“Aye.” Bioluminescent waves streak past the hull of the ship as you make your way forward. Carrying out the order, you climb into the headrig to furl the inner jib. Dousing it was smart in this wind, but the swell is big enough to dunk you if you stay out too long and your stomach swoops as the top of the waves skims just below your boots on the footrope. Easy enough to accomplish in daylight when the sea is calm, but another matter entirely in the dusk, with the bowsprit reaching such peaks and troughs of motion. Furling from the peak to the clew, you don’t take time to stretch each flake of canvas into a fancy zigzag like you would to show up in port, but instead grab loops and hunks of the bulky billows and wrap a daisy chain with the downhaul line, giving a good tug to keep the peak from creeping back up the stay in the wind and resetting itself, looping over and under the mass of canvas, wrestling and hugging until it is subdued, interlocking loops of rope creating a net to contain it, and you reach the clew, secure it to the jibboom, and spider climb back inboard. Grasping the jib halyard, you take out the slack, resecure it on the belay pin. Halyard coiled and hung, you make your way aft to the quarterdeck. It’s a new feeling to be on a broad reach with a following sea of this magnitude. Just off the starboard rail, dolphins surface. Knives slicing through the waves, flashes of silver, going ten knots like your ship. Long rollers come from behind, the ship surfing over each one like a hill passing ponderously under you. Motion completely different from the Atlantic, but even on the Pacific it’s different from when the swells are on the bow. Nobody leaves the deck, though it is after dinner and your watch is on duty. Only the right combination of conditions let you sail this swiftly on your wooden ship, without the engine, though the lack of a shaft brake means the whole deck vibrates from the freely spinning propellor. Propelled instead by wind, and a powerful push from the sea. Quiet has so many different connotations on the ocean, but the most significant for you is the silencing of the inner voice. Rising and falling, watching constellations of students form and ungroup, filter below to their bunks. Slowly, the deck clears, and just the standing watch remains. Turning over the helm to you, the second mate heads below to chart a position. Up on the bow, one of the students is on lookout. Vessels begin to appear on the horizon as night falls, tiny lights in the far distance, but none come near. With your mind empty and clear, individual words roll under you like the waves. Xylophilous, to grow or live on wood, which you think is meant to refer to insects or fungus, but you like to think could refer to a person who spends days barefoot on caulked planks of oak. You tuck that one away for later, perhaps the next line in the journal swinging in the hammock where it is stowed over your bunk. Zodiacal constellations march a glittering parade across the deepening sky, the night just begun.
Have you seen me lately? is the title of one of my depression songs. I hardly ever listen to the Counting Crows anymore, but the feeling that I have gone missing lately is a little bit accurate.
When I go missing, when I need to retrieve myself, the ocean is where I go. During a pandemic, it may mean going to the ocean at 6:30 am on a Monday, and it may mean going less frequently, but the ocean is still where I go to collect myself and bring myself back. Here I am, standing, kneeling beside the crowded tidepools of my inner world. There beside them, soaking in the brine, is the end of a long strand of mended rope. I pick it back up in my hand, ready to start adding to the storyline, twisting new strands, threading on new beads and seashells, eventually stringing more cranberries and popcorn once it is a little less soggy.
How does it happen that I would ever set this rope down? I know better. I repeat to myself like a mantra why I write. I repeat it enough that others know it, can paraphrase it. The fragmentation that once characterized my inner experience was the result of mental health crisis – major depression brought on mostly by emotional abuse (gone), but also a little bit predisposition (still there). Fragmentation, a broken storyline, allowed me to lie to myself, disconnect from myself, betray myself, something I remain committed to never do again. Writing is my best tool to maintain a cohesive storyline, to integrate the various pieces of myself into one narrative that I can keep my grip on, so that I can see the connections between one segment and another, so that I can tell if I am being true to who I am and so that I can tell if I am deviating from my truth or forgetting crucial pieces of the story.
Too much slack in the line is a different problem from fragmentation, but tangles are not conducive to okayness either. Winds will blow on me, waves will continue to endlessly pass, and if I am not doing the steady, dynamic tending this line of mine requires, it can become knotted and snarled. These posts piling up behind the scenes, where I keep second guessing myself and saving to drafts, need to start being eased out before they accumulate further. Like the sheet that controls the business end of the sail, my line works to keep me on course, to keep the wind coming across my sails in the most efficient way to maintain forward progress, to keep me from capsizing, to keep the sails full not flogging, to keep me from wallowing in the doldrums.
There is a certain amount of tension required to keep ahold of myself, in other words. The danger is there to become too tense, to hold on rigidly, which can also rock the boat. When my shoulders start to reach my ears, my hands are clenched, and I am holding my breath too often, I need to loosen my grip, inhale, exhale, and observe what the ocean is doing. Take stock, adjust course.
You can sail forward even when the wind is close to your bow, but there is a reason why they call it “beating to windward.” Heading into the oncoming wind and seas (usually they are coming from a related direction to one another, though not always) can feel like a beating. The motion of the vessel is more jarring, the force of the impact coming down from the crest of each swell causes the whole hull to shudder and the rigging to vibrate, and the ship is heeled over at quite an angle. The ship must be tacked much more frequently to maintain course, an act which by its very nature strains every line and piece of hardware, every tired seam and joint. Changing direction frequently just to keep going forward is exhausting, and you must ensure the coffee pot is lashed in the galley, the deck gear all stowed.
Still, it is while sailing to windward that I have most often encountered dolphins riding the bow wake. It is also only in the dark of night that the bow wake glows with bioluminescence. Remembering my study of the word “streamlined” a couple of years ago, I recall my conclusion that the status of the flow around me has less to do with turbulence in my life, than what shape I present to the flow; that if I present less resistance to the flow, I have a more streamlined experience. Salmon use the energy of the current to propel themselves upstream; adversity is not a direct line to crisis, in fact it can be a force of energy that is harnessed for good.
I feel as though, right now, I am swimming upstream against a strong current, or sailing into a strong wind. I am okay, but I am on watch for signs of slipping down the current too far towards the waterfall’s edge, or letting the wind get around behind the wrong side of my sails. I am okay, but I am swimming hard with nothing in reserve, I am beating to windward and taking a beating. I am okay, but I am only okay because I know firsthand the consequences of slipping downstream, of capsizing.
At market one recent Saturday, a lovely woman handed me a bundle of braided sweetgrass. She grows it herself, and she said she wanted to give it to me because I inspire her. I am using it to smudge this space and reclaim it, to clear out any traces of energy that would keep me quiet, that would turn down my voice, that would ask me to be smaller, less than fully me.
watching the moon with quinn one night, we saw a dragon cloud overtake the moon, sliding up its nostril and eventually becoming its eye. though the moon was enfolded in wisps of cloud, the cloud was now illuminated from within. dragons are always on our minds here at the dragon house, but especially for quinn recently as he has been reading eragon and making spinoff dragon cards for a new game. his first two creations of a wind drake and a storm drake are pictured, including an extra-spirally tail on the storm drake!
in his game about barbarians, archerers, giants, and goblins, situated among castles and builder huts, barracks and cannons and archer towers, he developed a defense of a spring coil, to propel enemies back over the wall surrounding the compound when triggered. then he modified it to have them land on yet another weapon, a tesla. he explained this electrical-magnetic device to me, and i asked him where he had learned the word tesla.
don’t you know, he read about tesla in the t section of the dictionary back in fourth grade. when he was reading the dictionary one day. as one does.
i had him browse the wikipedia article about nikola tesla and his eidetic memory and amazing mind. i thought maybe he could relate to the guy.
he still pronounces archer “archerer.” the holdouts are few and far between now, and he will reminisce with me about certain ones like “last day” for yesterday and “next day” for tomorrow, which were his staple reference points in time as a toddler. this is the type of thing i wasn’t able to anticipate about being a parent; as i’m headed up my spiral staircase, he is also wandering up his, and we’re both reaching vantage points along the way from which we are both looking back downward and outward together… it’s impossible to articulate what a trip it is.
quinn’s tag pull-out class was re-established to close out the school year. they took a field trip to an escape room, full of different locks and puzzles and codes they had to put together. he had fun, and though he said his group went over the time limit, they got to the end of all of the clues anyway. he described it all in intricate detail (such as tables with checkerboards painted on them) and was pleased to bring home a souvenir key. the kids are planning to build their own escape room to put their peers through back at school, so this was good research!
other forms of entertainment besides watching math videos this month have included a may the fourth! star wars movie night at home with (the best ever, made by rich) popcorn.
he and i played his new strategy game (from his easter basket) called odin’s ravens.
we also attended the dance performance of the wizard in oz in which several of our young friends danced.
one sunday after a women’s self defense seminar, i asked quinn to go for a jog with me. i started teaching him about which side of the road to run on, pointing out exceptions and how to make a judgement call when you’re on winding back roads with various amounts of shoulder. he is a good little runner, very uncoordinated but has endurance and is cheerful about it. i need to get him some better shoes to run in than his vans. we decided we’ll run to karate sometimes so we can be in good shape for fall cross country season.
one week quinn was sent to the library during the time his classmates did each state test session, to work on his “elo” or extra learning opportunity. he made a google slide presentation comparing mythologies from 4 different cultures (greek, roman, norse, and egyptian), as he had planned ahead to do. he missed both thursday and friday of the school week (at his dad’s house) and i learned later that he had not been collected from the library after each test session in a reliable enough manner, and that he had missed lunch period both tuesday and wednesday as a result.
i asked quinn more details about what had happened, and whereas his dad had framed the oversight as something more sinister (shame/disapproval/punishment by staff of those opting out of testing), i found out from quinn that he had been sitting in an area behind some book fair shelves on a low cushion, causing no trouble for the librarian who had her regular library classes coming and going, in addition to book fair. i explained to quinn that he has a choice of how he looks at what other people say and do, and it’s possible that his dad might interpret something in a very negative way without having all the information. we can choose just as easily to interpret what happened as an unfortunate oversight, and if we give people the benefit of the doubt that they are in a jumbled up routine and the dots didn’t connect how they were supposed to, it makes it easier to adapt. equally importantly, i also encouraged him that he can speak up for himself, and say “hey, i didn’t get lunch” to a teacher (this he did not do), who might be able to open up a box of granola bars for him at the very least. spending our energy on developing strategies to make it in the system instead of judging the system. that’s a lot of baggage i don’t want him to carry around.
as it turns out, this story has a silver lining… his friends, to whom we’ll refer as aragorn, gimli, and legolas, had grabbed him a bag of carrots and a fruit cup (the portable lunch items) and brought them to recess for him after lunch on the second day of him missing lunch, because they had his back and were worried about him missing it again. i asked him if he had been okay missing school the following two days, or if he would rather have gone, so he could be with his friends, and he said he had agreed to stay home, but that he had also wanted to go. i let him know i felt it was okay for him to insist on going, even if his dad was leaning towards having him stay home. self-advocating still a hot topic, and looks like it will be for a while yet.
quinn helped me come up with pseudonyms for his three friends, and though we explored pokemon, star wars, or naruto characters, we agreed the reference to the fellowship made perfect sense. encouraged by the friendships forming and bonds building among these four throughout fifth grade, i have been thinking of ways to try and nurture their bond over the coming summer, and into the start of sixth grade. i don’t want to necessarily hyper manage his social calendar, but i also hear a lot from the poppy moms about how hard a time so many of them have with finding and keeping friends… so being able to foster it a little bit into these middle school years feels like a good investment. they’re his friends, he made them himself, i just feel like i could nudge things in the right direction to keep the friendships going over the summer and into next year… when it may feel like it matters more to have some dependable friends.
he presented his comparative mythology research, result of the three days he spent in the library, and i was so glad i got to be there for it – because he advocated for doing it during my thursday afternoon volunteer time. i took video… it’s 14 minutes long. the sound is poor, but it’s possible to hear his voice over the bouncing yoga balls if you play it in a completely quiet room.
we had a delightful visit from our pancakes in april! lots of minecraft and dragon playing went on in between basketball games!
we attended a karate seminar with our sifu’s sifu. he’s a fun older guy with a 7th degree black belt, we like him, and he’s a good teacher. he loves quinn and i, always remembers our names. our mrs. todd was testing for her black belt (the big reason for his visit from california) and quinn was very excited to congratulate her on her promotion!
one saturday i took quinn with me to farmer’s market because rich was also working, and he was a big help again. we got to leave early, and attempted to go visit the tall ships for deck tours. however, there was a super long line and even though we stood in it for over an hour, they had to close before we could get on. quinn was very bummed, actually shed a few tears even though we had been talking about how it might happen, but he bounced back really well. i took his picture with the ships, and then we decided to try and watch their “battle sail” from the shore. we sat on the bay beach and ate our lunch and bundled up in a blanket and watched them. it worked out well, but they didn’t do much battling; gotta love when it’s too windy for sailing. by the end of our adventure, he was content. this was timely, because i really needed to use the bathroom, and i said, “i could just go over behind those bushes,” but quinn wouldn’t have it, “no! do not besmirch nature like that!” i was laughing so hard at his word choice that he wondered if he had pronounced it correctly, and i knew then for sure that it was another case of a word learned from literature. he was grinning at his correct usage and pronunciation, when i assured him he had it right. (i did not besmirch nature, i went inside the visitor’s center.)
in other vocabulary news, i have been getting called out on exaggerating things, with a quick retort of, “that’s hyperbole, mom.”
at our spring parent-teacher conference, his teacher told us what a long way quinn has come in his writing, saying he is most certainly ready for middle school in that area… “he is using appositives correctly, he’s ready for semi-colons.” (quinn chimed in, “i already do use semi-colons!”) moving right along to the next topic…
the pythagorean theorem, of course. his star test results are saying he’s ready for that type of math, and she went over again how she wants him to continue his khan academy math over the summer. she feels he is doing great, going at a good pace, and as long as he plans to continue over summer, will be in good shape to skip ahead to the 7/8 accelerated math for which she recommended him; where they learn the pythagorean theorem and then in 8th grade he’ll be walking down to the high school for geometry.
she said he’s ready for things in middle school, and recognizes that he needs a lot more challenges put in front of him than what she has been able to do in her limited way, and we get to start to expand on that in middle school. she recommended we visit with the teachers (at least for math and language arts) at the very beginning of the year to let them know that sometimes quinn needs cueing on certain executive function things, but to let them know about his test results and that he is ready for the challenges, and make sure they are putting those in front of him- there is no accelerated language arts, but she made a good point in that the students tend to get sorted a bit more by level in middle school, and i remember that… i was in enriched english and accelerated math with the same set of kids, who therefore kept showing up in my other class periods for p.e., french, science, social studies… because we had the same constraints on our schedule. this ends up meaning for quinn that his particular class for english may tend to be able to handle more advanced stuff as well.
on needing more coaching or cueing on things non-academic… he has made lots of gains in these executive function areas, but has room to grow. my job as i see it is to empower him to solve these things, and if that means an extra one hundred conversations about not avoiding bathroom use, that’s what i’ll do. i feel the same way about self advocating (about bathrooms, math classes, or parental duties to drive him to his activities,) and plan to keep the whole conversation going. the latest addition to the time management tool box is a watch, and he has been wearing it consistently and reporting on the time at regular intervals. rich and i are hoping it serves to increase his awareness of how much time various tasks require, and maybe clue him in on where he loses track of time.
on conference days, he went to work with me, set up a schedule for the day, and stuck to it while i was stuck in a freezer for 3 hours! he even did some khan academy math, a homework summary, and spent lots of time on khan computer programming (he has completed over 90 lessons as of this writing! essential items such as how to code a rainbow!). he also played a little minecraft and read some of eragon. then he wrote music note letters into his sheet music for hedwig’s theme. over the course of these two months, he has become proficient at playing the song, and i think he is very proud of this accomplishment.
he participated in open house and the spring concert at school (they played recorders, which was priceless). all he wanted to do was go make slime in one of the classrooms, as they had a “fair” atmosphere with activities. his hands were too warm, so he got all gooey and messy.
at the nexus between quinn’s math and music concentrations, he found himself once again engrossed in vi hart’s imaginitive and fun video on “folding space-time” which turns out to be centered around a tiny hand-crank music box that will play notes punched in strips of paper. even mobius strips! vi explains how music is a great medium in which to play with the dimensions of both space and time, and my hat is off to her for enfolding so much wonder and delight into her videos, whose nerd metaphors are now permanently embedded into my son’s psyche. i couldn’t resist obtaining a music box for quinn so he, too, can fold space-time.
at quinn’s school, students are voted for by their classmates throughout the year for exemplifying each of their “eight essentials.” (the full list of eight: respect, kindness, patience, selflessness, honesty, forgiveness, humility and commitment.) quinn was nominated for the commitment award! he was very proud that his peers felt him to be a committed person. i affirmed that i observe him to be very committed: when he sets a goal, he doesn’t give up, and goes on to achieve it with focus and determination, or as our karate principles describe it, perseverance, and indomitable spirit. but also, in the sense of commitment to people he loves, or causes he believes in, i see evidence of a very caring, principled, and loyal guy!
tour of sixth grade science classroom; at his table, from left: gimli, quinn, aragorn, and legolas
something that was a pretty big deal in may was the field trip to visit the middle school! i was asked to go along as a chaperone, which was an insightful peek at how nurturing these fifth grade teachers must be. there was high intensity that day, spanning the full range of human emotion. this is a huge transition for a kid, as i well recall. i think quinn is mostly taking it in stride, is excited about the new opportunities he’ll be met with, and ready to take on this new set of challenges. he had one minor freak out about a lost raffle ticket, but his peers were all over the board with elation and trepidation.
along with the explosion in learning/absorbing, there has also been a period of emotional intensity. as a result of forgetting to take care of his basic needs for food, water, bathroom, throughout the day (executive function skills), he has had a few music lessons where he was not at his best. processing those times after the fact is also intense, requiring quite a bit of finesse to extract what is going on internally for him, and involve him in finding solutions. i have been working on finding a good balance of stern firmness (holding the line of politeness to his music teacher) and compassionate sounding board (patiently waiting for the “it” that is really bothering him to be revealed, nodding understandingly that the piece of paper he didn’t want cut that morning and the disagreement over the game with his friend caused his “really bad day”), then revisiting lessons from earlier in life about mindfulness of staying on top of processing our emotions in real time so that we don’t take them out later in the day on our unsuspecting music teacher.
by lights out the night of one such discussion, he was telling me “i love you as big as the sky, as big as the ocean all the way to the moon… no… do you know the name of any galaxies besides ours, the milky way?”
“no.”
“well then, all the way past the milky way and back again eleven quintillion times.”
enfolded in the layers of all those surly emotions, there it is.
p.s. in the spirit of lifelong learning, i looked up some other galaxies. and quinn, i love you all the way to gn-z11 and back again, eleven quintillion times. (that’s 32 billion light years away, folks! it’s found in the constellation ursa major, aka the big dipper. there are also a sunflower galaxy, a whirlpool galaxy and a tadpole galaxy, all very cool looking, but they’re not as distant!)
now that jury duty is out of the way, and i only have my 2.5 jobs and house buying to keep me busy, i am getting back on the horse of blogging. actually, i will be down to just 1.5 jobs shortly, as soon as school is out for the summer. then i will just be tending fish in the fish disease lab on weekdays and peddling veggies every other saturday. and… our offer was accepted on the house! so we are well on our way to being home owners!
it was fun to shove aside all the mail and dishes on the table and sit down and sign and initial a whole bunch of pieces of paper next to my future house co-owner. i sure love him. i loved it when he told me so many months ago that he wanted my name next to his on the deed. i loved it when he told me, mere days before our hope of buying the house we live in fell through, that maybe it is for the best that we embark on a new adventure together (and buy a different house that we choose as a couple). i love his whole approach to this whole process, and look forward to making our new home our new home together.
i secretly get distracted by the left hand side of this picture and a pair of arms i like to have around me.
so, we will be moving soon. it has been a big transition to wrap our heads around, but we have found a great house in a great location, that just seems to fit us perfectly. i waited until the offer was in and looked like it would be accepted before i drove by the place with quinn and told him of our upcoming move. i asked him his thoughts and feelings. they were mixed:
i don’t really want to leave the dragon house
i really like exploring new places and it looks like that house has lots of good things to explore
i’m not very good at adapting!
(the dragons are coming with us.)
he also likes that our local pseudo-family (including his best friend) live right nearby the new house, close enough for an 8 year old to walk! he asked if we would ever get to go back and visit the dragon house (our name for the house we live in now) and i said probably not, but that we’ll still go to sharlei’s a lot on weekends (rich’s mom who lives next door to dragon house), so we’ll still drive down our old road and she’d even let us put up tents in her yard and camp if we want to sometimes.
“well, i’m fine with moving then,” he decided.
~~~
on top of all the busyness, it is the merry month of may. my mom and i were reflecting on the month of may back when i was in school, and how there were mays when we ate outside of home for 26 out of 31 dinners. although we have eaten at home more than that, we have been running frantically to catch all of our friends’ and students’ dance recitals and baseball games.
in our own world, quinn’s universe has been filled with many new and exciting adventures, most notably karate. he is now a yellow belt, his belt test is already receding into the past somehow, already more than two weeks ago now. his enthusiasm that night of his test was a sight to behold, and before the test it was hard to get him to stop bouncing up and down to take his picture in his final moments of having a white belt. after the yellow belt was on, he became very solemn, and only when his teachers started hamming it up in the group pictures did he crack a smile again.
last week he went through a very brief period of doubt and thought maybe he wanted to quit karate. i have my theories about the way quinn’s self-esteem and anxiety cycle on an every-other-week basis, but those are theories, and it doesn’t change the reality that he does a different routine every other week of his life. all i can do is try my best to make up for it whenever i get my chances.
i brought him to karate as usual this tuesday, and he reluctantly got dressed. by the end of class, he was back on the karate horse.
then i went one step further and encouraged him to check out the sparring class that he is now allowed to attend, given his belt status. he had been saying things about it that just sounded like made up things to fear, and i wanted him to give it a chance before he ruled it out. on the premise we would just watch if he wanted to, we showed up thursday to sparring class. we brought the uniform “just in case”, and then his instructor caught the nervousness and told quinn it was best not to overthink it, but just jump in and try it out! (great advice, to not overthink things. i should really try that out sometime.)
so he jumped in and tried it out. every parent on the sidelines was smiling at his infectious laughter, which was non-stop for the duration of the class. he beamed, he giggled, he jumped up and down with glee. he saw his two instructors spar with each other for a split second, and the look of awe and amazement and joy on his face was priceless (it was very impressive, to be sure). he gazed at his reflection in the mirror wearing his protective head, hand and foot gear.
one of the things he has been so looking forward to, for when he joins the purple belts and up in the later class, is that they tend to have fewer kids in those classes, so they get to run laps around the mat for warm-ups, as opposed to doing warm-up exercises in place. since only 8 kids came to sparring that night, he got to run, and they did a fun warm-up game with different exercises in each corner, and you and your partner had to run to all four stations and perform the various moves. for the end of class game, they had to slow-motion spar with each other while the instructors went around and slow-motion chased them with big foam pads that they’d sandwich each student between (once you got sandwiched, you were out). quinn was laughing and jumping up and down watching the first kid get sandwiched, he just delighted in the whole process.
i thanked his teacher for encouraging him to “just do it” and also mentioned that i think for quinn, it helps for him to see the whole process, including sparring with an opponent, so that he understands the logic behind what moves he is learning in forms class. some kids are physically coordinated and grasp things first in their body, but i think quinn really takes it in cerebrally first, and then it frees up his physical side to do the moves. he’s the kid who says, “i think i should draw a map of the studio, so i can study where everything is.” that said, he told me, “i didn’t really have to think about it when i was sparring, all i had to do was say in my head what move i was doing.”
his assessment after class: “it was awesome.” he wants to go to karate every day of the week it is offered. “and if they start a friday class, i’ll go to that, too. then i’ll go to karate every day except saturday and sunday. it’ll be like i have a job!” he also said he is back on his way “to build true competence! it’s in the student creed!” i had quoted the “principles of black belt” to him when he told me he wanted to quit, and let him know i believed in his “indomitable spirit,” and it’s fun to hear him now quoting back to me the words he has memorized from speaking them aloud at each class.
or ma’am, depending on the teacher leading class. i can’t wait until he slips up and starts yes ma’am-ing me at home.
i asked what he thought about having taken a chance on sparring and having had it turn out to be so much fun. he agreed, he had made up some impressions of what it would be like that didn’t turn out to be true. he finished my sentence about how sometimes your brain makes up what it thinks something will be like and “your brain just gets stuck on it!”
to his credit, at least his dad does take him fishing…
~~~
a few other highlights… we visited the tall ships when they came to town. it’s fun to hear my son walk around and chat with the crew about how “my mom used to do this for a job.” he asked if we could go for a sail next time they come, so that is definitely going to be on the agenda for next may.
we’ve also been discussing all about babies. yes, the birds and the bees! there’s a book you need if you have someone in the age 7 and up bracket called it’s so amazing. and if you have younger or older kids, there are books by the same folks for you, too. quinn has always loved babies and been fascinated by big questions of existence. we want all the kids of our living school to have accurate facts when they go swim in the bigger ponds of public school next year. before we began the unit at school, i bought quinn the book and we read it together. he hung on every word, and asked tons of questions. he loves to sit and leaf through. he points to the people in the pictures and says things like, “there’s me, there’s my mom, there’s my dad, there’s my grammy and there’s my grampy!” the book does a great job of portraying life’s ongoing changes as “perfectly normal” (the title of the book for age 10 and up) and yes, amazing.
my own mom is a super-prepared teacher mom who also had a book at the ready when these questions arose for me and my brothers around quinn’s age. and i just want to acknowledge that, because i think it is an area that many parents fumble through and i wanted to follow my mom’s wonderful example and handle it with lots of accurate information and the overarching attitude of “it’s wonderful to talk about this stuff, bring it on!”
i think the message got through to quinn, if his recent play is any indication. “the blanket is the uterus, and i’m the baby. it’s time to get me out, mama!”
finally, quinn had the awesome treat to get to ride the lovely pony molly over memorial day weekend, and he surprised us all by being game to ride alone, and control the reins with no one holding a tether. he did such a great job, and had so much fun. he looks forward to getting back on the horse again a bunch more times this summer!
