Growing Versions

Looking at things close up sometimes makes things unrecognizable. My tendency is to zoom in when I take pictures, and afterwards, I sometimes have trouble believing that what I am seeing is the same thing I took a picture of. I guess I do that in my life too. I tend to thrive in one on one relationships and focus how to make what is right in front of me work, but lately, I have begun to realize that I need to zoom out so I can properly see things. Zooming in with the lens is soothing, and I guess it makes things more manageable in life too, but an aerial view has its role. I don't know how to operate a drone but I can find some people who can. I can learn.

My daughter uses her hands to explain things, tell me things and invent stories. I do too.  It's like she has learned somehow, from me, from teachers, that to explain something accurately, you must use your hands.  It seems like a conscious decision she's made, not just a reflex. She is well equipped to play charades, but for her brother it has not been easy to play charades.  Re-creating concepts/things with ones hands has been out of reach.  But, suddenly, without warning over the weekend, charades has become a game that all four of us can play together.  Out of the blue, he started challenging me to guess what he was acting out. Before, someone always got left out or misunderstood or misinterpreted and it was just not worth the heartache. But now, we've all grown into charades.  He's learning from his sister how to use his hands. The latest charades included: writing with a pen that is running out of ink, Santa coming down the chimney, ...

Me: "What is a church anyway?" Him: "Let me talk to you about what a church is. Some have schools, some do not. They have a sharp part that goes up to the sky, it is a sky scraper. Sometimes they have long windows, sometimes they do not. Look."

"This is the way to China. This is the way to Spanish. This is where Jesus was born. This is not where Jesus was born." The first step to learning how to navigate a map is to understand that lines represent streets and intersecting lines make up cities. Places and locations can be stars or circles.

On the weekend, we visited our beloved cat Cleo`s grave. She's buried on a beautiful hill overlooking the ocean.  Initially, when she died, we feared our kids` reactions, but both of them have taken it in stride. The season has changed and new cats have made their mark(s).It is only now, months later, that the questions and the wondering has begun. My daughter urged us to read the book  Island Boy .  When we finally read it this weekend, I learned that it is essentially a fairly linear story about a boy who grew into a man and lived more or less his whole life on an island.  He travelled on the schooners up and down the eastern seaboard, but he always returned home to his island.  The book ends with his death where he was buried under a beautiful apple tree. I was curious to know why my daughter liked the book so much.  She proceeded to explain how even though he is dead he remains on the island and that is somehow important in her mind. Afte...

So, if you are not sure what Baby split with company means, you are not alone.  Perhaps it is because you are not a serious enough bowler and even if you are, perhaps you learned to bowl in a different jurisdiction than where this term is used.  It seems, upon a preliminary research quest, that even in bowling language there are dialects. Fence posts: The 7-10 split. (bed posts, goal posts, mule ears, snake eyes) I love bowling.  I love bowling alleys more.  Like many things, I've become reacquainted with them since having kids.  I have been reminded of their charm and their elusive je ne sais quo that persists even as I experience them as an adult.  With a few exceptions, bowling alleys, while many of them have been outmanoeuvred and have been supplanted by storage facilities and pubs, have, if they have survived, endured largely unchanged.  What exists already works fine and is functional enough that they don't need to be replaced. ...

The making sense of time chronicles roll on.  My son has declared more than once this week that he thinks we are running late.  When I ask him how he knows this (is it the slant of the light? his insistent internal clock?) he states that he checked the time on the microwave before we left. "What kind of time is this?" he asks.  What number, what happens now? Right now time is still the only time there is but there is evidence that it is losing ground to another "kind of time" which he hears other people discuss, adjust and regulate.  It is not yet something tangible that he can hold in his hand and line other things up against.  Even though the day has a linear progression from morning snack to afternoon snack and bedtime snack, time, expressed as a number, which can be measured against other these things is still vague but slowly and surely taking hold. He  noticed a calendar last night and wanted to know what comes next.  Looking at ...

Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination. e.e. cummings

The Band-Aid has an allure all its own.  Over the past six years, I've come to learn about new dimensions of the band-aid and they continue to bewitch my kids.  Decorated by characters or not, the band-aid and its non-brand name counterparts, fulfill numerous roles. Only one of them involves healing wounds. The Band-Aid is a craft supply, a temporary tattoo, a sticker, an adhesive (when tape cannot be located) and an agent that binds two uncooperative objects (i.e. Barbie and a tiny Barbie hat or cell phone).  Somehow, I thought they would have stopped giving after all this time, but on a semi-regular basis I come to find the tell-tale signs of their use (some argue misuse). The plastic tabs litter the couch where they have been peeled back and chucked hither and yon. The Band-Aid has certain properties that I was unaware that they possessed before I had children to teach me about them.  Apparently, when applied correctly, they can make a minor pain anywhere o...

Photo Source:  thesetingstaketime.com  via  Stephanie  on  Pinterest I love to laugh.  I love laughing so hard I lose  control.  I love that release.    For this reason and lots of others, I could not wait to see the blockbuster, Bridesmaids last summer.  Everyone told me, "you are going to pee yourself. It is so FUNNY." And yes, I almost did pee myself, but I also cried through almost the entire last half of the movie.  I did not laugh so hard I cried, I just plain sobbed. I felt really sad watching the story of two friends come to terms with how their friendship was changing.  I was really surprised by my reaction after all the hype about how hilarious the movie was, but I knew why.  The brilliance of this movie was how life can be so hilarious and painful at the same time.    Yesterday, I was on a social networking site and one of the people I follow mentioned that she cried "proper tear...

There was a time when  Amelia Bedelia's ridiculous adventures in misunderstanding were my favourite.  I am gaining a renewed appreciation for the brilliance of these lovingly rendered books.  My six-almost-seven-year-old daughter thinks they are so hilarious.  She'll recount all her favourite bits each day, only half understanding the jokes, but knowing that there is a joke to be understood.  She stands on the precipice of getting her head wrapped around double meanings.   "Do you remember when she thought a sponge cake should be made with sponges?" "Do you remember when she drew ON the drapes, when they asked her to draw the drapes ?" "There is the one I think is so funny, when she trims the tree  with scissors instead of ornaments." Each figure of speech comes with a very long winding explanation as she talks out the possible reasons why it is such a crazy predicament that Amelia finds herself in. She is just this side of n...

My daughter was messing around on her grandmother's piano yesterday and I noticed that she very methodically lined up the cards first and then "played" to them.  After a short spurt of "music", she would re-arrange the cards and substitute some of them for new ones.  Musical playing cards.  Of course.  52 notes, a multitude of combinations that produce a whole new range of melodies.  You just have to learn a new set of notes.  What songs would they combine to create? Which card would be your favourite? Which suit? Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm. Makes me want to play a hand. How about you?  I can picture myself clutching a handful of cards as I fall to sleep, a sleep that brings a dream of lullabies I haven't heard yet.

Am I a mean mama?  Or am I magnifique?  This article, Is Maman mean or magnifique? , about French parenting (mothering mostly) has been making the rounds of late and it has me thinking hard about my role and how much it is shaped by culture, how much it is impacted by sheer exhaustion and how much I am constantly coming to terms with how difficult it is.   I plumb the depths of my resources daily to keep my voice from hitting too high a pitch, to stretch to meet their needs and my own, whilst providing security within which they can grow and learn.  Sure, I regard my role as important but some days (many times a day) I'm not always so sure what part of my role is the most important.  I'm always happiest when we're all doing an activity quietly together--the sun is shining and we're all happily walking to the park or reading a story or constructing a creation.  Bedtimes are the most trying. Mornings, when we have to go anywhere, come a very very clo...

My daughter first expressed an interest in becoming a police officer after a police woman came to her preschool to talk about her job.  When she came home, she explained with great earnestness that police "help dead people".  Her interest in law enforcement was not entirely a surprise since she really likes to be clear about what is right and what is wrong, but when we dug a little, it turned out that the thing she liked the most was "her voice".  Her interest in policing endured.  Having only ever wanted to be a teacher, or a helicopter pilot (remember Danger Bay?) or a dancing missionary (I'll tell you about that one another time) myself, I could not really relate.  She, and later her brother, continued to enjoy games with their friends involving putting people in jail (usually their Dad) and taking turns being police officer #1 and police office #2.   This has changed a bit, ever since my mother introduced my daughter to a great book called Wangar...

Days go by and I do not look in the mirror.  Occasionally, I'll steal a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror or when I pass a shop window or in the kettle as I make tea. I catch images of me in my thirties.   I have begun to observe how my face is changing. The lines have finally emerged to illuminate all of the hidden, withheld, carelessly and freely expressed feelings that I have and continue to channel through my facial muscles.  A close friend once told me that what I'm feeling is always so obviously written all over my face. This surprised me initially, but I have tiny witnesses day in and day out who corroborate this opinion. They take note of the subtle crinkling of my eyes or an askance turn down of my lip, telegraphing subtle shifts in my mood.   As I age, I allow the gauzy mask to slip.  What does it reveal? How will my kids remember me? How will I remember myself?

Think of the last book that you read?  What was the setting of that book?  Had you been there before? Wait, let me explain. I will be reading a book, any book, and within 1-2 pages I will have already formed an image of where the action is taking place.  Not just any image, and I am sure the writers would not want to hear me say this, but I picture each and every book I read, no matter the description of the surroundings in the same 5-6 different locations. Most of these locations are from my memories of places I knew well from ages 6-9.  Perhaps this has something to do with this being the period in my life when I was first doing reading on my own. All I know is that the most carefully described settings in the world cannot seem to supplant these grooves, these imprints in my mind that every book I read settles into. I'll start with my favourite book of all time, which I read for the first time about 13 years ago, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. ...

For ages, twitter has been in my peripheral vision.  I dismissed it as a sound bite craze . Now, I think it can be the haiku of the internet .

In yesterday's post, Laugh Until You Cry , I was telling you about my effort to not know something and just wonder about the answer instead.  The compulsion to seek out an answer, any answer, electronically is strong.  There is a gushing waterfall of comments, ideas, pieces of information saturating our inclination to wonder. This guy, Pete Holmes, made me laugh really hard about search engines and how they are so efficient at dispensing information that they have zapped the wonder out of everything.  He bemoans our inability to be "impregnated with wonder".  He compares google to having a "drunk know-it-all in your pocket."  I did not laugh so hard I cried, but I got pretty close.

My daughter caught wind of the expression, laugh until you cry,the other day and ever since, she has been asking me how this is possible.  "If you are laughing, you are happy so how can you be crying?"  At first, I responded by saying, "well sometimes you are so happy you just cry, it happened to me the other night in fact.  I was telling a hilarious story to a friend and by the end of it, she couldn't hear the story because I was crying so hard".  Her eyes widened, but the questions persisted.  My answers continued to be pretty vague and lame and she continued to think out loud about this question. As her questions have evolved past "why?" to inquire about increasingly complex concepts, I've tried a few different approaches to answering them. I've used the "sometimes we are overtired and then we cry after we laugh really hard...",  make-it-up-as-you go along type response or I google "why is the sky blue" and give her a p...

I had a dream last night that I was in high school still. I have a dream like this about once a month.  I usually wake up, terrified that I haven't passed math or that I have forgotten to finish the assignments for a particular class.  Then slowly, as light creeps in, I remember, oh yeah, I finished high school and then I went on to university.  All the math that was required to do both of those things, and a bit more, has been completed.  This dream was a little different though.  I look up, across an auditorium-sized room, to see my teacher droaning on and on and I notice that all of my classmates are superbly bored.  I get the distinct impression that the teacher is way past caring and resigned to her fate.  There is a green tinge to the light in the room and it makes me feel like this place is not a good place to be. It suddenly occurs to me that I can complete high school by correspondence!!  Woah!! This will totally free me up, I think!...