Well, my brilliant kids cleaned up at the Regional Science Fair. Heidi got silver for "How to train a Betta Fish" and Levi got bronze for "The dangers of smoking and why people accept those dangers." Seth, sadly, did not get to Regionals despite his gripping portrayal of the trials and tribulations of a Raven-Watcher. And the squirrel did eventually get eaten, although not until we left for Edmonton to visit family there. So that's over and next comes Music Festival with various well and truly played pieces being adjudicated (I love that word. It just sounds so great if you say it slowly over and over).

Just a sec, I have to go put duct tape on my kids' warts for the night . . . This is an actual podiatrist-recommended remedy that has worked far better than anything else - and we have tried everything else. But you have to use the good stuff. No knock-off duct tape. Therefore we have little squares of duct tape coming off of socks in the dryer all the time. Also kind of disgusting bedtime rituals. Lots of handwashing, let me tell you.

So just like absolutely everyone else in Saskatchewan I really really REALLY want spring now. The last two mornings have been -25 and tonight it is supposed to feel like -30. That is ridiculous and depressing and very aggravating. I went shopping today for new running shoes. Dan does not think I should run ever again. Now that I have wrecked my shoulders and knees I have been working on wrecking my feet. Actually my shoulders are very well healed and as strong as they have ever been judging by the weights I can lift. But it took a full job change and lots and lots of physio to accomplish that. And if I continue to work my quads very religiously my knees do behave. However my feet have been giving me grief for the whole winter, give or take. I have taken advantage of my home ultrasounder frequently with pretty good results but any time I have tried to walk more than 4 miles, or heaven forbid, run at all, they act up again. This is not good. Running is so critical to my mental well-being! So I am not quite ready to give it up totally. Last summer as I probably wrote about I tried biking as a replacement but with spring coming that is not thrilling to me as a prospect for getting out there. I want to run! I want to feel the shock of the earth pounding through all my joints and to push through the forces of gravity and aging and injustice and stupid bureaucracy and all the things I am not allowed to say and all the conflicting paradoxes of life and just run! Yes I have issues but going out on the old train tracks and passing numerous wildflowers and bear scat and bends in the road is Very Good for Me.

So anyway, I went to SportChek and was immediately identified and upsold and came home with $200 running shoes (Asics - my favorite) that I am wearing right now and LOVING. I think my whole problem was just my 3 year old running shoes and 4 year old hiking boots and now I will be All Better. I hope. This after poring over our budget and figuring out that I cannot really afford the $10 flipflops they sell in WalMart. Priorities.

The point being . . . okay, now I'm ready. Bring on the nice weather.

One of my horse-friends dropped in today as well just to make everything that much worse. I cannot WAIT to get away from winter and snow and regular housecleaning and budgeting and contemplation and porridge every single morning. There comes a wonderful day in about mid-April (usually, probably not this year) when I clean the house one last time and basically do as little as possible inside til fall. That day has not yet come and therefore I am continuing to clean the house very thoroughly and it is not fulfilling. Not at all.

However, I did feel fulfilled last weekend when I actually cleaned out our car for the first time in, hmm, probably about 10 months. I love going in our car now! Did you know that there are actual people that clean their cars (the inside, mind you) every week? Can you believe that? I can't. It is one of those tasks that in my head takes about 8 hours. In reality it took 2, but the effort expended was psychologically worth 8 so nothing has appreciably changed in my head. However there are big changes to the feel of being in the car. I wish it would last. That's the other problem. It doesn't last. I don't really feel like a weekly clean would accomplish any more than a yearly clean. On the other hand, it's been a week and my kids are still scared of the gleaming interior and are throwing crumbs carefully out the window, so maybe it would work . . . I'll have to figure out if that's another aspect of life I need to reframe.

Other news . . . hmm. Nope, can't talk about that. Probably not that either. Let's see, yes . . . no. I'll continue to consider what I can share ethically and non-invasively and compassionately and all that as I watch Seinfeld with my husband who doesn't want to be mentioned. Good night!

censoring sucks (can I say that?)

Yeah, so I love to write and I can almost feel my thoughts untangling as I type (which is now much more effective than handwriting for me and way more legible). Also, as I have been searching through all the corners of the house for addresses and contact info that are stored in various mugs and files and lists and mostly obsolete card catalog thingy's, I have reflected often that there should be a way to use this internet phenomenon to connect with people quickly and easily and without using a whole ton of paper and ink to, say, share funny pictures of my current life. Aha. Someone else had the same thought and it is Facebook. Huh. Okay, so the world is divided on this issue into two camps represented quite nicely by my husband (who doesn't even want to be named online and is horrified that I'm blogging at all and thinks that online banking will send you straight to hell or at least identity bankruptcy) and myself, who loves to chat and has a very iffy filtering system for thoughts at the best of times and at the worst of times can really enjoy a conversation with way too much information.

And there we are. And, predictably, because I actually love my husband and am attracted to people like him (strong, silent, inscrutable, able to filter thoughts, and sound wise, and otherwise way more mature than me) roughly half of my friends (because I have listed you guys in this latest effort to re-connect and it has filled two pages of small handwriting) are like my un-nameable husband and have no online identity and probably don't want to have one. The other half are like me and very happy to chat and have a total of probably a million FB friends between them. So there you go. It all makes for cumbersome list-checking-off.

Add to this that I work in health care and with families with really quite complex medical and developmental issues going on and there is a HUGE confidentiality thing that I am constantly aware of and very very careful to respect in every possible way. And so the bulk of my life that is interesting to me and has fascinating anecdotes that happen frequently and in fact is a huge part of Who I Am, is really off-limits for any sort of chatting at all. So that leaves me able to talk about, hmm, the garden. Which is currently under 2' of snow and irrelevant to my feelings at this time.

Anyway, I am just wanting to say that I love the idea of blogging as a way to let you all back into my life in a more personal and up to date way than my Christmas letters used to. However, many of you (on my list) will never see this blog unless I really try hard to persuade you to find a portal into the www. Also, most of what I would like to tell you about I really can't because other people (such as my un-nameable husband) would Flip Out. Not to mention that I just can't talk about other stuff. And then there's the whole thing about kids online and should you really talk about your kids online and should you have images of them for the world to see . . . which my uncle-in-law who was an RCMP officer cautioned me about speaking from sad experiences and so that pretty much wraps up that topic, certainly in terms of anything specific.

AAAAAGH. I am still going to continue blogging, however, because, darn it, I like it. If you feel like I am talking in circles, though, that is why. I am circling around the real topics of my life like the ravens are circling around the dead squirrel hanging from the basketball hoop in our yard that my son just shot with his bow and arrow for his Science Fair project, which is to befriend a raven. See? That's priceless. Stuff like that you can't make up. Welcome to my life in Crutwell. I would describe it in greater and more interesting detail than that, but I have to figure out the censoring rules first.

Update

Okay, okay. It has now been, let's see, almost four months since I posted here. That's pretty bad. However, in my own defence, I have been totally reorganizing my life. In December (probably exactly a month after my last post) Dan and I decided that I needed a full year "sabbatical" from Attic Therapy. I was just too tired. So I began the complicated process of winding down a very busy business involving communicating with a lot of families I care pretty deeply about. However, every week that passed made me more certain that this was the right decision. Right at the same time, Seth got sick with asthmatic bronchitis, and he didn't manage to kick that for a full 8 weeks - lots of Dr. visits and 3 courses of antibiotics and finally a visit to the pediatrician. Heidi had a short bout of the same thing over Christmas as well but she actually got better. Seth just coughed and coughed and was dead tired.

Anyway, Christmas was almost a non-event in light of those two complications. We went down to Regina for the Lundell Christmas which would have been wonderful except that two of my kids were feverish and probably contagious. They tried hard to act like they weren't sick but by the time we got home for Christmas Eve and missed the closing of the walk-in clinic they were extremely ill. After Christmas we went to the Blocks' in Saskatoon but I almost felt like apologizing for coming with all the hacking and red eyes. Heidi got antibiotics on the way, literally. But the Dr. had this bizarre concoction that despite my requests, could not in any way be put in pill form so Heidi was choking it back in a syringe and ended up throwing up all over the back seat. On the way.

Then after we got back and Seth and Heidi started to recover, Levi, Dan and myself (and Seth, and I think Heidi too at one point) got stomach flu. So the entire week before New Year's was unbelievably quiet as all of us had zero energy, not to mention appetite. It did not make for a festive feeling, but was definitely relaxing. By New Year's Day I was absolutely stir-crazy (feeling better myself but pretty much all by myself) and so I ditched my convalescing, moaning, reading all over the couches family and went and visited my neighbour after shamelessly phoning and begging her to let me out of my quarantine.

Everyone was better, sure enough, just in time for school. This did not thrill them but I was certainly happy to have everyone on the bus. That lasted exactly one day and then Seth was down for the count with his asthma taking one final kick at the can. I had one final diagnostic assessment to complete for Attic Therapy, which took most of January, and then I went through our entire house with a vengeance, organizing, cleaning, sorting, and throwing out or giving away Stuff. And that brought me pretty much up to the February Break. Which was filled as usual with sleepovers with my kids' best friends who all live too far away to get together often. And now it's Saturday, and everyone's healthy, and I have vacuumed my organized living room, and the Science Fair projects are almost completely done, and there is one last friend waiting to get picked up, and then it's Sunday, and then we are heading into a week where I desperately hope I can begin to feel like I am on leave from work.

So here I am, back on the web, pouring out my soul for the masses to read (or not), and wondering how to spend the next year. I am determined to spend quality time with the horses, all of who(m?) need training. I would like to write something. I would like to concentrate on my kids, hopefully not just in the health department. I would like to have fun again. It's been a while since that has even been part of my vocabulary, unless it has been making experiences fun for others. I would like to renew friendships that have drifted apart with time and distance. I am trying to figure out Facebook and find email addresses and even snail mail addresses for people I used to at least get a Christmas letter to. My computer crashed about 5 years ago right after I had painstakingly put all my addresses on it. I lost touch with quite a few people after that. It was just very demoralizing.

I am also hoping to work on moderation. It would do me no good to stop working in order to rest and then to burn out doing all the other stuff that has been tugging at my back burners. Typical, but not a good idea. So I want to go carefully here. Life is just so darn short!! Anytime I get any bit of energy I start tearing around doing stuff I have been wanting to do forever and then all of a sudden - crash. It's an extremely predictable pattern and I would like to try to break it. We'll see.

So anyway, that's where I am today. Soup is on the stove. Levi is reading Asterix contentedly, having baked us a huge batch of Grandmother's Soft White Cookies this afternoon while I was grocery-shopping, bless his heart. Heidi is with her friend probably getting rice and sprinkles all over her room. Seth and Dan just left for a 5 mile snowshoe before supper. It has stopped snowing and is no longer -39 with the windchill. Hooray. Tomorrow my parents come for supper after the kids have basketball practice. It's all good. So if you're reading this and you're one of my old dear friends, please find a way to get a hold of me. You're on my list to find!

Blankets, etc.

Wow. I am deeply tired. Heidi just got diagnosed with mono after an excruciating week of her being miserably sick, whimpering in her sleep, waking up every time the Tylenol wore off because the pain in her throat was so painful and with her eyes looking so dead. She's better now - her throat is only "this" sore (indicating 2" with her fingers) instead of "this" sore (indicating as high off the floor as she can reach), but she definitely is exhausted and lethargic and not our regular Heidi. Ach. Levi got shingles in September, Seth got an ACL strain in October, and now this. The teachers are probably wondering about attendance issues.

I have wanted to write many times in the last month because lots of little things come to mind that I'd like to describe and remember, but there is no time! I have been scrambling to keep on top of work stuff, sick kid stuff, healthy kid stuff, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and of course Levi's birthday is this Sunday and it's the big 10 so we need to celebrate that properly. Anyway, now that Heidi's turned the corner and presumably will just slowly recuperate for the next month, and I have the urgent urgent stuff done or mostly done, I feel fairly done in.

However, I don't want to only write about how tired I am. There is more to life even when one is 41 and actually in the middle-aged category (aaaaagh!). We finished cementing the barn! Dan got a deer - a decent buck. That's a good thing. I rototilled 3/4 of the garden before winter for the first year in as long as I can remember. Before Thanksgiving I was doing great things with Jetta on a semi-regular basis. We are making new friends with new neighbours in Crutwell which is wonderful for us and our kids as they also have kids the same ages as ours. The colours outside my window today are actually very beautiful. Usually at this point in the year I just wish it would snow as it is brown and bare and cold. I think because of all the water this year though the grass still looks a bit green and there is the blue of the sloughs and all the reeds and the hay bales all gold and it's alright for another week of fall, I'm thinking. I'm reading Who has seen the wind? by W.O. Mitchell again and it is a lovely book. I had to read it in Grade 5 for some reason and it's hard to believe now as I have a boy in Grade 5 and I'm not sure if he would appreciate all the nuances. Well, I know he wouldn't.

I have been struggling with plantar fascitis since July and it seems to be almost all gone, so that's great. However, it appears that running is no longer going to be something that I enjoy on a regular basis. I have been trying hard to get excited about biking and I have been going very regularly with Storm and it's okay. But it's so fast and you have to worry so much about balancing and it's just not the same feeling as running. However, my knees and feet are totally and completely shot and so I guess that is reality. I can bike for a lot of the year and once I can't I'll be able to snowshoe and that'll be alright.

I have been thinking about how getting older is like a stack of magazines. A magazine doesn't feel very substantial and to make a pile of them takes quite a few. But all of a sudden you have this tall slippery heavy chunk of magazines that are awkward to store and which have all this great information in them but you know you probably won't dig through it even so. I have all of a sudden accumulated a bunch of years and a whole lot of experiences so that in lots of interactions with other people I realize with a shock that I am older than them, and in some cases quite a bit older. I don't feel older but the stack of magazines, so to speak, is heavy and substantial. I have been through a bit. Haven't learned as much from it as would be good for me but there you go. It makes me want to go back and read Twilight again just to feel like a fourteen year old again. Not that I want to really be fourteen ever again. But 41 is still very strange.

Last week for some reason I connected with a bunch of people from very different points in my history all within a pretty concentrated span of time. It left me feeling incredibly disoriented. It was all good, but there are so many different corners of me that different special people pull out that when that happens all at once I feel like a blanket with 6 people tugging at the corners at once. It's hard to find my centre and figure out who I am when I am alone. Maybe that's part of it because for various reasons I have not been alone for quite a while, and certainly not alone without any housework to do. Which is why I'm writing now. Writing seems to bring me back to centre better than most other things. Don't know why. For some reason I can sort out thoughts better if I can see them in front of me. Heidi is asleep and Dan is off getting something or other and the kids are not home from school yet and it is a little lovely island of quiet with no one needing me right at this very moment. I can just sit and breathe. Which is the song I put on to start writing to - Breathe (2 am) by Anna Nalick. I love that song. It's so appropriate so often.

I can't think of anything else to ramble. May your sunsets (and sunrises) all be breathtaking and off to the side of your windshield so they don't blind you while driving! Now I'm off to piano lessons with Levi. Back at it.

September air

I am sitting by my open window enjoying the September air which is rich with rotting leaves and the last deep breaths of the trees before they go back to sleep. The horses are picking through the garden's leavings, having chewed the grass down to a millimeter's length throughout the whole yard. They have fairly strict boundaries and are finally passing beyond them to the slough-y outskirts in the woods around the cleared space. I guess the grass there, cured by now into hay, is not as tasty as the freshly mown stuff (even if it was only mown by them all summer). Our water table is as high as it has ever been, thanks to 6" of rain in the last two weeks. We have a huge new puddle right in front of the barn which is causing difficulties with our planned project of pouring cement in the last third of the barn this fall. The truck will likely sink. We will have to lay down plywood. Even so, once it freezes we will be contending with a skating rink right in our major traffic area. Not good.

This summer was too full, and I am re-evaluating my entire life on the basis of the realities of my energy. Which is apparently finite. I figure that I am in general spending 60% of my energy on my kids. You would think this would go down once school begins, but this September all three got sick and Levi got very sick right away. Plus there were eye appts. for all three with Seth needing two follow-up appts. just to get much needed contacts. Finally he can play sports without his glasses going flying three times per game. Plus helping out with the Parent Advisory Council, field trips, and the annual Walkathon. Not to mention Crutwell's fall supper and bringing in our garden . . . September has been if anything, MORE busy than July and August. And they were full.

So, given that the kids will likely continue to require a significant majority of my time and thought and attention, and that my job also is very labour intensive and emotionally taxing, that does not really leave any time for Dan much less myself. It would be nice to cut back on everything, but financial realities make that highly unrealistic and many other parents have assured me that family life does not get simpler as children mature. Sigh. I would love to read a book that tells women how to do it all and still be serene and calm and reasonably fit. In the meantime, I am really enjoying the fall brilliance today after a week of dark cloudy rainy skies. The trees are the exact shade of yellow-orange that goes best with the fall-crisp blue of the sky. We still have green on the ground thanks to all the rain. So despite the fact that I am doing laundry, dishes, supervising kids' cleaning rooms and practicing piano, hosting two of Levi's friends, and trying to figure out which of the rest of the garden to even try to bring in, I am still enjoying breathing in the day.

Last weekend I was able to work with Jetta two days in a row! Before the rain re-started. That was very nice because I have gone right back to the beginning with her and am working on respect on the ground. She remains too emotionally scattered for my comfort when I am riding her and I have finally realized that she is wired completely differently from Chess. She may eventually come to respect me after I ride her hard for 50 miles but in the meantime I may also get my neck broken with her sudden bolting behaviour. So we are working on attention and sustained attention and her thinking, rather than reacting. I never really had to work to get or keep Chess' attention; she is too focused on avoiding extra work to not pay attention. However Jetta is very unfocused and I think it is just needing to realize that she must discipline herself for longer than 30 seconds. I am not great at setting clear boundaries (obviously) but this is very good for me. If I am clear with her, she is actually great to be around. So it was a very encouraging weekend. I hope to have another starting today, and maybe even extend the time to the next week . . . however I can't really get my hopes up!

Anyway, the boys have come in and it's time to feed everyone again!

I am not a duck

Sorting and untangling others' feelings

by colour, by texture, by sound

can be somewhat satisfying

But they don't stop

and frustration begins to set in with the unending task

bringing a sense of order to this mat of chaos

all snarled up around me

and if I turn my back the knots return

like they're on purpose

I look around and wonder if the colours of the earth

are the thoughts of God

and if so, how He somehow can take a disorderly tangle

the composting layers of a slough for example

and make it beautiful, without any sense of numeracy

no sequencing

no thinning

no culling

no alphabetical order

each duck a poem of happy

amphibious possibility

I think that the colours around me

seen and felt

are all spread out from the thoughts of God

so I suppose ordering them is silly

I should rather swim under, over, fly through them

and notice the reflections skating on the surface of the pond

as an upside down postcard from the sky

Still, my brow is furrowed lots of times

I am not a duck.

fishing poem

I am so tired I can hardly think so I suppose that is as good a time as any to share random thoughts online. On the other hand, this sort of almost dreaming state at 4 in the afternoon is when poetry tends to float nearest the surface so I'll give it a try and see what happens . . .

Sometimes sunlight drenches me

as when a small child casts a line awkwardly, breaking the air and writing a brief

note on the pond, fading to an invisible message

and the ducks soar after reading it, feeling threatened

by the small fists, so intent,

so earnest, so drenched with light that

you can almost see right through their souls

Bumping past the large holes in the road

not fixed yet and growing deeper with every rainfall

but packed smooth by all the 4x4's that determinedly make their way to the planned summer

I am transporting children with half-formed memories who

may remember this perfect morning as a note the dragonfly makes

background to the robins and blackbirds

interrupted by furious ducks

a blurry sensation of mud and reeds and tangled lines

that tightening of the shoulders to control the cast

that never goes where you were looking

but is hope each time

"I'm feeling lucky" says my son

almost soaked by the sunlight

so full of truth that he is lucky

but the fish, being in the water, do not see this clearly enough

and unfortunately ignore his lucky casts.

A father walks with his son hand in hand, the scent of togetherness smudging their

separate outlines and

glueing their memories together - mud and sun and ducks and that plane

drowning out the dragonfly buzz and smudging the invisible ink

on the water

Such vivid colours in the sunlight that

swirls and sanctifies

the tiny souls

the half-set minds of our

little children

and my own mind softens briefly and I feel smudged

into a watercolour with them

That was this morning - fishing with another family and their little autistic son as well as my own two youngest kids. It was really magical and one of those moments I wish I could just capture and keep in an album.

Now I really need to do paperwork - billing and charting and stuff like that but I really don't feel like it at all. Sometimes being an adult is just not what it is cracked up to be!