Discord in the Community Garden

I started a small mental breakdown in the community garden where Louis and I have plots last week.

At the Spring Community Work Day it was decided that everyone would take on the responsibility of one of twelve or so jobs in the garden so that no one person had to be Sheriff of the Garden.

I got myself elected as tree/sapling czar and we all agreed that if the crazy lady whose plot is next to mine had to have her failed arbor experiment (about twelve 15 foot Box Elders that she had tried to grow together, breaking many of the garden laws) out of her plot by 15 May or they would be removed for her.

The crazy lady (CL), who hasn't come to any of the six madatory work days that we've had since we joined the garden three years ago, told Tim (my brother and nominal head of the garden this year) that she couldn't come to the communal work day\ because she had an appt. at ten o'clock. Gardeners are asked to work anytime between 9-3.

At any rate, CL came out at 11:20 to pay Tim the annual rent on her plot ($15) and asked him to sign a receipt that he had taken her money because she hates him and doesn't trust him to give the money to the neighborhood association.

After he disgruntedly signed the receipt he asked her "What about the trees?" and she went ballistic. She told him to shut up, that he was a fascist, that he had no appreciation for diversity in the garden, that he was trying to get her out of the garden, etc. Tim, who said it was such a moment of channeling our Dad that he was rather embarrassed afterward, asked her to sign a statement saying she would get rid of the trees before 15 May.

After she stomped away, her pal (they both live across the street from the garden and regard it as more theirs than anyone else's)came out to be the adolescent message bearer of CL and told Tim that CL doesn't like to be challenged, especially in public (unlike the rest of us, who relish it) and that she would take most of the trees down if she could keep the biggest one in the middle of her plot until next year. Tim, at the end, of his wits said okay.

He, however, failed to pass that information along to me. So, on 15 May I went and cut the trees down along with all of the other saplings and suckers on the lot.

That evening I happened to be at Tim's house enjoying a gin & tonic before heading off to Charlotte's fifth grade band concert when CL called Tim; she'd been to the garden. She was absolutely furious, called him Hitler and threatened to sue him and a whole bunch of other craziness.

The next morning I called the neighborhood association (they own the land) first thing to get in front of the psychopath eight ball, but CL's friend beat me there. I spoke to the administrator of the land and they took a walk over to the garden that afternoon.

Essentially, they were aghast at the state of C's plot and called her in to their office and told her to clean it up or leave the garden. They also asked us to call them if we have any further problems with her. I will be more than happy to have it all being worked out by the trained association staff. Yikes.

Maybe now we can garden in peace? She brings bad juju to the place.

Freeburg Death March!

As I have said earlier, I can't ever sleep in at the schoolhouse so I often get up and go out with the dog on what Ted calls a "pajama walks", which is essentially a walk in my pajamas that ends up being much longer than intended.

This morning the world was so juicy and budding and sprouting and mating it was incredible. love the 'spring ephemerals' -the short-lived wildflowers that blossom early-on- and took a 2 mile hike looking for them. I returned and unlike yesterday, when I peeked in the window and found Thành just waking up (he was mighty surprised to see me looking in!), everyone was still asleep so I crawled back in bed and dozed off myself.

After we all got up, ate, washed and dressed, Ted suggested a 1.4 mile "as-the-crow-flies" hike to find a geo-cache he had looked up; it was extra-appealing because it was a cave! We left at 9 AM in glorious sunshine with Thành in his backpack. Crossing our neighbor Mac's hay field, we were suspected from afar of being mushroom poachers (morels are bountiful hereabouts and are in season) and he raced out in his pick-up with his enormous dog Jake to stop us. We had a nice chat and he told us about how waterlogged everything was so far this spring.

About three hours into the hike, which was all up and down in the coulee topography of Houston County, I started to think that perhaps Ted didn't know what he was doing and it turned out that he didn't! He had printed out the geo-cache listing, but never read it and had assumed that we would be able to find the route there on the system of State Forest trails that surround the schoolhouse.

By this point my infallible sense of direction was no good, because I had been taking pictures of wildflowers and just following along, not paying attention to where I was. Furthermore, in order to get the (#*$&@#! GPS device to recognize your current position, a person had to walk twenty or thirty steps. Let me just say that no one wanted, at this point, to walk twenty steps uphill only to find out that they were going the wrong way. We marched on another couple of hours.

After walking a long, long way -I estimate 8 miles- the last of which was a good 300 yard steep downhill bushwacking descent, we were .10 miles from the geo-cache but Thành and I were in desperate need of food and so we sat down in a dry creek bed on the valley floor to eat the SNACK that Ted had packed and drink sparingly from the ONE BOTTLE OF WATER that he had packed. I felt so bad for the dog that I let him drink some of it, too.

Needless to say, Louis was in tears at the prospect of not getting to the cave, so they continued up the other side of the valley, found the treasure, signed their names, explored the cave and returned happy.

By this time I was starting to worry about being out in the woods with a tot and no more supplies at 4 PM, so we followed the creek south and then trespassed across a farm pasture with a lovely pond. We stopped to let the dog get wet and were admiring the millions of tadpoles when we saw a tiny painted turtle hiding under an oak leaf. We checked him out, made some canals to repatriate some tadpoles that were stranded in footprints separate from the pond and continued on through a field and then a cattle yard.

By this time, Ted had removed his belt to use as a makeshift leash for the dog so that he wouldn't chase a calf, I lost my Merrell clog (why would you put on your hiking boots for a 1 mile hike?) in an unctuous mud/cow shit combination -Louis almost wet his pants pulling it out as I stood in the muck in my sock- and Ted had ripped out the crotch of his pants on some barbed wire. We popped out into a breathtakingly beautiful valley that we did not recognize in the least and when we got to a farm with someone home, Ted asked where we were. Low and behold, we were a stone's throw from Little Miami, our favorite supper club in the next valley. In other words, about ten miles from home.

It turned out that we had popped out of the forest where we should have started the hike. Ted doesn't get to plan a hike again for a really long time, if ever. Men and their gadgets. I only got mad once, when he offered the GPS to have me for the third time. Setting off with a two year-old and a seven year-old, one bottle of water, a can of smoked oysters, a box of Triscuits, two oranges and an apple. and no idea where he was going. I told him that I never wanted to see the thing again in my life.

When we hit the road that went to the main road he hung out his thumb and unbelievably two families going fishing together stopped for us. Who in their right minds would stop for two people with muddy shoes, a guy in a straw fedora with his underwear hanging out and a wet dog on a belt? Nice folks. Louis, Moby and I rode in the back of a pick-up and Thành sat on Ted's lap (to hide the hole) in a mini-van and we were delivered to Reno. Only two miles from home!

We walked to the Reno State Forest Campground where I told Ted that the kids and I would be laying in the grass while he went for the car. Not a soul passed going up the bluff, so we knew he was walking the entire way. Luckily when he came back he had the sense to bring water, cold beer and chips.

When we got back to the schoolhouse we were all so worn out we could barely move. Even Moby would not get up to drink a cup of milk I offered him. Initially I thought we needed to spend the night and leave for home early in the morning, but as the kiddie melt-down set in we decided to throw everything in the car and go. Thành was asleep before we hit the river road but Louis made it until 9 PM.

Without the good nature of our kids, the stamina of the family and the beautiful weather we had, this hike could have been a disaster. It certainly was an adventure. We call it the Freeburg Death March.

A Sunny Saturday

I can't sleep in when I'm at the schoolhouse and this morning I awoke with the birdsong, which is cacophanous especially in the spring when there are lots of birds passing up the Mississippi fly-way.

Out on the step in the early sunshine, the Mississippi sparkled down below and I was surprised by the amount of what my Grandpa T. used to call "mustard" in the alfalfa field. Later, when I looked up the plant, I found it was really called Winter Cress and is a member of the mustard family whose spicy seeds were often used in olden times to replace pepper when it was in short supply.

Moby and I quietly left the house and walked down the road toward Mac & Shirley Heiller's farm. We walked down to the little hut that a fellow from Indiana built on a half acre of land that he bought from Mac. It is under the radio antenna and under the big powerline that comes up the side of the bluff, but it has a wonderful view of the river because of the power line clearance.

We have never seen these folks and we may never, but we walk down to check out their little estate now and then. It is becoming clear that the fellow's plan to create an tiny arboretum is going to run into space problems soon, as all of the trees are too close to one another.

Next we headed through the fence onto state land and walked through the edge of the oak plantings into the bigger trees. The ephemeral spring flowers are all in bloom and the woods was bursting with the kind of juicy energy that you only sense in spring. Everything was budding and blooming, buzzing, mating and growing like, well, a weed!

I never remember, on these morning walks, to bring a camera when I first exit the schoolhouse and then I am reluctant to go back in to get it for fear of waking someone unnecessarily. What a dope.

Moby was having a great time following deer trails and rolling in the green grass and just plain running loose. I sometimes try to catch his joy on camera, but it never translates to film. He is such a happy runner and such a graceful jumper; it is a pleasure to watch him in the wild.

We traversed the trees and headed down to the edge of the gulley below the oaks and came upon circle after circle of May Apples. None of them were blooming yet, but their umbrellas were huge and obscured large buds. Closer to the ravine we came upon our first Jack-in-the-Pulpits and some wild Columbine. There were Lobed Hepatica, too.

We turned back uphill and popped out on top just at the corner of the schoolhouse fence. There is a nice open spot in the middle of the oaks just before this rise that I always think we should have a picnic in, but then when it comes time to eat, sitting in the schoolhouse with the six windows and the door open is sort of like having a picnic anyway!

I walked around the south side of the schoolhouse to peek in the window just as Thành was sitting up in bed and wondering where he was. When he turned to look out the window and saw me outside, a huge smile crossed his face and he cried, "Morning Mama!" What a joy this little boy is.

The rest of the day was dedicated to the early spring jobs. Ted split the new pile of oak that Bugman (Larry Bauer, who got his nickname by eating a bug in a bar one night) had delivered for us. I sat in the sandbox, cool from the previous night's rain, and pulled out all of the grass that seeds itself in the fall. It is fun to follow the rhizomes with your fingers, sometimes all the way across the sandbox! Easy weeding.

When I finished with that, and while Ted fed the boys some lunch, I moved on to a small stand of Stinging Nettle that was next to the sandbox. It grows in a place where there was once a burning pile; amidst the broken pieces of concrete and burned cans. One day I will excavate this spot, as it is the only garbage on the property.

Louis announced that he had learned at The Land School that stinging nettle was edible and just as good as spinach, but after gathering a big bunch and getting a pot of water boiling I still had not located anything about eating nettles in my Herter's Guide, and so we bailed out of the plan, lest someone have an adverse reaction to it.

(Subsequent research has shown that stinging nettle is ENTIRELY EDIBLE and is, in fact, a Romanian Easter treat and considered a spring tonic in many cultures. Some people consider them a "super food", so packed with vitamins are they!

After lunch I started on the woody vine that has grown up every summer next to the foundation of the schoolhouse. I can't find it in any guide, though it may be woodbine. I dug and dug and dug. The nasty stuff passes under the foundation of the schoolhouse, through the crawlspace and out the other side! In the end, I managed to finish one long side of the school, which included picking out all of the glass from one broken window that was buried in the dirt.

Louis dug himself a hole to lay in and took a little nap. Ted finished splitting the wood and made a tidy new woodpile north of the schoolhouse. The kids played in the sandbox and swung on the swing, climbed in the Jack Pine and hung out. What a great place this is.

In the evening we cleaned up and headed over to Freeburg to Little Miami for dinner. We haven't been there in a blue moon and on the way we were terribly saddened to see that the old rectory of the Universalist Church in Freeburg Valley had burned to the ground.

This building was much like the schoolhouse in design, though a bit larger and it had a large vestibule that had been added on. The entire place had burned and collapsed into the basement. Someone had pulled the metal roofing out of the hole, but everything else was down in the pit. Louis, of course, wanted to scavange for junk after immediately finding a couple of cool things. We told him that we were clean and going to dinner, but that we'd come back the next day.

My heart is sick over the loss of this little building.

We ate and then hung out near Crooked Creek for a while and let Louis scamper around on the rocks. The creek is high, but not too high, and the night was lovely. The Swallows were skimming the grass and the water picking bugs out of the air and a Kingfisher flew in and sat in a Cottonwood tree to watch for frogs. We took the long way home following a road that we had never taken before. The valley here is so beautiful and wide, it's just too bad about the junk guy that has his farm right in the middle of town.

To the Schoolhouse

This morning I did some laundry and worked out in the yard sticking in some seeds and moving some plants around while Thành dropped sand down the slide. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day; the kind where the air is still cool but the sun is warm on your skin.

I put Thành down for a nap and started to gather things for packing for the week-end's trip to the Schoolhouse when Ted came home earlier than I expected to help me out. What a guy. Though being home on Thursday and Friday means that I should carry more of the housework load, I really have come to resent being the one and only packer, so we're working to change that.

Besides, we are trying to attain that utopian state wherein we each have a pair of pants, a shirt and some socks down there so that all we really need to pack is toiletries. Good luck, 'eh?

We picked Louis up at school and he looked pretty wild after three days at the Land School. Everyone had looked at the same weather prediction of cold and rainy weather and the poor class had spent three days in the warm sunshine in turtle necks and heavy sweatshirts! We got home and the first thing Thành did was tackle Louis. Ah, brotherly love.

Not much information was forthcoming about the trip other than that everyone had a good time and Keegan was the only one who got homesick, so we moved on to loading the car. Louis was none too happy about getting back in a vehicle or spending more time away from home. He hasn't been home much lately having spent two days in Esko, two at school, three in Wisconsin and now two more in Crooked Creek, so I can see his point.

We drove to Lake City and for once we had the time to stop at the playground/park in the city marina that Louis always wants to stop at. The boys played and it was clear that Thành was very happy to have Louis home. I watched some birds and followed a black squirrel around (the only one I've ever seen outside of Toronto) and then it was time to hit the road again. The drive to the schoolhouse is half an hour too long for any of us, especially when you add in stopping at the grocery and liquor stores in Le Crescent. Still, this is a better strategy than traveling with a cooler.

As it stands, with four of us and Moby in the car now we have nearly everything up on the roof in a travel bag. Eventually we will get a larger car, but for now we travel in the Suzuki. Moby doesn't seem to mind sharing the back with a five gallon bottle of water, but we did learn this trip that you can't put the grocery bag with the donuts on top in the back with him!

We got to the schoolhouse just after dark and played our favorite game of Is it still there? Louis is usually the eagle eye that sees the little white triangle of the roofline as we come over the hill on the road after Walt Kuebler's farm. It's always a relief to know that some hoodlums haven't burned the place to the ground.

I took the kids inside, as it was just beginning to sprinkle, and Thành suddenly remembered where he was. He's only been to the schoolhouse twice and one of those trips was shortly after he joined the family, so he hadn't really understood where we were going. Inside, however, he headed right to the woodstove and said "hot" and then went over to the toy box and got out his truck and trailer.

We all hopped in bed just as a thunderstorm was starting. It was nice to be in our cozy little house in our toasty flannel sheets while the lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled. It didn't take anyone long to fall asleep.

Louis to The Land School

Louis left this morning -a beautiful, sunny spring morning- with his class for the Lake Country Land School.

Lake Country takes Montessori pretty seriously and they were put in a position about ten years ago of becoming the owners of an 80 acre farm in western Wisconsin, about an hour and fifteen minutes from school. This answered a problem that they had been trying to address in a number of different ways: how to pursue the ErdKinder (child of the Earth) requirement that is such a major part of Montessori's teachings.

They took the gift, hired two couples to run the farm as a CSA in the summer and then trained them as Montessori teachers. Lake Country kids start going to the Land School in first grade and by the time they are in Jr. High they are spending six weeks a year there, working on science projects and getting to know the rhythms of nature. (They come home on the week-ends.) It's a wonderful place and a big part of why we chose Lake Country for Louis.

And so, off they went this morning., 28 first through third graders. They had all packed their own bags (I only had to add two t-shirts because it's still a bit chilly at night and in the morning!) and were loading them into the truck that would carry them. They were going to be riding out on a school bus, but Thành and I left before they loaded up the kids because there's no telling how long that could take!

Mother's Day in Esko

Once the garden clean-up was finished, we piled into Jeanne Goessling's van and our car and headed up to Esko for the Mother's Day week-end. Jeanne didn't notice when we loaded the mystery boxes into my car so our big secret was safe.

When we got to Cloquet I pulled off to buy a hanging basket for Maura, who always gets to feed and pick-up after us when we come to visit. At the garden center I noticed a bunch of Zone 5 perennials that they had received by mistake that they were selling for $1 each and couldn't resist picking up some pinkish Cinquefoil, some deep blue/purple Butterfly Bush and some Campanula. I'll put some in the flower beds at home and the rest in the border I'm establishing along the alley at the Garden. Hooray!

Ted and his siblings decided that they were going to buy Jeanne a new PC this year for Mother's Day, in part because her PC is fairly old but mostly because...drumroll please...DSL is coming to Esko! This will be such a great thing for Jeanne because she will now be able to upload photos much faster and get email with attachments that she can open before she gets disconnected.

It was a nearly paperless transaction as, in this modern world, Ted went out and bought the PC and sent an email message to his siblings containing the link to his PayPal account. Nearly everyone had a PayPal account and zapped the money to him immediately. The family Luddites sent checks and that was that. How simple.

Jeanne is used to Ted tweaking her computer when he visits, so she didn't seem to notice that he was down in her office. He copied her files and installed them on the new PC and that was that. The DSL connection wasn't live yet so he couldn't do everything he wanted to do to customize the new machine for Jeanne, but he installed some remote control software that allows him to tinker on her machine from afar, so that will be handy.

We had a wonderful time with the cousins, catching up on their recent exploits. Parker, whose birthday was Saturday (12!) was freshly mobile with his wireless amp having just been repaired. He spent the day window shopping all of the music stores in the area with Steve and returned ready to play!

Raleigh (16!) showed us the photos from his trip to the Biathlon Junior World Cup in Germany in December and filled us in on the social life of Eskovian teens.

Audrey (5)played me in BattleShip, which she has recently learned and was an excellent cousin to Thành, who is often left in the dust by the older kids. Audrey let him play with her toys (he really liked the baby carriage and the baby dolls) and they did a lot of jumping on the living room ottoman.

The next day the PC was revealed to Jeanne and she was completely surprised, absolutely thrilled and relatively troubled by the expense. I told her not to worry about it, that when you had nine kids, nothing was too expensive for any one of them alone! She sat down for a lesson, and I think she will be fine (she is now using Vista) once she gets going.

Thanks to all those Goesslings for making their Mom so happy.

Maura and I took a long walk while Raleigh went out and ran fifteen miles. I got the first wood tick of the year and also scored some nice Pheasant tail feathers from a spot where a guy has been dumping his butchered game offal, much to Steve and Maura's chagrin. The guy isn't too bright, because Steve found the deer tag with the guy's name right on it among the deer carcass.

On Sunday afternoon Steve took Ted and I, Parker, Louis, Audrey and Thành to Cirrus Aviation, where I hadn't been in years. I certainly had never been to the facility that they are using to build the new Cirrus jet in. It is a cavernous building, 400,000 sq. ft. or more and was built by the City of Duluth for Northwest Airlines as a maintenance facility.

Northwest didn't stay there long, however, and the building sat empty for a few years before Cirrus moved in. We got to see a number of really interesting things and it was fascinating to listen to Steve, as what he does for a living is so far-removed from anything that I encounter.

There was a 1970s Yugoslavian trainer jet that Cirrus had just purchased to use as a chase plane for the Cirrus jet. There was a Cessna from the 1940s and a lot of recently finished Cirrus planes that were being sent to all ends of the Earth. We got to walk on the gigantic mobile scaffolding (sorry Steve, I don't remember what it's really called!) that was used to maintain the jumbo jets, we got to walk through lots of still-empty areas and make echoes and we got to see a lot of propellers in their shipping boxes, whereupon we noticed that they were manufactured in Piqua, OH.

Why is this interesting, you ask? Because Piqua, OH is the home of Jerome Horowitz Elementary School, the alma materof none other than George and Harold of Captain Underpants fame! Hooray!

One of the other really interesting things that Steve showed us was a couple of large ponds located not far from the building with a pumphouse located between them. I thought they were simply water retention ponds for the run-off from the runways, but no. If there were to be a fire in this enormous hanger, the pump would suck the ponds dry, mixing the water with chemicals and fill the hangar with fire suppression foam! That's a lot of foam!

Thành fell asleep on the way home, late in the afternoon, and then slept for a while on the couch until we ate dinner and so he was awake all the way home. Unlike Louis, who talked incessantly even at the age of three, Thành sits quietly watching the world go by or softly singing. As we drove along in the darkness (Louis had read until the sun went down and then fell asleep) we heard him singing, "Happy, happy, happy, happy..." How sweet.

The Odyssey

Louis and his cohorts have been working for about a month now to stage Homer's Odyssey, or as Louis puts it, "a greatly shortened version of The Odyssey". The play was finally presented last week.

Ted, Thành and I attended on Thursday and the kids did a great job. The backdrop (painted by the kids) and the costumes (togas sewn by parents) and masks (made by the kids) were lovely, as was the revised version of the song "We Need a Hero" that closed the play.

In case you don't know the story, Homer sets out on a voyage and returns twenty years later after many trials and tribulations including encounters with a cyclops, a deadly whirlpool, a witch, and more.

Louis, who was Voice #3 and introduced the Gods, memorized his lines quickly and because he can never seem to finish one thing before he's off on another, was seen reading in the wings.

For the performance on Friday the guests were Grandma Jeanne Goessling (Esko, MN) and Grandpa Jim and Grandma Jackie Trucker (St. Paul, MN). Everyone enjoyed the play and we were celebrating with a fine dinner of tacos when the phone rang. It was poor Auntie Renée Nowaczek (Bayport, MN) calling to say that Son #1 had fallen off of his bicycle and broken his arm during son #2's birthday party and she was the only parent present.

Grandma & Grandpa left in a hurry and went to supervise the sleep-over while poor Julian was taken to the hospital. Sure enough, broken ulna. Bummer.

Past the Last Frost!

After all of the excitement of The Odyssey, I woke up early and headed off to our community garden on the next block for our annual Spring Communal Clean-Up.

For those of you who don't know, Louis and I were part of a Community Garden for ten years that was located across the alley and a few lots down from our current location. That garden, called the Grand Avenue Garden, was three city lots in full sun that, amazingly, had never been built on. Having augmented the soil in our plots for over ten years, the place produced great veggies and flowers and provided a nice place for the customers at the coffee shop across the street to sit. There were 17 15' x 10' plots in that garden.

Sadly, three years ago the owner of the lots passed away and as it was the middle of the condo craze here in Minneapolis, his family sold the lots. The greedy developer couldn't wait to get started and so in the middle of July, with lots of green tomatoes and little green beans coming in, he kicked us out and scraped the lot with a bulldozer.

A few of us scrambled and found homes in the lesser-regarded Pleasant Avenue Garden across the alley. Only one city lot, the garden had always been the ugly step-sister of the two because it was quite shaded by weed trees that had grown up along the lot line of the crazy cat lady house that had been there prior to the neighborhood buying the lot and putting it in a green space trust.

I moved the rhubarb and tried to move some of the perennials that we had, but the bulldozers were too eager and we lost an established raspberry patch and much, much more. Alas.

The first year that Grand gardeners were in the Pleasant Ave. Garden we spent most of our time, outside of our personal plots, trying to re-establish the beautiful Victorian design of the garden. As it was shady and under-populated, the place was very overgrown and run down. The longtime gardeners didn't seem to know what had hit them.

The second year that we were there a great number of gardens turned over, as about half of the gardeners are earnest young people who tend to be transient; they move for a job or they move in with a friend and they're gone. In the middle of the year we found a fellow who is an arborist and loves community gardens. He offered to remove a bunch of the nasty trees along the southern lot line for us for a pittance and he did a beautiful job of it. At the same time, four of the enormous elms on the boulevard (east) side of the garden were taken down by the city. This left a HUGE hole in the sky and we haven't seen our Sharp Shinned Hawk since, but together the two have made the garden much, much sunnier, which will be good for everyone.

This year we have a handful of new gardeners and lots of returnees. I think the tide may have turned for the Pleasant Avenue Garden, as during the work day we weeded all of the borders, added soil to the plots, weeded all of the paths, trimmed overhanging limbs from the remaining trees and more. We have a composting composter (instead of a garbage bin!) and people are really enthused.

The rose that Ted and Louis bought me last year for Mother's Day survived the winter and so did most of the strawberry bed that Louis and I planted last year. The clematis that we planted on the outer fence on the north are back and growing and it didn't take very long at all this year to weed the fern and wild rose plot in the neighbors' yard that had previously been the source of a lot of Creeping Charley that came into the garden.

In Louis' plot the ferns are up along with the Pachysandra and the Bleeding Heart that we moved there last year from home when we split the big plants in the back yard.

Louis and my niece Charlotte (11), who lives three blocks from us and is a fellow gardener along with her parents, were the sapling patrol and Thành spent most of the work period sitting in Uncle Tim's Korean-era Willys Jeep pretending to drive. We all headed home at eleven, having been disciplined enough to stay out of our own plots, as hard as it was.

Studio Bricolage-Plastique!

Ted has finally taken me up on getting out of the house and getting a life of his own. Not only is he playing in the park dodge ball league again this year and taking a LEGO Robotics League coaching class but he has gotten involved with a neighborhood workshop as well and is not only on the Steering Committee but also leading events!

Ted's dodge ball team is called Grand Bal Seizure and they are currently in fifth place out of twelve teams. The league got a little messed up this year as the result of a few teams being far too competitive last year. This year the directors were hoping to make a competitive league and a recreational league and the teams formed with that in mind. However, there weren't enough competitive teams to form a separate league and so the teams are all mixed together again except that some teams have no "weaker" players (read: women), so they dominate.

When we were on the King Field Neighborhood Board we met a fellow who has gone on to start a hands-on workshop for kids. Now in its tenth year Leonardo's Basement, as it is known, has a building of its own and lots of classes for kids. Ted and Louis have been going there since Louis was five, mostly for the Saturday Open Build sessions. Check it out at http://www.leonardosbasement.org

Naturally once the adults saw what fun the kids were having, they wanted to play, too! Studio Bricolage (French for do-it-yourself) was born and once a month big people get together to build on a topic.

The first event this year was a doozy! The crew, fueled with snacks and adult beverages, built a Rube Goldberg machine that turned on the light switch at the door and ran across the workshop all the way to the Ladies' Room, where it flushed the toilet. It was a ton of fun, a huge success (it worked!) and you can see it on the Studio Bricolage site at http://www.studiobricolage.org/ It was, appropriately, named Chain of Fools.

Subsequent themes have been ice sculpting, balls (where not only did they make a Newton's Cradle out of bowling balls and steel cable, but a fellow made an incendiary device by filling a tennis ball with the heads from wooden strike-anywhere matches that he had meticulously cut off of the matchsticks with a pen knife!), and most recently plastics.

For the plastics class Ted taught a lesson on how to make bowls out of little green army men. Using green (and khaki) army men of the WWII vintage and grey and black medieval army men (maces, swords), aluminum foil and a propane torch (no oven at Studio Bricolage) they heated up the figures and then draped them over a bowl. Next they set the next smaller bowl of the nesting set into the bowl and pressed the figures into the shape of the bowl (and together).

As the night went on bowls were also made of plastic tableware, plastic snakes, CDs and more. It was a great hit and Ted earned his first teacher chit. The next topic has not yet been announced, so sit tight! In the meantime, admire Ted's creations!

Thawing Out From a Long, Cold Winter

Here in Minnesota we are very happy to say that we think -always a conditional!- that Spring may be here. It has been a long, rugged, snowy and cold winter with snow right up through last week, so we are glad that the trees have finally popped their bud coats and the seasons seem to have changed.

We spent the majority of the fall and winter adapting to being a four-person family. We know from the pre-adoption reading that we did that we have had it really easy as far as post-institutional behavior goes, but there is quite a bit to get used to when you've lived your entire life inside and pretty much in one big room at that.

The hardest part by far has been the constant reassurance and constant physical contact required to give these kids a good shot at bonding well with their new families. When it comes to Thành that has meant saying, "Mama, Papa, Louis, Moby, Thành, that's our family." and then repeating that at his prompt of "Papa?" or "Mama?", up to ten times a minute when he's felt really insecure, up to eight hours a day. If you get the members out of order or if you omit the dog, Thành is more than happy to correct you.

We also do the run-through of everyone he knows, which makes him feel more settled. "Mama loves you, Papa loves you, Louis loves you, Grandma loves you...", etc. We have been meaning to put together a little plasticized photo album for him but we haven't gotten to that yet.

Thành was held quite a bit as an infant, for which we are eternally grateful to the staff of the Bên Tre Care Center, but he absolutely craves the skin-to-skin contact and intimacy that he would have gotten if he had been breast-fed or otherwise tended by his birth mother. Perhaps there is an instinctual drive toward a female, or perhaps I am just a whole lot more cushiony than Ted, but whatever the reason I am the person that Thành wants to touch when he's feeling out of sorts or disconnected.

During the autumn and winter months this meant that Thành was physically on me a great deal of the time we were together. I am a snuggly person, but this invaded even my personal space after a while and got to be really irritating if essential. I got pretty good at smiling instead of running the other way when, any time my midriff was exposed (changing clothes, bending over, using the toilet), my little shadow would squeal with glee and start trying to pull his shirt off for a snuggle.

Things are much better now. We only have to repeat things about half as much and we have all gotten good at repeating things while continuing our regular activities and even other conversations. Thành can now go hours without needing to stick his hand down my shirt into my cleavage (I am now undaunted by this even at the grocery check out) or press his cheek against mine, which is actually quite charming.

Aside from those practices, we are enjoying having two boys immensely. Louis loves having a brother and it has brought out the more tender and patient parts of him, along with a good dose of silly sibling behavior (driving around in matching laundry baskets, water fights, etc.) and only a small spot of “Get the baby out of my LEGOs!”.

It has taken Ted and I a bit of time to get used to not having the time to ourselves that we had prior to Thành’s arrival and I am still suffering somewhat from the split personality of being a Mom with a part-time job. Ted is really great at helping out around the house and picking up where I can’t stretch –we parent very well together, the only project we’ve ever succeeded at doing together! We are thrilled to have another chance to do it.

Thành is a happy, smiley, cheerful fellow with a little bounce in his step. He is the one-man greeting committee of Pleasant Avenue as we walk Louis to school and back. He waves like a Dairy Princess in a parade, he says “’ello” to people and about three weeks ago he though he was pretty smart when he started saying “Morning” to people like I do. When you have a toddler parroting your speech you notice a lot of quirks, like how we drop the good in “good morning” here in the Midwest and the like.

Thành is very observant and he knows that you only say “Morning” on the way to school and never on the way back. He watches to see which pocket Ted puts his keys in and then carefully stores his (play) keys on the same side. He wants to do anything that Louis does and it takes some diligence on our part to keep tricky Louis from doing stupid things just to see if his brother will do it. There’s never a dull moment.

All fall and winter we walked Louis to school, sometimes on sleds, sometimes on scooters and trike. Thành, who has gotten the nickname "The Butler" from Louis, prides himself on carrying Louis' lunch the whole way. In the fall he couldn't believe that he couldn't stay at school with all of the other kids (if you think about it, it was probably really weird for him to be home alone with only me after living with a bunch of other kids his entire life) and he was thrilled and probably a little relieved when he started going four days a week 9-3 to a tiny Montessori-based day care about a mile from our house.

This winter we were outside quite a bit enjoying the deep snow. Thành proved to be quite daring, loving the big sledding hill and going down on his own when the adults were too busy jabbering. He doesn’t mind snow in his face, happily put on his snow suit, neck warmer, mitts, hat and boots and then took them all off and put them all away. We’re hoping that his orderliness lasts through his life and that it’s not just an orphanage aberration!

As you will see in the Spring Slide Show, Thành loves water and loves to play in the tub. He and Louis would spend hours in the tub and we can hardly wait to put up the pool for them to mess around in. Ted, Louis and Thành took their first trip to Lake Calhoun this week to dig in the sand. Thành was thrilled but after stepping barefoot on the sand he quickly asked to have his socks and shoes put back on. A little to messy for him. He has learned, finally, that you can wipe anything that might be on your hand onto your pants.

We’re all thrilled by the coming of spring and look forward to all sorts of outdoor activities now that the frost has come out of the ground. The latest snow has fallen in Minnesota is 27 May, but we don’t think we’re going to break that record this year. We hope not, at least!

We've been busy

Our winter was filled mainly with adapting to life with two kids, one of whom spent the first two years of life in an orphanage. While we know from our pre-adoption reading that we have gotten off incredibly easy as institutional behavior goes, it does wear a person out to actually go through the constant reassurances and continual physical contact that is required to give these kids a good shot at bonding with their new families.

As I said, Thành is an incredibly cheerful, bouncy, smiley fellow with a strong will, many opinions and he doesn't back down easily; in other words he fits into our family very well!

Thành is a one-person welcoming committee and cheerer-upper. When we walk down the street he waves to everyone and says hello. He thought he was pretty fancy when he learned to say "Morning" like the rest of us and he knows to use that greeting only on the way to school, not on the way home.

Thành has a little bounce in his step and a big smile and incredibly bright eyes and everywhere we go people break into a grin as they approach us. That, in combination with his irrepressible desire to press the back of our hands to his cheek or to spontaneously kiss us, makes strangers and acquaintances alike incredibly happy. He is our cheerful little imp.

And he's not as little as he was, he's growing! Thành recently hit 28 pounds and 33 inches and has officially outgrown 12 mo. clothing. He still fits into some 18 mo. stuff, but by and large he is a 24 mo./2T guy. We're really happy with his physically development, his coordination and his improved strength. He's one tough, but tiny, cookie!

We have, more or less, fallen into a family rhythm that is working for us with fits and starts. Every couple of weeks the house looks like a bomb went off in it, we're overtaken by fur balls or no one has any clean clothing to wear, but we are getting used to it. Both Ted and I are so much happier when the house is clean and things are orderly that this adjustment has been difficult and paired with the small amount of time that we have together alone to discuss things, housework is usually low on the list.

The other thing that is becoming clear is that we need a larger car. My Suzuki Sidekick has been a great car for us and largely problem-free, but we are using every inch of the car when we take road trips, and usually have a luggage bag on the roof. It would be nice to have a larger vehicle, too, so that we don't always have to depend on borrowing Mookie's truck when we need to get something large from the lumber yard, though that doesn't play into the decision much.

Mostly we look ahead a year or two to hauling our kids and needing to pick up a friend and go somewhere and we can't do that with the Suzuki or with Ted's VW. So, it looks like we will be buying some sort of van or cross-over car in the next couple of months. It will make life much easier when going to the schoolhouse.

Louis has settled in to having a brother very well. He alternates between finding it wonderful to have someone to poke and provoke and being genuinely sweet and appreciative of Thành. Being an older brother has also let Louis exhibit some of the sweetness that we used to see more often before he started school. He will stop and crouch down and patiently explain how to do something to Thành or enthusiastically invite him to join his fun. It's heartwarming.

Most days Thành wakes up at 7 AM on the dot and he comes and crawls in bed with me, since Ted leaves the house by 6:30 AM. We spend about a half an hour cuddling; it's pretty clear that while Thành was held a lot as a baby, he must not have gotten enough skin-to-skin time because he just cannot get enough of it now.

At 7:30 or so we wake up Louis together and that is really fun with lots of snuggling and kissing and crowing like a rooster. We read for a while and then get up and get washed up and dressed. We eat breakfast and then we walk Louis the block to his school and Thành carries Louis' lunch bag, which makes him feel important and makes Louis call him "The Butler".

Then we walk home and we hop in the car and drive the mile to Thành's pre-school and he spends 9-3 there. I go to work and Ted picks Thành up and they drive home and then walk up to get Louis at 4 PM. They play on the playground or come home and play and make dinner and then we're all together again at about 6 PM.

It's a full day, but we are pretty happy with it. We acknowledge that we're not going to have much adult time for another year or two, but that's okay with us most days. We get a sitter every couple of weeks and spend some time together and we've kept up a couple of regularly set dinners with friends through out the month, so we see other people, too.

Mostly we try to remind each other that while there is a lot to do and a lot to get done, the boys won't be small for long and then we settle down and "just be", as Auntie Reece says. That's when we're really happy.

Spring Slide Show!