Growing Versions

 Much to my shame, there are days when the iphone, wii and tv take my kids off my hands.  I'm not proud of this, but it happens. To draw  them back into my grasp, the best thing for me to do is to drop everything, housework, work work and head-somewhere-else activities and pick up a marker and start drawing. Like a pied piper, the drawing re-sets the stage and we all begin again.

“A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances, and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-syllable poem or devote twenty-five pages to the dissection of a small boy's feelings as he lies in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight...”-Allen Shawn

1. You follow the map. 2. You read the clues. 3.If possible, if you are not too tired, start all over again.

When you are learning to read, you have to read signs anyway you know how. You use the biggest letters to help you guess what the rest of the letters mean. You use the sign's location to decide what it might be all about. You see the sign as a picture telling you something. After you have learned to read, you do all the same things, just faster.

When my children were very small, they were relatively transparent.  With the exception of the mysterious times when sleep eluded them or unruly behaviour was the only way they could think of to express something, once the mystery was solved, the diaper was changed, the tylenol or the snack was dispensed or the nap was caved into, they went back to being transparent.  They told me directly (most of the time) what their motives were all about. ( I am just painting the walls to welcome Santa, I flushed the spiderman down the toilet etc...)  We were the ones who held our cards close to our chest. We'd sprinkle their day with little white lies to prop ourselves up and get to our destination ( Sorry, the pool is closed today...This soup has no vegetables in it...I am so busy planning a really big slide that I cannot make a little slide today.) Inevitably, their transparency has clouded a little and our own cards are falling from our hands. As they learn to say things ...

One switch turns up the volume, the other switch, if you flip it, changes the music. One time we caught a moth and it died because I left it at the beach overnight. I got it and put it back inside and I put it on the red chair. I go on that side, I jump on that side and I go flying. And it's a teeter totter.  If a person is strong enough it could be a sling shot. Tell me your plans, tell me your memories, tell me how things work. Tell me where you found the frog's eggs again.

We've convinced ourselves too many times that this toy or that one is needed or wanted.  However, it has been the "loose parts" that have carried the day with our kids.  My son's discovery of the marvels of a vacuum hose for marble rolling over took any product designed to do the same.  He has often quipped, as he does about any toy that seems to be having a great time, that he wished he himself was a marble and could go down the vacuum hose track. A pair of 3D movie glasses with the lenses punched out have been frequently thrown into the mix, creating a frisson to a wide range of play scenarios. The crib mattress has an even higher status.  It has been a trampoline, multiple (multiple!) versions of slides and launchers of all sorts.  It has a place of honour/hiding in our living room from which it is extracted atleast once a day.  It fills all kinds of gaps. I remember a moment in time when giving my kid a spoon in a restaurant got us through a cr...

The need for tunnel thinking, required to cope with walking through snow drifts and rain, is dissipating.

The surface has well and truly been cracked. Cracked by boots and separated for another season by sunshine, the shards of ice glisten while they can.

 Taking a break from other hand held technology, we took a peek into daddy's childhood the old fashioned way, with a slide viewer. Slides cast a different kind of spell than instagram or videos.  First of all, the technology itself almost asks you to climb right into a box marked 1973.  I really like the way the light shines through the images and draws you into a backyard 40 years ago.  The balloons bob along the ceiling of a kid's birthday. The people line up at a potluck in a church basement.  Someone's childhood is documented in such a simple wordless, private way. They are not catalogued images, available to anyone. They are closed up in a cardboard box for someone to stumble on, to discover.

Spring is like a perhaps hand  (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully spring is like a perhaps Hand in a window (carefully to and fro moving New and Old things,while people stare carefully moving a perhaps fraction of flower here placing an inch of air there)and without breaking anything. e.e. cummings

Like all good things, we've come up with a good reason to do it twice. Inspired by a t.v. show, the kids put the wheels in motion and we celebrated halfiween (after two days of preparation) this weekend. Halfiween, Hallowe'en's shadowy April twin, was a little spooky, and there were treats and costumes.  Apples were a decent substitute for a pumpkin  Home made treats were improvised. The floating objects really gave the place that Hallowe'eny vibe.

Of all the sports,  I prefer the glow-in-the-dark ones the best.