Corn maze looked a little more like a construction zone maze.
Best friends picking their pumpkins, the one in the foreground will be our jack ‘o lantern.
We’re holdin’ hands!
Two giggling running girls
Spooky, especially in the breeze
We’re going’ on a hay wide! Woohooo!
I have a thing about old tractors. I really do.
Dis hay wide is so much fun!
October
I am up before dawn to send one
son off to middle school.
The first crept out the door
to high school in the dark.
This one talks too much,
too much enthusiasm before
I have poured my coffee.
With a reminder, he stops, briefly,
Oh, right.
He complies with order to brush his teeth.
Then he slams the front door,
no goodbye.
I pull back the curtains
to pink golden light
yawning the dawn
upon burnished beech leaves.
The tree glows brighter, more golden.
My honey creaks down the stairs
slowly, a two hundred pound cat
reluctantly stalks the day.
He rumbles,
She doesn’t want me to wake her,
she only wants mommy today.
She is usually daddy’s girl.
When he is home from work,
he is her heart.
But for the past day,
she has been stuck to me:
a monkey baby, koala,
a litter of opossum grown too big
for marsupial carry.
She clings, she cuddles, she coos
I yuv you, mommy.
I ascend, I go in.
She smiles sleepily,
a smile that says, I won.
And with barely a glance,
she rises, scoots right by me.
I open her curtains,
and the beech tree glows deeper.
The dawn is almost complete. .
Look, isn’t the yellow tree beautiful
in the sunrise?
Her tip-tip sleepy steps change
direction on the carpet.
She slips in front of me and presses
her forehead to the window.
She sucks her fingers rhythmically.
With a nod against the glass,
she agrees.
This is the moment.
This is how we love.
I hope she remembers.
I walked outside this morning and what did I see?
Holly berries,
happy yellow leaves, shadow dappled,
blue sky peeking through,
and a rose to share with you.
I love morning light this time of year.
This morning I intended to edit while Toots went out with Grandma.
I woke up still having trouble from an allergy attack I had a couple of weeks ago (newly painted bathroom cabinet, latex allergy, didn’t air it out enough before we hung it back up), and took yet another couple of spritzes of albuterol. Probably still troubling me due to sleep deprivation from the past four nights, because Lucy has been barking and escaping from her crate. She’s going through a lonely phase and wants to sleep with us. We need to break her of this. She goes through this periodically, and we have to re-crate train her.
The boys got off to school without a hitch. I had my coffee.
Then I heard Toots scream from downstairs as I got in the shower. I figured Honey and Grandma were down there with her and whatever it was, they could handle it.
She was still crying when I got out of the shower. And after I got dressed.
When I came downstairs I got the story of her palm meeting the hot toaster. I have been through this with Mr. Cynic and Captain Comic at around the same age involving stove burners and campfires, so I wasn’t too worried. My kids like to learn the hard way. Honey had already gotten her to laugh a couple of times by tickling her wounds with a piece of the aloe plant. But she was still hurting and upset.
I finally got a look at them, and it was a hard call until I mentioned calling the pediatrician, and then she was ready to go to the doctor wight now!
But it was another hour before her appointment during which, she finally calmed down.
And then she didn’t want to go. So I bribed her with a blueberry muffin at a cafe if she would go nicely.
We walked out the door to 20 degree colder weather than yesterday and a hardy breeze, and she didn’t want to wear her jacket, so I had it in my hand, as the locked door clicked into place, and I realized my keys were not hooked to my purse.
Eventually she did put her jacket on. In the meantime I tried calling Honey, and he didn’t answer his cell, so I called his office, and his manager got on the line to tell me he was up the road in Williamsburg on a business errand. He eventually got him on his cell. Honey was just moments from home when he called me back as I was on the phone with the pediatrician’s office to let them know what was going on.
But by that time, we had let our runner dog out of the fence in an attempt to break in through the garage doggie door that I could only squeeze my head and one shoulder through. I had Toots crawl through and climb up on a pile of firewood to unlock the deadbolt, thinking the whole time I would be bringing her to the pediatrician with more wounds from this, like a cracked noggin on the concrete floor. She managed to jiggle the lock, but couldn’t turn it all the way to click open.
Toots started to get tired of the wind in her face and hair after we gave up that failed solution. So we got in Bertha, the van. Lucy was still running all over the neighborhood and marking everyone’s yards. I think she tired of her escapades, and when I called her from the van, she came bolting into it and joined us.
Then Honey drove up, unlocked the front door, I dropped the dog in the house, grabbed my keys, and we made it to the appointment only a few minutes late, but we still had to wait for the doctor, because, and this is why we like him, he is very thorough with each patient and lots of fun, too, so all of his appointments run long.
She was good for him, and he joked about not giving Honey and Grandma too hard a time about the incident. I assured him I only brought them up becasue I wasn’t there to witness how it actually happened. Then Toots was ready to go out for a blueberry muffin.
We drove to the closest cafe, Aroma’s in City Center, Newport News, and they were out of blueberry, but they had cranberry nut, with walnuts, so we split one and sat at a table where we could see the fountains.
The wind was kicking the water spray to the side of the spouts and with the bright October sun, we saw rainbows in the mist.
Even though it was a rough start to the day, spending time in a cafe with peppermint tea and my Toots happily looking for rainbows was a great way to spend some of it, once we were assured she wasn’t hurt too badly and we had a prescription for burn cream in hand.
Hi folks!
I am currently moving to WordPress from Blogger due to technical difficulties.
If you’d like to wander around my previous address to see what is likely to turn up here, here you go: http://www.musingsinmayhem.blogspot.com/
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for waiting kindly while I figure out this new set up!
In the meantime, moments I loved from this weekend with Captain Comic and Toots:
Please come see the mayhem continue there, and be patient with the appearance and set up while I figure out the new place.
https://musingsinmayhem.wordpress.com
Thanks for your continued readership, and I still love to see your comments!
I am thinking of people who need to be thought of.
I am appreciating the beauty in tiny moments, but I can’t upload the pictures from this morning’s drive to preschool. In fact, I lost my header photo and can’t seem to retrieve it.
I wanted to do more edits, had an awesome session of it yesterday and finally completed for the thousandth time the emotionally relevant chapter that is twice as long as the rest of the chapters, but I finally accepted that it was okay, because a middle reader can handle one 10 page chapter in a book of 35 chapters that are 3-5 pages each. But see people statement re: doing more edits today, but maybe I still can. And there is laundry, of course.
I wanted to go to a retreat this weekend, but it isn’t in the cards. I am sending Mr. Cynic, and he is cool with that.
It’s a gorgeous day, the library book I was waiting for was finally in yesterday, and I checked it out. I feel like going outside to watch the blue jays and cardinals flit between the changing trees, listen to the wind rustle them, too, and maybe, just maybe read for half an hour uninterrupted, outside, where there is beauty to be found everywhere, if you just look.
That last option is sounding the most appealing at the moment….
And then I will go pick up Toots, and the mayhem will resume. Captain Comic is having a rough first quarter of the school year again, and Mr. Cynic still needs to pack for the weekend and I am not sure when his ride is coming for him.
But yes, tra la la – opting for some time in the warm autumn breeze and light and colors.
I’ve been pretty quiet over here in the past few weeks under the guise of focusing on the final few laps of this draft of my manuscript. Really, a lot of mayhem has been going on in my home and outside of it that has prevented as much concentration as I would like, but it is nearing the finish line.
Promise. So if I stay quiet here and around the blogosphere in general, that’s my excuse.
I’m sticking to it.
Thanks for your patience, adorable pics and quotables from my family, etc to resume in the near future.
musings in mayhem 
