Living-Deliberately.com

Confirmed any nerd suspicions with that title, didn’t I.

Seriously, check out the link. The library here is FANTASTIC. It’s new for one thing, so it’s shiny and pretty and well designed. Spacious. It has a cafe and no food/drink restrictions so one can browse and sip latte. It’s not a snotty high priced cafe either; the kids can get lollipops and hershey’s kisses and it won’t break thier piggy banks!

Speaking of piggy banks….let me interject here that my daughter is shaping up to be a little shark. Yesterday I heard her hocking her bubble gum to her brothers for a quarter a slice and today she was charging them to get back into her club. “Back into” because they’d gotten kicked out for being “idiots” (watch Napoleon Dynamite for a proper pronunciation of the word ‘idiot’). What’s more concerning? Her jumbo inflated prices or thier willingness to pay? Hmmmm.

Back to the library. Tonight they had an Appalachian String band in the Reading Rotunda. This is the center hall of the library that faces a section of the beautiful Greenbelt park. Huge picture windows offer a panoramic view of the park and the town of Maryville. The string band placed celtic, mountain, and folk music on the guitar, hammered dulicimer, and mandolin. Half the town must have turned out for it because the libary was pretty full: people in rows watching, people hanging out in the cafe, reading in the more than ample allotment of leather armchairs scattered throughout…children dancing in the walkways.

It was a PBS moment.

Did I mention this library also has Interlibrary Loan? Bilingual story time? Chess club, craft days, and workshops for the kids multiple times a week? A huge audio and video section?

It’s an excellent use of tax dollars!

In other news: we’ve got a pyro on our hands. Ange (we sometimes call him that after Celia picked it up from Andy Griffith) was burning a dead bug to see if it would get crispy.

I should back up a bit. New friends of ours have a son who is at….get this… Pig Disection Camp. Such a thing exists! Well Andrew heard the word “disection” and off his little mind went. We don’t have any fetal pigs or frogs to do so he and Celia went off a mad craze today to find bugs. Armed with tweezers and baggies they gathered spiders, beetles, and crickets to um,… disect. How matches became part of the process, I have no idea. But there he was, packing his pipe with a bug and some paper.

Oh, his pipe is a whole ‘nother story. Maybe I’ll tell it some day.

I found them out (burned bug does have a rather distinctive smell) and doused it well. A day in the life with that one I tell ya.

But tonight at the library the two of them filled thier bag with bug and frog books. Ange said, “this is the first time I’ve gotten real books!” (movies being his typical library draw). Will wonders never cease?

Opie, um, I mean Wheaton, swam across the deep end today so he’s feeling very big in his britches and rightly so! As he says, “I just have to work real hard Mom”.

And Rowan is now eating Cheerios in his high chair. I love the cheerio stage…wet, soggy cereal bits lost in his armpits aside, it’s nice to be able to put a “busy” food in front of them when I need them occupied. Unfortunately it also means that every speck on the floor will be consumed anytime we put him down. Then again, in an 1000 sq. foot apartment, there isn’t much floor to be a concern!

We’ve got a full weekend planned, with David’s old friend Scott and family spending thier vacation nearby. We hope to meet at Cades Cove for some hiking. It’s going to be great to see them all again! Andrew has a cub scout fire building time (could the timing BE more perfect?) and Celia and Wheaton have soccer evalutations for team placement. Every day we love it here more.

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