Weird Bird in Love

Tonight during prayers, Zag reminded me to pray for his stuffed seal, Silkie. (Silkie is a recent addition to the family; he was purchased at a convenient Hallmark store in Maine, near my godparents’ beach house, after we discovered that we had somehow come up there for a five-day stay without any of Zag’s precious animals.) I prayed for Silkie, as requested, thanking God for Silkie being such a good friend to Zag. After we finished the prayer, Zag grinned at me and said, “I will dream about God coming down through the ceiling to see who Silkie is!” Read the rest of this entry »

Zag has big questions about language tonight. On the drive home from a visit to his Aunt K (a surprise treat – we didn’t know we’d overlap with her on our respective trips to the Twin Cities!), he wanted to know about the difference between the letters of a word, and the word. I can’t remember how he originally phrased the question; it took quite a bit of cross-examination to get at what he wanted to know. Then just now, between bedtime songs, he asked, “What’s the difference between the picture of a thing and the word of a thing?” I told him it was an excellent question and we would discuss it in the morning.

We’re working our way through Charlotte’s Web as our current bedtime reading. It’s such a gripping story for him. He’s been calling me Charlotte, and insisting that I call him Wilbur, for days now. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re enjoying a beautiful Saturday here in the green Northeast. This morning we went out for our first strawberry-picking of the season. The field was a little picked over – lots of people had the same idea – but we managed to fill a flat with some lovely berries, and we’ll definitely go again. I spent a happy hour after lunch chopping up strawberries and rhubarb (the latter mostly donated by a friend) to freeze. It’s so satisfying to put away the fruits of the season, fresh and local and cheap, to enjoy later in the year. Someday we’ll have a chest freezer… for now we’ll fill our little freezer with what we can fit. 

Last night we had lots of greens and radishes from our own garden as part of our dinner. I love getting to the time of year when you don’t have to do much to the food, because it tastes so good just as it is… 

We also got wonderful treats in the mail today: boxes from my parents, presents from their recent trip to the Netherlands. They sent me beautiful European maternity clothes. Here’s a little fashion show – mostly for my mama’s benefit. I love them! Especially the funky patterned skirt/belly cover things, and the stunning black dress. 

Zag has come up with a new name for the baby. He asked us the other day, “What name should we give our baby?”, and then volunteered that he thought its middle name should be Bean. That works, for now. He’s full of ideas. This morning he was pretending to be a helicopter pilot who had been injured in a crash, and he declared that he didn’t want toast for breakfast because the jam would sting his wounds. 

I’m in the process of uploading lots of photos from the past couple of months to our Smugmug site. Check it out. Email me if you’d like to go there & don’t remember the URL.

Zag in the bath: “Why is it called a penis? I know the ‘pee’ is because you pee with it, but what about the other part?” 

He’s in some funky emotional phase right now, since maybe a week ago or a bit longer. Whenever one of us speaks to him at all sharply (e.g., “Zag, can you please lie still so I can put on your diaper?!?”), he flings out his arms to reach for a big hug and says, “I’m very, very sorry for what I did!” And hugs and tells us he’s sorry until he feels sufficiently reassured that we’re friends again. If we speak really sharply, he bursts into tears, too. Nothing like having your four-year-old clinging to you, weeping and saying, “I’m very, very sorry for what I did!” to make you feel like a real champion parent.

Thing is, we’re really not suddenly being meaner… and he hasn’t become more compliant, just more remorseful…. so the level of parental sharp words has stayed pretty constant. We’re just getting a really different reaction than we ever have before. I’m actually starting to try to hold back, to avoid his eruptions of remorse, which – if we’re trying to accomplish something, like, say, bedtime – only slow things down even more. He’s clingier than usual, too. This morning he spent much of his church time just in his daddy’s arms, head on his shoulder. And at bedtime tonight he convinced me to get in bed next to him (I usually sit on a chair right beside the bed), and then insisted I wrap my arms around him. 

All this lovey-ness is sweet, but also a little exhausting. No idea what’s going on in that little noggin. Children are rum little beasts…

Among the projects I brought to the beach with me: revising our church’s bulletin, and starting to outline the order of service for a hypothetical Sunday evening service.

I know. Good times, right? The thing is, from the perspective of a busy week in my office, both of those projects sounded like a lot of fun. Like the kind of things I’d like to think about, given a little free time.

And it’s true: I will enjoy tackling both of those projects. But I will enjoy tackling them when I’m not on vacation. Now midway into this short week off, I look at that list and think I was nuts. Things will slow down enough this summer that these projects can get a solid day or two apiece, which is plenty. And I’ll enjoy those days. Why would I gum up my vacation with work, even enjoyable work? Why would I do the enjoyable work on vacation, instead of giving myself some fun stuff to do during quiet summer weeks in the office? 

This is why I need need need to take multiple days off in a row, and get the heck out of town. Because I love my job and I get so close to it and tangled up with it that I don’t even know what vacation means. Vacation means I’m so busy with my son that I’m not even getting around to playing with all the art supplies I brought. And that’s as it should be. The bulletin can bloody well wait.

Can you believe this is for real? I had to go verify it on the NYTimes website. I know I won’t always be pleased with everything the man does, but damn, I’m pleased with him today. 

We’re at the beach. My godparents own a place in a quiet resort town in southern Maine. At least, it’s quiet right now; schools aren’t out yet so the big summer rush hasn’t hit. It’s lovely – we usually see maybe a dozen other people on any given beach excursion. It’s good to be away from my job (though I have a little work with me, and Tilt has a lot…), and it’s great to be in this beautiful place and to have some time with my family. I don’t think we’ve ever spent more than 24 or 36 hours here at a stretch before. Now we have time to enjoy it and get to know the beach a little. 

Zag loves it. My memory of previous trips to the beach with him is that he needed a certain amount of coaxing and showing-how. Now, at four, he just gets it. He runs around like an excited puppy; he plays wave tag; he digs; he excavates channels with his toes; he climbs rocks; he explores tidepools; he finds shells and driftwood; he wears himself out and sleeps like a log. It’s great fun to see him so energized and happy.

And having time to play with my son is doing me some good, too. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I think I might be relaxing a little.

I’ve been having my Sunday school classes make Pentecost props, which we’ll use in the procession and sermon on Sunday. The littlest ones made “water wands” (dowels with streamers of blue ribbon), the 1st and 2nd graders made fire crowns and fire-waving things, the 3rd grade and 4th-5th grade classes made pinwheels (wind/breath), and the 6th-8th graders made giant dove puppets. It’s been fun – I’m looking forward to Sunday!

The pinwheels were a tough project. I spent a lot of time trying to develop a way to make pinwheels that was as simple as possible, yet resulted in pinwheels that will actually spin. Many of the little-kid pinwheel projects online seem weak on the functionality issue. Heather Bailey’s gorgeous pattern gave me inspiration, though I simplified a great deal. I finally ended up with a pattern that maximized spinnability and easiness, as best I could, but I knew it was still kind of challenging. Two weeks ago, I set up my 3rd and 4th/5th grade classrooms with the necessary equipment, showed the teachers how to use the grommet setters (… so the pinwheel can spin freely on its stem), and left them to it. Checking in later on Sunday, I saw that pinwheels had been produced, but I didn’t examine them closely. Read the rest of this entry »

Today is Zag’s final day of being 3 years old. This morning he woke up and got dressed by himself. He came in to snuggle with us for a little while, then went downstairs to work on an art project I set up for him yesterday (decorating small paper bags for party favors). He came up briefly to do the next step of his current Lego project, then went back down to continue work on the bags. When I came down, he was in the middle of making a picture of a fingerprint person with a stamp set his grandparents sent him – fingerprint, stamped hands, stamped feet, stamped face. He said, “I did this one all by myself!” I watched him work for a while. When he finished the bags, he decided he wanted to write the word “mulberry” before having his breakfast, a raspberry croissant I picked up at the good bakery in town yesterday. He still needs help figuring out words, but he’s getting better and better at sounding out letters himself. After he wrote his word, I got him his croissant and a big cup of milk. I came and sat down with him with my coffee and a poppyseed pastry. He asked what it was, and I offered him a bite. He said, “No thank you, I have my own.” 

It really happens. They grow up.

This will be a boring post for most readers. Sorry. But I’m cranky at the publishers of CRAFT magazine, and I feel like saying so in a quasi-public place. My sweet Tilt got me a subscription to CRAFT, a hip little art-and-crafting quarterly, for Christmas last year. I got a first issue early on, and then a second, and they were fun. 

Then in early February, I got an email saying CRAFT would no longer be published as a separate print magazine. Some of the content would be included in its partner publication MAKE (a much more techie and, well, boy version of the same kind of mag), and my subscription would be filled out with issues of MAKE. I thought, OK, fair enough. A little disappointing, but times are tough, they gotta do what they gotta do.

Then I got my first issue of MAKE. Problem one: I didn’t see any CRAFT-esque content in it. It’s a fine magazine and I enjoyed looking through it, but it’s not the kind of crafting I do. Problem two, and here’s where I get really cranky: on, like, the third page, there was a big ad encouraging the reader to subscribe to CRAFT. Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Lissa was ordained to the priesthood Friday evening – hooray, Lissa! Praise God! – and since her church was only 3.5 hours away and she did me the honor of coming up for my ordination in February, we drove down for the occasion. My cousin C and her family live nearby, and my grandpa lives in between, so we scheduled some visits and made a mini-road trip of it. Read the rest of this entry »