Burrow of DimWhits

This month at Simply Me you will be meeting my family, The DimWhits. I will introduce you to Tallulah, Clyde-Pierre, Wolfgang & Little Hank. I'll start with Hank because he's cute and work my way up thru Tallulah which will be her birthday tribute on the 13th. She has named our house The Burrow. Gaston and I bought this little fixer upper 20 years ago, he intending to fix it, me intending to move to a different one in 2 years and we haven't moved or fixed a damn thing. But here we are, it is what it is and my kids call it home. But then again, they call me Henry, so you can't go by them. My Canadian friend with the French accent always calls my kids the Wild Free Bohemian Gypsy Children with an "Urt Mudder" (Earth Mother) I think that's groovy. :) Somehow we have raised three Bohemian babies & one normal child here, with no yard, an old rusty woodstove & holes in the floor. All survived, no one has yet frozen to death, been bitten by a snake or fallen to their death although there was the time the killer mold under Pierre's bed attacked him & my hardcover edition of Catcher in the Rye he dropped when he fell asleep. The book had to be destroyed, but Pierre survived & cleaned up just fine. There was a while everyone was afraid to take a bath because the hole in front of the tub had gotten too big to jump over when you tried to get out. When I started moving in with my friends, their husbands jumped into action. What I do like about my house is that it is within walking distance of the Shenandoah River & my birdshelf outside my dining room window where I feed the birds. We have been homeschooling/unschooling since our oldest was in second grade. We have a lifelong learning philosophy, learning all the time as opposed to certain hours. This sometimes translates into pianos playing at 2 a.m. and lights burning all night. When Pierre was small a concerned elderly neighbor came to check on us the next morning because his bedroom light had not been on all night so she was worried. This lifestyle has turned out a houseful of readers,artists, actors, musicians, writers, world travelers, gourmets & night owls who can't tie their shoes or balance a checkbook. (Okay, that's mostly mom & dad, the kids are actually turning out to be quite useful) We can converse for an entire day using only movie lines. They have definitely had more freedom than most & artistic expression always takes priority here over schedules. It also means lots of artistic temperaments, emotions running high, drama & mess. One complaint they have is there is never anything to rebel against because at the first show of interest in anything new the whole house immediately kicks into gear to embrace it. No one has yet taken up drawing nudes in fear I may give up wearing clothes as a vote of support. Our home is always full of animals. Tallulah feels her intense fear of birds may come from a cockatiel I had named Fang when she was a baby and some attack ducks I made her ride with in the station wagon. (How do YOU take your ducks to the lake? I didn't know they would get out of the bag!) My kids say I have never taken a picture of just them unless they are holding a dog or cat. Thanks to modern technology & the ability to crop pictures, I can prove this is not true. Once a preacher's wife was sitting on my couch at some homeschool meeting and her eyes are frantically darting back & forth and she sat there twitching and occasionally jerking her head around to look behind her and finally I asked if there was a problem & she squeaked in a small voice, "I never know what's going to pop out at me here!" Later we heard screams from the bathroom when the ferret had squeezed underneath the door and joined her on the toilet. Life is always exciting here. My favorite thing to hear my kids say is "I like us!" Hope you enjoy hanging out here at The Burrow with us & I hope my kids are still speaking to me at the end of the month. Or not. :)