Here comes Velvet after a romp in the forest and a good roll in the Oregon red mud. (Her face shows her color.) Ah winter, don’t you just love it?
Here is a clean baby, my grandson, (two weeks old) too young to track in the mud. Give him time. “Tuned mass damper,” says my three year old grandson as he stacks a tower of blocks on the coffee table.
“Tuned mass damper?” I ask. “What is that?” You know how it is with a three-year old. Sometimes the words come through, sometimes they don’t.
His tower has a wedge shaped block on top. “I’m building a skyscraper with a tuned mass damper,” he tells me.
His mother, holding Baby D, explains. These days they are building skyscrapers of materials so light that the buildings sway in the wind and that gives people motion sickness. Architects came up with an ingenious idea. If you place a huge block of cement on the top of these buildings it holds down the building and stops the sway. That block is called a tuned mass damper.
I do believe I am in for it with two grandsons…
I suppose someone looking for a horse site will wonder what a baby is doing on it. Well, I called this blog Life’s Twists and Turns, and since we never know what lies beyond the next turning of the canyon walls, my newest find is a baby. Besides some people are saying, “Keep me posted,” meaning they want to hear about Baby D.
Baby D lost weight after birth, normal, but his was a little more than the Pediatrician liked, so right now it is a feeding circus around here. He is healthy, happy, vigorous, a perfect angel, and while he dropped weight, he grew an inch—preparing to be a runner I think. Luckily he had packed in the groceries before birth preparing for life outside the bubble.
I need to decide how often I will post a blog. Let’s see the last one was posted 7 days ago. A week, can I do one a week? Maybe I ought to say one every two weeks just to give myself leeway.
Regarding the horses, I am waiting for the paddock to dry enough so I can work Velvet and Sierra without losing a boot, a foot, or a leg in the mud. I’ve been reticent about working much with the horses, guess I scared myself after my fall last year, and didn’t want to kill myself before Baby D arrived. When I got young horses I thought I would have to live to see them into old age. Now with young grandsons, I need to see the boys they will become, I need to hear those wonderful truths kids skillfully throw out with such abandon, I need to see them graduate from high school, from college, and I need to see whatever it was that they came here to do…
"People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live... [We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born." - Albert Einstein in a letter to Otto Juliusburger
