At the library

Libraries are magical places. My childhood library was monumental. We went to the city's main library, simply because it was the closest, but also because it was amazing. There are some advantages to small-town living, one of which is that the children's librarian still recognizes my mother when they see each other in the grocery store. I've lived away from my childhood hometown for 16 years; but I had such a close relationship with my favorite librarian that she still asks after me.

I still have my library card with my 3rd grade signature. I would have one from even younger, but I had to turn it in. The earlier card was made of paper. In 3rd grade the library system switched to barcoding, and I got a plastic library card. There was a rule in the children's room of the library: each patron could check out four books per visit. I made my selections so carefully, knowing how I'd reread those four books for several weeks before I traded them in for new stories.

We now regularly take our small children to the Olney library, and imagine my surprise and horror that there are no limits on books. I would have been so good with telling E to select four books but the lovely librarian on the first day said, "sweetie, pick as many as you'd like!"

Do NOT give instructions like that to my child, for she will hold those words in her heart as Truth. Please and thank you?

So the girls run around making piles of books on the little kid-sized tables until I finally point out that we can not carry anymore. E finds a series that she is currently enjoying, such as Curious George, and tries to gather one of every Curious George on the shelves. (Do you know how many Curious George books there are? No? Many. Many many many. Could someone please give a name to the man with the yellow hat already?) L finds a book that enchants her and tries to take every copy of that same book off the shelf. She truly wants all four copies of Learn Baby Sign Language. Try to replace one, let alone three, and she'll shriek for all to hear: my babies, my babies! as if her offspring have been kidnapped.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. There is no physical way to enforce both
1) Pick as many books as you'd like
and
2) Shh! Quiet voices. We're in a library.

But it's all worthwhile, I remind myself, because I'm providing them The Library Experience. I'm a good mom, see?

Earlier this week, we made our last trip to the library. It closes at the end of the month for a two-year renovation. I know how badly it needs rehabbing; but this is the only library my kids know. It's the one they love and the one that provides the foundation for their sweet library memories.

We'll find another branch to visit, I'm sure.

But it will be bittersweet to spend two years driving past a closed Olney library.

At the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department

We spent the afternoon climbing up and down fire trucks, in and out of an ambulance, and through a medivac helicopter. To a little kid? That's about the coolest thing ever.

Today was the open house at the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department. The fire station down Georgia Avenue that we pass every day without much thought puts on a fantastic annual event. This wasn't our first year visiting, and I'm sure we'll be back.

The kids loved the red firefighter hats and badges they received, as well as the lollipops and coloring books and running through the smoke maze and operating a real fire hose. It was a wonderland of fun for them and they absorbed good safety lessons, perhaps without realizing so.

And for us, the grownups? We spent the afternoon among the rescue workers that keep our community safe, and other happy families enjoying the autumn day. Just another nice feature of living in Olney.

Five good years

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the day we purchased our home in Olney. Five years ago we were living in a townhouse in Gaithersburg, I was pregnant with our first child, and the housing market was at its peak. We knew we wanted to capitalize on the gains in the value of our townhouse to get a single-family home, as well as a little more space and quiet. We wanted to stay in Montgomery County, but we knew we could go anywhere.

We chose Olney.

I remember the moment we pulled into the not-yet-ours driveway to look through the house we now live in. The sun was low in the sky and the whole street looked golden. Two or three families were chatting in the middle of the street, and I remember thinking, what a lovely quiet street. It must receive so little traffic if everyone just gathers in the middle like that.

We walked through the home and thought it might be just want we want. We had one other home in mind, one in Rockville, and every feature in this house was compared in our minds against the Rockville address.

This one had a bigger yard. That one had a bigger bathtub. This one had a longer commute. That one had a more congested neighborhood. This one cost more, but that one needed a lot more work. We walked through the rooms again and again, thinking, is this the one? Which house is right for us?

We walked outside in the summer dusk and one of the adults from the conversation on the street called over to us. "So are you going to be our new neighbors?"

"I don't know," I called back. "Should we be?"

"For this street, you have to have kids!" called a second person, gesturing to the crew on bicycles and scooters and blowing bubbles in the last light.

I pointed to my rounding belly. "Four more months," I called out. "We'll have one soon."

"So buy the house!" yelled a third prospective neighbor. "You'll love it here!"

And we did. The strangers who encouraged the most hope-fueled purchase we've ever made are now our friendly neighbors. We had that first baby and added another two kids and we finished the basement. We took out some tree limbs and we chatted over fence posts and bubbles, now blown by our own babes, floating into sunsets.

There's a house down the hill at the end of our street that's for sale now. If we saw any prospective buyers looking about, I'd tell them:

Buy the house. You'll love it here.

Witnessing the rise of The Purple Octopus

Twice daily we pass the horse farms on Norwood Road. Twice daily my older daughter (age 4) points out to my younger daughter (age 2): "Horsies!" The younger yells each time: "I see the horsies!"

Twice daily we pass the construction on the old Stained Glass Pub building at the corner of 108 and Georgia. Once, I said to the girls: "look at the construction!" With the next passing, I didn't say anything. When we crossed the intersection again the next morning the older one said to me, "Mama, say to us 'look at the construction, girls!'" And so I do, twice daily.

One morning the girls were being silly and instead of yelling "Horsies" on Norwood the older yelled "Sea turtles!" The younger responded, while pointing to the horses: "I see the sea turtles!" If horses could hear my girls they'd have an identity crisis. Their species classification is now reassigned, twice daily.

Now we watch the walls going up for the new Fair Hill Plaza. I told them that the expansion on the corner will be a new restaurant called The Green Turtle. Each day we inspect the progress and (as I've been instructed) twice daily I ask, "How's the construction coming, girls?"

And twice daily they respond, according to their agreed-upon script: "We see the Purple Octopus!"

The nature problem

Though we both work several miles south, when I was pregnant with our first child and we wanted to buy a house we were drawn to Olney. We loved the wide, green yards and imagined our family running through sprinklers in the grass. Now we have three kids and a wide green yard and a sprinkler at the end of the hose line but the yard -- nothing really prepared us for a yard to mean anything more than grass.

I'm a city-raised girl and this nature stuff that accompanies the grass, it's really pushing the limits of my comfort. The squirrels are eating my tomatoes and discarding tomato skins in the kiddie pool and an enormous cicada is trying to commit suicide against the panes of the sliding glass door as I type and the bunny rabbits that my daughters find so adorable, I think they're in cahoots with the squirrels. My strawberry plants are de facto just strawberry-leaf plants and I didn't really feel like sharing.

Where I grew up in New York we had bugs, of course. We had crickets. They were little and they chirped and they stayed in the bushes outside. When we moved to Maryland and found ourselves in the company of  the local enormous-to-us field crickets, we didn't know what they were. We called them jumping spiders for a year. We knew about the property taxes in Olney; we didn't know about all of the nature stuff that would come to us along with our big, green yard.

That obstinate cicada hasn't found its way inside yet but all evening I've been trying to capture a field cricket that's been chirping in the kitchen. We never hung curtains on the kitchen windows because we love the wide, private view of our big, green yard and I use the little brass hooks that once held the cafe curtain rods to store the baby's bibs. Somewhere in one of those bib pockets is a loud and lonely field cricket. Every time I approach he goes stealth quiet and impossible to locate and when I walk away he cheep cheeps again.

So the truth is, as much as I love the look of our big yard so much suburban nature is capable of completely unnerving me. There's a jumping spider singing in the kitchen and I know I'll hear it mocking me when I try to sleep tonight.

At least the grass looks good.