Read Yesterday's Post Before You Read This One

If you have not read yesterday's post, it will make no sense to you whatsoever that I shrieked and jumped (yes, literally jumped) when I walked through the sun room doors this morning. Shrieked and jumped and palpitated. If I had been a cat, I would used up all nine lives repeatedly dying at this point.

But if you have read yesterday's post, you will not think it crazy that I was momentarily convinced that a nude door-opening snake had curled itself around my doorstop philodendron.

It took the space of three (extremely elevated) heartbeats before I remembered that last night I had been using this floor as a cutting surface when I reupholstered the seats of the old dining room chairs Boy#3 bought at a garage sale last weekend. I'm not one for cleaning up in-progress, but thought I had gathered up all the scraps when I finished.

Ooops. Guess I missed one.

To apologize to anyone scarred by yesterday's video, I offer up my absolute favorite internet find of the past year or so. Anyone who has had any contact at all with a two-year-old will...well, just watch it for yourself.

I can only hope I'm as imprinted by images of princesses as I was by images of the horrifying door-opening snake.

Surrounded by Wildlife

Exhibit A

Even when school is not in session and we lack student-generated noise and activity across the street at Small College, we do not lack for wildlife at the House on the Corner. Take Exhibit A, which was WITHIN INCHES of my feet as I did my cool-down (ha!) walk around the block yesterday.

IT IS A SNAKESKIN.

I'm sorry for shouting, but did you catch the implication in this statement? Not only is there a skinless snake slithering around my neighborhood, that nude snake is less than a block from WHERE I SLEEP. Oh, heavens. It could be THIS SNAKE:

Is this the most horrifying video you have ever seen? Yes, I thought so, too.

After I saw, shakily photographed, and scurried away from the snakeskin, I went into the backyard to give Our Dog Pepper her breakfast. That's where I saw this:

Exhibit B

Ewwww. Not so horror-producing as a snakeskin, but Exhibit B chronicles (in my signature out-of-focus style) where mulberry-eating birds have snacked upon Our Dog Pepper's food, then left their tips in the form of purple poop.

Our Dog Pepper is now old enough that she just watches the starlings chow themselves into a Purina-induced stupor before they poop and waddle away.

Awww, it's okay, Pepper. You invite your friends over to breakfast any time you want.

We just love living in the middle of a game preserve.

A(nother) Moving Experience

Oh, hi there, people who just Googled "switch plate missing" and found my obviously professional-quality photograph of, well, a switch plate missing. The internet has not led you astray, people.

A MomQueenBee family member is on the move again, and I'm the designated photographer for family moves. In some clans this would mean taking a picture of a person carrying boxes, or a happy relocator holding keys and pointing to a new address on a mailbox, or something of the like.

In our family it means we document every single thing that is amiss in the new digs in hopes that someday the rental deposit will be returned intact.

Hahahahaha! I know! The very idea that someone would get a full rental deposit back is patently absurd, isn't it? Still, we try. So Friday afternoon as we were schlepping boxes of music into Boy#3's new digs I also was snapping pictures of a barely-visible scratch in the new hardwood (It was there when we moved in! Honestly!) and deciding whether available light or flash would best capture the truly horrendously dirty oven.

Don't believe me about the oven?  Look at this:

Oh, you can believe me that before he cooks a single cupcake in that monstrosity it will have been Easy-Off'd within an inch of its life. By his mother. Who is frantically documenting previously-existing damage and  trying to pretend that she's not going to miss this kid when he moves away from home, permanently this time, in a few weeks.

I snap pictures and clean ovens because there is a sense of finality to this move that has not been present in any of the other Boys' moves so far (all of which involved non-permanent education or internship relocations), and I'm just a little verklempt about it.

Please excuse me. I think I need to put my head back in the oven.

Happy Birthday, Boy#1!

Almost 27 years ago. Sunrise, sunset...

Happy birthday, Boy#1!

I'm sorry you're not home with us to celebrate, but in lieu of baking you a cake I have published a baby picture of you on the internet. This is in direct response to your law school classmates who, when I met them last month, specifically requested "more embarrassing baby pictures of Boy#1 in your blog."

It's a gift for everyone!

I'm glad you're my kid--you laugh at my jokes, you keep your brothers in line, and you brought Lovely Girl into our lives. Plus you're still the smartest, coolest, and best-looking.

We'll just forget about that time your intramural basketball team christened itself using a double-entendre term that made me scratch my head and say "Does that mean what I think it means, and if so, why is the school LETTING THEM MAKE T-SHIRTS WITH IT PRINTED ON THEM?"

You're a keeper.

That Hurt

In spite of the sad mouth, this could look worse: I cropped off the saggy neck.

My Saturday wasn't all sunshine and roses, in spite of the cousins and the brotherly love that permeated the day. We stopped at the farm to leave a Father's Day card for my dad, who was becoming a swimming quintuple gold medal winner in the 86-90-year-old division of the Iowa Senior Olympics because he's just that awesome.

I'm sure Dad appreciated the card, but because he lives on a farm and I do not, I forgot to check the doorways for stinging insects and a yellow jacket nailed me on the chin. I repeat: I WAS STUNG. ON THE CHIN. BY A YELLOW JACKET.

It hurt.

Fortunately, my brave brother-in-law (Much Older Sister's chivalrous husband) not only knocked down the yellow jacket nest on the doorframe and sprayed it with something chemical and lethal, he dashed back into the house for a bag of ice the application of which gave immediate relief to my pain and panic.

By the time I reached the House on the Corner my chin was lumpy, red, and swollen, but it did not hurt. The pain didn't set in until I pointed out the lumpy, red, swollen injury to Husband and the Boys.

And they said, "Really? You can't even tell."

Ouch.

A Word of Encouragement for Mothers of Boys

Before our Boys were adults, it often felt as if parenting could be summed up in a single phrase, one I first spoke when they were newborns and repeated endlessly as they grew older.

Leave your brother alone.

We thought we would only need to say this when the inquisitive toddler had to be stopped from pulling up the baby's eyelids "to see if he was asleep," but we were wrong. We hoped we would be able to remove those words from our vocabulary when they reached the age of reason and knew that grabbing someone else's Legos would result in immediate chaos, but we couldn't. We dreamed that empathy and consideration would keep the teenager from slamming doors just because he knew his brother was sleeping but we were still wrong.

There were days when I thought these Boys would always be more Cain and Abel than Band of Brothers: Non-stop bickering and poking invariably  escalated to shouting and shoving. I remembered, though, that my two brothers had experienced much the same dynamic when they were growing up. At one point my mother decided they were fighting so much that they should formalize the arrangement and she handed them boxing gloves with which they whaled away at each other non-stop. When my brothers reached their late teens, though, they inexplicably morphed into best friends, each other's go-to-guy for laughs, advice, and comfort.

The same inexplicable transformation has happened with our Boys. The kids who couldn't be in each other's presence for five minutes without conflict have grown into best friends, and there is nothing (NOTHING!) that warms a mother's heart like the sight of her children enjoying each other. Seeing Boy#2's face at the first sighting of his brother, and watching him vault out of the car and sprint across the parking lot to exuberantly bear-hug Boy#4 when we reached Far Away University a few weeks ago--well, I suddenly had something in my eye.

Saturday night I came home from my cousins' reunion exhausted. It had been a long day of emotions and driving, and I mostly wanted to sit in a stupor and catch up on backlogged episodes of Chopped. But then Boy#3 and Boy#4 decided to go fly kites at the practice field, and Husband looked at me.

"Let's go watch them," he said.

It was a gorgeous evening and as the sun went down, Three's train kite and its 50 tiny kite-lets formed an arch across the sky. The Boys shouted encouragement to each other and ran before the gentle breeze in bare feet.

I wish I could share that moment with you, mothers of boys who are still in the endless bickering-to-shoving do-loop. One of these days your boys will kick out of that loop, and your hearts will soar like a train kite at sunset.

That moment, that one moment, is enough.

Cousins, All Grown Up

The cousins, minus three

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I did not really want to leave the house on Saturday. It's been a strenuous spring (boo-hoo, poor me) and with Husband's surgery on Thursday, I had a good excuse to stay home and plead nursing duties instead of making the trip to my childhood hometown for a family reunion. I wasn't looking forward to the seven hours I'd spend in the car for this meet-up.

But my oldest uncle isn't doing very well, and it was his birthday,  and his daughters had arranged the entire shindig and all I had to do was SHOW UP, for heaven's sake, so I bestirred myself and got in the car.

People, do you have any idea how much I would have hated missing this? In this generation of my father's family are 14 cousins, and 11 of us were there. There were cousins I hadn't seen in 40 years (no, I'm not exaggerating; yes, I'm really, really old) and people came from Virginia, New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Colorado as well as from the far-flung corners of our own state.

It was So. Much. Fun.

Somehow with the passage of time we have become the generation I think of as being my parents' age, and instead of being old and fun-less (as I had imagined they were when I was young) this is a great age to be. We've passed the age of becoming, and we are what we are going to be instead of what we hope to be some day, and we're okay with ourselves. We barely mentioned our jobs; all the conversation was about family and who is living where and how many grandkids and "Do you remember when Grandma..?"

I can sum up the afternoon by relaying a conversation I had with my cousin M. If you look at the picture above, with the cousins artfully arranged in chronological order, you'll see that there was a passel of girl cousins before any boy cousins were born. We played together by the hour, sometimes at their farm and sometimes at ours, but M was generally the ringleader. She was adventuresome and outspoken (and gorgeous) and she had BOTH a horse and a motorcycle. Oh, yeah, M was the real deal.

In recent years we've reconnected on Facebook, but apparently she is not a complete fan of this blog because she's never clicked through the links I add to my profile when I've pushed more blather onto the internet. Saturday she brought her dessert over to the table where Much Older Sister and I were finishing lunch and began to quiz me.

"Just what is this Empty Feathers thing you have going on? Is it some kind of club? Do you meet every single day? Why do you keep talking about it on Facebook?" she pinned me with her older-cousin stare. Much Older Sister began to giggle.

"Uh, no, it's a blog, and I just write about whatever I'm thinking about," I told her.

"Well, good, because I came over here to tell you that your kids are grown up! Get over it! Get a life!"

Then we laughed until we cried, but it was touching as well as funny because she was concerned about me and thought I needed to shape up, and only cousins and siblings can tell you that kind of thing.