Body Modification

Well, today all three of my daughters got their ears pierced. This was not such a big deal to me, I've had my ears pierced for years and don't feel strongly one way or the other about it. It was a bit of a big deal to my husband (who also had pierced ears, for a while anyway), for whom the whole body modification process seemed to imply an arrival at a certain maturity, which is dubious in the case of most if not all of our offspring. In other words, I said: "sure!" and he said: "uh--". This morning, after he got the treat of telling our seven year old that she was indeed allowed to go with her sisters and get her ears pierced (joy!) the female members of our family loaded ourselves into the van and headed for the local mall where a very frou-frou store (Claires) offers ear piercing services.

Nobody cried. Not even mom.

Waiting

Today is a big day in our house. Today we're going to take out a rock that we've been shrinking and measure it. Way back at the beginning of the school year, we took a one ounce piece of limestone and put it in some vinegar. Apparently over time, the acid in the vinegar will eat away at the soft limestone, and the rock will get smaller. It doesn't look smaller. I'm really hoping that when we weigh and measure it, we will see some difference, because waiting for this experiment to mature has been an exercise in patience over a couple of months. So why did we decide to do this today? The end time of the experiment is completely arbitrary, I have just been wanting to leave it in there nice and long so that we will be sure of seeing some sort of measurable difference. Today is the big day because taking it out and sparking the interest of the kids who have been waiting to see what happens is my way of coping with waiting for Matt to get home from his latest trip to the UK. He's been gone for several days on this trip, certainly long enough for me to see some measurable difference. Not having Matt around means no one constantly running the tea kettle, producing the countless cups of tea that prompt many enjoyable conversations around our house. Somehow it is so much nicer to sit and talk about things with a cuppa something hot in your hand. Not having Matt around means that I have been in charge of teaching all the kids during our sessions of doing school at home. It is very difficult to engage big kids and little kids at the same time, and usually involves letting one group wait while the others get attention. Not having Matt around means a constant feeling of being on duty every minute. I know that feeling of being in charge is multiplied by having kids home all the time, and that if I had them on a school bus to "away school" every day I would have some time to myself. But the way we do it here really depends on two parents being around for the sanity of everyone. So today, after months of waiting for a rock to shrink, we're going to take it out of the mason jar, rinse it off and measure it to see what happened. Meanwhile, I am discovering dimensions of my relationships while waiting for everything to get back to normal around here.

Bunny Love

We are a bunny family. Some families have dogs and cats for pets, we have dogs and cats and bunnies. At one point, after two unexpected (really?) litters of baby bunnies we had fifteen of them. Months and many craigslist ads later we are down to our four standby rabbit friends, Wolf, CT (Cottontail), Hop, and Buttercup.

I don't think often about why we are a bunny family, but lately I had reason to be reminded of all the bunny stories we have enjoyed through the years. First of all, when my eldest child was quite young she was given a green plush rabbit for a toy, which became named Eliezer. I used to make up bedtime stories for my young daughter about a little girl meeting a rabbit named Eliezer in the back yard, and the adventures they would have. Then, of course, there were all the Easter bunnies and Easter bunny stories: the rabbit series by Alan Barker which is now out of print, the book Bunny and Me, featuring a lovely baby in fabulous handknits playing with a lop (what could be better?) and Hop!, a board book featuring, you guessed it: rabbits.

In addition to all the picture books, of course, contributing to our bunny mania may be the tiny fact that as soon as my daughter could read I began shoving my beloved copy of Watership Down at her. She read through it twice before she was ten, and I'm sure she'll revisit it at some point later on down the road. She may not be as much into picture books as she once was, but we're still reading them out loud to her siblings. There's not much better than a good bunny story. Even if it does result in a houseful of rabbits.