little adventures

can you identify this bird?
maybe a turkey vulture? but that's a guess.

perhaps my favorite part of being john's mom is that even the most mundane happenings are an adventure for us. i have a new-found desire to appreciate the wonder and wildness of everyday life - to stop and look around me and to absorb everything.

this morning, three doors down from our house on our way out of the neighborhood, i saw a big odd bird in a yard. two years ago, i probably would have glanced at it and kept driving.

but with john in mind, i pulled to the side of the road and stopped the car. and we watched the bird in the yard for about two minutes. i asked john what color the bird was, what the bird was doing, if it was a big bird or a little bird. ("not BIG bird, mommy. big bird is yellow.")

there's nothing SO remarkable about a turkey vulture hanging out in my neighbor's yard. what IS remarkable is everything. all the things we take for granted every single day, that we drive by and hardly notice.

one day when he understands, i'll have to thank john for reminding me to stop and take pictures of silly birds when we see them. it makes life MUCH more fun!

Comments

i'm furberizing my baby

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean

on lullabies

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

home

annapolis rock 1988 thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions. yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year. i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child. 199

john's mom works

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