Growing Versions

"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries." A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh Both of my kids never pass up a trip to the "outside basement" (cellar) .   Our home has many inhabitants over the years and they always come up from the outside basement having made exciting discoveries. They emerge with old picture frames and abandoned frisbees and Christmas ornaments. The outside basement has no limits and it is a similar promise of exciting discoveries that keeps me hanging on to disorderly closets and brimming bins full of treasures just waiting to be uncovered.

 I was commanded to make party streams  yesterday for our new chameleons (recently chosen birthday). So I pumped out some from left over Christmas tissue paper. No tape, so we used up old Christmas stickers. He took over from there.

This is the season that we make bunk bed caves and forts and snow houses every day.  We suspend blankets over our heads and let the light of a tiny flashlight make the whole thing glow.  There is one at the foot of the stairs, another one behind the couch, one between two mattresses.  We feel this urge to create new structures to cocoon us until we can knock them all down in spring with our wings.

dendriform (adj.) tree shaped; resembling a tree in form and branching structure

How to draw an owl  is a post by the author, entrepreneur , and  marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin that got me thinking about how often I wonder about how to  draw roses. They are so beautiful. Everyone goes crazy for them. People obsess over them and they get poems and songs written about their delicate beauty. A whole holiday is practically devoted to them.  They are so omniscient that they are actually not my favourite flower.  There are just too many cartoonish versions of them to like that much.  However, every once in a while, I get the pleasure of coming across one in a natural setting and they wow me once again. I have tried drawing roses many many times over the years.  I'm not an artist, but still, I usually am able to draw a roughly drawn facsimile of most things, just not roses.  What do they really look like? I get too focused on drawing each petal, and can't seem to draw the petals all together. What does a rose consist of? ...

One time I asked my son why he didn`t play with two children at once at daycare and he explained that he only had two hands.  This comment instantly made me understand that, just like in adulthood, playing with other kids takes attention.  It`s by no means a mindless activity. A friend directed me to the blog  One Continuous Mistake , with the tag line, Zen and Parenting. It`s written by partners Tracy and Koun Franz. Koun is a Soto Zen Priest and Tracy is a writer and teacher. They co-write a beautiful blog about their experiences raising two young children.  Instantly, I felt a kind of kinship with their writing and one of my favourite posts so far is  Two Hands Mama .  Their deceptively simple, reflective and well written posts document their spiritual journey towards mindfulness in parenting. Blogging has been a forum for me to understand more deeply my and others experiences and reactions to parenting.  Writing through the regret for things ...

Kid: "Mama, have you ever heard the expression, good things come in small packages?" Mama: "yes, I have.  Like babies and diamond rings." Kid: "Yes, and rocks."

Marshmallow with a fresh lemon centre. Toasted nutty candy nestled in shards of coconut. Cherry enrobed in chocolate. Creamy Orange centre. We ate them all.

Sometimes I dream about taking pictures of bark, up close. So close I can see every ridge, every sprig of moss. I stare intently (as intently as one can in a dream) at this flickering image and then it is gone.  A bubble floats past and magnifies a emerald green fern, forcing me to scrutinise that for a while, until it dissipates. Sometimes I am aware that actually I am in a forest.  Standing small among the crumbling trees and growing mushrooms, unsure of where I stand. What does this place consist of? What does it looks like? My vision can only see small cells of it at a time. I can't see all of it because I am absorbed by the speckled rocks around the base of one of its trees. Yesterday, a friend helped me understand that. She used different words, a different approach, a completely different analogy, but I got it. Today is a easier than yesterday.

...I really really like being awake. I love sleep too, but not as much. I'm learning that I like being awake more-even when being awake excessively is going to make me miserable later. I love snatching hours in the middle of the night.  Hours I can spend any way I like, watching shows, writing, cleaning stuff. Of the 24 hours I've been allotted, I keep trying to push the percentage of awake time up because, well, "what's sleep?" I like borrowing against sleeping time so I can have some quiet time. What I did not see is that being awake so much has been making me less patient, dull in ways I don't like and unhealthy. So, I made a decision that I will really need to get to know sleep more. As the mirror image of being awake, sleep is something I have neglected so much I have stopped knowing its edges. It's depths, it's beauty.  I am going to start by seeing it as not optional to skip and take it from there. I also have decided to see sleep a...

Isn't heat wonderful?  The day the fuel truck comes is cause for celebration. I get all domestic the minute they pull away.  I start cooking and cleaning and revelling in the heat.  On that day and that day only, we crank up the heat. Sitting around under duvets and warm sweaters is for tomorrow.

Inchoate (adjective) \in-koh-it\ 1. to be in an initial or early stage; just begun; 2. imperfectly formed or formulated 2014 has been great so far.  Work got cancelled due to a raging blizzard and I've had room service twice already.  The hotel service here is great.  I get to choose what drinks and toast I want and I just have to hang my order on my door handle. The food gets hand delivered on a hand carved cardboard tray.   The hotel staff (of now only one, the other one moved onto making slides) has been super attentive.  I should have suggested this game earlier. The room service service is supporting my resolution to get more sleep. I'm trying to follow the wise advice of Penny Simkin, the godmother of the doula movement, who tells new moms to stay in bed (as long as it takes) until they get a full night's sleep. I scoffed when I first read that, thinking "yeah right, that's so not happening" and I am not a new mom. However, having...

One of the things I appreciate about Christmas is how it opens up the possibility of creating new things.  I love watching the kids drop everything and use their presents on the spot.  This Christmas morning my son was enchanted with and used every last lick of paint, within an hour, that came with a spin art maker he was given by a friend. My daughter stopped what she was doing and cranked out 8 markers which she proceeded to name "sad orphan blue", "good grey" and "pumper pink". As we put away all the decorations and tuck away the bits of this Christmas for the next, I keep in mind what I love to find when the Christmas stuff comes out. I relish opening the box with all the little bits of ribbon, salvaged cards and scraps of foil that will be reconstituted into new ways next year that I cannot imagine yet.

I know I am very late to this party, but this video by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis is blowing my newly minted 2014 mind. It was written as a parody of pop songs as a teaser to advertise their tv show, but it ended up having more than 300 million hits in just three months this fall. They accidentally got onto the Billboard charts with this song. It has also been turned into a children's book.  There are lots of theories about why it is so brilliant, but so far I think it is awesome because the writers use all the usual tricks to go to a really unusual place. It asks a question that none of us has really asked yet. What does the fox say?  No really, what does he say? How does it communicate? No matter how ridiculous and irreverent, it busts open the conventions of what all the regular questions songs ask. "Does he love me?"Do I love her?" "What does it all mean?" Instead, they put all their chops to work.  Maybe, just maybe...the fox and the hor...