the honey home

ten months (eldore rex)

Eldore Rex turned ten months on the 19th of September.

I missed his nine-month post, partially because I was sick and partially because he started crawling not long after he turned nine months, and there just wasn’t a whole lot interesting to say about the previous month in comparison.

So that’s our biggest news: all of his efforts reaching for things, getting up on one knee or maybe both, and rocking, rocking, rocking back and forth finally paid off in forward motion. Now there is simply no stopping him. He is into everything–I’m sure you’re shocked–he spends his time busily crawling from cabinet to cabinet and drawer to drawer to find all the things he’s not supposed to touch.

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inconvenient babies

The year was 2017, and Eldore Rex upset the whole thing. From the early Spring when I found out I was pregnant, to the garden I was unable to plant for morning sickness and first trimester fatigue, to the summer activities I could hardly participate in for pain, to the Autumn I barely had thought for as I tried to scrape our lives and routine back together in preparation for a new baby, all ending on that lovely November evening, just a few days before Thanksgiving, when he was born.

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thoughts on baby number five

This post was originally written in November of 2017, and probably never finished because Eldore was born just a few days later. The emotional upheaval did recede with his birth, like I thought it would, and we have enjoyed a lovely nearly-nine-months of having him in our family. 

eldore rex at one month

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the real reward

He was five years old and he could barely contain his disappointment as he stood there, barefoot, in the path between the garden rows. One older brother already had his hands in the dirt, and one little brother was busy making sure his sister wasn’t digging any seeds out of the dirt. I was pulling baby tomato plants out and laying them out to check the spacing. I didn’t look up from my work, but I could see his feet, and I could hear his voice. He has asked what reward there will be for helping with planting, and he’s been told by his father there will be none.

He wasn’t happy with that answer.

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gardeners

I plant seeds in the garden, and then spend the next several days anxiously walking up and down the rows, looking for signs of life.

I am watching for seedlings, but I’m not watching for seedlings, because—as Tolkien observed through his created people, the Elves—the eyes of mankind is always “thinking of something else” , and that “they look at no thing for itself; that if they study it, it is to discover something else […] because it reminds them of some other clearer thing”*; because of the truth of Romans 1:20. I am wandering the garden path, and my mind wanders with it.

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