Children Play While I Work and Dream
Yes, this actually happens in real life. Not often enough to retire my babysitter, however. (Aren’t they beautiful in their play? They are living in a deeply engaging imaginary world, here).
Category: Photos
Where Ideal Meets Real
So. I have a plan to hold a family meeting. But we have two separate topics to discuss.
First, I want to talk to the kids about the humanitarian crisis happening in Haiti right now, and I want to ask them for ideas about what our family could do to help out. And I want to broaden that out to talk about ways we could help in our own community more often.
(I’ve also requested an interview for my ParentDish column with Craig Kielburger, who is a young Canadian man I greatly admire–his parents, too! The mandate of his foundation Free the Children is to help North American children to help other children around the world–in essence, educating our children, helping them to make the connection between their own actions and the effect these can have on other children’s lives. I’m really excited about talking to him.)
That’s topic number one.
Topic number two might sound a little out there, but I’m thinking of having a family meeting about creating a family mission statement (and I must confess, we NEVER have family meetings, and I’m not entirely sure what this will look like in practical terms–sitting around the dining-room table with pieces of paper and pencils? Will we make it more than five minutes before chaos erupts??). Now, a mission statement sounds almost too serious, but what I’m hoping to accomplish is that we can all agree on some basic guiding principles for our household.
This is what I’ve jotted on my piece of paper: In our family … everyone is respected. In our family … it’s okay to feel mad or sad, but we express our feelings appropriately. In our family .. we ask for help when we need it. We help each other. We help others, too.
These are my ideas. How to bring everyone’s ideas into it? We’ll see. This is yet a pipe dream. My motivation for doing it, however, comes from a rather dark place, and that is the anger we’ve been seeing our older children express, recently, and our inability to help them find ways to express this anger appropriately (or to interpret it). I want to stress that I don’t think anger is a bad emotion. It’s human. But destroying your baby brother’s duplo project in a fit of rage isn’t a good way of expressing that emotion. So far, Kevin and I are not getting far with our attempts to step in and help the children find another way. Time-outs work, sort of, at least for removing the child from the situation. But anger tends to be an emotion that is actually pointing toward or masking more complex emotions. Ever felt angry about a situation, only to gradually recognize that your anger was saving you from experiencing a much more frightening emotion like fear or grief? Sometimes anger can give us a feeling of power in a situation in which, if we stopped to think about, we’d realize we feel awfully terribly vulnerable.
Stop me now, I’m rambling.
And it’s time to get ready for swim lessons.
Above, my youngest, sharing a quiet moment on the couch. And I caught it before it devolved!
What We Made
It was AppleApple’s turn to plan and help make supper this weekend. I suggested she look through Passport on a Plate, a cookbook for children that is underused in our house because it has no pretty pictures or photographs. But it does have menus from a variety of countries around the world. She listened as I read out country names (and in the case of Africa, an entire continent), and as soon as I read Japan, she said, Japan!
She chose miso soup, sushi rolls, and I added in vegetable rice because I thought the menu looked too slight (it turned out I was wrong, and we’ll be eating the completely untouched pot of vegetable rice for our supper tomorrow). I also suggested green tea ice cream for dessert (she wouldn’t have dreamed of purchasing such a luxurious treat), and we improvised with mango sorbet and Mapleton’s chai ice cream.
Today was our cooking day. I promised we’d start by 3pm. But at 3pm, I was still immersed in a self-inflicted photo organizing ordeal which I vow, as of right now, never to force upon myself (or my family) again. This past year has been our family’s most documented year EVER. And I’m beginning to question the need for so much evidence. Why this compulsion to collect the details? We have the blog, which has photos; we have a beautiful scrapbook I made online–more photos, but a creative final product; and now we have actual photographs, printed out, placed into (approximate) chronological order (definitely the most maddening task of my afternoon), and then into photo albums.
Next year, I’m going to let everyone choose his or her five favourite photos, get prints of those, and leave it at that.
Where was I? Oh, yes, 3pm, AppleApple’s buzzer went, and it was time to rouse myself and get to work. But because I have an obsessive personality, and need to finish one thing before starting another, I stayed seated at the dining-room table, butt damn near numb, and directed her to measure out the sticky rice we would need to make the rolls. The bag was apparently open. Rice everywhere. Never mind! I remained glued to the photos: “Just pick it up and put it into a one-cup measuring cup.”
Enter Kevin.”What’s going on in here?”
“Oh, some rice just spilled.”
“It’s everywhere.”
“Is it?” I couldn’t see. I was stuffing photos we didn’t need into albums. “CJ can vacuum it up,” I said. Yes, I actually said that.
“There’s a bit of extra stuff in here,” AppleApple said, at last, her cup measure full.
“What sort of stuff?”
“Like a bit of dirt and stuff.”
Okay, you’ve got my attention, kid. Limbs creaking, I rose and rinsed the rice. AppleApple vacuumed. She does it for real, and CJ does it as a hobby.
“We’re not off to the best start,” I admitted.
As the rice came to a boil, I managed to stuff the final stack of photographs into an album. I was back to the present. Praise be! Things became much more pleasant after that. AppleApple chopped red and green peppers and cucumber into matchsticks. I strained the chicken stock that had been simmering on the stove all day.
“I just read a book called Naomi’s Road [by Joy Kogawa],” AppleApple told me, out of the blue. “When I got to the end, it was still kind of sad. Why would a book end like that?”
Oh, be still my heart. She wants to talk critically about literature!
I said: “When I get to the end of a sad story, sometimes I make up another ending for it.”
“I do that too! Except it’s not a different ending, I just think about what might happen next.”
Ah, yes, exactly.
“Sometimes the author wants the story to go on in the reader’s mind. The author might not want the reader to know everything.”
“Maybe some things can’t get fixed up.”
Yah. I know.
Later, we rolled some sushi. We made it look pretty on the plates. We pretended we were running a restaurant, and everyone loved that, even our resident grump, Albus (taking over that role for today, anyway; we share; everyone takes turns). Instead of putting the pots on the table like we do most nights (classy, I know, but it makes for less dishes afterward), we served from the kitchen. We took orders. Everyone ate the miso soup! Everyone! Even fussy Fooey.
“What’s this green stuff?” “Seaweed.” “Oh.” Slurp.
Everyone had seconds. The rolls were passable, if not as awesome as the real thing. The wasabi was HOT. The rice went into the fridge for tomorrow. And we polished off a litre and a half of ice cream for bedtime snack. Pretty awesome.
Fooey’s planning to look up the recipes from China for next week. Albus wants Russia the week after. Can’t wait.
Focus
Can’t stop taking photos. Running out subjects. Maybe I’ll carry the camera out tonight and record an evening edition playgroup in session. Sleepy due to late night and indulgent celebrations. Achy from the hot yoga super-poses. Mountains of laundry due to not folding on my birthday. Supper will be black beans and rice with tortillas and authentic Central American crema, and queso blanco; this might possibly be my favourite meal of all time. I should be gearing up to make new year’s resolutions, or feeling more contemplative, but … somehow, not yet. “Can you please focus!” I just heard Albus tell his sister, who is doing the camera work for their mutual movie project, which involves all the amazing Star Wars Lego ships he’s built over the last week. Quite astonishing, really. He does it completely without assistance; when I tried to help, I realized that I couldn’t, because the instructions were too complicated for my non-mechanically-inclined brain to follow. It’s a bit like doing 3-D puzzles.
So here’s what else is on, this sleepy old day: Kevin’s gone to Toronto. Fooey’s watching TV. CJ’s napping. I’m playing. Above, some evidence.
I Have Been Informed That This Is How I Should Hold My New Camera
Thanks to everyone who made this day so truly wonderful and celebratory. Aging. It’s not half bad.
Wait! Birthday So Far Revised!
So, Kev and the boys were gone when Fooey and I got home from taking AppleApple to horse camp … gone for a walk, the note said. It did not add: to the camera store.
W.O.W.
I’m speechless.