Quiet time is precious to me. I love my kids, but I also love that time in the evenings when they are asleep and quiet and I can think.
Before my kids came along, I used to put on music or TV to have some kind of background noise going most of the time. Now, silence is golden.
Although it is also possible that a secondary benefit of quiet during kid-sleeping hours is that I can hear whether someone is calling out for me, having a nightmare, or falling out of bed. Always on alert for that kind of thing, quiet comes in handy. That’s not to say that I don’t watch TV after hours, but if I’m not actively watching something I’ll turn it off.
I wonder what life will be like when the kids grow up and move out. Or even just grow older and not want to talk to me all day long anymore. I will probably complain that it’s too quiet. I’ll probably wish I had these noisy days back, and I’ll turn on the TV as background to keep me company.
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
This week’s challenge is called early bird. We were challenged to wake up early and capture the sunrise.
I kind of cheated with this one. Here is the “sunrise” as I see it from my apartment. I finally see the sun rise over the neighboring building about an hour and fifteen minutes after it actually comes up from the horizon.
I love the idea of getting up early, going outside and photographing the actual sunrise. Maybe one day I’ll do it!
Trying to confirm the name of this. I always thought tulip tree, but it seems those have yellow and orange flowers?
I looked again for blooming trees and found so many different petals. What a dramatic difference in so short a time.
Thursday
The tree that had only one blossom on Thursday had completely opened by Saturday morning.
Saturday
Here’s another before and after.
On Thursday they are just about to open
I like the bee that I happened to catch in this one.
Open on Saturday, with a bee hard at work
Here are some more petals. I wish I could identify these trees. I typically think of the classic cherry blossoms as being pink, but last year I did see some white ones on a farm I visited.
Are they some kind of ornamental apple or cherry tree? They do not produce fruit.
This tree does not produce any fruit so I think it’s an ornamental cherry… Maybe? They look like cherry blossoms.
Possible cherry blossoms. They have a faint sweet scent.
Unfortunately we are supposed to get lots of rain soon. I hope it doesn’t wash all these blossoms away.
Celebrating the pretty petals before they are rained out
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
Took a walk in search of tree blossoms and it seems that most everything in my area is juuust about to bloom. I found this tree that had one flower that was opening.
The next few days should show an explosion of flowers (and pollen). The temperature is supposed to reach up close to 80° and sunny, so that should move spring along. I hope to catch more glimpses of flowering trees, and maybe even take a trip to the garden center to get my balcony garden started.
Here’s to a wonderful, blossom-filled weekend. I hope things are also warm and beautiful for you.
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
For anyone who has heard references to/jokes about the New Jersey Turnpike but have never had the pleasure of driving on it in person, here it is. There was barely any traffic at the time, we were lucky.
Here’s another view of NYC from an observation area of the LSC. The doors were locked (for the winter, I suppose) so I couldn’t go outside. Just had to try to find the cleanest spot on the smudgy windows and hope for the best.
NYC from the LSC
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
I came across this dried plant and noticed several seeds still clinging to the pod after sitting like this all winter long. With spring’s breezes finally starting to whip up, I believe the seeds will not be clinging to their home for long and will soon find themselves afloat.
They may float down to the ground and sprout, surviving as new plants. There’s a good chance they will end up in the pond, where they will be afloat once more, briefly. They may become food for a bird, insect, or other critter. Or they may settle softly in the dirt. No one knows where any of us will end up.
We stopped at a sugar house, during our recent trip through New England, to watch the process of making maple syrup.
An old fashioned can of maple syrup. Nowadays they use plastic bottles.
Syrup makers must wait until the weather conditions are just right to begin. During the transition between winter and spring, there is a sweet spot when the days are warm but the night temperatures get close to or below freezing. It’s at this point, when the sap is running, as they say, that it’s time to make syrup.
Trees are tapped, and sap drips out into buckets or, in more sophisticated operations, into a sap line, which is plastic tubing that runs from a tap down to a collection container. The sap is gathered and then fed through a series of boilers and filters before it is bottled.
Sap is pumped up to the vat near the ceiling, then gravity brings it down through the stages of the evaporation process.
Steam evaporates, perfuming the air with the sweet scent of what is yet to come. No additives, no fillers, just the boiled-down essence of the generous maple trees that is collected during a short window of time each year. Pancakes, French toast, baked goods, rejoice! More syrup is on the way.
Steam rising from boiling sap
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
Last year I received two pots planted with something called a Flower Rocket for Mother’s Day. I had high hopes, initially chronicling the growth of the two pots that would eventually lead to “thousands of blooms,” according to the product’s packaging.
My last entry comes from day 48, when nothing much was happening after 7 weeks. Throughout the summer I got maybe 6-8 flowers. I took some pictures, but apparently wasn’t excited enough to rush inside and blog about it.
A cosmo from my Flower Rocket last year
Here are a couple of those pictures. It seems I couldn’t even be bothered to snap a decent shot of the few flowers that did come.
Some kind of pink flower too. There was a white one as well but the photo is too blurry to identify it.
I suppose these do the job of proving that some flowers happened.
Here’s the maple tree that grew last summer in the Flower Rocket pot. I’m so happy that it survived the winter. I used photos of its tiny, new leaves in my post for Photo101: Scale last month.
Best thing to come out of the Flower Rocket Experiment was the maple tree that happened to grow in the pot.
I had a bad experience with the Flower Rocket, but to be fair to its manufacturers, it’s possible that my balcony doesn’t get enough sunlight. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. I hope that other people have successful rockets flying to the land of “thousands of blooms,” but it didn’t work for me.
I had the strange experience of joining a mom’s group when my first child was a baby. Eager to meet new moms in the area and looking for people to talk to about car seats and sippy cups, I went to a few meetings and playdates.
Within the larger group, there were smaller playgroups that broke off and met more regularly, and I kind of fell into one of those along with several other women who had recently joined. We met at parks and eventually each other’s homes, coming together about once a week to discuss our picky eaters, fussy sleepers, our non-napping, potty-training, preschool-going kids, followed later by our morning sickness, aches and pains, due dates, doctor’s appointments, labor stories, and battles with sibling rivalry.
As this time passed, I realized that these friendships that had seemed so quickly and tightly bonded by all that we had in common, were not progressing. They seemed stalled in the waiting room of mere acquaintances, failing to evolve into something more. This made me feel lonely when we got together. I wondered, “When will we start talking about something besides our kids? When will we start caring about each other’s lives, or even each other’s birthdays? When will we start remembering that we’ve told these same stories before, and then, like friends do, say, ‘Oh, I remember you saying that,’ and then hear the update to that previously listened-to story?”
It seemed to be the same thing over and over, and it made me lonely and bored. It was like meeting each other for the first time, week after week, at a crowded, noisy playdate; all of us talking and none of us listening.
I’ve realized many things since then. Most importantly, and obviously, that just because you happen to procreate around the same time as another person doesn’t mean you are destined to be friends. That first-time moms getting together and sharing the details of common first-time-mom experiences might feel like friendship, but is not quite the same thing as two people who have the same interests in movies, hobbies, shows, food, books, approaches and values in life choosing to spend time together on a regular basis.
I suppose my expectations were too high. It’s embarrassingly obvious now, but at the time I couldn’t figure it out. I wanted them to be my friends, but they became my “mom friends.”
I’m extremely lucky to have a few people in my life who have been my friends since the days before we became parents. Real friends, who will always have something to talk about besides our kids, who will wish me a happy birthday, and who will remember past conversations and pick up the story where we last left off.
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I’m participating in the A to Z Challenge for the month of April. The idea is to post every day, except Sundays, and end up with one post for each letter of the alphabet. It’s a good challenge to help me to blog every day.
Cynthia M Voss 