July 20, 2007
Moved!
Okay, I've moved to http://stephs.com, time to update feeds.
Posted by Steph at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2007
Moving over
I'm moving over to WordPress...hang on!
Posted by Steph at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)
July 11, 2007
The Young Man's Leisure Guide, Ch.1: On Enjoying a Driveway, Installment No. 1
Ford is practicing basic board maneuvers. He circumnavigates the driveway in rough squares of measured effort, propelling himself faster each time. His legs are slightly bent and his form conveys assurance and ease, but his arms carry some tension. They coil upwards toward lifted shoulders, bearing fear's weight in two invisible buckets. All the while, joy and satisfaction beams through his proud, young face.
Chas soars above the ground, speeding faster than the sound of his rolling bearnings. He clicks over twigs in the driveway, sometimes rolling over the board as it stops dead beneath him. He laughs, I laugh. His palms are black from asphalt soot and his nubby toes are fearlessly worn smooth and black, too. I can hear him acting out an action scene, his voice trails behind him as he flies across the blacktop, exaggerated cries of help and pleas for mercy, ending with a thud as he slams into the woodpile, throwing himself in a heap onto the ground. He lies spread-eagle beside his skateboard, looking up into the walnut boughs above him, swaying in the hot afternoon breeze.
After a three minute meditation, watching the leaves flutter and sway, he mounts his hovercraft and soars back across the driveway, his own little cosmos
to flail himself into the jasmine, in another utterly romantic gesture of bravado. His heart just couldn't beat any louder.
Ford and I laugh again. We follow no particular path, only minding not to run in to each other. Sometimes we glide just so close, knock knuckles, smile again. There is no two o'clock school traffic on our street to mark our passage through the afternoon. Chas is in his own world but he sometimes shows us where he's been. Sometimes he shows us where he's going. And then, like us, you can catch him just gelling with the afternoon. At that moment you know he's off any agenda and he's just somewhere in the middle of a summer afternoon in the driveway.
Posted by Steph at 06:38 AM | Comments (1)
July 06, 2007
Museum Possible
Above my expectations, the MOMA trip was something I can't believe we didn't try sooner. But our mental armor was strong that day. We pared the visit down to a Braque and that huge dog painting in the second floor foyer (hell if I remember; I was too busy trying to convince Chas that, even though the paint looked like dabs of toothpaste, he indeed could not touch it)...
And then, the Matisse exhibit. For both boys, a treat: nothing but nummies, in all dimensions. Having found our medium, our tether to real life, we were set. All we had to do was circulate smoothly without shouting too many body parts and we'd eventually hit the outdoor mezzanine. It was perfect! Couldn't have dreamed up a better recess.
After knocking out the ya-ya's, we had pizza downstairs.
The MOMA heats up a good pint-sized pepperoni pizza and the kids devoured it. We swilled a few pints of beer and then Damon and Dwight (Damon's brother) took the kids across the street to Yerba Buena Gardens so that I could see the rest of the Matisse exhibit in peace.
I think the kids, mostly Ford, would have appreciated that second half of the exhibit, being a bold departure from the previous body of work. Matisse had begun cutting pieces of paper to rearrange in composition for his larger paintings. And then, down the hall, the "Jazz" series of prints, all laid out on the white table--what have we all come to know better as the work of Matisse?
Still, what's best for the boys is plenty or room in the schedule for freeform fun. And fortunately, what's best for them worked out to be best for me, too. Thanks, D :)
Posted by Steph at 06:43 AM | Comments (1)
June 28, 2007
we're thinking of buying tickets to hell
We’re a little culture starved around here, snug within the benign mycelium of silicon valley. Granted, if I’d just know where to look around here, I’d find something interesting on exhibit. But the truth is that I’m just acheing to go to a fussy art museum where I can feel the music of terrazzo under my feet and experience air conditioning without a trace of retail and ride that fabulous chase from security guard to security guard, close behind Chas, always on the fringe of expulsion as he tries to weave fast arcs around freestanding sculptures. Art is, after all, mostly about the personal experience one has with the piece, and with Chas there is no exception. He loves sculpture, it FASCINATES him to discover giant colorful pillars shooting from the ground or brushed-steel geometry shining in the sun. OH! The joy! Must scream and run circles around them all!
There’s one exhibit in particular that I’m planning on taking them to see sometime soon, the Matisse exhibit at the SFMOMA. Ford is a collage guru and I figure it might provide a springboard for translating some of his 2D work into a new dimension; specifically, creating something 3-dimensional that his younger brother might be tempted to play with (especially if it’s made of paper or papier-mache). But again, really, I’m just sad that we haven’t been able to go for so long, for fear that we might die during the struggle to patiently corral our children politely through a quiet space for art.
I think it’s more important that they experience art from a very young age for several reasons. First, I think it’s fun for them to see how some people have translated emotions or themes into art. Secondly, I like for them to understand the value and purpose behind the art process. Thirdly, I want them to grow to respect the work of others as well as their own art, because the enduring value of art is that it has the power to change the future in many ways: it can alter a person’s perspective, create controversy, quiet a restless mind, you get the idea. Lastly, I want them to evolve quickly within the rigid confines of the art museum institution so that they naturally respect that paticular environment as they would a shrine, an that is mostly because I’d LIKE TO ENJOY THE MUSEUM, TOO.
So, this weekend I’ve requested we pay the MOMA a visit, take our chances, hope for the best. There’s a book I heard about that recommends certain tips for taking 5 year-olds and older children to the museum, How to talk to children about art: is the title. As an art teacher, I feel qualified enough to come up with my own suggestions (which, in all it’s conceit, is actually true) but I’m still curious about what it has to say and am ordering it anyway.
Wish us luck! Double that for the MOMA.
Posted by Steph at 07:00 AM | Comments (5)
June 19, 2007
Summer
Wow, what a hiatus. I've taken another mental health month, this time following a hectic family visit, and I am beginning to feel much better now, thank you. Your sympathetic messages have been a sustaining force and the only reason, I have to admit, that I'm sitting here at the computer now. It's one in the morning, I've been cutting fabric and thinking about the friends I'd like to keep, the ones like you whom I've met through this blog, who remind me that it's okay. Just keep writing. Keep taking photos. Don't say you're forgetful. Move forward.
Thank you.
So here we are. I'm sure you wanted more details, but here we ARE:
and watch out!
Summer is here, so very here. Each afternoon the hot winds off the valley blow through the garden on the way to Santa Cruz or wherever they go. Judging by the weary droop of the Lady’s Mantle, the Huecheras, the zucchini—I’d say an inch or two more compost would buffer tender roots from heatstroke. But the deer lop it all off and solve the problem instantly. Genius! Here's Chas, clearly offended by the marauding:
The deer. The wait until the tomatoes have sprung three tall feet and sprouted yellow flowers along the vine like christmas lights. Then they mow down the vines and pluck the hard green tomatoes, dropping them to the ground to rot at the bitemarks:
But the evening, it’s so summery. In the city, I have to wear fleece to dinner. In my backyard, however, I wear a tank top and feel nothing as the evening blues. The quail, scampering down along the fenceline, shepherd a new clutch of chicks. There must be twenty! I can’t see details without my glasses, but my eyes register fleeting puffs of down, left, right, then left, and the parents zig left then right, alerting the other of the dog by my side. Seti, mouthwatering, tenses and tracks their path.
When I water the zuchinni, it sounds like the heavy rain that I haven’t heard in months. A few weeks ago, the water pattered the mulch and the seedlings bowed under strain. Today, tall and turgid, the large uneaten leaves bat back at the downpour, an audible splattering, a hollow summer sound that I miss from Texas (and everywhere else I’ve lived in summers past, for that matter). I miss the moody days, shrouded in gray clouds, rain that evaporated off hot concrete, lightening that awoke a summer midnight. Puddles. Rainbows. Clouds.
Oh, screw it. Sunny days and starry nights rock!
Posted by Steph at 07:19 AM | Comments (5)
May 18, 2007
Found!
We are going camping this weekend, our first camping trip since we became parents. Although the campground is beautiful and luxurious and coastal, we are fortunate in that it is an hour away from home, forty miles as the crow flies from our house westward towards the Pacific.
I spent the entire morning searching for my sleeping bag. In the end, where would I find it? In the garage, in a tall box with the words written on the side in a black Marks-A-Lot:
WELDING JACKET
+
WEDDING DRESS
Of course!
Have a wonderful weekend, everybody. And may your clutter be so happily married!
Posted by Steph at 11:19 PM | Comments (8)
May 16, 2007
Mother's Day
An early morning trek to Santa Cruz, but we were still too late for swapmeet. The omen walked past as we were unlatching the children from the carseats: a teenage guy carrying a shiny aluminum tricycle. You just know the good stuff is going, going, gone. And for the most part, it was. But the garlic fries bufed the bitter edge, and we still managed to have fun poking around atticfuls of yesterday. Alis and I flirted with two cute plant geeks hawking boutique perennials from their watsonville nursery, and I selected a naughty little eggplant penstemon and another plant I still can't pronounce.
We lunched at the Saturn diner, bouncing on the vinyl seats and throwing quarters at the pinball machine, downing yummy amber pints and and more garlic fries.
Afterwards: Derby park. Just before the big kids started to file in, some of them hungover and sobering up atop sunny expanse of a wide blanket. Ford is getting more confident, now sliding down the bowls and taking turns with the highschoolers. Wide boards are the fashion here, with small wheels (not too Penskey!). They stand on the edge of the concrete and smile at Chas, who is playing with a notaLego skateboard (HELO, made in Mexico, bought for small change at swapmeet) atop his deck. I'm drawing in my sketchbook and Alis is chasing Seth. Jim is reading a magazine and getting very sleepy. Damon is with Ford. I'm heavy with satisfaction.
Posted by Steph at 08:10 AM | Comments (1)
May 08, 2007
5.7.2007
After a day-long playdate, when we are pooped and our eyes are closing and our tummies are falling asleep, one picture can say it all, as we quietly drift off into slumberland. Goodnight! I hope your day was as fun as ours!
Posted by Steph at 07:19 AM | Comments (4)
May 01, 2007
Monday, April 30
It's an inexpensive easel, Ikea sells them for twenty dollars and some stores sell them for as low as ten, but there's not a better tool in this house for creativity than it, save what the kids thrift from leaves and mud and berries within the matrix of their imagination (you'd be surprised to find what can be made into homemade paint and collage). I set the easel in the mudroom, facing due west and in full sun and bright light for the better part of the day. In the chalkbasin at the bottom of the board I let the children leave stubby black and white caran d'ache crayon segments, sometimes a random red or primary stump. Today there are two brush pens inside as well, painted black from another day's painting session, and now it's your guess which one is red and which is pale blue.
Chas is in the studio but I can't see him through the glass window. I am standing in the living room holding his shoes and socks, ready to find him and sit him on my lap and finish dressing him to play outside. He hears me and responds, I see a mop of strawberryblonde dreads bounce behind the table and out he emerges on the other side, slapping his fat little feet along the cold concrete floor like a happy hobbit running for high tea. He rounds the door and passes in front of the easel and skids to a halt, almost stumbling over himself. A piece he worked on earlier in the day: one large circle, spined like a black urchin, and two smaller circles in the corner. He feverishly grabs a red pen and scribbles away meticulously first, then faster and faster until he jolts to a halt and pauses with pen in hand. He mutters something that I cannot hear, looking at the page, a validation perhaps, nodding to himself. He caps the pen, sets it back into the chalkbox with matched intensity, and continues at a dead run into the laundry room where, by echolocation, he finds me.
I am holding a ladybug vivarium in my hands. It is a tall glass vase filled with quince branches and the dry twigs of a grapefruit tree, the diced green onion tips, shrouded with a black veil of aphids, and the contents of the ladybug bucket, those thrown in at the last minute and left to settle autonomously, which it has already begun doing, the ladybugs crawling over each other and the carnage of a week in captivity in a labryrinthine race braiding through bug and brush to the sunlight above. At the top of the vase I have taken a newspaper rubber band and turniquited the opening with a square sample of gauzy purple polyester. Ladybugs are scaling the top of the vase, their tiny feet gripping the fabric as they head the escape reconnaisance. To placate them, I slip four halves of soaked raisins, which they hone in on, with deft purpose as if by program, and begin to slurp up the sweet juice. Meanwhile, a drop of water placed atop the polyster floats with all structural integrity and maintains its globular shape as ladybugs descend upon it, dock and drink in the quiet silence of satiation.
Chas and I put on shoes and walk together into the garden, and I set the ladybugs down upon the grass. I open the lid and watch as fifty-odd shiny ladybugs whizz out the mouth of the vase, landing in my forearms, shoulder, eyebrows, knees. One bites me on the hand and I flick it off into the bush. Everywhere, crawling bugs, and the green onion remains a smorgasbord.
When enough have flown the terrarium, I stretch the rubber band over the fabric, spread it taut and drip another drop of water atop the lid. Thirsty ladybugs begin honing again upon it. And Chas continues to laugh in the grass, crawling himself with fifty-odd ladybugs as they roam his sunny toddlerscape. He giggles and drools accidentally. At his sooty bare feet, ladybugs congregate in a drying puddle of water, irrigation from hours ago, some with noses to the ground and tails pointing skyward, devout and transfixed.
Posted by Steph at 06:51 AM | Comments (2)
April 28, 2007
Friday
In the sleeping house at midnight I finish folding a load of whites on top the dryer, which is already humming to a new heap of wet laundry. There is a stack of dishtowels one foot high and I pick up a prefold diaper, still warm and soft from the basin, and I hold it by the corners and let it hang lengthwise, bring it to my chest and take either corner inwards, folding the diaper into itself. My muscles on autopilot after years of memory, I turn the top three inches or so down and then fold the entire thing in half. Now it is ready for a bottom and a snappi fastener, and I set it down onto the stack of towels and frown at the anomaly. Because Chas hasn't worn diapers in over six months now. And a small part of me frets that he never will again, a very small part of me called Insane. I pick the prefold off the top of the pile and sling it over my shoulder, walk into the kitchen and start to tidy the bar, a cuttingboard still wet with lime juice and cut spearmint, dribbles of rum on the white hexagonal tile counter, sticky now with mostly sugar remaining from the spills.
Outside the open windows on a windless fifty-degree midnight, a mockinbird hammers away atop some neighborhood perch, several doors down, hawking himself witlessly from every persuasion and to absolutely no end. After all these spring midnights since, filled with hours of mockingbird song in pitch black, and there are many in the expanse of fifteen springs, I always remember walking my bike from the architecture building on my way back home down the middle of an old college hill street in Providence, laughing and talking to a classmate about a project under the passing streetlights, to the swelling soliloquoy of a crazed mockingbird just days before finals. Tonight I am there again under pink falling blossoms, anticipating phantom critiques in the morning. My stomach is in giddy knots, I can't sleep.
Posted by Steph at 08:13 AM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2007
Thursday
The bucket of ladybugs is sitting on Ford's lofted bed in the cool north exposure, the hundreds of ladybugs awake now in the advancing daylight and ravenously crawling over each other in the mysterious nutrient-shavings the were packaged with. I lay on Ford's bed looking out the window now into the sunny patio as the boys flip pages in picturebooks atop the bed beside me in the quiet spot of our schedule just after lunch. At the top of a middle pane of glass, just under the white wooden frame, a bright red ladybud scales the perimeter and it is surely looking for that colony of aphids in that cluster of chives on the other side of the house. Or just a way to get outside, I reason. I roll my head back towards the bucket of ladybugs on the bed. Crawling as they ever were, teeming with purpose. A few unfortunate bugs are carelessly macerated between the clear lid and the bucket. Ford.
I pick up Island of the Blue Dolphins and leaf to the first page of the first chapter and begin to read. Words cascade off the page while I stand on a remote island in the Pacific northwest somewhere on a typically windy day, and I look out onto the glassy sea to find a ship with two red sails. But I know what a ship is. And I wonder what I would imagine this thing to be if I had never seen a ship before, and as I wonder out loud I ask the same question of Ford, who has begun to watch Seti ram his wet nose into the glass window at the foot of the bed in a senseless pursuit of a housefly. Chas is no longer listening either, and he has cracked a smile at the dog, along with his brother, as Seti continues to buffett the windowpane with ears all a tonic and the tenacity of an inbred terrier. I lay the book on my chest and the boys reel in delight as Seti smacks his lips and eats the stupid fly.
Posted by Steph at 08:24 AM | Comments (1)
Wednesday
Ford and Chas have two buckets of ladybugs in their hands at the local nursery and they are looking at the hundreds of them crawling inside the bucket. The bucket is filled with shavings and they tilt the container round like a gyroscope on some invisible axis before them, trying to see all those ladybugs as if in an effort to count them all the clear platic tub, behind the bilengual paragraphs of instructions and disclaimers and branding on the package's outer skin. I have found a boutique huechera, Key Lime Pie, and return to my own set of disclaimers with narrowed eyes for a few seconds before their intense excitement catches up to their awe. Chas has redefined priorities and the circular sprinkler attachment, the one he has been carrying around for fifteen minutes: brown plastic with ten black prongs, used in this manner as an alien spacecraft, is laid to rest momentarily on the nursery's potting table, beside eight other buckets of ladybugs. Ford has set a diode battery-powered dragonfly necklace with blinking red light on the table already. The area has become a still life, a shelf of curiosities for the young collector.
"Mommy, can we get some ladybugs? we really need a whole bunch of ladybugs for those aphids in the chives. Please, mom?" Ford pleads and Chas steps up behind him, "Yeah, dey're so tool! We got a WOT of wadybugs Ford, huh? Yeah! Wet's go put em in de aphids in a gawden now Arrrr! Jus wike in 'Bug's Wife' huh?! (begins to reenact a scene from said movie, very physically carrying the ladybug bucket into his character as he stomps down an aisle of shade-tolerant plants, splattering water puddles along the way. Ford continues to peer in through the clear plastic container while I watch Chas roam, half my face smiling and biting my lip at the same time.
Posted by Steph at 06:45 AM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2007
Tuesday
The winding drive down 92's western slope was typically satisfying, the exuberant decline through the winding fertile gap towards Half Moon Bay set me reeling for the low tide, earmarking time later in the day for the nursery that I breathlessly passed along the way.
We plop down immediately on the beach and the boys begin carving into the coarse, wet sand. In the distance, atop the rocks on the outer reef, gray harbor seal pups shimmy up to their enormous basking mothers and settle back down. The surging surf swells back into the ocean, returns seconds later, breaks upon the shining boulders and the seals hoist flippers above the white surf. The boys are building alien spacecraft and reenacting battle. I am sitting crosslegged, smelling a rotting rockfish that I hadn't yet noticed, which is drying in the noontime sun and it's close enough to where we are sitting that I can discriminate white swim bladder tangled in other viscera. We have so many bags, we just sat down, the boys are building. There is no sense moving yet, until they stop playing and notice the smell. I put my book down and walk to the upper intertidal pools.
You aren't supposed to pick up rocks. Beneath rocks, small animals hide during low tide. To pick up a rock undermines their efforts to survive; anything can come along and notice them in this hostile little pool, which is heating up by the minute, already a stressful enough for any small Pacific animal stranded in a small pool, and the salinity is heightening at the same time. It is a small, ragged rock perched in the middle of the very shallow pool.
Still, I pick up the rock. The kids aren't watching me. Nobody is watching me. I feel like I'm trying to rob a bank in this kind of stealth. I lift the rock gingerly about six inches above the pool. A small crab crouches, freezes. A serpentine fish slinks into the nearest algae frond. I take the half dollar-sized crab and transfer it to a neigboring pool so that it can hide again, and turn to examine the fish.
It's small, the length of my index finger, the width of a chopstick. It is brown, with a tiny tailfin and a cerebral noggin, eyes set close and undoubtedly fixed on me, perhaps my own eyes. I think it's pouting. In the dark shadow of the red algae I can barely discern other features, but I know enough; this is a monkeyface eel.
I search for a vacant space and set the rock down, a few inches from where it once stood. By this time, the kids are tossing sand at each other and before I can reach the dispute, Chas is screaming about the sand in his eyes that Ford threw, and Ford is laying a screaming claim on his innocence. Time for lunch.
Posted by Steph at 06:26 AM | Comments (2)
April 24, 2007
Monday
It is midmorning and the boys whine in disappointment as they watch the highschoolers slip quietly down and up again in the Sunnyvale skatepark bowls, their slaps, skids and rolls hushed behind the windows of the Golf. Why the kids weren't in school, I couldn't explain. Perhaps they were college students? Or homeschoolers? One thing was certain: I couldn't place my younglings in the bowl's bottom while a pack of adolescent men bombed around them at high speed, flipping boards here and there, sometimes missing catch, and pitching their whim against my maternal fear.
So we trudged homewards and took an unexpected left at the last intersection before our road, heading hopefully towards our neighborhood park, and when I was one block from the park I realized that my intuition rang true: It's the perfect preschooler skatepark because of a fifteen foot landscaped berm inset with a spiral sidewalk leading up to a bench on top, perfect for idly skating down and safe by all measures.
Three hours later we lie in bed, and I'm exhausted from reading to them but they are nonetheless climbing like cubs over me, ready for more stimulus. Mentally drained as well as physically, I shuffle down from their lofted domain and idly brew an espresso, that I might match their might, but in a half hour's time I'm merely irritable and tired, so we lived the late afternoon in a disharmonious rut; the boys, fighting not so much for the right of their individual wills but probably more for my undivided attention and I, weak from my own mental slump, puttering among household tasks and small ambitions. By five-thirty I have a glass of wine, amble into the garden with the boys, notice that the deer have mowed all but the basal eight inches off all the tomato plants and the entirely of the paprika achillea (they didn't touch the yellow one in the ground beside it). I handed Ford the pepper spray and he sprayed with robust purpose while chas whacked the potted ferns with a black plastic bat. Seti lay on the grass gnawing on a panel of redwood from the rotting firewood stack.
By the sun's setting I found myself serenely watching the quail out the studio window, nice benchmark that is for dusk, and detoxing on a second installment of bottled water while Damon and the boys skated at the elementary school across the road, by now empty of all children save mine. Peace found in the quietude of their silent grazing, I watch the quail weave their way darker into the thick of our hedgerow.
Posted by Steph at 07:36 AM | Comments (1)
April 18, 2007
Easter weekend
It rained last night, throughout the night and into the morning, until the sun poked through the snivelling stratus and proclaimed that it was no longer a time of grieving. So the rain packed up and moved eastward, I'm told. And in its wake, the starlings came back out of hiding among the ivy boughs, and the quail promenaded atop the dewy lawn, properly.
For the past three weeks we have had occasional rains, and each time the pitter pattering begins above our heads on this old roof, we tell ourselves, "This is the last rain of the season." That was the last rain of the season.
Speaking of proper, this is a blog where I am obliged to to log a chronicle of events, and I missed the holy weekend of Easter. I've been called on this, so let me indulge you people on what you missed, heretofore two weeks.
Alis threw Seth an Easter rager. Thirty-odd toddlers turned every stone and log looking for eggs and chocolate on the Whitman commons that straddle Skyline ridge. She spent the week beforehand sewing fleece easter bunnies and dying eggs in pots of boiled beets and onionskins and cabbageleaves. On other nights, she wrapped heirloom seeds in tulle and tied them to colorful tongue depressors, and when she was busy wrapping little pots of violas and wheatgrass with tissue paper and hand-painted yarn, she enlisted friends to string wooden beaded bracelets into the wee hours or, as in my case, stand in her kitchen, slackjawed and dumbfounded, to gawk at all the hard work she really put into this fete while she dyed yet more gorgeous eggs.
Which is all to say that my boys cared neither here nor there about any of this, on that particular day, the day of the hunt, as they poked and prodded through the Lamb's Ears and Lilies until they found all forms of chocolate, but that we girls, and by that I mean me( because I was trying not to notice my younger competition) secretly dashed through the garden like a pixie, collecting shiny glass beads and seed packets, purple-and-orange violas and wheatgrass pots, slipping them inconspicuously into Chas' easter basket while he gorged on his gold, his precious chocolate. Occasionally I'd urge him to pick up a seed packet that I'd found, and he'd probe the entire area first for chocolate, certain that I had scouted for nothing other, and finally reach for the only thing hidden in the foliage, which was indeed the seed packet and which he indeed picked up. For me!
And so, with seeds to plant, I'm faced by the bare patches of three quarterempty flowerbeds, spared just for such purpose, and the blank face of a front and back yard, freshly plowed by a thirty year-old and rusting tractor with a likewise rusted and ringing plow, just days ago before the rain fell. I see mounds upon which to plant two to three ppumpkins seeds apiece. Give or take a melon.
I have tenacious, hard callouses on my hands from three weekends ago, when we spent the rest of Easter weekend in Pebble Beach, playing drunk barefoot tennis doubles into the black of night. I'm not sure how I didn't bleed through my feet by bedfall, on those heavy, luxurious sheets; on the contrary, my feet tingled as if they'd been freshly shorn of three old inches of thick hide. Perhaps they were?. Indeed, the rest of me felt that idyllic; it's fun having rich friends with third homes nestled in the surreal beauty of California's monterrey bay peninsula. We drove home along the coastal highway bisecting the prim acres of golfing lawn and the rugged, emerald blue jumble of ocean and guano-stained rock and the white froth of my amazement. Acres upon acres of blooming artichoke and fruiting strawberries, laborers scattered along the endless rows that stretched inland, hunched over the produce like props. Surreal produce signs with enormous specimens that seemed to shine from the light of the sun itself, which glared down sternly upon us as we shook off the two day hangover that only an irresponsible weekend in someone else's mansion in someone else's neighborhood could bring.
Posted by Steph at 06:45 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2007
Full Tilt into Spring
On the way home from the beach, I stopped by my favorite nursery in Half Moon Bay (who doesn't have a website to google but I can give you directions, if you are interested) and bought plants. Not just any plants, but anything that could double its duty as both gopher proof and textural. So I chose a leaf in every shape: oval, circular, fusiform, serrated. And I picked up anything chartreuse and violet, wispy and hugging. In essence, I chose plants that not only worked double time but put in extra hours at playing off one another: purple huechera and silver helichyrysum, lenten rose and bronze fennel, waving yarrow and succulent prostrate sedum. They sit in congragation together on cardboard flats atop whiteplastic lawn chairs, in the shade of two towering cypress beside the house, waiting for me to finish digging vitality back into the cold earth.
A family of quail graze the ground beneath them, black and purple plumes gleaming in the afternoon sun, ebony bobbers wiggling like alien antennae atop their noggins. It's hard not to grin every time they pass. That's probably one of those beautiful things about Spring here, although for all I know the quail are permanent residents. But the Robin has started chattering at dusk with the scrub jays around the grapefruit tree's birdbath, the frogs start peeping soon afterwards, and nothing sounds more like an American Spring, to me.
As you start to spend more time outside, maybe gardening, maybe taking a brisk walk, what sounds of Spring are ringing in the air around you?
Posted by Steph at 11:01 PM | Comments (2)
March 13, 2007
SPC: Flickr tools #2
With little difference to the stiff neck I felt yesterday morning, I drove the kids down to the beach. All the elation that nearly winded me on the drive down to Half Moon Bay fizzled once I started lifting Chas out of deep tide pools and stretching to capture fossils embedded in the rocks. I remember the swirling panorama of beached seals and hungry surf, thinking, This is a very bad place to be with a stiff neck and two exploring preschoolers.
So I let both of the kids clamber their way back to the beach on their own (Chas is getting surprisingly nimble) and then rested in the tent while they bouldered and threw rocks at the incoming tide. This overexposed shot is taken from my little infirmary. I like the way it captures the heat, unforgiving light and pain (although I might be the only one to look at this picture and feel it). It also has a nice retro tint. What's your impression? I'm obliged to use these flickr tools for SPC's current challenge but I'm not sure I'd use these tools in my own. It lacks authenticity. Not sure I like that, although it has a home somewhere.
My advice to anyone waking up in the morning with a stiff neck is to traction yourself to a board for the rest of the day and hook yourself up to an IV and catheter. Don't drive a long, winding road to the beach, set up a tent, wrangle children across the rocks at low tide and then press reverse. That was a recipe for disaster. Damon says it wouldn't matter; that the muscle would spaz no matter what.
I wonder if he's right.
If you want to learn more about online photoediting tools , check out a gallery exhibiting some at SPC.
Posted by Steph at 07:32 PM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2007
Squinting in the sunshine
I am traversing the eastern slope of Fremont Open space, and I'm walking along a terrace once trafficked perhaps by laborers on this former orchard as they roamed from tree to tree during harvest. What kinds of trees? I don't know. Today their gnarled, leafless, stunted silhouettes stand arabesque upon the hill above me, black and static amid the flowing grasses, beneath the hovering falcon. Birdsong travels like a current over the terrain, bees are busy buzzing in the clover mats, hummingbirds fighting in the treelimbs. I stop along the trail while Seti sniffs the newspaper; it's Sunday and the weeds hang with dog pee here and there along the worn trail. The entire hillside is tense with new life. You can almost feel the warm ground quake beneath you, a mycelium overtaking winter's rot, aerating the bedrock, paving the way for shooting rhizomes and weeds. Little yellow wildflowers sway with glossy grass. If I were to try drawing three square inches of this space I might scream; beneath the mat of green urgency lies an even tinier world, a lilliputian army of plants and fungi working together to hold the soil firmly against the hillside. A linear delight, it reminds me of Dutch painting and discovering the architecture of dandelions and drawing for hours on end, without interruption. But today I'm plodding onwards, at times tugging the dog to urge him faster, so I might get back to unpack yet more boxes, and break down more boxes, making space in the mudroom for this naked and young morning light to pour into our house and penetrate the walls with its warm yawn.
Posted by Steph at 11:09 PM | Comments (1)
February 27, 2007
Composting in the Rain
Despite my occasional irritations with way the boys continue to remain so close by my side, there are upsides to their lingering dependence on me. I can still redirect muddles between them by simply leaving the room, a perfect curveball. This morning, I quelled an escalating feud between them in the living room, one I was almost ready to fuel with my own frustration, by halting mid-step, turning round and retreating to the mudroom, where I silently baffled them as I put on my socks and boots and headed out into the yard. They watched me from the stoop as I opened the shed door, near the garage, and began excavating hoes, cultivators and shovels from an ethereal matrix of dusty cobwebs, spreading them like battle artillery, single-file, to rest along a low-lying branch. And within minutes, both were eagerly digging into the understory of a giant oak tree in the front yard, heaving shovelsful of composted peat into random piles around me.
Chas soon began to look for earthworms. Crouching over the dugout, in the space I'd carved beneath the tree, he picked fat glossy creepers between his fingers and carried them around the yard, through the house for a little while, taking them on a helpless tour of distraction before returning to my side. As if he'd forgotten it was still in his hand, Chas would ask to take another bath (perhaps his third?), doe-eyed and head tilted, and I'd look down at his hand to find another gleaming, limp, pinched annelid. "I wanna put him in the bathtub," he'd say, quite matter-of-factly. And I'd have to disagree, smiling apologetically, as I turned the compost in the drizzling rain.
Posted by Steph at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2007
Our Third Child
I read somewhere, ten years ago when we were puppy-surfing, that a Jack Russell Terrier is like having a perpetual three year-old in the house. Well, that's pretty true. Seti, our dog, is all about the "now" and the "me" and balls and toys. He doesn't always share; in fact, he's always hoarded his own ball at the dog park, fending off dumbfounded pit bulls and retrievers five times his size, just by the obnoxious tang in his snarl. And, just like any preschooler, you can distract him off the nasty scent of a dead rat in the backyard just by saying the magic words "where's your ball?" It's so easy.
Ball. Ball is life. Well, ball is second to frisbee, but we're out of frisbees right now. We have two chronically wet tennis balls (you can see why, above) and one racquetball (a far superior choice to all manufactured dog toys for the medium dog set). Seti will carry the ball around the house, right under your feet, hoping you will throw it. When you sit down to talk on the phone, he will drop it at your feet. When you try disapppearning into the bathroom for ten minutes, he'll unlock the door with his razor sharp Jack Russell perserverence and drop the ball at your feet. And certainly, when you slip into a nice warm bath, ready to erase the day's grime off your body and soul, Seti will come and drop the dirty ball into the bathwater. Then he'll sit and stare at you imploringly, his brown eyes now big obsidian orbs, penetrating their voodoo into your weariness, and there's no way to resist him: you find yourself throwing the ball this way and that, trying to outwit the bastard but damned if he doesn't catch your every curveball! He's a machine. He'll do this all day. And here he is, twisting Chas' arm in the new bath.
Posted by Steph at 11:07 PM | Comments (4)
February 18, 2007
35
Birthdays. They just keep getting sweeter. Alis and I celebrated our birthdays tonight by having a fondue party up at her place in the Santa Cruz mountains. I think we both might be missing the absence of the yearly Red & Chocolate party, which used to include a few more guests than just the ten of us that were there tonight. It's normally such a wet, cold time of the year here, especially up in the mountains, where the rain freezes and sometimes turns to snow. But the weather is warmer this year. I cut a quince branch, already in flower, and attached it to the bow on her present. Fruit trees along the Saratoga avenues are white with blossoms, rolling hills at the open space preserve, where I run, are adorned in special corners with tiny pink and white buds, showering petals along the path. It's already Spring and it's righteous.
Every time I think it's a beautiful day down here in the valley, I'm blown away when I step out of my car in her driveway up on Skyline ridge. For starters, there's the quiet outdoor air there that's almost deafening, like the sound of nighttime in the suburbs after two fresh feet of snow. After the birds have gone to roost, near dusk, I can almost hear my ears ringing (thanks due in part to Chas and to a lesser extent, Ford, the loudest children I've ever known). And then there's the view. The breathtaking view that, were it not for the fog, would include the Pacific, beyond Santa Cruz.
Birthdays are sweeter and sweeter. I can cook in the same kitchen with my college buddy, smile about where we are right now, and look into the living room to see benchmarks we've left over the years since we met: solid ties with men that became important to us along the way; the three beautiful, vibrant children that this love made possible; our two little dogs who are getting older, followed by the ghosts we've grieved to tell goodbye, recently: three other dogs, a horse; a mother, a grandfather.
Turning 35 this year is the sweet little nudge in the arm, reminding me about babies and books and other priorities that can't wait behind my hedonism. But I think this year I might start lying about my age. Alis and I made a deal: it's not important for anyone to know. Except for the clerks at the grocery store, but I'll tell them my age any time because they still card me when I buy groceries (which, I now realize, tells me that I buy entirely too much booze). 35 used to be old. But I've never carried myself better (thank you, yoga. why didn't we meet sooner?) and my smile, most often, has a careworn grace to it that I am proud of, suggesting achievement and the attainment of purpose. I think motherhood did it to me.
...The rest of time I think I'm frowning, though, and I can attribute that to motherhood, too ;)
Damon, thanks for the photos! You're getting gooood!
Posted by Steph at 11:18 PM | Comments (4)
February 06, 2007
We've Moved
The big difference I feel, being in this house, is the announcement I make with every move within it; the floorboards do most of the talking, try as I may to pussyfoot from room to room, as I imagine what will go where. Our belongings arrive within the week. I'm enjoying the graceful expanse of sunlight across the hardwood floors, this immensity of personal space, after being in a hotel room for one month.
Arranging our nature walk loot on a quiet surface in the sunroom, I look out the window to spy quail silhouettes scampering beneath the rhododendron and a scrub jay punctuate the clover in blue. Unknown bulbs peep through pine needles. These walls, this acre, is filled with hope for the coming years. I'll complain a lot about the Los Palo-Gato-Altos-View smog of silicon valley, but I'm amazed at how we manage to still smell grass and trees here in Saratoga, at the foot of the Santa Cruz mountains, who are (these days) obscured through milk glass. Here, the cleansing respite of a eucalyptus grove: towering twisted trunks with warping bark. Although the blossoms are brown, the hummingbirds are still fighting among the drooping boughs.
Posted by Steph at 08:16 AM | Comments (2)
January 25, 2007
Fitzgerald Marine Reserve
Ford is rediscovering the coast and he asks to go back, time and again, to Santa Cruz. However, I've blissfully started introducing him to different shoreline habitats and today I figured was the perfect time to indulge myself, and the kids, in a low tide experience along the rocky surf at Moss Beach. I'd actually never been before. As it turns out, the park is a refuge for the Harbor Seal, who swims between this beach and the harbor, in lower Moss Beach; and, during low tides, this is the safest refuge for them to rest, atop the black rock that crops up through the crest of low tide. In fact, the rangers set up construction cones around the rim of the beach to give the seals privacy. Otherwise, they might flee the beach and swim to exhaustion, unable to find the refuge they need anywhere else along this shoreline.
We had just reached the beach, at the end of a short trail, when the camera battery died.
Ford was so anxious to recall what we saw today once we returned to the hotel. He quickly synopsed the visit with a drawing of his favorite finds (which deserved better light when I took this photo, but this will have to do):
With a stick, we had turned over an organism in the sand that resembled an enormous, wide cow tongue. On the underside of the orange beast, a flat foot with a central groove, in the shape of a U. On the backside, a row of partially hidden plates under thick hide-like orange flesh. A chiton relative? A grapefruit from outer space? Actually, I was right: Cryptochiton or Gumboot chiton (named after the color and texture of its flesh). Way cool, but also very dead and intensely rank. Next!:
Ford's favorite of the day: the Green Sea Anemone. He discovered that he could stick his finger into the flowery nubbins and make them close up, squirting water out in a tiny little stream clear up to his nose. Very entertaining, he did this for the longest time until the tide started swallowing us. But not before we investigated Turban snails and rescued a parching Pisaster.
Posted by Steph at 01:58 AM | Comments (1)
January 23, 2007
Week Two
I couldn't properly toodle around until we found ourselves a home and signed the paperwork. Fortunately, we found a lovely home in saratoga last week. It's sunny and quaint and sits on a terraced acre where an orchard once stood. The road bisects the farm from the field. We live in its vestiges: a tower hung with vines, once for water, stands beside the driveway. What happened to the orchard? In the excitement of finding ground for roots I forgot to ask. There're more history behind the house, too. It was the retirement home for the owner's parents. I recognize the 50s mint cream bathroom tiles. A real breakfast nook. And it was home to two young boys, before we came along last week. There is a fading basketball hoop in the driveway with a piece of paper taped to the backboard, claiming "FREE." Two belay ropes hang from a large pine tree in the backyard, and as I look around, I see other swings hanging in other trees. A treehouse in an alcove of the lot, tucked behind soft green corners.
We move in february 1st. The owner, who lives next door, is my new town historian. She has a playground of her own in her backyard, standing attention under the eaves, awaiting her seven granddaughters. In her pool she has taught all the neighborhood children to swim. Ford is on her list for Summer 2007. She even has an Araucana chicken.
Home, indeed!
In the meantime, back to toodling:
Shoreline Park shenanigans
Natural Bridges driftwood
cleaning our lungs at Castle Rock SP
budgeting a membership
We lived here once and it was never so sunny. Kids change everything. Baker beach, the Presidio, SF
Noodles on Haight
Tired on Haight
all toodled out on Twin Peaks.
Posted by Steph at 07:42 AM | Comments (4)
January 16, 2007
Week One
The hotel is quiet and mellow, and the ebb and flow of Googlers from Sunday afternoon to Friday morning keeps me regular. Otherwise, our life is crazy and chaotic and loud. I come and go through the lobby apologetically, always on some pretense to avoid conversation with the concierge, but the reality is that they are all cool with our presence. They love the kids, and they laugh when Chas climbs all over the fancy retromodern furniture in the lobby, reaching out to grab bottles of wine from the rack on the wall. But someone has to hear them downstairs when they jump off the bed like kid goats or stampede across the room with the foam basketball towards the net I hung from the minibar closet. And if I don't get out of the hotel room by ten o'clock, all of us reach a critical mass and someone has to have noticed the screaming tantrums when we've missed that deadline. Half-dressed baby dolls on the floor in the corner of the room. Marbles in the toilet. Cream cheese on the rug. But every day we return in the evening, after a long day of house hunting, to find Petey and Baby (the boy's dolls) tucked properly back into bed, and a replinshing set of little toiletries standing in array in the bathroom, telling us to go ahead, shower off, relax. There's an apricot beer in the microfridge. This isn't so bad now, is it?
Friends. We return to very loved friends here. Alis is now a mother and I enjoy watching her on her home turf. She's beautiful and photogenic and while she may wonder why I chose this photo out of many others, it is because I just love it for some inexplicable reason. She's thinking about something while we wait for food at the Upper Crust Pizzeria in Santa Cruz. And this is Seth, Chas' partner in crime, so you'd better look out.
Jim is Alis' husband and is telling me that I have a sweet camera but that my fisheye lens is really not a fisheye lens. And I'm about to tell him that it is a fisheye lens, but that it cost less than $800, so it's just not an expensive one. Santa Cruz, at a popular local coffeeshop that I can't remember the name of.
Jerry, our best man, bester than ever. In counting our blessings, having Jerry back in our company is at the top of the list. We pick up just where we left off, just like that, and it's fun to watch him study our new parental habits and hurdle the chaos we create around him. Always benevolent, here he is with a peace offering for his girlfriend, because we kidnapped him for an entire day down to the beach to skateboard and watch clustering monarchs and buy panoramic cameras at SwapMeet.
Posted by Steph at 07:12 AM | Comments (1)
January 07, 2007
Waiting
We insisted that Chas poop before getting on the plane, and this saved our LIVES. The kids and Damon filled the row behind me on the plane, shouting out random data like "Look, Mom! Shit Pile crater!" and "WHOOOOOOOOOAA!" and "Look at me! Look at ME!" as the plane bounced through mile-high white clouds. Really, there was nothing sober about the flight; I think that these pictures just show our fatigue after dealing with the whole waiting-for-Chas-to-poop-while-fearing-he'd-still-wind-up-pooping-on-the-plane period. The flight was nothing but an amped riot and strangely, everyone near us on the plane thought it was all pretty funny. One man lost it when he heard Ford ask Damon,
"Daddy, what's this button for?"
"Don't touch that Ford, that's the Self-Destruct Button."
Just lost it.
Posted by Steph at 03:38 PM | Comments (2)
January 04, 2007
Goodbye, Austin
Posted by Steph at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)
January 03, 2007
Powerbook Shuffle
The process of moving has involved Damon spending much of his time in the office, rearranging bits and bytes among three or four different laptops, including mine. I've walked into the room numerous times only to stand in the doorway, slackjawed in fatigue, wondering in my little mind whether it may be wise to interrupt the binary flow and ask for my computer. Most of the time I pause there for a minute, holding my breath, until I decide that I'd rather go pick my nose or knit, or do both, in no particular order. Craziness becomes me when I'm in limbo, manifesting itself in peculiar ways.
I had a lovely photomosaic from the holidays which, after Damon looked sideways at my computer, got lost. Not that it was his fault. I blame it rather on my computer, for being there on the countertop, in his plain view. So intimidating was his glance from across the room that Safari just quit on him. On all of us, really. It took me about an hour to put together, so you can understand my frustration and the hesitation I feel trying to making another. And until I have packed. But first, priorities: blogging. After all, I've been such a prolific blogger the past 4 months, right?
For the record, I did get a Shuffle for Christmas and it's probably the coolest thing on my list of cool things on the planet, next to this really cool other new thing I got for christmas, called a FISHEYE lens! I still can't believe it. I must've been a good girl last year. Or something.
Posted by Steph at 03:16 AM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
Finishing Business
The act of moving feels second nature. We have been moving every two or three years for the past decade, Damon and I, so this time feels not unlike the rest. We know the drill: Before it's too late, one last taste of everything we love...Today, Magnolia cafe pancakes--without the kids; a muddy plod through the greenbelt basin; yesterday, skateboarding after dark at the top of Damon's old parking garage. Shotgunning Shiner beer and watching the weather change above us. I wish we could experience one more thunderstorm before we depart on Wednesday for the west coast; I'll miss the stratospheric drama we're accustomed to here, but we'll exchange all that for a new trove of earthly spactacles: quakes, geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pits. Purple sulphur bacteria. And heaving kelp beds beneath tiny boats. I decided to unearth the kelp quilt I started several months ago and pack it with the hotel yarn stash, fodder for my late nights to come, once we arrive in Mountain View.
Posted by Steph at 05:56 AM | Comments (1)
December 15, 2006
Over the River and Through the Woods and Across The Mojave and Up the Empire Valley and past a bunch of those gigantic white windmills to Mountain View we go
Wow, this is awkward. That struggling for the right anecdotes when you're standing there with a towering armful of them, ready to topple over. An anxious pause in conversation with a long-distance friend, when you know there's something you're forgetting to mention.
Well, here it is, the big thing I've forgotten to mention: We are moving back to California. At the end of the month, a big tractor trailer will back into our bending driveway. It will rip off the lowest, brittle oak limbs that cover the stretch of pavement where Ford has learned to skateboard and park over the spot, near the garbage cans, where the chickens keep scattering leaves in their search for grubs. And somehow, when this all happens, I will be in a hotel room in Mountain View, probably still scanning Craigslist for a place for us to live.
It's not that we don't love Austin. We've managed to sink a pretty thick taproot into the limestone bedrock here, and bought a lot to build on and sunk our teeth through some great plans for our future here. And we're keeping that foothold here. Nothing changes that.
It's just that someone really needs Damon right now, enough that they found him, interviewed him 23 times over the course of 3 months and made it virtually impossible for us to justify staying here in Austin, when every fiber in our body was begging us to just stay put. One of his colleagues sums it up well: You'd have to kick yourself in the arse every day if you stayed. And I can't live with a husband who kicks himself in the arse every day; only one of us can do that in this household and I claim that right for myself. For reasons that aren't important right now and that vary from day to day anyway.
And because it's the holidays and I'm packing and making presents and freaking out, I've given and exceeded the five minute limit I put on blogging tonight. I don't have any new pictures. I do have so many things I regret not writing about over the past few months; the time has simply slipped through my fingers. I've instead been rewarding myself lately, at the tail end of the day, with a beer, a shameful tv program and a lapful of wool between busy but meditative needles.
Posted by Steph at 05:24 AM | Comments (4)
November 26, 2006
I'm thankful for...
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November 11, 2006
Blink, Wish
A double-take, and I see Ford drinking milk straight out of the carton; he is five going on fifteen. The array of cheerios on the table ground him solidly at five, though, harking back at two.
Chas, meanwhile, sneaks a few steps ahead of me when I'm not looking. Here, he is taking a break from sit-down longboarding in the driveway, elated with the feeling of being able to soar only inches above concrete, all by himself.
I have a cache of smiley moments to toss onto the page but not a lot of time to do it right now: the way the sun dappled through cool limestone shadows as we rambled through the canyon, grazing the chalky outcroppings with little fingers; laughing at the dancing chickens in our yard; standing on stools in the kitchen, cutting vegetables for a pot of soup and laughing at the carrots that kept rolling off the countertop and onto the floor. Despite the occasional headaches, this job rocks!
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Posted by Steph at 03:55 AM | Comments (0)
November 01, 2006
Happy Halloween!
Ford, the White Witch from Narnia, along with Mr. Incrediboy, on the walk to the school carnival. Looking pretty tired already. But they perked up after each squirted a half-can of cookie icing into their mouths while we grownups weren't paying attention.
Chas, on Halloween night, decided to be the White Witch, too. But in battle dress.
It looks even better with the red lollipop hanging from the pelt, but I lost that photo somewhere.
Posted by Steph at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
Happy Halloween!
Posted by Steph at 05:43 PM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2006
"Mom? Did You Like My Song?"
It took me a half hour to post my last entry because Ford was singing really loud downstairs in the garage with Damon and I kept turning an ear down the hallway and laughing. I wish I were this uninhibited:
Posted by Steph at 03:28 AM | Comments (1)
Elgin Sausage Stampede
On Saturday morning, we rediscovered our old college schedule of getting up early and hauling ass to class, except this time we went to Elgin for a Sausage Run. I loved the morning drive, creeping out of night across the hills, still blanketed in fog. It's so breathtaking, this yawn of daybreak. I usually sleep through it, as do my children; we are a family that wakes up twenty minutes before school starts, and somehow this works for us. But to see what I've been missing makes me want to curb my nocturnal habits. Passing by our neighbors along the road, little glowing windows inside each shadowed house reminds me of forgotten habits: frosty morning jogs along Balckburn avenue in Providence, cats on the prowl in driveways that I pass, concert flyers waving on telephone poles, and showering before breakfast; the opposite sequence to my current routine, a thousand miles south.
Ford, quietly pouting in the center of the universe, was disappointed that the race didn't include him. So we pulled back, letting him sprint every now and then through the old town streets and across train tracks. I even gave him my number, and trailed behind him through the finish line. I want to be the family that runs together. It's a lifelong sport. And my hip was killing me so this made good pretense. He ate it up.
A proper fun run, this race divvied up a kegger at the finish line along with steaming pork sausage (note: the best in Texas) and while I dislike eating pork, I couldn't resist pints of beer and hot sausage to follow the trail of woodsmoke that carried me from start to finish along the uninspired smalltown route. Even better: a bounce house for the squirts to decompress while we shotgunned refreshments.
Posted by Steph at 02:43 AM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2006
Horsing Around in the Moonlight
It's midnight and I can't sleep. The shelf above my desk retains a wall of towering fabric scraps, folded in assembly and ready to be all cut and sewn up. Into what? Perhaps a glow-in-the-dark circuitboard horse? Why not!
Cutting through thick wool felt is so satisfying, like the slow and steady joy of learning to cut through paper in preschool. And the way it sounds, like horses chomping on warm hay.
The surplus yarn in the office here is Fall-friendly and begging to be touched, wishing it were warm enough to get all knit up into scarves and pants and hats. Otherwise, it makes great manes and tales. But do you notice that Chas is wearing fleece?? After eight months of flip-flops I found myself wearing wool socks under my Air Jesus' and I felt so...back in northern California. Layering is fun. 60 degrees F feels so nice, so much better than 90 degrees in mid-October.
Posted by Steph at 04:26 AM | Comments (1)
October 13, 2006
Oooh, If the Dust Ever Settles in This House...
A circuitboard made of white foam and leftover yarn that Ford's friends made during his birthday party; Chas' wild volcano painting, originally with volatile sound effects; A featherwreath adorned by Betty and Boo; Ford's rock collection: "magic rock," amethyst geode, coral from Galveston, birthday geode from CZ...
Our Fall nature table. Little Ivy Elizabeth Walker, Ford's favorite character last year from The Village, sitting on the resting rock in the middle of a little Hill Country glade; Burr oak and Post oak acorns from around town; Edwards limestone; Ball moss from everywhere around town; chickenfeathers and unknown native grass, what I pretend is a White-Tailed deer...
at Ivy's feet: "HEXAGONS!" that Chas found on our walk through the neighborhood (courtesy of a sunbleached, long-dead armadillo skeleton)...
Gretel, another storybook favorite, plays cavalier atop Big Billy Goat Gruff; and no nature table in our house is grounded without a chicken.
Posted by Steph at 05:51 AM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2006
Quietly tumbling into the folds of my memory, like carded wool bundles, are little mundane moments gone undocumented. The smudged picture of Ford, placing a fistful of wildflowers atop his chick's small stickpile grave. Chas, smiling in the kitchen with a half-eaten stick of melting butter in his hands. The pit in my stomach as I scan the decay in Ford's dental x-rays while he squirms in the the chair and Chas wriggles out of my exhausted arms. The warm breeze lofting the sunlit red feathers on our chicken Betty, dead in the grass beside our driveway. Ford sitting before the nature table, arranging feathers and acorns and tiny baskets of glass beads. The electricity of change, orchestrating stifled conversations about not moving and interrupting my sleep. Like now.
Posted by Steph at 05:57 AM | Comments (2)
September 19, 2006
A New Laptop Battery is Just Like Having a New Laptop
I am waiting for apple bisque paint to dry on paper and listening to three seperate snores. It's allergy season. The windows are all open and neighbors just chunked two fireworks into the sky, exploding over the oaks, hissing sparkling arcs across the driveway. I imagine a handful of boys laughing a few doors down, high-fiving over a six-pack and rummaging the garage for more things to detonate. It's a window into the Sicore boy's future, enough to make me wince (Watch those fingers, boys!) but also smile. It's FUN to blow stuff up!
Damon and I went alone together to the gym this morning. We shared machines and grins. In the middle of the bustling gym floor I wanted to pounce on him. Watching him huff and puff drove me crazy. It was like a shot of Back in College, that undivided attention between us. So as soon as I picked up Chas at childcare, I scribbled down reservations for the rest of this week and next week--pencilling in about an extra half-hour for good measure, each day. Damon did the same. It feels like I've found a missing gasket and now I've replaced it, allowing the machinery to run smoothly again. This may have been one of those elusive missing things in my life.
We took the kids out on the lake again tonight. Austin is absolutely lovely right now, fresh out of the shower and sprinkled with joggers and children and rowers and hummingbirds. I've been dying to bring along a camera, but too paranoid that it might get wet (which it will); the setting sun just gilts everything on its way out. Chas and Ford shared the middle seat tonight, each dragging the little wooden boats that Damon made them, holding graham crackers opposite hands. The way it should be, we just coasted in and out of cypress coves, above illicit beds of Eurasian Watermilfoil and broad mats of Hydrilla, the boys humming Sonic Youth and we, the grownups, chuckling over cold beer. We ran a Great Blue Heron off its hunt five times, tracing its hunt by accident along the convoluted, wooded banks off the lake.
The paint is now dry. I'm daydreaming of graduate studies in painting here at the university. Priorities first, though. I close that window in my browser and step back to the table, dreaming up a series of paintings for a show. 'Self-taught' is satisfactory.
Posted by Steph at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
September 16, 2006
Rain Again
Posted by Steph at 04:46 PM | Comments (1)
September 06, 2006
notblogging
Shorter, cooler days. A front on summer's coattails. Soft rain hides a full moon tonight and the chickens whisper chirps at me, asking for voice recognition, as I close the tractor door in the darkness. It's only me, I tell them. The neighbors mentioned a fat coyote crossing our road yesterday.
Before bed, Chas rolls onto his back on the bedroom floor, staring up at the swirling red snake mobile that I hung from the air vent yesterday.
"How do do dat?" he asks, smiling with wide, twilight eyes.
We are spending mornings, afternoons and evenings outside. I rarely am at the computer, these days. I wonder how I could make more time to write any more than I already do (in my journal), amazed at people who can ignore distractions and faithfully blog on...slacker that I am, I sit slackjawed in a long red canoe at night on the lake, breathless atop placid waters. Our city glows under the indigo sky, buzzing with the current of hungry bats, evening traffic whirring above us on the avenues. We slice through the coke bottle water, a parade of shrieks and babble as our children narrate a joy I'm too grown-up to blurt out. So I just paddle on, smiling, as Chas leans over the bow, dragging his little hand in the water, tiptoe on his flip-flips.
Posted by Steph at 04:50 AM | Comments (0)
August 30, 2006
Sidewalk Circuitry
Ford is really, really into circuit boards. Sadly, I'm not. But his father steps up to the plate in my stead. When I walked outside before dinner, he and the boys were elbow-deep in chalk dust, reviewing their designs. So pervasive is the circuitboard concept in his everyday speech that I'm unsure where to begin elaborating on this current fascination. (oh, I just did a funny, did you get that? Because I just did) And, seeing as I've already had a day chock-full of the stuff, I must admit that I really don't want to discuss it any further. Maybe another day. Or maybe I can transcribe something from the engineering mini, himself?...
At any rate, I thought the grandparents would really love to see some of Ford's creations and I wanted to mention that I, for my part, am thrilled that he's finally beginning to enjoy drawing and sketching more than he used to. This is so important to me, that he always feels comfortable letting go with paint or pen, whatever medium. You see, for a long time he seemed to have little interest in this kind of activity, preferring to flip through books or pretend he was blowing things up. I tried never to push it, while always having accessible materials. Somwtimes I'd try getting him to work through a freeform "assignment" but it still didn't break any barriers (of course, knowing me, you'll understand that I'm certain it only made them!) I think that his seeing me spend more time at the desk doing my own work (which has been more frequent lately, as well) may have something to do with his increased comfort in expressing himself on paper.
Whatever. This just made me smile.
Posted by Steph at 08:29 PM | Comments (2)
August 28, 2006
Home: A Collaborative Journal Project
I wish I had left the words out. Everything spoke a quiet abstract tongue to me without the embellishment, and the filigree is really grating my ribs of sarchasm right now, as I look at these pages I painted last night. I had planned on doing something completely different to weave the pages together, and then I got all sappy. I had a Hallmark moment. It happens. It might have involved wine, but I can't remember.
Edited to add: And I have obnoxious waves of sourness, too. Like last night, when I wrote this post.
Christina organized this journal project. I'm #2 in a big group of gals contributing to the book. It'll be fun to see the book once it nears completion, in all it's Flickred glory. For now, it's in a truck on the way to Houston....
What does 'home' mean to you?
Posted by Steph at 11:48 PM | Comments (3)
School Blues
As it turns out, Ford hates school. He dreads it like a fat set of immunizations, asking every night whether the next day is a school day, telling me that he’s already feeling sick; he asks me every morning if it’s a school day, and tells me that he’s not going to school; he runs away from the classroom on some mornings, bolting back towards the car. This is a lot to pay, on top of tuition, for the three hours each morning that he is in “school.” In his defense, Ford says he’s “bored,” and that he doesn’t like the teacher, and the schoolroom “sucks,” along with the toys.nThey, apparently, “really suck.” Straight from the horse’s mouth, four going on fourteen.
And I just don’t know what to do about it. I thought this would do him a world of good. After all, I loved my Montessori years: feeding the animals, teaching myself to ride a bike, learning about different countries and fiedltripping to cotton gins and post offices. In fact, the only school years I like to reflect on are those freeform, user-paced, friendly three foot-high days. Really, my heart is in unschooling him and raising him on experience and one-on-one “lessons.” But we aren’t able to freewheel it around the globe for years at a time, immersing ourselves in the daily rhythms of various cultures, learning to make our rope hammocks in Bali, build fishing boats in New Zealand and forge our own stainless steel toenail trimmers in Germany. Who has that kind of independent wealth? If you’re in this group, don’t bother raising your hand because it’s already pressing my angry buttons.
I also don’t know whether Ford is telling me the whole truth. When I ask him,
“Ford, what did you guys do in circle time, you know, right after I dropped you off?”
“We didn’t do anything. We just sat there and stared at the walls.” Is his immediate and nonchalant reply. And when I asked him about the red bump on his noggin, he told me he got hit with a rock, “and no teacher noticed. Nobody cared.” Yeah. And when I asked him whom he sat with at lunch, on the second day of school, he replied: “Nobody. I didn’t sit next to anybody. Nobody cared about me.” Uh, huh. He follows with this raised eyebrow, sideways-glance. It looks like this: C’mon, Mom. Buy it! I’m so convincing! And you’re soooooo gullible!
For the record, I sat in today and watched the little rugrat in circle time. Lo! He did sit and stare at the wall. Complete disinterest! And I’m beginning to see why. He’s the eldest in his class, eccentrically focused on resistors, capacitors, stratacone volcanoes and molecules. He could care less about “learning to roll a rug” (which, according to Ford, he has practiced in circle time three days in the past week) and “how to walk in a line” (today’s lesson—something I thought he’d learn if he ever entered public school).
So, I’m in a conundrum about what to do with him. I’m a neurotic, borderline schizophrenic parent who plays devils advocate with herself and her decisions. I can’t decide what’s best for Ford. I think I’m deciding for my own reasons, at this time, since those few morning hours are well-spent laughing uninterrupted with Chas, helping him learn to pour rice down a funnel and into empty cups, feeding the chickens, reading books and brushing little teeth. I like this time alone with him. But the situation is not ideal for all of us, and I’m left feeling guilty at the end of the day that I just can’t figure out what’s best for my child. After all, isn’t this really my job? I can’t seem to get the hang of parenthood; it constantly throws me curveballs.
I wonder, staring across the house while I do dishes: how do some parents exhibit such
conviction in their decisions? What makes me so neurotic? Is it all a matter of self-esteem, for my part, or is it just pigheaded perfectionism? With the huge parent market out there, it seems that keywords such as “THOSE CRITICAL FIRST YEARS” and “HOW TO BUILD YOUR BABY’S BRAIN” and “DON’T YOU WANT WHAT’S BEST FOR YOUR BABY?” have anchored in my brain, flailing wildly around the canyons of doubt, to echo, “DON’T FUCK THEM UP! IT’S ALL UP TO YOU! DON’T FUCK THEM UP!” Even though my teeny rational brain, tucked away in my frontal lobe somewhere in a fold, is meanwhile repeating the mantra in a soft whisper, “It’s not up to you, how the kids turn out. I mean, it’s your job to give them security and love, but they will evolve for themselves out of experience—it’s not what you hand them, it’s how they process what they’ve got to work with.” Or something like that. It's hard to tell, because I can't really hear it under all that screaming.
So...I guess the pivotal part of my job becomes clearer amid the conflict: staying sane.
Posted by Steph at 10:29 PM | Comments (11)
August 22, 2006
104 F
It's mid-August and we're roasting under happy white hot skies with evenly-spaced, cottony clouds. And it's dry. Natives hark back to the 1950s and dust storms and hectic farming, and they get giddy about gray clouds on the horizon but are too supersticious to predict rain. When the clouds pass overhead, they spit fat droplets that pat the pavement and vanish magically, evaporating before you can call it rain. And then you sigh and shrug your shoulders.
In the morning, I crawl downstairs to start a pot of coffee and let the hens out for the day. Almost immediately they run for respite in woodier shade, and I start watering the deer-picked, rabbit-picked, chicken-picked truncation of a summer garden: wrinkled and dark green, prostrate. Within minutes, the cicadas start humming a low, warm-up drone. Like dry beans shaking in a parched pod, the cicadas rattling trance intensifies as the heat sets in. I slink back inside.
Chas wants to be outside at all hours, so for him it's all a matter of being buck naked out there. I have no choice but to follow him with a tube of sunscreen in my back pocket and a narrow set of eyes, since the job mostly entails shepherding him out of direct sunlight. Which is difficult, really, because our yard is mostly sun. He glows in the sunshine, his white back reflects the entire spectrum of light as he examines a pillbug in the brown grass, something the hens must have overlooked; they're busy meanwhile under the boxwood, flinging dusty mulch onto the walking path as they burrow six inches into the landscaping. I re-pave the path with the broom as I return for cover, my feet now dusted with roasted umber dust. Chas runs in my wake, the chickens flurry from the hedge to follow him, but the door closes. From inside, Chas laughs at the unaffected triplet standing on the doorstep, wasting little time before they start scratching again and picking at the potted ferns.
Posted by Steph at 05:22 PM | Comments (2)
August 18, 2006
A Little Off
When it's too painful to write, it can be easier to draw or paint. In my sketchbook, this is one of the only pages recently that isn't a painting of a horse crammed into a small wooden crate. I think this means I might need a mental vacation. As if plugged into my psyche, my close friend randomly sent me this link today.
Posted by Steph at 04:24 AM | Comments (4)
August 12, 2006
Decisions
We bought a canoe. We needed a water vehicle and this is the perfect entry-level family waterpod. So we’ve been mapping the aquatic terrain around town and last night we tried putting in at Redbud Island, a popular dogpark not far from home. Only, we didn’t gauge the current well by sight and had a difficult time attempting to circumnavigate the island. Standing at a push against the current, over boulders and eddies, I sweated as Chas fussed and leaned out of the canoe. He wanted to swim off the starboard, and Ford wanted to lean over the starboard to watch Chas, and all I could do was pitch nagging pleas and breathe shallow puffs as I tried holding onto Chas’ lifejacket. I was so afraid of tipping, since we really haven’t practiced rolling safety with the kids.
The rest of the lake felt like satin and reflected the huge pink clouds above. A Chinese duck followed a trail of goldfish crackers left by Chas, who giggled and greeted him with a singsongy “Hi, Dut!” We paddled through a troupe of swans whom I was sure might attack us (for being so rude) but they just watched us compassionately, as if we were lost mental patients, wandering alone and down the lake and shouting out high-pitched nonsense. An annoyed red-tail hawk tracked us as we glided only a few yards beneath him and his cypress perch, taking off for a quiet place once we were too close. Bats, everywhere against the blue twilight and the greasy feeling of sunscreen and sand and sweat between skin and car seats.
…
Ford starts school on Monday. We found a way to pay for the neighborhood Montessori program, decided it would benefit everyone and enrolled him yesterday. I feel like a homeschooling dropout but the only thing that will likely be damaged by this decision is my pride. So while I busy myself preparing for next week, I think I’ll stay on this little blog hiatus another few days. I just haven’t felt like talking much or writing much. It’s time to reflect and be quiet amid the chaos so the boat doesn’t tip over.
Posted by Steph at 01:24 AM | Comments (6)
August 03, 2006
Garden of Earthy Delights
The chicks are hardy in the heat. This has been the hottest week this summer and they've spent the whole time outdoors in their new tractor. I'll return home at noon from the gym, walk barefoot to the edge of the deck, and peek down on them. Looking back at me are three chicks that are always an ounce heavier, more feathered and panting with open mouths. Every few hours I give them cooler, fresher water. I love the way they peep quietly as I move about, rinsing and rearranging.
We've been terrestrial lately, despite the heat outside, tending droopy plants, cultivating the soil, digging. We have a few good books to inspire more curiosity and garden-play: Diary of a Worm, by Doreen Cronin, and Thumbelina, by Hans Christian Anderson. Ford digs Thumbelina. Yak yak. We haven't yet made it to Microcosmos yet. Then, of course, we have all the nonfiction we could need at home. The huge sci/nature nonfiction library in our bedroom: that would be my fault.
This afternoon, Ford and Chas helped me pin together a 3x4ish compost bin out of some remaining galvanized builder's cloth. Once we'd finished, they helped me rake leaves and pile them into the compost bin. Somtimes they'd run through the piles and the lawn would look no different than it had before I'd organized the chaos, and a fuse would blow in my brain, but I've been more mindful of my wiring today. I'll have to write more about that later, about what it's like lately, ramming horns all day with the four year-old rebel. But right now I'm slipping like mercury through planks of burnout. And I'm falling asleep. But god, he has his Hallmark moments, too:
Posted by Steph at 11:35 PM | Comments (2)
August 01, 2006
Poolside Confessions
The other day, when I finished a lap at the pool, I cleared out my goggles and confided in the lady in the lane next to mine. "You know, learning to breathe on both sides is really hard!" I blabbed through upcurled eyebrows. To that one confession, she donated the rest of her workout towards coaching my bumbling, barge-like freestyle into bilateral breathing, tilting my body upwards, so that I felt as if I were gliding across the water an hour later. I love her. I wish I could be that helpful to someone else. Well, beyond the normal butt-wiping and nose-wiping that comes with motherhood.
The first lap felt like swimming in a storm today: the water spraying from the sprinklers into my face, my nose, my mouth; the traffic of the experienced swimmers. I stabbed the water with my arms at first, struggling to remember her pointers: head down, tilt head only as high as the inside corner of my mouth, gentle roll left, right, left, right. Don't think about getting air, just poof and it will return back automatically.
What I have discovered about swimming is that it may start out loud -- the bubbles and splashing assault me when I first get in -- but within a half hour, just like in running, everything gets really quiet. No music, no newscast-- nothing but the roving tiles and dancing sunlight on the bottom and the steady rhythm of puffs and rolls.
edited to add, with an embarrassed blush:
HOLY CRAP! It's (still, thank God) August 1st! Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad!!! See you Friday :)
Love,
*s
Posted by Steph at 11:44 PM | Comments (7)
July 29, 2006
Roots
We've lived in this rental house for a year now, and the place is finally beginning to fit like a glove. Though a temporary rental (we begin building this year on a lot down the road), we have given it our patina. We have adopted and lost two pet fish here, but also begun raising the chicks, who have, for their part, done a tremendous job connecting us with the outdoors. In mid-July. In Texas. Which seems entirely difficult, given the heat, but by God we have learned to enjoy it and sweat it out. By the bucketsful.
Today in a tube dress, straw hat, pigskin gloves and flip flops, I cut and nailed rolls of galvanized builder's cloth to the pesto-colored poultry tractor. As I tatted away in the shade, the little chiquitas chased each other for earwigs, sometimes peeping quietly by my side, asking for a wing. Boo, the bold one (because they really do have different personalities), flit perch-by-perch to my neck, where she inquisitively pecked at my moles and freckles. The other two weaved around the timber, little Buffalo shortshanks they've become, content to scratch around my workspace, dusting themselves occasionally in a patch of dark topsoil, peeping their quick, velvety peeps of contentment.
I've gotten to know the deer, who rarely make themselves seen anymore, much less sleep with their twin baby fawns out in our front yard (they did this daily, last year) but still continue to eat the runner beans, flowerheads, morning glories, sweet potato vines and god-knows whatever gourd/pumpkin/squash seedlings I tried to grow from seed. They continue to surprise me, sometimes grazing feet from me as I jog along the trails, with their fawns stumbling close behind them and at other times, sneaking about like elves in the moonlight, grazing tiptoe across the lawn.
I am finally proud of the boy's room. Finally, because it has never felt, no matter where we have lived, to be their own-- it has always been a post between travels: en route from the bathroom, to fetch a toy before going to the living room; the halfway point between breakfast and brushing, where they can dilly dally five minutes while I clean, playing with forgotten toys. Never has their room been theirs in the sense of belonging until we added the bunk bed. That was two weeks ago.
In the time that's passed, since the purchase of the bunk bed, the room has taken shape into a sleep playground and a place to stay and play. The quilt my mother made during the 1972 summer Olympics (when she was pregnant with me) is now draped over the top bunk rail, making Chas' lower bunk the sleep fortress. Before naps I lay there and read to them as they scramble over me like lion cubs, and I, heavy with exhaustion, lay there and read. At night, I sit at the foot of the bottom bunk, reading Grimm and Anderson by the light peeking out of the closet. I'm surrounded by goose down and log pillows and quilting and childbreath and the warm pads of feet resting against my legs. Ford is content to lay in the bunk above while I read "because there are no pictures in the book" but also because he delights in his new space to sleep. The sleep king, who has to be awakened in the morning because he is so heavily renewing his energy during the night.
When I pause mid-Ugly Duckling, I ask "Ford?" and listen for an answer. Only the soft sound of a stuffed nose: slowly in, slowly out, waltzing in the summer nightmusic of the air conditioner, turning pages and other little snores here and there (I think Damon must be asleep, too, now). I reach over to rest the book under the bed. The floor beneath the bed has become a charter library: The Story of Pooh, The Story of Ping, Aeson/Grimm/Anderson classics, Baby Animals, Hedgie's Surprise, Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes a cameo appearance.
The place feels like home in the way I'm starting to settle in: a mixed bouquet the color of sunrise on the kitchen table; the way I can make stovetop coffee blindfolded; clothespin artwork to the back deck's lattice, and hang my jewelry to a piece of driftwood in a windowsill in the bathroom; I smile to see Damon shepherding his harware in the garage, replacing stagnant unused stuff with the stimulus of welders and grinders and routers and saws, all in singlefile attention. Some people settle in quickly to a new domicile, but I think we've grown jaded to constant change. After all, we lived for a year in a 22-ft. trailer. With a baby. We want a sense of permanence so badly against the the tech industry flux. Here, we can at least afford to stay; it's now only a matter of believing that roots are, beneath all our lingering doubt, indeed growing.
Posted by Steph at 09:11 PM | Comments (7)
July 26, 2006
Chicken Tractor Links
I'm sensing that a few of you may be brewing a little chicken ideas in your mind, dreaming up having a backyard brood of your own. After all, it's a great idea. Pest control. Companionship. Eggs. That cute sound of gossiping hens in the middle of the day. It's really cute. Well, if you are thinking about housing options, let me share a few links I've used.
We're building what they call a chicken tractor. It's a henhouse that you can move throughout the yard, so the chickens always have a fresh patch to scratch on. They're just as safe as a regular henhouse.
I like the ones below, which obviously required more time and labor to build. We don't have much of that around here, which is why ours is, well, amateurish. But the hens will love it anyway. Here's my thirty second link list:
Chicken tractors
Chicken tractor project idea
& etc
And here's an article about the benefits of using a chicken tractor to benefit your soil.
I'm sure you can google all you want and find a good clutch of ideas out there. I say go for it. And let me know if you, too, decide to get a few chicks. We're having a blast! Now, off to add the chickenwire...
Posted by Steph at 10:43 AM | Comments (2)
July 25, 2006
...Painted a First Coat...
I got a blob of paint in my hair. On top of my head it looks like green bird poo. How does one get exterior water-based latex paint out of hair? Or maybe I'll just have fun explaining to people how it got there. Any suggestions? It's just not silly enough that I got it while painting a henhouse.
edited to add: the paint came off after I washed and dried my hair. I was able to slide it out gently, running the globs down the strands of hair ;)
Posted by Steph at 10:39 PM | Comments (4)
SPC: Me As A...Farmer
No time. Gotta run. More SPC. More later.
Posted by Steph at 08:38 PM | Comments (10)
July 24, 2006
Getting the Chicken Coop Did
Damon thinks the chicks will be gone in less than four weeks. Such shallow hopes! Still, he spent another day grunting in the oven outside, throwing lumber around like an ogre and eyeballing his way through his final weekend project. Which was more a honeydo than a "project" in his queue. But the reality was that I was too preoccupied doing God-remembers-what inside with the kids, probably sitting inside under a ceiling fan with a child on each lap, sipping iced tea, laughing about how crazy Daddy was to be outside in the sauna, sweating over a heap of lumber.
When he'd thrown in the towel for the day, after completing the first phase of construction, I stood back and grinned at the expressive fabrication. I'm usually a perfectionist, but I found the artsy, passive-aggressive unevenness oddly charming. Or maybe I was just very grateful that he had spent his entire Sunday afternoon laboring over my whimsical chicken fancy.
This design is an A-frame chicken tractor. It has hanndles on the bottom so you can move it around the yard. Encircling this frame that he built will be chicken wire, even on the bottom, for predators. We'll find some scrap wood and I'll get the kids to help me nail together a ladder, so the hens can scamper up to the little roost at the top. And looking at it now, this will certainly be a feat--can you see what I mean? Look how steep that grade is going to be?! Oh, dear. And hopefully there will be enough room for three hens, but we can always add another loft, if necessary. We, meaning Damon.
So, this evening at the local DIY megaplexx he helped me wrangle children and pick out a buttery avocado exterior paint that will weatherproof the lumber. Such good taste. And all for a mere four weeks. P-sha!
Posted by Steph at 11:16 PM | Comments (3)
July 22, 2006
You'll Never Guess Who the Mother Is
On the drive home, as the kids fought over who would hold the chicken box on his lap, I began to doubt the success of the kids with the chicks. I figured it was a good idea I'd arbitrarily chose three versus two chicks: one would certainly meet its fate under one of the boys, and being left with two chicks is far better than being left with one.
But I may be wrong. In fact, the prognosis is GOOD. I watched them with a smile all day long, as they gently trod around the garden, the chicks weaving in and out of their footpath. They encouraged us outdoors the entire day, and I found time to rearrange the rosemary and trim the papyrus, harvest parsley bolts and this and that. Ford mentioned "I never knew there were SO MANY BUGS in our yard!" because the chicks: they never stopped harvesting them, too.
Ford is, to my surprise, the new mother hen. And he's a natural. To watch him cradle the chicks, or sprawl across the grass while the chicks scramble over him, for hours at a time, and compare this sight to the same child in a playdate full of little boys: one would never suspect the two images belonged to the one Ford. But it's true. He's come into his new role with all the fever of a new mother. Periodically, I'd have to come outside and feed him a yogurt or a half-sandwich because he was so preoccupied with shepherding the chicks.
But, as it turns out, they follow Ford everywhere; there's no need to chase them down. They believe that Ford is the mama hen and will run up to his feet, peep imploringly with pinched eyes, and all he has to do is pick them up before they drop their heads on a thumb and fall asleep. Ford looked up at me after his pullet, Abby, fell asleep this way. He had reddish purple circles under his eyes, his face flush with afternoon sweat, dry grass dangling from his knees. "Don't you just love the baby chicks? I'm not going to let anything happen to them."
He is drinking water from a glass right now, pausing after each sip to raise his chin to the ceiling and gulp it down, just as he's seen the chicks do when they drink from their shiny metal tray. He licks his lips and smiles, and I wink back. As I read him a new book at bedtime, he reaches over and pecks at my arm with his fingers. He's just so impressed with his new brood. For fun, I paint little glittery dots on his finger- and toenails, and we'll wait to see how the chicks respond tomorrow. But the young Mama Hen needs to go to sleep. And so do I. Tomorrow we build the coop!
Posted by Steph at 10:58 PM | Comments (11)
Baby Chicks!
Last weekend, the kids were so thrilled with the new chicks at the grandaparent's house that they insisted we get some of our own. So we did! Three Auraucana chicks. And when I get more sleep, I can talk all about them: Abby, Boo, and Betty. The kids named them i the car on the drive home.
Posted by Steph at 12:33 AM | Comments (6)
July 18, 2006
Free-Range
I was a free-range child, roaming on foot and bike throughout the neighborhood like most kids did. We were barefoot with scabs on our toes from the Big Wheels, flags forever flapping behind us on our bicycles. We came home for popsicles. There was a corner of the yard where we corralled box turtles, but we were always hunting for more. But we sold other reptiles: anolis were 10 cents; geckos I sold for twenty-five cents in class. I kept them in coffee cans. Back then, I thought the smell of the coffee cans was gross, like metallic urine.
Free-range days continued once we moved to Houston, but the experience matured quickly. I discovered perverts in fourth grade when a man approached me and asked me to follow him to his van. Sitting on the bench opposite me and my brother, he smiled confidently and touched my hand. Asshole. Sadly, he was only the first jerk to taint my adolescence, but I'm still alive and I was never seriously molested as a child. But I read stories all the time about those less fortunate than me.
I can smile as I look out the window at the boys in the backyard. They run half-naked around the house, building mud volcanoes on the deck, lava plumes in the rivulets running off into the woods.
What will I do when they're able to bike around our neighborhood? What will I do when I can't supervise them?
Posted by Steph at 05:16 AM | Comments (3)
July 14, 2006
The Quilts of Gees Bend: The Soul of the Quilt
I arrive in Houston at six o'clock, scarf down a plate of italian sausage and spaghetti and my parent's house, and escort mom to the Gees Bend exhibit at the MFAH. We have an hour before the museum closes and I get momenntarily lost navigating my way to the museum's new addition, through the same corridors I used to browse with a trail of small children in my teaching days at the Glassell School, across the street. It's embarrassing and I smile to an Asian security guard who doesn't seem to remember me this time.
The glossy terrazzo floor reflects little observational discussions, the tapping of fancy shoes and the muted cast of each bold, vibrant quilt in this collection. And boy, are they something. If the colors and assymetry of the quilts don't immediately make you smile, look closer.
If you have a sensitive conscience, then you have questioned the way we live today: the overlooked luxury in each car parked in the driveway and the way you can choose your way each day, the piles of fashion magazines and the excess clothes, garages filled so full of crap because the house is spilling over and space is limited-- this is the typical American family way of life (not that I am the exception) and this is a way of life that starves people of happiness and groundedness and peace. I think about this a lot and was brought to tears when I listened to an interview with one of the quilters as I scrutinized a soulful patch of denim in a quilt, a piece taken from a pair of worn-out blue jeans, that included the dark blue ghost of a pocket, the reminder of the fabric's former life. I wanted to run my hands along the seams, feeling the backbone of handiwork and sweat and conversation that birthed these colorful objects. I cradled the idea of reuse, inspiring the happy purist in me.
I thought about the stiff smell of rows upon rows of fabric bolts, the angst of shopping for the perfect hue, specialty scissors and quilting stores with basketfuls of fat quarters in every imaginable print: cats drinking milk, cats dancing, cats pouring milk, cats stargazing, cats chasing balls of yarn, cats chasing mice, cats napping, cats making me dizzy with a cascade of possibilities, for some reason(pardon me if cats are your thing--and I still think cats are cool). I thought about my own sleeping, shelved monster of a fabric stash. I thought of the closetful of clothes in my bedroom that I will never wear again but refuse to give away, holding them for some special deconstruction but not finding the time just yet. And so they sit there, looking stale. And smelling about the same. I think I vowed right there to boycott the purchase of any more fabric from a store or supplier for a good, long time--at least until I can manage to recruit much of what I already have. You know the old adage, Waste Not, Want Not. I mean, I value the use of new fabric for projects (and man, can some of you SEW!) but for now, I will value myself more if I downsize.
Plummer Pettway 1918-1993 "Roman Stripes, variation (local name: "Crazy" Quilt) cotton twill, denim, cotton/ polyester blend, synthetic knit (pants matieral), 86 x 70 inches.
These isolated women had only the outgrown and worn-out clothes and bolts of local fabric (I think Sears once gave them bolts of the avocado fabric that shows up in nearly one hundred of the collection's quilts). One of the quilters, in the interview I was listening to, struggled as she tried to convey what it was like not to have much of anything to work with. Work shirts, blue jeans, feed sacks--nothing was wasted. Nothing.
I smiled to read little excerpts about the children, sitting on the front porch beneath the quilting table, watching the needle poke through the underside of the quilt. I told Ford about the way the children (who became the artists of these quilts) picked up scraps of fabric that had fallen to the floor and began making little quilts of their own, right there on the floor. "We didn't have much, but we was happy" echoed similarly among them. And I still get tears to remember one woman share her surprise in knowing that someone else besides herself appreciates them, not to mention put them up on a wall.
Missouri Pettway, 1902-1981. Blocks and strips work-clothes quilt, 1942, cotton, corduroy, cotton sacking material, 90 x 69 inches. Missouri's daughter Arlonzia describes the quilt: "It was when Daddy died. I was about seventeen, eighteen. He stayed sick about eight months and passed on. Mama say, 'I going to take his work clothes, shape them into a quilt to remember him, and cover up under it for love.' She take his old pants legs and shirttails, take all the clothes he had, just enough to make that quilt, ahd I helped her tore them up. Bottom of the pants is narrow, top is wide, and she had me to cutting the top part out and to shape them up in even strips." --both quilt images from Auburn Universitys: Quilts of Gees Bend in Context's website.
Posted by Steph at 11:24 AM | Comments (9)
July 06, 2006
Illustration Friday: Sticky
I've never seen a bear do this in the wild. In fact, I've never seen a bear in the wild. For that matter, I've never seen a wild beehive, either. But I've read The Story of Pooh many times before. This is exactly what I believe bears should be doing all the time: raiding beehives and foraging blackberries and slapping salmon out of the water. Of course, bears eat what they can, because honey and blackberries and salmon aren't always in supply. Have you seen Grizzly Man?
More Illlustration Friday.
Posted by Steph at 11:33 PM | Comments (4)
Sunprints
There's a Storm Trooper maintaining his aquatic fleet.
Waiting for Chas to finish napping so we can go out to play. These short, quiet little projects are sweet fillers in a day jammed with chaos, amped-up play and an onslaught of noise.
Posted by Steph at 10:31 PM | Comments (5)
Studio Friday: PLAYTIME: 7 Layer Salad
It's difficult at first, resisting the urge to keep working, but in order to create a smooth surface texture on encaustic paintings, such as these, you have to wait at least two days for the top layer of wax to cure before you can buff it. And these have been stacked and waiting patiently on my windowsill for a week (which, incidentally, is not the best place to cure an encaustic painting in the middle of summer, but it's somehow worked so far in my home--at any rate, it's safer than leaving them on a countertop or table, where the kids can reach them!). Now, all I have to do (if I decide each is finished) is take a chamois and buff the surface smooth. The result is so buttery soft and shiny. I REALLY dig this medium. When I'm finished with thee, I'll share more pictures....
More Studio Friday.
Posted by Steph at 10:10 AM | Comments (7)
July 02, 2006
Ford,
|
While I'm not happy about the fact that you watch Chicken Little three times a day on occasion, I can at least smile knowing it slowed you down enough for me to paint your portrait.
Also, thank you for letting me paint again today while you watched the movie. Again.
I'm trying to be the artist who can write a check for a trip to the Cascades so you can finally see Ranier and Hood and St. Helens in person. Because you are so so so worth it. And because I love you so so much.
Well, I'd better get back to work. |
Posted by Steph at 04:46 AM | Comments (7)
June 14, 2006
Renewal
On June 14, 2005 I quoted one of my favorite artists, Georgia O'Keefe:
I decided to start anew -- to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own unknown -- no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue.
I started this blog one year ago with one mission: to document another quickly passing year before my memory fades. The kids are growing like beans, their life compressed in a blur of wonderful, remarkable moments of discovery. If not for myself, I've been motivated to return to the page every day (or maybe not as often, while I always try) knowing that a grandparent or a travelling Damon may be curious to see what we are doing from day to day. It's a powerful tool, this added external pressure.
A year has already whirred by and I'm ruffled in its wake. But I'm finding a new perspective in this drift, like one does when the painting is turned sideways, and I'm finding that there's room for more than me:
There's the mother I've never met who wakes up on a Saturday morning, or the mother who takes time during her child's naptime and spends a minute not only to read my latest post, but to comment on it. There's the wonderful writer I admire who, at every post, encourages me to keep writing by leaving constructive criticism. And then there's the enormous mass of you who may never comment at all, but who I am AMAZED and flattered to know spend their time coming back to pick up whatever peanuts I've left on the blog. Our humble life here in central Texas plays out to the swirling symphony of children and crickets and a running dishwasher and lo, I'll be damned if there isn't someone pulling up this blog on his or her computer every few seconds. The comments are flattering, and every single one is cherished, but the actual traffic (the stats I pull up and analyze--and I do!) just blows me away.
Thank You.
And now, it's time to renew. I thought it would be nice to make a list of blog priorities:
1. I need a gallery.
2. I need to share more creative catalysts, soul vitamins. Tutorials.
3. I'm still going to relentlessly catblog about my children, no apologies
4. The blog is getting a spa treatment, as time warrants
5. To be fair, there will probably be plenty of house-building drama this year. Add category.
6. And when I need mental vacation, like a long-winded haiku I will continue to post a moment of zen from the day.
7. New category: (drumroll) Home. Schooling.
( Hark! Rattling crickets! Frantic nail-biting!)
Peace. And thanks for stopping by,
*s
Posted by Steph at 11:52 PM | Comments (7)
June 10, 2006
Painting With Chas
It's really too hot to paint outside during that quiet time of the day when the kids are centered. If I leave Chas to paint alone on the floor in the kitchen, I begin to prickle with anxiety, because it's never long before paint begins flying across the room towards the wool rug (which, being wool, easily stains. And which, for the record, I refuse to live without.) It's a high stakes gamble, but one I can avoid if I sit him on my lap at the kitchen table.
So there we sat, yesterday, and I found I was able to engage him for a longer period of time than usual, simply by painting alongside him, on the same page. Normally, I'd discourage this--it goes completely against my teaching style, which is to let them simply create on their own. But he seemed to enjoy telling me what he was doing, which colors should go where, and he thought what I did was funny. He loved sharing the piece of paper, maybe it reminds him of sitting on my lap when we read a story. For this reason, it felt just right.
Posted by Steph at 08:07 PM | Comments (3)
My Toys Are Your Toys
I made this aluminum starfish at RISD when we were told to design a toy. I'd just returned from a weekend at Narragannsett, where I'd found a scattering of beached brown sea stars. Inspired by the way they clung to my hands (I'd never before felt one) and their bumpy texture, I immediatedly brainstormed a way to recreate one (or a scattering of them). And because I couldn't get enough of the oily sharp smell of metalshop in winter, I HAD to make one out of aluminum. My favorite memories from school there are from this project.
And what a pang I felt when I looked up this morning to find Ford playing with it! He was whirring and buzzing it all over the house, pretending it was an omidriod robot, for HOURS. It was so rad. I almost cried.
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Posted by Steph at 07:29 AM | Comments (2)
June 06, 2006
SPC: Pop Art: week 1
Summer is saturated with mass-production. The sun destroys anything left outside. So after lingering twilight, chasing fireflies and each other around the flowerbeds, toys stay outside night and day. Our home has stretched out onto the lawn. Plastic toys will only last a few months in this climate.
This is an inflatable swimming pool that I bought last summer. I also bagged sand toys, beach balls and a Slip and Slide, but these have all been shuffled into the other toys, buried in sand and punctured by piercing UVrays. This pool has lasted longer than I imagined, knowing when I bought it that it would destruct by Fall, like summer plastic tends to do.
It's beginning to get a fair amount of use, now that we're baking our way towards the double digits. And every day we drain it, like I'm doing (with Ford) in the photo above. I don't have time for stylized puns on Pop art. Take this as a nod to mass production. We like it. Well, maybe not, but it's convenient and cheap and beautiful when you're short on cash. And who isn't, when you majored in Industrial Design in school?
And you can see more Pop art self portraits here.
Speaking of mass-produced: balloons. They are in high demand at our home. Chas loves them. We can drive by Blockbuster (our fallback now that all of our Netflix movies have gone awol) and Chas will scream for boobahs. BOOBAH!!?!? BOOBAH?! BOOBAHH?! like some heroin addict. JUST! ONE! FIX!!!
We brought home two of the Blockbuster balloons with us on Friday, and Ford picked one up to practice the properties of static electricity.
So he rubbbbbbed the balloon on his nappy hair a minute and then I watched him hold the balloon over a small mount of sugar. The sugar flitted excitedly on the table. "A sugarstorm, mom!" He passed the balloon over a pile of punched paper holes: "Dancing dots, mom!" and then he passed the balloon over an ant trail in the kitchen: "Mom! Check it OUT!" And, sure enough, the ants were flicking up onto the balloon. Can you see them? They're tiny pharoah ants (otherwise known as 'Piss Ants' by my father in-law, the entomologist). Science is so funny.
Posted by Steph at 06:57 AM | Comments (4)
May 24, 2006
The Child Naps A Lot
It's not fair that Chas can nap like this without me. But Ford will have none of it. He meets my exhaustion sometimes with sandpaper to my nerves, and I could just cry. So I've started taking vitamins more regularly, and with exercise and a little more sleep I've built up a better defense against the afternoon slump. Damon has introduced me to blackberry sage iced tea in mason jars. And I've taken up painting the sleeping babe.
I signed up for an encaustic painting class. A while back, I mentioned Amy Ruppel and her wonderful buttery paintings. I love this texture. It's what I'm craving, more fat. Anyway, I've been wanting to learn for years, it's just been hard to find an instructor. Lo and behold, they have one in Austin at the Laguna Gloria. So I cancelled our Vegas plans and am now sitting primly on the edge of my seat, waiting for two weeks to pass so I can start playing with oils and beeswax.
There are no more caterpillars. I keep waiting for a second generation to spill out of the trees but they haven't arrived. I jogged along the creek today. The white rocks are dry now and milk-green where water trickled down only weeks ago, runoff from uphill. The pools where the big fish swim are coated with pollen and dust and milkweed tufts. Every big patch of sunlight holds a surprise along the trail. I've learned to ignore the scattering spiny lizards and squirrels. At the last minute, before my foot falls on them, they dart into shadows, bark and leaves flying behind them. So I ford through the little forest community, knowing it will all unfold before me.
Unless it doesn't. My foot descends on a fat snake. Like the recoil of a shotgun, I yank back with so much force that I pull a muscle in my chest. But the snake is safe, motionless, and only as I bend down to study it does it slink into a rotten tree stump. Who knows what else I've narrowly missed?
Posted by Steph at 04:24 AM | Comments (1)
May 22, 2006
It's Been Too Long
Chas wore this dress of mine yesterday. I had to roll it about six times until it was short enough for him to just barely clear the ground in, and he just barely cleared the ground all over the garden as he trampled the runner bean seedlings and bulldozed through the birdbath. Finally, he returned inside with a little wicker basket and a tiny Schleich lamb at the bottom of the basket, declaring his arrival with a wet pattering across the tile floor and up onto Damon's chest, where he soon fell asleep.
We went out on date last night. This is not something we do often, but my parents were in town and they decided to relieve us. So, after a quick bite and a paint lesson from my dad:
We left. We drove as fast as we could to make the 7 o'clock reservation. It was still hot outside, and my dress stuck to my legs in the car while I waited to the air conditioning ot kick in. Summer is just getting comfortable; you could see it in the smile of a man in his convertible, sunglasses reflecting the red light: summer is wedging itself back in the seat of the rocker, next to a side table with sweet iced tea and a paperback memoir.
Sunset raked over white table linens at the restaurant. Wine and hands, a sublime filet and the finest long grain rice from Texas; I felt ten years younger immersed in the quiet of our childless space. I mentioned that the restaurant reminded me of the bistro in Mill Valley, the one with the gorgeous hostess, but I realized that the similarity lay not in the setting but the absence of stress. Children have been the bane of our dining experiences. No matter how charming it is when they politely request macaroni and cheese, each good deed is met with an equally annoying faux pas: say, a fork thrown across the table and barely skewering the woman at the table behind me.
We kill 45 minutes atop a parking garage.
And then eat molten chocolate cake a la mode with pints of ale at the drafthouse theater.
My head is heavy and tipping off my shoulders on the winding road home, smiling and satiated but sleepy.
Posted by Steph at 05:05 AM | Comments (8)
May 16, 2006
Nothing's So Random
I'm sitting in a freezing lab next to a wall. A lab tech dressed in bright blue scrubs preps my arm for a blood draw, and I look the other way, to face the wall beside me. On it, eight inches from my nose, someone has thumbtacked a cardboard cutout of a meat processing plant. A monochrome logo in fat red ink of a curly-haired bull and the company name blazened around it.
Me: (chuckling) That's pretty random.
Tech: Random? (smirks) It's not random at all.
Me: How so? It's a meat processing plant logo on a piece of cardboard! It's hilarious. You kill me.
Tech: You know, the owner of the plant was here just the other week.
Me: No kidding?
Tech: She was very pleased with the sign, of course.
Me: (nodding along with the surreal conversation) Then it was worth it, having this sign on the wall.
Tech: Yeah. And then, when she was leaving, she gave me a dozen chicken wings!
Me: (laughing out of my mind) Then it was definitely worth it!
Tech: (laughing) I like you. You come back here anytime!
I watched the monitor as the nurse practitioner glided the sonogram on reconnaissance around my organs. It's hard not to get technical and revealing with the findings; I keep erasing lines. But I enjoy this kind of detective work, even at my own expense. There was no visible embryo, not yet, only the stage for one. She gently reminded me that it may be too soon to tell, but I'm trusting my gut instinct that there won't be, this go round.
I disclosed the blood sample more out of courtesy than closure. What gave me those symptoms was most likely a ruptured uterine cyst, which, apparently, is a common ailment in horses. Yes, try googling "uterine cysts." I got graphic rat dissections and a litany of equine medlines on the subject, but nary a word on uterine cysts documented in the human species. But I swear, the nurse told me they were a common ailment in women!
This I know now: our hearts and home have room for another child, even if our cars don't accomodate a third carseat.
+++
It's gorgeous right now. Everything has a crisp surface, the horizon unfolds in blue and purple hills; you can see the outlines of trees several miles away. I forget my camera when a peach-colored sheet of cloud covers the skybowl, reflecting the setting sun. As if the earth has turned off all the lights, the sky beckons the eye upwards. All I notice on the ride home is the linear network of telephone poles and electrical wires, the limestone cliffs as they rove by. I love the sunsets in Texas.
Posted by Steph at 04:01 AM | Comments (6)
May 15, 2006
Knotted
The highs and lows this weekend knotted me and left me wondering how I should feel. I took the remaining two pregnancy tests, the ones left in the package. Compulsively, I had to confirm the positive test; I couldn't wait until the doctor's appointment, which is tomorrow morning. And I never suspected they would silently disappoint me! But after seeing two negative results, I steeped in doubt for a while before resurfacing to tell Damon what I found.
The mind has a powerful way. It can wrap itself snug around the possibility of a new baby, no matter how impossible it originally seemed. As the hours pass, a vision becomes clearer and problems begin to resolve, and fear transforms to hope. Then, to release the notion is like asking to grieve. Could this all have been a fantastic head trip? I feel I can relate on some level to IVF patients, who never really know what to expect.
Both of our children were planned. It took an agreement, a basal thermometer, a chart, and a month to conceive each boy, and each time I felt in complete control of my body: I knew the day I was ovulating like I knew the day I was pregnant, and two tests for each child confirmed the latter, in each case. But now, I feel so vulnerable and human, clumsy and blind. And I'm sorry to burden you with this self-pity, but years later I might find this all amusing. I mean, relatively speaking, these are small beans. But they are feelings, nonetheless, and because I'm human I have them.
So tomorrow morning, I go to the OBGYN. I'm anxious. Knotted. And I'll be a little sad if we don't find an embryo, but I'll be okay.
Tonight I have a fun project to occupy the rest of my time: a painting, commissioned for a very special occasion. And I'm absolutely thrilled. Still, I can't give away any details (well, not yet!).
To all you mothers reading this, I hope you had a relaxing but joyful Mother's Day...and maybe a glass of wine or a mimosa, for me?
Posted by Steph at 05:48 AM | Comments (4)
May 13, 2006
Three is the Magic Number
I don't like to make excuses. I've scarcely written a word in more than a week, posting photos instead. Words have sunken deeper, swirling in my subconscience and slowing me down. For seven days I've failed to run three miles without stopping short, panting behind a frown for more oxygen. Every time I've stood up, the world's disappeared for three seconds behind a white vacuum. I couldn't draw, couldn't paint. I was incubating. Last night, I drove to the store for milk and returned with brownies and dark bars of chocolate, a magazine and a pregnancy test.
The test. Last night, I sat on the toilet and stared at the results laying on the bathub ledge. For fifteen minutes, the little white wand stared back at me with those mute, faint lines. I sobbed in denial. The moonlight poured in; it's a full moon. The seasons, the changes, the moon: I've been more aware of every cycle but my own. I hadn't had an obvious cycle in nearly three years. And we were taking precautions!
But I hadn't read the instructions correctly. A crossed line in the oval window, not a single line, indicates pregnancy. I hysterically threw the wand into the trash and went to bed.
When I awoke, I took the test out of the trash. I remembered doing this with Chas' pregnancy test: there was the negative result, yet all of the symptoms indicating pregnancy. Sure enough, when I lifted it to my eyes, I saw a faintly crossed line. And sighed, wincing, before piling the boys into the car and heading to the gym.
I stopped on the trail to do some knee lifts. Within a couple of seconds, I caught eyes with a whiptail lizard. It watched me from a hole in a tree stump for three whole sets, occasionally turning an eye to a passing jogger. Shortcutting across the meadow, I lunged through high clover, lush and fragrant. My legs felt like lead. When I greeted Ford at the childcare facility, he asked me if he could have a baby sister, point blank. I nearly fainted as I stood up from my bags to ask him if he wouldn't mind repeating himself.
I wanted to sleep all day, even though I had promised Ford that we'd go hiking. Instead, the television numbed us and I fell in and out of sleep, and my watch would ocasionally chime at the hour. When I had worried long enough, and Damon flattered me plenty on my glow, I bought another test kit and snuck into my bathroom.
Pregnant!
+++
Damon walked into the room, where I was nursing Chas, and I shared my shy, pink grin. After a few tries, he understood, folding red, wet eyes between cupped hands, a happy jaw escaping words. We paced the house in wonderment together, doe eyed and dumbfounded.
Strangely, the only person the news has fallen hard on is Ford. He is heavy with grief. The levity of annoucing the news to family has been lost on Ford, who keeps telling me, "Promise me you're kidding, you're not pregnant, Mommy. I don't want you to be pregnant!" Guilt cuts me with these words, but Damon tells me it will pass. Not to worry.
Meanwhile, Chas is dreaming in his sleep, sprawled on the bed. His frog legs are twitching and he appears to be mouthing words almost imperceptibly. Exhausted, I lay down between him and Ford (who is now asleep, himself). Sandwiched between the kids in the bed, I lay grounded by the mass of a growing family, while my joy flies high from a quiet smile. And Chas begins to laugh in his sleep.
Just like that, we are now FIVE!
Posted by Steph at 02:38 AM | Comments (7)
April 28, 2006
Spring Sprang
Spring covered up what stood bare months before. Under a moonlit sky, dark circles drape the lawn and driveway like velvet blankets, shadows under the unfurled crepe myrtle and ornamental plum. I whack my head in the night’s shade on a low branch that is heavy with young foliage, and walk out, cursing, to my car.
Layer upon layer, Spring spackles up the landscape where Winter fails to slough. Years pass. The prickly pear cactus has budded and bloomed into an agglomeration of ovals, a colony. Little green pup ears stand atop careworn gray sections, each pup is topped with a flaming yellow flower.
There is some serious primping going on.
Night sounds have multiplied. The mockingbird’s soliloquy rambles like a long ribbon across the tapestry of night music, over the tiny drone of crickets and the clicking of bats. Sometimes the Chuck Will’s Widows interrupt the peace with their harrowing calls, hammering from cavernous throats. White Wing dove keep cooing after hours, still love-drunk.
Day sounds too, they have bustled out of bounds. It’s a denser panorama, a flourishing of things everywhere: the chortling of swallows and Purple Martins, hissing wrens, bossy jays. After a rain, the Cardinal leads the symphony with its intense love song. Focused, the calls are sculpted, intricate and metered like gingerbread on a Victorian cottage. And while most female birds silently acknowledge their mate’s serendades, the female cardinal responds clearly, without upstaging her man.
While she broods, I watch the male gently stuff her mouth with little morsels. I wonder if it’s appealing to her, what he’s brought to the table. Does she even care? Before Chas was born, I requested sushi and beer to be delivered bedside after his arrival. Instead, we shared a bag of cold Egg McMuffins. I guess we get whatever’s available in the wild, or at 5am in the hospital.
…You know, he still could have filled that order later that evening, or the next day, damnit. But I never got the damned dinner I asked for. And that’s where I differ from the cardinal…
….I totally forgot where I was going with this.
Posted by Steph at 11:48 PM | Comments (2)
Studio Friday: PLAYTIME
Put a paintbrush in your mouth for family art time. Take a deep breath. No matter how many times you've cleaned up today, this will be the biggest mess. I can't wait to see more fun at Studio Friday.
Posted by Steph at 05:21 PM | Comments (14)
April 27, 2006
Wild
In the morning, it’s the last thing I do. I dunk the special black comb with wide and narrow teeth into a tall glass, filled with water. I take a deep breath, forgetting to exhale, and recruit ten seconds and a truckload of patience.
You hear the water running, see me step forward with the glass and comb, and your eyes suddenly spark behind an impish grin. Suddenly, you are tearing through the house, little feet thumping across carpet, patting excitedly atop tile. Unleashed giggles bounce in your wake. I grope for a lock of hair and get nothing but a flurry of laughter and air.
It’s like wool back there: the comb would stand straight if you would sit still, but away you prance and the poor comb bounces in place atop your head like a clinging tranquilizer dart. You disappear behind a corner and discover a forgotten toy.
I kneel behind you as you play with the toy car. Sections of hair at a time, I gently unweave tiny dreads from the night before. Your hair is fine flax. As I arrange it, tame it with comb and water, you begin to look more like a normal toddler boy and less like a normal Chas.
Sloping waves mount each other in back, I swoop longish locks over one another, rounding my way forward to frame your face. The comb easily slides through your fringe in front; it is immune to your rowdy tossing in bed and tantrums in the carseat. I swing the comb down and around your cheek, parting it left. You grin, suddenly noticing me. With both hands, you grab my cheeks and screech! I see your tiny, perfectly round molars in back, and your squinting blue eyes coax me to drop the comb and tickle you.
After we stop laughing, we both sigh. Then, speechless with a hand over my mouth, I watch you tousle your hair up joyfully as a dog on a dungheap. When you are finished, you check my reaction with a curled lower lip and shadowed eyes, trying to mask your grin. But I see it! And we both acknowledge our dueling gumption.
Posted by Steph at 12:20 AM | Comments (11)
April 21, 2006
Over the Weather
I watched the kid's sunhats bob and spin in the Twinner this morning as I pushed them up and down the neighborhood hills. Left and right, the wildflowers! Everywhere, embroidering the landscape with color. Like butterflies, we stopped at every honeysuckle to sample the sugar; Ford wouldn't let a single vine pass unplucked. Australian cowdogs bounded to greet us, licking sunscreen off our hands, as we walked under the arching necks of blooming yuccas, a mature hedge that bordered their yard.
We spent another day at home, but mostly outdoors: pruning trees, training vines, repotting, chasing black bear caterpillars across pavement. In the middle of the day, we watched the storm pass in green darkness, spraying a horizontal rain and dropping hail between the boards of our patio the size of small grapes. Then the sky opened like a vault, and I got a wild hair to drive the kids down to the lake, where I waded into the water with a hand cultivator and a pickle jar, collecting aquatic plants.
I thought it would make the betta happy.
But we survived the last day of the flu: grimacing with every cough that blew my way; washing, washing, washing; spicy seafood soup with lemongrass and mushrooms from the Thai restaurant down the road; iced tea in mason jars with fresh spearmint; bundling up into the down comforter to watch Godzilla movies with Ford in blue twilight. His hair is thicker, no longer baby-like. I'm finding it difficult to snuggle with him, he has grown lean and long.
I laid there, in the rain, remembering cocooning like this in the Airstream. With Ford I would snuggle up in the same comforter, womblike and warm, under the air-conditioning's permafrost. We'd lay there, wrapped in down and encircled with window: we'd curl up and watch the water crash on the rugged Kennebunkport coastline, or tractors plow by, or passersby swoon at our silver bullet bling.
I ran through the neighborhood again, backtracking alone. This time, to the stopwatch. I started out pounding but eventually glided, like I was pedalling up and down the hills. I have retrained my upper body to assist, my legs to reach higher. My eyes followed the powerlines, where birds were busy preening in peace: cardinals, mourning doves, Whitewing doves, Scrub jays, cowbirds. Above them swooped chimney swifts, and the whole lot of them were in song. A four-foot cedar stump jumped out at me from the bushes, black and damp. I never noticed it this morning, but I imagine it was bone dry and pale, then. But that's the bunny in the magician's hat, why I stayed to watch the show and left my gym bag in the car, only two inches further out the driveway.
Posted by Steph at 02:05 AM
April 20, 2006
I Have Cabin Fever and I Need to Vent
It's a crapshoot, this pediatrician's office business; in my experience, one visit to the doctor's office has the power to precipitate subsequent visits in the following weeks. Still, I had two kids with a high fever on Tuesday morning and I was forced to take them in to the pediatrician; Chas boiled in the bed at 105.4 F the night before. Still, take one immunocompromized child to an infirmary and he's bound to pick up another bug. Which is why this visit to the doctor's office on Monday was not the first visit but our third in the past week.
The previous Monday, I brought a happy, robust Chas into the office for a well-child visit. We walked around the huge lobby aquarium while we waited, patted the glass, scrambled over magazines, dumped jars of otolaryngoscope tips, pocketed tongue depressors for our garden (they make good labels) and dug through the children's books before receiving a clean bill of health among those agonizing tears of hurt and betrayal that accompany immunizations.
Three days later, Chas was drowning in phlegm, trying to cough it all upwards yet forced to swallow it back down . After dropping Ford off at a playdate, Chas and I kept driving down the road towards the doctor's office. Presenting with nothing but a happy disposition and a chunky cough, we returned to our car after our quick visit with a prescription for an antibiotic and meds to treat acute bronchitis.
My brother John's wedding and Easter Sunday came and went, and so busy we were with all the drinking, barbeque-feasting, egg-dying, visiting and mayhem that it was hard to notice both kids getting progressively sicker. On Monday, we were all slumped over. I tripped three times while jogging, and nearly fell over in yoga while trying to find a focal point on a bleak, gray wall. Atticus spun in circles around Ford at the lake, as my poor kid sat on the diving platform, it seemed the entire neighborhood had converged at the lake to revel around him and his blah expression. By Monday night at midnight, Chas had developed the high fever to push us near the edge, on splinters, until morning came and we could take him to the doctor.
Dragging Ford along was difficult, more so than usual. But we made it through the door of the lobby, and Ford found the nearest bench on which to lie. I suggested the nurse to pull both kid's charts.
This technique works well with siblings: I told Ford to demonstrate for Chas how to cooperate with the doctor's exam, even though we were at the doctor's office "only to treat Chas." And do you know who had the fever? Who tested positive for influenza? Ford. Chas' results were difficult to read, but we were intructed to treat both kids for the same thing, the flu.
I think I was wiser when I used to take Ford to the Texas Department of Health & Human Services for his routine immunizations. For one, it's cheaper. The wait is usually less than twenty minutes. The nurses are always efficient, soulful black women with impeccable technique. And the best part? No sick kids to bump into. As for the "well child" portion: who can't measure their own child's dimensions and follow a developmental checklist?
It makes sense: $15 for immunizations at a clinic, with a 15 minute wait
vs.
$20 copay + ($100 abx & esoteric meds+ $20 copay) + ($40 copay + $40 addition meds) and HOURS lost. Am I right?
Posted by Steph at 05:27 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 14, 2006
Illustration Friday: Spotted
On the granite coast, I kneel down to see layers of round shapes in a tidal pool: the glistening curve of blue beach glass, ground shell, bits of marl, littoral litter. It is the texture of a cold and unhemmed coastline, a study in extremes.
Here, you have to hold on to your life. You have to blend in to avoid being hunted, unbruised by the pounding waves, while managing to stay wet in the face of sun and wind, maintaining your heritage by staying pretty in order to attract the opposite sex. Your existence is hinged on the passage of time, good genes and pure luck: will you survive until high tide?
This little intertidal oasis, paradoxically gorgeous, has a rainbow of life crawling within it: red, brown and green tranlsucences, bumpy lumberers, glittering gems, but it is growing stagnant by the minute. At noon, the water is warming up under the intense sun; in fact, it's so sensuous to lie in the small ripples at the rim of the pool that you can hardly tell, with eyes closed, where the water ends and the balmy air begins. Then a breeze reminds you, as a shadow sheds some cool on your skin.
The estuary beyond the dunes, nursery for marine life, reminds me less of motherhood than these beautifully unprotected cavities. Here, time is compressed. Weeks become seconds. With little time to think, intuition develops. I slowly begin to trust my intuition as it gains conviction, but the experience that feeds it is time that's lost: will I still be here by high tide?
Posted by Steph at 06:44 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
Oops
I'm scraping dried droplets of Danimals yogurt off the monitor and keyboard on our old iBook that we retired to Ford. It has served as his personal, portable Harry Potter and Bil Nye cinema for about six months or so, and it's seen better days: like, when responsible adults used it. Chas has popped off the keys many times; I've rescued some letters from the dustpan more than once. And in the center of the browser I see a large rainbow-colored diffraction that is likely a dent made by a Matchbox car. My guess is that Chas disaggreed with the content?
At any rate, here I am using the kid's laptop, because my Powerbook's hard drive died. Blip. Just like that.
One drawback to blogging in the wee hours, as I do, is that my time is short at the computer. I sit down, type, nearly fall asleep, and then fall asleep. Hopefully, somewhere in there, I've recorded something important about my children or my daily experience (I'm trying to remember little things that I might otherwise forget, if I didn't take the time to write).
So, while I've been dutiful to record moments of firsts and little epiphanies, nature walks, whatever, I've been forgetting to do the necessary backup work: I've been forgetting to back up my work. And I can't say I haven't been warned. Damon's raised eyebrows more than once, pointing his finger at the hardware before going to bed. But it's in his nature to back up his machines every night, to dock into that little corner of his office, rejuicing fones and updating files, compiling this and that, reconfiguring hard drives, installing this, extracting that, blah blah blah. It's all so left-brain.
But look at me, the right-brained artist, the distracted mother, using the high-maintenance, technical, inorganic hyperjournal. It's like asking a Moose to gether nuts for ye coming winter: sure, it can be done, but why bother? And what do moose eat, anyway?
What I need is a good squirrel, I guess. To keep me from losing another six months of priceless data. Actually, and FYI: some data may be recovered for $500-700. Just to drive the point home: Don't be a moose. BACK IT UP!!!
Posted by Steph at 01:11 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
April 07, 2006
Turbulence
I am sitting on the grassy slope, keeping an eye on the kids and our bikes. Chas is lying on his back, arms wide, laughing at the twilight and the moon. Ford is networking with another stranger. They're wild and free. I'm in a funk, but Damon encouraged this bike ride. And here we are, downtown, waiting for the bats. Emotional management.
A colossal thunderhead looms over downtown, rolling south. It's insides churn with lightening. We pack up the kids and head back, weaving through pedestrians on the bridge. Half of them are holding camerafones to the sky. Passing them, we feel a headwind as the storm sucks up our warm air, wafting guano up from beneath the bridge: intense and murky, like cultured warm beef agarose.
Faster we pedal back, past the biggest pillowfight I've ever seen, diffusing with hoopla under police megafone. I want to be in it, to detox. I can't clip through the shadows fast enough for all the angst. Instead, I whiz through the trees wondering whether my kids will grow up as moody as me. While some parents hope their children become pro basketball players, I hope my children become rational problem-solvers. Fortunately, I am married to one. The odds are even, I guess.
Posted by Steph at 06:06 AM | Comments (8)
April 06, 2006
Chas,
I watched you carefully this afternoon, at the lake, while your brother threw a fit about his ill-fitting swimsuit. You were so content to walk the length of the short sandy ledge, back and forth, cautiously. When my busy eyes returned to you, I found you pouting, somehow affected by something I missed, ready to cry, but so willful not to. My eyes flinched and I bit my lip, but you stood there facing the sun and let your feelings rest with a deep sigh and a frown to the ground. Even when I was on alert, a bear-sized yellow lab lumbered up and grabbed the football you found, right out of your hands. The nerve! You YELLED at him, and pointed to "MUH BALL!" When the dog walked away, you looked at me so desperately. I had to do the impossible, and explain to you that it wasn't really your ball after all.
But then, I was fortunate that you are nineteen months old, you let your feelings go again, as I pulled you into the cold lake and encouraged you to splash. You upshifted to rowdy, and the raucous splashing started, drenching my shirt and sunglasses and soul with chilly wet abandon. The other day, you were in the lake right here with the two boys. You were frustrated that they kept swimming to and from the diving platform without you. So I watched you meditate through your approach, but always kept two hands behind you: sure enough, you walked all the way out to the platform, until your little button nose went under water, just before the metal ladder. When I scooped you up, I saw fearlessness in your chattering, toothy smile. You are so courageous and unfettered in the water. As I laughed and nuzzled my face into your neck, I felt pride mixed with fear: I can't leave you for a moment near water. You have dived into our bathtub, climbed into the kitchen sink, taken off towards the waterfall at the creek, traipsed along the edge of every fountain, submerged your own head (while lying face-down!) in the bathtub and stood in the rain and in the shower: completely in love with the feel of water around you. I'm so thankful we don't have a swimming pool, but really, it takes less than two inches of water.
While you were getting ready for bed tonight, I handed you your football so I could attend to Ford. While I brushed and cleaned and put on pajamas, you threw the ball high into the air over your head, over and over again. It would disappear and you'd laugh like a robust Vince Vaughan, and it would fall five feet in front or behind you. Then you threw it up a foot or two in the air, and you caught it! And you caught it again. You did this like you've been doing it for months. Have you? When I applauded, your joy noticed the audience, and you joined me in clapping, laughing even louder. And afterwards, you picked the football back up and threw it high again, catching it on the return.
For every day that I've forgotten to read to you, or let your wet diaper pickle your bottom, I've been rewarded with these little hints of determination. It's proof that there's a lot of nature to match nurture. It's amazing what you have managed to teach yourself while I've been preoccupied, and I'm happy so say that , at the very least, I haven't been too preoccupied to notice.
love, ma
Posted by Steph at 04:14 AM | Comments (7)
April 04, 2006
5 Minutes ago, 5 Minutes Past His Bedtime
Mom, I want to play PBSkids.
No, it’s bedtime. And I’m writing.
Why are you writing?
Because I want to remember.
What do you want to remember?
I want to remember you, and all the little things you do.
I don’t do little things, I do BIG things. (frowning)
Posted by Steph at 09:15 PM | Comments (1)
While My Battery Was Dead
I just got a new battery for my Powerbook. Damon stood in line for service while Ford played a video game. I stood over Chas while he stood bouncing on one of the black ball-shaped seats at the kiddie table.
Friday morning we took a hike along the creek. We chased a young bullfrog, who teased us along a stretch of cattails at the bank before disappearing into some brown muck. Ford was so eager to catch him, standing there with his little plastic red bucket. Chas only wanted to shout and jump into the water. We had to retreat into the woods to keep everyone safe. 
I stopped to inspect the mustang grapes, and Chas disappeared. I felt my heart in my thighs ten seconds later, when he reappeared uphill about thirty yards; he had found a loop and had come round to surprise us. Mind you, we were walking along a twenty-foot precipice that overlooked the creek.
Chas is a bushwhacker, both on and off the trail. We put him point blank, while Ford trailed behind, scouting for honeysuckle. He managed to find four blossoms, and gingerly dissect them for the four drops of nectar among them.
On saturday, we biked along the lake. Though the landscape is vibrant and the wildflowers are in bloom, people were the life force along the lake, running, canoeing, parading, strolling. Winding through the trees, we trailered the boys and their havoc, like a small zoo train with a cage of crackhead chimpanzees. I wore a constant smile; for one thing, I wasn't the one hauling the trailer, and for another: it really does sound cute. Despite the mayhem, I like robust, vibrant kids and my kids are anything but reserved.
Some jocks were playing kayak polo under the MoPac bridge, the ball barely clearing the beams beneath me as we rode over them. A Pug meetup and show along the waterfront, one was wearing a pink tutu. A birthday party for a resident goose. The swallows are back. Wisteria and Chinaberry blossoms made the air heady and seductive. I am in love with Austin.
Dinner with friends Saturday night at a neighborhood dig, margherita pizza under the oaks with good wine while the kids scrambled on the lawn and playground. A two-man blues band played in an alcove on the patio. Sunday morning completely disoriented me. The blazing heat, with the loss of an hour, drove me straight into summer. Jogging through our barely-rural neighborhood, grasshoppers zirred past me across the blacktop. The only thing to ground me in April was the fresh, green terrain, littered with half dollar-sized white flowers; everyone's yard looked like a driving range. Wooly bear caterpillars marched across the road, and a brown tarantula stood paralyzed as I passed it on the curb.
Posted by Steph at 06:11 AM | Comments (2)
March 31, 2006
Happy chartreuse puffs have appeared among the evergreens here. Oaks and mesquite are leafing out in between cedars. They look hopeful now, but won't take long to mature. The little, tender green leaves shine in the sun, denying that they are part of the dense, gnarly, scrubby chaparral.
I take ginger steps along the riparian trail behind the gym. After yoga, it's good to be outside breathing fresh air, untainted by foot odor and old sweat. The cedar I walk on cuts the grime like a blade, cleansing me. It reminds me of the barn in the morning, fresh shavings cascading out of my wheelbarrow and onto the floor of the stall. In a split second I dodge after noticing a hanging inchworm. My feet reach high over little mounds where squirrels have dug into the mulch, I plod faster. Five shiny, tall brown mushrooms have erupted overnight. The basidiocarps are covered in a cheesy white film, like little newborn babies. I dodge another caterpillar. The creek is flowing steady, after a good rain. Wrens are on alert, surely happy with all the worms. One darts across the path just before me, and disappears into the shadows.
When I have finished my stretching routine on the mat, upstairs in the gym, I look down on my white shirt to notice an aberration: a bright green inchworm with a shiny black head is trying to navigate across my belly. Without thinking, I take my shirt and slingshot it across the room, towards the Cybex machines. Old habits die hard; at least I didn't squash it.
It's midnight. I nearly fell asleep at nine but Damon arrived at the bedside with a Coke float. It was delicious, like the ones we sipped in the middle of summer twenty-odd years ago. I remember laughing, in between foamy sips, while watching John MacEnroe chew out the referee during Wimbledon against Jimmy Connors. I was glad for Wimbledon, during siesta time in Beaumont, when the sun shone too hot at midafternoon to hunt for lizards or ride bikes.
A sure sign of the season, a few loony White Wing doves are cooing outside the window. At midnight.
Posted by Steph at 12:28 PM | Comments (3)
March 30, 2006
Breakfast at Stephanie's
Posted by Steph at 06:29 AM | Comments (2)
March 28, 2006
The Litter on the Lawn
Posted by Steph at 05:09 AM | Comments (6)
March 25, 2006
The Butt of My Brain
We meet our friends every afternoon to play at a playground. It's a standing date: around 4pm every day. By that time, at least one of the toddlers has taken a nap, and the big boys have built up considerable steam. They scamper, laugh, and shout potty talk like nobody's business. Polly and I stand, exasperated, torn between roles of shadowing the little ones as they teeter on the edge of tall perches and jumping into the storm to interrupt the trashy talk. We wonder why they can't just use other words, when quiet time at home consists of lengthy discourse on subatomic particles and static electricity. Why Ford can't make any word substitutions when he's so clever to point out that "I don't like to snuggle in the bed like a pack of batteries." Instead, we hear endless "BUTT-HEAD!" and "BOOTY BUTT-HEAD!" and "PENIS HEAD!" in the drone of play combat that orbits around the playscape following a stampede of little feet.
To make matters worse, Chas loves to follow them around the playground, bouncing and roaring, tumbling every now and then as he tries to keep up, but occasionally shouting, "BUTT!!!!" He bends forth with a red face to proclaim the profanity as loudly as possible. It's hard enough trying to get him to say normal words, like "sock" and "help" and "horse," but I get so irate when I catch Ford leaning into Chas' face, to teach him to properly pronounce "BUTT." At the playground, when people hear "BUTT-HEAD" coming from Chas, they turn to me, surprised and amused. At these times, my eyes try rolling back into the nether region of my skull, to a place where fading dreams linger: where my house would always be tidy, where I'd ride horses while the kids napped, and where my boys would grow up perfect.
Posted by Steph at 08:56 PM | Comments (5)
March 24, 2006
DFW Intl. Airport
Into the relentless sunny wind, Chas ran towards the distant airplane as it lifted off the tarmac. "DET! DET!" he shouted, pointing, and Ford translated it for me: JET, JET! HE reached the end of the berm and stopped still, apprehensive, as the jet loomed closer. But the roaring became intense, and Chas turned round and trotted back to me, quietly frowning to the ground, pink cheeks bouncing. I scooped him up and together we tracked the gleaming silver jet as it thundered over us.
Ford is into jet turbine engines. He likes to describe their operation, and tell stories involving turbines. He will pick up a gall off the curb and tell me, "Mom, do you know why this gall is so fast? It's because it's a jet TURBINE-powered gall that shoots through the sky and into your eyeball!" or "I'm so fast because I have two jet turbine engines, spinning like huge atoms, on my sides." He has been into jet turbines for while, but I can't remember what set it off, this fiery interest. These days, he's all about atoms, particles, molecules, jet turbines, and electromagnetic forces. I'm not cut out for this.
Posted by Steph at 05:48 AM | Comments (2)
March 23, 2006
SPT: time :week 3
We left the house on Sunday at noon.
The fog loafed through the canyon without much hurry,
and in our own haste I thought breathlessly about 101,
driving into town just before the tunnel above sausalito,
before hitting the traffic awaiting the Golden Gate bridge,
around 5 o'clock.
I was sad for a while after that, missing the eucalyptus,
thinking of how ridiculous is was that we had to move away from that place,
where Ford was born and where I enjoyed salty air in my lungs
simply because housing was too expensive.
The thought was fleeting, though, because the quality of life is good here.
And I like the smell of juniper about equally.
Around midafternoon we ran into thicker rain, to explain the mounting traffic.
When we arrived in DFW, cars were swimming in feeder lanes,
and flashing lights from towtrucks, fire trucks and squad cars reflected in the flood.
The following day, we spent much of out time in the car.
Why? Because I forgot how big DFW really is. In fact, we lived out of the car,
collecting disposable stuff and growing stinky.
Chas would go to bed later that night exuding that patented
deep-fried Twinky chimichanga funk, still in his day shirt, but too tired from
a fatty dinner to take a simple bath. Which is okay, because we were tired, too.
Damon had two exhausting days of training. A difficult thing for an introvert.
On the way home, I picked up my needles
and a skein of Peruvian kettle-dyed wool.
I smiled as we passed Willie's Bio Diesel truck stop, in the middle of nowhere,
happily having left that muddled maze of people-clutter behind us.
While the kids were awake the ENTIRE trip back to Austin,
Chas occasionally would point to my needles and frown, reminding me to be careful,
by saying, "ow. ow. ow."
Posted by Steph at 04:08 PM | Comments (2)
March 19, 2006
Sunday
Onions slide around butter in the shiny, black cast iron skillet. I throw in some red peppers, steam rises. It is dark blue outside the window, behind the black silhouettes of leaves. I light a candle on the counter, beside the stove. Next to the candle, the fish glides in a tall column of water, backlit a glowing orange-pink from the lava lamp. Migas, black beans and brown rice. Habanero jack cheese. Strong, dark coffee.
Downtown Austin, 6th street. In the rain, a circe 70s tour bus is parked in front of an old bar. Painted a sandy brown, with a cheesy airbrushed panorama on the side panel: Moab? Hipsters crowd the sidewalks, carrying universal messenger bags and wearing standard issue neutral clothing with close-cropped, tousled hair. Retro eyewear. Shades representing the many faces of a gray day.
Posted by Steph at 07:19 PM | Comments (2)
No Swimming Today, the Pool is Closed for Cleaning
On Wednesday morning, I awoke with a fever and an aching body. Chas sat up beside me, with gloriously knotted bed hair, and began to pat my head with thundering blows. Ford, still asleep, snuggled closer, raking his razor sharp toenails along the back of my leg. I remember searching for a focal point, questioning whether I felt more like puking or finding a hole to crawl in.
It was another bout of mastitis, and I spent the rest of the day in bed, rolled up in layers of flannel and fleece. I am lucky to have a husband who can occasionally work from home, and a good friend who can watch my children while I sleep.
The following day, I recovered enough to make the weekly trip to Costco, babysit and help the neighbors move in. It amazes me, the body's will to recover when the mind is still feeble. It bounces back with surprising memory, catching us off guard as we try and coordinate our muscles to the impulsive drive to do more.
Yet, despite the quick recovery, the wellspring of creativity has slowed to a trickle; I find myself cleaning toilets and attempting to tighten ship, as if I were ready to set sail. Actually, we are driving to Dallas tomorrow morning, and I need to finish packing our bags. Maybe once the dust settles in the car, on the way to Dallas, I will find the focus I need. I'll bring a skein of yarn in a lollipop colorway, and coast on autopilot while my brain sorts things out. Knitting is good therapy, like cross training for the brain. I know this much: cleaning the toilets hasn't really helped much. And Lysol toilet bowl cleaner smells HORRIBLE!!!! I'm getting my money back. yuck. There has to be a greener way to clean toilets.
Posted by Steph at 05:37 AM | Comments (2)
March 15, 2006
SPT: time: week 2
Midday, as the sun passed over us:
Chas dangled from my arms like a marionette,
complaining that I wouldn't let him swim.
I inadvertently pissed off the fish.
I think it was my shirt.
Ford asked me to retrieve a berry,
he later pelted me in the head with it.
I fed Chas avocado chunks, but he didn't eat much.
I worried that he isn't eating enough.
While Ford asked "which is faster, 'x' or a satallite?"
Where x = many, many, many different things:
jet planes, cars, space shuttle, rocket...
Posted by Steph at 10:41 AM | Comments (6)
March 14, 2006
Kath at Redcurrent made me a winner! Once again, I love Kath! And I can't wait to get the pants in the mail.
Ford ran his first 1k fun run at the Austin Rodeo Rumble. We trotted beside him past cotton candy machines, hot dog stands and hat vendors, in the noontime heat. But he was a winner, himself! It was the first time in two years when he agreed to wear shorts and a tshirt (he prefers long clothing).
Chas lounged in the chariot with a popsicle:
Sheep dog trials were underway in the arena afterwards. Their finesse blew me away, and made me wish I were so effective corralling my own kids. Focused and efficient, the Australian shepherds rested on the ground while the cattle fumbled over each other on their way through chutes. We'll have an Aussie Shepherd next door in a few days; our neighbors are moving from Santa Cruz county, dog in tow. Will it dutifully keep everyone out of the road? Hope so.
We spent the better part of yesterday hung over, the kids climbing all over us in blinding sunlight while we lay in bed. Around 5pm, I rallied the kids (as if they needed any help) for a neighborhood detox run. It was difficult. Ford wanted to run every so often in one-minute sprints, then recline in the twinner. I plodded along, feeling full of sand and rather gummy. But it was well worth it, because dinner the night before at Polly's, drinking wine while the kids orbited around us at warp speed, was uplifting, totally fun. In the meadow behind their home, I saw the first bats of the season, flitting about above fresh green grass in the twilight.
We took a spring walk this morning at Zilker Botanical Gardens. I helped Ford list all the new emergences: flowering quince, fragrant mountain laurel, new growth at the base of old inland sea oats, cypress trees leafing out in whispy tufts of soft lime green needles, ferns unfurling in dappled shade.
I called out to Ford, "Look Ford, there's some spiderwort!"
and he walked up to investigate, but snorted back "That's NOT spiderwort! That's Purple Heart, mom!"
And I smiled and shook my head, amazed at what four year-olds spit back out at their parents, these days. He looked up at me in rebuttal, face scrunched up in the sunlight.
Some unabashed, desperate attempt of one tree to get laid--what kind if tree is this?!:
Posted by Steph at 06:06 PM | Comments (4)
March 11, 2006
Studio Friday: Eyes, and Chas' Birth Quilt
When Chas was somersaulting in utero, around seven months, I began to stew up a birth quilt for him. At the time, Ford had checked out a book from the library that I found terribly inspiring, Ducklings and Pollywogs by Lizzy Rockwell. The guache and watercolor illustrations were flat but the compositions rich in detail, and I'd find myself oggling the pages when I was on the phone, or sipping coffee. It was the theme that most intrigued me: paying reverence to a small pond throughout the year, noticing small changes, seasons. So I chose to use a pond theme for the quilt. One afternoon I tore the colors I loved out of old magazines, and after I had a collection, began to assemble them on a page in my sketchbook. After the arrangement seemed right, I picked up a glitter pen and made droplets fall upon the water, adding rings of vibrations through the pond, as if I was looking into the water during a rain. For more interest, I started drawing black eyes of frogs. I cut them out and pasted them onto the paper (I had made about twelve little compositions). After that, I was in love.
Of course, after selecting fabrics and playing with applique, I chose a composition based less on cryptic eyeballs peeking out of the water and more on the idea of lilypads, or pods, on the water. Something more evocative of how I felt as I sewed: healthy, whole, very pregnant.
I handpainted the watery background, staining the kitchen floor with aqua splatters. Scraps of pond colors littered the hallway floor, beneath the table where I worked. Natural specimens lined the window above my sewing machine: reeds, willow blossoms, seed pods and empty chrysalises. With my machine, I sewed ripples in the water fabric with gossamer thread, sandwiching soft layers and different textures of cotton. I tied the quilt with different shades of green, like the aquatic plants that slide between my toes when I wade.
Chas noticed the circles one day, very young, and smiled, running his finger along the seam of a circle. I was so pleased.
And I like the way it turned out, myself.
Posted by Steph at 10:02 AM | Comments (17)
March 10, 2006
I awoke this morning at 4am, staring up at the smoke detector's red light staring back at me. Fat raindrops clinked on the dry gutter, the pats becoming crowded until the sound showered the roof with a roaring rain. I tossed in bed, restlessly wondering whether I'd closed the car's sunroofs, until the rain became steady and sedate.
We had a playdate this morning. I love it when our home is full of kids, reassembling pretense and climbing over each other, cutting up the quiet order with their happy chatter. In the front's wake, the sun shone brilliantly through zero atmosphere, as it does on mountaintops. While the boys played with the Millenium falcon on the driveway, I picked up a transparent purple beach ball and a racketball racket, volleying the ball against the garage door. I could slam it satisfyingly hard, with all my might, and it would cheerfully float back to the racket without complaining. Occasionally a gust would blow it towards the yuccas, but I'd run after it, flip-flops flapping, and slam the ball back towards the house, losing sight of it to the blinding sun.
The oaks and grasses sparkled in the sun but barely waved in the rolling wind, while three red-tailed hawks spun round overhead, crying into the canyon. Black vultures weaved in and out of each other, as commuter jets suspended long white threads behind them all, high up in the stratosphere. The Texas Mountain Laurel, blooming violet and happy, smells like grape bubble gum. The weatherman proclaims a weak year for wildflowers; we haven't had enough rain.
It's night now, and the moon has gilded the landscape with pale white light. I am counting all the toys I'm too lazy to go outside and pick up: two kids bicycles, a basketball hoop, several balls, two or three cups, a frisbee and a Tonka truck. They shine and sparkle under the constellations, and I could release the kids to play outside as it is, if they weren't leaden with sleep in the bed. Besides, the coyotes are beginning to wail.
Posted by Steph at 06:05 AM | Comments (1)
March 09, 2006
Corners
I would love to have a fancy hardwood barn and dollhouse for the kids to play with. But they are expensive! I think I made a smart decision to recycle some boxes from Costco, fashion a good working barn from them and gesso it for the kids. One morning soon, we'll get around to "decorating" it. Until then, it's been getting good use as it is.
Since I can't have my own Hanoverian gelding, I bought a pretty one at Target. It's a Schleich and I named it Claus. When the boys ask me to play, I tap it across the rug in a meditative half pass left, then right, then I a collected canter around the rug's perimeter. Chas will pick up a heifer and follow my little program. Ford picks up the Velociraptor and shrieks, thrusting it through the upstairs doorway, attacking the little brown rabbit.
And there you have it: the farm play "corner," which actually is sitting atop Chas' birth quilt, atop the chaise in the living room. But we carry it all over, sometimes outside. See more corners here.
Posted by Steph at 10:22 AM | Comments (2)
March 08, 2006
SPT: Week 1: Time
In 2000, the experts told us it would take on average about one year to conceive, after throwing the pills in the trash. I googled (on Yahoo, at the time) "trying to conceive" and followed my nose to babycenter, which suggested the use of a basal thermometer to predict the time of ovulation. On the way home from Point Reyes, I stopped off at the Long's drugstore in Mill Valley and found a ten dollar basal thermometer on the bottom shelf. Smiling at the clerk, I stepped back out into the rain and into the world of possibility. I felt control and the hand of science on my shoulder.
Some mornings I awoke at six, to journal, and I'd forget to take my temperature until I was already comfortable on the sofa. Irritated, I'd drag myself back into the bedroom and wake Damon up with the tiny BEEP BEEP BEEPing. Then, I'd turn the corner, reach into the medicine cabinet, and pull out my chart. I'd have to squint my eyes to plot the coordinates.
Other mornings, I'd open my eyes to bright sunlight, staring at the ceiling with fatigue. The chart made its way to the bedside table, out of convenience, and the beeping and recording would commence. Those were dreamy mornings, before children, when the sun could rise up high in silence. When the scrub jays would wake me up, rasping among my zoo of potted geraniums, spilling over the balcony.
It only took one month, one spike. One night? Clockwork. Looking at Ford, as he sleeps with rosy red cheeks and a tangle of blonde curls beside me, I can't say I wish it had taken longer. But it was a year-long program, and we took the weekend workshop. It wasn't supposed to be this easy, and I, torn between pride and guilt, hysteria and fear, stood there staring at the pink line in the bathroom for ten minutes. The countertop was cluttered with tears and cosmetics, the pregnancy test commanding my focus. I looked up, smiling with red eyes and a wrinkled forehead, naked in every way, and carried the test to Damon. And the last thing I remember from that night was him, holding me and laughing, wondering why I was crying, running his fingers down his chin as he does when he's trying to make sense of someone else's imperfect logic. This time, however, with a hint of pride. We'd done good.
Posted by Steph at 12:24 PM | Comments (4)
March 06, 2006
The Brutal Curiosity of Youth
The lake today breathed a joyful sigh of peace before spring break arrives, next week, to slosh her with boat fuel, beer and music. Polly and I stood thigh-deep in the cold water, prattling about this and that, while Atticus and Ford rollicked on and off the diving platform. Chas and Tabitha teetered chest-high in the wakes from the occasional ski boats, the water slapped playfully against the banks and the youngsters, who didn't seem the least appalled. What I thought was a minnow and then maybe a tadpole turned out to be a mayfly larva, swimming like a snake an inch below the surface. As I lifted it out of the water atop my palm, it walked along walked along my hand with surprisingly deft strength against the water's surface tension. In order to take a closer look, Ford did something I cannot do anymore: he lifted the insect between his fingers and carried it away.
Most children enjoy letting slugs wander across their arms, caterpillars creep over fingers. Dad brought a jar of grasshoppers for the kids to play with last summer. Chas sat and picked them, one by one, out of the jar, letting them crawl all over himself. When I was Ford's age, I remember picking up insects in this matter-of-fact way. I had Stag beetles, tarantulas, and pet grasshoppers, large, shiny red-on-black grasshoppers that I kept in mason jars. And then one day, I picked up an earthworm. It was cool, pinkish-brown and very long. I wondered at it's sleekness, imagining that it could stretch to great lengths if it wanted to. So I pulled it gently between my fingers until it cracked in two places, exposing its tragic red insides to me. I remember dropping it, as I have seen Ford abandon his kill, only I felt sick. I still feel sick. I wonder what Ford feels, when his fingers erase another small life. Lifting him over the bank, as we were leaving, I noticed a very small gossamer wing on his arm.
(Sigh.) The mayfly?
It is midnight in early March, and I'm hearing what I can't bring myself to believe: a mockingbird serenading outside on the telephone pole.
Posted by Steph at 11:55 PM | Comments (8)
The Validator
"Mom, where are we going?"
"We're going to the store, so you can get a new hat and so I can get some yoga pants."
"Why are you getting new pants?"
"Because Daddy says I look silly in those grey lounge pants, you know, the soft ones."
"YOU DON'T LOOK SILLY! YOU LOOK AWESOME!" he yelled from the backseat. He yelled!
Posted by Steph at 12:26 PM | Comments (3)
March 05, 2006
Pedernales morning
We drive to the Pedernales River this morning for a hike. It is quiet around 11:50 except for the last of the churchgoers leaving mass. We cruise under a weary, overcast sky that echoes a landscape hardly awake from winter, except for a lone quince tree blazing pink alongside a truckstop. 290 is growing. What was once a frontier escarpment of limestone and prickly pear is now claimed property of "Muirwood" and "Oak Haven" and the mycelium of other residential real estate developments. But the road itself is still old. We climb and descend each hill like a motorboat on choppy water, tossed about by the scars of traffic and extreme temperatures on the road, our eyes following the varicose veins of long asphalt-filled cracks in the pavement. Scores of Open House signs are everywhere, in short trains of five or six (per builder) they picket the shoulder. There's a balmy southern breeze and the American flag at the Pulte Highpointe Information Center is at full-mast, waving gloriously. I wonder how many prospective homeowners will visit this trailer today. A part of me can understand how a person would appreciate a home, like the ones I see beyond the trailer, sitting on two green acres and surrounded by white ranch fencing. Perfect for your one-horse family and sidekick goat.
People driving along this road must buy a lot of pottery, rustic metal art and deer antlers; every other store has a side yard filled with chimineas and yard art. Sheet metal silhouettes of cowboys leaning against imaginary walls are among them, so you could (if you wanted to) lean one of those buckaroos against the entrance to your ranch, right there next to the gate. So everyone would know your home was cowboy-friendly, supporting all cowboy-related endeavors.
Damon used to work on the King Ranch. When he was in high school, he had many different roles on the ranch, and his least favorite was the caballero duty of processing freshly-purchased cattle for their new life on the King Ranch. And since he worked during the summers, I'll begin the description of setting to include blistering heat and dust. Add to that, a two-foot layer of bull shit to stand in (and I mean literally), the smell of burnt flesh, the bustling sounds of hydraulics and metal and groaning cattle.
There's a short list of duties to perform on the newly-purchased stock: a bloodbath of dehorning, branding, castrating and immunizing. You corral cow into the chute with a cattle prod. If it's female, the most effective way to move her is to stun her with a cattleprod to the clit (I kid you not). If the cow has horns, you take a large pair of tree pruners and slam, slam, slam them together until the horn lops off, trailed by a river of blood from the marrow (since the horns are, after all, a part of the cow's skull). While the cow is bleeding out, you take a branding iron and burn the famous running W onto its hide (a cow may have many brands over the course of his or her life). Then, if it's a bull, you have to castrate it. It's a systematic thing, really: you slice with a razor blade, pull them out. Period. Lastly, you immunize. If you look up occasionally while injecting, you can pound the huge hypodermic needle accidentally into your own leg, as Damon did. While all of this is going on, the Mexican laborers will take a few testicles and fry them over the same fire that's heating the branding irons, a sort of freak show snacking. And at the end of the day, the laborers will often take a long latex rubber glove, the kind used for artificial insemination, and fill them with the leftover balls to take home. They'll leave, smiling and proud, holding a bloody bag of bluish-pink cow balls to cook up later, for themselves? For their family?
Yes, we are in the middle of country with a capital K, as in Kountry Kitchen, Kountry Klutter and Hill Kountry Kabins. I had to retype these names a few times to get it right. It was difficult.
The river is low. The river bottom is worn smooth, and deep crevasses bore through the bedrock like swiss cheese. I hold my breath as I boulder with Chas in the backpack over deep divides, and gasp when Ford leans over edges, peering into the whirlpools. We stop to investigate fossils, embedded everywhere along the riverbottom terrace.
On our walk back up the trail, I stop in my tracks to listen. I hear a slight symphony beyond our parade of noise: Ford is belting out more White Stripes, while Chas is simultaneously repeating Dvorak's New World Symphony (to the three syllables "Hi Daddy, Hi Daddy," over and over again--amazing in itself!). Everyone stops, and we all hear it, the distant sound of geese underwater. Looking up, we see birds flying in V-formation, due North, but they are clearly not geese. In a less-focused, more carefree jaunt, these are actually Sandhill cranes flying at about 2000 feet. We watched as they flew over the river, paused, and dissociated into a flowing fabric of cranes, wafting upwards on thermals in freeflowing spiral, resting their wings as they ascended. For about three minutes or so they did this, until one set course and the rest followed, straight into V-formation once more.
We learned three new things on the longish return hike uphill:
1. open-toed sandals and sand do not really mix well, according to a 4 year-old.
2. Ford will knock down any structure, no matter how sacred, to prove his power over inanimate objects.
3. Chas will always attempt to get in the water, so never take him out of the backpack without preparation.
Posted by Steph at 11:56 PM | Comments (2)
March 04, 2006
New Routine
The past two days have been unusually exhausting. I'm not sure if it's Chas' being sick, or missed sleep or, quite simply, Ford, but I rarely feel so mentally drained. I sit down to write, and feel nothing. It's a dull, cottony feeling. I type three sentences, erase two. Type ten sentences, erase eight. I am not making any sense, and my stomach feels sour.
It's not so bad being tired and numb, but it's awful being blind to what's running underneath, although I have a feeling it's symptomatic of sleep deprivation. I'm standing in a pitch dark cave without a headlamp`, groping for a wall to guide myself towards someplace concrete, and hopefully in the direction of light, although I'd be content just to feel a wall to lean on and hug. Why can't I just sleep at night, when it is dark? Why does my body want to stay awake, even if my mind is asleep? What little time there is to claim, after they have all gone to bed, is very little in exchange for the sacrifice of mental clarity (or something remotely similar).
So tonight (and for the next week) I am signing off an hour earlier. I want to see what happens when I redistribute the weight on the scales. It is 11:15pm, and the laundry is piled up, the toys are still scattered across the house, there may be a pile of spaghetti on the kitchen floor: I am TOO tired to tackle it now, and power to the bug that discovers it first. I'll clean up in the morning.
Posted by Steph at 05:21 AM | Comments (2)
March 01, 2006
What numbers do you see revealed in the patterns of dots below?
It's 8. Yes, we ate all the leeks from the farmstand last week in a potato and leek soup. Here are the leeks, chopped and soaking in a bowl of water, de-sanding themselves. I steamed the leftover romanesco and served it atop the soup, drizzling hemp seed oil around it. The presentation appealed to the kids, and they ate it up. I braised the rest of the carrots in honey and butter, based on a recipe from Deborah Madison's cookbook (which I HIGHLY recommend). Ford made honey whole wheat bread. Yum. Chas won't let me type much more than this, every task is getting interrupted with bouts of constipation and running snot.But tomorrow is market day again, so I'm looking forward to stocking up again on agrarian sights and smells. And vegetables. Hopefully, Amy will meet us there, again? Hopefully the kids will be better. Hopefully Chas will finally POOP....
Posted by Steph at 02:48 PM | Comments (2)
SPT: all of me :week 4
Zilker park, public restrooms. Bad hair day. Blah. We're all pretty tired.
Posted by Steph at 06:36 AM | Comments (2)
February 27, 2006
doggerel bantering in the clover
I think my days have compressed. We joined a gym nearby, where a friend of mine teaches yoga, and I've found myself going there in the evenings on a daily basis. This, in itself, is a good thing. But it cuts into my writing time. Fortunately, however, we still find time to paint.
We rode down to the lake today. There were hints that March winds were about to blow, that it was on the horizon. I brought a crinkly nylon kite and let Ford have his first go at flying solo. But his eyes were reddish, and snot dangled from his nose, quivering in the breeze. I didn't have kleenex, so my shirt sufficed. Dogs galloped in arcs around us, hollow barks ran through the canyon. I discovered that my children have become afraid of dogs since we sent ours to grandma. Ford cried when a yellow lab pup jumped up and licked him, bumping Ford's lip and making it bleed. Then there was bloody drool dangling in the breeze, suspended, as Chas shrieked like an alarmed chimpanzee.
Clover is everywhere. The sweet smell reminds me of baseball and bee stings, afternoons napping in the sunny infirmary with a swollen hand resting on my chest.
Posted by Steph at 11:50 AM | Comments (2)
February 23, 2006
Fight or Flight Syndrome: does this include eating?
I came home tonight from the gym at ten o'clock, ravenous, to find leftover chicken BBQ on the dinner table. So I dropped my bags, haunched over the table (too hungry to sit down) and started inhaling a drumstick. Outside the kitchen window, the hedge whacked into the pane suddenly. I froze, staring into my reflection: I stood over my food with my hair on end, arms outstretched, and chicken in my cheek, not much differently than my dog does when Damon looks at him sideways. But I wasn’t about to run to the window for a face off, up close, to see what I was up against. Instead, I stood there, chewing the meat, guarding my kill and watching the bush sway back and forth; all I could see were the illuminated leaves beating against the glass. After a few seconds, it ceased.
I kept a blind eye on that black window, until I was convinced the animal had either left or settled comfortably in the bush to stare at me while I ate, and then I licked my greasy fingers and continued engulfing bird parts.
Posted by Steph at 05:56 AM | Comments (2)
February 22, 2006
Commons Ford Ranch
We're on the cusp of Spring, you can smell it in the damp air like pheromones. Grass shoots tint the meadows, still covered with leaves. On some property near home, Chas ditched his wellies to run sockfooted down a long dirt trail, his cheeks bounced up and down as he ran and sang. He shoved his head into a hole in a tree, shouted, and plunged his foot into a burrow near the creek. Life was hidden everywhere. But closer to the lake we passed under a gossiping flock of Red-Winged Blackbirds, a throaty playful labyrinth of song in the pecan treetops. Once we were directly below them, and they noticed us listening, all talk ceased and the troupe flew away like a fluttering, carefree black veil. Chas followed them with his eyes. It was quiet like that for a few seconds, before Ford started belting out White Stripes lyrics (I still have 'Blue Orchid' pumping in my head). On the drive home, close to dusk, a very large Coyote jumped the fence into the chaparral. I shouted and pointed it out to the kids, almost running off the road, but when I looked back at them, both heads were buried into the sides of their carseats, asleep.
Posted by Steph at 01:16 AM | Comments (4)
February 21, 2006
SPT: All of Me :week 2
This is my vice. I remember trying to stop biting my nails when I was about eight. There was a small vial of Stops-It or No-Bite or something, which tastes bitter. It worked for a while, but long enough. Look at this! I can't believe people see me do this. Yet, whenever I have a dry cuticle, it has to GO, and the fastest way to remove it is to....bite at it?
I've just set a new goal for the year. I'm NOT going to walk around looking like this.
Posted by Steph at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
Something's Gotta Give
The house is thick with testosterone, even when they are all sound asleep. At night, the clean scent of my lotion cuts through it like a warm knife through butter. In fact, I can barely smell a thing, it's that subtle. But Damon will sit up in bed, half asleep, and declare, "I can't take that smell! You don't understand, it's killing me."
I'm outnumbered by men, three to one. And that's not including the dogs, who (for the love of God) are not here right now. The boys are getting older, though, and more willful. Chas is already throwing flailing tantrums, of the head-bashing variety, when his brother takes the basketball away from him. Ford, for his part, is already a little man.
I was carrying my open laptop into the bedroom today and found him lying on my bed, watching some afterschool, non-PBS-type, commercial-interrupted cartoon show. I stood there, frozen in the doorway. And he just lay there, staring at the tv, oblivious to the screaming going on in my head. And I couldn't help notice that his hand was, as usual, in his pants.
"Ford, this show has guns. You know how I feel about guns! I hate them. Guns and greed are the root of all evil." Well, except testosterone, right?
"Well, Mom, you'll just have to keep your eyes on the laptop, then, okay?"
Posted by Steph at 12:05 PM | Comments (1)
February 20, 2006
I lay draped over him like a lead apron. I am shielding him from any lingering resentment hovering in the air around me; in the last half hour I’ve kept busy while stewing in anger. But I’m sinking deeper and turning softer, as we breathe together. Nothing else matters at the end of the day, even if neither of us can understand the other’s point of view. What matters is that we’re here in uninterrupted silence, in a heavy pile of forgiveness, on the bed together, (alone!) staring at the wall and the ceiling with relaxed faces.
Posted by Steph at 12:13 PM | Comments (5)
February 18, 2006
Mommy Time
It's my time, now. I waited upstairs this morning while the workers installed floorboards. I ran errands, and babysat the boys in a toyshop while Damon tested guitars for purchase. I have read a bedtime story, explained the concept of "gold medal" to Ford while watching speedskating, and tucked him in. I never took the walk I promised myself this evening, but we spent dinner together at a table, and everybody ate at the same time. No, I take it back, Ford talked all during dinner about his new wand. still, we all sat down together at dinner. Finally, it's time for me to breathe. It's my time.
Chas is in bed. Every half hour he wakes tonight, which is unusual. He is still wearing his romper from earlier in the day. Strawberry stains, rubbed in by fat fingers, are now dry. Those sweet stains mingle with smudges of vanilla yogurt and margherita pizza to saturate the air around him with the smell of fried churros. He smells like a carnival on a Saturday night. I want to eat him up, maybe dip him in a warm chocolate (for added magnesium and antioxidants, of course). His fine, caramel hair tickles my nose as I try to inhale him whole. His index finger is still bruised from the morning he closed it in the bathroom door, and I ache to look at it. My skin shifts across my back in a painful way at the sight of it. My eyes rove across him in admiration: how he has succeeded to go to bed without washing, less brushing his teeth. A dirty toe looks as if he might have stepped in wood glue, then dipped it into a dusty corner somewhere (surely from the floor installation); it looks as if it's teeming with a colony of penicillium. It's really funny, in a totally gross sort of way.
Damon, for his part, is in the boy's room. He is wearing the 4000-watt technical headlamp I gave him for his birthday. He is lying in bed, under the covers, reading a book. Something science fiction, I am sure, but I didn't peek when I stopped by to give him a kiss. I'm just happy that he is enjoying himself, donning the headlamp with the "find me" blinker, in case he gets lost among the piles of disorganized toys. Not that I won't be able to find him by his snoring, which will commence in approximately five minutes. This feature works like clockwork; his ability to fall asleep within twenty minutes after cracking a book in bed is absolutely mechanical. I envy him.
In fact, all of this is making me quite sleepy. I want to sink into something horizontal, letting my mind peacefully unfold. The icy wind shoves the juniper against the gutters, and the day exhales upon me. I slow to a pause, then start typing again, in and out of sleep. But I am forcing myself to type, showing up at the page. I am showing up for the date with my self.
Yeah yeah yeah, this is ridiculous. I'm going to go snuggle into bed with McGuyver and his novel.
Posted by Steph at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)
February 17, 2006
Studio Friday: What's Your Poison?
Ruta Maya organic coffee. If I'm not drinking water, I'm having a latte. Stainless moka pot. Whole milk. Not that I'm always able to sip and paint; I paint or draw in 15 minute spurts throughout the day, whether I have a cup in hand or not. It's just nice when the two activities collide.
Posted by Steph at 09:49 AM | Comments (5)
Little Theories
Ford was his usual, curious self today, with the questions about Black Holes, wormholes and portals, wanting me to read A Brief History of Time to him so that we could dissect current knowledge together over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And then he sat still for a moment at lunch to ask the question,
"Mommy, does the sun love me?"
"Of course it does," I replied cautiously, "Does the sun follow you around all day?"
"Yes."
"And does the sun go to sleep with you at night?"
"Yes."
I thought about this all day. How he takes apart our concept of the universe into fragments and puts the pieces back together (Big Bang theory, bits and pieces scattered, cooled, then formed planets; the sun is a dying star, etc) and reviews it out load (he did this with the digestive system to his pediatrician at his second annual checkup). I thought about the frequency of questions, these days, that I am unable to immediately answer. I thought about how uncomfortable I feel, anthropomorphizing the sun. I took a deep breath and started to paint. In a few minutes I felt much better.
As I pulled out of the parking lot tonight, I noticed the moon on the hill, squinting through the atmosphere in a sleepy haze. As I kept driving, damned if it didn't surprise me in the way it followed me home. There was nothing usual about it. The sky was the color of the asphalt under my high-beams. Nobody else was on the road. The air, balmy and warm, smelled metallic and a light southeast breeze blew into the car at the stoplight. Winding my way home through the hills, the moon swung playfully left, and then right. It followed me out of my car and down the driveway and up to the stoop, before hiding behind the junipers. It tucked itself in, an hour ahead of the rain that followed. And then, Ford's naive question made perfect sense.
Posted by Steph at 12:42 AM | Comments (7)
February 16, 2006
Reason #212 Why Our Dogs Don't Live With Us Right Now
"What the fuck is that?!"
"Oh, shit! Who did...wait, that's just brown Play-Dough. Gross."
Chas arrives at the scene:
"Poo-poo?" "Poo-poo?"
He stoops down, picks it up off the floor and puts it to his mouth, eyebrows tilted. "Poo-Poo?"
Posted by Steph at 06:19 PM | Comments (1)
Corners of My Home
Our kitchen table. This is as pretty as it gets (in the traditional sense), somewhere in the sunny hour between art time and lunch, after I've sprayed and wiped the surface, moving the essentials to the center: flowers (thank you John and Amy!), the water pitcher, the empty vase (which will be filled with markers in the final phase of clean up, after they've been picked up off the floor) (thank you, Chas), the paintbrushes, and the small vase with forsythia blooms. Yes, it's already that time.
Take a peek at some other people's corners.
Posted by Steph at 06:19 PM | Comments (1)
February 15, 2006
My Son, the Hit Man
At the park, Ford helped himself to another child's sand toys while I was spotting Chas on the gym. I watched him engineer his play and block out the rest of the world, as I often try to do when I'm, say, typing on my laptop. So serious! I stood there smiling at him.
The other child's mother, when I glanced up at her face, was smiling down on him also. Then she bent down to hand Ford a shovel.
"What's your name?"
"That's not important." he responded, like a calculator.
Posted by Steph at 05:54 AM | Comments (2)
SPT All of Me :week 2
One of those neverending, nagging summer days alone at home with the boys. I have a negative default response to stress that, over time, has begun to improve. It takes work for me to think positively. It's important to be positive for your children. They learn to cope by example. I'm unlearning, rewiring my brain.
See other real people here.
Posted by Steph at 04:12 AM | Comments (7)
February 13, 2006
Surreal
I return to the exhibit on impulse, after viewing the installation of Eva Hess' drawings. I know the corridors by heart: the oak floors creak in the east wing, but enough to surprise me every time; I am always arrested in front of the Ernst frottages, three paces north and an immediate left lead to the painting of the pipe, Leger on the diagonal wall across the room. This time, there is something different (after all, things usually change after ten years). An alcove off the Surrealism exhibit with its own security guard outside.
It's like walking into a jazzy vacuum chamber. A dark room, painted blue the color of Chas' eyes, the sky on a full moon. It is a wonder-room filled with tribal masks, katchinas, headdresses and totems. In the center, a sculpture of a human being, with pins radiating from all surfaces. The opposite wall, above my head, hangs a charming sculpture of a man riding a whale, the two of them casting animated shadows on the wall. It is a collection, tribal and oceanic, curious and natural. Things collected by the Surreallists. I stand in this dark room, awestruck, wondering why this feels like home.
In a corner I notice Dominique De Menil's provincial desk, filled with ephemera: keys, marbles, blue butterflies, feathers, coins, seashells, buttons. "For the children who visited her home." It's a Darwinian duplicate of my dad's roll-top desk. I stand in front of the desk for a good five minutes, examining treasure. Wealthy couples circulate in camel coats and leather shoes, fresh out of the box. The men are distinguished and chiselled, the women have long, glossy hair and everyone smells of ambigously scented soaps. They speak softly of travels to Fiji, and smile at certain masks. They feel at home, too.
I exit the museum onto the wide open expanse of green lawn and sunshine. Down the block, behind a rambling old white oak tree, the boys run circles around Damon. As he waves at me from the void between branches, Chas stumbles onto the grass. Ford is laughing, calling me. I take the children into my charge and urge Damon to go see for himself. We are playing gallery tennis, allowing the kids to be kids while we struggle to be grownups.
Posted by Steph at 06:05 AM | Comments (4)
Primitive
They are often called primitive for want of a better name.
They are the most sincere and most unself-conscious art that ever was and ever will be. They are what remains of the childhood of humanity. They are plunges into the depths of the unconscious. However great the artist of today or tomorrow, he will never be as innocent as the primitive artist—strangely involved and detached at the same time.
What could never have been written is there, all the dreams and anguishes of man. The hunger for food and sex and security, the terrors of night and death, the thirst for life and the hope for survival.”
Dominique de Menil, 1962
Posted by Steph at 12:21 AM | Comments (2)
February 11, 2006
Studio Friday: FEAR!
This week's Studio Friday topic is a challenge (and I'm on vacation this weekend, so I'm not up for any added challenge besides the enormous challenge of travelling with kids). How do I illustrate my approach to fear, within the context of my studio, my work?
I posted one of these photos this Halloween, after Ford won first place in the neighborhood fair for the costume he is wearing, the one I made with him. After searching my workspace and my desktop for a clue to this week's topic, I kept coming back to this series. This costume was the keystone of several months of Ford's fear, and by including this triumph of his (over his fears of this imaginary creature) I am displaying my own attitude towards creative challenges: I like to face them head on, without fear of rejection.
I think design school (and I was talking to a friend about this today)(Hi MaryEllen!), despite the fact that I am still paying for it (and will be for a while) taught me to accept criticism. It taught me that jumping in headfirst, and giving all of myself to a project, would yield back every ounce I put forth. What I create may be a flop, but as long as I persist, it's the process that matters (to me. Screw everyone else!). No effort is wasted.
That said, I am also a perfectionist, so for years now I have resented myself for certain flop projects in school (that really weren't flops, but mediochre work). The other day, Damon walked into the kitchen, where I was having coffee, and plopped five of my school sketchbooks onto the dining room table. He was cleaning the garage. I sighed when I recognized them: each handmade, handsewn and bound, oversized and beginning to mold. It was funny that, while I knew most of the books contained great (naive, hopeful, expressive) stuff, I was drawn to one section of 1992 where I sabotoged myself brilliantly in a particular class on designing for the future. I remember slipping into a horrible funk after the required reading, Future Shock. I'd never been introduced to speculation. I didn't grow up with science fiction; in fact, my family avoided it (I never even saw Star Wars until college). You can imagine the shock that I, this mega-naive college coed, felt after reading the book. In me, it planted little seeds of nihilism. I floundered in the class, got my first "C", dropped off the dean's list and got really bummed.
But I showed up at the page. I did the work. Sure, I was afraid of failing. I was also afraid of failing when I was in dental school, but I busted my ass and survived. Well, until I realized I didn't want to become a dentist. When you try, when you do the work in earnest, and miss a little sleep or lose a few hairs, you grow stronger and get to know who you are. Some efforts are successes and some are failures, many may be in between. Over time, the successes eclipse everything else and begin to define you. The portfolio speaks for itself. I ramble when it's late and I'm on a mini vacation. I'm going to the beauty parlor in the morning and I get to see my grandmother in the afternoon, so I feel giddy and chatty. Maybe a little preachy.
I feel like Chas, in the photos: bring it on, I say. I also identify with Ford, who is wearing the costume I made to resemble the creatures in The Village, whom he had been reckoning with for months, wondering whether they lived in our woods, too. He faced his fears in his own way. In fact, I don't know who was more proud in this photo: Ford, for winning the costume contest, or me, for having a son so brave to confront his fears in a creative way.
See more Studio Friday.
Posted by Steph at 11:16 AM | Comments (7)
February 09, 2006
Corners of My Home
Kid's Kitchen
When I am cooking at of the stove, I'll glance around the corner and watch Chas pull the bowls off the shelves of his small kitchen. One bowl is filled with chubby markers, another is filled with small Swedish tartlet molds, another is filled with cedar balls. He'll sit atop the lambskin and rearrange contents, draw on the floor, throw the balls across the kitchen and into the living room. I'll find them later behind the sofa, or between seat cushions.
Posted by Steph at 08:05 PM | Comments (2)
February 07, 2006
34
The car feels strong and bottom-heavy, it keeps going when I feel the need to pedal faster. It's disorienting driving a car after cycling for several hours.
We contour the gilded canyon bowls at sunset, travelling north. Long shadows like blue fingers hug the hills. A dip in the ridge reveals downtown on the right. Deer tracks jog up the limestone bluffs, Yaupon berries are still red, cast in a mini-explosion along the bottom of the bluff. In traffic at an intersection I notice a pair of cowgirl boots with silk flowers inside, roadside bouquet. I think this is very Austin and wonder whether this is a resting place.
At the restaurant, I struggle to wipe chocolate buttercream icing off my pink merino sweater; small brown crumbs sit high on the wooly pile. In the middle of an anecdote I forget what I am talking about as I watch Chas lick the remains of a large block of sweet cream butter off his fingers. While wiping his right hand, the left dumps a cupful of toothpicks onto the floor. Ford asks me where the chef has managed to catch a baby squid. He demonstrates how the squid consumes food, I notice how dirty his hands are as he puppeteers the cooked squid's tentacles, directing invisible food in towards the squid's mouth. "I don't like shrimp anymore," he declares, while Chas pours ice water on my lap.
It is dark. Focused hypnotically, I migrate home beside fellow lights. we are travelling synchronously, automatically, snaking our way through the black canyon. Rut is over, I am seeing no more deer at night, a relief.
At home, I park the car, and carry a package of diapers under one arm along the moonlit driveway. It is a half moon, and I could play badminton on the lawn. The birdbath sparkles as I pass. You can hear the night in it's crackling quiet, with a band of coyotes wailing a mile away. Orion has bookmarked the sky, and it's especially bright, even as I approach the yellow incandescent halo of our home.
Posted by Steph at 11:59 PM | Comments (2)
February on Town Lake
We leave the playground, and I weave along the lake, trailering the boys. In this warm winter weather, Austin has molted and begun to grow again in little green patches along the water. The rest of the landscape is still dormant, less agressive than the shoots. Clusters of Elephant Ears brazenly crowd along the bank, submerged and waving in the breeze.
The wind awakens me, and my rhythm intensifies while growing efficient. My muscles remember well; I biked for many years before children. I love the way my quadriceps begin to feel warm. I don’t feel this way when I run. My neck burns. I am smiling.
I pass under Riverside drive, and pause to watch reflections dance uninhibited on the bridge’s belly, winding up the concrete posts like white fishnet. Sliders anchor the river, basking in the sun, and we count them. I notice a canoe, motionless, with a fisher aboard, waiting.
It’s a dry day, and chrushed granite crunches as joggers pass us under the bridge. One woman smiles at the trailer, and I follow her eyes to find Chas’ sleeping head on Ford’s shoulder. I return to meditate on the coke bottle water, crystalline turquise jade with a fuzzy rockbottom, brimming with rippling silvery fry.
Barton Springs feeds the creek, the creek feeds the river.The dedicated swimmers, all three of them, are lumbering the length of the pool, their slow, regular paddle lulls me.One is wearing a wetsuit . The elm trees lining the pool are tipped with new leaves, on the pecans, empty shell cases gape at the sky on bare branches, so that we don’t forget that Fall ever happened. But it did, and so did Winter.
Posted by Steph at 09:19 PM | Comments (2)
And now for something completely random
Closing windows on my desktop, I was cleaning up two days worth of clutter. Beneath three Ecto layers I found a cryptic little poem. Did I write this? I sat frowning for a few seconds. Then my eyebrows lifted my face; I had written it last night, my mind replied, but I needed to string together what facts I could recall: I had put on heavy eyelids, a light shone down the hall, metered by snoring, the laptop was too warm on my lap. A car dealership ad jostled my thoughts, Forwards, backwards, backwards. I had written this in my sleep:
I'm stop an elderly gelding
White and mellow
He is standing on a tidal flat.
A poem? Or was I dreaming? Did a TV ad filter into mysubconscience?
Did something happen to Marshmellow, the grey gelding I sold in Point Reyes? I feel compelled to search for his owner and find out.
I just turned a year older while thinking this over in my mind.
Posted by Steph at 12:22 PM | Comments (2)
February 05, 2006
Credit is Due
Kathreen inspires me to seek out color
and to perfect my stovepot coffee technique
(she compiled an excellent how-to)
Brownies with kids
sweetened last Friday afternoon:
(...video would have been even better)
and the easy pants tutorial is on my calendar.
On top of infusing her blog with such goodness, she conceived Whip Up!
Thanks, Kath!
Posted by Steph at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)
February 04, 2006
This is not the itsy bitsy spider, but a dead baby desert tarantula in the bottom of an empty bowl (left outside by the front door). Let's bring it inside for examination! Here, under the bright sunlight in the kitchen:
...oops! don't panic, it's not dead, I guess!
Let's take it back outside:
...oops! Shit! Back up, kids!
Posted by Steph at 12:55 PM | Comments (3)
February 03, 2006
Spring?
Brushing my teeth before the window, I noticed how hazy the horizon looked. Yesterday was so clear and sunny! And today, it looks as if we are covered in a thin veil of smoke. I had to stop brushing so I could look more closely. Squinting beyong the Live oaks, a patch of smoke caught my eye, lifting up between our lot and the one next door.
I spit into the sink and wipe my face.
"Damon, is this smoke?!"
He came into the room for a peek out the window, his toothpaste-breath blowing over the top of my head.
"Well, it looks like it. Wait..."
And we both realized what it was simultaneously: clouds of juniper pollen releasing into the wind.
I guess this means it's Spring already?
Posted by Steph at 10:44 AM | Comments (1)
February 02, 2006
Studio Friday: Happy Accident!
Last week, I mentioned that I manage to sketch whenever I can during the day, right alongside the boys. We do this indoors and out. I prefer outdoors.
A good workhorse for outdoor drawing is a long masonite slab. Ours holds three sheets of drawing paper in a row: One for me, one for Chas, one for Ford. Ford oftentimes abandons the art for something else: playing cars with drawing/ painting tool "x", playing spaceships with drawing/ painting tool "x", playing Harry Potter with drawing/ painting tool "x". Chas imitates Ford until he sees that I am drawing, at which point he picks up drawing/ painting tool "x" and begins to assist me on the page. We work together for another two to three minutes, and then I stand back and watch.
And here we are: I'm now standing behind the glass, watching the two of them devour the carcass of a clean work station. More performance art than painting, red and black paint are beginning to slosh beyond the edges of the masonite and onto the floor. Within minutes, there will be little red footprints peppering the deck and two naked boys running around the yard like bloody red Banshees. Later, I will be rinsing curly pink hair in the bathtub and scraping petechia-red gunk out from underneath longish nails as they watch *tv.
But wait! There are more studios to see here.
* tv is handy for: trimming nails, cutting hair, brushing teeth, taking measurements, but not much else.
Posted by Steph at 11:26 AM | Comments (6)
January 31, 2006
Checking in
It's hard finding morning time for morning pages. I resolved to do them at night, after the boys went to bed. This made sense because that is when my personal day begins. They were tedious to write in their entirety; I found myself consistently checking my watch at twenty minutes. Maybe twenty minutes would be a more ideal measure of time for me? When I have a 3 hour workday, I'm anxious to get work done, so I have to remind myself that morning pages are indirect work. And the pages, they worked to an extent, but this week has been emotionally-charged and turbulent. Both boys have been sick and Damon pulled a muscle in his back on Friday. Added deadlines and housework have commandeered my time and attention.
I was surprised to find myself writing repeatedly about feeling the need to take the family out of the house for a year. I have strong wanderlust, and I always have, but it feels particularly strong right now. Still, it won't happen anytime soon, it's too expensive and I'd prefer living on a boat, which we can't do (even if it were affordable) until Chas is out of diapers. Imagine that! (Although I know it's possible --there's a link out there somewhere I saw once, a photograph of fifteen-odd cloth diapers hung to dry on the mast of a docked sailboat. So inspiring!)
I did the artists date several times this week, a total drug in itself. I have a new travel set of watercolors that fits nicely between diapers and toys in my bag. And a new moleskine notebook, this one with graph paper, that I may begin doing morning collages. In the evening.
What suprised me most this week? Realizing just how important it is to PLAY. Something I thought just might make a little difference apparently makes a BIG difference. I have been trying to remember what I enjoyed doing most as a child:
1. going exploring through the neighborhood, catching reptiles and bugs.
2. drawing. a lot.
3. interviewing my stuffed animals, recording the interview on a portable tape recorder.
4. collecting rocks.
5. watching horses, trying to be with them
6. gardening.
7. taking care of wounded animals.
8. roaming the vet school stalls at TAMU after kindergarten.
9. drawing. a lot.
10. reading. a lot.
11. hanging out in my room
It gave me hints. I realized why I enjoyed being a student in dental school (being bookish, being in a santitized building, feeling important to other people). Why I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little (and being reprimanded by my grandparents, since it didn't afford the salary of a medical doctor), why I will always want to be around horses and livestock, and farm, and garden. Read. Explore. I enjoyed reconnecting with my young self through this exercise. It gave me direction for the future (I'm on the right track for now, I think).
I want to read how the rest of the AW bloggers are doing but, oh well, there's no reading this week. I'm being forced into ignorance. Can't say it's my fault this time.
Posted by Steph at 02:12 AM | Comments (4)
January 24, 2006
SPT
When I was four.
I remember playing with my dad's Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs until the points broke off, and pulling bit after sticky bit off his gum erasers. But I never came across his crow quill pens. Where did he hide them, as a medical illustrator?
Ford, also four, loves to dig through and (accidentally) destroy my art supplies, crow quills included. He uses them as wands. I've found sewing machine pressure feet discarded on the floor after being used as rocketships, bobbins (previously used as Ty-fighters) under sofas. I never manage to keep it all concealed.
Posted by Steph at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)
Living in Austin with Children
On a Japanese prayer wall, one anonymous child wrote:
Posted by Steph at 07:28 AM | Comments (3)
It rained. It rained all day, beginning with bright flashes at midnight and ending with a shroud of mist on Sunday. This afternoon, two days after the relieving episode, the grass is still moist. Is our burn ban over? Hopefully not; this morning Ford and Chas followed me outside to the garden, where they leaned over to watch me burn the raffia and summer grass that decorated the rim of Bird's fishbowl. Quickly, the straw crackled into embers, and died into crumbly strings that we blew into the rosemary, which was still dewey. Before lunch, we had bought a new betta; the new one is named Angie and he is a vigorous red. Funny, I never thought to photograph the morning.
Ford got a new bike on Sunday. Electric blue, like mine, it inspired him to go very fast. We took him to the veloway, where we could ride and skate beside him for three and a half miles. Around the third quarter, his energy began to wane, and after Ford's excessive whining, Damon reluctantly carried the squat little bike the rest of the way, while I taxied him in the bike trailer. We continued to loop for another half hour, during which I thought about my own famous fallouts. Like the time I showed up for team practice on the first day, claiming I was an intermediate rider, and spent the rest of the evening correcting myself on an overly large, very young thoroughbred who felt like a Ferrari on wet pavement. Although I didn't quit, I did nearly shit in my pants and I definitely didn't make Intermediate.
Yesterday, we took the boys to the Children's Museum, where I found this:
With the grasses outside, glorious from Fall but wet from the rain, I thought we'd make a bunch of these for a wall parade. It didn't happen today, so we'll try doing this tomorrow. It may even be a good idea to use them for Christmas tree ornaments next year? I want a whole herd of them...
Posted by Steph at 06:56 AM | Comments (0)
DJ Ford at the Westbank this Tuesday, no cover
I am sitting atop a five year-old blue area rug as the timid, gangly librarian greets us with her friend, the fifty year-old once-purple spider puppet. Her eyes are so tiny that I find myself searching for the person beneath them, and out it peeks with a nervous giggle as she shifts her weight in the chair. Awkwardly, I encourage Chas to sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider; it's surreal to be repeating this same archaic fingerplay with my children. I'm tired of this, and I'll not reminisce about this moment when I am sixty-four. The Itsy Bitsy Spider has hung around the waterspout way too long, it needs a new venue, to broaden its horizons. I suggest setting sail for the Spanish riviera.
Ford is being patient as I tolerate the spider song. He understands the pain; I think he feels it himself. He tumbles in breakdance acrobatics around the three other mother-child pairs, threatening their two year-oldness with his four year-old rebellion. One mother flinches as Ford jumps in her face. What is he doing?! But wait! This is his method, and it's difficult being completely objective when reacting so easy. But I call him closer. He jumps back in my direction, clearly to tell me off, and I find myself flinching.
"These songs are not my kind of songs. My kind of songs are...," his straw-colored curls bounce and his eyes flare, "the White Stripes, and the Strokes, and Beck, and Kings of Leon....,"
Blood flushes to my face, and I find relief when I realize these mothers probably have never heard of Kings of Leon, much less trained their ears to understand the slurred lyrics (not that Ford has),
"...this music is na-nee na-nee BOH-ring..."
Posted by Steph at 12:00 AM | Comments (2)
January 22, 2006
Naptime
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January 21, 2006
The Veloway
My thighs, burning holes through my pants, heave as I haul the combined weight of two kids in the bike trailer and Damon, freeloading off his skateboard behind me. He coasts back there like some urban remora, silently clinging to the back of the bike trailer from his longboard, while Ford yells, "Hurry up, taxi! Mommy the wedgie-taxi! Wedgie, poopy taxi, HA!"
"HEEeeYA! MULE," echoes Damon, like some 6 foot 2 Yosemite Sam that he is.
Posted by Steph at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
Wee Hour Banter: Remembering to See
Writing is hard, but joy comes easily these days. I am rehashing my way through The Artist’s Way* again after a 6 year hiatus, and digging new roots in fertile soil. I’ve been drifting about for a while, tendrils outstretched, and feel ready now to grow down instead of laterally; the plant is strong but the roots are weak.
I’ve put my mind to naming the sources of joy and I’ve found that it comes from being aware of my footsteps and playing a lot. There may be events unfolding around me, but they may as well not be there when I am engaged. Being aware, I’ve found over the years, is what has given me fullness and sanity. Oddly, I ran across a passage in week 2 of The Artists Way that refers to this same phenomenon: Julia Cameron, in describing how her grandmother “made do” with the circumstances her husband left her (financial instability and a wild ride on the waves of success and failure), remarked about her mother’s capacity to be very much in the now, a reporter of life around her. Not focusing on regrets or fearing the future, she was able to immerse herself in experience, a great way to cope and remain sane.
"Attention is the act of connection," says Julia. "My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of laying attention."
How do other people stay sane? Here are a few obvious secrets:
I watched a documentary last night on a female stunt pilot, who enjoyed the way flying dangerously required so much focus that everything else slipped out of her periphery. Surely a big wave surfer feels the same way, risking his life each wave as he directs every neuron to the dynamic matter and energy thundering around him. I imagine a surgeon feels a similar zen, perhaps a more cerebral, fine-motor adaptation of the same principal, or a writer, for that matter (although, as Robert Cormier once said, “The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”).
Another way I find sanity: watching my enthusiasm of the outdoors trickle down to my kids, watching them web together information on the world around them, making connections that, in turn, connect them to earth. When I am outside appreciating the world around me, it’s infectous; I can’t help sharing it with the kids, with others. It hasn’t taken many brainstorming sessions to discover purpose behind this. I want others to see. I want others to experience and feel joy in his or her footsteps, trying to banish regrets and ignore to-do lists, even if for five mintes at a time. Little bursts of sanity provide hours of empowerment.
I think of other writers who have fostered this capacity for seeing: Annie Dillard, when she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Anne Lammott and Operating Instructions, Rachel Carson, and the late Provensens, who wrote my favorite picture book as a child: Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm. There are others, but these are favorites. What are yours? Have you seen much lately? Assuming that, like me, you feel periodic insanity, what centers you and makes you sane?
*Other Artist's Way bloggers have been inspired by Kat's Paws. I guess I can consider myself one if I just said "others."
Posted by Steph at 11:17 PM | Comments (1)
Happy Distractions From the Act of Writing
I enjoyed making this doll for Chas, who was referring to it as "Dee Dee" before dismissing it to the floor and moving on to deconstructing an old Blackberry device. Ford has since grown attached to it. I myself have been carrying it around the house also, and when I'm least aware I find myself twirling the little cap between my fingers and daydreaming about making more for the new babies in 2006 (what do you think, Elisa? A sophisticated pink velour for Claire? :)
If you ask Ford what he wants to be when he grows up, these days he will enthusiastically tell you that he wants to be "a daddy." If you could see him escorting Chas through the line at the burrito shop, or sharing his cereal with him in the back seat of the car, or hear him translate Chas' babble when I'm most desperately trying to understand what he's saying, his choice would make perfect sense. Ford is very sensitive to human expressions and needs, and he loves to help and to understand how people work. I think he'll be an outstanding dad someday. If I could only get him to remember to feed the Betta. Too late! Bird died yesterday, but it wasn't starvation. I was tending to that. He had some sort of growth that prompted me to warn Ford (yesterday! whew) that the fish may not live the rest of the week. Bye, Bird. Thanks for contributing 4 months of exotic flare to our dining room, and for freaking out about the Le Creuset Flameware (it was just a pot!) We will miss you.
Posted by Steph at 09:11 PM | Comments (2)
January 20, 2006
Ben & Jerry
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January 17, 2006
Today I was loaded with anxiety, but my soul was too weary, so what happened was that I stood there in the middle of the house while my head ran around the living room without me. It was really weird. I remember going to the refrigerator several times to meet a wasted, irritable odor. But I didn’t have the discipline to clean it, desperate as my fridge was for a good cleaning. Instead, I concerned myself with keeping Chas out of the kitchen and hoping that Ford wouldn’t look back into his childhood, later on, to discover that his first memory was peeking into a rancid icebox. I thought of solutions to the problem, and none of them were to clean the fridge. The best idea I had was to ignore it another day.
Chas likes Harry Potter, not snuggling up in bed to read a copy of the book but sitting on the edge of the bed watching the movie on Ford's laptop. If I deny his first request, he will continue bobbing up and down uttering "Pottah?" Pottah? Pottah?" until either I give in or he breaks down in a holy shitfit. I blame Ford, who is entirely too influential. Chas will sit, transfixed before the screen, for ten minutes at a time. It's creepy. I know it's not porn, but this bothers me fundamentally. Books have a lot of competition for his attention. At the same time, I can't help chuckle; "BOMBAZAH!" is a very interesting first phrase.
Where I lack the inspiration to wipe diluted bleach solution onto refrigerator shelves, I certainly haven't lacked it in the creative department. And I have Ford as my witness; I found myself telling him earlier this week that 2006 was the year I would be rejected by a lot of publishing companies, but that I'd have dummy (picture) books flying in all different directions, nonetheless. Experience has shown that nothing is final until I've confessed it to Ford. Of course, I had to explain the definition of a "dummy book" to Ford, a rather simple process made difficult and I don't think he ever got over the derogatory connotation.
Posted by Steph at 06:20 PM | Comments (4)
January 16, 2006
Saturday
Posted by Steph at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
Defiance
I just walked downstairs and caught Ford dipping his grubby little fingers into the cake batter. Notice that he doesn't look spooked or guilty. He's not trying to hide a thing.
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January 15, 2006
Happy Birthday, Damon!
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January 14, 2006
Saturday Morning pileup
I’m stuck in a Saturday sandwich, between competing layers of Close Encounters (with commentary from Damon) upstairs and Ira Glass downstairs, under the leaden weight of a sleeping Chas on my lap and the beaming sun on my shoulders. There are pressing obsessions on my laptop: a map of museums and our morning itenerary that’s now past due. But the house is now clean, and the smell of freshly sliced limes is creeping across the kitchen countertop.
Posted by Steph at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)
Visions of Swallowtails dancing in my head
I cut my finger pruning today, I was so eagerly (and glovelessly!) trimming the garden in the front yard and it was especially dangerous with Chas underfoot. Nothing serious, just a battle scar, a merit badge for my work. It felt invigorating to trim the seeded grasses and the long, thin dead stalks off the perennials; not unlike the liberation I feel whenever I have a thorough haircut and bound out of the salon, leaving piles of medium blonde locks on the floor behind me staring up at the ceiling like fish beached after a red tide.
I was surprised to find tiny green veins thriving inside much of last summer’s dried stalks. Seeing this as I explored each plant gave me all the hope I needed to dream of starting another garden this Spring with the kids. I thought of the new book I bought myself for Christmas, still waiting for me to put it to use: Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy. Not for lack of inspiration, I bought the book to validate my eccentric enthusiasm about growing gnome-infested theme gardens and cultivating what land we’ve got to best use. Thinking of ideas, I took all the clippings and reduced them further, sprinkling them over the soil like little golden confetti.
While I dream of having another vegetable garden, we don’t have the means to create a large plot. We haven’t enough graded, sunshine-filled yard or protection from the deer and we sure don’t have the backhoe we’d need to cultivate a righteous bed atop the kaliche. But we have the perfect woods for little surprises, and a corridor between the house and the forest for a fragrant moonlight garden path (we had a resident bat last year). There’s room for a teepee, and I already purchased the heavenly blue morning glories for the tarp, and Mexican Sunflowers to play off the blue and create a haven for swallowtails. In fact, I am thinking of planting the entire meadow beside the driveway in a swath of yellows and white, a sort of homecoming parade.
As far as our land goes (where we are building, down the road), I still have to research rainwater harvesting, although I’ve been putting this off knowing full well that I’ll need a couple thousand to build a cistern, irrigation system and fence. Thinking ahead to another long hot summer, shopping for new fridge easily trumps those plans.
Posted by Steph at 04:41 PM | Comments (2)
January 12, 2006
Astro
What more can I say? The kid just rocks. And he's got it all figured out.
Posted by Steph at 03:49 PM | Comments (5)
January 11, 2006
Butterflies in the Treetops
A giant live oak tree stood in arabesque on the hill above the creek, a proud centenarian but with arms so long and weary they dug back down into the earth for relief. While the sun sank behind it without saying goodbye, as it does on these arid, cloudless days, Ford and Chas cavorted among the branches. Ford wanted to climb higher than possible, satisfying each inch up the tree with laughter and a hearty jump back down. Chas, for his part, interested himself mostly with the mulch around the base, a dusty combination of dead leaves, acorn bits, bird guano and the small particulates of decomposing plastic gelato spoons from the chi chi grocery store nearby. I cringed as he faced the wind, gleamed with joy and flung a handful of detritus into his face by accident. Mycoplasma, Avian flu, corneal scratches buzzing through my head while Ford demanded "Look at me now, Mommy! Look, Mommy! Mommy, look at me!" I quickly scan Chas, while Ford hops back down to the ground.
No harm done, no tears. Ford looks back up at the heart of the tree, a perfect vortex of boughs and tailored for sitting, tempered and rounded from a century of children. He turns to me with raised eyebrows, and asks me to lift him up to the top. I remind him of my jammed thumb, my short height, and promise that Daddy can help him up next time. A couple walks by, the man understands Ford's gesturing without hearing a word. I tell Ford that I approve, the man can help lift him up to the top of the trunk. As the man lifts him, I watch every ounce of Ford's enthusiasm diminish instantly in proportion to height. Tenatively, the man releases his hold on Ford, and enables him feel his presence atop the grand oak, above our heads. Perched so high, he claws that trunk like a castaway cat riding dark seas. While his eyes help round out the terror, his voice says it all, as he quivers his shaky plea,
"mommy can you please get me down?"
Posted by Steph at 08:07 AM | Comments (2)
January 10, 2006
SPT
Week 2 in Personal History series.
Is there a child that isn't immediately enchanted with her first visit to the beach?
I have this fantasy that I will live another life that I can completely devote to the study of echinoderms.
More SPT bloggers here.
Posted by Steph at 11:12 AM | Comments (8)
January 05, 2006
'dee dee' in progress
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January 03, 2006
SPT Personal History Series #1
I have loved horses since I was four. Our vegetable garden backed up to a small pasture, and a paint named Skip Bug would stretch his neck over barbed wire to eat our corn. After school, there were days when I learned patience, by standing at the fence, waiting for the girl to finish riding practice; she would often let me ride atop Skip Bug as she walked him in circles, during his cool-down. My lofty perspective gave me certain power, and I felt great pride as I looked over the garden each time we passed, above the tall stalks of corn, with the sun setting behind our roof.
When I was in college, I took a job waiting tables so that I could buy a horse of my own. I learned what it means to own a horse. In the morning I'd drive in darkness to feed the horses, through patches of mist on the farm roads. The grain smelled like molasses and I would sit in the hay loft and finish homework, while listening to the soft munching below, interrupted occasionally by the hens, clucking about the stalls.
When we moved to California, Damon bought me my first dressage horse. From this horse I learned to fear injury and to prioritize my goals. He threw me one morning and I broke my pelvis, but I healed and I kept riding. Within a month, however, I was pregnant with Ford. So I went back to the basics of ownership, enjoying the simple things like sunny showers under the eucalyptus trees, and once again I practiced the art of letting go.
I have two saddles; one here at my parent's house in Houston and the other in our garage. They wait with me for the opportunity to ride again, meanwhile enjoying piggyback rides with the kids and basking in the sunny hope that it might indeed again happen.
More self portraits here.
Posted by Steph at 10:03 PM | Comments (2)
Basquiat
We took the kids to see the Basquiat exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Ford validated my anticipation, eagerly counting recurring symbols and remarking that "he uses crayons!" I knew the portfolio would captivate Ford, with the cartoony anatomy and cars and expressive style. But I didn't realize how much it would synchronize with Ford's interests. And I enjoyed it, too! Even if I couldn't really stop and breathe much throughout the show. Our tour was characteristically whirlwinded; we bounced around the gallery, cross-referencing to find the ties that bind the work, punctuated with requests to go to the bathroom, get a drink, go home, no stay, go to Austin. Chas, for his part, snoozed in the stroller.
Posted by Steph at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
January 01, 2006
2006
It's New Year's Eve in Houston, and over the buzzy drone of Chas' snoring I hear little groups of people hollering one block away, the rat a tatting of firecrackers and guns, and the horn of a freight train downtown. Our house and much of our block is asleep. But if you walk barefoot out onto the front porch, and sit on the swing, you can see Christmas lights smiling at the raucous din of nearby celebration. The turning of a new year unfolds as I swing back and forth in the stillness. The family of gliding squirrels is probably shaking on one of the grand oak boughs above me as bottle rockets whine above them.
Being a homebody on New Year's eve never felt so luxurious. I think I got over being homebound on New Year's eve four years ago when we made Ford.
Cheers to that and a new year!
Posted by Steph at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)
December 30, 2005
What is it like having a four year old boy?
For starters, you get interrupted quite a bit when you read to them. And it's not always the "Why?" kind of questions. Sometimes, you have to play dictionary. If you read "The Night Before Christmas" to them, you might get a "What the hell is a sugarplum?!" or a "Bloody Hell! How do you know what the elves know?!" Other times, interruptions are more the result of commentary, which is endless, throughout the day and every day. Try reading the Grimm classic tale, "The Bremen Town Musicians," as I did the other morning:
A certain man had a donkey, which carried the corn-sacks to the mill indef-
"Nutsack!"
-indefatigably for many a long year; but his strength was going, and he was growing m-
"Nutsack!"
-he was growing more and more unfit for work. Then his master began to consider how he might b-
"Nutsack!"
-He bagan to consider how he might best save his keep; but the donkey, seeing no good wind was blowing
(snickering from Damon across the room, acknowledged)
ran away and set out on the road to Bremen.
"Nutsack!"
Posted by Steph at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
The Christmas buzz that had us sailing into hyper drive has slowed to a sobering halt, and the quietness in our house is chopped into pieces by the babble of children at play. Here I am, taking a picture of Chas, on the back porch, trying to open the back door. I stand here laughing from the dining room because he has smooching his nose up to the glass, making funny faces at me:
Unintentionally, I took a revealing self portrait today. It's me, the me that I see, the reflection of my children. I see my creativity in the toys I make for them, I see my attitudes in the way I dress them, my discipline in the way I may sometimes remember, but not always, to cut and comb their hair and brush their teeth. I see my self-esteem in the way I keep my house (dirty windows and all).
Perhaps my perspective is just as distorted as the self portrait; in the act of mothering my mind is sometimes so absorbed in the middle of every minute that I lose point of reference, and my closest point of navigation is my limbic tunnel, that impulsive, instinctive maze of motherhood. My rational mind is often in left field. In content imbalance, I'm satisfied. When I put things into greater perspective, I feel so fortunate. Left to calmly breathe and think in quiet, as I am doing now beside that little boy you see above, now in deep slumber, I tend to call upon the more rational part of myself and remember that it's all good, it's all part of the process. Breathe in, breathe out.
Other self portraits can be seen here.
Posted by Steph at 05:47 AM | Comments (0)
Oh, well. Who am I kidding, anyway?
I don't pretend this is a craft blog, but to mark my time on this planet I have to log the hours I spent making these little wee people into the wee hours preceding Christmas. Behold, Ivy Elizabeth Walker, cloaked in the safe color of mustard and in the forbidden woods with her bag of magic rocks! (Reference to the movie "The Village")
And here are a grandmother and her grandchildren, open for interpretation; I've been using them to play Hansel and Grethel:
And lastly, Grandma fairy, made in the likeness of my mother-in-law (and who she forgot to take back home with her):
Posted by Steph at 12:10 AM | Comments (1)
December 26, 2005
Merry Christmas and Happy Flu Virus
For the past month, I have been the anal-militant freak with the alcohol lotion in her diaper bag, whipping it out and sluicing all of our hands when we were so guilty as to even look at the floor we walked on. I have been that afraid of being sick yet again on Christmas day. And for the week preceding Christmas, I was feeling extra edgy, avoiding most crowded places and supplementing our diet with added vitamin C and food grade Plutonium. We were really doing well; Ford had already suffered his week of agony two weeks ago, and Chas just this past week recovered from a week bout of croup. People, mostly veteran parents, warned me that our house would be sick all winter once we had two young children, but enough is enough already, especially this close to a happy occasion.
Well, Christmas morning, the inevitable happened: I got sick.
Sunrise was such a pretty assemblage of rainbow peach for me to sneer back at it when I awoke, but I was pissed. I felt worse than the usual hangover, worse than a night without sleep. Meanwhile, as I tried prying my eyes open, Chas began to crawl over me to join Ford, already under the Christmas tree.
Buzz an blur, fast forward through presents with the strobe of a camera keeping time, and I found myself bent over the toilet, popping eyeball cappilaries and yelping for relief. And not one, but two Phenergans and three hours later, I had puked my way out of Christmas dinner at my brother’s house. Damon was able to leave the children with the rest of the family and hold my hand while I puked some more.
Finally, around eleven pm, I began to regain consciousness. I remember tossing and turning in a dehydrated, feverish funk through a series of old indie films, knowing the room was too hot and stuffy but too weak to get out of bed to open a window. Damon meanwhile slept in the boy’s room, all three of them must have been curled in a giant snuggle pile watching Harry Potter. I could hear the menu music playing on Ford’s iBook repeating over and over again. Although it was endlessly irritating, and I was too tired to lift myself out of bed, I let it replay in the background until I finally fell asleep.
I walked my way through today feeling cored and weary. Damon had cleaned up the downstairs last night, so that this morning there were no untidy remains of Christmas day. There was no ribbon scattered about, no toys littering the floor, no gung ho Christmas music and no grandparents. Just one very tidy, vacuumed living room. And this, coupled with a deafening quiet, made me feel very sad. So I suggested we go out for pancakes. And while I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach by a large plow horse, I had a huge appetite. Until I began to eat, and then I felt otherwise.
Anyway, there was more to Christmas besides my 24 hour bug, right?! For example, if you pause the screen at about 7:30am, you can watch Ford open the present he has been surreptitiously avoiding while dutifully opening a series of other smaller, less huge gifts. It is unmistakably his, yet his name is scrawled onto the wrapping paper with a big black marker: it the long-awaited electric guitar, just like his father’s:
Fast forward ten seconds. For months, for a long as I had been planning on not getting sick for Christmas, I had been wondering how in the world I would find a laser fan that Ford wanted. A laser fan. This, to replace the laser fan he lost, the seasonal item that Target carried last summer. Well, on a last-minute shopping trip to Whole Earth Provision with Mom and Dad (aka project flu transmission) I happened upon a basket of these little f-ckers amid all the stocking stuffer impulse grabs on the counter. Did we SCORE or what?! Ford nearly exploded when he discovered this in his stocking, and I will never understand this fascination, but it is apparently as contagious as the flu virus (except that adults seem to be immune, unless on acid):
Mom and Dad were wonderful. They gave such fun gifts to the kids, as well. Among them: an set of German puppets and a doorway theater that John and I used to play with when we were little. They were handmade in the likeness of Hansel, Grethel and the old witch. I feel extra special to have received a Harvard copy of fables and folk-lore. Well, it was meant for Ford and Chas, but they can't fully appreciate a book without pictures yet (unless it has "Harry Potter" written on front).
The imagination is wild these days! I set up the theater today in the doorway to the boy's room. While I checked my email in the office, I could hear them laughing and running back and forth through the fabric wall. I came to discover they were actually transporting themselves through Platform Nine and Three-Quarters (and if you've read Harry Potter books, you know that this is the secret rail platform one must run through a brick wall to access, which leads to the Hogwarts Express and takes you to Hogwarts School). The theater is still up, and the boys are now asleep to the sound of the credits music, again. I just peeked in on them through the stage window.
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and that it was free of the flu and full of this much magic.
-Steph
Posted by Steph at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2005
Solstice
Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year. We have never before celebrated Winter Solstice, but it has earned higher rank this year as I try reconciling myself with Texas' sublime seasons. I am frustrated reading about snowy winters elsewhere when we are only now beginning to see the red leaves go brown and fall. To celebrate, we will plant mostly seeds for spring, but also some painted rocks and magic pebbles. And tomorrow night: every light will be a candle.
Posted by Steph at 05:33 AM | Comments (1)
December 17, 2005
SPT: Reflected Surfaces Challenge
I keep forgetting about to the weekly Self Portrait group. Here's my contribution. So what if it's really Wednesday.
Some of the entries were amazing!
I don't know why I love this type of self portrait so much.
Two weeks ago, for fun, I took this photo. It's pretty half-assed, I know. And it's late, too!
I could take another shot; alas, the camera is charging and in five minutes my five minute window of opportunity will be gone.
Look familiar? Same glass door, this time in winter:
Posted by Steph at 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Pictures of Ford That Aren't of the Back of His Head:
He's so miserable in the other room, with his flu. I feel horrible about not being able to comfort him. So while he rests now in his bedroom I thought I'd share a few moments of Ford (over the past couple of months) with Linda, my mother-in-law, who remarked that she's only been able to see the back of his head.
Posted by Steph at 02:35 AM | Comments (2)
December 12, 2005
We Didn't Get the Flu Shot
Ford endured an hour of driving in the cramped back seat of the puny Golf car, ready to puke out his heart, when we stopped in Smithville and paused before turning around and returning home. We were driving to Houston for the annual Lights in the Heights, which is a Christmas tradition in my old neighborhood. Mom and Dad had a bell choir on the front porch. The street was closed off. We looked forward to bundling up, boozing up, and towing the kids in a red wagon through the neighborhood, saying hello to old friends.
Poor kid. It broke my heart to watch him tough it out. He is the bravest little boy, so careful not to puke anywhere but into his little yellow bowl. Remembering to say please when asking for a towel. It reduced me to tears when he asked whether the pediatrician's office that we were taking him to this afternoon was "the one with all the toys where we went when Seti (our old Jack Russell) bit me when I was trying to keep him off the bed because mommy was nursing Chas?"
Posted by Steph at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)
I Am Not Yet Ready for Christmas
Instead, I am knitting. Clothing is a priority. It's too hard to fit normal pants over cloth diapers, so I have to knit my own. The solution: Little Turtle Knits pants. Noro Kureyon. He seems to like them. These won me kudos from our local knitting shop, where we left only minutes before taking this picture. Not before buying another 3 skeins of yarn for: another pair of pants.
Now, back to procrastination.
Posted by Steph at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2005
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December 05, 2005
Friday
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December 02, 2005
Show and Tell
Knitted Little Turtle Knits soaker, Araucania Natural wool, happy model. Knitting is therapeutic and addictive. Like running, once it becomes routine it's hard to miss a day. Then, just as easily, it's possible to quit without looking back. I dropped the needles in May of last year and I'll probably do the same this year. I think it has seasonal appeal, to me.
Posted by Steph at 12:13 PM | Comments (2)
Congress and Sixth
On the walk to dinner, oak boughs bounce with Christmas lights to the sound of rush hour traffic. Lights, everywhere, confuse us all along the way, awakening us: sodium, mercury, halogen, fluorescent, neon. The dark silhouettes of two live oaks frame the facade of ArtHouse like a shadowbox, their branches alive with a congregation of grackles, cackling and cracking.
Posted by Steph at 05:52 AM | Comments (2)
November 29, 2005
A crisp blue day and all spent outdoors, without camera. Tomorrow I hope to remember.
There is a pair of great horned owls outside: one near the bedroom window in the juniper, the other down the road, and they are volleying a throaty sonnet. The windows are closed for the frost tonight.
The Mexican Freetail bats are still here. On a walk beneath Congress Ave. bridge, the colony distracted me from the sunset with their electric chirping. On my way home, a lacy parade of bats veiled the blue twilight, hungry.
Chas and I are snuggled in bed and I just finished his blue soaker shorts. They are precious but it will be too cold tomorrow to model them outdoors. Perhaps he can model them indoors.....
Posted by Steph at 01:35 PM | Comments (2)
November 21, 2005
Tick, tock
I can tell that life has gotten hectic because I haven't spent much time the past week in reflection. Normally, there are about five minutes of peace in the middle of a day where I can stare into the forest and listen, or watch a spider spin a web, or feel the sun warming my back. But the holidays are upon me and I feel the pressure rising. I have a gift list that keeps detailing and evolving. Chas has developed the speed with which to help Ford whirl the house into havoc, and I simply can't keep up during the day. The evenings are either spent tidying or knitting, since Chas needs new wool pants. But there isn't much time left for gift-making. And the elves begin visiting the house, what, next week? Ford is expecting a fabric Whomping Willow and a set of handmade Harry Potter dolls from the elves. Me, being the elves, of course.
Posted by Steph at 02:59 AM | Comments (6)
November 14, 2005
Sunday Sound Quilt
Chas has been playing with words. He watches my mouth pronounce his favorite words, and he is eager to repeat adn repeat:Ball, mamamamamama, dee dee (which means "baby doll" to him), dog, hieeeee (hi), bye-eeeee (bye), bah-bah (basketball), and various barn animal sounds. His favorite monologue is the repetition of the word "hot." He repeats, "Haaaa-Tuh, haaa-tuh, haa-tuh" for himself to hear. He enjoys the way it feels. It's sweet to watch him circle about the house, signing and saying the same word in a happy, meandering trance. It's a layer of music.
The other layers include the IndiePopRocks simulcast, set on low. I think Damon enjoys the living soundtrack. It's mellowing.
And then there is Ford on electric guitar and Damon on Ford's classical guitar. They sit beside one another, playing guitar-babble of their own. Of course, it sounds nothing like babble, but it's the same little dance. They are feeling out for sounds they like. Ford has the advantage of not having to develop and fortify his ego right now; he is at a wonderful stage in his life where these things are already robust. So he sits there, exploring the sounds that he makes without the want to play like another, or sound like another. At this point, it is only sound. It's like learning how to talk; he and Chas are very much on the same page, in that respect.
Posted by Steph at 06:24 AM | Comments (0)
Sunday Tapestry
Santa's elf has set up her workshop upstairs:
...and is ready to open the gimongous $3 bag of vintage fabric:
While Santa snoozes outside:
Posted by Steph at 01:57 AM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2005
In Case I Forget to Mention It
With the return of daylight savings, preparing dinner is a delicate but manic dance around a demanding and danger-prone toddler and the fact that Ford leaves school at dusk, right about the time Chas turns into a werewolf. It's a crazy juggling act trying to get dinner, or something that resembles dinner, on the table for everyone. It's even harder trying to get the boys to eat it. But that's another story. Tonight there's one thing I want to remark on, because I know Ford is getting older. This cute little thing he's done all year that has been so fun to watch will, most likely, eventually phase out:
I love the moment when the plates are all on the table, and everyone has a glass and a fork and a knife and a spoon and a napkin, and the burners are turned off and we finally begin to eat. It is at that moment, when we take our first bite or have our first sip of wine (after an obligatory "Cheers!"), that Ford always begins, in upright posture and a tilt to his head,
"So, how was your day, Mommy?"
See? Small talk never sounded so good.
Posted by Steph at 04:04 AM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2005
Speed of Sound
Click on the photograph below and wait eternity for the movie to download, but it was my moment of zen today and I thought it was fun enough to share.
Posted by Steph at 03:33 PM | Comments (1)
November 09, 2005
SPT: Self-Documentary Series #6
I am his teacher.
From birth, I have helped translate the world to him.
And now, the world is not enough;
he wants me to explain the universe, and death, and subatomic particle behavior,
and my mind is getting tired and feeling ignorant.
I need someone to translate these things for me.
Posted by Steph at 08:44 AM | Comments (0)
The Garden: November Specimens
Posted by Steph at 03:15 AM | Comments (2)
November 07, 2005
Fall comes, Fall goes
It is Fall in the Northern Hemisphere. I had to explain this to Ford tonight, as I hunched over the bathtub bathing Chas. Not just the fact that it really is Fall, but the part about our hemisphere facing away from the sun. He had originally asked why today was so short, and I had to explain to him that the days were actually getting shorter. He stood there, watching his reflected expressions in the mirror:
"So, Mommy, is it Fall?"
Of course, he would have to wonder, what with the confusion we're experiencing in our Spring-inspired weather. The boys spent the evening playing in the sprinkler while I tended the plants. As the sun began to set, I put them into the jogger wearing only their underwear, and we walked along yellow Chinaberry groves and scattered Black walnut, red flags bouncing in the breeze. And then, hark! we heard the unearthed drone of a cicada. Ford sat upright in the stroller and, I kid you not, said "What the hell? A cicada!"
Posted by Steph at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)
Wild Child
Posted by Steph at 05:16 AM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
An Interview with the Emergent Illustrator Ford M. Sicore
Ford wants to be an illustrator. I interviewed him this morning after he created this elaborate scene:
Stephanie: (holding my invisible microphone) So Ford, the world wants to know more about this young illustrator named Ford. Can we begin our interview with the question, "When did you decide to become an illustrator?"
Ford: (With a mouthful of sandwich) I decided to become an illustrator when I was playing the guitar upstairs with Daddy.
S: I see. Did something or somebody inspire you? What I mean to say is, did you read a book, or watch a television program or watch somebody else illustrating when you decided to become an illustrator, yourself?
F: Yes. I was watching television on the channel they call (pause to chew sandwich) K..L...R....
S: Oh, our local PBS station called "KLRU?"
F: Yes.
S: And what show were you watching?
F: The show with the books, you know...
S: Oh, Reading Rainbow?
F: yes!
S: Well, that's all the time we have for today, Ford. Thank you for the interview. Now let's hear the story behind this piece you just finished. Would you do the honors?
F: Sure!
"Next to these mountains right here are some caves, do you see them? People lived in these caves and slept there. And next to the caves, next to the mountains was a huge, huge pool of water. Actually, a huge pool of atoms. And the atoms are so small, they are this small (demonstrates with his fingers, the space between his pointer finger and thumb, pressed together). The atoms bounced together so furiously that they made noise that actually woke up the people sleeping in the caves. So the people went outside the cave, and they found a portal. The went up to the portal, but the portal sucked them inside. Suddenly, suddenly, they found themselves taken by the portal to that place called...New York City. And they looked around and saw what was there. Then they went back into the portal, and the portal took them back home to their caves."
Posted by Steph at 04:00 AM | Comments (0)
November 05, 2005
Chas found a portal, too:
Posted by Steph at 04:09 PM | Comments (1)
November 04, 2005
Wild Basin Wilderness
I took the boys out for loop around Wild Basin wilderness preserve after lunch. As we unloaded for our walk, we were met by a investigative swarm of yellowjackets. Ford began to freak out as I watched him eyeball three drones on his shirtless body. Not sure what to do, since my hands were tied, I urged him to just be still and watch them explore. I told him to use the opportunity to see them up close, so long as he remained perfectly, perfectly still. Which he did. And the whimpers ceased as he began to comment on their similarity to bees. I have no idea why they were attracted to us. All I can figure is that we smelled too lavendar-y with our herbal sunscreen, and that Ford might have left a little strawberry jam on his face after lunch.
At any rate, once we started on the trail, they lost interest.
The trail crests a ridge that overlooks, um, Wild Basin wilderness. It's Westlake's backyard, full of, um, wildlife. Besides the wasps, however, there wasn't much wildlife awake to greet us on the trail except one lone mockingbird. We did see something new, though. Atop a limestone outcropping laid a half dollar-diameter star-shaped fungus that could have easily been mistaken for a spider: a small sphere, on inspection, had burst to reveal a tiny hole on top; the "legs" were eight radiating, pointy black extensions. I think it was an Earth Star, a type of exploding shroom, and this lesson captivated Ford. Like, the rest of the afternoon. These days, it's all about explosives and things with bioluminescence.
I brought a heavy and clunky 35mm camera without batteries. The strap irritated my neck, but Chas, in the backpack, seemingly felt sorry enough to pat the back of my head and play with my hair. He occasionally pointed to things and shouted exclamations that we couldn't understand but agreed with. We felt so jaded on the trail, Ford and I, because it was a very large version of our yard. I guess we were hoping for a water feature or a cave or, um, more wildlife.
Posted by Steph at 05:24 AM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
Making Wreaths with Chas
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November 01, 2005
SPT self-documentary series #5
Everyday me. The silly cornerstone of the meal.
It's all good. Sometimes, on the job, I dream.
Mostly about other things I could be doing,
not that I'd rather. Even when I really do feel like a pig on a spit.
Posted by Steph at 11:33 PM | Comments (2)
Fall, finally
The morning was crisp and the breeze tickled the Juniper Cedar boughs, and berries littered the patio before we swept and painted:
Later, while Chas napped, Ford and I sat down at the foot of the flower bed and tended the plants. I drilled him on the names of each plant and he was, not surprisingly, correct most of the time. He showed me where the Christmas cactus is growing new leaves, I told him that people used to make paper with the papyrus plant.
Damon buzzed and whirred in the garage, building his amp as fast as possible before the rain came. And soon, it came. Gusts of cold air lifted the new Fall foliage and tiny drops ushered a long rainfall. Ford and I watched as Damon scrambled his welder back into the garage, shouting expletives into the bustling front.
Posted by Steph at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)
October 30, 2005
Thinking of: Holiday CelebrAprons?
Posted by Steph at 08:30 PM | Comments (0)
First Place!
We had to leave home without finishing the costume. Seventeen papier mache quills left to tack on but I ran out of glue for the glue gun. When we arrived at the lake for the carnival, we stumbled onto the costume judging stage. Around forty children were decked out and fidgeting in their seats. We coaxed Ford onto the stage and he just stood there when the the kids began to parade in a circle around him. But following Ford were many ooh!s and aa!s, and he ultimately won first place! Twitching those creepy claws of his. He is so proud.
Honorable mention goes to Ford as Samurai. Here, searching for treasure in the hay. School Halloween party.
Posted by Steph at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
October 29, 2005
Studies reveal that girls are getting dumped earlier in life than in previous generations.
I walk Ford to school every day. School's been going great.
Today when we rounded the corner of the playground, the boys yelled, "FORD'S HERE! FORD'S HERE!" and stampeded to the fence to wait for him. Closer to where we walked was the little playhouse, and a cute little girl in pink and white, with straight blonde hair heard his name and walked out towards us. Ford lurched forward from the jogger so he could annunciate through the veil of chain-link:
"I'M *NOT* YOUR FRIEND!!!"
She heard this, didn't flinch, and turned right-side-round back to the playhouse. I watched her tell the other girls what happened. Or that Ford is a little prick and I hope he never calls again. That bastard.
UPDATE: It has been over a week since I last posted this, but I forgot to mention that, on the following day's walk to school, Ford picked yellow wildflowers for this sweet little girl. When he arrived at the gate, Ford climbed over his friends to hand-deliver them. Alas, she didn't want to hold them all afternoon, and Ford wondered why not. Still, they are new friends.
Posted by Steph at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2005
thinking of: a "My Animals" puzzle
Posted by Steph at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2005
SPT, Self Documentary Series #4
My little corners, here and there.
Nobody but me would put Rosemary the pony in her own stable for the night, nor would they place Bird the fish next to the lava lamp during the night to stay a degree warmer:
Nobody would go to sleep at night without putting the lily pad sculpture back together again and tuck it aside, either. And here is the Christian coloring page that Damon gave me and that I laughed at on Sunday after we argued about the importance of the church to religion:
I enjoy feeling a tad more like gentry when I see these putters beside the entrance, along with my homemade cedar walking stick. Offset by a huge walking shoe collection (of which mine dominate):
These little green clogs are a gift from mom on a trip to Amsterdam a few years ago. Damon keeps accidentally throwing them away and I somehow manage to rescue them every time, my sixth sense (or what I call my Unwanted Clog Sense) kicks in. I prefer these to remain nested by the front door, even though nobody can currently fit into them.
The last photo is the wild card; the tabletop is a good reflection of my spirit tonight: slightly cluttered but creatively content. I am building a wild boar head for Ford with papier mache. This is for his Snifferator costume WARNING!!!! CREEPY!!!! But he insisted and I think it's way cool anyway.
Posted by Steph at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2005
First Big Boy Shoes
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October 20, 2005
Argentina?
I need to recharge my sense of wonder. While I was watching a squirrel outside on a limb, I reflected on my dull reaction. I thought my appreciation would climb if I travelled to another continent on another hemisphere.
Posted by Steph at 11:37 PM | Comments (0)
crazy crayons
These are an exhibit of tedium but the children enjoy them. Chas left toothprints, do you see them?
Posted by Steph at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2005
Self portrait tuesday - self documentary series #3
Working in the office.
Multitasking, usually involving children. Here, with Chas:
Working as he is headed towards the power strip:
Pause,
A moment of peace while I work:
Distracted:
I need to clean the upstairs. Wait! what was I working on?
How important is it, really?
Posted by Steph at 04:42 PM | Comments (3)
October 17, 2005
Fearless
It's hard having conversations with other parents at the playground when I have to keep eyes on Chas. He is fearless and out of control. Ford and Chas are so different at the playground. Chas' proprioception keeps surprising me; he always seems to correct himself when he starts losing balance; just when I think I have to step in and save him, he saves himself. Mostly. And he has more self-confidence in his physical ability than Ford did at his age.
Posted by Steph at 04:58 PM | Comments (1)
Inquiring Minds Want to Know....
We were shuffling through a lazy night of low-IQ tv with the kids and landed on E! during an episode of The Girls Next Door. Because it was too mature for the children, we kept oggling for a while, long enough to pique Ford's interest. About ten minutes into the show, Ford ultimately broke down and asked us, in response to the selective digital pixellation,
"So, are we having satellite problems or something?"
Posted by Steph at 05:30 AM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2005
Crawfish are fun! And did you know? They're tasty, too!
Mom places Ford's lunch before him: several boiled shrimp, some fried rice, and a crimson red crawfish, and Ford looks at his plate with proud disbelief and surprise.
"Is this a crawfish?"
"Yep."
He sits there, peering into the crawfish's tiny boiled black eyes, examining it like some Edwardian curiosity.
"It's so cute!"
"Want to touch it, mommy?"
"Is this his thorax?"
"Yep, it's in there. I think his abdomen is in there, too. Well, part of it. Anyway, you eat the tail."
"Like a shrimp?"
"Yep, like a shrimp."
"Can I eat it?"
"Sure can. Here (I break open the tail, pull out meat, God this looks disgusting, and hand it to Ford)
"Mmm! I like it!", grinning. "Can I have some more crawfish?"
I look up at my mother with a faint look of "WTF?" and then we both laugh at how cute this really is.
She tells him, "Ford, I'm so impressed with your adventurous palate!"
"I know," he tells her into his plate quietly.
And while she and I eat and chat and wrestle Chas through the rest of lunch, Ford continued to eat crawfish. Periodically, however, he obliged the technicolor carcasses to duels sur le table, narrating as he went along.
He's becoming a very interesting narrator.
Like today, when we were reading the book I Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, there was a page in the book tenderly illustrating a boy standing on a quaint little hill overlooking a small town, with birds flying overhead and trees in the valley...the words go:
I love the sun
I love a house
I love a river
and a hill where I watch
and a song I heard
and a dream I made
I asked Ford, without reading this charming passage, to narrate this picture himself. Just to compare. Here's Ford's rendition:
There was this boy,
on a hill,
and somebody PUSHED him over the hill,
and he crashed onto the town
and shattered in a million pieces
and broke his eyeballs all over the place.
That's it. That's what happened. (grinning)
Posted by Steph at 05:02 PM | Comments (1)
SPT, Self Documentary Series #2
Conversation at lunch.
Self Portrait Tuesday, Self Documentary Series #2
Posted by Steph at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)
It's been a good, long day. I'm going to keep staring at these precious feet for a while longer. He will outgrow these shoes within a week, I'm afraid.
Posted by Steph at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2005
MY martini
Trust me, he wasn't thirsty; he's just discriminating.
Which reminds me: Today at lunch, when mom placed a plate of lentils in front of Ford, he shot me doe eyes from the table and fawned, "Aren't we having wine with this?" We laughed at what he might be asking for during snacktime at school a few hours later. Mint-infused sippy mojitos? Icy Kool-Aid cosmopolitans?
School. It has been a very good thing. We start the day with breakfast and either go somewhere for the morning or have fun at home when he's fresh. Then we lunch, read and rest until 3pm, when off we walk to the schoolhouse. When we arrive, he lurches out of the jogger onto the playground, dismissing the teachers and plunging into play. I chit chat with faculty, and leave to run errands with Chas. All the while, Chas is either asleep or restful, engaged and content; it's a lot of fun having the one-on-one time with him. Three hours pass, we return down to the school, and Ford pours bubbly bucketfuls of enthusiasm in my ears. I give him a juice box, we walk home, eat dinner, clean up and read Harry Potter. It really has been that perfect. The best of both worlds: having him home when I'm at my best, having a break when I'm more tired in the afternoon--he benefits from having playpals and square footage when he's his most physically atomic, and time with me when he's most quietly engaged. Way cool.
Posted by Steph at 05:46 AM | Comments (1)
October 09, 2005
Heels down, boys!
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October 08, 2005
Cold Front #2, this time for real
Mom and Dad arrived this evening with a truckful of potted plants from their home in Houston, and with the refrigerated rain they are all perky and ready for me to spend time with them, rearranging them in the garden while Chas chases balls into the street and Ford runs around the yard in the buff. But seriously, when I do get a moment, I'll enjoy putzing around the garden, rearranging them. To distract me even more, the Wildflower Center is having their Fall plant sale tomorrow morning.
I'm beginning to get more excited about the land again. This weekend we will scatter and stomp wildflower seeds around the grounds, tuck a few perennials here and there. Add a totem or two. It's time.
This just in--new phrases from Chas: "All done" (sounds more like "ah-duh" followed by a flinching refusal to eat another bite of food), and "Woof!" He is also less afraid of dogs, but at the same time Clingy with a capital WTF on me. Annoying, but with so many lovely chunks to hold, how can I really complain?
Posted by Steph at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2005
Revelation
It was eleven this morning, and we had eaten breakfast, cleaned up, brushed teeth, read a book, and the next sequence (even though out of sequence) was "wash face and get dressed" for Ford. He balked, meanwhile charming his way to watching I Robot,eventually turning the movie on outright, and I started losing it, irrationally complaining that I have no control over my kids. I was so ruffled over trying to get the kids out the door by noon, for chrissakes that I was starting to jerk my weight around and complain about not having enough control all the while. Damon walked into the room and pulled my horses to a screeching halt with his lucid analysis. He told me to rephrase "I have no control over the kids" (a self-centered, gun-in-the-foot approach) to "What does Ford need right now? What needs to happen?" (goal-oriented approach). It was an amazing moment of silence in my raging brain. All the birds swooped down to the tree branches, the monkeys stopped throwing papayas at me and the "to do" list tickertape died. It's one of the things I love most about Damon, his ability to help me regain control over my temper (which translates to forgetting about regaining control over the kids), because hostility and irrational moments are part of my makeup as much as moments of clarity and calm. So thank you, again. I needed that, so did Ford.
Posted by Steph at 05:22 AM | Comments (1)
October 05, 2005
SPT, Self Documentary Series #1
Ford is now in an afterschool program from 3-6pm. It was quiet today even with Chas whining in the background as I did mundane chores, but it was a deafening kind of quiet, and I felt a little out of balance as I putzed the hours away. I missed the din of his bubbly monologues and the nonstop questions, meanwhile wondering whether it's time I did something new to really make myself happy.
Posted by Steph at 10:02 AM | Comments (3)
On Saturday, a trip to the music store to get strings turned into a trip to get 6 more: Ford asked for his own guitar and we flat out bought him one. And do you know what? He's picked it up like a natural. Here he is playing Mozart's Minuet in G. Minus the Mozart. And the minuet part. But the G--he's got that,, and I can't believe how his fingers are already able to wrap themselves around the fretboard to play a chord. It's amazing.
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October 01, 2005
Fall, cont'd.
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September 30, 2005
Fall
Austin awoke and fell back to sleep again tonight under the clouds; it was invigorating. It was the first noticeable cold front of the season. Please do not notice that I was taking this picture while driving.
Ford has a new piece of jewelry, the hydroxide molecule ring. Actually, it's a small keyring with, oh, I don't know, some sort of ball attached to it. Something like that. And I wasn't driving when I took this picture, I was at a stoplight. Anyway, he removed it from a little chotchkie that Damon brought home, put it on his finger, and asked me what kind of molecule it looked like. Ford is into molecular models, atomic models, skeletal models. I can thank Bill Nye. Thank you, Bill Nye! You rock! Except when Ford is bouncing off the furniture at 4pm, when I am so very tired in the afternoon, proclaiming (no, shouting) that he is an electron. But it was very cute when he dissected his birthday balloons into protons and neutrons. Of course, the whole bunch of them was the nucleus. Thank you, Bill Nye!
The last of the Gayfeather is in bloom, but most has gone to seed and left to drape the new stars:... 
the grasses.
The Muscadines are ripe,
and the Beautyberries are shouting.
Posted by Steph at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2005
Chas is no longer satisfied with the way crayons and paints taste; now, he is interested in their use as tools. Fingerpaints are in order, although he tends to dislike using materials and tools in ways that are different from his older brother.
Yet, in so many ways, Chas is very different from Ford. Today I suffered multiple minor heart attacks as I caught Chas atop various perches, each time rescuing him from a fall: The back deck has a seat-railing around the perimeter, and he is able to climb atop the railing and prepare for launch off the other side (and down five feet to impale himself on juniper-cedar bramble). For example.
I am frustrated that we can't pile the kids into the Airstream and drive up East for the next few months. I had more serenity back then: the cabinets were impossible for a child to open, there were no "dropoffs," everything was so...ship shape. Eighty square feet of control. Minimal cleanup. Simple. Irresponsible. So much less baggage than just the two images below, in and of themselves:
The piece of land, our whole quarter acre of it--I'm so overwhelmed with that right now, I can only sit in my car to photograph it, let alone walk up to a rock on site and watch the sun set, or plant a few Cinderella pumpkin seeds in the middle of summer, or place a few good luck totems around here and there. Something about the land is haunting me and I can't put my finger on it. Am I just rebelling? Not enough shade? Too many fire ants? Burrs? Mosquitoes? Slippery kaliche on the walk down? Not enough privacy to enjoy a few minutes of meditation, what with the big peach McMansion next door? I'm disappointed that I'm just not clicking with the property, even though we've had it for a few months, now.
Posted by Steph at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2005
Chas enjoys nesting. He would remove this Plumeria if he could, that he might better fit into this pot. Other vessels are emptied and sat in: boxes of Matchbox cars, sit-atop dumptruck buckets, frisbees, booster seats, magazines, wrapping paper, board game boxes...
I am returning to painting and using Ford's art supplies when he isn't looking. Thinking of Hamilton Pool, where we immersed on Sunday when it was 107 degrees outside.
Posted by Steph at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
A picture of Ford and I at a private beach in Rhode Island, summer of 2002. We had fun arranging and eating large round rocks. Aside from the cheesy Hallmark symbolism (you know, time slipping through our fingers yeah yeah yeah), I like this picture because if the Mork reference. Naa noo Naa noo, I wore jeans with rainbow suspenders in third grade. No, really, I did.
Ford officially turned four tonight at 8:11pm. Which means that tonight is also the fourth anniversary of Star Trek Enterprise. I am somewhat embarrassed to say I was actually watching the show's premier during active labor. How luxurious! compared to the Holy Visceral UnMedicated Shriekfest of Chas' birth.
Posted by Steph at 01:43 PM | Comments (0)
Today is dry and baking hot outside. We have had five consecutive months of heat. While this may sound like nearly half a year, it feels like it has been a mere two months because there is no other way (correction: no cheaper way) to endure the heat than to deny it. See? Isn't heat FUN?!
update: according to the nightly news, the temperature outside today was 108 degrees Farenheit.
Posted by Steph at 05:18 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2005
Katrina-Rita Donations of the Handmade Variety
Every night the past three days, as I've read Reeve Lindbergh's book (beautifully illustrated by Jill McElmurry) entitled Our Nest, I've reflected on our health and good fortune to have each other and a home to return to each day, when we are tired and weary.
I don't know if this blog entry will reach many people, but if you read this and have three to five hours of free time this month, I have found a wonderful way to share some skill and love with the evacuees and their children, who have very little "nest" to speak of. It's a project called The Linus Connection and the mission is to "provide a handmade security blanket to every child who is in a crisis or at-risk situation in Central Texas." If we are able to meet the basic needs of the evacuees, I think this would be a loving addition to the effort to help mend lives and offer warmth.
Austin's News 8 featured this initiative a while back. To describe one benefit of the mission, founder Stephanie Sabatini offers:
"What we’re trying to do is provide security. This is something handmade that the kids know that people in the community are thinking about them, hoping for them and hoping that their lives get better perhaps than they have in the past."
I love this bug jar block quilt. A six year-old friend of ours received one of these himself, as a gift. It's adorable, just like this one:
Posted by Steph at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2005
Happy Blue-Green Robot Fish Birthday, Ford!
Today was Ford's blue+green+robot+fish+Fourth Birthday Party. All of the pre-party freaking out was worth the post-party glow, as you can see:
Oh, I was fit to be tied until the guests actually arrived. From there, it was, well cake. But even the cake-decorating stressed me out.
However, it was a success, measured in burps.
And blurs.
Posted by Steph at 10:09 PM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
These colors work very well with pink construction paper. It is my new sketching combination. My hands are beginning to age.
Posted by Steph at 05:21 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
Museum Day
Today was Museum Day in Austin, when all the museums are open to the public, free of charge. Most of them also hosted fun kid-centric activities, like making seed balls and collages at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. Because it was noon, and white hot outside, we decided to head on over for some masochistic martyrdom at the Wildfower Center, where we could either bake to death outside in the beautifully landscaped terrace or pressure cook till our eyes popped out in the Little House, aka Little Barely-Air-Conditioned Room Where the Children Hang. So we decided to share the best of both worlds, and I took Ford to the House while Damon and Chas kicked back in the brick oven.
Lois Ehlert is in town, and while she was signing her picture books that we left at home, Ford and I made Leaf Man-inspired collages:
While working on them, I paused to take a break and admire all the children at work on their collages. Ford had squirted huge silver dollar-sized dabs of Elmer's glue onto his paper and stuck, very gingerly atop it, thin strands of dried grasses. It was so cute. An eight year-old across the table scanned this and then looked at me, scrunching up her face, and asked "Why did he use such a big glob of glue?" Before answering, I smiled, immediately thinking of the way Ford and I laugh together at Chas' "mistakes" all of the time, and the way he in so many words, asks the same of Chas when he makes a "mess."
"Oh, Chas! What are you doing?" Ford will say, and laugh in a very infectious way.
Posted by Steph at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2005
Austin Nature Center
With all the company we've had the past week or so, it has been easy for me to forget what it's like being around Ford, when he is not competing for attention between one or more babies. His enthusiasm, when he is engaged, is really unbridled. Unbridled engagement. That sounds weird.
Today we rediscovered the Austin Nature Center. In May I took the boys there, but we didn't make it past the first tier of exploration; today, we stepped throught the back door and into the rest of the museum. It's such a gem! They have a collection of native animals in the form of a miniature zoo, so the kids can see a coyote or a ringtail or coati or raccoon walk feet in front of them. No annoying cotton candy vendors along the way. It's small, shaded, and in the middle of town. There were several trails adjacent to the animal enclosures that we earmarked for later. Today's focus was the outdoor dinosaur dig.
Ford asked a ton of questions about the Pleisosaur fossil model. "What bone is this, mommy?"
"It's a phalange, but look how many there are on his pointer finger!"
"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,"
I ask "How many are on your pointer finger?" I help him identify them:
"One, two, three.."
"Three! That's not quite as many as the Pleisosaur, huh?"
"Mommy, what's this bone?" Points at some kind of wrist bone.
"That looks like a wrist bone, maybe a metacarpal?"
"Where is my metacarpal?"
I take his hand and poke around towards his wrist, nearly in the same area. "Right in here are several metacarpals. But in your hand, the wrist bones that you feel are actually part of your arm bones!"
"What are your arm bones called?"
"The radius (I point to the bony prominence on the distal radial head) and the ulna (yada yada)."
He lays his hand down upon the "fossil" remains.
Chas kept crawling in and out of the Pleisosaur mouth. He does that a lot. I mean, he's not particular to Pleisosaur fossils, but if there is a cozy nook then he must rearrange the contents so that he can wedge his round bottom into it. He will systematically throw Hot Wheels out of the toybox until none remain in the small box, then squirrel around inside the box like a restless dog until he's comfortable. And then he'll sigh, sometimes clap. And then claps some more. And grunt, smiling. It's very cute.
Posted by Steph at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2005
surprise
Ford is an expressive, independent kid, and I've never tried to squash the juice out of him by making him "draw things" or label his art. Naturally, I would think, his artwork would be as it usually appears: more evocative than representational. He usually begins a piece by slowly dabbing and stroking the paper with paint, and then begins to get physical with the medium by testing the limits of the brush against brute strength(how hard can I jab the brush into the paper? how many times can I do this over and over again before something gives? this feels GOOD!) until finally, his piece resembles a meteor storm or a hurricane, or a dance, or a race. His work is never static.
I was in a funk after Jim and Alis left, feeling vaguely cathartic, venting, and extremely tired, when I began to sob. This consumed Ford, and he began to offer to buy me various things which he thought might make me happy again. I told him that I didn't really want him to buy me anything, but that I would appreciate a drawing instead. And continued to decompress, although I was charmed by his efforts.
About five minutes later he came upstairs and handed me this drawing. It is, according to him, a picture of me and I am smiling. Notice the long arm, of which my left is longer (I am left-handed) and the petite legs. The smile is uncontrived, very nice. This is his first fully representational drawing that he initiated on his own. And all for me, it is mine. Granted, I am not praising his newfound mastery of realism, but instead just amazed at how he has restrained this capability he already apparently has in order to be true to his art, to nurture his expressive style. I'm very proud of that.
Posted by Steph at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
I drive to Houston every three months for a haircut; I only trust one person with my hair. One of the best features of the current do is that it holds up when tossed about and messed up, because it is usually tossed about and messed up. Actually this is not unlike how I feel currently.
Posted by Steph at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2005
Catharsis
It rained. It rained from the minute we awoke, in heavy little pats, until late evening, in one long exhale, the sky clearly exhausted from crying so long. I don't think it's rained here in weeks, so the plants outside--the non-natives--are completely overjoyed and outstretched for more, bursting to produce as many flowers as possible before the next drought. It's impossible to traverse the driveway without stepping on tiny little snails, overzealous and anxious to breed. They are aimlessly sliding around like little old drunken men, groping their way through their drunken haze, leaving a trail of drool. One of the twin fawns is now an adolescent; I was startled to see her in the blue twilight, slowly stepping through the juniper-cedar outside the living room window. Her white spots travelling through the branch silhouettes made a striking image, inspiration for a quilt.
Alis and her family are visiting. Best friends are wonderful gifts. They arrive, and the music doesn't skip a beat. Jim falls asleep peacefully reading on the sofa while Alis and Ford bake apple pie. The house smells more like home than it ever has, and I feel content and blessed.
Posted by Steph at 04:48 AM | Comments (0)
September 09, 2005
zen and the art of anger management
Parenting is hard work, but proof of God. Otherwise I would have barehandedly killed Ford today. Stronger forces exist outside the realm of my patience. But oh, the demons within. I mean, how else am I supposed to react to our new residents Jeckyll and Hyde, where five minutes after retorting "That is not a good idea. bitch." he murmured, "I want you to sleep with me, mommy."
Yes, the "Terrible Twos" was a cakewalk. This, people, THIS is the Fucking Fours.
Posted by Steph at 06:42 AM | Comments (0)
September 08, 2005
Midnight sound byte
I am sitting in my bed, listening to jazz pipe in from the next room as it ripples through the white noise of my children, in bed beside me, breathing. I think I am damned lucky to enjoy this moment, I want to cling to it knowing that I'm still here enjoying this as a refugee from Katrina sits up in bed, acheing through a wave of despair in having lost a home, a loved one, possibly a child.
Posted by Steph at 06:17 AM | Comments (0)
September 06, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
I've been blogged down for a couple of weeks, but tomorrow is a new day.
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September 04, 2005
I love my dad
But perhaps not as much as Chas. The two of them, they'se like peas n corn.
Posted by Steph at 06:26 AM | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
pass the kleenex self portrait tuesday
Chas has evolved into this dense chunk of loveliness that stops my heart mid-beat; I have to remember to breathe. I don't know if it's the hobbit-baby hair, long strawberry blonde pouring over his ears and face, or if it's his huge top teeth set a mile apart from each other and opposing two tiny bottom teeth, or his cosmic blue eyes. Or if it's the Proof of God that I see as I watch him sleep, with leaden eyelids. But it's arresting, his presence. Of course, at other times I'm too distracted to sit in awe.
Posted by Steph at 06:15 PM | Comments (3)
August 14, 2005
...
Chas is now walking across rooms. On Friday he began practicing in earnest, stopping only to eat and sleep, but today he feels he has mastered his first footed gait and is scrumptiously sleeping now in his bed, smiling and dreaming and proud of himself. His reddish hair is rumpled around his head, tired and wasted from a day of hustle-bustle, not just from walking but from climbing up and down from Ford's booster seat in the middle of the living room floor. Chas looked like a finicky dog, spinning and adjusting, around and around for fifteen minutes atop the miniature seat, before sitting, sighing and smiling in satisfaction. And then clapping! And then he proceeded to traverse the house once more, clap, and repeat. Again and again. And again. Again. Again. again.
Posted by Steph at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2005
...
Chas would very much like to walk, minus the falling down part. In the kitchen we were captive audience this afternoon. He would get up, look at us as if to say he'd just been given a $1000 gift certificate to Design Public, step step step witholding breath, then plop halfway surprised before looking up at both of us in pride, clapping his hands loudly and vigorously, grinning and soliciting our applause. At times like this I think he is entirely happy-go-lucky, just riding this whole walk-tease phase out; other times I perceive him as fiercely opinionated, like when I try to rescue my delicate cell fone out of his grasp and am met with the ringwraith scream, eardrums shattered and eyelids peeled back in strain. He's a soft, snuggly bundle of conflicted joviality and frustration.
Posted by Steph at 06:36 PM | Comments (1)
August 11, 2005
...
Ford and I visited the Montessori school at the end of our block yesterday morning. It was poised, pretty, just bubbling with children. They practice strict Montessori method, and I was impressed with the industriousness and self-reliance of a 4 year-old girl as she swept collage remnants with a child-sized broom into a child-sized dustpan. The place glowed with purpose and warmth and Ford (and Chas, for his part) seemed to enjoy it very much. In fact, he didn't want to leave. He was attracted to station after station, wooden baskets and utensils, glowing freshwater fish tank and sunny windows facing the children's vegetable garden.
But there are no openings until June 2006.
This might be our opportunity in disguise to travel this year and shuffle the boys out of the country for a little exploring, while we still can.
I feel as if I'm waiting for Them to come take Chas away. With conflicting travel plans coming from more than three loved ones, I find myself pushing Chas' birthday celebration nearly two weeks following his actual birthdate. Is it so much to accommodate everyone's schedules that they might be able to join us in celebration, or am I reluctant for Time to take away Chas' First Year away from me, with all of the poignant milestones? He's not going to be a baby once he passes his First Birthday, but a toddler. It's not fair that decades of dying are preceded by the short, enthusiastic pant of life in that first year here.
Posted by Steph at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
August 09, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
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August 04, 2005
...
Not only have I re-acclimated myself to the heat, but I have re-acclimated myself to applying gobs and gobs of sunscreen every half-hour.
Posted by Steph at 11:00 PM | Comments (0)
August 03, 2005
Simplification
Since I have difficulties juggling two kids, multiple personalities and a clunky EOS Rebel, I begged Damon to trade me his teensy Elph for my monstrous camera baggage. "Do it for the kids?" I urged, to his chagrin, but he caved and I love him for it.
Here is it's new sleeve, lovingly (albeit hastily--c'mon, this is just after Girl's Nite Out) stitched by hand from leftover sake monkey's tie fabric when I should be sleeping. But it's protected now:
Posted by Steph at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)
Self Portrait Tuesday
Negotiating a deal with upper management.
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August 02, 2005
The machine is still humming...
This afternoon we were all so amped on imaginative play that we decided to set up a sushi bar in the boy's room. With remnants I've been sewing salmon sashimi, tuna sushi and seaweed salad. It was so entirely diverting that we might go thrifting tomorrow for more kitchen accessories and vintage fabrics. Ford also mentioned wanting his own tea set and glasses for bubble tea and a sushi cutting board with a picture of a glass of bubble tea on top. And he wants bubble tea. I think the green tea variety.
Driving to playdate this morning with the restless boys in the back and Sake Monkey buckled into the seat between them, I realized the satisfying feeling of control that a stuffed doll offers. No matter what scenario you place them in, they remain quiet, trusting and happy.
For the past hour I've been drawing silhouettes for stuffed dolls. I began with a human-type but it quickly morphed into a starfish-person. Go figure. Add starfish-person notions to the thrift store list for tomorrow.
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While the machine is still warm:
Aren't these just Dandi?
I believe I've been inspired to make some aprons for Christmas and for another group:
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August 01, 2005
Sake Monkey
My sewing machine needed a jumpstart so I jumped onto the July Month of Softies bandwagon in the nick of time and created a sock monkey (this month's theme) out of a pair of Damon's old boot socks. Guess what? He doesn't smell funny. Chas thinks he's charming and likes to snuggle with the toy already. When he is older he might think this is amusing. Why would his mother make a toy out of used men's socks? Really, there isn't enough Oxy-Clean and bleach in the world...but look how cute this is:
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I can't believe it, and you probably can't either: we have never hired a sitter to watch the kids. I realized this when we were the only guests in the sushi bar this evening that had about a quart of white rice scattered on the floor beneath our table and from which a preschooler's voice echoed across the restaurant: "DABBY DOTS OF JELLY! (giggle giggle) SALTY ON MY TONGUE AND YUMMY IN MY BELLY! (ikura) LOOK Daddy! There's rice on the wall!" But this is us, and these kids are having fun eating fancy with us, being served with luscious glazed pottery and playing with the food-art. And the money we saved for not hiring a sitter pays nicely for two cold bottles of sake. DOWN THE HATCH, HONEY!
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The Austin Children's Museum hosted "Bubble Day" this afternoon, for which we have been planning to attend all week. There was a special shirt Ford selected to wear, and a priority given to this event over all other appointments, even eating. We left Houston in the rain last night in order not to miss it. And Ford has been talking about it all week, All Week. The entire visit, Ford whisked among the exhibits like an ER surgeon urgently attending triage, objective and meticulous, testing each demonstration and lingering where he saw fit before moving onto the next interest, oblivious to everyone else but with growing receptivity towards taking turns, nonetheless. Chas, sometimes clapping with pride, figured out all of the baby room puzzle exhibits, but he petered out quickly along with my aching feet.
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As we drove back tonight from Freeport (Texas), through a cloud of small insects that stretched sixty miles in the moonlight and caked my windshield, I realized that this may be the last time I ever willingly drive down past Chlorine Boulevard and the oil refineries on my way to this particular section of the Texas coastline. But we had to do it today, because Chas has never seen the saltwater and I was anxious to beachcomb and show Ford a few ctenophores and nudibranchs among the mile-high piles of sargassum. And I was sure that the longshore current would have brought, along with hurricane Emily, plenty of flotsam to collect at the neck of the jetty. When we opened our doors on arrival, a warm effluvia (my God how pretentious of me) of rotting seaweed and crustaceans rolled through the car. Nickel-sized mosquitoes swarmed and fire ants began to gnaw on Ford's feet as he stepped down onto the pavement. The sand, if you can call it sand, was a fine, sooty brown, not quite anything like sand but more like the fine sediment atop the ground after a flood. Particles of rock left to churn and churn and churn until there is hardly a surface to grind any further, sand grains the size of atoms remain. It is an irritating, virtually impossible sand to rinse off the body, and it carries with it the unmistakable stench of Freeport if you forget to clean you car out afterwards (just so you know, honey, I did). And the piles of sargassum, the miles and miles of mile-high piles of sargassum, were unprecedented. Even the flies gave up on the bacchus; I think they must have all lost their minds because I didn't see a single fly on the beach. There were only the rounded remains of shell bits, and virtually no sea life besides the rotting seaweed and a few entangled shrimp. Of course, it is difficult to comb the beach for wildlife when your baby is busy crawling into the Gulf like Kate Chopin's Edna (in the final chapter of The Awakening). He was in love and wonder, on a blind mission like a sea turtle hatchling, flapping his huge broad hands onto the slick sand and beeline-ing it to the Eastern Australian Current or EAC as Crush calls it because that's what sea turtles do, according the Disney/Pixar, and there was NO STOPPING HIM until the waves began to roll over his head and, unlike the baby sea turtles, he stood up, squinting and licking, unsure what to do next. And just like those cute little sea turtles you see on Nova, I got Chas' first sea legs on film, too. I can post it when we return to Austin this weekend.
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Two small steps for Chas-kind. Happy he was to repeat this mission thrice over the weekend, though elusive to cameras. There is still the flutter of applause in my heart, the embers of an ovation. He took it all in stride, forgetting the third triumph as he grinned and drew my chin into a rather painful four-toothed bite.
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Once again, I was squandering away a perfectly good hour of sleep when I stumbled, falling completely in love with the designer Josef Frank, by the kitschy beauty of his supernatural textiles on display at Stockholm's Svenskt Tenn. I was ready to pack a few days worth of clothes with my toothbrush and board the next flight to Stockholm before realizing that:
Posted by Steph at 11:49 AM
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Even if the the plan backfired and these stickers became a commodity, I still think the You Are Beautiful campaign is a lovely thing.
Posted by Steph at 12:46 AM
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Posted by Steph at 11:39 AM
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OOh, OOOh, this is important: Chas stood and boogied for the first time today! He stood in the middle of the living room and bounced up and down to music! Grinning with wide, four-tooth abandon. Any other parent knows that this is truly a fun moment in time. It's the last time they'll ever do that move without frowning and shoving out their lower jaw as if to say, "I'm so fly, look, I can dance (even though I feel like a total dork out here alone on the dance floor)."
Posted by Steph at 06:11 AM
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They say some of the best ideas come to you in the shower. You can also belt out great music in the shower. Especially when the kids are in there with you, singing to the tune of "Three Jolly Fishermen:" We all went to the Ap-ple store, We bought stuff at the AP-ple store, We like things at the Ap-ple store We have stuff from the Ap-ple store By the afternoon, most of the neighborhood kids, who had overheard our singing at the pool, we all making up verses of their own.
Posted by Steph at 04:18 AM
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Posted by Steph at 12:49 AM
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It's like setting up a new fort. This platform is taking some getting used to but in time it's going to feel like a fun place to hang up ideas and document the time. Here is a photo of Ford and Chas atop the igloo-bed, atop the quilt my mother made during the 1972 summer olympics, while I was probably napping in a white wooden crib within a sunny yellow nursery, in a small fourplex on Vassar Lane, in the sweltering Houston heat. Blogging time will likely be restricted to midnight hours, as every moment during the day is nowadays occupied with kidstuff. I can expect to grow red eyeballs and get more irritable with time, unless I start working in the quilting and crafting in the afternoons when Chas naps and Ford gets stir crazy--after all, the heat is stifling outside during the midday hours. In fact, I'm off to start his rock collection. I think he'll enjoy learning about what makes the Hill Country so hilly and rugged.
Posted by Steph at 09:18 PM
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blah blah blallh
Posted by Steph at 06:13 AM
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I have decided to get certified in order to teach art again at UT. I keep getting these urgent jabs into my conscience that Mrs. Ory is rolling in her grave, hoping I do so, that I may continue what I started ten years ago in Houston, during my first two summers off from college.
Posted by Steph at 05:41 PM
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I decided to start anew -- to strip away what I had been taught, to accept as true my own thinking. This was one of the best times of my life. There was no one around to look at what I was doing, no one interested, no one to say anything about it one way or another. I was alone and singularly free, working into my own unknown -- no one to satisfy but myself. I began with charcoal and paper and decided not to use any color until it was impossible to do what I wanted to do in black and white. I believe it was June before I needed blue. -Georgia O'Keeffe
Posted by Steph at 11:54 AM
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Want to see all of July's pedal primates?
July 31, 2005
For goodness sake, pass the sake
July 26, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
July 24, 2005
Bubbly
July 22, 2005
Freeport, very NOT Maine
July 21, 2005
Waste
Inexpensive is good. Cheap is better. But at what cost? Photojournalist Michael Wolf has documented the flipside to the euphoria of cheap and returned my thoughts towards weekend garage sale shopping and the recycling of consumer goods.
July 19, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
July 18, 2005
One Small Step for Man...
July 17, 2005
SuperNaturalism
a. not only was he, to my disappointment, already dead, but that
b. my youngest child was sitting up in the bed, screaming for me to pick him up.
His designs seduced me as Feodor Rojankovsky's illustrations first did, when I was a very young girl, in the pages of John Langstaff's Frog Went A Courtin' and Over in the Meadow.Better than Andre the Giant
.July 13, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
Evidence that we, too, play dress-up; although, as I painted Ford's fingernails today (as per his explicit request, in the color orange no less) I realized he quite often cross-dresses. I think that's way cool. I'm down with the whole cross-dressing thing. I hope he never gets fussy about trying to look conventional. This orange scarf here? It makes a great,long head of hair when Ford pretends he's Violet (Incredible). He'll chase around the house, in pursuit of...Dash? muttering and repeating sharply, "I said shut UP!"Usher, look out
July 03, 2005
We all went to the Ap-ple store,
APP-le APP-le store store store,
APP-le APP-le store store store,
We all went to the Ap-ple store.
We bought stuff at the AP-ple store,
i-Pod i-Pod Pod Pod Pod
i-Pod i-Pod Pod Pod Pod
We bought stuff at the Ap-ple store.
We like things at the Ap-ple store
POW-er POW-er book book book
POW-er POW-er book book book
We like things at the Ap-ple store
We have stuff from the Ap-ple store
i-Book i-Pod powerbook
Canon camera and games
We have stuff from the Ap-ple store.
June 29, 2005
Self Portrait Tuesday
The June heat in Austin makes everyone cranky midday. June 24, 2005
Getting Started
blah
June 23, 2005
June 14, 2005