Category: Family

Now THAT’s more like it!

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

We had snow last Friday, as I detailed at the time. What did I know then? Today, now — today was a different story. Today we had SNOW.

Now that’s what I’m talkin bout. This is serious snow.

As soon as the city’s slumbering school kids awoke and realized snow was a-fallin,’ the wireless networks were instantly clogged with text messages buzzing with the news. Christopher was immediately invited over to a classmate’s house for sledding, and before long, he was bundled in 27 layers of clothing and equipped with a bright-red plastic sled, acquired a couple years ago when we also had sleddable snowfall.

Sadly, I didn’t get a photo of snowman Christopher. Instead, I present “Jeff.”

Jeff here is the creation of Claire and Trassie, who ventured forth into the approximately 4-inch, extremely wet snowfall that was so perfect for making snowmen that, why, they practically make themselves!

They also have to endure a few indignities, like having rabbit-ears thrust behind their snowy heads. But hey, Jeff’s a stylin’ snowguy, equipped with a baby carrot nose, genuine gravel eyes and mouth — and a vintage scarf from Mother’s Extensive Scarf and Wrap Collection. This one, c. 1984, is festooned with metallic thread and saw service as a waist-wrapped sash in a Flashdance-influenced period of my wardrobe history.

I hope you realize how much courage it took for me to admit that. But on Jeff, now, the scarf looked great, the kids had  a great time making him … and about six hours into his lifespan he was kicked flat and pressed into service as a fort.

The poor guy!

Now as evening approaches and I’ve got a chicken roasting in the oven and cranberry sauce cooling on the stove, my house is filled with good cooking smells and damp outerwear, drying here and there in various bathrooms and over heating vents. Who knows what tomorrow will bring; possibly frozen streets and perilous conditions for morning Mass-driving.

But now I’m snug and warm with Tras and my darling children Claire, Christopher, Trassie … and Jeff. God rest his snowy soul.

I have a theme

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

When you have a blog, there are lots of important things to take into consideration. Whether or not you can write should be high on the priority list, and since I’m somewhat able to string sentences together coherently, I suppose I qualify.

Then there’s this thing called appearance. What image do I want to project to the world? Blogging software allows you to pick many different themes, and none of them inspires me to write War and Peace, particularly. Since it’s already been done, I guess I don’t have anything to worry about. Mostly I’d like the thing to look pleasant, and sunflowers make me happy, so I usually art up whatever I’m doing with plenty of ’em.

So today I changed my theme, and things look different. I can always go back … or choose something else. I mainly would like the photos I take to look gorgeous, though I suppose that’s more up to me than it is to WordPress.

Anyway, this morning I traveled 67.8 miles on foot from the elementary school to the fire station with a teeming horde of kindergarteners.

You have never been anywhere until you’ve walked down a busy thoroughfare, through a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, down a parking lot, and across three lanes of traffic with 47,837 6-year-olds.

They squirm and they wiggle. They tug and they pull. They skip, scatter, and flee and pick up pieces of gunk from the sidewalk. They are utterly charming.

So maybe we only walked six blocks. And maybe there were just 40 of them: two classes’ worth, including the one to which my own little urchin — front row right, in the jean jacket — belongs.

They met the nice fireman. They poked and they prodded him, and asked him penetrating questions like, “why do you have those Christmas decorations over there?” They were in the spirit of Fire Prevention Week, you see.

The walk back to the school was as eventful as the 4,000-mile trek getting there. A highlight: a funnel web, one of the three types of web we’d learned about in our recent spider studies and one as yet unobserved by us.

So if this week I have a theme, it’s that everywhere I go I’m surrounded by spiders — and the sticky hands of kindergarteners.

We never talk

Published on by NouveauSoileau2 Comments

Hi. Remember me?

I know, I know. I never write! It’s just that I’ve been busy — I know, that’s no excuse. We used to be so close! Remember all the good times we used to have, hanging out, talking about cooking and old prints that hung on our dads’ office walls? I know. Those were the days, weren’t they?

I mean, it seems like it was only last September when I threw myself out on the Internet and announced I was A Blogger. Wait. It was last September.

Well, it’s been a busy month or so. I have an excuse. SUMMER has arrived. Things have heated up ’round the old Soileau homestead.

For one thing, vermin have been eating my garden just as fast as I can plant it. I’m feeding several species of darling wild mammals here — mammals who are perfectly capable of supporting themselves, mind you … DO YOU HEAR ME, WILD MAMMALS?

Chipmunks: bah! You are dead to me, you sunflower digging-up little cretins. And bunnies. Bunnies! What could be cuter than bunnies? Well, listen you darling little things, I ain’t having NO MORE OF IT. Quit eating my Dianthus. And stop consuming the sunflower leaves that managed to poke their way skyward, despite the chipmunks. Go be cute elsewhere. There is no feeding trough here. I see plenty of clover out there, ready to become your sustenance. Stop it.

That’s funny. I didn’t know bunnies could chuckle.

And speaking of cute, would you look at this? Trassie is attracting flocks of girls.

Girls are appearing out of the woodwork.

OK, not the woodwork. But definitely from across the greenspace, the lush area behind my house which, I guess, supports an animal population of endless proportions. (Where are the OWLS, I’d like to know? I’m looking for Circle of Life stuff here — and the raptors crap out on me.)

But back to the girls: directly opposite our back yard live The Girlies: Allison, Lauren and Catherine. The first two are 8-year-old twins, the the remainder, a 5-year-old. Trassie likes ’em all. They jump on the trampoline, they eat popcicles. They tramp in and out of the house, gathering up Mario paraphernalia; they fly across the divide to THEIR home, amassing mermaids and stuffed floppy doggies. Piles of socks have appeared on the grass. Sandals and ponytail holders have sprouted on the deck. I’m having flashbacks to Claire’s girliehood.

We’ve also been doing yard work, which involved something I’m calling Prune Surprise.

Tras took the trimmers to the trees along the street which, as trees will do, have been growing and impeding Progress. This Progress is mainly mail delivery. The mailman got tired of fighting the limbs blocking the mailbox and finally one day got medieval on them. I found them twisted and broken — but certainly out of the way of the mailbox. Not wanting to inspire any more violent outbursts on the part of postal personnel, Tras himself went medieval on the very same trees, and ended up with a container full of trimmings. Here, Christopher poses with the container.

But let’s look a little closer.

It appears to have contained something more.

The old Prune Surprise.

Tras asked the rest of us, indivdually, to come outside and take a look at the lawn, and more or less scared the living daylights out of us when the container full of branches began wildly giggling.

If you’ve ever owned and operated a 5-year-old, you know they don’t tire easily. In our case, they don’t appear to tire at all — so the game was just as fresh by the time the last family member was fooled as the first.

So June has arrived and we’re all outside. It’s a light-filled, exciting time – one that leaves precious few moments for the deep introspection and quality philosophizing you’ve come to expect as the hallmark of NouveauSoileau.

Hey! Don’t tell me that’s the bunnies chuckling.

In the high hide

Published on by NouveauSoileau6 Comments

In the movie The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park, something called a High Hide is prominently featured. Because I recall the book by Michael Crichton better than the movie, I’ll describe what I remember from it, not the movie … but if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s this tall platform that animal researchers can use to observe dangerous predators, like lions, in their natural habitats without danger to themselves. They were not designed for dinosaur observation and thus we have forward momentum of the plot.

But at any rate, the term has been on my mind for the last several weeks, as Tras completes his array of high hides in the garage.

Not that we have any predators to observe. We just have a garage with a high ceiling, a vast open space that screams “potential storage area” to my handyman (and pack-rat) husband.

Ok that, wasn’t exactly fair. Yes, he is a pack-rat, but he’s not the only one. When you combine households, as we did six years ago, you get a lot of duplication (and triplication: at one point we had three sets of washers and dryers). That duplication also comes in the form of stuff — he and I both had boxes and boxes of college textbooks, files, and the various flotsam and jetsam of life we couldn’t part with, not to mention  all the paraphernalia, equipment, toys and clutter associated with the children I had then so far produced.

So this was his solution: affix to the high ceiling, and walls, various shelving units which could store all the things that probably would be best off out of the attic (fragile, melty stuff among them) and leave up in the attic what could be stored there (bunk beds, other furniture, suitcases).

It’s an exciting project for me because, in order to affix these various high hides to the garage ceiling,  they had to be bolted to the floor above … a space otherwise known as the attic. And to accomplish the delicate task of finding the right stud to mount [stop: this is a G-rated blog] the bracket to, the attic had to be cleared of most of the things previously stored therein.

So we’ve had some boxes sitting around for a while while this project unfolded. And soon, they will go back into storage. But in the meantime let us celebrate: Tras was justifiably proud of his handiwork, once finished, and couldn’t resist demonstrating its cargo-lifting capabilities with young Trasimond, who enjoyed his trip into the high hide thoroughly. So much so that he couldn’t resist a goofy expression or two.

So now, should any prehistoric creatures threaten, we know we’ve got built-in safety measures already in place. I guess all that storage it can provide was just incidental.

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