banner day

Posted on September 7, 2022 by marybethrew

This kind human is a sophomore. He spent our labor day hike dispersing dandelion seeds because, “every living thing deserves a chance to grow.” I made a wish on each seed, in similar words, but my wishes were all about him.

Also, today we sign closing papers to buy the dragon house. A long-held dream comes true.

Honorable mentions:

I am halfway through semester three of my program, and still loving every 4am writing session. On a sunny day back in January, I typed one of my essays on Great Grandma Rew’s typewriter and submitted it to a zine called Selkie, and I recently received word that they’ve published it! I will share how to get copies when they become available. My first published essay, hurray! In a zine named for mythical females who zip in and out of sea-suits to live in both realms, on the theme of “disobedience.” Sounds about right!

I started my permanent job in July. I’ve filled out what could be the last round of new hire paperwork, for the last set of changing benefits, and the waves of relief are still washing over me, and I expect that will keep going for some time. Three pay periods in, I went to Kodiak, Alaska, for field work. A new place to fall in love with. (They have otters there!!!)

rock greenling

penpoint gunnel

giant Pacific octopus

humpback!

uh-oh

Salmon for breakfast, and second breakfast.

Sending love to all the mama bears out there with cubs snuggled close and the otter mamas with their pups swimming off and away.

dorkaversary

Posted on June 22, 2017 by marybethrew

there’s a lot of life being lived right now, and not a lot of spare time to write about it, but i couldn’t let today go by without marking its significance. as of today, rich and i have spent 5 and a half years together… and in exactly one month, we will be married!

in a recent dream, i was trying to settle into a college dorm (with my actual college roommates) and all of us had classes at different times so i never saw any of them. when it was time for me to eat i went to the cafeteria and the options were burgers or pizza but they stopped serving just before i got to the counter because they had run out of both. the cafeteria guy was sitting right in front of me eating the very last slice. i went back to my room all mad and pretended to be asleep and rich walked in (completely out of context). i said, “who’s there?” and he said, “it’s the pizza lady!” holding a slice in his hand for me. which is a pretty accurate approximation of what he’d probably say in that kind of situation to convey 1) i solved it, and 2) i’m a goofball.

my honey in the honeysuckle

i’ve been doing a pretty terrible job of collecting moments that exemplify our happy life together in the past month or so, so oddball dreams are what we have to work with.

actually we have been going on so many dates, so i’ve had little time to write (wedding planning and overnight field trips factor in as well…) we go on a date at least once a day, but a lot of times it’s many more than one. often, one date can turn into multiple dates, because we might be heading out to dinner, but rich might take the scenic route, so the drive itself is a date, and then maybe stop and look in on a boat yard, which is its own special date, and then maybe we stop and rent a dvd on the way home… you see how dates can snowball. every day when he gets home from work we meet outside and he asks me if i’ll walk to the mailbox with him. i always say yes, because i love going on dates.

a very early morning date during which he made my coffee for me

it’s good we’re fitting them in now, because it’s only one month until i start wearing nightgowns, start making him only sandwiches for lunch, and stop going on dates. (just kidding! not doing any of those. also don’t expect any bouquet throwing, rice throwing, garter wearing, toasting, cake smooshing, or any other wedding tradition i reserve the right to omit! i am having fun embracing the tradition of not letting the groom see my dress, though, because let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater!)

embracing my ring; rejecting nail polish

it’s not all romance, of course. he’s my partner in everything, sprucing up the yard, taking out the garbage, figuring out the logistics, vacuuming the floors, and providing commentary for kitty behaviors. he’s even my partner in sniffling over songs sung in tribute to johnny and june, one of our relationship icons. but that was another date.

carlene carter ~ lonesome valley

just as we were almost dried up from that one, jewel started singing over the rainbow… she got to the line, “there’s a rainbow highway to be found leading from your windowpane to a place behind the sun just a step beyond the rain.” going down the rainbow highway with this guy makes me very happy. don’t mind all the weeping, that’s just me being 39.

jewel ~ over the rainbow

after the concert date, we took some back roads home, and we took a bathroom break at a historic covered bridge where people have apparently gotten married, judging by the engraved bricks on the walkway. shortly thereafter, we had one more date at beazell memorial forest, which fred and dolores beazell founded (we read the sign telling about their love story). apparently people get married there, too!

we got home and took a walk to the mailbox.

and now it’s the 22^nd, and for my birthday he bought me the 33rd edition of nike air pegasus (the same running shoes i started with in 7^th grade), and today we are celebrating 5.5 years. it’s a glamorous celebration involving kitties on our laps and reheated leftovers, and i am feeling lucky and blessed.

i love you, pizza lady. i am thrilled to spend one more month as your fiance, and look forward to many more dorkaversaries together!

the bee’s knees

Posted on May 7, 2013 by marybethrew

pretending at the park, quinn, who was a fish at the time, climbed out of his fish tank because i said it was time to go, and asked me to wait up. he wanted to hold my hand, and as he grabbed it, he said, “now let’s pretend we are married.”

i played along, curious why he had been thinking about marriage. i asked if he was thinking of the characters in harry potter (we just started the 7^th book, and near the beginning two sets of well-known characters get married), but he said no. i asked him what made him think of it, then, and he replied, “k (a little girl friend of ours) was talking about it. we were pretending to get married when we were playing house. but i can’t get married, because i don’t know the dance.” i hid my smile with some difficulty, and let him know that i think he might not want to get married until he is a little bit older anyway, but that i thought one could actually get married without knowing how to dance at all. in fact i have seen it done. he seemed a bit relieved.

he would still like to marry me (he has told me this before) but i explained once again that we can’t get married but it is okay because i will always be his mama, and he will always be my son, so we will be together forever because of that. i said that one day he might find a partner he wants to marry, but he said, “but if i don’t, i will keep staying with you.” i told him that was fine with me.

i had a dream about our upcoming trip to new york to see my family, and in it, i was walking with my red-headed nephew (whom i have yet to meet) and looking out over the valley at the farms across the way. i was taking pictures with my new camera, because while we walked, although it had been snowing when we started, it turned to rain and i was trying to capture the lightning over these old farms. but my camera was getting wet, and i was getting frustrated. and then suddenly one of the trees near one of the farms in the distance was hit and fell crashing to the ground, taking a power line with it, and it all sort of happened in slow motion, but i knew that no one was hurt and hurried to comfort my nephew, who was scared by the tree (which was of a variety not found in new york; i must have brought it with me from oregon). so i picked him up (he is 2) and then suddenly quinn was there, also needing to be picked up, so i let him climb on my back, and i carried them back to grammy’s house.

quinn on the phone with grammy; taken on my phone camera before the bee’s knees camera came along

(“grammy’s house” is apparently what my nephews call it. i told my mom it is awfully nice of her to let grampy sleep in her house, since grampy’s barn- apparently that is his domain- is not quite as comfortable.)

speaking of my new camera… my mystery man, rich, asked me on a date friday night, and i checked my calendar and made sure i was free. then i told him i would be able to join him for dinner. (actually i still have a hard time remembering not to squeal and jump when he asks me out, and i only attempt to do the aloof calendar check because he does it when i ask him out. all in jest of course.) after i got finished with pilates i did not find him in the library parking lot like i often do, so i called him and, when pressed, he told me he was reading the paper by the park. i had to ask three times before he would answer, so i knew he was being mysterious. and sure enough, when i got out of the library 10 minutes later, he was in the parking lot, holding up my new camera like he was the paparazzi trying to get a photo of me. and people, it is the bee’s knees.

the bee’s knees!

mystery man

it is almost exactly my old camera (a canon eos rebel t3 if you are into those details), but i don’t feel like i have to make some huge commitment to each photo i take, and therefore i am free to take 10 (or 100) different frames of columbine flowers from different angles, playing to my heart’s content. which i spent much of the weekend doing. one of the best birthday presents ever, right up there with playing with dolphins and taking SCUBA lessons (age 15 and 16, respectively). after our date, i pulled off the road at the beach while rich was at the store picking out movies to rent, and took 13 photos of the sunset.

the timing is perfect. everything is in bloom, and my little family of three is off to new york to see my extended family! and take lots of pictures of them, of course. and the blooming things in new york. and any blizzards or lightning we might encounter.

simple poems

Posted on February 21, 2011 by marybethrew

“the rain comes out of the moon’s tummy.” 1-8-11

“i’m the tooth giver” (tooth fairy) 1-28-11

“we should make our own muffin cases soon. (they are just paper)” 1-28-11

his people, in their garden, had an empty muffin wrapper (post-muffin) that he wouldn’t let me compost yet because it was their round garden bed and they were “waiting for muffin season.” 1-28-11

“i decided you could be my milk spinner” 1-30-11

“my dream will be about big sunflowers, trees, rocks, holes in the snow, tracks in the snow.” 1-29-11

“i’m going to dream about sunflowers, trees and snow.” later, adding to his list: “totem poles, bus schedules, maps, buoys, rope, crab traps, fish traps, net…..”

quinn’s twenty-eighth month ~ heffalumps and woozles

Posted on June 23, 2009 by marybethrew

5-24-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

Seal rock, walk to bay front, late nap. Hot dogs and ranch. Then, “my body wants yoburp! I’ll have the blue one, and have the red one at dada’s shop.”

5-25-09

a couple of quinn’s spiral drawings…. i am not making this up!

quinn coloring manic face

noah and quinn bubbles at fm

in dada’s kayak with his paddle

brand new yellow playdough we made yesterday

5-27-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

bubble in back yard.

“dada has his shop and we have our house.”

5-28-09

i’ve got a bunch of boxes packed….. i’m getting there. i cannot wait to be in our new house and just in one place again. i’ve been talking to quinn a lot about the orange house (new house) and how we will bring baby kitty and our play table and our garbage cans…. last night just before bed he climbed on my lap on the couch and i asked if he wanted to talk a little before we go night night? and he said, “yeah do you wanna talk about the orange house?” he is so cute the way he wants/needs to hear stuff over and over again. i know it is how he learns so fast. the fact that he has read the lorax 50000 times is why, when he found 3 empty cat food cans on the floor all with blue labels (they have lots of different colors) he exclaimed “all my LIFE i’ve been searching for…. these blue ones!” (the lorax- ” those trees, those trees, those truffala tree! all my LIFE i’d been searching for trees such as these!”)

5-31-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

long moving day. Yoburp in green chair on new porch. Not more and more often it’s “yogurt”. Also says “wood” now more often than “woob.”

6-1-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

first wake up in the orange house!

6-2-09

the orange house is good. it feels good there. hard to explain. the kitchen needs some help, need drawer handles and some more counter space. but the “earth huggy office” is getting settled in, the bedroom, we have one wall we get to paint and quinn has chosen “geen!” definitively (the opposite wall is purple- yay!) and we’ve slept there two nights now and i think it will be a good place. i still haven’t bathed in that amazing tub, but i did shower last night, good water pressure, one of those nice big round shower heads. if i drove 0.2 miles downhill from my house i’d be in the water!!!!!!!!!

i think it is so much easier now that i have a kid- to find a house that has a good “feel.” i just watch him, when we look at a place, and it is such an amazing indicator of how the place feels. he was so mellow and when we first looked at it with becka, just swept with her broom the whole time. and then when we looked with the landlord, we sat outside with her talking for a while and he just jabbered away about the garbage cans… i knew he felt at home there. i had that same thing when we looked for houses before moving out here to newport, we had stress at the other house we looked at, but then the “green house” he was mellow, and just let me hold him and walk around and look… not that i recommend having a kid JUST so you can find a good house, but i remember living in the house in berkeley (above the guitar store) and i never got that bad feel vibe, but that place had funky mojo.

quinn is doing SO well with the move. he has been angelic, and cute as a button. he woke up this morning, sat up, looked at the bare plywood wall in the bedroom and asked,, ” can i paint geen on the wall mama?” he is so excited to paint it! i am going to order milk paint, and try it out- it’s supposed to be the safest, least toxic kind of paint you can buy, and i’ve been curious how it looks and how it works, so this is a great opportunity to try it out… for future reference in my cabin out in the woods someday.

6-3-09

there was a woodpecker in the tree outside our bedroom window yesterday morning. it is nice at the orange house. 🙂

6-6-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

Saturday drizzzly farmer’s market. Started reading Winnie the Pooh – first three chapters in one sitting!

6-8-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

“I never know when a garbage truck is going to come and pick up me!”

6-9-09

last night i came home from work, and did not have to go and clean the green house anymore, and i just felt so good. i live here now. and yes it’s still crazy messy and some stuff is still in boxes, etc., but we made dough and made pizza and bread, and we read winnie the pooh in the rocking chair, and we have the essentials all moved in…

as for winnie the pooh, we are reading the real chapter book… we are almost done, we just started it on saturday at the FM, and we have read 2 plus chapters every night since reading 3 at the FM… he LOVES it and is devouring it. it’s awesome. we get to the end of 2 chapters, my eyes are closing, and he is like no let’s read more! but i am so excited he has such a great attention span, at least for pooh- it opens up so many new reading opportunities when you get bored with the same old story books.)

quinn is rocking to the indigo girls these days… 🙂

not knowing what one wants…. can be such a source of discontent and horribleness in life, and i think that is why i am SOOOOOOOOOOO talkative about that aspect of my upbringing of quinn, that i think if i am doing one thing right, that is the thing. he is growing up knowing what he wants. and if it happens to be a hot dog and ranch… every night…. then so be it! i will serve it up with gladness in my soul that my son knows wtf he wants and says so!

(added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook) He is blending consonants… two syllable attempts are being made such as crab trap which was tab-tap, is now sounding like “tur-rab tur-rap,” and grapes, which were dapes, are now gur-apes.

6-10-09

naked nudie dinner in (old) backyard- you guessed it, hot dogs. and ranch. (i handed him a strawberry last night and he asked for some ranch to dip it in. sheesh!)

FM in rain pants. eating grapes. (i got more comments on his rain pants than any of my products. best handmedowns ever!)

FM, in the “tent” under my table

i think he really did some maturing during this whole move time and i think between that and me taking fewer and farther between pics for two weeks, it seems magnified how much he has changed in so short a time!

(added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook) Finished Pooh, started House at Pooh Corner.

Osprey/eagle story

Quinn’s story: The osprey was very upset because the eagle was flying around and the osprey thought it might try to take his babies. But then the eagle flew away and the osprey was so happy! Then the eagle went and talked to another osprey to feel better.

“Let’s catch a woozle!” (Sticks hands up, looks expectantly into the air…)

Catching woozles in the bathtub, letting them go back into the sky (red and black and green; green and black and purple and yellow; pink and purple and yellow) “foop a woozle!”

Q asked: “Do you love me, mama?”

6-11-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

Garbage trucks first thing in the morning, with mama!

Sailing after work- four crabs!

Q: “Did you miss me? Did you miss me when I was putting the bait in the crab traps?”

6-12-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

painting the green wall.

6-13-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

pouring rain when we woke up, but dry for the whole market! lots of yoga and running around with noah. seal rock with dada and mama.

“I put the kitty food in your left shoe.” (It was left!)

6-14-09 (added 8-18-2020 from the found notebook)

We’re out of bagels so we ate toast (homemade bread) with butter and honey. I told Quinn we were going to eat honey for breakfast just like Pooh and as I was getting him into his high chair to eat it he dubbed it a “Pooh sandwich.”

6-17-09

quinn is much better, hasn’t puked anymore since yesterday 7am. at 4am he woke up and said “can i wake up?” and i said yes but i’m very tired do you think we could lay back down? and he said “no i gotta get up” and i said what do you want to do “i gotta pyay” (play) so i asked him how he was feeling and he said “i feel a yittle better mama”. he was just done sleeping. but he is still very much exhausted, we “got up” and he laid on the futon in the living room, i brought him his playdough to squish a few anemones, and he ate some more green grapes and drank juice and had a hot dog and ranch (i know…sigh) he hasn’t wanted anymore milk since last night so i am sitting here pumping as i type this. i fell asleep next to him on the futon, and i’m pretty sure he fell back to sleep too, but he may have been lying there awake, i am not sure. i myself am quite exhausted. and of course i stayed up till 11 last night (he went to bed at 7 after a nice bath with me- he just laid there floating with his head on my arm, he was so limp and relaxed.) i cooked myself some yummy pasta with asparagus and fava beans from my veggie box (oh the love of the veggie box!) and then i sewed for 3 hours on those diapers- i am making progress, and my old machine is working great! the one that is already fixed is actually my old one that i got as a present for graduating from sixth grade. 🙂

milk… it’s awesome. i have just been marveling about how he can go one day and be all “i’m over it” and maybe nurse like 5 times in 24 hours, and then the next day be sick and do super long marathon hour-long sessions every couple hours… and then today he’s over it again so i’m pumping. (i haven’t pumped much recently at all, though i do occasionally if i feel the need or am just curious how much i’m producing.) my body seems to respond really readily to “make more, quick!” and not as readily to “make less now, quick!” so i’m glad i’m going the gradual weaning route…

6-22-09

quinn’s dreams… the other day he woke up and was nursing as he usually does, and when he stopped he told me “i was sailing in the green boat with dada and we threw the crab trap in the water splash! and pulled it up to see if there were any crabs in it….” basically his standard crabbing story, that they have been doing a lot recently, but he hadn’t done it the day before, and something made me ask, was that a dream? and he said “yup” and went back to nursing….

this morning the same thing- he paused nursing, said “noah camed upstairs and he was eating my snacks!” something which has never happened, and i knew then, it WAS a dream, so i said it again, was it a dream? Yeah! and as he continued nursing i told him how cool it was that he was dreaming and remembering what he dreamed about, and how it’s like having story time while you’re sleeping. it is SO COOL that he just “knows” that’s what it is, it’s not like we are born knowing the word dream, but he knew what i meant when i asked that.

6-23-09

quinn is much better. he stayed up till 11 with me as per his usual monday night habits. we made muffins, we listened to hum, he ate two hot dogs and 20 strawberries for dinner, he had some of my ice cream (i usually eat it after he goes to bed but i wanted some and knew he wasn’t going to bed ahead of me… he told me “that’s YUMMY” in a very serious voice) i pushed him around on his trike, and we read pooh (re-reading now… he likes the hunting woozles chapter at the moment) and it was a good mama quinn evening. his tum tum is all better and he is perky.

mb

magic & bioluminescence

Tag Archives: dreams

banner day

dorkaversary

the bee’s knees

simple poems

quinn’s twenty-eighth month ~ heffalumps and woozles