Begone child (take me with you)

It's been a minute, but digging about the ancient storage bins in my mind, one of the earliest times I remember thinking I should share intimate information about my daughter on very public internet to complete strangers was when she had barely reached toddlerhood.  

I feel our naivety from that time.  We ambled about the world, thinking it to be a material place, where relevant boundaries were tangible, touchable.  We did not know about the universe inside the boxes and screens.  My daughter was so young, unaware of the dangers and adult associations of the material objects about her.  I called her Smootchie.  She certainly did not know about the Internet.  I hardly knew about the Internet.

She also did not know about the potty.  Or maybe, she hadn't yet learned to withhold appreciation of an object to the most pedestrian* designated use, which is one of the necessary but not the most creative parts of growing up.  We were at a shopping mall, my mother, my daughter and myself, perusing one of the new style novelty shops, A Loonie Store, which sold things that only cost a loonie (or one dollar cad for non-Canadians).  

Grandma says, You can have thing, child, from this here shop. Pick anything you like.  

There was toys.  There was candy.  But in the end, my daughter parades out holding aloft her shiny new toilet plunger. 

Of course that plunger was a favourite toy for years to come, kept pristine and far away from any lavatory.  It was a hat, a horn, a sword, a tripping hazard.  I remember my son, born three years after the girl, playing with it. 

But I am not here to speak specifically about toilet plungers or the ethics of writing about private family life that includes minors.

I am here to mildly embarrass my daughter.  Again.  

I have written so much about her online.  It has been mostly, I believe, about my experience as a parent and as a maker of things for people.  I've tried to not speak for her.  But she has been employed as my muse and model, for her entire life.  At first she was generously compensated for this with chocolate.  In later years, gas money and the occasional boot.     

    You can still find this sewing pattern modelled by daughter in 2007 (I think?) on this blog site, and purchase the e-pattern with the sewing pieces on my Etsy.   People still do, every week.  If I forget to renew my listings on Etsy, or a download link breaks here, I receive messages to Please Make Available.

It is surprising to me.  After all these years.  I wonder if people see this little girl and believe she is out there now, an eternal enfant.  I am estranged from the world of sewing, currently only using my machine to stitch together paper pockets in books I make.  My creative work moves along; I won't say evolved because it doesn't seem like something moving away but connected and better suited.  It more revolves, spinning around an elemental base.  Still, I like to think that if I sat down with a pile of fabric squares and a serger, my hands would remember the movement and I could put something functional together with just a few tears.  

That is one thing I remember.  There is always tears when sewing.      

But daughter.  Daughter has Evolved.  Moved along.  Long ago she started on a path I had laid for myself. But she's fast and brave.  She is way up ahead of me, carving out the trail for herself.  I follow her now. 

This blog has saved so many moments for me.  My memory fails me, despite my attachment to the dramas I live.  Reading the archive here, my own words are unfamiliar.  I don't remember writing them.  I don't know what happened next.  But I am transported through time, feel the feels.  Looking back over the entries, sometimes I am impressed with drive to find insight, but mostly I am appalled at my smug belief that I could tidy up experience and draw out some sort of sense of the glorious absurdity of these years.  I knew nothing. I know nothing now.  

But here.  Look at this human that has survived somehow from the effort and chaos of my devotion.   

Girl child's closing act of childhood will be playing roller derby this summer in Valence, France, with the Junior Roller Derby Association Canadian team for the Junior Roller Derby World Cup.  

I can't think of a more suitable launching point into adulthood for this dynamic, tenacious, valiant human.    

As I write about this on the Internet now, for strangers to read**, I experience, despite my murky memory, a direct line of sentiment that ties me back to way, way back to when I started writing about my tiny baby.  That small one who began life in the middle of a boss battle and has somehow never stopped fighting.  I'm grateful for this child who brought me inspiration and reason to pursue my own fundamental needs to create and love.  That she lives and breaths is so gobsmackingly miraculous.  I am so happy for her, and that she does this thing that makes her feel alive and such intensity.  

So today I briefly revive this ancient format to just express my wonder at it all.  For those who have read about my creative work and my small family who are my inspiration, if you are curious, you can know that we are well.  Life is not unblemished, we have many regrettable moments we unfortunately designed ourselves and, of course, still stand in the way of the inevitable tragedies and indignities that is the burden of every living being on this planet.  But we are well and we have so many good things and many other things to look forward to. 

I still don't know what I am doing.  

And we are going to France.

 * It's perplexing to me that the word pedestrian, an occupation that is undervalued and endlessly fascinating when approached with an inquisitive spirit, also means something that is dull or mundane.  Although, I admit, I often prefer to pedestriate while wearing roller skates.   

** Or not. I am sure no one reads blogs anymore at all

teatime with predators

Made the girl a little top.  Put a spider on it.

I'm tickled with my spider web appliqué.  I shall have to revisit this again in the near future. 

The spider is machine sewn. The web is pieced together with pin tucks.  Spider web in process:

Back to the girl this morning:

This was moments before she broke the tea saucer.  My girl is a delicate flower.  Except when she's not.

The embroidery on the shirt says, Part Girl, Part Wolf Spider.

(It took all I had to not reverse that into spider wolf.  Spider wolves are terrifying.  Thank you Welcome to Night Vale for that particular thing I'll never forget yet I can not remember where it is.)

I saved the tea cup from miss delicate, though.  Put a weird little cyclopean clown doll in it.

Then I listed the doll on Etsy.  Check it out. 

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, I bet you regret your asymmetrically shaved haircut now

A couple days, I told girl child that I would write her a short story, something funny and a bit weird to entertain her.  A couple hours later, I had my wish from a recent post granted that someone would come take my children away for a camping experience I was not involved in.  Well, sort of granted.  They only took one child, the female, but that puts me at a fifty percent success rate which is not half bad.

But now I'm sitting down to write her a story and I'm a little stumped.  I started with, "There once was an almost teenage girl who, like, totally abandoned her mother and deeply regretted it."

Of course, I deleted that and began again.

"The girl was born in 2004 and began her travels a mere twelve years later.  She was light hearted and happy, glad to be facing a future on her own two feet, but she did not know that while she cheerfully skipped away from her childhood home, the woman who had provided her with all she needed to make her travels possible was wasting away from this vale of tears."

Or not.

"The girl startled with fear.  It would be hard to say which she was more afraid of; that she hurt the only woman who cared for her or that that woman would hurt her back."

No, no, sorry. That's getting a little dark.

Anybody else want to wrap their children in bubble wrap and install them permanently in the living room so that they will always be safe and can not go out into the scary world yet, at the same time, want to go hide from them in the basement with a book and a bottle of wine by the laundry machines where they would never think to look? 

I usually am pretty good at balancing the fears that are normal and identifying the crazy (eventually) but even when I think, 'yes, that is a totally insane thought,' I still have to work very hard at letting go.  All while keeping a totally neutral expression on my face for the childs, so that they do not see the underpinning neuroticism that is fundamental to my decision making.

Relatively speaking, the childs are free range.  We live in a small city with a high crime rate but considering that in our neighborhood someone experiencing a psychotic break in reality is just as likely to walk into our backyard as anywhere else, there isn't much reason to hold them back from traveling about on their own.    

All of this doesn't stop girl child from rolling her eyes at me and saying, 'Yes, Mother Gothel,' when I make a small request for her to stop by someplace with wi-fi and check in once in awhile.

Oh great, now I'm the bad guy.

But here's my deal with camping and why I think it's good for the childs to go even though I really don't want them to.  Outdoor life is, as the Internet tells me, really healthy even though nature is violent and cruel.  It's sort of the bears but mostly the storms. Big dramatic storms with wind and lightening can and do cause bodily harm. Camping is just so rife with the opportunity to be caught unsheltered in some sort of rage-y weather.  I don't think this is an irrational fear.  I just think that when the risk is weighed with what camping can offer (see Internet: outdoors is healthy), it's an acceptable risk.

It's cool to camp in bubble wrap, right?

We may not be tornado alley here, but we do have short lived burst storms throughout the hot months - hail, plow winds, lightening.  Just last week our spruce in the front yard lost the top half during a storm (was it a microburst, plow wind, or almost tornado - there is a debate - but it destroyed hundred of trees around the city), and, as it took out a power line on the way down, we were without electricity for three days.  So that's us almost getting fifty feet of spruce tree to the face and a power line zinging about without ever having to leave home.  What happens if you are out in the backwoods and don't have a handy dandy house to protect you?  I think tents are just roomy and colourful body bags.  Or bear burritos.

Without electricity, by the way, it was kind of like we were camping at home.  I didn't like it.

Regarding our tree out front, we're all devastated that it had to be taken down all the way.  It was a good tree, that provided tons of shade for our house and backyard (yes, it was so big it shaded the yard on the other side of the house... or is that our house is just so small?)  Global warming is being felt much more in our house.



In a necessarily epic act, The Man borrowed a fire truck with a hundred foot aerial ladder and my brother-in-law, a professional tree guy, came by with his chain saw to take down the remainder of the tree.  A couple of guys, a tall unsteady tree, a chainsaw, the impression that emergency assistance was already on the scene... what could go wrong?  The whole endeavor was fraught with opportunities for traumatic hilarity.  The neighbors brought out lawn chairs to watch. For awhile, we had a little hobo meet up on the front sidewalk where bets were placed on whether or not we were going to bumble and take out the house or the truck.  It was nearly universally agreed that, at the very least, the power line would be yanked down again.


 

To general disappointment (except the neighbor directly next door who has lived under the shadow of that tree for decades and, of course, us) the tree was expertly dismembered and came down perfectly without causing damage, except for some wood dust, or man glitter, came down into our bowls of ice cream, which the childs and I were enjoying while spectating. 

What is left is a twenty foot high stump.  The Man wanted to take that down as well, but I asked him to leave it for just a little bit to see if I could come up with some ideas of how to use it. 

And then girl child gave me an idea.

We do have to build her her own room.  And she does like to call me Mother Gothel.

So, a story for girl child: "Once upon a time, since a certain young girl loved camping so much, she ignored the life lesson that was the tree in her front yard, and as her karmatic reward, she was made to live outdoors at the top of the stump of the former tree, in the urban wilderness.  Also, she stopped rolling her eyes at her Mother Gothel."

Girl child's revenge

This is a picture of girl child's arm.  She used it as a reference today as she wrote her second post on her new blog, Book Drift.  She's great with the reading but maybe not so much with the math.

I have conflicted feelings about having a vulnerable twelve year old showcase her tentative writings on the Internet, where all sorts of unfriendly people can post their opinions of her opinions, but girl child tells me that she's good with that, she just wants a place where she can practice her writing and share just enough of herself to build a small community. 

Or she wants revenge against me for blogging about her since her toddlerhood.  I know she's been itching for an opportunity to refocus the spotlight a little.  I have written thousands of words about her, posted hundreds of photos.  Oh, dear. 

I am freaking out here because I totally deserve everything she's going to say.

So far so good, though.  Two blog posts in and I've only cast in a small supporting role. Maybe I'm not nearly as important as I thought?  Or maybe I should be worried that she hasn't talked about me.  Maybe she's got more than me happening in her life?! What if she never talks about me at all? 

What about me?

I have predicted that it will all end in tears anyway.  Probably mine.

deer skull

 

I really like it when my home school resources doubles as my home décor.  It helps to enjoy natural  objects and biology aesthetically as well as intellectually.  Then resources and décor can be found inexpensively and just sort of, you know, lying around. 

Around here we love our skulls.  Sometimes we are given a beautifully prepared clean skull, such as the deer in these pictures, and sometimes are given a freshly decapitated head and must do the preparation itself.  (The later situation is why ants are bros.)  Some types of learning is messier than others.

In our home, our formal instruction time is quite minimal (each child has one subject that they absolutely must learn and absolutely hate to do, so a half hour of each day is dedicated to progress, no matter how small, in that subject) and the rest of the time the childs get to pursue what they are interested in.  So it's good to have some stuff about the house for the childs to get interested in.

In a perfect universe my home would be a large industrial space that could be temporarily partitioned into smaller human size work spaces, with insane amounts of tool/materials storage, ample heat and a fully stocked kitchen.  With bean bag chairs, cozy reading corners and ample electrical plug ins.  Basically it looks like an interactive science center, but with fewer toddlers.

In reality, I have a home about the size of the bathroom off of a large industrial space and if I put in a cozy little reading corner here, we'd have to move out the dining room table.  The storage is nearly non-existent.  If we have it, it's out in the open.  Everything must serve double duty.

Thus, having the interesting things about that the childs can get interested in is a tricky bit of curating and use of outside home resources.  But we are in luck there because between the woods and the library, we can get an amazing array of materials to work with.  And when we are done with it, it can go back to continue its natural lifecycle elsewhere.

Some items are keepers, though.  This deer skull came from friends, one had the head, one cleaned it, and it's beautiful.  I try not to over interpret our natural objects until the childs have developed a good amount of familiarity with it.  Labelling something with a value like interesting or ugly or morbid is limiting, whether that be for good or not, and I want them to explore it first before the label get slopped around on things.  My kids tend to be interested in anatomy and view dead animals as fascinating but I know that some visitors to our home have different views.  Like the friend of boy child's who plays a game called 'count the creepy heads' in our living room.

Anybody interested in cleaning and studying animals bones with their children may find Jakes's Bones website interesting and informative.  I know that if you wish to have more skulls in your life, you only need to let people know and they will shower you with boney gifts.  Skulls are one of those things that people find intriguing and beautiful yet somewhat disturbing.  They are hesitate to trash something lovely but do not necessarily want to keep it themselves.  Gifting it to a novice collector and science enthusiast uncomplicates the situation. So, go ahead, just ask about.  You will most likely become rich in bone.

Girl child in particular is a bit of a bone nerd, expanding her love of skulls to beyond the ones in our home out to studies of ossuaries (mostly European ones we've read about in books and on the Internet) and to human evolution and the changes in skull shape.  In fact, last week we were in a shop when she ran across a wooden carving of a homo erectus skull and she did a little fan girl squee.  You never know where the childs are going to take their passions.  So I'm just here, quietly curating our home, bringing as much of the world in as I can fit in these close quarters without bursting.

nutritious popcorn balls

Perhaps it's a stage in every homeschooler's evolution that they start waking up late, acting like hung-over college student on the Sunday of a long weekend, making popcorn balls for lunch in her pajamas?  Or has living with a middle aged homeschool mom for so many years, one who considers pajamas and messy clipped up hair to be acceptable daytime wear, tragically impaired her sense of style?  Maybe the resemblance would be less strong if she didn't steal my t-shirts.*

------------------------------------------

* Girl child would like to note that she is a) not hung-over and b) would love to be a college student.