Is the sky still blue?

On Friday, my school was closed and so were the kids', so I took them to a little neighborhood park near downtown Raleigh that we'd never been to before, called Isabella Cannon Park. It was adjacent to the Rose Garden, so we went there too. Of course, Simon just looked for bugs the whole time.

Alice made a dirt slide.

It is hard to overstate how devastated Zac and I are about Trump winning the election. It was good to get out and be distracted by the beauty of nature and to remember that one way or another, the world will go on.

I also take solace from a Japanese children's book I read Alice recently. In it, a poet is tricked by a fox into giving up the rights to his cherry trees to the foxes in exchange for two gold coins (which are really just river stones that have been magically made to look like coins). The next day, after the magic wears off, the poet realizes that he really just has river stones, but instead of being mad, he notices how beautiful the stones are and is inspired to write a beautiful poem.

I don't think we'll find much beauty in Trump's presidency, but it probably won't be as bad as we imagine, and I think that no matter how bad it is, we can always try to focus on the good and beautiful moments. You know how whenever people visit poor countries, they always come back talking about how happy the people are, despite their miserable conditions? We can do that too.