~quinn’s fortieth month~ rebirth

~written november 2018~

four weeks of farmer’s market, in a nutshell:

1. drizzly networking market;
2. brought in enough cash to pay for a bike trailer;
3. $99 and sunshine;
4. fantastic and packed with friends.

the day we got our bike trailer, there was still enough light for quinn and i to hook it up and take a ride to our community garden. all the way there, he was singing little songs to himself and telling stories about us on our bike. walking to the garden took an hour; on the bike it was 10 minutes. i was happy to usher in a new era of saving gas on every errand!

…such as trips to the “live-berry”. after we would pick out books, he liked to play the winnie the pooh math game and loved to put the frosting and sprinkles on the cupcakes and put the bugs in the boxes. it seemed insane to me how fast a 3-year-old could learn to command a mouse! one book quinn was studying around this time frame showed him how to draw pooh bear, and this is the amazing result of that work:

the recollections from this month that don’t read like a report on our saturdays at the  farmer’s market, read instead like a menu of the food i prepared from our first csa boxes, our garden, and the wild.

strawberries from “our gathering farm”

last night’s pasta had zucchini and garlic and fresh oregano from the potted one on my doorstep.

yesterday for lunch we had breakfast burritos- blue new potatoes, new onions, chives (also from the doorstep), eggs, cilantro.

i’ve been having killer salads and adding sunflower seeds, eggs, peanut sauce.

i was eating hippie glop last night- it was supposedly “chili” but with the pinto beans were turnips and pea shoots from the veggie box, wild sorrel, in addition to the normal onions, chili powder, and tomatoes.

we started buying goat milk from a local farm, and quinn resoundingly loves it. he may yet wean from mama milk, who knows! i’ve been looking for a way to get away from ultrapasteurized milk, and hoping to learn cheese making, and i can use it to make our yogurt. i am excited to bring quinn out there sometime and meet “our goats”.

i took quinn for a hike in a new state park that isn’t really “official” yet…. i harvested some edible wild plants and herbs (my latest hobby) and scoped out great berry bushes…. it’s on someone’s old farm so almost no one goes there yet, and there are a lot of old fields, farm roads through the woods, rolling grassy hills. we saw ladybugs and fell down a bunch in the grass.

we planted our tomatoes!!!!!

he was playing boats every second, tying laundry baskets up to the handle of the refrigerator, and all the while making up little jibberish sing-songy phrases like those in mokie and bik: “slip slide slippering, skate chase racing, splosh slosh galoshing.” i could get a lot done while he was boating, cutting fabric or sewing nearby.

a milestone was reached during this month, in which quinn started coming out of the bedroom after his nap! usually he would just say “mama…. mama……” until i would come in the bedroom. he was so proud of himself for being so big and kept doing it day after day. after one nap he woke up and was still in the bedroom playing with our cat, and when i walked in he wanted me to go back out so he could come out. i realized that the work days on which i was still rousing him from a slumber were the moments to which i was now limited for scooping up a sleepy boy.

i had been teaching quinn that when he wanted to hit me, that i would like him to tell me “i feel like i want to hit you” or use other words along those lines. one morning he did just what we had discussed. he held up his hand, but controlled himself, and used his words instead of hitting me. i was able to say, “you must be feeling very upset with me if you want to hit me,” and he seemed to receive that validation, and became able to access the sadness he felt beneath the surface anger. he moved through it beautifully, (this was in the car, dropping him off one morning) and it was overall a bonding experience. i was seeing that he needed an outlet for the very strong feelings he was having- hitting was one choice but telling me what was going on for him was preferable. i could see that there were some uncanny parallels between what was going on for each of the two of us in the department of developing emotional intelligence. i was starting to celebrate the thought that he was getting a much earlier start in life on being able to identify his emotions than i was.

there was a theme this month surrounding birth, something quinn was very actively “studying” in his unschooled life of play (the post on being born that i wrote later in 2010 pulled directly from quinn during this month), and i find it interesting how much i can see my own rebirth at that time as a person with emotional competence, how having my son was such a catalyst for me to do the hard work i needed on myself. but we all have a chance to birth and re-birth ourselves throughout this life.

this month holds one other important milestone, whose importance i could only identify in looking back from years later. this may very well be the month of the inaugural “you find an egg” game. clearly documented is the much smaller quinn having hidden himself under a grammy quilt, with a caption of “inside his egg, ready to hatch.” from there, the game developed, and to this day, i am still lucky enough to find an egg every now and again.