Quotidian: daily, usual or customary;
everyday; ordinary; commonplace
the kids dug up the bottles in our field and picked the tulips from the abandoned lot across the road (which they’re not allowed to do but did anyway)
springtime supper: biscuits, sausage-cheese sauce, asparagus, and boiled eggs (cooking tip: to make a cheese sauce even cheesier, whisk a generous lump of cream cheese into the sauce before adding the other cheeses, yum)
waiting for Grandmommy and Grandaddy
after Grandmommy and Grandaddy drove on by without stopping: it was the plan but apparently my little boy was the only one who didn’t know it
studying a food web after breakfast with their biologist Grandfather: my parents found a bunch of high school textbooks for me to use (history, literature, science, algebra)—so far we’ve just started the biology
a pedicure from Grandmommy
sometimes my kitchen help looks a little odd
after coloring a map of the United States (one of her assignments), she went up to her room and cut the shape of our country out of some fabric, backed it, and wrote some of the states on it with marker
this is what our evening read-aloud time looks like: me reading out loud while all the kids (except for my son since he’s the only literate one) pore over their own “reading” material
a friend from church asked me to run some of his parched corn through my grain mill and then he brought me a loaf of mush he made with it—both my husband and I love it, the kids not so much
Watching the horses: the scene looks peaceful and romantic, but look again. The child in the middle is getting ready to discreetly pinch the boy.
Who says each kid needs their own bike? That’s a myth.
(They’ve since figured out how to fit all four kids on one bike.)
After watching the four deer that were in our field (a very unusual occurrence) jump over the fence and thinking the one had lost his tail on the fence, my daughter went up to retrieve it—but it was just a handful of fur. (And then, almost as soon as she got back to the house, we saw eight more deer up there and the kids went wild.)
making a pot of “soup”
Our yard is full of thistles. Each spring I dig them up by the wheelbarrow (or orange, plastic sled) load. It’s an exercise in futility since we’re surrounded by fields of thistles, but I do it anyway.
the potatoes are planted
bales of straw ready for the garden
skywalking from shed roof to straw bale
This same time, years previous: my excuse
