A Very Good Day

What a day! The Taiko drummers were really amazing. The group was made up of fairly young college students, and they put on a great show. They had choreographed moves to complement the phenomenally vigorous drumming; it was a very physical show. Homestead Mama and I were moved and invigorated by the show. The drumming historically was used to intimidate and inspire on the battlefield, and also to synchronize the heartbeats of large groups of people. Pequita was nervous at first - the drums were so loud that you could feel the percussion in your chest - but transformed to fascinated. Monito was - well, see for yourself.
Typical. Months of sleeping through his sister's occasional-to-frequent fussing/screaming have conditioned him, I suppose. Once he woke up, he was pretty interested in the motion.

We spent some time in the science museum afterwards. We haven't been members long enough to have gotten tired of the place, and still run around playing with things under the guise of showing Pequita the exhibits. There is a ball that floats on a jet of air that kept her (and H-Mama) excited for a long while.
We left because I was hungry, and the kids were asleep within a couple miles. We had a nice romantic dinner of takeout Chinese food sitting in the car at 4 pm in the parking lot of Lo.we's. It was actually a lovely snatch of alone time together - ambiance is in the eye of the beholder, clearly. We were at the home store to look into buying new doors that are lead paint-free, and found a good, fairly cheap solid pine door that will work just fine and are cost effective enough to justify the effort - it would take us weeks to strip the paint off the old doors given our amount of free time, and the exposure to toxic stripper makes it hard to do with kids around. We'll spend the time/money to strip the 2 big cabinets we have, but those we can do at our leisure. The doors we need when guests come for Pequita's birthday in October and for Christmas. Our family and friends had to use the bathroom and the guest room with only a curtain for privacy for long enough during the initial renovation, and I don't want to torture them any more than is necessary. (Actually, they should be grateful to have a bathroom with a curtain for a door. We have a good friend who spent many a day here pulling electrical wire, re-shingling our garage roof, and soldering pipes who still whoops with joy each and every time he is able to flush the toilet. Some people have a lasting bad reaction to going to the bathroom in the woods for a few months. In the winter when leaf coverage was scarce and the snow was deep. Go figure.)

Once we returned home, I nursed Monito down and started sorting books that we'll be donating to a local charity sale for which we will receive a tidy little tax write-off. I'm working on not being attached to the things that are cluttering my life, even some of my beloved books. I am keeping only a few fiction favorites, some that I haven't read yet, and all the pertinent reference books we've collected (gardening, farming, woodworking, cooking, etc.) Homestead Mama popped Pequita onto her back in the Ergo carrier and went outside to clear some brush from the yard while daylight was waning. We have a lot of burdock and thistle that are drying out and will be attacking the dogs through the winter, so it is easier to cut them down and burn them now. She came in with a burdock cluster stuck in her hair. I thought it was pretty, like a hibiscus in your hair when you vacation in Hawaii, but Homestead-style and an invasive weed. It was a bear to pull them out, though.