Growing Versions

My kids got more than enough toys with batteries and shiny paper the other day. It was overwhelming and memory making and all that, but one gift stood out. My husband gave my son a binder. No, no you read that right. A binder. He has just started to write and draw in earnest and he thought he would get a kick out of having his own binder.  Up until now, he's just been an idea boy, now he can put that stuff on paper.  He's thrilled to have these new skills. I have seen him use the binder more than any other gift he received. Last night I fell asleep on the couch by the light of the tree.  My son busily wrote and drew in his binder while I slept.  When I woke up I was half buried in snow flakes, drawings of cubes (which he had been practising all day) and notes. One note read, my dads moms dads dad. Some things you really have to figure out on paper.

Time off from school inevitably leads to a camping night in the living room. It is bound to happen. Tonight, my son is sleeping in his "cabinet" by the woods (Christmas tree). Next to the cabinet in the woods is a quaint little karaoke cafe that serves wine late and hosts Apples to Apples Junior and Crazy 8s tournaments. Under the table where we play a child is now sleeping under a tent made with bedding. I love this little village that gets erected during Christmas vacation. It gets incorporated only after a couple of days of boredom undoes the glue of regular play.

We ate all the pickles and all the scones and the bacon. We ate all of the fudge and the cookies. We kept going. We drank all the pop and the wine and we ate some more cookies. All that is left is the brine from the pickles and the bacon grease. Leftovers made way for new courses and we ate those too. We ate more than enough and we are now looking for more.

Just like that, after several years of putting up a fight against the demise of sending Christmas cards (real live ones), it seems that we collectively kind of sighed and put them aside. We got a handful of cards this year. Yes, and that means I have five fingers.  I atleast made some vague effort before, but this year, no, I put it out of my mind. I got another five electronic cards and countless Facebook/Twitter/Email greetings instead. I am an advocate for writing cards, for care packages and for letter writing, but even I have surrendered.  I want to want it more. I know we will miss something.  Down the line there will be a petering out of artifacts from this season, in this era.  I still treasure Christmas cards my mother was given, and that I gave my parents.  When I read ones from the time before that, I am rather in awe of the artistry that they feature, the humour that now seems stranger than funny, and the sentiments that echo down the line.  ...

It is always a gift to spend time with one kid at a time.  Things get revealed. Things that are hard to see when I get distracted by the demands of keeping track of more than one person.  One on one, I can calibrate to that kid and plug into his voltage.  

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. -Gerard Manley Hopkins "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief."

Update: the library opened.  It is gorgeous as expected, but also hushing and so powerful it turned me inside out upon impact. Turns out all the words got used up reacting to it the first time I entered it. I walked through it the other day on my own and ended up feeling small and stranded a bit.  I felt like I have when I have visited other countries.  At first enchanted and then later, excited and now a bit daunted about all the parts of it I don't understand yet or know how to be in comfortably.  Looking forward to my next quiet visit when I can get turned inside out by it once again. It unzipped a big seam in the sky and the ground into which I stepped and have yet to emerge.

It is rather easy to feel like a failure at Christmas.  The crafts that go unrealized, the visiting that gets short circuited and the gifts that never get made or bought. Undiluted expectations get created and then begrudingly let go of. New expectations get found and half met. The light dims to almost nothing until today.  We hastily blaze up the candles and the lights and the tinsel to feel less alone in the dark.  Then we wake up after the solstice and there is a smidgen more light than the day before.  We prepare to live the following days in the half light, trying our best to live freer from expectation and catch the light any way we can.

A whole bunch of blankets falling onto something is a blanketalanche, I've been told. Chipping ice. Freezing 7 stacked cups into a bag of water and then removing it to create a fountain. Grating chestnuts. Discovering that cutting wafers with scissors does indeed create a lot of crumbs. This is the age of exploration.

I was clicking through photos this morning in preparation for Christmas and I came across a photo that stopped me in my tracks.  It was not a photo from the Christmas concert or a photo of them doing something delightful. It was almost a mistake. It was taken by my son as we walked along the street somewhere this fall. Mid-step, we walk in the sun somewhere together. Someday,this photo, as unintended as it was, will be so precious to me. A little boy (who is not so little anymore) walking by my side everywhere we go.

The churches in our province are struggling to keep the doors open, the furnaces lit and to stay relevant. They used to be the glue in many of our rural and urban communities. They provided a place, which, at least theoretically, was meant to provide shelter, comfort and a meaningful structure to life. Our city is just about to open a outrageously gorgeous library which we are all eagerly awaiting entrance into.  We've been teased with the odd picture here and there of it's magnificence and I can only imagine that the real thing will be something to behold and be breathlessly proud of.  Finally, a public space right downtown in which we can seek shelter from the sideways rain of winter without having to buy anything in the process. The first few photos are stunning. The library even made the impressive list of  10 eye-popping new buildings you'll see in 2014 on CNN.com .  It is going to be fabulous. It is set to open on December 13th. I am itching to see...

Before I started taking photographs, or whatever you can call the outcome of taking pictures with an iphone, I heard about photographers falling in love with light. It is a well worn cliche I thought, but now that I have been regularly taking pictures I am starting to get it. There is a light that I love. A light that the house creates at certain times of the day.  When I see it, I drop everything and find my phone and start taking pictures. I know it when I see it now.  I wouldn't be able to get there scientifically, but the house permits the light and I accept it when it is available.

It is a painful decision, any easy one to put off. The decision is trying to decide when to correct your kids' misheard words. I treasure these phrases and protect them from correction for as long as possible. "I was running so hard Mama, that my heart is bleeping like crazy." "I fell and made a face platter right into the puddle." "Backpack  (Dora the Explorer) is on!" Those misunderstandings are part of the process of learning the language we speak together. They eventually fall away...they fall so very far away, that they are hard to remember when they are gone. That's what makes it so hard to decide when they need to know about them.

The snow has started to fall. Not here exactly, but still, the cold wet rain that is the remorseless usher of snowfall certainly has. As I steel myself against the cold rain, I always start plotting how to get warmer boots and more waterproof clothing at this time of year.   I fantasize about being toasty as an element inside me starts to calibrate to the falling temperature. We work hard to heat up the molecules in the room in which we sit and play. How will we keep the molecules warm this week, this month, this season? I get there soaking wet--a chilly cold has set in that is hard to warm up from, but my friend has a floor vent, and that changes everything. The heat rushes up to meet me.  I quickly take off my socks and stretch them across the grate eagerly anticipating their dryness against my skin. I stood over that grate, just for a moment, to fully experience the blast of heat. I turned my attention to my friends...

That's not a pizza box, that is a wall of a house and if you look very carefully, you will see a tiny door. ...see that window next to it. Over by that tiny cabin with the door in the roof. Let us burn it up together.

 School is in session.  Be sure to bring your cheques for the field trip to the mountains.  The Remembrance Day assembly is starting at 1:30.

My daughter and I were talking about friendship the other day.  We were talking about how hard it can be sometimes. It is hard to find the balance between what you want and what your friend wants.  It is hard to share time with someone and figure out how to get what you need out of the relationship. It sounds easy and natural, but friendship can be hard. She summed it up.  "It is harder than a crab's shell over the soft part underneath."  

What I have learned recently is that even though my nine year old daughter can now set the timer on the microwave if needed and can read time on a clock, her sense of internal time has not yet calcified. More or less, I can, at this stage in my life, approximate 5 minutes.  I set the timer for my tea to steep and walk away. When something inside me tells me to, I head back to get it, and the timer dings on my way. We wait for approximately 5 minutes at a customer service counter and my daughter is unbelieving how long it took to get served.  "It was like 40 minutes Mom!" Partly, she was bored and when we are bored all time denatures into jelly, but partly she had no idea approximately how much time she had spent looking at brochures while we waited for them to process our return. Ever since both kids have entered the school system, their grip on time has tightened. Our daughter corrects me on a regular basis when it comes to time, my son still relies on us to clarify...

I have observed these past few sugar rush filled days that with Hallowe'en candy eating  is only a small fraction of what kids like to do with it. Getting it, redistributing it, and planning what to do with it take up a lot of the time spent with it.  Before they even head out to get the candy, the kids talked for weeks about their plans for saving, stockpiling and/or recommissioning the candy (we could give it as Christmas gifts) after they got it.  Once it was safely back home after being lugged through the streets, it was piled, counted, sorted, categorized, briefly packed up and taken to the library to ensure they weren't too far from it and then finally became stock in a hand made vending machine (with a slot for parents' money) and then arranged as a homebased "snack shack" complete with a price list.  It was even taped together to form a pattern.  Briefly they had a sizeable amount of anything (bonus being that it was as de...

Both of the kids came up with costumes that, in the right light, scared me out of my wits.  My daughter was Coraline's other mother .  That may not seem so scary to you, but I know just how terrified she has been by Caraline's other mother  who has kind of tortured her in her imagination over the years, and trust me, her ballet flats, grey scarf and eye make-up all added up to something bone chilling.

As the disturbing revelations flow from a trickle to a flood in the Jian Ghomeshi case, I, like many others have not only been horrified by what I have learned but also have just plain learned a lot. I have learned a lot about what victims of sexual assault go through, I have learned why so many choose not report this crime, I have begun to learn a tiny but interesting amount of information about the culture of BDSM and how important consent is to its participants.  I have also learned about Canadian law.  Most of all,  I have learned about myself that I still have so much to learn.  In more than one of the articles I’ve read in recent days, the writer has written something to the effect of “you (the reader) should be ashamed for immediately siding with Jian”.  I agree it tells us a lot about our collective understanding of sexual assault how readily so many of us wanted to believe his side of things, but subsequently so many of us have learned new things and ...

Can you rocketship me? Or should I ballet all the way there? What verbs are not verbs yet, but  really really should be?

Barbie at rest.  We know all about Barbie's habits. She's industrious, well educated--busy healing dogs, delivering babies, being an entrepreneur and designing rocket ships. She has got it going on.  Stylish and in control sum her up.  She's a bit  messy-- at least she is around our house-- dropping shoes, cell phones and evening dresses as she goes, but I've come to learn that she's got another side too. She is often alone. Occasionally, she hangs out in a heap of other Barbies, sipping coffees or camping, but more often than not, she can be found sitting alone staring out into the room, or the closet or the bottom of the bed. Barbie can be contemplative.  She understands better than anyone that between jobs and leisure, she needs to rest. She sits, plotting her next move or channelling peace. She must. If she can find the time to do this, so can I.

“Meanings is not important,"said the BFG. "I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right.”  I am not a night person. My daughter does not really like being read to. Combined, this means I rarely have the energy to read to her and she reluctantly listens when I do dig deep and find some energy. We have found a solution. She has started reading to me. "Take a bite and I am positive you will be shouting out oh how scrumdiddlyumptious this wonderveg is!”   The BFG by Roald Dahl is a book I have never read before and it is rather exhausting.  His brilliant bending of every word he touches requires concentration. My daughter speculated that he did not use autocorrect.  Explaining to her that autocorrect was not invented when he wrote it was really difficult. She has got the stretch left in her brain to accomodate these inventions, I adore falling asleep to these verbal contortions. " Titchy little snapperwhippers like yo...

 "We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching." C. S. Lewis

We are taught from an early age not to yell for help when we are swimming in case we unduly alarm the people around us.  I took this lesson right to my heart. I have been thinking a lot lately about how I have somehow  trained myself to resist help.  Pride is partly to blame, never wanting to be accused of not being "helpful" is also a culprit.  For whatever reason, I feel compelled to tackle most of everything I do solo.  I repel help by not asking for it and assuming it's not needed, until it is. I have, in turned, trained the people around me not to expect that I need their help and I have almost (almost) forgotten how to ask for help. This weekend I needed help. I had a stressful situation on my hands (our hands) and I completely absorbed it.  My lips were trembling I was so stressed out, I could not think straight, my heart was racing. Help! I took my son to basketball. The sun was strong and gorgeous and we walked slowly  home toget...

Green tinged sunshine floods the kitchen.  It blinds me for a minute  to the rotting compost and unfolded laundry (dirty and clean) just a short pace away. My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch fire, or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one else cares. Why should you? Erma Bombeck

Adding an eye to a piece of paper instantly suggests a mouth and soul are not far behind. Without fail an eye can animate some felt, a sock or rock or a lock, even a scrap of garbage. Attaching an eye to anything, can turn once listless objects into witnesses.

We were completely taken off guard by a "storm day" yesterday. The very last day of summer ended up being a day off due to wide spread (albeit brief) power outages. We spent the rest of the day doing what we did all summer, scrambling for childcare and taking turns doing paid work. It was a fantastic gift. A day of being outdoors after the first few weeks of adjusting to sedentary indoor work. Scramble scramble, shimmy, hustle, lurch and then, sit, Just sit. On a tree or next to one, one more time, before we will officially be doing it in a new season.

Saturday mornings I wake up so empty. I don't mean empty in a bad, nothing kind of way, I mean empty of all the plans and angst and requirements in the form of permission slips and notifications and agendas that slowly but surely get piled up inside of me through the week.  The pile of expectations, hopes I can't quite articulate and just plain pieces of work is stacked up, lopsided, one on top of the other inside me, the big receptacle.  As the week starts chugging up Monday, and staggers around icy hair pin turns Tuesday and Wednesday, the pile eventually falls right over on Thursday in the middle of the afternoon.  All I can do is stuff all those little post-it notes and unopened envelopes, the things "I keep meaning to tell you" all back inside  and do my best to keep them stacked until Friday. Then at the end of the day on Friday , a big hole is punctured in the bottom of the bin and they all leak out. I wake up Saturday empty. A whole day, a whole...

I am standing at the curb. I am anxiously thinking ahead.  Kids have been dropped off -- the second the bell sounds signalling it is legally okay for me to walk away from them at the school yard, I run. From a distance, I must look like a covert spy on a special op, instead, I am just going to the next in a series of pre-scheduled times "I need to be somewhere".  And then, as I wait impatiently for my drive, I look down. a tiny, fraction of a leaf is standing ever so briefly upwards. This leaf is on its way to an appointment with being carried on the breeze, perhaps it will get swept up with chip bags and candy wrappers and be buried, or perhaps it will degrade into soil and feed the tree it fell from.  Either way, it is glowing in this moment. It is still and light is pouring through it. The drive pulls up and we drive off.

On a whim, I asked a couple of the other mom's at school if they wanted to check out the  Robert Frank  exhibit at NSCAD (the art college in our city). It was only going to be open for 1 week and a fraction of his iconic photographs from his famous work from "The Americans" would be printed on newsprint, put on display, and then destroyed directly after it closed. The really amazing thing about this exhibit for me is that I actually went. I never make time for art shows. I love to go to them and I cannot wait, am counting down the days until I can be in the same room as  Mary Pratt's paintings , but I rarely find the time.  I  diligently write down the dates of the openings in my agenda, and then other things crowd them out.  But when I do, oh my, even if I don't like the art, or cannot understand what I I am looking at, something stirs in me--Something stronger than the strongest opinion, something more fierce than my most well worn argument, something el...

This week I had to get a can of paint tinted and I got a pair of contacts fitted. Two very routine (for some) errands that I came away from full of awe and admiration. The first task was to get a can of paint to turn to the colour of "vellum". The guy at the paint counter did not just punch in the formula and wait for the machine to pump out the requisite drops, he fiddled, he estimated, he worked with the paint drop machine as carefully as an artist would. He predicted, as it turns out correctly, that the formula would make the colour too green which we did not want.  He smudged a small amount on to a card and blew it dry with a hair dryer, talked to himself about it needing more red. Added four drops, worried about what that might do, knew it wouldn't be enough, added two more. He played with it for more than 30 minutes until he was satisfied. I was entranced.  I had never seen someone mix paint in a hardware store with so much care and experience before. Next,...

Readjusting to a new school year takes a lot out of a kid and a parent. New teacher(s), a new configuration of students, new friends, old friends who become more distant, old classmates who become deputized as potential friends. It is a little jarring having to grasp a whole new slew of subtleties that your mind had learned to gloss over by the end of June a few short months before. To rest in between days at school, my children are turning to us more than usual for comfort in the form of being read to, which can fall by the wayside when they are feeling more sure of things. They also like to watch a show with one of us.  Dog tired, getting back into the routine, I am less tolerant of their choices and I have been inflicting my own, especially on my daughter. We've started watching Midsomer Murders, a classic British "whodunit", on Netflix. Other than a ghastly murder near the beginning the rest of the shows are a relatively monotonous enterprise of eliminatin...