Growing Versions

I published my first post on this blog on November 30, 2011. It has been fun. I'm still enjoying checking where hits come from, Saudia Arabia, Malaysia, Sweden, Russia, Brazil...I'm still having fun letting my brain hang open to ideas from the trees, from my growing kids and from all the places I had never thought of before. When I don't write I miss it and when I do write, I start to feel like myself again. Right away I started to realize that that had been a hole that needed filling. I chose to start blogging because I needed an outlet to express myself, I had only tinkered with public, creative outlets for the past 15 years, and I felt the need to create a venue. I am learning and seeing and noticing new things each new day by doing this, things that I hadn't had a space to explore for a very long while.  In fact, my focus on my kids and the process of raising them and the creative terrain of childhood is interesting to me because in many respects I feel like ...

Beads on a string. Hours in a lot of whiles ago. Drops on my head. Syllables in a sentence.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning.  The end is where we start from. T.S. Eliot

Last night, as my son's restlessness and resistance to sleep intensified, I suggested "a talk".  Knowing that part of his challenge with falling asleep is letting go of the day and connection, I figured a talk would comfort him. He responded: "Well, we could talk about the problems for me at my old daycare." Me: "Okay, if you like." He changed his mind, "Or, we could talk about imagining things." Me: "That sounds like a great idea. You go first." "Carrots can talk to each other in the earth." "Monkeys can be camouflaged." "Geckos do not like to be touched but they like someone to talk to them." "Birds have special powers." "Okay, mom, it's your turn."

Last night we celebrated Thanksgiving. No we are not American, but for the first time ever, it felt like a perfectly normal time to celebrate this holiday and celebrate the first flurry fall.  My daughter helped my husband make the supper and she also took great care to decorate for the event.  We moved the table into the living room and fancied things up.  It was everything a fancy dinner should be: delicious, candlelit, eaten in pyjamas and full of conversations about all the other fancy meals we've had.  Last Christmas we braved eating duck and the kids had great fun thinking up other options: sushi, geese (plural), bear and moose and cow.    

I came across this article about  Untranslatable words  by Lauren McKay in Urban Times awhile back and the term that spoke to me the most was the Japanese term Mono No Aware*. This term, according to McKay relates to "the bitter sweetness of transience, and a sadness for the passing of things." I'm not a fan of endings. I definitely have a melancholy bent. I hate when books end. I cling to stages my kids are in long after they themselves have abandoned them (i.e. what? no more sippy cups (and breastfeeding before that)?, come on guys). I prolong saying goodbye in many different ways. I hold on to memorabilia, like ticket stubs and cat hair (okay, not anymore) and old letters.   I leave my Christmas ornaments up way too long and agonize over little changes (haircuts and throwing out my daughter's school work) and much bigger ones (moving house and swapping jobs) with almost the same measure. Beginnings I can do. I start lots of things on a regular basis. I star...

How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.-John Burroughs

Yesterday, I mentioned that I have not bothered to match my own socks for a long while.  Truly this has been a problem  for years. There have been spells when I have managed to get myself temporarily on track and, for a 2-3 week stretch, I match.  I still remember being mildly shocked to realize that people notice this sort of thing, when at my first professional job it became a running joke at my expense.  I simply did not (do not) pay attention to matching socks.    When it comes to my kids though, there is more angst involved.  I feel more responsibility to make sure they match.  However, I really feel like I'm working up hill most of the time.  The worn old joke about wondering why only single socks come out of the wash when a slew of pairs went in wears on me.  I am constantly tracking down mittens and socks and matching them up.  On really bad matching days, I literally contemplate sending kids with socks on their hand...

It is way to cliche to complain about being busy.  I am busy because I am privileged to have a job (which I like) and two healthy active kids (who I like).  However, these past couple of years have been strenuous.  I concede that I have taken certain (i.e. hundreds of) shortcuts to make things easier. Most of these shortcuts I am at peace with, (no vacuuming,wearing unmatched socks on a regular basis, not insisting on nightly baths and no homemade bread ...well, um, that never happened anyway).  There are hundreds of these shortened steps, I am sure, that I have gradually succumbed to accepting.  However, one of the shortcuts I am not so happy about has been cutting out baking and cutting down on cooking from scratch.  Cooking from scratch still happens but lots of shortcuts have been thrown into the mix which have also short changed  my joy doing it. In the process of saving time (initially to keep the impatient pleas from kids to a dull roar), I...

 I had an awesome (and these days all too rare an) opportunity to read to a little toddler this weekend.  Along with smelling great and being adorable, he was quite the little reader.  He pointed out all the puppies and babies on all the pages and requested each book be read 3-4 times over.  It was a delightful experience and reminded me how my own kids went from touching the page (sometimes chewing) on the page, to trying to pry the characters right off of the pages to slowly slowly, step by hundreds and hundreds of miniature step, begin to follow along. My daughter has always been very independent when it comes to reading and has disappointed quite a number of adults in her life when she insisted on taking over the reading duties from a young age--depriving us of snatching those little hair-smelling-kisses that come along with reading to a child.  (We still sneak them in).  Sitting on a lap and patiently listening to a story be read to her is just no...

This morning we were greeted by frosty grass and crunchy, icy leaves. The Christmas parade put us all in a hot chocolate frame of mind. The icy frost has properties that crumbly leaves and sugary sand do not. I am coming around a bend, my thoughts crystalizing, as the water solidifies while we sleep.

Here is a list of the iphone games my kids have requested recently.  Not one of them was available, all lost opportunities as far as I am concerned! -a "kitty painting game" "tuna make sandwiches for gold fishes" -a "zipline game, where your head is attached to a zipline going from a house" -a game where you "design a restaurant" -a "witch game and you have to make your own hat" -"monkey games out of fur" -"grocery store game and you have to time it but not break anything (or you lose points)." -"boy hair cutting game" -a "tea pot game and you put mashed potatoes in it to make food for people."

Have you heard of  Maud Lewis ?  She was a woman who was born with a disability in the early 1900s and ended up living in isolation and poverty in rural Nova Scotia.  She and her husband lived in a tiny house where she became famous for her quirky, child like drawings of the natural world and the world she knew growing up. She painted on the back of old Christmas cards, and breadboxes and chairs and even her own tiny little house.  Even when she was living, she drew people from miles around to check out her art and marvel at the beauty she had created in the woods. Years later, those simple paintings ended up in museums and are worth many, many times more money than she ever saw in her lifetime.  She is now famous and her little house is in the Art Gallery of NS.  Every time I see her work, I think how bland and non-descript most objects are in my life.  She took it upon herself to create colour where there was none and her spirit lives on in that e...

We got cracking on a big house purge this weekend.  As I have stated several times before, our clutter is always threatening to take us down and muffle our screams.  One of my biggest struggles has been with having a space at home where I can, when I am not bone tired, pull out the paints and suggest a craft project or where I can sort out the mounting photos we have in our midst, without feeling slightly sick afterwards, and  worse still, determined never to do it again.  Most of all, all this stuff was really starting to create barriers between us.  Together we finally took a big bite out of all this, and slowly but surely over the weekend, some treasures were unearthed, tons of useless (to us) things were either given away or discarded and places to work and play and eat and sleep and put clothes away in and read books and wrestle became distinct entities again.

 I have not worn a watch for a long while.  Cell phones fill in nicely, but really, in so many ways, I do not need one, especially, of course, on a free day.  It always astounds me the innate timekeeping skills I have inside me, that have gotten better with time. 37 autumns have taught me some things about what the light is like at 3:10 p.m.

Have you ever come across a fragment of a hand drawn map or a shard of a list that no matter how you hold it you cannot quite figure out what part of the city/country/world it depicts or what the person was getting at when they wrote it?  I am fascinated to know what this map I came across in our house is referring to. The website  Found  compiles these objects that we have all experienced slipping out of our clutches or coming across at one time or another.  Here is my favourite so far: 92nd floor  and  The Ballerina Diet .  What is the weirdest, saddest or most mysterious thing you have found?

On Sunday, my son rigged up a sheet as a sling between the couch and a chair.  For hours, he hung out in this suspended sheet cradle.  He was happy to be held by it and often made references to being a baby again .  At one point, he asked that we talk about babies.  I could not help thinking as I glanced over several times that day that his contraption looked like a cocoon. He regularly would emerge from the cocoon but he rarely moved from his position. The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.  James Russell Lowell On a cold rainy day like today, I would like one of these cocoon (hopefully a sturdier one!) almost more than anything else. * co·coon   [ k uh - koon ] noun 1. the   silky   envelope   spun   by   the   larvae   of   many   insects,   as silkworms,   serving   as   a   covering   while   the...

When I used to drive around in the back seat of my parents' car in the rain, I used to stare intently at the falling rain on the window and pretend that it was a meteorological map and I would silently play weather forecaster.  The other day my son starting drawing with his finger in the steam that he puffed out onto the cold window.  He pointed out the tiger and the bunny that he drew and he huffed out more hot air to create a new drawing.   Drawing with condensed air, playing with falling raindrops, what other mediums am I passing over for flashier, more expensive materials? Check out another fascinating material, Laura Fields'  Smoke Painting  website.

Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. -Jack Layton I so wish you and Jack could have been in office simultaneously.   Congratulations President Obama!

You have spent your whole life with elegant speeches. For sometime you should walk alone in the gardens of silence. ~ Rumi  I sort of stumbled into the Victorian era Public Gardens last week.  It was the first post-tropical storm day here in Halifax.  The rain had not yet swooped in and the temperature was balmy.  A lot of leaves remained on the trees and everything had a glow to it against the grey sky.   The moisture in the air made everything slick and alive, but the rot had set in. The next day the rains swept up the coast and by now the rain and wind together have removed a lot of those falling leaves. It was a good reminder of all the beauty in the garden.  Beauty can found there not just when the buds are emerging, not just when the blossoms are burgeoning, not just when the trees are umbrellas of leaves.  It can be found in the shiny rotting leaf and the promise of new growth next year. Oh yeah, spring and summer do not have th...

Well, we reached another milestone this week. My husband taught my son how to blow up a balloon.  Now, if I was forced to teach anyone how to blow up a balloon in 45 minutes or less (or ever), I just do not think I could do it.  But together, they emerged from this brief session victorious.  And after many many many practises, he has mastered it.  His sister has also given him finishing lessons in how to twist close a balloon so that it does not lose air.  He will definitely be on deck for the next party as his lung capacity exceeds all of ours put together.  Now, he likes to blow up balloons everywhere he goes-in the car, on the way to preschool, while he's watching a show, at the bus stop.  I never gave it much thought, but learning how to blow up a balloon is a coordinated effort of timing and muscle memory.  So, both his quick mastery of it and my husband's mysterious (to me) instructions impresses me.  Just like him putting one foot i...

Have you ever had someone run past you and you wonder (however fleetingly)...are they being chased? Are they pursuing someone? Are they terribly late? Are they running away from their life?  Are they running to catch up with the love of their life?  Or, are they exercising? When I asked my daughter yesterday why these two young women ran so fast past us, she predicted that since they weren't wearing exercise clothes and since there were no buses around that they were late for a musical. Well, today, after my son noticed that I was finally wearing my sneakers, he suggested that today we run to preschool.  The whole way I was thinking, do I look like I am running because I am late? or scared? or escaping? or exercising? Now, 1 hour later, regardless of how I might have looked, I feel great.   

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself. Desiderius Erasmus

Last Hallowe'en, after yet another version of a "princess" costume got assembled, I suggested that she be a queen instead.  For some reason it made me feel better.  Why settle for princess when you can be a queen?  I mean, if you are going to go trick or treating as royalty, you miles well go all the way!  She agreed that a queen was way better and went with that.  I'm not saying queens do not have their issues but at least they are less defined for us by popular culture and are more open to interpretation.  This year, when she dressed up as a cat, I wondered out loud if she was a queen of cats.  She dismissed this notion outright.  "No way, I'm just a cat!"(Well, actually, she was going to be a butterfly cat but there were some technical issues)  Put in my place, I realized with relief that the princess/queen spell had been broken and new ideas for costumes had finally deposed the monarchy.

"Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth." Diane Ackerman Not long ago, my mom shared an experience she had when she was cleaning out my grand mother's basement.  She came across a bag of glass baby bottles and supplies.  Upon opening it, a scent came tumbling out that instantly reawakened memories long ago forgotten.  The combination of scents mashed together to send her flying into a foggy bank of memories she had long since lost. It got me to thinking about all the scents, unique to a time and place, many of which I cannot even name, that still hold power over me when I come across them again. A unique mash of smells harness themselves to my other senses and bring to mind a time, a moment, a period in my life that usually lies dormant.   Recently, I went into a Sunday school room in a church that I had not been in since I was my daughter's age and the mound of crayons and books rubbed a...