Belated Valentines

C is somewhat…uneven…in his gift-giving. Sometimes he completely knocks it out of the park, getting me something that is a total surprise, but exactly what I want and need at that given time (The Birthday of the Laptop comes time mind), and then there are…the other times (The Christmas of the Mop will forever live in infamy). Valentine's Day is not one of his strong points, and to be honest, I don't really care about it, that much.

So this year, I wasn't very surprised, and really not all that put out when he came home of Valentine's Day and, seeing the heart-shaped chocolate cake I had just pulled out of the oven, started squirming and mumbling in this certain way he has.

"Why are you whining?" I said.

"Because I forgot Valentine's Day," he said.

Which wasn't entirely true, since we'd gone out on a Valentine's date Saturday night—to a murder mystery dinner theater—and even though it had been my idea, and I'd had to prod him to get the tickets, he did pay for the tickets, and he did drive there and back, an hour each way, in a snowstorm. And I hadn't really done much for Valentine's Day—a nice, romantic dinner for five, a heart-shaped cake, a bit of chocolate for everyone, and a card, about which there's much disagreement as to whether it looks like a heart or not.

So I wasn't even all that mad. Mildly miffed you might say. And the next day, C came home with a card, a bit of chocolate, and actual flowers from the store (which I'm pretty sure he's never done before).

As I was tucking him in bed, E also gave me a belated valentine: this drawing he made of a cat couple.



And, as it turns out, the Valentine cards I sent out were all belated as well—even though I'd ordered them very early, I didn't get them in the mail before the blizzard (I'd had a vague thought that I might pick up some pretty stamps), and they didn't even get picked up from our mailbox until Valentine's Day. So we'll chalk this year up as the Year of the Belated Valentine, because really, isn't any day a good day to show someone you care?

Snow Days

Out of the last nine weekdays, all three kids have only gone to school two.

Three days all three of them had snow days; two days either one or two of them did; and the other two days, they had early release.

Needless to say, I haven't been getting much done these last couple of weeks.

(And next week is school vacation!!)

I should, in theory, I suppose, be able to work when they're around, but I can't. Or not much anyway.

It's "Hey, mom…" every few minutes.



And even when they're not bothering me, I feel obligated to engage them in other activities so they don't turn into total screen zombies (which, I admit, is a serious danger right about now).



And then there is the bickering, and the need to feed them occasionally.



So I heave them outside on a regular basis (and myself, too, because a daily dose of light—no matter how dim—and fresh air and body movement is essential to surviving February).


Last week's Artist's Way question was: what is your favorite creative block? That was an easy one: my kids. What to do about it (which the book doesn't ask, not yet anyway) is another question.

This is the best I could do for a Valentine heart this year. Can you see two of them?

In addition to outside time and puzzles and games and movies we all watch together (which feel a little healthier than each to his own screen), I've tried to engage them in a little creativity, both to keep them busy and to help me in my creative recovery.



One of The Artist's Way activities is to create an image file where you store pictures of things you want or that represent who you want to be or what you want to do. I figured, why create a file when you can make a collage? And E and I spent a happy evening cutting up old magazines and gluing the pictures onto big paper. My collage, necessarily tending toward nature and birds and travel, because that's what kind of magazines we had available to us, tells a little story about what kind of life I'd like to lead.



"Make art" is a phrase that keeps popping up in my mind—and in my Morning Pages—when I think about how I want to spend my time, and I was able to get all three boys engaged in a little painting project with me (when paint and canvas are involved, I can usually even get M to play along). I'd had an idea for monochromatic landscape paintings, based on a project E and Z had brought home from art class a while ago, and gave each of them a cool paint color, plus white, and had them draw a series of mountain lines.



We started with white with just a little color mixed in for the sky, and then added more color as we moved toward the bottom of the painting (foreground). I suppose I should have talked about value a little more, and maybe it would have made sense to pre-mix the different values to ensure there was enough of a range, but, well, I'm not an artist or art teacher, so we bungle along as best we can. I was left with black (though I thought sure M or Z would pick it) and it was surprisingly a lot more interesting to paint with than I expected.



Z had the idea of adding snow to his—using a mostly-empty squeeze bottle of acrylic paint, and I thought it was a pretty good idea (especially considering the blizzard swirling around outside at the time). E suggested I use an old toothbrush to flick paint on my canvas to make the snow (a trick he learned from a former art teacher), so it was a fun, collaborative project and we all learned from each other.

Another aspect of The Artist's Way is to take a weekly "Artist's Date" all by yourself. I had planned  an extended Artist Date for last Friday, thinking I'd head down to the coast, but I wanted to get some work done at home while the kids were actually at school, and it was brutally cold and windy (not a nice beach day, in other words), so instead I took a shortened date to a nearby not-quite-coastal (but on a tidal river so it feels like it is) town, where I sat in my warm car with hot tea and ate  sticky bun while watching ducks on the river and writing in my journal. I also went to a book store, which I seem to do every Artist Date, but was very good and didn't buy anything.

Valentine's Weekend

I had a gloriously long weekend, with the holiday Monday and a sick kid on Friday (I should caveat that having a sick kid is not actually glorious, but he wasn't that very sick, just coughing so much that his teacher asked him to kindly stay home).

I used to have a four-day weekend every week. I forgot how great that was. What an idiot I was to give it up!

With the extra time, I was able to get started on a household project I've been meaning to get to for months--more on that next week.

I also got out for a nice long walk in the woods every day, sometimes with companions, and sometimes alone.

I made these cookies and sent out Valentine's cards (this year's card--the reflection of a pink crabapple tree in a heart-shaped puddle--only showed up on Saturday. I was feeling very irritated with the photo-card company for taking two weeks to get my cards to me, while at the same time feeling very first-world-problem-guilty, especially after my complaint email to customer service was answered by someone in India).

E, Z, and I carried on our tradition of making a Valentine's Day gingerbread house (okay, not much of a tradition since the last one we made, as far as I can tell from scanning ye olde blogge, was in 2011). This was from a kit I got for $1.75 post-Christmas. So we started with graham cracker houses and have progressed to the kit--someday we may even make one from scratch (though the kit seems to be the cheapest and easiest way to make one).

C and I had an old-people's Valentine's Day date--we went out to breakfast and then to the garden center to buy a new bird feeder (a festive Valentine's Day red one).

It's taken the birds a while to get used to it, but I think they're coming around.

Driveway Love

Saturday was a stay inside kind of day--rainy and then snowy--with lots of insides stuff that needed to get done--housework and projects and cooking and a spontaneous closet clean-out triggered by a desire to hide away all of my wool sweaters in the bottom of a deep drawer (they will need to come back out to be washed once the weather is warm enough to dry them, but disappearing them for now felt good). But late in the afternoon the sun came out and since I had dinner all prepped and a few minutes before my mother-in-law was due to arrive, I slipped outside to take a walk to the mailbox. 

Partway up the driveway, I came across this deer track shaped like a heart.

A few steps later, I saw a heart-shaped rock.

And then the heart-shaped rock I saw last week.

Pretty soon every rock I saw looked like a heart.

I tend to look for heart shapes in nature, but this was getting ridiculous. Was I just feeling extra loving toward my driveway?

I mean, who wouldn't love slogging through this mess every evening after a long day at work?

On the way back home, a load of mail under my arm, I didn't see any more heart-shaped rocks, only my shadow.

And our sorry-looking sugar shack. Poor C hasn't been able to boil any sap yet this year, between the weather and working in Bar Harbor for the last five weeks. 

But now that he's done with that and with the sun making an appearance here and there, this part of the driveway will become a very busy place for the next few weekends.

Weekend Things ~ Still Winter

This is what it looks like where I live right now, at the tail-end of March.

Snowy and muddy and very much still winter.

I was supposed to go to Vermont for the weekend to visit a friend and her new(ish) baby, but I came down with a cold and didn't want to go coughing all over my friend's baby.

Vermont wouldn't have been much of an improvement in climate, but it would have been away, which is something I've been needing lately.

As it turned out, the kids were gone for most the weekend, so it was almost like a vacation, at least from other people's needs.

I found myself in a nearly empty house with a lot of free time, which is a state I dream about but rarely experience, yet I couldn't settle down to do anything.

Whatever powers the perpetual motion that propels me through winter seems to have run out of fuel.

I spent a fair amount of time working on my final project for my naturalist class. I was pretty excited by this turtle for about a minute after I finished it, and then my mind spun into the abyss of "my drawings are so flat I don't understand perspective and they have no character and this is going to be the worst project ever."

It was time to get outside. 

A walk to the (starting to break up) river, and some time just lying around doing absolutely nothing, followed by a little reading and daydreaming helped. Funny how hard it is to do nothing.

When E and Z got home Sunday afternoon, we did a little half-hearted Easter decorating.

It's kind of hard to get in the Easter spirit with snow still so deep I sank up over my knees when I went off trail.

We didn't have any wheat berries for starting Easter grass and no one even dressed up in the bunny costume and hid eggs.