Growing Versions

I have had a bad relationship with math. As a grade 2 student, I remember not really understanding what the teacher was getting at when she placed a handful of cubes on my desk and asked me to take some away. Things became more fraught in grade 4 when I was one of 2 kids who was disqualified from a class taco party for not knowing all my times tables (we were eventually brought back into the fold). I developed math anxiety which made things worse. I excelled in other areas that involved language and I came to accept that I was just not a math person. As a parent, I was determined not to pass on my anxiety about math to my daughter.  By then I was also running a business that involved daily math and I discovered things I actually liked about math. I embraced math, outwardly at least, as much as possible. One day this week, my daughter wanted me to help her with her math homework. I took on the task with gusto, not betraying my underlying self-doubt. I stared for a ve...

Boxes are a hot commodity in our household.  Squabbles will be fought and lost (or won depending on the outcome) over really good ones. One day we saw a box for a large appliance down the street and we were so excited only to get down to the street to discover it had already been pinched. That was a sad day. Boxes contain not just 4, but  6 or more sides ( chances) to create a world, a room, a closet, a machine, a....anything.I save up boxes for days when we are home bound and they rarely disappoint. The best boxes have two elements.  Sturdy material and interesting features...  ...they do not have to stay intact to be good. It will take a long time for me to break the box collecting habit.

As the winter set in, the mice returned to their home village.  The castle, at the base of the Escalier Mountain, maintained its reign of the kingdom.  Dominating the landscape and protecting the princess' domain that the peak, it kept its secrets tightly kept. The mice spread out in search of comfort materials from high and low, although since they had last been there, there had been considerable loss of habitat and provisions. The guardian of the crumbs and bits , was rather dismayed at the lack of detritus in the main domain, as was the usual expectation after such a long absence from the village, but alas, she quickly turned to her delegation to rectify the problem, dragging seeds and drying husks from back behind the kingdom walls. The quiet imposed by the castle made the mice wonder what turbulence the summer months had wrought. Sylvester, the head of comfort material management, was not pleased at all to discover a stable full o...

I have been horrified by my kids in their Halloween costumes. They often toy with iterations of costumes in the weeks and days leading up to the big day, only to give me a shock the night of. Bunny, zombie business man, kid lost trick or treating, pharmacist gone berserk, ghost, bunny, skeleton. While none of these costumes are elaborate, if the light is right...they make you squint and see them as the terrifying little essences that they can be. My daughter, long haunted by Coraline, scared my socks off one year with her rendering of   Coraline's mother , her personal bogey woman. This year, my son finally settled on a skeleton and when he stretched out on the sidewalk, I could barely look at him through my fingers.

I started knowing this city at university.  Every other place in the city was over there. Then, for the longest time, all schools were there and I was here . Next the daycare was way over there .  Then it was right here , and now it is back over there. While we were going to preschool it was here  and elementary was over there . Now that school is here and the junior high school is right here too. The high school is not far away, it is right over there .  Where will I be when they are all over there?

I've come to except (and accept) little pots of gooey gunk littering my home for a quite a while now. Corn starch, vinegar, baking soda, food colouring, pasta in water that is growing mold and oatmeal face masks run amok. These potions have been fermented, boiled, frozen, baked into pie shapes, smeared and set on fire. What can I about these secret potions? Their mystery persists.