This is today and tomorrow is something else.

Someday in the distant future I may wake up in the morning, and there may not be multiple tiny sweaty smelly bodies snoring and splayed out all over our bed, depositing sand and dirt and noxious fumes as their little chests rise and fall, rise and fall, and someday, I will be grateful to sleep in clean sheets that don’t feel like they were used to transport goats across the country. Someday. But for today, I have to pause at the end and be grateful that today and tomorrow, I will wake up with smelly people enfolded in filthy sheets, and I will be glad for that in the present, and also for hot showers.

24/7 on.

If it is barely past 6am on a Monday, and if you are able to spend three minutes snuggling silently on the couch with your ten-year old son, then you have already been gifted a treat by the universe.

Toddler boy relaxing on the porch by himself.

Letter of the law.

Protocol 37b in our family requires pants, or at minimum, diaper and/or underwear to be worn at meals. In drawing up this mandate, however, I neglected to include kitchen duties and chores. So that is why, if you visit us on a Monday at 6.30am, you may find a three-year old doing dishes wearing a pajama shirt and nothing - nothing - else.

We are raising children to ask questions and discover better ways of doing things so we can learn them too. This might possibly fall into that category. If there’s a loophole and someone finds it, well…we watched Catch Me If You Can recently and saw a criminal turn into an FBI Consultant. Hackers turned security experts. Point is: if there is a hole in my directives and it’s found, then it’s fair to exploit it, and that is why we have people doing dishes without pants. There is some sort of lesson in there.

A million different ways to help.

It is amazing how many different ways there are to spread peanut butter on a piece of toast. Our children are working their way through every combination possible, and that is why we wash approximately 732 knives and have dirty floors every day. Because sometimes peanut butter and crumbs fall onto the floor, and sometimes they are picked up and eaten by a one-year old scavenger, and sometimes they are merely picked up by the bottom of someone’s foot and carried to another room, to await the scavenger. That is how that happens, and it all starts with children helping in the kitchen.

Note: yes, we have very strong immune systems. The previous paragraph might be a clue as to why.

Note sequel: yes, we have strong immune systems, and no, we are not troglodytes who think that having strong immune systems is a substitute for wearing a mask during a pandemic.

Picnic.

We have a bunch of rules, and one of the most important is that we eat outside whenever possible. Honestly, I didn’t feel like eating outside while the temp stretched to 90. But he offered to make lunch - not just lunch, but a picnic lunch. So I said sure, and he slopped together veggie sandwiches and chips, found a spot in the shade, and we made a mess on a blanket under a tree while the sun jeered through the branches and tried to torch us out. Worth it. Everything tastes better outside.

Brokeback mower.

Mower’s broken again. This time it’s the deck. Full replacement needed. In the meantime, I’m trying to put in new flooring in multiple rooms while living with a family of six. So the grass grows.

Old is the new new.

I have stated this often, but nothing gets a child interested in an old toy again than the panicked notion that you might be thinking of sending it along. Not that I was going to get rid of our classic Fisher Price empire, but it had been languishing unused and unloved for a while. So when I embarked on an organizational spree in the midst of supervising and keeping four children alive, suddenly the forgotten became the prized and the unloved became the essential.

Just wait til I dig up my G.I. Joes. Again.

No excuses.

The Olders (10 and 13) are making plans to shoot a movie version of a short skit they’ve written. Or rather, that they’ve mapped out to improvise. Expectations are electric and the joy shooting from their presences as they giggle and argue over points of dialog and technicalities make my heart pump happy blood.

With their permission, perhaps I shall post here when they’re done.

Note: their growing interest in sketch comedy and improv has been helped dramatically by their whirling, twirling dancer of an aunt, Lanessa Long. Go find her. Here you go.

Don’t know what you got until.

I’ve tried to do a few things well over the years. One of them is trying to make it easy to do certain things. Easy to paint or make art. Easy to make music. Easy to toss in swim suits and go find water somewhere.

We’re less than 15 minutes from multiple swim spots on two different rivers, and over the last 14 years we’ve had many mini-treks where we throw stuff in and go hop in a for quick swim. Or sometimes longer one. The important idea is that it’s been accessible and easy. We’ve had Saturday summer afternoons where we’ve had off-the-path swim holes to ourselves.

No more. The pandemic has accelerated everyone’s desire to be outside, and virtually every spot, seven days a week, that we have gone to for years is full, or close to it by mid-morning. I’m not the first to say it, but…insane. I’m not against sharing spaces, as long as it’s safely done during this time, because we’re all tourists at some point somewhere…but it is also frustrating to see the attitudes that can come with out-of-area license plates and visitors who leave trash and garbage all over. Very, very frustrating. I get that a lot of people are looking for places to get cool and relax on a river or lake.

But wherever you go, just please: arrive and depart with a respectful presence. Please.

Tried going down to Cottonwood Beach, a longtime favourite along the Columbia, late on a Monday afternoon. As we pulled around the bend and looked at parking… I said nope. Cars parked and double-parked on both sides, all along all the way down the stretch. People doing exactly what we were trying to do, which you can’t blame them for…but also a total of two people masked up amidst the hordes coming and going. Nope.

So this.

You set up a slip ‘n’ slide, you move a speaker outside so you can play LCD Soundsystem very loud, and you wish you had bought popsicles.

Infant boy rides in a carrier on mom's back while she makes supper

And this.

Your wife celebrates a long day of work by getting home and cranking out a gourmet meal (again) that you eat outside. Because.

She is something.

Blonde three-year old boy eating salad at a farm table outside

Gus and Shawn.

After a long absence, it seemed like the right time to jump back into watching Psych with our olders. The chemistry in season 2 has only gotten stronger, and they pull off the deft balance of character comedy that jams in a lot of laughs, and plot lines that are interesting enough to make you care what happens. In the end though, it’s all about the buddy dynamic between Shawn and Gus, co-founders of the Psych Detective Agency.