Clearly

We’ve enjoyed some rain off and on all week, and you know what that means: CLOUDS! The sky is one of my favorite parts of living here in the Yakima Valley. It’s so wide! And deep! When it’s full of puffy clouds, it seems to go on forever and ever. I told Jeff that’s what I think the fourth dimension looks like—a big skyful of clouds. He has a much better handle on dimensions than me, so he merely chuckled. But the SKY!

These views were taken from our back porch. The view from our west ridge of Grandview is exceedingly fine. On my run this Wednesday, I had to work hard to stay on the wide road because I was so busy cloud-gazing. I love the sky.

On a similar clear, scenic note, I’ve noticed off and on for the past few months that our windows were looking a bit dusty. Today I finally took action with a bottle of Windex and some Bounty paper towels. WOAH, they were dirtier than I thought. It has probably been years since this house has had its windows washed—it was uninhabited for two years before we moved in, for goodness sakes. Plus we have dust storms here every now and then, and the whole exterior of our white house could definitely use a good power-washing. Still, I didn’t know that this much dirt could cling to glass windows so… tenaciously.

After rubbing the inside (!) of one window.

Annnnnd after the outside too…YUCK! I did gouge out an inch or two of dirt from the edges of the window too, but YUCK!

Now I’m enjoying the pleasant, constant surprise of gazing out the window at the clear view, unmarred by a layer of blah. It’s amazing how easy it is to get used to dirty windows. I knew they were dirty, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I could go on—the clean windows metaphor is a juicy one, but I shall resiiisst (think Jaques the crab of Finding Nemo).

The third and final item of bloggyness today (bloggyness=blog business) isn’t really related to poofy clouds and clean windows, but I will slide it in here nonetheless. All winter, Jay talked about starting preschool when he turned four. I decided that we’d do preschool at home, and worked hard to get him excited about that instead of preschool in a school, and he was. For the past few weeks though, he hasn’t really talked about it much. Lo and behold, on his birthday, he said “I’m 4! Now we can do preschool at home!” I wasn’t planning on starting anything till this fall, but how can I deny a bright little sponge of a boy who wants to do SCHOOL and learn every day? Clearly he’s ready now. So today I peeked at Pinterest for some ideas and quickly had to stop because getting ONE idea from that place is like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant, as I’m sure I’ve said before.

Instead, I got out a sheet of white paper and a yardstick and a pencil, pen, and crayons. I drew some handwriting lines and A’s. Then we had our first little preschool. It is all too easy to sound prideful when talking about your own children and their amazingness. Suffice it to say that Jay takes after his intelligent father. He’s understandably a tad clumsy with a pencil, but he made a valiant effort to hold it right and it was pretty cute to see him concentrate on it so carefully. I just hope I’m teaching him the right way! Do I hold my pencil right? I don’t know!

We did some letter tracing and circling and after that Jay said knowledgably, “they have playtime at school too,” so he went and played for 10 minutes, asking me every other minute how much longer school playtime was. Then we did some counting. We lined up all 18 of our hotwheels and counted them a few times together. Then we added the 3 Lego car creations and counted all 21 of them (#15-18 are a little muddled). We had a school potty break (“do they have potty breaks at school, Mommy?”). After that we had story time and Rose went to bed for her nap while Jay and I did our project: we made playdough. Pink and green. It was great spending quality time with my sweet Jay. Home preschool is way more fun than I thought it was going to be! Hopefully we can keep this up—3+ days a week is my goal. I have a feeling Jay will make sure we do.