Happy birthday baby bro

Ah, now that I'm blogging at work (on shiftingthinking.org) AND working hard on my book, it's harder to show up here. If there were particular things you readers wanted to know about life here, or particular things we wanted to talk together about, it would help to hear them. In the absence of that, here are a couple of stories and pictures, and I'll lead into them with this picture of the brick path I put in the back yard a couple of weeks ago. Pathways and new prospects for our garden...

First is Naomi at netball. We put up a hoop on our new back deck so that she could practice shooting. And she shoots and shoots and shoots. Last week our back corner neighbour, who has a daughter on Naomi's netball team, joked about how he had heard her shooting when he went down to collect the eggs on the corner of their property closest our house. He went back and reported to his daughter, still in bed, that Naomi was practicing. Instantly his daughter was up and shooting in her bathrobe on their deck, while Naomi shot baskets in her bathrobe on ours. At Naomi's first game, she got about 7 goals (=baskets) and had about a 50% shooting success rate. At her second game, she got about 14 and had close to 100% in the first three quarters. Gladwell tells us that practice is everything, and Naomi shooting baskets on the deck bears that out.

Second is my writing shed. The most recent WWOOFERs, who should be back in the US now (write to me and let me know you're safely home, ladies!), became part of the family effortlessly and made lovely changes to the house with their hard work. The best change was the painting of my writing shed, pictured here in all its periwinkle glory (and pre-WWOFERed in the picture above). It makes me happy to use my lovely little space, and it makes me happy to stand in the kitchen, deck, or garden and look at my lovely little space. So far I haven’t done heaps of WRITING in my lovely little space, but the WWOOFERs can’t be faulted for that!

Finally is Mother’s day. Here’s the breakfast Aidan made for me all by himself. I have read stories of women who cry when their kids bring them an unpalatable blend of non-breakfast items, but I’ve never actually BEEN such a woman. This year I came down from a morning workout to find Aidan spreading honey on toast for me. He picked the cherry tomatoes (ripening on our window sill) for colour, the breadstick as a treat (because those are uncommon at our house and we’d served them for dinner the night before), and the toast as the main course. I held him for a long time, tears rolling down my cheeks as I tried to figure out what was so moving about it all. It was his initiative to do something nice for me, the attention he paid to detail (the aesthetics and the food selection), the way he wanted me to be celebrated and happy. All of it done with such love and devotion, with an almost unbearable sweetness of spirit. Ah, the love of a child is shockingly precious.

I close with a picture of an ordinary night with an ordinarily extraordinary sunset. I hope all of you have enjoyed this day, my baby brother’s 21st birthday. I love you, little bro, the first child I ever loved so hard I thought my heart would break with the sheer scale of the love it had to contain. Now you’re taller than me, but my heart has grown to keep up. I hope it was a magical day.