Witches' Brew!

I have discovered that spending my days with small children has inevitably opened my eyes to magic.  Sometimes these are fleeting sparkling moments when joy overcomes all else and the smiling faces of my children capture my heart and remind me of things all too often lost in the routines, tantrums, and obstacles of life, for instance, moments when a fragile butterfly alights onto the unexpecting yet welcoming fingers of a Dreamer.

But, sometimes, the days are gray and torrential angry rainstorms hide the magic and sadden the spirit. A lonely Caveman who is stuck in a house yearning for the Dreamer to be home instead of off in the first grade develops a thunderous opinion all his own in regard to lightening and unrelenting downpours. It is during and after these moments that one is required to make a bit of magic on their own.

After spending a very long, very dull day indoors as the wind and rain and lightening and thunder crashed and flooded the yard, the Caveman and I fetched the Dreamer from school, and the skies cleared. Puddles, fallen branches, and soft earth decorated the lawn in the aftermath of the angry sky, and we became witches. 

A potion was just waiting to be brewed in the perfect puddle adjacent to our drive, and without delay we picked out our stir staff sticks, developed our hag personas, and set about collecting ingredients for our witches' brew.  Only natural disgarded items were allowed (we decided that witches, although often frightful beings, hold nature in high regard), and we successfully gathered acorns, insect carcasses, feathers, leaves, mud, sticks, rocks, wasp paper nests (unoccupied of course), and more. We attempted to create our own verses and rhymes as we "stirred and mixed our little stew, making a poison witches' brew".

We continued to stir and steep our brew until, alas, it was time to go inside for the evening, but the next morning, the brew had soaked into the mud and our yard had absorbed the magic stew leaving soft damp dirt just perfect for the Caveman's shovel to dig soil, searching for earthworms...