Feeling oddly...sentimental

It's like I have a lump in my throat and, at the slightest provocation, will tear up and bawl.

It's been all this week, actually. When I dropped Emma off at school on Monday—a gorgeous springy/summery day, the campus in blossom and green—knowing it was finals week and that the school year was almost over, I experienced, really viscerally, a desire to be there, to spend long days with friends and to smell the blossoms, to learn and stretch my wings. I can't tell you how badly I wanted, at that moment, to be fifteen again, with my whole life ahead of me.

It was so odd; because any other moment in my whole life if you'd asked me if I'd want to return to ninth grade, I can't tell you how big and emphatic my NO would be. And yet I loved high school and junior high. I had a great time in school—great friends, great classes. I definitely remember it with fondness, even if I don't want to do it over. Or maybe I do.

So I have my own strong feelings welling up, memories of a really good time; but also, good heavens, I can't believe how fast Emma is growing. She only gets four years of high school, and she's a quarter of the way through! A quarter! It was a mere blink, how quickly that went. Three more blinks, and she goes—she stretches her own wings and flies, and my household is forever altered. I'm thrilled for her, excited, can't wait to see how it goes and where she ends up. I do want her to grow up and I can't wait to see her adult life unfold. But I also want her as a little kid. I want time to stop, to freeze; I want to live in this moment forever and ever, this moment where my children belong to me, and I to them, and we're all together all the time.

So I sit here listening to Seals and Crofts and welling with tears. Even so: it's a good day.

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Now playing: Seals and Crofts - We May Never Pass This Way (Again)
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This is why we wanted an acre of land.

Plenty of places to play. :)

Five of my seven, and three other neighborhood families (4, 4, and 4 kids) are outside playing, and there's plenty of room for all. :)




Through the open windows it's pretty noisy, actually, but in a good way. We haven't had families in the neighborhood much since we moved here, I'm pretty giddy that they've all come.

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Now playing: Iron & Wine - Boy With A Coin
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The town that smelled of lilacs

Lilac has been my favorite scent since I was tiny. My parents didn't have one in our yard, but there was a yard four houses down with a long fence bordered by lilac after lilac bush, probably twenty of them. I loved to huddle on the sidewalk beside those bushes when the lilacs were in bloom. Every good flower smell, ever, I compared to lilacs.

I had no idea (being the horticultural idiot that I am) when we bought this home in July 2000 that one of my bushes was a lilac. I had that delightful surprise the following spring. It's a white lilac (and I prefer the, well, lilac colored ones, in terms of color) but it smells just as sweet, and it is conveniently located right outside my schoolroom window. And it's in bloom.

This is doubly exciting, because last year we didn't get any blooms on ours at all; we'd pruned the bush too late in the year, and lilacs form their blooms for the following year in late summer. But the wonderful thing about Fairview is that everyone has lilacs. Our next-door neighbors on both sides have them, planted right on the fenceline too! They're everywhere. For the next week or two our entire town will smell of lilacs. I wish I could embed the smell (which the breeze keeps sending through my open window) to share.

Christian and I got all our hoses and sprinklers out and running this morning. It was a wettish early spring (yay!) but we haven't had any rain in weeks and the grass is drying out. Time to be a responsible homeowner. But my reward for that hour of work? Walking by the lilac tree repeatedly. :)

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Now playing: Laura Pausini - Primavera Anticipada (It Is My Song) [Duet With James Blunt]
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Odds and ends — boring little life :)

(1) One more week of school. SQUEE!

(2) And then we start summer school. (Still a little curriculum to wrap up.) But Emma will be home, our schedule will change, and somehow it's all different with that word summer on the front there.

(3) Am refinancing the house. Again. (Third time's a charm?) Just refinanced in February and got 5.25%, which rate I also locked in today. But I'm getting cash out. Renovations here we come!

(4) We're going to have plenty of projects to do this summer.

• "Master" bathroom redone from subfloor up.
  
• Kid bathroom completely rearranged and redone, so what is now a tub-only will be a tub/shower. There's not a good way to make that bathroom really functional due to awkward construction, but at least we can make it a place for showers.
  
• Addition of new bathroom in downstairs. Nine people, three bathrooms, that's a pretty good ratio.
  
• New, non-carpet kitchen floor.
  
• Window in Emma's room, to make it a legal bedroom and, hey, let in light and air.
  
• Can't afford a new kitchen, but I'm going to paint all the dark cabinetry and walls and make it look bright.

(5) But none of my contractors have given me a bid yet. SIX WEEKS. Outrageous. I don't care. I'll do it myself! To heck with 'em.

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Now playing: Missy Higgins - Peachy
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The Ls go to Town

We had a fabulous day yesterday. This is my first week without a calling or a Sunday responsibility in 9+ years because I've always been plucked from one calling directly into another. So since we were open, we took a day off church o_O and drove our crew of nine to Salt Lake City to visit Temple Square. I had no idea where to park—the city is all torn up and being rebuilt around Temple Square, and I thought the only available nearby parking was outrageously expensive—so we parked about ten blocks away in a random free parking lot and caught Trax (the in-city train system) to Temple Square. Trax, as you can imagine, was just as much an attraction to the kiddles as everything else was.

Our family of nine (paired off, bigger ones holding the hands of little ones) marching through the city to catch the train was just as much a spectacle for all the city dwellers and they were for us. Ahaha country folk are so easily amused!

The flowers were gorgeous and the ornamental cherries were just beginning to blossom. It was almost like ohanami.






We went to the Visitors Center and saw films and displays and it was pretty darn churchy. I think we all had a wonderful day. We had dinner with my sister Joan's family and my parents, a lovely sit-around-the-table for the grownups while the children frolicked and romped. It almost made me wish we could skip church every week.

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Now playing: Finger Eleven - Paralyzer
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