chicken, dog bite, spider family

will you look at this? our city friends own this land and home in the wilds of mendocino and we were lucky enough to go spend time with them over the weekend again. we walked through redwoods and sequoias to the fairy corral, the kids gathered kindling and played many ball sports. we drank a lot of wine and ate delicious meals. it is so beautiful up there. the kids can just move around and make a lot of noise and throw things and we are not all on top of each other. i was sad to leave.

what was not so fantastic was that our little foster dog was attacked pretty badly. our friend's dog picked him up in his teeth and shook him like he was a rabbit. he is healing ok but had to get antibiotics for the big puncture wound. he was already fearful. it is hard being responsible for a tiny dog. maya was right there and i think it was traumatizing for her, too as we all screamed at the big dog and finally his owner had to kick him hard in the head to make him open his jaws..

we hit two libraries today. the first was the portola branch where i went down memory lane remembering my days working at e.r. taylor elementary. this is a sunny working class neighborhood with way less garbage than our hood. i see e.r. taylor has several school gardens going now. the portola library was full of people, kids lined up to play on the computers and lots of garandparents. we went to a separate room so the kids could participate in a storytelling theater type thing. i am always surprised that my son especially is so open to these unknown quantities, but in minutes they were in costumes and part of a spider family, miles as cushion and maya as see trouble, acting out a story from africa "why the moon is up in the sky" with the very talented storyteller sally davis.

later maya and i ventured out to the bernal library. she really really wanted to go because she had heard about this event and that there would be cookies and chickens at the library. she imagined the chickens roaming free, just as she imagined this morning that all the kids in china were sitting in the backseats of their cars listening to the same terrible katy perry song as we were "in their land". a wonderful author-illustrator and 20 year bernal chicken and duck farmer, jane wattenberg, showed us lots of different eggs, let us pet her chickens, read a book, took a wide variety of questions from the audience, and gave away postcards. maya was very impressed with the way the author's clothes matched the cutest chicken's feathers, and i was impressed by her life, making children's books and raising animals right up there at the most beautiful part of bernal hill north.

my kids are getting a good start to learning over the summer. i hope that other kids are too.