Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to my mother (and to all the mothers reading my blog) - a mother of 5 girls. When I was born, my mother already had a 2 yr old and an 11 month old. Having had only one daughter and one son, and knowing how difficult that can be - I cannot imagine having FIVE daughters - and three so close in age!

The poem is by Robert Louis Stevenson and is not actually written to his mother, but to his nurse. But I love the words...and it totally applies to a mother.

To Alison Cunningham
From Her Boy

FOR the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:
For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And grant it, Heaven, that all who read
May find as dear a nurse at need,
And every child who lists my rhyme,
In the bright, fireside, nursery clime,
May hear it in as kind a voice
As made my childish days rejoice!

Two Monkeys in a Tree

This is the little "treehouse" the girl has been working on recently. She has been climbing this tree for quite a few years - it's just the perfect height that it's not too dangerous and is easy enough for her and now for her brother too, to climb.

They decided this morning that the "treehouse" was where lunch needed to be eaten. I was skeptical. I wasn't sure they could rig something up (using no nails) that would be stable enough to hold them both and would be big enough for them to sit on and eat their lunches. I was wrong.

The pail is attached to a string and used to transport things up and down out of the tree.

Robert Louis Stevenson is one of my favorite poets, when it comes to poems dealing with childhood.

Foreign Lands

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.

If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,

To where the road on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson