(A picture of Tessa's new pajama pants I fashioned out of an old hippie skirt to show I am not as useless as the following post might lead you to believe).
One of my favorite things to do when I'm feeling restless is rearrange my life somehow. Sometimes it's just a picture here to there, sometimes I take down an entire room of wall paper or sometimes I just swap out the comforters. This trait is genetic and it comes to me from my mother who is an avid, some might say obsessive, re arranger. Her house will look completely different from year to year, season to season even. I grew up in not four different places but probably 50. I loved it, my dad and brothers not so much. I think it sparked my interest in travel, in trying new things and my insistence on change. My childhood bedroom went from sunflowers to floor to ceiling collages to dark song lyrics painted all over in the space of a year. I felt like I could change myself whenever I wanted to, all it took was a little paint or a big shopping spree to SA.
So these days, these long often lonely winter days trapped indoors when I yearn to give away all my second hand clothes and start fresh, when I want to buy a gallon of Athens blue paint and start in on a room the reality hits me, in the impossibility of it all I sulk. I move a bed resentfully. I get the kids to help me organize every single craft supply into separate mason jars. I change which towells go in which bathroom. Honestly, it gets pathetic.
But all I have really wanted to do for a few weeks now is buy a pair of earrings. Seriously, it's a change that small that I've given into. I have exactly in mind what I'm looking for and I want it and the absurd difficulty of that kind of task makes me want it more. This feeling of wanting something just for myself is almost painful, it's so coated in guilt. To buy something, not make it, not craft it with the kids, but buy it. The frivolousness of it all. I feel like a real housewife of Connecticut. Not Vermont because if I was of Vermont I'd be melting down old iron from the torn down barn and welding it to maple leaf inlaid glass to make my own earrings. Nope, I want to go shopping. I don't want a yoga class or to go for a hike in the woods (I do but not with the same kind of obsessive zeal). I want a store to spend money in. (This post has been completely high-jacked by crazy Kirsten, btw.) Not much money mind you. Like $10. Maybe $15 if I go totally crazy.
Hoo. Wow. That was weird. Gotta go. The kids are restless. Craft time!
A collection of proof that these kids are indeed growing up. Thatcher insists upon wearing layers of mismatched clothes, preferably Tessa's. They stand and run on their own outside. Their individualistic nature turning them loose on the world. Tessa found and "saved" a dead mouse the other day. We finally had the dead talk although I'm not sure it phased her that much. A pulse is not necessary when a decapitated rodent is just going to sit in a play bird cage on ice for days anyway. 
