It is 5am and I'm too excited to sleep

My wunderkind come home today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My mind is racing with all the stuff I want to do with them. I want to go for a car ride with the Arch Angel WHO HAS HIS LICENSE!!!! I want to draw bionicle storyboards with Dark Mirror. I want to cuddle up and read Ronia The Robber's Daughter with Nature Girl, I want to collect rocks with Wild Thing. I want to feed them peewee eggs and make XUP's veggie burgers for the bbq with them, and play charades in the dusk. I want to paint Nature Girl's room robin's egg blue and plug in her bird call clock. I want to set up the tent in the backyard and listen to them giggling in the dark. I want to tuck them in at night and say our prayers. I want to wash their clothes, and remind them not to stand in the fridge door while they decide on a snack.

But first I will wrap my arms around them and give them each a huge hug, look deep into their beautiful eyes and tell them how much I love them. Then I will sniff them all over like some primal mama. I have so missed their smell!

I'm back in body...

but my spirit is kind of scattered about the ether right now.

Chiron East was wow, amazing, enlightening, deepening, nourishing, all great and wonderful stuff and Inwill post a whole lot more in a few days time.

While I was dropping the kids off in Ottawa (which went really well at the airport) Sprout and I crashed the Fringe Festival blogger wine and cheese with Zoom ... Greenpa, has competition I have a new crush - Milan from a Sibilant Intake of Breathe. Sprout got rowdy and threw brie and strawberries.

I spent an afternoon with Dark Mirror, and had my heart stomped on when I went to pick him up - poor Nature Girl and Wild Thing were down with a stomach flu bug and Wild Thing fell apart when I had to leave him there.

Went to Chiron and got some sage advice on being the pillar of strength I need to be for my littles during this sort of developmentally inappropriate separation.

Came home, called the kids and my sunny, strong, independant Nature Girl broke down sobbing that she wanted me to pick her up!

I spoke with Dark Mirror and told him I was afraid to talk to Wild Thing in case I upset him even more.

What do you think, should I be calling once a week or not? Will it mae it harder on them, or am I making excuses for how hard it is on me?

I'm exhausted, of to bed and tomorrow I'll clean and maybe blog but definitely take pictures of all the flowers that came out since I left!

Wild Thing has some spiffy new orange shorts

They fit great and his butt is always covered!

Frenchy's comes through again!

The brand you ask? Carters.

The size? 3 MONTHS - as in 8-16 POUNDS!!!!

MY ALMOST 4 YEAR OLD BOY IS WEARING NEWBORN INFANT PANTS AS SHORTS!!!!

Our other favorite pair of pedal pusher length pants are a size 18 months.

Lets give a WOOT WOOT for getting out of diapers!

I've been missing elements of our old property in Quebec...

I was missing our woods...

Wild Thing was asking when we could get him more sand. He had a roughly 40 ft in diameter DEEP - like dug out with a backhoe sand box edged with boulders and logs with swings and a two storey playhouse at our old house.

This is what he's excavating now.

We do have a lovely story circle here though

We're appeasing the neighbours with a mowed lawn out front...

But I'm cultivating a natural meadow in the backyard...

I think it might be too late to get a garden in this year, and we have a huge job in the fence this summer. But next year...oh boy! I'm getting out a book on food not lawns and planning what we can do already.

My house is a mess right now

I'm trying to fit too much one on one kid time into a week and being totally child centred has led to that state of entrophy that consumes so many homes with kids.

My house it not healthy right now.

Mess is NOT creative. It really isn't - well organized displayed stuff can be creative, but if it doesn't have a place it is clutter, and if it has a place but hasn't been returned to it it is a MESS. Messes are disharmonizing. It stresses us out and frankly for me and mine, it symbolizes brain chaos too. It symbolizes fear, and anxiety, and losing our centre and then it feeds those things.

A healthy home life involves the full circle of any activity.

You do something like make a meal, get the kids to wash their hands, set the table, give thanks for the food, eat together, clear the table, wash the table, do the dishes, and the next time you come to make a meal it is a calm centred activity again. If you break the circle by not clearing the table or not washing the table or not getting to the dishes when you come to start the circle again the primary task of making the meal becomes a harried production because you don't have space, clean tools, etc. You start dropping things to fit in the essentials and usually that means you drop the kids helping because it takes too long or requires some supervision and you're too busy for that in that moment. Then you feel resentful that the kids don't help out automatically. If you are so harried that you can't set the circle right in that cycle then it just compounds and you have total chaos on your hands.

We HAVE to feed our kids every day so the mealtime circle usually keeps rolling along however wobbily.

What about things like artmaking and handcrafting though?

The painting circle requires that clean table, then you put down the painting boards, mix the paint, set a tray to soak your paper, put the paper and paint in front of each child then hand out the paintbrushes last. At last you paint. You remove the boards so the paintings can dry. You wash the brushes, little fingers and the table. You put away the paints. After the paintings dry you wipe down and put away the boards. All ready for next time. If you come back to paint and you've missed steps in walking the circle how likely are you to do the extra work to keep that circle spinning? Its the same with knitting, embroidery, papermaking, woodworking, what have you.

So today we're spending the afternoon cleaning up the mess, together. Tomorrow we will paint.

The perfect treat, one no one else in the house can stand!

Wolfville is home to http://www.justuscoffee.com/, a really cool Fair Trade Co-op. Along with amazing coffees, teas, and chocolate, they have recently started to make really great organic, fairly traded hot chocolate mix. My favorite is the Spicy Mexican blend. It has hot peppers in it along with cardamon, cloves , nutmeg, cinnamon and big chunks of milk chocolate.

Everyone else is disgusted by it, so my bag of it will last and last.

And here's a funny story, at least it seems funny now...

I went to get hot chocolate with the kids the other day and forgot my wallet! I realized this outside the Just Us! Cafe. I was drooling the whole 3 km walk. So I went to the post office instead, and as soon as I stepped inside the warm post office I started having a massive asthma attack (which the hot chocolate would have helped alleviate, might be why I was craving it, for the cayenne and caffeine.)

I had planned to drop into our new medical coop with the releases to have our files transferred, but decided IN A MEDICAL EMERGENCY that instead of walking 500 metres to the doctor's office, I'd walk the 3 km home UPHILL to get my puffer. I made it halfway and a student passing by flagged down another student who drove me home - sans stroller (I ditched it in someones yard) - and I found my puffer was empty - so I ATE SOME COFFEE GROUNDS for the caffeine, and called Papa Pan, who was done work but still an hour away. When he got home I went to the clinic and got a new puffer.

Subsequently, we now have spicy hot chocolate mix at home. The kids may never want to go get hot chocolate with me ever again!