Aussies are VERY intelligent dogs...oops.

Please excuse the mess. But, you see, there was a large dog with  a small potty on it's head bumbling thru the kitchen.  Obviously Stark would never survive in the wild.  

Food on the fly..or is it flies on the food?

     The Boy got a multi-purpose tool. This is essentially a pocketknife with a flashlight and a corkscrew. It was some mail-order  subscription dingledadder that is supposed to be a keychain so it didn't seem too dangerous. It was supposed to go in my purse so what could be bad about letting him play with it? Well, let me tell you...

     First,  there is a Code of Behavior With Knives  that boys just pick up from the air like a radio frequency ( " tune in to KMAN for the sounds only guys can hear" ).  This starts with incessant sharpening of the knife.  Follows with boy showing off the sharpness of his knife to anyone who can shift eyes into the rough area of the knife. Next comes the first finger cut with the knife but this is tricky to discern. It sometimes comes with a muffled "OWCH DANG IT" and furtive sounds of a knife being hidden. Count ten then wait for boy to nonchalantly ask for a Band-Aid.  Ask boy if he has been playing with his knife and he will likely look indignant that a mother would imply such a childish thing. Knives are for real, manly work he may rebuff. This is how you know the Code is on.

     Second, odd toothpicks may start appearing in inappropriate places. Perhaps a straggly 4" L-shaped pick dangling from a baby sister's mouth. A sandwich held together with a bit of whittled hydrangea twig. Colored pencils reduced to lovely sawdust. Like we incinerated a peacock on the dining table. A wooden haircomb tine wasting away to a third the size of it's mates. Not whittled away. That would be wrong. But tested out, sort of.  Boy may become radically interested in oral hygiene and need to carve out something to remove a bit of chocolate milk from between his teeth. Hide your chopsticks. 

But this is all just practice. Knives are for real, manly work, you know.  The Boy sought long and hard for real work. He pried some bottles open. He cut open a really difficult bag of Frootie Tooties to save his sisters from starvation. I'm pretty sure that in his mind he was one of the Donner Party and that 75F degree weather was a deadly blizzard. He was stalking grizzlies. He was fending off Confederates. He was getting darned annoying. So I latched the screen door and told them to play outside unless someone was bleeding. And guess how long that took?

Roughly ten minutes later three children galloped up the porch steps. They banged flat into the locked door.  A girl had an injury. Fell down and got amnesia she claimed. They needed in stat! So Boy kicked into superhero mode...that hero must be The Tick or some other intellectually challenged character... yells " I'll save your happy behinds"...and he flicked out the tiny little blade on his knife...seriously, I have nail files that are longer and sharper...and he cut the screen to let them in. For amnesia.

So since I will be squishing the new screens back in with a cuticle pusher and an old butter knife there is no time to actually feed them. And since we are in the South there are already houseflies in the screenless kitchen that are big enough to carry off the Small Girl.   G*d bless Amy from FoodDoodles. She is the reason my children are alive today.

http://fooddoodles.com/2011/03/08/chocolate-fig-truffles


Plus, who can resist anything that is health-ish and looks like a truffle??  Seriously better than calling my therapist. 

Thats how we roll

Potato warning

No one is hungry at dinner. Ever. Everyone is ravenous two minutes after bedtime. I am steadfast and stern. Dire words about " dinner is at dinner time" bring much complaint. Then silence falls in the room. For about three breaths' time. The baby has to go pee. Who can argue with that? So we all migrate out and the boy dashes to the kitchen to nab a VERY large spoon full of mashed potatoes. I do not recall ever buying a spoon the size of an Army surlpus ladle. Perhaps he has borrowed an oar. I shake my head, wipe backsides, and wave girls back to bed. The boy trots behind. A bit to close. Eating potatoes. He is distracted by bacon bits and forgets to brake, thereby slamming into my back. With potatoes.

I recite the rule about not eating in the bedroom. He cunningly counters with the defense that potatoes have no crumbs and thus must not be a danger to eat in bed. This is brilliant. Until he drops a large blob of potatoes on my foot. He ninja vanishes with the offending potatoes, wipe foot and tuck the now whining girls into bed. Boy and silence return in seconds.

One and a half minutes is all it takes for sleep. Mr. Sandman has upgraded to chloroform these days. After thre minutes Baby A sits bolt upright screaming "POTTY" and adrenaline practically spurts from my nose in the race to get her there. And then I step in potatoes. Cream and butter make an excellent lubricant to glide me down the hallway like a sodden Busby Berkeley extra. Careening on walls, bumping into the bathroom door. Screaming girl runs the wrong way to pee in the dining room. I wipe pee with my last good towel then follow the white footed trail back to clean potatoes.

I see it all now, Spouse sadly telling how his wife died in a potato accident. The shame. 

Perfumes of the day

 Books will always be superior to Kindle just because of the smell. I am totally trying to make the house smell fresher just by filling it up with books. Normally we smell like the average medieval alchemist's hovel. Our attempts at making gold are about as successful, too.

But there is another, mysterious smell in our neighborhood to be tracked. Maybe butterfly bush or blooming kudzu, its flowery and overwhelming an idiosyncratic to the South. Smells like a lovestruck grandma who has gussied up for a date. I love it! 

Fungus chasing, because mushrooms run slowly

Sequoyah Hills is a Fungus Fun Land thanks to abundant pine mulch on the running trail. Really, fungi was EVERYWHERE , creeping amongst the poor unwary residents. We cut an unstealthy path, diving like excited seagulls onto interestingly shaped shrooms and squawking at the abundance of low slimey gooze.

We surmised that fungi prefer acid environs. These got plenty of sun so darkness requirements for shrooms is a myth. They have nothing much to root them down so we hypo that they can get nutrients from the whole surface since they seem to thrive even when sideways lying down. Or perhaps they have some kind of super efficient root that works when barely touching dirt.

 Fungus hunting is hot work so we took a break at the Talahi Fountain. Only to find that it had been BUBBLED by vandals! AWK!

 A short dance exhibition.

Then back to the hunt. Pretty sure the neighborhood watch has labelled us as "suspicious activities". 

Back to school, er...wait, we never left.

The sibs wanted to go to a splash pad for some R&R. This is where we went;

 Multi levels of splashing fun with natural filtration, free parking, and bonus nature walks. On the downside, the poison ivy was abundant. On the up, it was an opportunity for the sibs to learn to identify jewelweed, the kryptonite of urushiol itch.

 Jewel weed conveniently grows near ivy. One might say it grows like a weed. Bwahaha.
We got a demonstration on how fairies wash their hair. Fairy hygiene is a bit lax.  This led to a lesson about water purity and the evidences of clean water. Tiny crayfish are a good sign. See this little guy? Really, there is one there.

 Fresh water mussel shells, half gnawed, indicate both good water and an abundance of raccoons.

 Mermaids love mountain streams.

 A wild honeybee visited, washing her face and legs. Funny about bees, they respond to human conversation as though they understand.  We all had a little chat with her and she turned politely to each speaker. She was a very attentive listener.

 Plenty of wild cherries to lead into winter

 All Heal looks like beehives with corsages. It makes a tea for pleurisy or after-winter tonic but it tastes as horrible as echinacea. Blah.
Then we stopped to check out an empty farmhouse in hopes of realtor signage or some indication that it may be buyable or leasable. Wouldn't this make a great place to have a....something????? The house is victim to bad remuddling but the barn it top notch!