Summer getting started

This tree is always our first priority on any visit to Baylor campus. 

Looking so grown up. 

I seem to have a whole series of pictures like this one.

"I'm gonna stay neat, mama." 

Love a table covered with art supplies

"mushroom" 

Ben said his painting is called "sin." I wasn't sure I heard that
quite right, but when asked he said, "you know, like Jesus
died for our sins." 

Chalkboard at Lula Jane's while Ben was at farm camp.

JB got a great little band together for a friend's
wedding. Here's our little dancer at work before
everyone arrived. 

another birthday celebration in Sulphur Springs 

Feeling justified for not throwing away this old computer many
years ago. All this stuff is now on a large tray so Ben can work
on taking it apart and putting it back together when he wants to. 

pouty vs. happy

Best friends

May in NY

Baby Ryan milk coma 

checking out Auntie B 

Happy birthday, big brother Jack! 

So fun to have some Jack time on my own

And some sister time at the Tea Room in New Paltz 

I need to try making my own cream puffs again...

And just a view from my jog around Sara's neighborhood : )
I sure do miss these mountains when I'm in Texas. 

Pre-K Graduation

I've never been one to make a big deal about graduations, and if you asked me most days, I'd probably tell you I think a pre-k graduation ceremony sounds a bit excessive and unnecessary. (Where's my sense of occasion, I know!) I won't say the word "excessive" didn't cross my mind on Ben's graduation day, but the word applied more to the sheer amount of work and attention Benjamin's teachers put into making a really special ceremony for the kids. And the excess was a good thing. The confidence on Benjamin's face and poise in his body as he stood waiting for his "diploma" made him look so proud and grown up. 

These teachers. They had something kind to say about each child during the ceremony. They showed a video montage of interviews with the students. They framed graduation pictures of each child. Ben came home with folders and story books full of projects he had been working on all year. That's not to mention the big bag of crafts he came home with every month. And it was only three days a week! And they went on field trips every week! I'm thankful for their energy and commitment to each student in the class. 

Eliza sure loved her teacher Mrs. Jessica this year.

Eliza with daddy waiting for Ben to walk down the aisle.

Last day of school! 

Blowing bubbles in the tree house: summer has begun. 

"This is the story of a wish come true."

"North Star, star of the sea, I wish for a ship named after me, to sail for a day alone and free, with someone nice for company." 

"When she woke up, she was in the cabin of her own ship. It was named The Maggie B. after her, and the nice company was her brother, James, who was a dear baby." 

"On the poop deck was a tiny farm. There were a goat and some chickens, an apple tree and a peach tree and an orange tree with a toucan perched on a branch. They picked an orange for breakfast." 

The Maggie B. is a lovely story--almost a party plan in itself. Margaret and James have a picnic lunch and start a beautiful sea stew for supper before nap time. 

"James had his nap on a velvet pillow and Margaret painted a handsome portrait of him." 

I love the serious look Eliza gets when she is painting.
Just like her grammy. 

                            

Eliza outlasted everyone at the painting activity. She
was in the zone--very focused.

After juice and cookie time, the sun disappears and Margaret has to prepare her own little ship to weather a storm--just enough adventure to remind them how wonderful their little world really is. When everything is safe and secure, they go back inside and mix up a batch of muffins and warm goats milk to have with their stew.

Eliza does love this book (especially the part about the storm coming), but I wouldn't be totally honest if I said this was all just for her. A day on the Maggie B sounds like a perfect day to me at this stage in my life--good company, good food, creativity, control of my space and just enough storm to keep things in perspective. 

Eliza playing with Rosa at the end of the party. 

Eliza at almost three. What a confident, imaginative, and loving little person. 

Me and my girl a few weeks ago. Her idea to sit this way eating our ice cream. 

Is this really just pretend?

an assortment of mud soups after the rain 

The children are playing with hollow toy drum this afternoon, filling it with toys and banging on it.

Liza: Let's mix it up!

B: Yeah, let's pretend that life is mixed up.

Me (overhearing): Ben, what do you mean by life?

B: Life, you know, the life we are living. Life is mixed up. Pretend life is real and real life is pretend.

Hmm. The children parade around the house banging their drums and shaking their maracas.

best friends 

The best game: I get to be baby ryan swinging in the hammock

Pop! It's Spring.

No rational grounds for it

We love our yearly grandparent photo. This year at the Dallas Arboretum. 

The rain held off for my birthday trip to the Dallas Arboretum with the whole family. I love that my birthday falls during spring break--anything we do feels like we are celebrating. What a beautiful world they've created at the Arboretum. It's big enough that when you visit just a few times a year it feels like a world without end--always something new to see. 

Almost every semester I read a story with my students called "The Garden Party" by Katherine Mansfield. Walking through the Dallas Arboretum, I always think of the opening of the story--here's an excerpt from a few lines into the story:  

"As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels."

Trying to take a pic at the end of the day--forced smiles anyone? 

It's quite sad to think of it this way, really: to think of a garden as artificial, an illusion made to impress or to flatter the intelligence. Not to malign the story--it portrays a delicious irony between the world of wealth and beauty the family carefully tends for itself and the dismal realities of other people's lives right outside their door. And there certainly may be an element of this in the massive expense of maintaining of an arboretum (in full bloom in early March?) in the middle of a city. But those ironic opening lines of "The Garden Party" do not really capture how I experience the beauty of a garden.

I thought about the arboretum again this week when I got to the end of a wonderful novel called "The Goldfinch" (won the Pulitzer prize a few years ago--I'm quite behind). The main character is talking about paintings, about "those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find” (759).

That's much more like it: the power of an artfully made image (or garden) to connect to our hearts, to renew us, to remind us of our deepest longings. The power of beauty to change the way we see and think and feel.

a poppy blooming in our yard

Making our yard beautiful

And so we tend our own gardens--our own little patches of beauty. Making little paintings of the garden has been my way of tending to beauty, I suppose. I'm a more whole person when I'm somewhere in that creative process. 

For JB, it's the process of envisioning and creating the actual garden and cultivating it from year to year. Our yard is a demonstration plot in some ways.  How can we take full advantage of the unique soil and conditions of our native Texas landscape and make it the most beautiful and sustainable thing it can be?

Playing in a friend's garden

And for the children,  "Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—“ (757). There doesn't seem to be much rational ground for a fairy garden like this either, but it sure captures Eliza's imagination. And it was a satisfying project for JB's creative energies too. 

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tending to the fairy garden 

Fairy pond in a tree