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My backyard neighbors own a small pink car which a toddler can ride on and push with foot power. This is Patches favorite backyard activity. He’ll sit on that car and push it around their patio for hours vigorously defending it against any incursions from their one-year-old toddler.

This evening bedtime loomed near and I advanced on Patches to begin the exhausting process of removing Small Boy from Beloved Car. As I walked toward Patches I noticed some odd-looking spots on the pavement. Lots of odd-looking spots. I leaned closer to figure out what they were, because on first glance my brain was telling me they were blood. I dismissed this impression as the influence of watching too much CSI and because there were so many of them. If a child had done that much bleeding, there would surely have been screaming as well. A closer look revealed that they weren’t so much spots as smears. I tried to picture kids throwing berries to make smears like these, but there were no available berries. Then I realized that the smears were in a pattern. They followed exactly the same around-the-picnic-table path that Patches uses for driving the pink car.

In my head I flashed back to several days ago when Patches had a mysteriously bloody toe which I only discovered because he’d tracked blood through the kitchen. I turned to look at Patches and sure enough, both of his big toes had been scraped bloody. The quantity of smears sugguested that the toes had been bleeding for the past 20 minutes or more. I picked up Patches and began carrying him home. The moment he noticed the state of his toes he imediately began crying in fear: “I bweeding!” This distress cry quickly drew the interested attention of Gleek who always finds blood fascinating and frightening. The actual scrapes were quite small. Only by continual abrasion was Patches able to spread his blood so far. After bandaging the toes and tucking the boy into bed, I wandered back to my neighbors to advise them what the splotches on their patio were and to help wash them off before the splotches became sun-bakedly permanent.

Watching CSI has definitely changed the way I think about some things. Even though the patio came relatively clean, I can now picture a CSI team with their special lights out there finding all that blood and spinning theories about spatter, and smear, and directions of dropplets. As for me, I feel oddly pleased with myself for sorting out this little evidentiary puzzle. Mommy: Child Scene Investigator.

Like so many other things in our life this past year, our 4th of July traditions are in flux. Last year we finally ditched a 10 year long tradition of huge picnic and watching overhead fireworks because it simply wasn’t working for our family anymore. Last year’s celebration was kind of small, so this year I wanted to make sure that the kids got to do something memorable. I took them to the local parade.

Most of the impetus for the Parade attendance came from Kiki. She really wanted to go. Howard really didn’t. He hates parades. Kiki agreed to help me watch the littler kids and so I packed them all into the car and we trundled off to the parade. The Provo Freedom Festival Parade is a fairly large one I think. This year it had over 100 entries. This means that it is extremely crowded. We had to park about 6 blocks away and walk in. We found ourselves a little spot that had been left bare because it was concrete instead of grass. For us this turned out to be a good thing because when Patches got a little bored he had a place to drive the toy cars I brought for him. I think we were also fortunate in our choice of neighbors. The three groups surrounding us were all extremely tolerant of my kids. The young couple next to us were particularly entertained by their antics.

The group in front of us not only allowed my kids to have space on the curb, but they also fed my kids from their copious supply of donuts. Gleek was the first one to score a donut. She did it by walking up, looking cute and asking for one. I couldn’t have her return it because she’d already taken bites, but I did require her to share with Patches, Link, and Kiki. She shared and then she showed them where she’d gotten it. The grandparently people noticed the longing looks and started handing out donuts like water. I tried to appologize, but the assured me that they couldn’t think of a better use for unwanted donuts. I’m really not sure how many donuts my kids consumed, but every so often Gleek or Patches would wander up with a half-eaten donut and hand it to me. Then a few minutes later I’d see them with a fresh donut. When I packed up to leave I found that I’d collected 6 half-eaten donuts. Add to that the licorice whip that Patches acquired from somewhere and the powerade I bought to keep kids hydrated and the dirt from the street and grass: they were all sticky and dirty in layers before the parade was over.

Kiki and Gleek loved every minute of the parade. They watched every entry, waved at every person who waved, and cheered for all they were worth. They loved the huge floats with beautiful girls in them. They loved seeing the huge balloons carefully limboed under the street banner. The loved seeing all the horses, and bands, and dancing. Gleek especially loved the entries with music. She began dancing around anytime there was music nearby. I’ve got some adorable video of her doing a little jig-like dance to marching bagpipers. The longer the parade went on, the more energetic Gleek became. All the sugar might have been a causative effect there. Link got tired and bored after awhile. He doesn’t like loud noises much and the parade kept being very loud. He was hot and sweaty and kept trying to crawl into my lap. Since I was hot and sweaty too, this wasn’t comfortable. Besides Link is 7 and not really lap-sized anymore. Fortunately getting his hair all wet helped and he perked right up when he was given a donut. Patches loved all the machines. There were cars and tractors and no less than three fly-overs by military aircraft. Hours after we came home Patches expressed an interest in going back to the parade to see more cars. That was the consensus from all the kids. They loved the parade and want to go back again. Even Link said he liked it even though he got hot and occasionally bored.

Predictably, the rest of the day the kids were really cranky and hard to manage. Then in the evening we went out into our cul de sac and lit off a dazzling array of fireworks. It was subsidized by one neighbor who’d spent pantloads of money on huge boxes of fireworks. His teenage son, another neighbor’s teenage daughter, and Howard were the firelighters. The rest of us all got to sit on my neighbor’s lawn and watch the show. The show was made even more impressive by illegal fireworks shot into the sky from a street or two over. I loved getting to sit with my neighbors and visit. The kids loved getting to run around in the dark and see all the fireworks. Howard enjoyed lighting off the fireworks. It was a happy hour or two. Then we herded the children inside and tumbled them all into bed.

Today is going to be a deliberately calm day. We had enough excitement yesterday to last for a week.

I haven’t been writing in this journal as much as I used to. I keep reading my friends page and wondering why I just don’t feel motivated to write. Today I spent some time surfing my journal archives in search of motivation. I discovered lots of entries that I really enjoyed reading. Some were valuable realizations that I’d forgotten about. It proved to me that having the record is extremely valuable to me and so discovering the reason for my lack of writing became a front-of-my-brain pursuit instead of simmering in the back.

I think it is a combination of reasons. One is that events have conspired against journal writing. I went on vacation and being away from my house always puts a damper on journaling. Then I got back with sick kids. Right about the time everyone was well and I was getting on top of housework I was hit with a 10 days delayed effect from forgetting to take my daily medication while on vacation. There were five moody, grouchy, non-journaly days in there. I recovered from that several days ago, and yet days still went by with no writing.

The weird thing was that I miss writing in my journal. I miss finding things to say and saying them well. I miss having people comment on my thoughts. All of that is valuable to me, but when I sat down in front of the screen nothing in my head seemed worth writing about.

Today I have thoughts to write about and I think the major difference is that today I had lots of contemplative time. I had two hours during church while my children were in the care of others. Then this afternoon the children played peacefully together for hours. It seems my brain requires that quiet time to sort thoughts into meaninful shapes. The summer schedule with all the kids at home just doesn’t leave me much time for staring at the walls and thinking. Every time I pick up a book or sit at the computer in order to soothe my brain and make space for contemplation, I get interrupted. I’ll sit down just wanting 10 minutes to myself and everyone in the house will walk up with things they need me to do. Hiding would work I suppose, but it is hard to properly supervise children if you’re hiding from them.

I don’t really have an answer for this, but it is yet another element for me to consider as I try to figure out how to shape my days this summer. The plan of taking a morning outing each day has worked well so far. I’ve already planned all the little outings for this next week. We all still get cranky in the afternoons, but at least we don’t feel house-bound and cranky. Tomorrow I’m taking the kids to a Fourth of July parade. Howard will be staying home to stuff the buffer and because he absolutely hates parades. I’m just hoping that all the horses and parade floats will be interesting enough to induce Gleek and Patches to sit still.

This was going to be yet another griping entry. The summer schedule I planned so carefully is simply not working. The kids are bored, I’m exhausted, and we’re all too housebound. I was all set to complain about it in detail when I was forced to go out in the back yard by the screaming of children. This turned out to be a good thing. The screams were happy screams because my kids were playing with the kids of my backyard neighbor. My neighbor was out there too. I realized that her summer seemed to be going much more smoothly than mine was and so I started asking questions trying to figure out what she was doing differently.

I’ve had the days structured wrong. I’ve been trying to have the mornings be times to be at home and get work done and then afternoons available for activities. This meant that at my most fatigued time of day I was trying to entertain kids who’d already played with all their toys and games all morning. Not only that, but it was taking forever to get the work actually done because the kids had no motivation to get it done quickly. So tomorrow I’m trying out a new plan. We get up and breakfast at 8 am. Then we do housework until 9:30. At 9:30 I leave the house for an outing with whichever kids are done with their work. These will be small outings to parks, libraries, museums with no admission fees, going for a walk, etc. Any small trip that gets us out of the house in a place that lets the kids see new things and run around. Kids who don’t finish their work have to stay home with daddy (who has to do his cartooning work in the mornings.) I think that will be sufficiently motivational. It will also mean that we come home ready for some down time and happy to play with the toys and games we have here.

I don’t know if this new plan will work. But I do know that something needs to change or I’ll go crazy with two months of summer left and zero trips planned.

I don’t like who I am when I am furious with my kids. I don’t like feeling like I’ve mistreated them. I think it’s the closest I ever really come to hating myself.

Taking kids to the library is on my mental list of “Things Good Mommies Do” so I try to do it regularly. It is almost always a frustrating and engrumpifying trip for me. I have mental standards for appropriate behavior in the library, but it is impossible for me to actually enforce them on both Gleek and Patches simultaneously. And every moment spent enforcing appropriate behavior is not spent selecting materials to take home or checking books out, which is the reason I went to the library anyway. I don’t get to help Kiki or Link select books. I don’t get to select books for myself. In fact I don’t really “select” books at all. I tend to snatch a few picture books from the handiest shelf and hope they have good bedtime stories in them.

Today herded my children through the library only to be rewarded with a Patches tantrum serenading me all the way home. Then upon arrival I needed a simple response from Gleek which she actively avoided giving until I was screaminly furious. Going to the library was a highlight in my childhood. It is supposed to be a good and happy thing. Instead I’m increasingly convinced that family trips to the library are a bad idea and I cringe at the thought of using up child care options for a library trip. Willing child care is always a scarce resource. It makes me want to cry.

All day long all of the kids (and me too) forlornly checked to see if any of the food in the open cage had been disturbed. I was pretty certain that we wouldn’t have a chance to find the hamster until evening. I was right. Link selected my bedroom for story time and half way through I spotted motion in my walk-in closet. Small, furry, brown and white motion. I walked over and there was the awol hamster. I knew I had her cornered, so I called for Kiki to bring the cage while I recaptured the critter. Hamsters are FAST when they’re scared. I didn’t like scaring her, but she simply isn’t tame enough to be captured fearlessly.

So now the Hamster is caged. The hole in the cage is patched. The kids are all wound up and excited. Kiki in particular is beaming with joy. I’m so glad to have the little furball back where she belongs.

A crisis erupted this morning when Kiki discovered that her beloved hamster is missing. Apparently last night Kiki popped out the plastic from one of the habitrail expansion spots so she could see the hamster better. Then we all went to bed. I’m sure it didn’t take the hamster long to discover the hole and disappear out of it. Unfortunately the cage was on top of a dresser, so once the hamter got down there was zero chance that it could return.

We had weeping and sadness. We frantically poked in corners and cleaned the room just in case. Now we’ve placed the cage with food down on the floor in the hopes that the hamster will return. If we can get the hamster coming back for food and water then her eventual recapture is inevitable. If I had live mouse traps I’d set those all over the house, but I don’t know where to get any without spending money. Usually I want the small rodents in my house dead not alive.

What surprised me in this event was my own reaction. I actually like and miss the little hamster. I was having fun guiding Kiki through the process of hand-taming. I was anticpating having a really tame and friendly hamster. Patches is sad too. He’d taken to going to visit the hamster 2 or 3 times a day. In fact the room that Gleek and Kiki share had been relabelled in Patches head as “the hamster room.” For now I just hope that the hamster comes back to eat.

The closing quote of Middlemarch reads thus: “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

This quotation resonates with me because it is essentially how I picture my life. I do not expect to ever be written of in history books. I don’t plan to ever be seen on national television. If such things do occur in my life it will be a convergence of happenstance not because it is a goal of mine. I can’t say I would mind making a huge and visible difference for the better in the world, but I don’t expect it. My gift to the world will be four well raised children, an emotionally supported cartoonist, and whatever other good deeds happen to come under my hands. I would much rather do thorough good deeds for a few people than scatter my efforts so thinly that they coat the intended targets like dust.

Perhaps my ambitions will be raised once I’m not buried under the needs of small children. But at the moment I don’t feel I’m doing well enough tending the small spot that is given me to want to spread myself any thinner.

Most of today was pretty rotten for me. I was discouraged at how much I hadn’t gotten done, how much attention the kids demanded and I failed to supply. I was tired and cranky and in need of time off. So I was glad to abandon the kids to Howard and attend a comittee meeting. The meeting lasted two hours. It was full of fun conversation and decision making. I came home invigorated and happy. Time off makes for a much better mommy.

On the other hand Howard had a really good day. He accomplished lots of buffer stuffing and was in a really good mood. When I came home his good mood was all gone. He was full of frustrations that he wanted to vent. Including the fact that Patches wandered into his office and drew on one of the Schlock Mercenary originals. The really good news is that the kids had fun. (well other than Patches who got significant scolding.) None of the kids had any idea how angry/frustrated their daddy was. Not quite the happy homecoming that I’d love to have, but better than total chaos.

Right now my mood is pretty good. It may even stay that way if I can just convince the kids to stay in bed. Hopefully Howard will be able to salvage his evening as well.