The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up

Well. The world continues to turn. And although I haven't continued to blog as frequently as I'd like, I continue to want to blog...

I've been back from Ukraine for two weeks today. Dwelling on the adjustments only confuses me, so I won't. But I like being back, and I'm excited for the future as I look into courses at Kilgore Community College and think about options for work.

Today Ethan and I started reading lessons. He already knows some, but with the topsy-turviness of Mom working, he hasn't practiced in a while. So we worked on sounds for a bit. He's so serious that his subtle humor takes me off guard. It creeps into his eyes under the long lashes when I'm in the middle of an explanation, and then I look up and find him cracking some joke. Which takes me off guard, because I'm being serious too. And then I remember that silliness is a greatly underestimated part of education. Not constant silliness, but a healthy sprinkling to loosen things up a bit.

He wanted to go and build things in the creek. After a year in the Crowe household, the lack of boy around here is absolutely alarming. What? Only one? You need two at least, preferably five...

I am a sad substitute for a boy, but only Ethan and I were home, so we went to the creek to build things.

Since I've been home it's done almost nothing but rain. When I left Ukraine it had been raining, and Dad told me to bring some with me, because they hadn't had rain in weeks. As soon as I arrived home, storm clouds began to gather and within two hours there was a shower. Then we went to Glen Rose, TX for the weekend, where they hadn't had good rain for a month. It rained two days. Incidentally, the evening we got home, it stormed violently at our house again. Dad said he should send me on a world tour :)

Well, yesterday and the night before we had five or six inches. Afterwards, it was so humid out that our windows fogged up. Naturally, the ground couldn't hold it, so our lowland lot became a wetland lot, with an island of sagging vegetable garden and an island of house. The creek, which normally runs at only a few inches, was flooding its ten foot banks for a few hours.

This left a nice scene to be explored this afternoon, and some pleasantly squirchy mud to be tested by feet. The water has gone back to almost normal.

(and here I wanted to insert a few pictures I took, but alas...)

One is of Ethan beside the water with the yellow sun on his tanned back mingled with shade, and the coffee-and-milk creek flowing by. Another is of the two of us, and he is making a face. And the last was of the miniature (3 inch high) hut I made out of reeds woven together. We were the proverbial (parablial???) man who "built his house apon the sand," and Ethan spent as much time repairing his house as he spent building it. He dug his out of the shifty bank. By the time we finished we had had three leaf boat races and a million mosquito bites.