The Learning Umbrella

I finally got an email from my husband in Mexico.  He didn’t really try to reach home very hard, but his excuse is that everything was shut down for Sunday and Monday was a National Holiday.  I wish I’d known it was a holiday - maybe I wouldn’t have worried and gotten so upset.
At least […]

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Well, still no call home from the boys in Mexico.  They were going to meet family, so someone would have called me if they didn’t get there?  Right?  I’ve never gone more than a day without talking to Carbon before, and I feel sick to my stomach with worry and missing him.
This is somewhat typical […]

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I dropped my husband and Carbon off at the airport this morning.  They are off to Mexico for a week, staying at my MIL’s vacation home down there.
The house feels waaaaayyy too quiet.  I thought I’d get a bunch of work done, not having the distractions in here.  The plan was to clean the house, […]

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When I was a kid, I was taught the rule that “you never talk about politics or religion at a dinner party”.  That was the way it was for my mom and us kids, but my Dad has never been able to keep his opinions to himself.
Now, my MIL has been a politician at the state […]

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We’ve received a month’s worth of rain in the last day.  Yes - it’s flooding all over the place.  I just saw aerial shots of the town one over from my Mom’s, and I called her to check on her.  She had no idea it was flooding, and she’s gone out to see if the […]

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I actually got a full night’s sleep last night, which is the first time I’ve had that luxury in over four months.  It’s somewhat ironic, because just yesterday I wrote this meditation on sleep in my journal:
In the beginning, sleep must have been so natural.  It must have been like drifting peacefully from rest to […]

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 Carbon has been doing lots of what I call scribble art, and he loves that.  Recently, he made a break through into the realm of representational art - he’s drawn a simple face with a smile, and he painted this painting that he says is of “the night”.  I love that he represented a fairly […]

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The last stop on our summer vacation was Craters of the Moon National Monument.  It was a fun experience for Carbon to learn about lava, with many different types of volcanic rocks and some lava tunnels and caves to climb in.  I just got the film developed - summer and sunshine already seems so long […]

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We’ve recently observed a large jay in our neighborhood, and it looks just like a grey-breasted, or Mexican, jay.  It’s quite large, with a blue head, wings, and tail, and grey/white underparts and a grey back.  It has that jay song, and it is pretty bold.  However, there shouldn’t be any grey-breasted jays this far […]

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On our trip, we stopped at The Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.  They have some really nice dinosaur fossils, but Carbon seemed to find them too abstract and unreal.  He liked the big T Rex out front, from a distance.  Up close for a photo op, he started to […]

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