when I'm a wee bit stressed

This is what I do when I'm stressed: I become obsessed with some project—embroidery, sewing, photography, and I throw myself at it so that the hours pass without me noticing. Hours where what color or what fabric become the most important thing. Like this morning when Ike asked to paint the sticks he collected at the park yesterday, and I sat for an hour after he was finished dabbing paint on little sticks while he ran around the house with paint on his face and hands, smearing things.

Tonight we have an open house for the Wooden Button. Not the sort of thing I love doing: events, talking to strangers in a group. I don't even go to the playground. But sometimes things must be faced. And I've learned to trust that in general things will develop on their own, as they are wont to, without any pushing and shoving. We do our best, and that is plenty. Hopefully tonight we will find enough committed, laid-back parents to send their children to join Genevieve and Luna in their class at the Wooden Button next year.  But if not, that is OK too. Things generally work out.

being human isn't a one-size-fits-all endeavor, even when you're 5

Sometimes I look at my son as he sits preoccupied with his thoughts, completely oblivious to the fact that I've asked him what he'd like to drink three times, and I see myself. Sometimes I'm a little jealous: childhood provides far more time for getting lost in thought than being the mother of two small children does. I love going there—curled up in my chair by the window, with a cup of coffee, the weather and trees for company, maybe some knitting or embroidery sitting near. For hours and hours.

Frankly, I'm a little worried about my son going off to school next year. Six hours in school a day, with 25+ other five-year-olds sounds exhausting. I don't imagine there will be a lot of down time for people like my son—who works and learns better alone. With time to think up the good questions, and with enough quiet to know why we want to know those specific answers and what we plan to do with them. I've subbed for my son's preschool class and I've watched him. He loves building "nests" outside or digging in the dirt with one or two friends. But when the rest of the kids come over to join, he slinks away. Or gets really angry with them for invading his space. When a group of kids invite him to play Duck Duck Goose, or sled down the snowy slope, he yells, "No!" and continues digging. He loves his friends, he just prefers to love them in groups of one or two. Preferably a group of one.

I'm not worried about my son's nature, any more than I'm worried about myself. Of course he'll have to come to grips with his own peculiar way of being. But there are so many benefits of this temperament we share—I plan to give him lots of reasons to be proud of it—I think he'll do just fine. But what I don't want is for the love of learning I see in him now to be eclipsed by the demands of fitting-in and socialization that school demands. There are schools he could attend—if money were no object—where they incorporate diverse learning styles into the rhythm of class. I just have doubts that our local NYC public schools are going to be able to handle the matter with largess.

Elementary school: I didn't completely hate it, but I don't remember learning much. What I remember is the big ugly rooms with dusty shelves and a moldy smell. I remember the chaos of all the students, the pressure to be friends with the cool girls, to wear the right kinds of jeans, to not act completely awkward during recess even though I hated playing kick ball and wall ball and hand ball and all manner of other sports. I dreaded the big flat black-top playground. I felt antipathy toward the burnt-orange tiles that covered the bottom half of the hallways between classes, the food in the cafeteria all seemed to be some version of tater tots. I didn't like tater tots. I was suspicious of the electric blue plastic on which we were served our food. I didn't like elementary colors in general, and it seemed if you were a kid everything was done in elementary colors. Plastic elementary colors. I didn't like standing in lines. I feared the bathrooms without windows—I was particularly anxious that someone might turn out the light while I was using the toilet and I'd be stuck in that pitch-black stall all by myself. I stopped going to the bathroom altogether at school. I hated gym class. I dreaded the fact the every seating arrangement involved me sitting next to one of the two worst-behaved boys in class. Everything at my school seemed to be uncomfortable, ugly, one-size-fits-all. There was nothing warm and soft and reassuring, no inspiring art or cozy corners. There were no cool interesting maps on the walls, just huge block-colored letters covered over with posters or math charts. No one ever really seemed to even notice what was on the walls, or made any reference to them. I remember wondering what I had in common with my classmates, and the environment itself seemed foreign to me. I didn't feel like the one-size-fits-all was working too well for me, but I was quiet and well-behaved and didn't want any attention. I just noticed all these things, cataloging all the ways in which the school repulsed me. I wanted to go home and read a book. Or play outside in the grass, someplace with trees and vegetation. I wanted a little beauty, please. A little humanity.

So here I am with my son. Wondering if six hours a day next year of this sort of thing will work for him, will work for me.

oops! photo friday: orange

 
So, well, I think I'd better put Photo Friday on hiatus for awhile. I totally forgot about it today and only now, midday, did it occur to me it was Friday. Ike is sick, and I'm off to the doctor with him in less than an hour. And Genevieve is also sick, I was with her at the doctor yesterday. Charles, too, has come down with something. I am the holdout.

Besides all the sickness, there have been other dramas to try my patience and wisdom. Not the kinds of things to blog about now. But there are also some lovely things to share—the heart necklaces Ike and I made for his classmates on Valentines, the coffee & muffin ritual Genevieve and I share at Buunni Cafe, Genevieve's new haircut (so cute with a bow), and Anely. Anely—our nanny of five months—is superb. I've had such problems with nannies in the past. Anely is truly a delight to have in my home.

So I will reopen Photo Friday in the summer, when I hopefully have enough time to pay it proper attention.

photo friday : blurry

We woke to large snowflakes lazily eddying past our widows, the river hidden in white. By now—or at 10:00 am when I've had time to sit and compose this post—the flakes are smaller and fall straight and quickly, like New Yorkers rushing off to work.

I have been busy, the reason this post is up so late today. Doctor appointments, teacher meetings, school tours, applications, worrying. Worrying is the most time consuming thing, just thinking through all the choices and possibilities takes far too much time. I want three choices, not twelve. I want one thing, not the many many things all thrown at me at once. Including the army of "no!"s that my son has found in his chest lately, making his feet too heavy to walk down the hall to wash his hands or take off his coat or put on his shoes or eat his dinner or say "please" or just not cry every time he wants what he cannot find.

I don't have enough time to write; there are things to do. So I post these few blurry photos... the first two were accidents, the last the result of me shooting one shot after another at the Museum of Natural History while the crowds walked through the Hall of Biodiversity. 

photo friday: sepia

What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.

—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 

photo friday: license—to post as you wish

It has been bitterly cold here. Walking the children to their respective schools I've noticed how quickly the dog pee freezes in little puddles all along the sidewalk, an odd advantage of such weather when you have small children in a dense urban neighborhood teeming with dogs. Our lives have been mostly uneventful lately. We've had some illness (but luckily not the dreaded flu), a handful of tantrums, an unending supply of daily dramas arising from the running of our little school, the introduction of some new words (Lola and Ike built a "sex-slide" yesterday, and today one of Ike's made-up songs starred a "six-E laid-E"). Mostly I've been working, or trying to work, and cooking dinner, or at least attempting to. Charles discovered itunes and has stayed up late downloading classical albums and operas.

In the midst of this—the cold, the paid and unpaid work, the endless effort of raising two children—I found myself daydreaming about composting. A strange thing to daydream about, I concede. I recall as a child watching my father composting in our backyard, the steam rising from the black beds of soon-to-be-soil; he could stay out there for hours with the wheelbarrow and spade, processing his compost from one "station" to another. I remember walking back from high school, nearing home, and knowing absolutely that my Dad was out back, turning the decomposing matter. You could smell it a block away. We burned everything that could be burned in the wood stoves; took the plastic, metal and glass to the dump oursleves; and composted everything else.

And now here I am in Manhattan, daydreaming of taking the leftovers of our meals and making them into soil. With maybe a few chickens pecking around. And what's this, tears welling in my eyes? Oy Vey!

photo friday: simplicity

As I prowled around for simplicity photos (since the paltry few I took this week were anything but inspired), I found myself drawn again and again to summer photos. Maybe summer seems simple to me this time of year because going outside with two children in warm weather does not involve twenty minutes of bundling. Or maybe I was drawn to these photos because they were all taken on vacation, on uncomplicated days where what to eat was the most pressing concern.

The first photo was taken after a walk on the Jersey shore with my niece and nephew. We build sand castles and kicked around a ball. We walked back to the hotel and washed off the sand in the outdoor shower, then my husband and nephew dove into the deserted pool. The sun had gone down but the air was still warm, and we were the only ones using the pool in the darkening evening.

The second photo was taken at Kainalu Elementary School in Kailua, Hawaii, where my husband attended school as a child. He says he always went to school barefoot.

The last was taken in the carport at Edward Gorey's house on Cape Cod. Jenny and I visited the house this summer. It wasn't a house of simplicity—Gorey collected many things: cats, rocks, Coptic crosses, cheese graters, fur coats. But after the tour Jenny and I went outside and poked around. It was quieter without our tour guide's rehearsed anecdotes, and the old house and grounds were full of delights. There was a simple ease in each others presence—on the same continent, in the same time zone, without children or husbands or a bad cell phone connection.

Today is also my birthday.