Summer Holidays

Ah, the joys of summer.
The backyard fun, the barbeques, the sunshine and bike-rides... and my adventures in "gardening"

The raspberries are delicious; this week I have eight blueberry plants and three bag balm flowers to settle. The grapes are probably going to be small and not so delicious again this year, due to our lack of attention. The strawberry patch is just about done, and once it is they will be fruitful and multiply, all for the joy of my children!

My favorite things, the tree's, are looking quite majestic again this year - they need (and get) very little from me... My baby corkscrew willow has grown taller than I, which has me excited to watch it shoot higher this season. I have a tiny azalea, a cast-off gift from a woman dying of cancer early in 2008, which made it through its first official winter (and one that, I'm quite sure, it should have died through!) Now for a second summer, and I have to be highly dedicated to the watering of this baby... and the mulching... thankful it is very small.

On to the rest of summer then....My work is good, simple, easy, it is purposeful and gives me a grid to settle my time around. Being a working mom is not so easy, simple, or settled. Having never done this before, I feel like an insane lunatic. Add to that the joys of tween-dom, and the sad and sorry state of affairs on my social calendar, and the working mom part of me is a wreck! It will pass, though... And one day I will look back on this, like everything else, and say, hmm. ah, well, it was as it was!

I'm hardly cooking a thing; if I do cook its in batches of two and we eat leftovers of the extra. We are eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches - so I'm not exactly in bikini form (that too, was lost in jr high, like my mind!!) My lovely ovens have a mind of their own now, and my joys of baking are screeching to a halt over the angst of oven temperatures. Can't win it all, now can we? Perhaps in the fall the oven temp gauges will straighten out like the burner did so well, and I will be able to bake again. Or not... tis a season of life for everything...

As we track through the book of Ecclesiastes this summer at church, I make startling little revelations that I make note of... things like the fact that God has appointed a time for everything, and those things will take place whether we accept the hand of God in them or not. It is comforting and freeing to be able to say "I believe in God and His plan" - to give Him the glory and the heartache, rather than try to hold onto it all myself and control it and own it and figure it out. As if I'm very good at letting it all go anyway, but its a novel idea in it's own right! And it's a true idea, which helps me get to it, eventually...

I'm writing ten-thousand words a day on the pages in my mind, and five words a day in real ink. That too, is a summer holiday reality. It's not for lack of want, but lack of disciplined attention.

Straight on to September, then...