Growing Versions

  These days I wear a mask. I don't wear a mask all of the time, only when I am indoors or unavoidably up close with people who I don't usually interact with.  I wear one when I am ordering things, or buying things or attempting to enjoy some form of public entertainment.  I cannot rely on reading others lips. My lips are hidden. We ask each other to repeat.  We move our eyes or our whole heads to try and enunciate more clearly.  I say fewer words, more carefully chosen words behind the mask. Sometimes that is helpful, sometimes that just causes more confusion. I walked into the woods. I did not need a mask.  I only saw a few other people and they were distanced. Masks were unnecessary. After so much talking and not talking and avoiding talking out loud I am forced to examine when I speak and when I choose not to. This is not a bad thing since I can be an insufferable chatter box, just a new thing for my brain to adjust itself to. When I am not standing aro...

It cannot be seen by the naked eye.  So, we have to trust the experts--the people who have devoted their careers to seeing these things for us.  This weather that approaches, the coming storm, the looming march of an invisible force bears down on us, they forecast for us. There is something very scary about trusting that much.  We do it sometimes--when we fall in love, or meet our children.  Letting go of so much of what we know of ourselves takes a lot of..something. As our lives change in ways we never quite imagined, even after watching all those movies about pandemics, we lean into our shelters.  Shelters that are not always safe for some of us and wait for the storm to pass.

We bought a fairly underused game of Clue yesterday at a flea market. I had a version when I was a kid and I remember playing it.  I must have known the rules then. Now the rules are laid out in a glossy pamphlet and I, as logically laid out as they are, cannot for the life of me figure out how to start the game or conduct it. I am once again scratching my head against the ticking clock of my kids' impatience. Finally, my son takes over and invents some rules. He explains them and adapts them as we go. I get killed in the game multiple times. Depending on the cards you draw, you are "allowed" to murder in certain rooms with certain weapons. After many convoluted rounds, I finally concede defeat and go to bed. I figured that that would be the end of it, but when I woke up in the morning, both kids were fully involved in a game of Clues.  I cannot say it was Clue, but Clues has been launched and a Clues tournaments cannot be far off. No one will get out alive. ...

When I first observed my daughter attempting to write in a Mothers Day Card at age 1, I was unexpectedly taken off guard.  I treasured what she presented me.  As time went along, her and her brother's work piled up and, with notable exceptions, I did not necessarily take that much notice.   Something I have started to miss as my kids grow is the art projects. Far fewer come home with them from school and when they are at home, art projects are not the focal point as they once were. So when they do take it upon themselves to create something at home, without prompting, I stop everything to admire it .  I walked right out of the house and bought a frame for the one above when I discovered it. When the other kid noticed the depth of my gratitude, she went about making her own version.  Just another example of how buying food colouring during a stormy week was one of the best purchasing decisions I have made in 2017 so far.

I have long admired the versatility of  pipe cleaners .  Their durability and flexibility make excellent construction tools for kids because they don't require any tools. Pipe cleaners played a pivotal role in Hallowe'en this year. Kazoo holster ( the kazoo , when played emits a high pitched sounds that lays waste to the bad guys) Head gear. An excellent way to hang stuff And they help you display the treats after you get them.

Yes, I know I misspelled couch.  I meant couch, not coach. I have this bad habit of going to bed before my kids. I am trying to change things by laying on the couch and instead of waiting for their impossibly late bedtime (9 p.m.) for stories, I get them to bring me stories and we take turns reading them with silly voices. My son has a real command of a hushed, authoritarian and his whole body is composed as he reads. My daughter adds commentary as she goes that keeps me in stitches. It is entertaining. They are learning and my guilt is assuaged. The best part is I am lying down and still fulfilling my duty.

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...

The lifeguard is still at the beach one more day, the bathing suits are on the line waiting for another round. The Christmas wishbook is waiting to be picked up. It's a book full of suggestions of wishes. I want to issue a new wish book for finding out your wishes...those wishes that are deep inside you, waiting for you to realize them.

 Vacation gets me walking in a straight line again.  No juggling, no strategies, no curve balls, just one foot in front of the other. Straight over there.

Thanks to a Facebook share from a friend I stumbled on this very funny little video.  It turns out it is the product of a youtube series channel called  Bored Shorts TV  and it is the creation of four brothers who started by telling their kids stories about growing up and then the kids  told the stories back to them in their own words.   The different versions told through stories and acting are brilliant and everyone in our family enjoy them immensely. The kids and the adults tell a similar story simultaneously. The kids with their version and the adults with theirs.  They really prove the point that fancy words are not always necessary and that eyes and gestures tell 90% of every story. Other family favourites include:  food allergies  and  book report  and  library .

My earliest memories are supposedly from when I was about 2 1/2.  However, I do not entirely trust that they are solely my memories and are instead a scramble of photographic evidence of the period and my parents reminiscences. I guess that's how memories begin though.  They start in someone else's head and then take root in your own like a tangled garden grows around long forgotten toys. I have a picture in my mind of my mom pointing out water leaking down through the dining room ceiling from an over flowing bathtub, I remember peering up some attic steps and thinking that the back of an old TV set in an empty room was a chicken coop.  However, these snapshots are an amalgam  of snippets of the shared memories of others and a malleable baby imagination. It was a time when I heard many words each day, but had not yet been spoken any of them. The words chicken coop and stairs and overflowing  were incubating in my mind, awaiting the day of their birt...

Denial kept us from spending money on indoor shoes and duo tangs until the very last minute. We were having too much fun eating meals in our swimsuits to acknowledge what was coming. The result was a very chaotic and intense shopping trip to a big box store. Ahead of and behind us in the thirty-five minute line were numerous university students buying crock pots, bedding and full-length mirrors (now I know that a lot of full-length mirrors get bought in this season, I really had no idea). Attempting to maintain some level of patience and grace in these proceedings, we kept busy playing guessing games, etc... but every once in a while the anxiety would climb up and leap out of my mouth. I sighed heavily and said to my daughter, just think, "it won't be long before you will go to university and you'll have all those things(full-length mirrors and toasters) to buy too." She replied, "Mama, let's just concentrate on me being in grade three." T...

We are gearing up for a new year. We are Starting New Projects , tackling old problems , and beginning a new chapter . We have stocked up on sunshine, we have roamed, we have introduced baby cousins to blackberries and said goodbye to a  close friend. And now, we turn our heads. I feel the urge to burrow. This time of year contains a lot of promise and intentions.  With promise comes fear, fear of messing up and a misplaced determination to perfect  my life. These beautiful words inspired me and put me in my place tonight.  It is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever. I turn against you, I break from you, I turn to you. We hurt, and are hurt, and have each other for healing. It is healing. It is never whole. -Wendell Berry

This weekend we spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with our daughter after she was away for a whole week at camp.  I say re-acquainted because it was her first experience of re-entry. You know, that period when you return from a trip or from an intense experience, and you see things slightly differently than you did before you left? I knew enough to be low key when we picked her up. I have a bad habit of being too demonstrative at reunions and overwhelming her. Slowly but surely, she told us about her experiences. At the end of each day, they had vespers*.  She insisted that it wasn't church, it was a fun, kid's version of church. You sing a song and do a skit around a fire. Although we grew up in the church, we don`t regularly go now. It was reassuring to me to know that she had time away from electronic devices, tv and media. She had time to be outside under the stars, sitting around a fire, and having a chance to listen to nothing but her own voi...

You've probably seen this before, in it this clever little girl presents a logically and succinct argument against segmenting "girls" and "boys" toys.   I love it. I love her fury and her indignation and her ability to sum it up so passionately. I was reminded of her today when my daughter was losing her cool with a Lego  kit.   Tears of frustration started rolling down her cheeks almost as soon as she started. She struggled to decipher the instructions.  What began as an innocent, well meaning activity quickly turned sour.  The process began to stress her out and chip away at her self esteem.  I decided that she needed to step away from the Lego kit. The Lego kit (a tiny lobster) could wait, mayby indefinitely. As she calmed down, I started to hear what she was saying. Lego kits that force you to follow instructions are not fun for everyone.  I'm sure they're great for some kids, but they are really frustrating for others. I told her...

My daughter started reading early.  As far as I could tell, she skipped right over the sounding-words-out stage and saw words as words early on. She is a competent reader, now we are working on getting her to read for pleasure.  It was not a struggle to learn to read, I hope it is not a struggle to get her  to read. My son has gone through the first years of his life with the attitude that since my sister and parents know how to read already, what is the point in me even trying?   He's only five, he hasn't started school yet, so we're not expecting him to read yet, but the contrast has been noticeable.  Until recently we didn't even think it was on his radar.  He was too busy constructing tunnels and slides and running and jumping.  Fair enough. No worries. However, over the past few months, he has begun to ask us to read to him frequently. He takes pride in remembering stories and re-reading them to younger cousins.  At the cottage, he and...

Like clockwork. Like rising tides. The inclination to bring work  out to the deck into the June sunshine returns. She draws, she thinks out loud, she creates, she orders, she explores, she brings attention to, she publishes her inner world on the front deck.                                         

 It is fun fair season. Bean bag toss  It is has spilled over into playtime at home too. She thought of everything. (Just in case we got injured.) This afternoon my daughter made a fun fair version part-sunday school picnic-part- school fundraiser.   Bouncy ball on a spoon obstacle course.  If you won a game, you got to get a prize in the "fish pond" , just like the real thing.

 Industries and economies rely on us seeing weeds.  What would happen if economies relied on us seeing seeds instead?

First it was a stick he wanted to be, so he could sail down the sewer into the harbour. Yesterday, he tells me would love to be a toy car so he could get played with on ramps and get swung on ziplines. However, he has a stipulation.  He would not like to be a car who gets played with by a baby.  Likely, he was heavily influenced by Toy Story 3 where it is made clear that babies play with toys much differently than older kids.  Babies don't understand that toys don't want to be thrown around willy nilly.  For one thing, babies don't know how to build ramps.