A little bit ago I heard a small slightly worried voice call "Daddy" from the basement. I didn't respond immediately, but the calling became more and more insistent until I had to investigate. I found Sophia, my 2 3/4 year old daughter in our library pointing urgently at a plastic container. Being the clueless father that I am, I said "yes, there's nuts and bolts in there," and proceeded into Ruth's workroom to gain more insight into why Sophia was so enamored of the container.
Ruth recently got a Dora the Explorer pillow kit to make together with Sophia. Sophia, being terribly enamored of both Dora and sewing, could barely contain herself. In fact she couldn't. Ruth was busy for a while and told Sophia that they'd do the kit in a little while, which for a two you old may as well be when hell freezes over. So Sophia ever so discreetly goes to the table, opens the pillow kit, finds the sewing scissors (even though they were quite well hidden) and proceeds to start cutting out the Dora pillow.
We sent a couple days this week up at our cabin helping my dad clear some felled trees. It was good to get out and do some physical work again, I've spent too much time this summer messing around with and recuperating from my surgery. But apparently going much of the summer without hardly putting on my work boots has allowed my feet to soften. I have one good sized blister and one pretty good sore spot on the other foot, but it was worth it.
Ruth and I (esp. me) can be a little lazy, one of the facilitators of said laziness is iChat. We tend to chat rather than get up and go up/down-stairs to talk face-to-face. Sometimes I think this has affected our brains, I want to share a snippet from a chat earlier today, if only because it gives an insight into the environment Sophia is being raised in:
Ruth: every time the computer made a noise for me responding to you Sophia made the same noise at it while reading a book it's hilarious
I’m not really a rancher. Sure, I raise cattle for a living, I brand the calves and ship them away to become hamburgers, steaks, stews, and all of the other myriad of tasty things that beef can become. I fix fence, round-up herds, and spend much of each day “on the range.” But I’m not really a rancher. Please don’t misunderstand I do love my job, most of the time (which is a dam sight better than many people can say).
As long as I can remember every time we get a winter storm I'm regaled with stories of the legendary winter of nineteen-seventy-seven, seventy-eight. This winter is not remembered, as you might imagine, for being the year I was born. Rather, my birth is merely a passing footnote in the saga of one of the worst winters in living memory: "Seventy-Eight, the year you were born, now that was a bad winter." That sort of thing.
Ruth's and my life is slowly turning into a waiting game. It isn't yet Ruth's due date, but we're getting too close to feel like we can go anywhere more than an hour or so away, and we've started carrying the bags and car-seat with us when we go into town, just in case.
