The Yin, The Yang and July Metamorphosis

Will had the entire month of July off, which we had all been looking forward to for months.  We made a summer bucket list of things that each family member wanted to do to enjoy our time off to the fullest.  Top on our list was spending time outside in our own backyard.

I must say that we sure had fun, enjoying lots of popsicles, ice cream cones, the kiddie pool, and slip and slide as well as the majority of our meals outdoors.  In the bottom right hand picture you will see that even I enjoyed the slip and slide - much to the delight of my children and the shock of my husband and probably neighbors.  Let's just say it was an amazing good time but I paid the price the next day when I could hardly get out of bed and my arms hurt so bad that just swinging them as I walked brought tears to my eyes!  Totally worth it though and now I think slip and slides should be considered as a valid addition to any good cross training program!

We decided that we didn't have the energy to deal with Violet's car ride screams long enough to go anywhere on vacation, and so we utilized our backyard as the sweetest vacation spot around.

We had an amazing crop of strawberries, raspberries and blackberries this past month to the point where we were considering putting up a U-Pick sign in our front yard.

Being the thrifty folk that we are, we diligently picked, canned, froze and ate every last berry.  It was definitely quite a responsibility in our otherwise month long vacation.  Violet has become a berry picking pro and helped quite a bit by eating them as she picked, making less berries I had to find a way to preserve.  At the beginning of the month she would pick and eat berries even if they weren't ripe.  By the end of the month, not only did she know to only pick and eat the ripe berries but if she accidentally picked an under ripe berry she would throw it to the chickens.

Charlie enjoyed all of our berry picking, and would sit under the raspberry bushes and bat at our legs and feet as we picked.  He's been kind of a nuisance actually, and unless he gets his share of love and attention he is very persistent with his demands.  I'd say I yell his name almost as much as his three human sisters!  Almost.  And at our house that equates to a much loved member of our family.

Also part of our family, if but temporarily, are a bunch of toads, four tadpoles that are almost frogs, and a couple of black swallowtail butterflies.  We found caterpillars in our garden and decided to put them in our netted butterfly garden to help protect them until they became butterflies.  One by one, they all turned into chrysalises after eating an amazing amount of dill we picked for them from our garden.  The first four chrysalises hatched into beautiful black swallowtail butterflies.  We learned from our field guide books that the first butterfly was a female and the next three were males.  Charlie unfortunately injured the female when we released her but the silver lining was that Lucy got to play with her for an entire day.  We locked Charlie in the garage for the release of the next three and after they fanned their wings for a bit on our finger, they flew away.

The netted butterfly garden sat in the center of our dining room table and we observed them in every stage of metamorphosis.  After some emotional months at our house as we came to terms with Violet's diagnosis, it was so nice to have such a beautiful reminder of the miracle and beauty of nature in the center of our house.  Then we started to get wasps in our house.  The first wasp was on the bed when I was getting Violet up from her nap and stung me several times.  Picture me swatting at the wasp with a book, yelling "DIE! DIE! DIE" while Violet clapped her hands excitedly, thinking I was putting on a show for her.  I cannot even begin to describe the mama bear instinct that was fueling my adrenaline - imagining if that wasp had stung Violet!  The wasp eventually died but I was uneasy still.  I had Will check the house for cracks or nests to try and figure out how the wasp got in the house.  The next morning we woke up and found the same kind of wasp in the butterfly garden.  We let it go outside but the following day there was another wasp.  Finally it occurred to us to do some research and we discovered that there is a parasitic wasp that lays their eggs in the caterpillar and it doesn't emerge until the caterpillar goes into it's chrysalis.  At that point, the caterpillar becomes the wasp's first food until it emerges as a full grown wasp at the same time the butterfly would have hatched.  Talk about a major shock to our feelings of hope and beauty that these butterflies had brought to our house.  Especially since we were viewing this process with so much meaning and symbolism.  After some serious thought and discussion with a wise mentor, I have decided that the emergence of the wasps did not trump the symbolism.  In fact, I believe this experience is even more symbolic to our family.  The fact that this is not heaven, but earth and that yes there is great beauty, but there is great unjustness and pain too.  This is not heaven may seem obvious to you, but to me, this was a break through moment as I come to terms with the unfairness of two of my four children having rare birth defects.  As unfair as it seems, I am now coming to terms with the fact that on earth there is yin and yang in all things and that both play an integral, necessary part.

And so, here is more of the yin and the yang.  While Lucy and Emma have no qualms about honey bees or caterpillars or playing with frogs, they are very fashion conscious.  Here they are below applying make up to each other with a set of metallic crayons, some water and an empty tic tac container.  I have no idea how the tic tac container plays into this, but somehow it does.  In the bottom left hand picture below Will is proudly displaying his painted toes.  

Will has been cleaning out the upstairs of our garage as part of his bucket list (don't worry, to him this is fun) and the girls capitalized on this and made a play area in an otherwise off limits part of our garage.  They loved it up there until the weather started heating up and it felt like 100 degrees under those rafters.

The girls and I enjoyed lots of treat making this past month from granola bars to rice crispy treats, fresh squeezed cherry limeade, and homemade chocolate cookie ice cream sandwiches.  Take a guess whose bucket list those items checked off!

Will also fixed the dryer and I proudly watched, feeling a renewed sense of why I am so lucky to have married him.  Fix something yourself so I don't have to pay $100/hour to a repair guy who doesn't take off his shoes when he treks across my carpet and I will swear undying love to you for the rest of my days!  In all seriousness, I am in awe and appreciation of Will's talent of fixing just about anything.  He also figured out how to install a recessed light in the china cabinet he installed when we moved in five years ago.  To make these home improvement tasks even sweeter, I enjoyed watching Emma have fun helping Will.  I'm not going to lie, it would make me so proud if our kids got even a fraction of Will's home improvement abilities.

We took lots of walks this past month to our favorite places - the library, the post office, the bank and the cemetery by our house.  

 We enjoyed picnics at the property north of us that I have some of my bee hives at this year, and we also enjoyed exploring the area near the property, visiting my cousin's roadside stand and a barn filled with antiques. Both Will's and my parents joined us for picnics at the bee yard too, adding to the feeling of fun.  In the bottom center picture, is my cousin and I, both beekeepers.  Neither of us would have guessed this shared love when we were kids growing up together!

Something that has been on my bucket list for many years is to have a table at a craft show.  This year I signed up for my first show - the Honey Festival in a town about an hour away.  It was a ton of work prepping for it and I learned so many things.  My family was amazingly supportive and helped me from wrapping my yard signs in kraft paper to helping me make hundreds of clay seed bombs in an assembly line fashion to sell along with my yard signs.  The morning of the show Lucy almost made me cry when I confessed that I was nervous.  She told me, "Mom, the hardest part is showing up and you already did that.  No matter what you sell, we will always be proud of you."  This is similar to what I told her and Emma before their dance recital and I have to say that I had no idea that those words would help me too.

My sister in law shared the table with me and sold her lovely embroidered necklaces.  Neither of us sold very much, but Lucy had a bucket of rubber band bracelets that she had made and she sold out!  It was crazy chaotic with six kids six and under between my sister in law and I, but made entirely possible by our wonderfully supportive husbands who kept the kids happy the entire day.  After the show was over, I treated the whole family to ice cream for dinner.  It was an amazing day, despite selling less than I had hoped, and I can hardly believe how lucky I am to have such a supportive husband and kids.

While we were out of town for the honey festival Lucy lost a tooth.  Fortunately we had the inspiration to leave a note on a paper plate in the window of our hotel room so that the tooth fairy still found us.  Lucy lost a total of FOUR teeth this past month and has the cutest little grin now.

Once the Honey Festival was over we enjoyed lots of social visits with friends and family.  I am quite nervous of the look that Lucy and her friend gave me in the bottom right hand picture.

We enjoyed a program put on by our local downtown business development called Outdoor Explorers this past month, where thirty-some participating businesses offered collectible pins upon completion of summery, fun activities.  In the bottom pictures the girls met a fire fighter, made a musical instrument, drew a picture of a butterfly...

 …made sock puppets, found out the name of a favorite statue at the library, made macaroni art and put their hair in a crazy hairdo.  It was a great way to get out to lots of businesses we would have never had on our daily path and it was a fun activity that we did with friends.

We also did tie dye for the first time with friends and had a great time, despite me having green hands for several days afterwards.

I attended a retro themed wedding shower and wore a 1950's apron I had found at an antique store, enjoyed a mini Farmer's Market in our downtown, attended the Lavender Festival with a friend and ran into several more friends while there, and the girls had fun at Fairy Princess Dance camp.

 We enjoyed several birthday parties...

 …and celebrated our 11th wedding anniversary as well.  This past year has not been an easy one for Will and I dealing with Violet's issues, my broken tailbone, homeschooling and Will's crazy work schedule.  Because of this, Will's time off this past month has been an appreciated time for us to reconnect as a family and to just relax and have fun together.  Will and I managed to get out a couple of times without the kids and enjoyed some picnics and bike rides almost as carefree as our days before kids but definitely much, much more appreciated!

Eleven years, one halo and five pairs of shoes later, we are ever so grateful for the life that we have, and for each other too.  If I never check another item off of my bucket list, I will still have accomplished more than I could have ever imagined with my mate in life and my four beautiful children.  Life is tough but life is also good.  The yin, the yang and the metamorphosis.