jodie, and I got along famously and kept in touch for many years after she went back to England but around the time Morgan and I moved to our house we lost touch. A week or so ago I found her on Facebook. We've had a few chats on there and then on Monday we Skyped! I was so wonderful to *see* her again. We hadn't seen each other, except for photographs, in almost 17 years! Technology is really a wonderful thing!

Something I love...

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, I love public radio. We are fortunate in Minnesota to have a thriving public radio station. And the reason I love public radio has nothing to do with politics.

One day at church I mentioned something I had heard on MPR to one of the pastors and he flippantly replied, "Oh, the liberals network." I was slightly offended by this comment. First, because I think it represents a narrow minded view of something I value highly (and I don't like narrow-minded people in general). Second, it devalued whatever it was (I forget now) I was talking about. Which brings me to the reason I love public radio, which as I mentioned, isn't the politics. It's knowledge and the exposure to all kinds of it. I don't know if the politics represented on MPR are liberal or not, because I tend to be on the liberal end of the political spectrum. But the majority of what I listen to doesn't have anything to do with politics. (And the people who tell me the politics are liberal are in fact right-wingers, so their opinion isn't unbiased either!)

Last night on the way home from a meeting at church I was listening to MPR. It's generally the only station I listen to in the car because I don't like commercials, on TV or the Radio, and public radio's sponsor messages while actually commercials, are less annoying to me than regular radio. The program being broadcast was Fresh Air with Terry Gross and she was talking to Charles Fishman who is the author of a book called The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water. I was not able to listen to the whole interview but the part I was able to hear was amazingly informative. One bit of information that really stuck with me was this, "In the U.S., we spend $21 billion a year buying bottled water, and we spend $29 billion a year maintaining the entire water system — pipes, treatment plants, pumps. We spend almost as much on crushable plastic bottles of water as we do maintaining the water system." Where in the US is bottled water actually a necessity? I don't like the way some water TASTES but that doesn't make it undrinkable. And if the money spent on bottled water were put into maintaining or improving the water system wouldn't we effectively eliminate the need or want for bottled water? He talks about how we it isn't an issue of taking our water for granted, because to take something for granted you have to think about it. We are so used to having clean water flowing out of our taps that we don't even think about it. We use safe drinkable water for drinking as well as washing our cars and watering our lawns. Which, if you think about it, is absurd.

You can read about the interview HERE and listen to the whole story online as well. It was interesting and informative and everything I adore about public radio. Because who doesn't want to know more and have a better understanding of what is going on in our world?