searching for clover

took a friday and saturday night "pause" from the blog (that's 'break' in danish, pronounced 'POW-seh'.. it's also 'pause' in english so you knew what i meant) due to tiredness.  friday evening i definitely hit a wall of tired in the middle of dinner-making and pushed through it and then did movie night (an on again, off again, but lately on again tradition) upstairs in bed (a first) as greg was at a work function and it was just the boys and me, and i worried i'd be super tired by the end of the movie and i just didn't want to deal with the long journey up the stairs to bed with two reluctant travelers.  i figured if we were at least already up there, maybe the stars would align and the final push to sleeptown would be made easy.  as it happened, greg got home before it (it = 'the goonies') was even halfway over (right as they'd gone down the hole under the fireplace and chunk was caught by the fratellis) and he was able to usher them into bed at the end of the movie.  thoughts of a post were resting comfortably on a pillow behind closed eyes.

saturday i hit a wall right around the same time, but with greg home, was able to take a little break.  still, by the end of the evening i didn't have it in me to post.  but i know the bad habit i get into when i stop posting each day.  no matter how little i have to say, if i'm going to say anything here, i seem to have to put something up each day or pretty soon it doesn't happen at all.  which i suppose leads me to ask or at least reflect on why i'm keeping this blog at all... well, an obvious answer is to document our time here (hence the name... which expired about seven months ago).  a less obvious answer is that i enjoy writing, and while i might like to limit the times i write to the times i actually feel like writing something, i realize that it's like anything else and requires actual practice... which is not to say i'm putting in a full and good effort each evening i 'practice' (feeling tired, right before bed) and so, unfortunately, if you've decided you're going to read this on a regular basis, you have to wade through some poorly edited stuff at times (maybe a lot of the time! maybe even tonight!).  so what is my point?  this blog is about as organized as my life right now: what i manage to pull off is inconsistent at best.

and now for some pictures!

henry was home with me friday.  here, we prepped dinner.  he cut most of the cabbage...

a hard worker with a slightly serrated butter knife.  he cut nearly the entire half of the cabbage and i'm sure the only thing that made him stop was that his arm must have gotten tired from the effort...

one thing the boys had their hearts set on was making a chocolate mint cake.  so after henry and i picked up william from school we went home and made it.  but we didn't have any mint flavoring so william put some mint leaves in warm water and after about an hour we added the water to the cake batter.  in the end you couldn't really taste any mint but it was still a really yummy cake.  the next morning henry insisted we get out the firemen candles and sing happy birthday to him...

cake for breakfast.  happy birthday henry, 5 months early.

and it was also a beautiful day, so we all walked to the grocery store...

except when henry was sitting in the burley...

and the goats ran up to us...

and the boys fed them clover flowers...

(and then the camera/phone died.)

and this morning we went to brunch at our friends' house.  here, henry helps greg get the pomegranate seeds loose for the fruit salad...

and though we got caught in the rain on our way there, as you can see, it turned out to be another beautiful day...