a few notes about life today

It was a good day today.... while I was making breakfast, Clare was hand-sewing a hem on her nice blue dress. Liam and Sean were having some sort of battle with their bamboo sticks; Paddy was jumping in and out of range like a puppy. Aidan was dancing around happily and lopsidedly, as he does when there are lots of things going on.

It's strange to think that soon Clare and Brendan will be at college, Liam will have finished the "porting" of a game that he is doing for his dad and may be off finding a job, and Sean will probably be at school.

This evening Liam, Brendan, Sean and I went on the trail-walk around the perimeter of our neighborhood -- it takes about an hour at a brisk pace. The boys all had shillelaghs of one sort or another just in case we encountered bears, mountain lions or coyotes, but the only things the sticks were actually used for were occasional jousts with each other or with branches of the nearby trees. When we came home, Clare was playing her guitar in the kitchen.

Sean's last day of football practice is tomorrow and he's looking forward to it. The team, indeed the school, is in transition. Declining enrollment has cost the team some of the core players, kids Sean has played football with since Pop Warner days. Last year's varsity coach has left and tomorrow will bring the decision as to the new coach. Things like that are difficult for a team. Football teams remind me just a bit of the crew on the British ships in the Patrick O'Brian books. They can work hard in the right conditions but morale is key and when that's lost it's hard to get it back.

I have been reading the Mrs Piggle-Wiggle books to Paddy, who has been staying awake way later than a 6 year old ought to be staying up even in the summertime. After I shut the book, his habit is now to read another chapter or two on his own, sometimes telling me what it was about with a couple of verbatim quotations of what people say. Being a social sort, I guess, he is quite tuned in to "quotations" and often re-uses ones that he thinks are unusual or funny.

Kevin and the older kids are watching "The Happening". Hmm... I'm not seeing enough of it to know if it's any good. I think I've already watched enough movies about mysterious cataclysmic plagues anyway.

It took a surprisingly long time to write this out. I guess you can get rusty with journaling just like with everything else! Or maybe hearing shots and shrieks and the like from the area of the TV isn't conducive to narrative : ). But I like having these little moments written down because when I look at them a year later, or two, or three, they evoke so much.