Sometimes, It's Love

Some writers ring all the bells. I love Ta-Nehisi Coates in general. Today I'm reading this article, though, and it reminds me that of all the columnists I read (a lot, thanks to The Atlantic link to my Feedly) he's the one whose sentences jump off the page:

All kinds of crazy are not equal, and in America, racist crazy has a special history worthy of highlighting.

 Yep. Yeppers. Yeppity Yep Yep. 

 

Blech

I don't know much about allergies. But this can't be good. Perhaps it explains my mild headache or Charles' massive one.

Spring: wonderful to look at, unpleasant to inhale.

The Legos. My God...the Legos.

OK, so there aren't actually photos to do justice to the Lego stack. But let me say this: Iain has - at six - embraced the idea of building his own Lego sets.

This is not to say that Mom and Dad get to relax. Oh, no. We must answer a constant barrage of questions ("What's your favorite part of Frozen?" "What's your favorite character in Frozen?" "What's your favorite part of The Nut Job?") and come over every 3.5 minutes to find a "lost" piece. Occasionally the pieces are actually lost.

But he does the rest. And he's built 2-5 sets each day since last Sunday. Today is Friday. You do the math on that.

Yay!

I finally found a pot for the big jade. It's been in a plastic pot since last summer - a cracked plastic pot for at least the last 4 months. I am a bad plant mommy.

But last weekend Iain's Nana joined me on a pot search and there it was: rounded, squat, a pretty aqua color...perfect.

Yay!

Almost Six

Iain entertained his friends today. Donuts instead of cake, platters of strawberries and clementines for snacking, and overall a very bouncy vibe.

Photos - later - of the unbelievable stack of Legos he received. Un. Believable.

Photos and Text Have Nothing To Do With One Another

 The Scripps Aquarium contains fish. No lie.

It's been a craft morning around here. All week, my throat hurt. Sharply, dully, in that weird crackling sort of way - it hurt all week.  Tea, lozenges, making faces all failed to help. Last night I broke down and embraced the Old School. I gargled with hot salt water. It was, as Iain would have said four years ago, "Lexsuxting."

 The bay between La Jolla and UCSD. 

But this morning my throat felt better. Still a little crackly at times, but better. So I took myself off to Michael's for a bit of shopping.

 Playing with the water flow toy at the Aquarium. Note the Snoopy sticker from his visit to the dentist.

Next weekend Iain celebrates his sixth birthday. We need gift bags for his guests. Last year I learned (too late) that a craft store is the mecca of gift-bag stuff. So off I went. On a Saturday morning.

But, in the end, it was fine. I found bags, tissue paper, swirly straws, colored pencils, decorative notepads, festive sequins and confetti, stickers, and little tubes of glitter. Yes, I am giving away glitter. Because parenting is about sharing the pain. 

Posing inside the mouth of a great white shark: priceless. 

Once home, I arranged my mis en place, unfolded 30 bags and filled them up. Task #1 for the birthday party: done. Next stop: order 5 dozen donuts.

After that, my craft glands went into overdrive. Iain's longest-standing teacher - the woman who supervises his extended day program - will leave at the end of this year. Iain would have moved into a different division of his school, anyway. So we need to say goodbye. Together, we made her a long bead necklace.

Then Iain used leftover glitter and sequins to make a thank-you note for a gift he received last week. It says, "I like tools." Effusive, I know.

And now, sparkling with glitter, no doubt with beads hidden in the folds of my jeans, I'm considering what to do next. Quilting? Perhaps.

Fun with Twitter

So I looked for my name on Twitter. I was feeling a little paranoid.

Reading tweets obviously about someone else (who shares my name) turned out to be amusing.

Apparently, on Twitter, I teach ecology. I rap. I have a photo collection of bad prom dresses. I did all these things in 2012.