The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
You hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.
Psalm 15:5-6
There is a lot going on in the world; there is a lot going on close to home. But sometimes I look around at my life and think, “How lucky am I?” I look at my husband, at my girls, at the beautiful place I live, and I’m just so, so thankful.
I live the way a person does who has ceased to dread each day’s ration of time. I live what can be called a normal life only if you’ve always expected to live such a way. If you think you have the right. Work. Love. Good. A bedroom sheltered by a pine tree.
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
We’re having a very rainy spring here on the Coast and it’s been getting to me a bit. But on Friday the forecast shifted and the day ended up being beautiful. Which was great timing because Pearl’s class was on a field trip at a farm. She had such a fun day – highlights included riding a pony and visiting an area called “Bunny Land”!
On that same day, I had a long-awaited appointment for Rose (some lingering symptoms from our bout of COVID in January that our doctor thankfully thinks can be dealt with) and we made a date of it. We had lunch together at a local diner and visited a playground and played so many rounds of 20 Questions.
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to join my sister-in-law at her church in the city for a Women’s Conference. Still feels kind of surreal to be doing such things again but I’m so glad I got to go.
Took the girls for their annual eye check-ups (by annual I mean the first since pre-pandemic days). For pre-school age kids, they show a series of black and white images rather than letters. Which makes sense but some of those images seem open to interpretation and when an old-fashioned style rotary phone appeared on the screen, I began to worry that Rose was going to fail simply because she’d never seen one before. Also because she tends to mix up eagles and seagulls and seems to think sardines are the same as salmon. (There was a little video with a grizzly fishing in a stream.) But fortunately, both girls have good eyesight and healthy eyes.
Peter took the girls hiking on the weekend while I worked. He and Pearl have big summer plans, so they are doing some practise hikes. I love when those three pick me up from work, the sound of our car at the back entrance, their smiles as I come out.
Happy weekend, friends!
Karissa Reads Books 
Ha, it does seem odd to show kids a rotary phone! What age is your optician? 😉
I would guess younger than me, so probably early 30s? It’s an office shared by several opticians so I don’t think she personally picked out the pictures. But it still seems like a weird choice for something geared toward small children!
When I was a student nurse on placement, I helped with the toddler assessments that health visitors do to check on developmental milestones. The team I was working with were all in their late fifties, and this was about twelve years ago. One of them made an offhanded comment to me that two-year-olds didn’t seem to have as much vocabulary as they used to, but one of the ways they tested vocab was showing them a peg puzzle and seeing what they could name – which included a rotary phone, a teacup (not a mug), and something else that I can’t remember (maybe a steam train?). When I got my smartphone out of my pocket, the toddlers all recognised it! I think they updated their methods after that.
That’s a good reminder that these types of programs need to make sure they’re testing in an accessible way. I feel like here they could easily update it to a smart phone and still keep it as a simple black-and-white image like the rest. There was also an image that I would have called a tree but Rose said it was an umbrella so I think overall their images could use some tweaking!
I’m impressed that your pre-school aged children can tell the difference between different types of birds and fish 🙂 Not sure that my own adult children can.
They are pretty good at knowing the birds we see regularly around here. My husband teaches in a nature program so he is much better than me at knowing that kind of thing and telling them. The only fish I would expect them to know would be salmon so I was surprised when Rose called them sardines instead (which do not live around here!)
In that case, your children knowing their birds makes sense. In our house, our children could identify hotrods and various car makes, models and years from a young age!
I wonder if your little one found out about sardines from a book? I seem to remember them being eaten in midnight feasts in Enid Blyton’s books.
I don’t think they’ve ever eaten sardines so perhaps from a book. We haven’t read any Blyton yet but I feel like maybe Roald Dahl mentions them…
My oldest is suddenly interested in cars and I know nothing beyond the very basics. She’s starting to identify different models and she’s already better at it than me! Did your kids get that from you?
Roald Dahl does mention sardines frequently in The Twits! They get into people’s beards and become stinky, if I remember correctly!
He Who Eats All of Our Leftovers is the car-lover in our house. It would be impossible to be around him for long without absorbing some car knowledge 🙂
I hope all was okay with the doctor’s appointment to address COVID issues. That’s got to be so scary, and you are doing an amazing job as mom! It’s been very rainy and windy and chilly in Indiana, too. I’m aching for things to get warmer, but I’m trying to slow down and appreciate the gradual chance of seasons. In many summers past, we simply race through spring and it feels like the sky is on fire it’s so hot. The rain has been good for the plants, that I can see.
Thankfully her symptoms are relatively mild, she just hasn’t been able to shake them. Our doctor thinks we should be able to deal with it in a few weeks with some inhalers though so that’s promising. It’s hard to know if this would have happened regardless but Rose is also the only one of us with lingering issues and the only one who didn’t have any form of vaccine protection in January.
All the rain and cloudy weather here has made me pretty unmotivated to do anything in the garden and it’s starting to look pretty scrappy out there. I just got a bunch of veggie starters though (Pearl’s school sell them as a fundraiser) so I need to get to work soon!
That is so cute that the school sells them at a fundraiser. I wish there were more lessons about food production in public schools. Also, how to calculate interest. That would have been helpful.
I would love that! That would have been so useful. I don’t know how much they really do that kind of stuff in schools even now. But the school does have a little farm nearby that they get to spend time at.