Mother's Day Eve

Oh the sweet joys of being a Mom. 

At first I chuckled at Ben's answer to "I love my mom because..." but it reminded me of this proverb:

A Zen Teacher saw five of his students return from the market, riding their bicycles. When they had dismounted, the teacher asked the students,
"Why are you riding your bicycles?"
The first student replied, "The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!"
The teacher praised the student, saying, "You are a smart boy. When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over, as I do."
The second student replied, "I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path."
The teacher commended the student, "Your eyes are open and you see the world."
The third student replied, "When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant, nam myoho renge kyo."
The teacher gave praise to the third student, "Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel."
The fourth student answered, "Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all beings."
The teacher was pleased and said, "You are riding on the golden path of non-harming."
The fifth student replied, "I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle."
The teacher went and sat at the feet of the fifth student, and said, "I am your disciple."

Its pretty special when put into that perspective. That a 6yr old loves for the sake of loving. Ben is a sweet kid. He picks me a flower every single time he is on a walk. Any time there is a flower. It is absolutely adorable.

He is almost 6 now... 6! That means 6 years of mom-ing + those 9 months of not getting to drink any gin, which is sort of like mom-ing. That's hard to wrap my head around (the 6 years part...). A fair number of friends have had kids in the past year or two. Now and then I will see a post about them struggling with the breakdowns and tantrums (on both ends) that comes with having to raise a plant. Dang that part was hard. The diapers, the screaming, the barfing, the screaming... and those funny-looking plants don't even give much back. I mean it. You can tell yourself all you want that those little giggling moments make it all worth it, until you realize the plant is giggling because it just shat itself and you need to get up and go change that in the next 10 minutes.

As for his comment about my favorite thing to do... "rest ... ride bikes" ...he sure nailed it.

Tis the Season in Tex-as

Howdy Y'all,

Uuum, well... we went to a delightful little holiday lights/Christmas in the Park thing tonight and, it really was a wonderful time. Especially since it was free!

The best part was probably the hayrack ride, but to Ben the best part was the PILE OF SNOW that they brought in (presumably from somewhere cold. Probably Alaska).

Unfortunately for me, both camera batteries were dead/dying and there was not enough time to get it adjusted for taking decent pictures. Fortunately for us this happens AGAIN next weekend! We will for sure be back! Free cookies and hot cocoa afterall. Now to just convince Jared to bake something for the baking contest!

Cup Cakes errrr frosting

We enjoy mixing it up in how we spend our evenings.

Sometimes it is silly stuff like making milk blue, but other times it is delicious stuff like making/coloring frosting for cupcakes!

True story is that we were playing Candy Land and I had drawn the cupcake (for the 324 time. I always get the @#$!ing cupcake). Ben saw it and declared that he wanted to make cupcakes. I thought: who wouldn't!? So we made cupcakes and frosting.

I walked in at one point and snapped this shot. I immediately walked out. They were clearly sneaking something and not telling me about it.

Here is Ben's lesson in frosting:

Mix it gently as to not make a mess.

Dip Finger. Fall in love.

Question the purpose of the whole cupcake part anyway. Next time I am fairly certain he will just ask to make cupcakes.

Which reminds me of a delightful book we have called If you give a cat a cupcake.

It is a great story and closely parallels what happens when you give a 2yr old a cupcake.

Blue Milk

Sometimes... The little things are what make parenting worth it all.

Jared always pesters Ben, who regularly asks for "fresh milk." In Jared's ...Jaredness, he questions Ben's request with return questions such as "you want... red milk?" "you want... yellow milk?" "you want... blue milk?" To which Ben always replies "noooo daaaaddyyyyy" with a snicker.

Ben, being the growing individual that he is, has caught on though. And finally told Jared "Yes!" one of these times. Being the consistent parent that Jared is...... he made Ben blue milk.

Thanksgivin'

Oooh Texas. You have isolated us, but we shall not be held down! We shall still cook delicious meals and give thanks for ...stuff.

We still made ourselves some sweet taters.

And Jared picked up a wee little chicken to wrap up in bacon and to stuff with stuffing. Whoah was that good.

Even Ben enjoyed a bit of it, as did Homer who is our friend Betsy's new little puppy. Oh yes, Texas, we even managed to not celebrate alone! No no! We grabbed someone else who was far from family! Thanks again for joining us, Betsy!

We even made some apple piiie. Yum.

So aside from not having family around, it wound up being a pretty lovely little, normal thanksgiving. We even went for a walk after dinner, but before pie, over to the park!

One of the strangest things was that it was still warm. 60 degrees on Thanksgiving? That will throw these Iowa folk for a loop!

What was even More strange was the Thanksgiving potluck that happened at work. Fortunate for me, none of them know about this little space of internet that I occupy, so I feel that I can share. It wasn't strange in a "bad" way anyway though, just in a "ahhh, people are just people." sort of way.

You see, in the administrative offices, they are well a bunch of prudes. Not all, but some. One in particular. We'll call her...Snude. Just for the hell of it. She is the lady who, no matter what you say, she can one-up it... even when it really isn't better. And this is about Everything. Well I had the pleasure of sitting in her vicinity during the potluck and somehow, one of the ladies started telling the story about beating the crap out of her ex-husband's girlfriend outside of wal mart or something and going to jail for it. Snude proceeds to jump in and tell a similar story involving one of her [4] ex-husbands. She of course did not get arrested for it though, but claimed she probably should have.

My boss (not in the admin services and not a prude) turns and asks one of my other co-workers if she had ever been to jail. "no!" She didn't ask me. Come to think of it, she didn't ask herself either!! I have never been in jail. Can you imagine if there would have been alcohol involved at this potluck?!?!

Later Snude gave me a dirty look for sharing that Jared did not know my middle name when we bought our Iowa house together.

It really felt like family. I enjoyed it.

I like my job. I like Thanksgiving, too.

Thanks.

Twinkle Twinkle

We like daycare.
Not just because it gives us a few hours in our day to not have to be playing trains or dinosaurs, but also because Ben gets to do all sorts of new things with new people. We believe it is good for him.
Apparently, they sing quite a few songs at daycare. One day when we picked Ben up, continued singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star over and over again. He would sometimes switch straight into singing the alphabet... probably on accident. They used to do songs at his other daycare too. We knew because he would do the motions to things like The Wheels on the Bus before we ever showed them to him.


So anyway. I'm not sure there was too much more of a point to this, but here is Ben helping me sing along. :)

Early Morning drizzle

This morning, while walking into work after parking my bicycle, I saw a man who looked as though he could be Roger Baer's brother.


Roger, on the right.

And he was riding a bicycle like this:


He was wearing a white dress shirt and dark dress pants. Probably a librarian? (he was parking at the library...). It had rained this morning, so the roads were still drying out. Since it isn't particularly cold here (70 degrees this morning at 8am) I figure the next best excuse someone could make to not ride would be... rain!

And it gave me hope for the world for some reason.

That perhaps there are more Rogers in the world and that perhaps everyone really could commute to school. I wish I would have gone and talked to that man. Ah well, I'm sure i'll see him around. There are only so many roger baer-esk men riding bikes to campus and parking at the library at 8am. :)