Last days of the school break

The sun is shining – blue skies with white clouds. The garden is green from the daily rains. I can hear the pool filling with water from the mouth of a concrete fish hanging over the deep end. A nice cool breeze whispers the fronds of the palms. The high branches of the pecan tree bend. Birds as small as humming birds fly among the leaves outside my window. Their wings are iridescent green, and their chests are bright red. I can hear three other birds, bigger ones, whistling and chirping to each other….and Miles humming to himself as he runs down the hallway then calls to the gardener’s son: Panache, I got a cactus!

At the Brookfield produce and gardening shop, he picked out a spiny dark green cactus as tall as his thumb. I got the echevaria sertosa, a pale-green, fuzzy cactus that looks like an open flower and will have orange blossoms.

A slug that I noticed yesterday hanging above the kitchen door is now high on the hallway wall.  It’s really too high to reach, and who wants to climb a ladder and pull a slug off a wall anyway? It’s better than the nest of flat spiders and fleas that infested the Moon Close house where we lived last year. With the rains come the little creatures, but it’s really not so bad – an advantage of elevation.

Mambo, who we adopted as a little kitten in October, has earned his keep, presenting the remains of at least two rats at our front door. We love Mambo, whose high energy and tolerance of playful kids fits well with our family. Have you seen the Olivia books with the little-girl-pig carrying her cat just under the front legs so that his whole body stretches out? This is Eliza who will hold the cat just so…while she is brushing her teeth, for example. If only Mambo would not wake me at 4 a.m. for his early morning snack.

Two more days until school starts. The nearly four-week Christmas holiday has flown by. Apparently having nothing to do all day is just the kind of day that Miles loves. He is singing now and building a tower with his big cardboard bricks in his room. That is not to say that I won’t get a request from him in five minutes for the iPad or a Walking with Dinosaurs dvd. We haven’t been very strict with our restrictions on those things over the holidays.

It’s night now and Miles had a special day with us without his sister around. Eliza is spending the night at Aljosha’s (Jana Lou’s brother) - her first sleepover invitation, and her first time without her parents or brother. Miles drew some wonderful pictures for his “mamy” and “dady,” and then helped David roll out and cut homemade pasta for dinner.