Busy Busy

Have I been off my posting schedule! Sorry about that. We have had lots of nice things happening, so really, no excuse but busy for me.

Here in the PNW we are in that period of completely disjointed spring weather, where a day starts out glorious and leads to a torrential downpour, followed by brilliant sunshine, followed by gray foreboding, followed by hail, followed by sun, followed by drizzle. This is normal, and boring (yes, it is boring to talk about the weather, I know!), but I bring it up because its disorienting effect is amplified by my work situation, where I work for hours ensconced in my little interior office/cave, and then go to the kitchen to get some water, and look out over the lake. Visit 1, lake is blue, but it's dark where we are. Visit 2, lake is dark gray, but it's sunny where we are. Visit 3, it's pouring, lake is misty and vague, and so on.

This weather also makes it more or less impossible to dress appropriately, or more importantly, to dress one's children appropriately. The consolation is that at some point and maybe multiple points during the day, whatever you're wearing will be exactly right. As my friend likes to say, broken clock = right twice a day!

Weather grousing aside, hooray that spring is upon us, bringing with it the promise of longer days and more motivation and planting things outside and bike rides and the whole shebang. This past weekend, I went to visit my girlfriend in Boise. It was supposed to be a Girls' Weekend in the grand tradition, but it turned into kind of a Mom Plus One weekend when her family needed her back urgently. The lesson of course is that Girls' Weekends work better when enforced by distance, and also, that they are super trumpable, and appropriately so. While I was gone, though, there was some Dad/Daughter gardening going on, which is worth a picture:


This reassures me that they did not just watch movies the whole time I was gone, though, who am I to complain either way?

Going back in time a bit, here we are at the beach walk put on by our church a couple of weeks ago:

There was some kind of extremely low tide condition, and to celebrate Earth Day, a couple of our church members who are certified beach naturalists or some such thing invited everyone to bring a picnic to this lovely beach park in West Seattle and get to know some tidal creatures. At church before we left, there was a puppet show to help teach the kids how to handle (or mostly, to not handle) the creatures. This was terrific for me, as I was teaching Sunday school, and it was truncated for the puppet show. Woo!


We saw sea stars (WA has some rad purple sea stars, as you know), anemones, which is fun to try to get Muriel to say, fish, crabs, and the amusing telltale squirts of underground clams.

Naomi was also very focused on creating a collection- she started with white rocks but kind of went from there. The naturalist told us that this was a protected beach park- you can't remove anything. So Naomi arranged her collection and left it on a drift log.


And Muriel thought it was even funnier to do the same thing with our shades.


OK, and one more thing before I forget. I read an article yesterday on a parenting blog I visit once in a while (here's the article) that really spoke to me, about how being overly busy really does make you unhappy if there is no room in your busy for activities of play or flow (flow being, I think, a kind of grown up play). How's this for a quote:

"Busy-ness does not make us happy. Muller reminds us that the Chinese symbol for busy is composed of two characters: heart and killing."

Being too busy does make me unhappier. But the happy understanding I got from this article is that even though being busy is kind of unavoidable, if I make time for play here and there, the busy-ness doesn't have to prevent the happiness. Though it helps to know how to achieve the flow...