Art Friday with Saffron

Ah, today is one of my favorite days - both kids are at Montessori having Art Friday with their incredible teacher, Saffron. She is as wonderful as her name. And it is the only morning I have when both kids are at school. It is lovely. Sage is napping, the sun has been streaming in our front windows and the house is toasty warm (we have been experiencing probably the finest September I have ever felt), and I have been enjoying a respite from pre-packing to just enjoy. Lovely.

We are down to a little less than five weeks from moving date. Chris and I continue to pare down our household, one file, fabric and food item at a time. Each day we pick something and go through it, usually finding at least some things which we haven't looked at or used in the last two years. We are getting good at the old reduce/reuse/recycle mantra. Our friends are getting loaded with the treasures we cannot justify storing (or carrying on the plane). I've created a few projects to use up those things I just love (like some black ribbon with white polka-dots - who can just give that away?). It is hard work - giving away those little things you love, that you've been moving for years, that you would like to be the kind of person who has used them. But it feels so good to get rid of the guilt associated with those things that each time I look at them I think "man, I shouldn't have bought that/ stored that/ taken that..." We will leave with a lighter load, both practically and emotionally!

We are all dealing with the grieving process of moving from here. And hoping we might be able to return someday. Sterling in particular is very sad, and has the hardest time expressing it. We've been awash in playdates lately, trying to give him as much time with these friends as possible. Siena is sad, but also very excited about the adventure, and riding on the Metro when we get to DC. Sage is very excited that she continues to wake up and see me at every turn (ah, I LOVE this stage). Ironically, our little Canuck is the only one who won't have memories of Canada.

FIVE MONTHS!

Ah, five months old. What a blissful age - sleeping fairly well (at least during the day!), nursing well, smiling and laughing and trying to sit up... does life get better than this? What are we doing at five months? Up at 7 a.m., usually, with our big brother and sister, awake until we are grumpy by 8:30 or 9, sleeping for a bit of a nap (with a favorite softy at our face), up and eating again. Slobbering as much as possible on everything we can possibly gnaw throughout the midday. Playing on a play mat, discovering our feet. Rolling both forward and back and all over the floor and crib. Taking a nice long nap (on a good day) in the afternoon while brother and sister go to school (yea for Mommy!). Loving to be in the front pack, going for walks and watching the leaves flutter in the sky. Laughing at daddy. Sitting up for just a few moments at a time. Taking showers with mommy and staring wide-eyed in the wet. Going to sleep at 7:30 (and still waking up two times a night). What a sweet little pixie.

First Ballet Class...and other accomplishments

This will be our Siena-centric post of the month. Yesterday was a day of celebration - first, Siena has, in her words, "finished sucking my thumb." We had challenged both she and Sterling to start that process (for Sterling it has been a few months, for Siena, we began on her birthday a month ago). It wasn't going anywhere fast, so we decided to offer them a rational deal (what, dealing on a rational level with preschoolers? I think we were in an idealistic moment, but hey, as you will read, it worked with one of them!). "Big Kids" don't suck there thumbs. But "Little Kids" do. Unfortunately, Little Kids don't get to eat any treats (sugar), so as long as our two kids were still sucking their thumbs, there would be no treats. We set two days as the sign post of self-control on the matter - two days with no thumb sucking, and they could celebrate with a special treat (ice cream, of course). It took Siena only five days of trying, and then she made up her mind, and viola! she is weaned of it. Here she is celebrating with an early morning ice cream cone (it never tasted so good!). We are so very PROUD of her!

And in other news, yesterday was also Siena's first ballet class. She was tickled pink - pink leotard, pink slippers, a pink smiley face for her "mark" on the dance floor. The teacher is a wonderful dancer, who understands not only the three to five year old mind and ability, but the parent who just wants ballet to be FUN and not about a dance recital. So today she learned first position, danced slowly and quickly, waved purple ribbons in the air, played dress up and did some coloring. It was a huge success!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Don't know when I'll be back again. But boy, I hate to go.

I guess we should have known, being Americans, that our stay in Canada was not permanent. But I think we never saw moving as a choice to move to Canada, but simply to Bowen Island. Unfortunately, Immigration Canada does actually recognize Bowen Island as part of their world, and that means that we are illegal here. Not terribly, and after so many years in southern California, where "illegal alien" has some pretty concrete connotations, saying it feels strange. But the reality is, we have been allowed to reside and live on Bowen because Chris has a student permit, and he is no longer a student.

There are other reasons too, of course. We are actually American, and being in Canada is a cultural change for us. Not one that we dislike, but one that exists, and there are things which we deal with that make it more difficult than easy (paying taxes in two countries is just one example). We are also very far from our family, which makes all of life more complicated! And, Chris is raring to go in moving to the next stage of his Story Collective/ Piko Fellowship (we are calling it Piko Version 2.0), and with our ability to work in Canada non-existent, that becomes quite difficult.

Needless to say, nothing can really describe how sad we are at making this decision. We not only love the location - the beauty surrounding us, the water and the green and the mountains, the ferry, the isolation and community - but we love the people here. We have friends for life here, people we don't ever want to live away from, much less MOVE away from.

But move we must. The plan is tentative and firm at the same time. We will go trick-or-treating on Halloween - the ultimate Bowen holiday - watch the fabulous island fireworks in the evening, and then catch the last ferry off Bowen. We will cross the border late that night, stay in a hotel in Washington, and fly out from the Seattle Airport on Nov. 1 (hence, leaving on a jet plane). The car is taking its own special cross country trip from Seattle, hopefully not arriving too long after we get there.

And where is there? Temporarily, Washington DC (from the OC to BC to DC is our route, it seems). The vast majority of my family is on the East Coast, and this will allow us all to reconnect and build on our family relationships. The kids will get to know Gramma and Papa Carlos (and great aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc). in a real way, not the hyper environment of a vacation. It will be a time for Chris to work with those he has already met in the DC area, and those he will meet because of them. Our prayer is that this six months (a total estimate) will be a time for us to grow as a family, and to develop his next move strategically. Where will we end up after that? It really is anyone's guess. Thankfully, we don't need to know that today, because I am too busy grieving for our move from this place.

Harvest Moon Rising

Actually, I don't know if it was the "harvest" moon, but it was an amazing moonrise none-the-less. Two nights ago, I lay in bed and watched out our window as an incredibly bright spot appeared on the mountain range across Howe Sound. I wish I had a camera sitting by my bedside. Slowly, the bright dot (which at first I thought was the local ski resort lit up for some reason) grew and grew, and even though it was slow and stately, it took only a few moments, maybe one minute, for the moon to rise up until it was a full moon, balanced on the mountain top. The glow it produced was striking and I just watched in awe. To think we will leave this behind!?

Way Too Behind

Sometimes you just get too far behind. I have a list the length of my arm of blog postings that I have wanted to make. Today I managed to write two of them, but realized that it just isn't practical to think that, one month later, I can write about blueberry picking. I'd like to get to it, because this has become a wonderful family journal for us, and not having some of these posts means a missing memory. But I've got my scrapbooks in front of me, and those tell the stories almost as meaningfully. For now, I will say that I have missed taking the time to write regularly, and hope that, as we have a little more than a month on Bowen, that I'll be able to post things as they happen, and let the past lie. It's the dilemma with something like this - great ideals, not so great follow through. So, here's some grace for myself. Moving on!!

Yard Sale Boy

As we would say in my family, This Boy is a Heinemann! He's got the YARD SALE genes... though in his case it is much less about going to yard sales and getting bargains (that would be my family), but about SELLING and MAKING MONEY (that would be Chris's family!).
So here he is, sitting at his first ever "yard sale" - a small table of his no longer wanted toys, sitting at the end of our driveway with Dad, late afternoon, and too shy to say anything to anyone. Amazingly, he made quite a few sales, and came home shining.

Needless to say, we've had to have more and more sales since then. A few weeks after the first sale, it became about making more money, so we had to add lemonade to the works:

And then, it kept going. People on Bowen are entirely too generous - his 50 cent lemonade was often paid for with loonies or toonies (one or two dollars), and once even a five dollar bill (no, no, keep the change as a tip!). Very generous, though not great on the "Learning Important Life Skills" scale.
Anyway, it all culminated this last weekend when we bought a table at the community yard sale at the local Sun Market. Last sale of the summer. We loaded up all that we could from our own house (everything that we don't want to store or ship)and sat in the rain with about twenty other tables to sell. It was hardly a raging success, but we did sell quite a few things, and in the drippy, chilly rain, Sterling was finally able to say that he was ready to stop selling. Until next season!

The Birthday Girl!

I can't believe she is four already! Such a short time to becoming such a big girl. It was a whirlwind month of celebrations - we began in late July with the special 2-3-4 tea party for Siena Cate and her friends, and then went to Seattle for her birthday (okay, we were going to Seattle anyway, it just made it more "exciting" for the stay in a cheap hotel to be about her birthday and not about our adult plans!), where we visited with our friend Samuel, had dinner at a Mexican restaurant (her request), ice cream, My Little Ponies, the works. Then we had a real birthday party - in the enchanted forest, where fairies and princesses are known to giggle and play. She and two girlfriends (and one boy friend, who I think was very grateful to have Sterling there) made princess crowns, clothespin fairies, ate magic cheese wands, and built fairy houses. It was a great success - and we all had fun watching these little fairy girls flit about. Here is my favorite photo of that day...

Life On Bowen...

Is about to end for us. The last blog was about the four sleeps left until preschool/kindergarten began again. And this one is about the sad, very sad fact that there are only fifty-three sleeps until we move from our island idyll. In fact, that is all I am going to write right now, as that fact alone nearly unglues me. Stay tuned for a fuller update as I pull myself together!

Only Four More Sleeps...

... and school starts again! And that means that at long last blogs will begin again. I have a long list of posts - birthdays have come and gone, summer activities, crafts and kids. I hope to have a rash of blogs coming out next week.

Until then, enjoy this final weekend of summer!