living like it's sunday

a ball of Trixie

Oh, Sunday. I love you so. My kids overheard me saying that I'm working on time-bending, (they love the allusion to their favorite show, Avatar) and they thought that was so funny, but really - Sundays do just that.  The time stretches like silly-putty, around the naps, the lazy meals, the game after game after game, the pajamas in the afternoon, the endless crafting...And there is so much learning I hear going on.  Listening to d'Aulaires' Greek Myths as they carefully color intricately drawn animals, Ani and a neighbor friend discuss the stories that are familiar, and wonder together what the sirens really were, and is the Black Sea a real place?  "Did they just say GIANT HORSE? I love this story, I've heard it before!"

condensation...it's getting cold!

Playing cards with Eliza and Dan, we look at the paintings on each card (an awesome deck of "Art Cards" from my sister) and talk about pointillism; Boucher's Diana leads to talking about the Roman myth, which Eliza quickly recognizes as the Greek myth of Artemis.  Eliza sees The Little Gleaner by Renoir and remembers a painting hanging in the music library on campus, of the girls playing the piano, also by Renoir. To make it even more fun, we play our game using whatever French words we can come up with and heck, if you can't remember the word, just say it with your best French accent...

After Bananagrams, where Eliza's first word was cataract, we talked about what cataracts are and looked at lode versus load.  Dan spent three-plus hours reading the seventh Harry Potter to Eliza, snuggled up in a swath of sunlight reaching our bed, as it's just gotten cold enough where the air in her northside bedroom produced great puffs of steam as he made his way through the dialogue. 

Ani and her friend continued to make art and listen to myths, figuring out how to work together on clothespin people and their vehicles,  pausing to mimic Kathleen Turner's wonderfully smoky voice reading the story of Achilles, and share an "aha" moment about the achilles tendon.

Are you with me? I'm roasting an eggplant for baba ganoush and thinking about cleaning up the garden, putting plastic on the windows, going for a walk...or maybe I'll do some self-care and take a long nap before putting on a pot of soup for supper. 

This is a rich day of life, and it is what I really want for every day - needs all getting met without the stress and struggle we tend to feel during the rest of the week.  

Yes, some of it is having Dan here, the girls soaking up his attention, and me enjoying his companionship and the little break it gives me from being The Person, but maybe the essence of a Sunday is something I can foster through the week for all of us, not buying into the must-be-busy-to-be-productive illusion that nips at my heels.  We overdid it last week, and when that happens I feel it deeply in my gut.  That feeling is my disappointment that I didn't listen to the little voice that warns me that I'm starting to run on empty.  Some of it is just being depleted and feeling stretched too thin, with no bounce left me.  

The Professor making off with his kid's bike

Approaching this non-schooling life the way we do, it doesn't work for me to be empty. I'm unavailable to the moment, and being available to connect is at the core of what we are doing.

So, we had a Sunday. We created and played and cooked.  We took a walk to pick hot peppers at a friend's garden and I played my old tapes of Billy Joel (instead of that nap, today's self-care was singing along with abandon) while putting plastic on Eliza's bedroom windows.  

look! a mushroom!

Consider us recalibrated, happy (I heard so many "I love you"s today!), and content and sooo ready for bed.  I know tomorrow can't be another Sunday, but today was a reminder of how good it can be...