7 Quick Takes

- 1 -

I've had a gloriously relaxing week. Jake's naps have been long and so have his nights. The garden is growing and the yard is peppered with pink bougainvillea petals. The jacarandas are blooming all over. The promise of a move in the nearish future keeps me from committing to any house projects, or any other projects, or anything at all really except trying to see friends before we skip town forever.  So life has been pretty much entirely comprised of minor housework and Pinterest. 

- 2 - 

Pinterest has an entirely new appeal now that house ownership in the next couple years isn't a pipe dream but a probability. The thought of owning a place and renovating it and decorating it and doing whatever I want to it, literally keeps me awake at night with excitement. It's pretty much all Jacob and I ever talk about.  My recent obsession can basically be summarized by the walls and ceilings of this place.

His recent obsession is along the lines of tiny houses. Tiny as in:

Tiny as in: load it up on your trailer and park it at the sunset.

- 3 -

If you've been reading this blog for a long time now you probably remember that my husband comes from Mennonite stock. Old-order Mennonites. The horse'n'buggy, no electricity, Pennsylvania Dutch type. I haven't written about it much because I keep thinking one of these days I'll do a whole series on it since it is indeed such a big part of Jacob's history. I'd explain the whole situation: how Jacob's dad ran away as a teenager, how Jacob's mom up and moved the kids back when they were in high school for a year, how it's possible to have triple digit cousins, etc, etc. And perhaps I will someday, but I'm always intimidated away by how the road of Jacob's childhood is a forest of relocating and tent-living and gurus and meditation domes because Jacob was raised by a hippy.

- 4 -

I know this because I read through a buzzfeed of 29 Signs You Were Raised by Hippies (Beware any link with "Hippies" in the title will always sport some naked people. Be warned today and everyday after.) and they were all pretty much spot on. I even called to him in the next room while I was reading it and asked:

"Honey, do you know who Buckminster Fuller is?"

And he replied in a deliciously ironic you've-got-to-be-kidding me tone: "Um...yeah..."

- 5 -

So the last two takes got me all kinds of distracted because the REASON I started talking about the Mennonites in the first place was because of the house-buying possibility. Jacob has a dream that involves getting us some land and chartering a bus and bringing all his cousins down for a good old fashioned barn raising.

It will be a party of beards and suspenders and some weird iced "tea" that tastes like peppermint but apparently isn't.

- 6 -

So the Jake-ster has moved into imaginative play. He will call a screw a horse and run it around the coffee table. Meal time ends with him and his crumbs in some type of circus. Everything - including everyone Jake knows - "falls down in the ocean" at least once a day. The kid is going through some type of growth spurt and his appetite has doubled since we got back from Texas. He eats more than me and (consequently) his little sister combined. Eating is great and all, but the diaper situation is out of control: we're talking 3-4 bombs a day, people. TMI? Probably. But this mom has got to mom-vent somewhere. He also answers all his own requests for things: "Oatmeal? Yeah? OK." And nods.

- 7 -

The other day Jake was in the bathroom while his dad was getting out of the shower when I heard him say this:

"Papa's butt...Papa's butt...Papa's BIG butt!"

It pretty much made my life. (And lucky you if you're reading these takes early because I'm almost sure Jacob will make me delete it as soon as he reads the post.)

Now feel free to go back through this post and edit out the overabundance of adverbs and then have an awesome holiday weekend. See you at Jenn's!