To break or not to break

We've been on summer break now for over a month. It's a working vacation. We're exploring new ways of living: hanging out laundry (or hanging in laundry, as it is gray in Michigan most of the days I do laundry), bringing down the food bill, getting used to not using air conditioning. The list will look familiar to anyone whose husband is working reduced hours. It's been fun and challenging. I've enjoyed The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyzyn very much.

The children have built with all the block sets we've got in the house. E and L are reading up a storm. J and R stay with K while I take E and L swimming 4 days a week. So we are very busy!

The break has allowed me to step back and think about what direction we're "shootin' fer." It's also given me time to assimilate some of the good of talks and visits I've had with my sisters and mother. (And here are some pictures on the blog, because it's nice to blog during a break! Recalling the visit pictured here is great. . .more than a little embarrassing when I discovered one of my children had colored all over one of my sister's children. . .)

I've thought about why it's not enough just to teach girls to be good housekeepers. If you give a girl a college education or a marketable skill, you've given her what she won't be able to get easily once she has a home and family. If she has an education or hard-earned skill, it's very likely she'll be able to pick up all the ins and outs of homemaking without much trouble. So here's a big thank you to my parents for oomphing me through college, despite all my desperate desires to be married with kids. Married with kids is great. But I see now that it's no time to go back for that college degree!

Here is a recent picture from a zoo trip. The girls love playing on the bronze statues all around the zoo. When they are more interested in the statues than in seeing more exhibits, we know it's about time to head home! Just before this photo was taken, the girls were playing "shoot the lions," "tame the lions," "ride the lions," "I'm a lion, too!" and "Let's be a lion family. . .R can be the baby lion!"

We loved the monkey exhibit, where we watched a mama monkey keep ahead of her little baby all around their enclosure. We gasped as she forcefully placed him on the chain links beside her some 10s of feet above the ground. But he was equal to it, despite his small size. When he got stuck, his big brother would come and help him out. He tried to nurse, but the mama wasn't interested in that, either. The few times the baby caught up, she'd only let him cling to her for several seconds before repeating the "disengage" routine.

This is the opposite of what we've observed of the robins in our back yard. Several weeks ago, we saw a small robin in the back yard. He had feathers, but not enough to fly. His mama hopped out of the bush and beckoned for him to join her under the lilacs. Nothin' doin'. She flew away and it was several minutes. . .the girls and I discussing whether we should "rescue" the baby before the neighborhood cats found him. . .before she flew back with some insect in her beak. She got close enough for the baby to just nip at the insect, and then hopped backward into the lilacs, the baby following her the whole way. The outcome for this particular robin family is hopeful. Since then, we've seen the fledgling hopping around with his sibling, both of them being fed by the parent robins, who are looking skinnier and skinnier as the juveniles get larger and larger. Not for long, though. Just today we saw our juveniles attempting to "dive for worms" by themselves. Not very successfully, but with all the correct mannerisms of the parent robins: head to the side, hop, hop, look around, head to the side, peer into the grass, dive. . .