Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Busy Day

After long amounts of writing and thinking on the questions itching at my brain, we
  • headed out to the grocery store,
  • picked up stitched bits of yarn for my upcoming graffiti knitting project from several friends who stitched them(designed to counter the city-sanctioned version running amok all over town, proving our neighborhood cooler and more subversive, as well as saying a big "f you" to whoever cut down my previous attempt)
  • stopped at the library for more books and dvds on giant squid for our upcoming art projects, discovered the "wipe your fines" canned good donation program and stored that for a day or so from now
  • went for a walk in the woods at shaker lakes as the sun went down, encountering but a couple of deer this time



I was struck by this yellow leaf amidst the sea of brown.
Aleks is reading everything these days. We drive down the street and he shouts at me from the back seat, "Mom! Why does that say egg-zit on-ly?" or "Milk! $2.99!" Or reads off names of businesses and signs I don't see and wants me to explain what it means without any sort of context. It's great, because now the reading thing is being taken care of and I can feel far less anxious about it, but it's sometimes difficult when we have to sit and decipher what the heck this tree says while Bastian runs way ahead on the path.
Fuzzy family in low light.
I still don't understand the Shaker Lakes lean-to thing. I'm not sure that I really want to though. If I had it explained, it might take away some of the magic of going on walks and ending up here to FIVE different lean-tos in different places than the previous two or three or one or whathaveyou... Every time we visit, there are new crevices to explore and they're ever-changing and I've no idea who or what changes them or why. We just check them out and sometimes add to them...
The street car going by out on the street.
We worked on the lean-to for about a half an hour before it got too terribly dark to continue hanging out.


After woodsing, we went to Target to buy Natty a birthday present (as it was her actual 23rd birthday) and some canned goods to pay off our library fines. Then we headed home to wrap it up, eat some dinner, and examine our library goods.

4 comments:

Donna said...

When Miranda was first discovering her ability to read, we were walking home through Ohio City and she carefully and clearly read SUCK MY DICK off the side of a building.

Rachel said...

Yep, sounds like just another one of your sit around and do almost nothing days.

Speaking of sitting around and doing almost nothing, I'm sitting here with my calendar in front of me, tiny pieces of paper with ideas on them, shuffling them around from day to day. I am guessing you know what I'm doing... Otto saw it and was very interested. He mentioned that it was very good that they can't read yet (see, I tied it all in there with this reading reference), because then they could look at it and see all the stuff I was planning (note: I was trying to be discreet, but I obviously failed). And then he told me: "I would like it even better if the envelopes didn't have just words in them." We usually do an Advent calendar with small gifts in it each day. I am hoping my kids will love this as much as yours did. I am pretty sure they will...but they DO love a good little giftie. ;) I'm also planning on putting some chocolate in the regular Advent calendar (we've got a large felt pocket one I usually use). Anyway, I should be ready soon to post my own list...

anna kiss said...

Yay Rachel! Donna (who commented above) has like 15 advent calendars and does the countdown thing and each day they go around opening all the little windows. So having more than one sounds fun to me. I want gifts everyday for almost a month. That sounds awesome.

I did mine in front of my kids too and now that Aleks is running around sounding everything out all the time, he totally was able to read some of them. Luckily, their attention span is so short, that he'll forget and it will still be a fun surprise.

Rachel said...

Yeah, our philosophy has always been that we can't have too many ways to count down the days 'til Christmas. And we've also had multiple Advent calendars, but stuffing the felt pocket calendar has gotten really expensive in past years!!! :) I'm so excited to try this, and it's made me want to start right away. So we took some of the ideas that didn't make the final cut...and we did them already! We had a fancy dinner tonight with candles some of our most special wine glasses, and the boys wanted to wear their ties, but we were unorganized in the moment and couldn't find them. Still, it was pretty fun, and we ended up serving a very special dessert: chocolate and creme cookies (knock off Oreos) with milk, served by candlelight. :) They've never tasted better.