The mild month of May
posted in Alaska, Holidays and Festivals, OmegaDotter, Parenting, Weather |I have come to a momentous conclusion:
When telling people when to visit Alaska, I should say, “Come in May.”
Rain? What’s that? Sunshine? Oooh, lots. Greenery? Yup. A few flowers–not as many as later on, but at least there’s no drizzly, chilly, rainy days. It has just been glorious, and I highly recommend it to non-Alaskans as a good way to get to know Alaska.
The dotter tried to do her homework in the hammock this afternoon. First there was the flat-on-her-back approach:
Then there was the sitting-up approach:
It ended up not working. Too many distractions, too much sunshine, the breeze kept blowing her papers around, and then there was the problem that her pencil’s eraser was worn down. Which, of course, meant she couldn’t do her work. Oh, well; it was a fun afternoon anyway.
I might note that this is my hammock, now dangling from my new Pawley Island hammock frame, a Mother’s Day gift from the hubby and the dotter. The hammock was my gift many years ago, and was hung between two trees in the back yard of our house in Small Mountain University Town. Here, however, I was adamant that I needed a frame, rather than putting the hammock between trees; I wanted to be able to grab the sunshine, and anywhere we had two trees properly spaced, we didn’t have sunshine, or else it was right next to the next-door neighbor’s driveway.
The lilac buds are proceeding apace. The one bush is loaded with buds on every branch:
The other two bushes are just beginning to get their leaf buds, but I fully expect them to do just as nicely.
The pasque flower that was a bud last week is now fully open:
My other Mother’s Day gifts were a cake, decorated by the dotter:
And, of course, the obligatory hand-made Mother’s Day card:
Note the nascent cursive writing. She’s not supposed to be doing cursive at school, but is busily producing her own version. This will probably cause problems next year, or whenever they introduce cursive (if they do at all?)…
I would do Deep Thoughts about Mother’s Day, but will just give you the gist: Mom’s day is one of the hardest holidays an infertile woman can cope with. To all my readers who are still struggling with infertility, all I can say is that I hope you, too, will one day be getting the hand-made cards and the gifties made at school. Another Mom’s day thought is that I found myself thinking of OmegaDotter’s birthmother a lot; the girl is so damned amazing and fun (and irritating and whiny) and smart (and capable of doing incredibly silly stuff), and I wonder what her mother is like, and feel sorrowful that she’s missing out on such a cool kid.
Follow-up: Not only did the New York Times quote OmegaMom, but Inside Edition emailed me, wanting to know about flu parties. Since I don’t know diddly about flu parties, I passed the query on to one of my Tweets, who was interested in doing one.
