For the Kingdom of Heaven Belongs to Such As These July 9, 2008

Today I made pancakes for Eamonn and Ella as a treat because they have been such loves this week. They have fallen back into their easy pattern together: sharing more than arguing, hugging more than shoving, and running to each other and flinging their arms around each other dramatically every time we get to the condo.

On the way down the freeway, the closer we get to Ella’s house, Eamonn tells me with more and more frequency at every mile, “Mom? I luff Ellas. Mom? I luff Sy (his name for Josiah). Mom? I see Tata (his name for Crista, which we find hysterical)? Mom? I Ellas? I luff Ellas and Yon (my brother).” In between each of these sentences I am peppered with demands to go to “Ampa’s” house and told that “Dah-ee” is at work and that Dah-ee, too, is the object of his undying luff.

When we get to Ella’s, I hardly get the door open before they are running at each other, a tangle of 5-and-2-year-old hug in the entryway. “ELLAS!” my son cries. “OH EAMONN!! I’m SO GLAD you’re finally HERE!” Ella responds. “Hi, Sy!” Eamonn croons at Josiah in his exersaucer and then cries, “Won, Ellas! I play!” Leaving me to the baby, Ella and Eamonn run down the hall together to drag her play table and chairs into the living room while I get Josiah ready for breakfast. They sit across from each other while Eamonn sips “cossee” and Ella reads, like the oldest old married couple you ever did see — perfectly content in their pretend routine and comfortable in the given of the other’s love.

This makes my mornings good.

Because we’ve had a reign of peace this week, as I said, we celebrated this morning with blueberry pancakes. “Aunt Mary?” Ella asked as I whipped up the batter, “Are these blueberry pancakes going to have chocolate chips in them? Because that would just be my favorite.” I secretly designed to put chocolate chip smiley faces on them, but to no avail — we only just had blueberries.

Over breakfast Eamonn chattered and Ella asked for interpretations or interpreted his words to her own designs. “I think he is maybe asking if we can watch TV after breakfast Aunt Mary.” “Really, Ella?” I replied, “Because he just said something about vitamins.” “Oh! Vitamins?” she replied, “Well why would he ask about vitamins? I just thought maybe he likes Sesame Street. That’s what I was thinking.”

It is very hard not to laugh over breakfast.

And then she hit me with it.

“Aunt Mary?”

“Yes, love?”

“Even though Grandma is with Jesus now, could we still have a party for her? You know, when her birthday comes? She still has a birthday, right?”

“Yes. Yes she does, Ella. It’s in October.”

“So, we could maybe have a party for her, I was thinking? We could remember her even though she’s not here anymore?”

“I think that would be a great idea. We could remember all the things we love about her while we were together.”

I swallowed tears and choked down pancakes.

“Aunt Mary?”

“Yes, love?”

“What did Grandma give me? I mean, which of my toys did she give me that I could bring to the party? I am thinking maybe I would like to bring two things to talk about that she gave me.”

“I don’t know, love. We need to ask your Mommy about that. Like…Eamonn…he sleeps with his tiger from Grandma Wagner and his Dino from Grandma Kathy…I know she gave you toys too but I just can’t think which ones those are.”

“I know I have some,” she said. “I just cant think what they are. But she did give me things.”

“I’m sure she did, love. I’m just not sure which things.”

It’s amazing how quickly pancakes, butter and syrup can taste like cardboard. We ate to the track of Eamonn’s chatter.

“Aunt Mary!!”

“Yes, love?”

“I thought of it! I thought of what she gave me!”

I thought she meant a toy and asked, “You did? That’s great! What did she give you, Ella? What would you bring to the party?”

“Aunt Mary, she gave me all of her MEMORIES! That’s what Grandma gave me! All the things I remember. That’s what she gave me. I will have those with me for always!”

And so, for the umpteenth time, I did not make it through breakfast without weeping.

Just as many nights I end the same way.

Twice in the last week my son has been woken in the night, weeping. I go into him and immediately after I calm him he asks, “Mom, pray?” Always, I agree and we begin to pray. But inevitably he interrupts me, “Mommy…I pray Ampas.” “You want to pray for Grandpa, Eamonn?” “Yes,” he tells me, “Pray Ampas.” And so, we pray. We pray for all our hearts but on those nights we pray especially for Grandpa’s.

The Lord used my Mom to touch hearts and she certainly touched Ella’s…a kid with one of the softest hearts I’ve ever encountered. And I am so thankful to see how my Dad has touched Eamonn in some way that goes beyond the explainable, but gives me joy all the same. As my mother-in-law so aptly puts it regarding these children, “There are waters that run deep.”

It is so humbling when your faith is challenged by that of a child, but it is hard not to be challenged in the face of Ella’s faith and Eamonn’s instinctual desire for prayer. I go through so many days challenged, hurting, not thinking of the hope I possess so securely because of what Jesus has done for me.

I keep stopping here and not knowing what else to write tonight. How do you go beyond something like that? Tonight I cannot. It’s as far as my heart will go. And for now I am content to be led by the wisdom of a child…and I am thankful for the solace of prayer and my memories.

Such pals from the very beginning…Mom and Ella

Mom and Dad with Eamonn hours after his birth

The Zucchini Naming Contest July 8, 2008

All right, friends. A zucchini this size deserves a name. But I am too fried to come up with one right now. And so I leave it to you to come up with a name for what is, currently, known as “The Whale” of those of us in Ivey Ranch who grow zucchini. It was so big I yelled when Joce showed it to me while she was watering for me as I pulled some weeds.

I give you The Whale, AKA Zucchzilla, AKA “HOLY COW WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT THING??”

Entries will be considered with considerable bias by me and possibly my sisters-in-law because DANG are they funny…but if they make suggestions then clearly it’s just me deciding on the winner. And we all know I’m succeptible to bribes. A prize will be given. I’ll even promise a GOOD prize. But I have no idea what form that will take at the moment.

Comments with suggestions, por favor!

Knee-High By 4th of July, You Say? July 6, 2008

Get a load of this:

I’m just over 6ft tall, and my arms are pretty long, which leads me to believe that my tallest corn stalk is about 10 ft tall.

Now to figure out how to know when the ears are ripe and ready for eating…

The Tree-Climbing, Thorn-Poking Baby Bird Caper July 2, 2008

This morning, in a desperate attempt to get the kids outside and some wiggles run off, I scooped up the baby, shoed up the kids and out the door we went for a run/scramble/crawl/walk around the condo complex. This is how it usually goes:

The kids run.
I scramble to keep up with them yelling “WALK SLOWLY”.
Eamonn sees a kitty and starts to crawl while alternating between “MEEEOOOWWW…HI KITTY!”
Ella, the good listener, walks slowly.

So that’s how this walk was going with the added benefit of Josiah in my arms for company. When we got to the waterfall I notice that a branch was broken on one of the trees and then on further inspection I found that there was a nest in the end of the part hanging down and that there were baby birds in the nest. Right about the time I took this all in and called the kids over to take a peek I heard lawn mowers start up. “Oh, Lord,” I thought in a slight baby-bird-related panic, “Today’s the day the landscapers are here. Please don’t let them cut the branch yet. Please!” And, sorting through frantic baby-bird-saving ideas in my mind, I hustled the kids back to the condo so I could figure out what to do.

I called the bird lady in Fallbrook and got a message. I looked online and just got a bunch of anonymous chastising from bird-folk who were more interested in assuming anyone trying to help baby birds were morons and that really the birds were FINE and who did I think I was and call the professionals and again WHO did I THINK I WAS? Really, honestly, never ask for bird advice online.

With all that helpful information I looked up to see all the landscapers working outside the patio doors and I went running out to find that their English was just as limited as my Spanish. Our conversation when something like this.

“Pardon, Senors! The tree? That tree? Es…uh…broken. El arbol? Er…no no lo ciento…um…BIRDS! Bebes? Los bebes?” I then flapped my arms to clarify. They all gazed at me, hedge trimmers, hedge clippers, and mowers frozen in their hands. “Um…El arbol as malo, y,…um….los bebes (flap flap) son en arbol!”

Please don’t be too impressed at my amazing Spanish. It just comes to me naturally as you can see.

“OOOOH! The…tree?” said one of the gardeners helpfully.

“SI!” I cried, delighted. “Si!”

“Ohhh…you no worry. We cut it already. Es…CUT” He did a ’snip snip’ sign.

“Nooooo!” I cried.

This caused much Spanish discussion, gesticulation, pointing at me and concerned glances the direction of Ella who was now saying, “Aunt Mary…aren’t we going to SAVE the BABIES??”

“No…is okay!” The gardener attempted to explain again. “Is broken already. We just cut it trim nice!”

“No…oh…but THE BIRDS!” I flapped some more.

They all looked at each other, concerned (possibly about my sanity). “Lady…” began the gardener again, “the birds? They flying. They fly away. We just cut it. This all, we cut. Birds fly.”

“The flew away?” I asked, hopeful they meant the little furry babies I’d seen in the nest with barely any feathers. “All of them?”

“Yes.” He told me, looking at me with that kind of uncomfortable smile people get when they’re thinking, you might be super simple and they just now are realizing it. “Birds fly.”

“Ooooh! Good! I was so worried. Oh never mind I just…they…pequito! Los pequitos bebes!” I did a little flap and cheeped and then clutched my chest and wiped my hand across my forehead in the internationally acknowledged symbol for “Phew!” But now they looked worried again and much Spanish discussion happened again and there were lots of men and both kids saying “cheep cheep” a lot and one of the men made a nest with his hands and then they all gesticulated a lot and I helped out by pointing at the nest-hand man and shouting “SI! SI!”

The English-speaking gardener said, “I be RIGHT back!” and they all darted off around the corner.

I looked at Ella and Eamonn who looked back at me expectantly. “Well! Well then! The men said the birds flew away. So!” I tried to be relieved and convinced. The doorbell rang and I opened it and there stood the gardener. “You go around there. Okay?” He pointed back to the patio where another gardener was standing with a nest in his hands. They had, indeed, cut down the branch and were about to dispose of it but somehow, miraculously, the baby birds were in the nest still, unharmed. He handed them to me. “You take them. Okay? The mom, the dad, they fly. The babies okay, okay?” I nodded with an expression of what I can only think must have engendered no hope at all. “Now you put them…(he waved his hand in a general way indicating I put them SOMEwhere) and you come. You see the mom, the dad. Okay?”

We put the birds in a basket and the kids and I all trooped over to where the gardeners had last seen what they thought were the parent birds, they all patted me on the back and kept saying, “Is okay. Okay? Is okay.” And then they all trooped away to pack up their equipment and head to another part of the complex.

Luckily I got hold of my friend Ann who has rescued quite a few baby birds thanks to her cat, and she had me go out to check to see whether the mother and father were anywhere around. (It is an old wife’s tale that birds will reject their young if touched by humans…they can’t smell well and generally will take their young back and search frantically for them in the meantime. I didn’t know that until today. My friend Aimee, who knows a lot about animals and helped me with information via IM confirmed this as well.) The parents were there again, frantically searching the tree for their babies and I was horribly aware that, if I were going to try to get those birds back up in that tree it was going to have to be with help — A ladder wasn’t going to do the trick. But Ann said she could come to help me.

So the kids stared at the four baby birds and cooed to them while we waited for her to arrive. There was much discussion about naming the birds. I said ‘no’ and Ella said, ‘But I think one of them is named Betsy!’ She was mollified by my explanation that these were wild birds and that meant God already knew their names and so we didn’t need to make up new ones for them. They were SO good about not touching them, and only speaking quietly to them, and mostly leaving them alone so “they could rest.” (Babies need lots of sleep, you see. Even bird babies.) And then Ann arrived ready for action.

If you ever wanted to know what it looks like when two adult women climb a tree with thorns all over it trying not to drop four baby birds out of a delicate nest while a two-year-old tried to go swimming in a public fountain, you could have found out today. It’s quite the caper, let me tell you. I climbed the tree and immediately got vertigo when Ann handed me the babies. So we got them into the crotch of two branches so that we could climb up further and she could hand them to me in a less precarious position, and I finally, thankfully and with much prayer wedged the nest into a high, high, high branchy outcropping and wedged sticks underneath to further steady the birds so they wouldn’t come tumbling out.

Immediately once the birds were settled they began to vocalize, peeping loudly for their parents and quickly after that we began hearing the very distinctive voices of the parents in return.

The little birds were safe, I had a few thorn pokes, and we all had a sense of extreme accomplishment and relief. Last I checked I couldn’t see any of the parents (the nest is REALLY high and hidden) but I could hear both adult and baby noises from that part of the tree. I will check on them once tomorrow, but I’m about 99% sure the parents have found them again and I’m hoping they try to attack me and chase me away as soon as I get near.

Happy Birthday, Daddy June 29, 2008

We had the privilege of celebrating my dad’s birthday with him this weekend. I have a lovely picture of him blowing out his candle, but I won’t post it unless he says its okay.

We had roast chicken, roast potatoes, caprese salad, purslane salad, sauted zucchini, fresh almond/flax bread and of course, cake and ice cream. Much lovely conversation accompanied it all, as well as some nice wine.

So I’m not going to wax poetic about my dad tonight. It’s late and I might get sappy. But here is something I really, really want to say again:

We trust, as Christians, in God’s sovereign hand in our lives. (Sometimes I am better at this than others.) But my dad is, as was my mom, a constant reminder to me of the great love that God has shown me and continues to show me. What amazing parents I have. I can’t contemplate it without welling up.

My dad has loved me when I was utterly unloveable in the way I was living my life and behaving. He has helped me when I needed helping. And now, as we all deal with the loss of my mom, he has been an example to me of grace and courage. I love talking with him and just spending time with him whatever it is we are doing. He is my friend and I am honored to be his daughter.

Happy birthday, Dad. I love you so very much.

Some pictures of the boys enjoying Grandpa’s birthday cake right off the beaters follow.

Josiah emulates Daddy’s questionable fashion sense by getting a mustache of his own. Only Josiah’s is made of chocolate so, really, it’s win-win:

Eamonn gets to eat icing off a beater. His Aunt Crista spoils him so wonderfully and he loves just about every second of it. Here’s to getting a beater on Grandpa’s birthday!

We Know How I Love Before and Afters June 29, 2008

So here are two.

B10 the day I got it:

B10 today:

C10 the day I got it:

C10 today:

Holy cow…I got tagged! June 28, 2008

I sort of feel like this makes me a “real” blogger. And so, here we go…many thanks to Spatulahandle for the nod. Sadly, I’m not so artsy so I don’t think this is going to be as cute as yours.

Tag: Write a six-word memoir. Post it to your blog including a visual illustration if you would like. Link to the person who tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogsphere . Tag 5 more blogs with links . Don’t forget to leave a comment in the tagged blogs with an invitation to play. (I tagged 6, because I liked the breakdown. Don’t judge me. No, don’t.)

So here goes.

Crossing the street, I was saved.

I can’t figure out how to email the folks at Letter to America to ask permission to use the image so here is full credit and I’ll work on asking permission in the meantime.

Someday when I go back to Solvang, CA, I’ll take a picture of that actual street and tell the story.

My tag list (Two faith, two family, two garden…my interest trifecta):
Triblogue
Creed or Chaos
This Sure Real Life
The Wagner EXPERIENCE
The Root
Hit Pay Dirt

A Garden Update June 28, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve done a strictly garden update with pictures, and some really big things have happened out there.

I’m now getting about a pound of tomatoes every other day. I have peppers coming in and beginning to ripen finally. My corn is sprouting ears in both patches. I’d estimate about 80 ears before we’re through. I’ve also got 4 good sized watermelons and a bunch of babies. We’ve gotten several crops of potatoes thus far. I’m truly convinced now that you just can’t plant enough potatoes. I have okra buds now (amazing after so many lost plants!) that came from a second set of seeds I started about two months ago.

So anyway, here are some pictures. I’ll do a before-and-after of B10 and C10 in a post following.

My corn. Silver queen in the taller patch and Casino (I think, I have to re-check this. It also might be Bon Jour, but I don’t think so. It’s amazing what you forget. Anyway, the shorter guys I grew from seed.) corn patches with Jack of All Trades growing underneath in both, also started from seed.

Here is my okra, trying hard to outgrow purslane (destined for a salad soon) and Sugar/Pie pumpkins. I have buds and teeeeny baby okra now. You can check them out in my Flickr photostream if you want.

And speaking of pumpkins…

One of my smaller Sugar pumpkins, followed by my ripening one, and a shot of my Jack of All Trades, which is now almost half again bigger one day after this photo was taken.

My melons make me happy. Too bad I can’t remember which is which anymore and my plant tags faded. Note to self and anyone else: When you write on plant tags, don’t use girly colors like pink and light green. Use black. Truly. Or a soldering iron. For the sake of permanency, that is.

My bush beans, Bountiful and Cranberry, are having an identity crisis. They want to climb like pole beans! Well, I was rebellious, too. So I built them a teepee and they can climb if they want to. As long as they keep producing those gorgeous, tasty pods. Have at it little beans!

There are plenty more pictures on Flickr, as I mentioned. Feel free to take a gander. I won’t force you to look at them here, though.

If any of you have good experience with peppers, I keep losing mine to sunburn…but they are full sun plants. Do the peppers themselves need some shade?

Pot-Heads Flock to My Blog June 26, 2008

So, apparently my rapture over eating weeds — purslane, specifically — has led some people to my blog for very interesting reasons.

I really adore the “Blog Stats” page. I refresh it obsessively. But it’s not, as my husband accused to our family friend Joseph, because I love tallying up all my page hits. (Don’t get me wrong, I love that people are even remotely interested in what I say on here and am really honored that anyone would read more than a sentence deep into this thing.) But it’s not the ego factor. I swear it. (Mostly — what a sad, sad person I am.)

It’s my utter fascination with how people get here and where they go from here. I love it!

So I get a lot of hits from people who want purslane recipes. I also get a lot of hits from people interested in things like blueberries and caterpillars or zucchini overloads and a lot of bell pepper hits for some reason. But what I get at least as much as everything else people search for, and usually more, is people looking for recipes for weed. They want to know if they can eat it straight, cook it into food, how much they should use and how often they can do it. I also really got a kick out of someone wondering “How to say ‘hi’ with weed?” I’d honestly never considered such a possibility before. What a let-down I must have seemed.

Anyway — sorry folks. Even if I wanted some pot I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to go about getting it and I lived long enough in Pacific Beach to know the smell well enough to be fairly certain it wouldn’t taste good eaten straight. And other than waving pot at another person and yelling, “Hello!” I’m also not quite sure how one would say hi with weed.

But I’m fairly certain that by sharing my fascination and amusement with all of you will also lead to my being auto-linked to a bunch of pot-related sites again and gosh, that just cracks me up in ways I can’t even begin to explain. Maybe I am too easily amused. Who knows? But it sure is funny and I love checking those stats every day as a result.

Actual real and possibly profound things to come. Thank you for putting up with my babbling. (Oh who am I kidding? I haven’t achieved profound yet, so what could possibly make me think my next post will be any different??)

The Good, the Bad, and the Bunny June 26, 2008

There are a lot of pests I have no issue dispatching into the sweet hereafter when I find them gnawing on my food plants. Corn rootworm and snails come to mind immediately. This is the sort of fuzzy line I have regarding snails: If I find them on pavement after the rain, I’ll pick them up, all worried-like and bring them to whatever non-edible-to-us batch of plants I have handy and safely deliver them to a life of veggie-munching without a second thought. “Ooooh little snail!” I’ve been known to cry with my friend Jocey as we do shell-bearing-being triage. However, the same snail found eating my corn? Splat. ‘Nuf said.

I’ve also been having to do battle with lots of mice who have quite a taste for tomatoes, I find. Really, they’ll hop right over zucchini, lavender and peppers if a tomato has started to ripen, I find. I won’t go into details on my mouse war. Let’s say measures were taken and now that I have enough tomatoes to share and my plants are too thick for gnawing through, I’ve called truce.

But last week I discovered that a certain bunny person has taken a liking to my squash patch.

Really, I draw the line at bunny war. There are quite a few gardeners, I know, who would have no compunction about dispatching bunnies. And I was aware as I sprayed a little extra water into the squash with the thought that it was extra hot that day, that some of my fellow gardeners would not take kindly to my instincts if said bunny took a liking to some things in their patches too…but…really. A BUNNY!

My bunny is very polite. He works on one zucchini giant at a time rather than going around and rudely taking bites out of a bunch of them. And he leaves the baby squash alone. Perhaps he knows those are my favorite?

But essentially this is the truce bunny and I have come to: I don’t chase him off and he respectfully keeps his little paws on only one gargantuan zucchini at a time. I can live with this. I, who have been bemoaning the zucchini plethora for weeks now cannot justify fighting with a bunny who only wants one or two for his own.

Boy, I do hope he doesn’t have any bunny parties that the other gardeners notice because they might not be so accommodating.

Forgive the lull in posts. We spent a lovely weekend in LA in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave visiting family and generally being irresponsible and quite pleased with a few lazy days. Pictures to come as much has happily grown in my garden due to the heat.