Braley Pond Again

Last week was hard. Not any kind of heart-rendering, soul-searching hard, but the kind of hard where you would give your children away for a good night's sleep. Or even if someone asked (but no one did).

Everyone managed to get sick, along with the rest of the East Coast. Even the laptop crashed. The only truly worrisome one was the laptop. Well, also Gideon (13 mos.), who sounds like he's on the last stages of pneumonia with a good measure of whooping every time he gets a cold. We call him Croupert. Because when you've had little sleep, that's a pretty funny joke.

But now everyone is talking in a permanently whiny voice and finding ways to irritate each other, which means we're on the mend. And yes, the laptop is also up and running.

I'm sure the week would have been much harder had we not visited Braley Pond last Saturday. That few hours of Sunshine and Outdoors readied me for the coming days of dosing and drowsing (them, not me).

Whatcha got there, Ben?

Oh, yes. Kayleen would be proud. And also, ewww.

And while they were catching crawdads (seven in all), Gideon worked on his fishing skills.

He caught a Salem (one in all).

I could just look at this view all day. Everything is so ... kissable.

Jonathan was the first to get sick, but we figured a dose of Vitamin D via sunshine and the babbling brook was probably just what he needed.

Probably the most fun moment for me was when Eden (4) came crying up to us with her net: "Everyone but ME is catching something! I will never catch anything! I can't do it!"

We were busy consoling her with "just keep trying," when she loudly interrupted,

"HEY! I CAUGHT SOMETHING!" And sure enough, squirming at the bottom of her net while she held it and fussed to us a good 20 yards away from the creek, was a little crawdad. The smallest find of the day.

And then this past Saturday, we celebrated semi-recovery with a trip to Augusta Co-op, Tractor Supply and Lowe's. I could just spend hours in Tractor Supply. We cuddled baby bunnies and chicks and drooled over chicken coops and wood stoves and books on gardening.

Lowe's provided the bulbs and flowers, and Ethan provided the window boxes emblazoned with color outside my kitchen windows.

And that was just the pick-up I needed!