Monday, October 11, 2010

A good mommy day

I had a great mom day today. And after the weekend we had, I needed it.
I won't go into the gory details of what made our weekend so particularly awful. Let's just say it involved a husband recovering from surgery, a little boy with an ear infection, a little girl waking at all hours and up for the day long before the sun and a mommy with a severe, and as yet undiagnosed infection in her upper jaw/lower sinus as well as a very adverse reaction to vicodin. And very little sleep.
Today I was feeling much more like myself, and managed to get a lot done this morning to help the house recover from my illness. Because if you're a mom, you know how insane the house gets when you're out of commission. It's ridiculous.
This afternoon I took the kids on a nature walk. There's a trail through a rather narrow greenbelt across the street from our house. It isn't exactly the deep woods, but it's close and offers enough in the way of pinecones, leaves and sticks that the boys like it. The boys carried plastic bags to load their treasures, and I carried the Bean (aka my daughter) on my back. We wandered around, looked at things on the ground and looked up to see where they might have come from. We picked up leaves and examined their color. We found sticks with moss, and found trees with more moss growing on the trunks. We found tiny mushrooms, and the boys got a lesson in never, ever eat anything you find growing on the ground in the woods. We saw a tree that had fallen, only to sprout a new trunk growing straight up out of the bent part. We talked about evergreens and deciduous trees and David was delighted to learn a new fact to amaze grown ups with.

We got home and they proudly showed their finds to Daddy, who was working from home. Then they drew pictures, telling the story of their day.


David drew the half fallen tree that looked "like a rainbow," ferns and rocks on the ground, and two little figures with bags full of leaves and branches in their hands.



Grayson's was a little more abstract, but he is three. He told us all about what his scribbles meant, so the intent was there.



Ella wandered around the dining room playing with her sippy cup and a pan lid, occassionally peeking up over the table to see what her brothers were doing.



It was a totally random idea, and it went so well, it made me feel a little like supermom.

Then after dinner, the boys wandered outside as I made orange popcorn balls. They noticed something in the sky, so we went out to investigate and after conferring with my astronomy expert (aka, my mom), we think it's Jupiter. So we talked about the differences between stars and planets, and why they look the same in the sky. Then we looked up pictures of Jupiter, and various other planets and astronomical things on the Internet. I think David may be developing a new fascination with space and astronomy, but we'll see. The kid loves to learn how things work and why - he's a little scientist already.

All in all, a good mommy day. Goodness knows on this crazy journey, they aren't always this way. But this one certainly made up for the awful weekend, so I'll take it!

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