a splash of color on monday
a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed
~rainbow mondays~ wild and precious
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Tag Archives: yoga
~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ turrets and portcullises
minecraft fortress building was a frequent occupation these past two months. quinn has also been inspired to build games in scratch, making use of a book fair purchase to familiarize with how to use code within the scratch framework to generate a game.
birthday books; on the right, an excellent story called eagle boy that i found at our local book store.
contemplating fortress features (like hidden sky libraries) with kitty ball.
mission control; where the scratch games are made, as well as some of the minecraft work accomplished. the head lamp slays me.
we cleared off a small area of his desktop so his piper can fit there, alongside a story cd. (he was listening to harry potter and the deathly hallows). i asked him if he felt he had figured out how to work in scratch, how to use the various commands.
“the only one i don’t know what it does yet is pen.”
“have you ever just played around with the commands and figured out what they do?” i asked.
“yeah! i figured out how to make someone jump! you go “face in direction zero (which is up) and then say move 5 steps then wait 1 second, then face in direction 180 (which is down) and then move five steps. and you actually JUMP!
“…and i know how to make gravity.”
he made his “first game ever” called whale saver, in which you have to click the space bar quickly enough to get the mama whale across the screen to the baby whale. if you are too slow, the mama whale drifts towards the left, and you lose if she gets all the way to the left and her thought bubble reads “defeat”; if she makes it to the baby, her thought bubble reads, “victory!”
then he made it more difficult by adding a shark that the mama whale has to out swim in order to reach the baby whale before the shark does.
we have an ongoing discussion concerning cool math games, and before he played it one day, we talked about using it to research how parts of a game work together, with his new perspective of game making in scratch, i.e. how you make it look like a penguin is swimming even if he is in the middle of the screen, by making other objects move past the penguin. though in my opinion there is nothing cool and a negligible amount of math embedded in cool math games, a site which i resent the schools promoting because of its blatant ads targeting kids and its ability to require restarting my computer, i am trying to find the middle ground between adamant disapproval of (big air quotes) cool math games and finding some redeeming value since it is obviously something quinn enjoys. reverting back to my principles, i asked how can we use even this despicable platform as a tool for learning?
he came home pretty psyched about his tag program one afternoon, just absolutely buzzing with inspiration about automata. they are going to build automata. i played dumb and asked what’s an automaton? he regurgitated the definition, understood what it meant, and was able to discuss it critically, such as when i asked “ok, so what makes it different from a robot?” we ended up watching some of the you tube videos he had seen in class, finishing up with the TED talk of theo jansen, which quinn subsequently reenacted, listing each adaptation that was added to each new iteration of strandbeest. his capacity to memorize reminds me of my ten year old self, while my 39 year old self has trouble remembering where i parked.
raspberry storytelling.
becoming entrusted with more dangerous kitchen jobs; serrated knife use, birthday candle transportation, and (the incredibly risky) making of guacamole.
shown above, his finished essay on martin luther king, jr., plus a collection of notes and research on the subject. one worksheet (most of which was empty, classic quinn) contained a space to write one connection made during reading/research on mlk where quinn had written “martin and i both are as non-violent as possible.”
we’ve been getting outdoors between bouts of rain. when we trek to the bayou, we sometimes catch imaginary pokemon; other times we observe trilliums, trout lilies, the flora and fauna. he was compelled to do some irl minecraft brick laying. i was intrigued to realize that he understood to alternate the way the bricks are oriented so their seams are offset in each layer. play is never pointless.
his class took a field trip to cape perpetua. we hiked, wrote and drew in nature journals, did a visitor’s center scavenger hunt, and hiked some more. our final hiking destination was the giant spruce, under whose roots the whole class crawled. walking together alongside a stream, quinn and i brainstormed descriptive language; gushing slushing sploshing galoshing giggling clapping hooshing whooshing shhhhhh… were just a few i can recall, describing our impressions of the different character of various sections.
he fell asleep on my lap on the return bus trip to school.
the library hatched a batch of baby salmon, so we stopped and paid them a visit.
baseball! i am surely biased, but i believe that quinn has very good aim, and i adore his pitching style of raising his left arm as though to place his pitch where he wants it. he has been practicing archery since he was quite small, and i noticed that when he began learning to use throwing stars, he aimed well with them, too. we are looking forward to more throwing stars, nunchucks, eskrima sticks, and bo staff classes that are going to be happening soon at our dojo.
quinn worked diligently on a birthday present for the baseball buddy pictured above (aka panda)… his very own pokemon collection. quinn sorted through his own binder to find cards of which he had duplicates, to put together a pretty awesome starter collection. he put them in a binder for panda, colored the front and back covers (raichu and greninja, panda’s faves) and he was very excited about giving him his gift.
earth day! more (slightly unfinished) school artwork.
one day when i was volunteering, quinn’s class discussed and voted on several topics, items that had been submitted to the suggestion box. one was written by quinn about rotating between play porch, gym and classroom when brain break has to happen somewhere other than the playground due to rain. his suggestion was the one voted into effect, after careful consideration of pros and cons of each alternative. their discussions are amazing to behold. (“who can show proof of listening to jasmine, and add to what she said; do you agree or disagree… because…” were some of the prompts the kids are accustomed to receiving.) they also voted on saving spots in the classroom for work (this was sorted out in all its nuances of when it is and is not okay to save spots), as well as whether to do yoga both at the beginning and end of the day (they already do it at the beginning) and they did institute an end of the day yoga session by majority vote.
quinn was pretty elated when his suggestion about brain break won in a landslide.
we also got to do a yoga session while i was there. quinn asked if we could order a set of the yoga cards for home, “so i can teach you yoga.” so we ordered some! we have done quite a few sessions so far. as yoga has been an incredible source of self care, solace, exercise and healing in my own life, i am quite pleased to see quinn embracing this positive practice.
feeding ice cream for mama’s birthday to the family of camp boss. beautiful sunny day to play with friends!
easter egg dying and hunting, and a fun (belated) easter basket when he got back from his dad’s.
one recent wendesday morning wake up (after a late bedtime due to karate then dinner then bath) was not one of my better ones (nag nag nag), so for thursday morning i decided to do a better job. when i went in he was burrowed under his grammy quilt, head and all, and my usual “good morning boo-pa-loo” song turned into more of a david attenborough narration.
“here we see a rare undescribed burrowing creature in its natural habitat. this animal has a fuzzy head and is very quiet, just before emerging from its sleeping burrow. we are hoping to catch a rare glimpse of this new species, which we shall give the name boo-pa-loo boo-pa-lee-doo, as it rises to consume one of its favorite foods; biscuits. with any luck, the aroma of the biscuits will entice the creature out of its sleeping burrow at any moment.”
for some reason, that worked better. it was easy to then coax each appendage out of the sleeping burrow with further narration, sans nagging. (i say it again: play is never pointless!)
play can be a science experiment. quinn made some spinning tops from legos, and it was a great avenue to discuss experimental design. he was telling me that the one made from the big lego wheel and the taller stick spun for the longest duration because it was the biggest. i asked him if he thought it was the larger diameter of the wheel or the weight of it (which aspect of “bigger”) that helped, and whether he could design an experiment to determine which factor was most important. he hesitated, then told me “you just gave me an idea” and came back having tested the wheel on an even longer stick, having found out that with the same wheel, the longer stick helped the top spin longer (yet another aspect of size). then he was able to verbalize how one could test two different diameters of the same weight on the same length of stick, or two different weights of the same diameter on the same length of stick, to test the diamater vs weight concept.
“concept” is a word he is using quite frequently. his battle/dungeon/castle/mythology/pokemon story language is as lyrical as ever.
in the realm of d and d, he has me on a mission to defeat a dragon, who is guarding a treasure stolen by some orcs/goblins from the elf high council (my character is an elf and she is apparently a member of said council) and right now we are discussing an alternate plan, instead of killing the dragon, to get him on our side. i freed one of the original guards who wasn’t killed when the treasure was stolen but who was taken prisoner, so he informed me that the dragon has one scale missing over his heart and that’s his weakness and the way to kill him if i wanted to, but i suggested making the dragon a shield/artificial scale and offering it to him in trade for the treasure (agreeing to set him free in the process) but then it turned out one of the orcs has the missing scale (made of mithril) and is using it as a shield so before i face the dragon the new plan is to go kill the orc with the missing scale and bring it to the dragon to return it as a peace offering.
and the experience of actually playing d and d is a lot like an incredibly long run-on sentence, so i’m going to leave that exactly how it is.
there was more work to be done these past months on the theme of advocating for himself. quinn arrived at the conclusion after one frustrating karate session (frustrating because of a missed week of class, and because he had forgotten the techniques he had learned the previous week) that he was disappointed about not being brought to karate at least once during his dad’s weeks. we had a pretty good conversation about how he, quinn, has a lot more power to change that than i do, and how he would be wise to communicate his wishes to his dad.
karate has provided a plethora of opportunities for self-advocating and initiative practice. our sifu believes in letting the kids have space to learn how to initiate their own advancement through curriculum; this implicitly allows them space to flounder, until they realize they are in charge of their own destiny. i very much appreciate this, and have had numerous discussions with quinn about this dynamic; such as discussing how open mat classes allow an ideal time to “bug sifu” for a new technique, given the smaller class size and therefore increased availability on the instructor’s part. children deal with so much powerlessness, and i want to teach quinn how to use what power he does have, teach him that, “it is what you make of it” and the structure of self-paced learning at karate is helping him see how much control he can have over his learning.
both his classroom this year at school, and his dojo, are achieving some of the educational priorities i hold nearest and dearest, such as connection with his teachers and a sense of belonging.
though my favorite memory this month is not my shoulder injury, one bright spot in that particular evening at the dojo was the way quinn rushed to help me with carrying my bag, and holding doors for me.
one morning we parked at school several minutes early so quinn sat on my lap and snuggled while we finished a deathly hallows chapter. when i turned it off and took the keys out of the ignition, quinn tried to take them back, then got this twinkle in his eye and said, “i’ll roll you for your keys!” and i laughed so hard. our sifu uses that particular choice bit of slang (and other good ones… “you talkin’ mess?” for example… when he’s creating a scenario for using a given self defense technique). sifu had joked the previous night to quinn, about his new day-glow safety green karate hoodie, “i’ll roll you for that hoodie” but having q use it on me (and immediately start giggling uncontrollably) was hilarious.
and i will leave you with one final gem from the school spring concert, during which such rites of passage as 50 nifty united states, found a peanut, and the rattlin’ bog were sung. but this one really says it all!
~rainbow mondays~ a happy return of the day!
i spent part of spring break on wedding projects, including dying and cutting the fabric for prayer flags i am asking my guests to help decorate.
checking items off the to-do list feels pretty good!
i also gave my rainbow jar/flower plan a test run, even though i didn’t have any orange or green flowers yet to work with.
my son requested that i buy him a set of the yoga cards his teacher uses in class. i felt like this particular card was a sign that it was a good addition to our library. he has been setting up flows for me to do with him ever since they arrived.
rainbow tidepool creatures from a low tide walk with a good friend on sunday… with sunshine! on my birthday weekend, i couldn’t have asked for nicer weather for our walk!
red: sunlit crab in the shallows
red: another, larger sunlit crab!
red: gooseneck barnacles are not often seen on land, as they often grow on pelagic flotsam. we saw a cluster on the beach yesterday, looking like they’d just arrived from outer space.
orange: crabs seemed to be prevalent!
orange: including hermit crabs! i loved this little guy perched on the baby orange urchin.
orange: as part of my pre-birthday celebrating, i tested for my orange belt! had an awesome test alongside some inspiring young women.
yellow: test day, the last day of my previous belt rank of yellow.
yellow: and one of my first days of sparring. i was dreading it, but it turned out to be very fun!
yellow: a friday night outing with some girlfriends included a fun dessert, which came with sparkler candle! the friend who took this pointed out my angel over in the lower right corner.
green: minecraft, irl! (in real life, with real bricks.)
green: more sparkly twinkles. dew on clover.
green: twisting dragon pose!
green and blue: sharing smores with camp boss!
blue: smiley face rock!
blue: eagles always visit us at this beach. this was a juvenile.
purple: we picked up some trash from the tidepools, but some trash has become a growing surface, like this sparkly red plastic. i had reached in, ascertained that it was not one to be removed due to baby sea urchin, and stooped lower to take this picture before i saw the sculpin lurking in complete stillness! they are incredible at hide and seek.
purple: still quite sparse after the wasting disease that diminished their population to almost nothing, we did see a hopeful handful of sea stars.
purple: sea urchins with tube feet visible!
purple: some of my birthday flowers, and another purple birthday present, from sparring. it looks much worse than it feels!
purple beauties.
purple: crocuses in the terrace garden. i’ve always loved the stripey ones!
red violet: speaking of stripey, the trilliums are beginning to do their magical color change trick. trilliums in red violet, 3 petals on the 3rd of april, a lovely birthday present!
white: but a few of them are still white, providing a nice camouflage substrate for the cute white spider.
a splash of color on monday
a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed
~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ peaceful protests and a lot of alliteration
it’s been a good couple of months to be review listening to harry potter audio books, with so many themes having heightened relevance to our current events. it was quinn’s idea to listen to them again, when we finished with the heroes of olympus. while we were waiting for the order of the phoenix to come in at the library, we briefly reviewed some lemony snicket, and quinn observed, “these titles sure have a lot of alliteration.”
when he turned 10 *gasp* a month ago already, i borrowed from some of my lifelong learning notes for the birthday post, so you’ve already heard about peaceful protests, fourth person point of view, and our chatty walks up to the school building each morning.
the peaceful protests, of course, were a residual effect of his essay on martin luther king jr, an essay of which i think he is quite proud now that it is finished. he put a ton of effort into it, and i personally learned facts i hadn’t known before, such as that the day of his assassination, mlk:
“…went to Memphis, Tennessee to help black garbage collectors get the same amount of money as white garbage collectors for the same amount of work.”
i could copy and paste that snippet of his work into this post because we live in such a fancy modern age that our children can “share” their google doc essays to their mama’s email address when prompted to do so!
i went to school one friday while they were doing their martin luther king jr essays and i was circulating and helping kids. the first 10 minutes of the 45 minute class was a mindfulness breathing exercise… the teacher had them sit tall and breathe along with a drum beat for each breath, and a breathing ball (it expands and contracts) that the two team leaders handled. this was followed by a loving kindness meditation: “may i be safe and healthy… may i be happy… may i be… ” was the first of 4 rounds; second, she had them think of a person they love, and hold that person in mind and repeat “may he/she be safe…. “; third, “this one is harder… think of a person that it’s hard for you to like… “may he/she be….”; and finally, “may everyone be…” this was such a good investment of ten minutes, because the kids proceeded to spend the next 35 minutes acutely focused and getting so much accomplished on their essays. with lots of direction from her (they were working on conclusions so she provided examples of transition phrases that work well for beginning a conclusion…. and then had kids share their first sentences… then they worked on how to include the 3 main ideas of the essay in that first sentence… and went back to work on their first sentence some more… very methodical with them on actually how to write.) quinn had a ton of writing on his piece of paper, and also arrows going here and there of places he wanted to insert sentences he wrote later… the kids completely understand “drafts” and they get excited when it is time for “publishing” and writing their final drafts… he picked the right year to work on improving his writing, with such graceful guidance.
he is a certified… guacamole masher, steam mopper, fireplace filling technician!
(i clearly was unable to put a log in the wood stove, with 30 pounds of cat on my legs, so someone had to do it!)
risk and play date fun with a panda, and birthday celebrations with a koala.
beach clean-up class field trip! we found some cool rock formations including some that quinn claimed were dinosaur eggs in a nest! we filled a pretty big pile of garbage bags from our little stretch of beach.
first belt test at his new dojo! quinn earned his half yellow belt, something he was very keen to do. i appreciate sifu’s approach, and the way he tunes into the individual needs and interests of each kid. he knew and understood that quinn wanted to “collect them all” and was happy to oblige with a half belt test! quinn actually already knew almost all of his yellow belt curriculum, so his full yellow test was scheduled for soon thereafter.
this dojo is a really good fit for us. i personally enjoy the self paced curriculum, because if i feel ready for new techniques, all i have to do is ask for them. if i need more time to practice, i can take more time. i am not lumped in with a group all trying to advance at the same pace, and yet somehow teaching everyone new individual techniques does not seem to become unmanageable even with large class sizes. i am trying to use as many opportunities in life right now to help quinn learn to assert himself in positive ways, to advocate especially for what he wants to learn. since our debut in public school, i have wanted to reinforce his right to self-direction in his learning choices. in the conversations we’re having about learning, i keep trying to set the tone that what he wants matters, and that speaking up about it is always a good choice, even if his wishes can’t be accommodated right away. he is getting to practice that in his karate pursuit, and i am glad for the parallel to his schooling that i can point to as an example.
creative reading postures; eye rolling
a visit from ruby tuesday! she’ll even hop up on his loft bed with him to snuggle him into bed at night. we are so lucky to be her fairy dog family.
games! playing games with panda, playing games with grammie e, who recently added quinn into the weekly rotation of her grandkids so he could play games with her and have some undivided attention. they played monopoly for their first round. when he’s not playing games, he’s usually making games…
some recent game themes included wilderness survival, owl evolution, battle islands, an angry birds spinoff, and a few others that he didn’t not have fully developed or named yet. graph paper!!!
most of his peaceful protests had to do with bringing graph paper, pencil and markers along to work on a game design. he also made some new “elements game” cards one afternoon, based on magic the gathering, but with his own spin. i was glad i had already turned on google safe search when he started google image searching terms like “mermaid queen.” all of the mermaid queens he found were fully dressed, thank goodness!
it will be fun to find out how this game is played!
one of our vacation house roommates came to visit! he hadn’t been to our new house so we got to give him a tour and feed him dinner and treat him to our air mattress. he brought a king cake for dessert (awesomeness, straight from NOLA) and i made soup and bread for dinner and we all ate and got caught up. we told him he needs to bring his other half and come back in july for a get together we’re having. we also showed him the bayou, the name of which was of course inspired by our new orleans roomies.
after dinner we got out the king cake which had a warning label “inedible baby figurine included” or something to that effect. they don’t hide the baby in the cake anymore because of litigation so the baby was sitting inside the wrapper. i took it over to the counter and hid the baby under a piece that had green sugar on the frosting, thinking quinn would want a green piece, so maybe he would get the baby. (if you have never had king cake this all sounds incredibly ridiculous!) i brought it back over and handed rich the knife and he asked quinn what color he wanted. quinn said green, and rich cut the exact piece where i had put the baby (which was a long shot!) and the baby popped out as he was putting it on the plate. lots of laughing, quinn was happy he got the baby, and our friend told stories about king cakes he’s eaten in the past; how some high end places use gold babies, and how his cub scout leader had a king cake one time with 15 babies in it so all the kids got a baby and it was a fun surprise, and several other funny scenarios involving king cake.
our friend had been tracing the geneaology of his family, who it turns out have been living in the 9th ward for something like 8 generations. he has been visiting old family homes, graves, and digging through old microfiches to trace family members back even farther. we were talking about the naming conventions of various family members and he would say to quinn, so who is your grandfather’s son (and quinn would answer, um…. my uncle) and then it got more tricky and there was a discussion of what “once removed” means in cousin terminology. i told the story of how luigi always called q “cousin quinn”, and that one time when we went to visit when q was 5 and luigi 4 and i was coaching them on being kind to each other “after all, you’re cousins” and luigi saying, “wait, i’m a cousin?!” mind blown. that led to principles of family like “you can’t have a cousin without being a cousin” and you can’t have a sibling without being a sibling, and quinn was coming up with more. then we talked about how it applies to friends too, but can you have a friend without being a friend? that was discussed, but then it got silly with “but what if the second friend is really a spy, and only acting like a friend to extract information from the first friend…” so then to be even sillier i asked, “well then what if the first friend is a double agent” and then it was “oh yeah, what if the second friend is a triple agent?” and by this time we were all giggling hysterically at the table, to quadruple and quintuple agents, and beyond.
when our friend asked quinn about school, quinn said they are learning mostly about martin luther king jr. right now, and also about native americans. he told us all how their land was taken away, and talked about the sioux and knew where in the country to point to on the map of where their land was, and didn’t know what states’ names that corresponds to now, so he went to look for an atlas, and wandered away. i went and found him after a while and he was on his bed reading calvin and hobbes. we looked at an atlas together and he pointed right to the dakotas, with an “oh yeah, that’s right.” i am glad to know he is learning such things right now. i got him a young peoples’ history of the u.s. on audio cd (howard zinn), one of his stocking presents for christmas and i think he will get into it once he starts. knowing how he absorbs auditory information, he will be an american history expert (from the zinn perspective) in no time.
i chaperoned a field trip to the art department at the local community college. the kids had all prepared a drawing they would use to carve and print a linocut, so they set about carving right away. this was full of ups and downs for a few of the kids who struggle a bit with perfectionism. not that i know anything about that. at one point he wanted to give up and felt he had ruined the whole thing, but as he worked through it, he found equanimity again, and then he tried a print even though he wasn’t finished carving and beamed, and said, “it looks like an old black and white photograph!!”
using the brayer; printing his first draft
pleased with his print
“just like an old black and white photograph!” i guess i’m not the only one in this family who likes spirals… i quite like the way this spiral has a beam of light shining out of it, and even if he continues to carve away the rest of the outer portion, i will treasure this first print.
recently the name “the happy spot” has come back into vogue; lately he likes to get cozy in my chair with my laptop and my heating pad on the low setting… often it is his first activity upon arriving home from his dad’s week.
he started back up studying computer programming on khan academy and got caught back up to the point where he left off a year or so ago in one night. after that quick review he moved forward. this was a totally self motivated effort.
in the department of “life lessons we wish we didn’t need to learn” these past few months, one of the teachers quinn had for walk to math last year in third grade was arrested for sexually assaulting a teen minor at a summer camp. the teacher had already left quinn’s school, and was now teaching in a different county, and so our school system did not even appear to address it, which was disheartening. for my part, i discussed it with quinn, preferring him to hear about it from me rather than from classmates (i heard about it via facebook, where a friend had originally learned of it from her 6th grader reading the online news article aloud at the breakfast table (!), so i felt it was safe to assume it was going to circulate around school), and we sat together and read the brief few pages in it’s perfectly normal that cover the things that are not normal or okay when done by an adult to a child. i had just recently ordered this book, since we had the 7 and up book it’s so amazing but are now approaching 10!
the song happy by pharrell williams came on the radio on a random weekend day when we had npr on the radio. quinn loves listening to all of those shows (wait wait don’t tell me, radio lab) and laughs at the political jokes. happy came on and quinn was singing all the words and rich and i made eye contact over his head and grinned as we do when stuff like that happens.
he’s getting so big… he has favorite songs he knows the lyrics to…
he got past the part where leslie dies in bridge to terebithia.
he has inside jokes with me like “whatever sleet is.”
karate is a fun long evening twice a week, and i feel good about the time we’ve spent every time i’m leaving there. he is learning a lot in sparring, which in this dojo has a lot to do with control vs pummeling your opponent, and he is finding he likes working with some of the adult class green belts because they teach him while they spar.
one day quinn and i were all by ourselves for a day class, and he got to go through all of his moves for his full yellow belt test. he had fixed one foot maneuver sifu had worked on with him in his short one form, and sifu noticed that he had fixed it and said “i’d give you your belt just for that.” that was a nice acknowledgement of quinn’s attention to detail.
and the full yellow test was again a success! this time he tested with a friend, and they both did a wonderful job. and better yet, they left feeling like they knew they had done well, their hard work had been affirmed and encouraged.
valentine’s day; excuse for dorkery in the kitchen and receiving handmade cards!
some random learning moments this month; listening to his friend read to him (as part of their daily 5 reading program, i think quinn has probably helped this one boy with his reading quite a bit this school year, by being such a loyal listener and patient decoding helper. plus they are awfully cute sitting in their camp chair together. we also attended a fun movie night at the dojo, to which each and every student brought their fuzzy fleece blanket. before the show, board games were played, which of course is always a good time for quinn! he even got to eat an off-brand lunchable, poor deprived child that he is, he has had precious few of them in his lifetime, like possibly only one other one, but i succumbed to his special request.
and then he turned ten….
his birthday weekend was nice, and not stressful. by deciding to keep it simple, i ended up free to make it fancier. he helped, and it was so low key that i could have fun and be creative. the pizza pokeball and the type symbols on the veggies were last minute add-ons, because i had time to sit around and briefly google “pokemon party.” quinn set up the pokemon figures, and also decided he liked my balloon curtain idea, so he hung 4 out of 5 of them, after i hung up the first.
the boys played outside quite a bit, and would come in and do pokemon and legos and stuff in between. quinn got a minecraft medieval fortress book from grammy and grampy and that was his favorite. for a while they played minecraft, and then they would revisit the table and load up on more pizza and veggies. the three of us sang to quinn and he joined in singing to himself and laughed, and then he made his wish and we ate cupcakes. we put on a movie in the evening so the boys could transition to inside voices. we watched indian in the cupboard since they’re both familiar with the book.
then they went to bed and read and drew and talked. i turned the light off at 9 or so, and they fell asleep 9:30ish. not too bad, they were actually noisier the next morning.
it’s wild that he’s 10 and having sleepovers…
he hasn’t parted with the minecraft book (it rode to school in the car with us several mornings) so that definitely won best present. he does like his jedi robe though, and he was listening to music on his mp3 player morning while he got dressed for school. because he’s happy… “clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.“
~thankful thursday~ warmth, choke slams, baseball and apple pie
i’ve been posting a daily gratitude post on facebook this november, inspired by a couple of friends who have done so in the past. this year i saw their november 1st posts and impulsively decided to join in, and i am transcribing these posts here because it turns out that it’s already becoming a self-assigned writing exercise (read: verbosity ensued), which i’ve already established is much needed self care right now. add to that the self care of the gratitude itself, and we’re using self care in layers, as self-prescribed for the cold darkness of november. plus, top readers mom and wedding boss have had the better judgement not to join facebook, and i don’t want them to miss out! here is the first installment of grateful posts:
~30 days of gratitude~
11/1/16 day 1
gratitude has become a cliché hashtag to many people, but it’s also an important practice, and one that helps me think outside of myself. i’m going to join in with friends who practice 30 days of gratitude in november this year, for selfish reasons, however, because i have quite frankly felt better, and i am hoping that attempting to count my blessings on a daily basis for a whole month will improve my mood and help ease me into this cold and dark season of the year, my most challenging time of year by far.
there are many ways i could begin this month of gratitude, but i’m going to start with what’s happening right in front of me right in this moment… my sweet fiance, keeping me warm by building and tending a wonderful fire in our wood stove. I am so very thankful for his hard work of cutting, hauling, splitting, hauling, stacking, hauling, lighting… dealing with all things power tool, knowing how to make a blazing fire nice and toasty warm for me, since i can’t seem to generate any heat myself, and all with a smile on his face. i am being so specific about his fire-making abilities because i know i will have numerous other thankful things to say about this wonderful man throughout the month! and maybe this whole gratitude thing is also secretly a way to shout my love for him from the rooftops of facebook, because i am one lucky woman to have him in my life!
11/2/16 day 2
i am thankful for the balance in my life right now between yoga and karate. yoga: what can I say, it saved my life 10 years ago when i started practicing it, and has been a constant friend ever since. from prenatal yoga when quinn was gestating, to meeting a tall dark and handsome man in an evening yoga class 5 years ago, it is a source of great memories, comfort, wholeness and sanity. (oops, i told rich this morning i would give him the day off of being talked about when he asked in horror, “you’re going to write about me every day this month?!” oh well, sorry, honey. maybe you can have tomorrow off.)
now karate, i started practicing on a whim because my son was doing it and because i got a free month for being his mom. that was back in may. last week i completed my first belt test and graduated from white belt to yellow, and i see myself in it more than i originally anticipated. i’m more of a yogi than a fighter, but there’s more to it. learning one of the self defense techniques on my white belt curriculum, designed to defend against a left hook punch, i was brought back to a distant, jarring memory of a left slap to my face, and not only that, but the drunken lecture that followed, about how lucky i was that he had the self control to use his left hand to hit me instead of his right, given that he could probably kill me with a blow from his right (dominant) hand.
back at that time, i did not perform any self defense whatsoever, in fact, i cowered in fear. i made myself as small as possible and prayed he would pass out without hurting me further, so i could get myself and my baby to safety. and i did just that, and it’s been onward and upward ever since.
i know i began to carry myself differently after i started doing yoga, because my body had been so slouched and collapsed into itself from exhaustion, fear, self-loathing, criticism, and emotional abuse. it hurt, at first, to sit up straight in a seated yoga posture. with long, slow, movements and mindful breathing, my muscles have lengthened and strengthened and i’ve stood up a little bit taller ever since.
karate is all quick and powerful, not the long and slow and graceful, but the feisty kicks and punches and blocks that feel foreign to me. and yet… there might be something about it that makes me stand up even taller still, with the inner knowledge that i would not cower in front of a left-hand, or right-hand punch.
today in yoga class my teacher had us meditate on the space around our hearts, and specifically visualize the space in the front of our heart as the place of giving of love from ourselves to others, and the space in the back of our heart being the place where we receive love. i can tell you one of those spots contains a substantially greater amount of tension for me than the other, and it was a bit startling to me that while i feel i have come a long way towards loving myself whole, there is still a decent amount of work to do. so along with the gratitude practice, i’m going to be breathing into that back heart space a little more mindfully this month, with the goal of more graciously receiving the love of others. love is all over the place, after all.
and wherever i’m getting no love… i’ll just kick some butt.
11-3-16 day 3
today i’m thankful for my mom, with whom i had a nice long phone conversation yesterday.
i was thinking of being thankful for baseball today, but then i’d probably end up mentioning my <3 date <3 last night to watch the cubs win a very exciting game 7 of the world series, which hasn’t happened since my grandparents were infants, and then i’d really be in trouble. it’s his day, off, people, so i’m not going to talk about him. the pear cinnamon cider was lovely, while we’re being thankful, though.
my mom is an even bigger baseball fan than my significant other, probably the biggest baseball fan i know, and she would choke slam anyone in new york mets trivia. she is the subject of today’s gratitude post, not because of her baseball passion, however, but because she is the most supportive and loving and nurturing woman in my life. i’m really just the luckiest.
when i was 6 or 7, she had a hard time with me, but she left no stone unturned, and eliminated the hydrolyzed fat peanut butter from my mostly peanut butter diet, and i’ve been a model daughter ever since (hahahaha. she’s not on facebook to submit a rebuttal to that claim, so i’m safe!) of all the things i learned from her, how to be a mama stands out as the most important one, and if i am doing anything right with my kid, it’s because i learned it from her.
mom has a lot to do with why my brothers and i have such an independent streak, and also why we are insatiable readers, and also why we never stop learning. she’s the definition of a lifelong learner, leading always by example. her latest passion is the stand of antique apple trees (planted pre-1948) on the farm where she and my dad raised me, and she has become an autodidact expert in vintage apple variety identification. she also makes the best apple pie which she taught my brothers and i to do as well and has given us all a wonderful gift by unearthing information about the chenango strawberry, winter banana, red astrachan, hubbardston none-such, and blue pearmain apple varieties that she and my dad are rehabilitating. see, didn’t you just feel like you got a gift, reading those amazing names? i bet blue pearmain cider would be lovely.
mom always knew she’d be a teacher, so when we each decided what we wanted to go off and pursue, she wholeheartedly supported. this included sending her daughter off to sail on tall ships, with her blessing, which i can tell you is not how all the parents react to their kids taking a few years off from life to travel the high seas.
her support is also what shines through to me when i think of her strong faith, because even though she has always been clear about her christianity, she also never expected us to fall into line just because it’s what she chose. as a “lapsed catholic” who has been a free methodist all my life, she emphasized that to her, what’s most important is that we are all on a spiritual journey, she always encouraged us to ask questions and think critically and make conscious choices, not to follow blindly but to think and feel and intuit for ourselves. i get the feeling this is also rare among parents of my cohort.
finally, if you know the side of me that doesn’t believe in t.m.i., that likes to sit in the red tent and discuss uteri or any other aspect of being human that other people can be squeamish about, a good deal of that is because of my mom, again, for setting the example that it’s important to be comfortable talking about this stuff so we can all learn. so, if you and i have chatted fertility charting or how to broach the subject of where babies come from with your kids, then you, too, can count my mom as someone you’re thankful for.
i love you, mom!
up
quinn and i have a scrabble game going on, laid out on the table in his bedroom. he got interested in it because he “helped” me play a few words in the game words with friends (ie scrabble on a smart phone) and one time he looked over my shoulder and told me, “mama, you can spell up! u-p!”
slowly but surely, he is gaining more confidence with reading and he seems to relish all of those little quirks of the english language. he will pose questions, “carrot starts with /ck/ (saying the sound). is that a c or a k?” he delights in observing silent e’s on the end of words. it’s like he’s in on all these big secrets now, and he loves being in the know. replenishing his scrabble tiles he tells me, “mama, i have 3 vowels in my tray now. two a’s and a u.”
can you find “up”? hint: he used a blank tile for p.
now that the evaluation wave is behind us, and the swell of our ocean has calmed down, we are back to diy methods for helping quinn learn to tolerate frustration with more flexibility. i am making a conscious effort to enhance quinn’s “sensory diet,” that concept i mentioned from the out of sync child. i don’t know that quinn has sensory integration problems, though i suspect it’s like the rest of his “stuff”- it’s there in quantities too small to register on a neuro-developmental pediatrician’s yardstick. either way, i know that sensory play often seems to calm and center quinn and so beefing up his sensory diet can’t hurt and might help. (i think that is probably true of any child.)
i made myself a list of things quinn already enjoys on a sensory level. sand and water are thing one and thing two in our coastal lives. we spend a few hours on the beach each week, lately as part of my nanny job. (aside: i often get looks of pity when i tell someone of my career change from science to nannying. i know the automatic first thought is other peoples’ childrens’ fecal matter but to me it means i get paid to take children to the beach. i went into marine biology because i love the ocean, and now i get to spend time with it instead of a computer screen.) the beach is of course a full-immersion sensory experience (the sound of the waves, the smell of the salty seaweed, the feel of the sand in your toes, in your fingers, scooping, sifting and pouring, building sand castles, stacking rocks, the feel of the sun, wind, rain, space to run and gallop and spin, drift logs to balance on, and if you are only one, the taste of the sand and the feel of it crunching in your teeth! (my little charge is at that fun stage of exploring everything orally.) similar to the sand theme, we used to get a lot of mileage out of a tray of birdseed i would bring to the farmer’s market, which somehow attracted all of the market urchins to my tent for hours on end as they dug their fingers through it and filled plastic eggs to make shakers, shoveled, funneled and poured it among containers. i may have to revive the birdseed bin- which i do recommend over popcorn or dry beans, because birds will still eat it after it’s been played with. also, it is that wonderful time of year called gardening season. digging in the soil is therapy for anyone, and quinn has always enjoyed it.
what quinn really enjoys about gardening is watering. he will dip a yogurt cup into a 5 gallon bucket 431 times to water tiny seedlings, right to the bottom of the bucket, then ask me to refill it. he will hold the hose in the greenhouse and squeeze the spray nozzle for so long i usually need to put a stop to it so we don’t empty the tank or drown the plants. he will hydrate foliage using a full spritzer bottle until it’s empty, as though he is hypnotized. like his mama, he will soak in the bathtub for an hour or more, though he likes tepid water and i prefer it boiling. he has a fun time pretending all sorts of things in the water (one time recently a pink rubber duck was hermione, and she had been captured by the giant squid). he can usually be heard talking non-stop to himself, moving water from here to there, squeezing ducks to fill them up, and squirting water out again.
he doesn’t love the sensory experiences involving hair washing, cutting, or brushing, (in fact he finds them excruciating), but we have made some strides. he likes having apricot oil rubbed on his scalp, something i do at night occasionally to try to loosen the last remnants of cradle cap. he knows that means the next morning’s bath will include a shampoo, but he likes the head rub enough to agree to it. i just have to be super gentle and not get any water in his eyes at all. the last haircut he told me he only wanted if it could be gentle and fast (it hurts and it’s so boring!) so i did my best. i definitely lost style points, but on the other hand it may have enhanced his harry potter look. we just picked up a little rubber duck scrub brush, and i know that skin rubbing/brushing is a sensory integration tool that helps kids organize their neurons. there has been many a night when quinn simply will not fall asleep, but after a good backrub and dolphin story (the baby dolphin has his body parts listed and mama tells him to let each part sink into the waves while focusing on his breathing) he is out like a light. we also like to start our days, when we can, with a good 10 minute snuggle.
of course, sometimes snuggling turns more into things like steamrolling and hiding under the blankets, sometimes “being an egg” (which he will ask me to sit on) and then hatching out, other times requiring tickling. i am a stickler about tickling, i rarely want to do it, and will only do it on request and will stop at any indication it is not wanted any longer. yet, because i have done it this way, respecting his boundaries, quinn seems to crave it. usually things devolve into horseplay then, and quinn can be seen hanging upside down by his ankles from my arms, wheelbarrowing around the house, or dancing to whatever happens to be on the stereo (the other night it was the band, and the grateful dead hour dead air is also a favorite on saturday nights.)
i notice that he is interested in swinging more than he used to be. he has never been a natural at swinging, but is starting to get the mechanics of keeping himself going. he doesn’t like to go very high, but seems to enjoy the constant motion as long as it’s a gentle arc. when he finally does come off the swing after a session, he seems more grounded and flexible, speaking of neurons becoming organized. we just put a swing up in a big tree at home, from a board and some rope we hauled off the beach.
there is a putting green in the yard outside our nanny house that quinn has been drawn to, so we went to the second hand sporting goods store and got quinn a putter. i imagine putting as a skill that causes one to have to integrate both sides of the brain, as the hands have to move across the body’s centerline. the significance of crossing the midline might be very great for children with sensory integration issues. i imagine quinn’s archery practice (he does this with his dad) is great for this as well.
my little perfectionist does not want to try skipping (i wonder if he will let grammy and grampy work on it with him in a few short weeks- they are the ones who taught me!) but i got him a jumprope while we were buying the golf putter, and he has been having a great time with that. he is supremely uncoordinated at it, of course, but as he doesn’t know it (as he seems to have some indication with skipping- maybe because of the evaluation) and he thinks it is a barrel of laughs, he is happy to practice. he will jump over once and stop, then ask me “how many times now?” and then will do two individual jumps, stopping in between. i keep increasing the number as long as he is into it.
another thing quinn got to do for the first time recently was jump on a friend’s trampoline. he had such a blast! he and the friend spent a whole afternoon on it, alternating between bouts of bouncing and then periods of sitting and talking, imagining all sorts of things together. he also thoroughly enjoys yoga balls, and loves visiting the yoga studio and getting to use them. i am planning on getting him one for home. rich handed me a newspaper article about schools starting to trade in desk chairs for yoga balls, and it is said that the kids’ focus is vastly improved.
probably my favorite sensory stimulus is when quinn asks for a sandwich hug. it happens just about any time he comes into a room where rich and i are hugging. it is so routine we all know the script now. it goes like this: “make me into a sandwich! i will say, ‘don’t squeeze me too hard’ and then you squeeze me as hard as you can! ok! don’t squeeze me too hard! aurghlmph!” i like having my arms wrapped around both of my guys at once. it it the best thing i have found for organizing my neurons.
boat moon balance
our commute into town from home takes 20-25 minutes, and for most of that drive tuesday night, quinn was exclaiming over the beauty of the moon (phase: boat moon, aka half) and expounding on his theories of what it might be made of, “because it seems like air, but it also seems like it can’t be air. maybe it is made of wood,” and telling me about how he thinks the moon becomes bigger and smaller each month, and where the extra pieces go into hiding when it is boat moon, so that they can be put back on for it to become fender (aka full) moon again.
(this is a fender; reference photo circa june 2011)
i thought briefly about letting him in on the secret of the earth casting its shadow on the moon and how it is illuminated by the sun. then i said, instead, “i’m so glad you think about the moon so much. it makes me happy.” he replied, chuckling at my quaintness, “how can it make you happy, mama? it’s only normal!”
then he was off, telling me more about how the moon was actually a chunk of a planet that split off when a large meteor hit a medium-sized meteor and sent it colliding with the planet, breaking off a chunk that became the moon. this happened in the time of the dinosaurs, naturally.
(quinn made this in photoshop)
then i went and taught yoga while he went home with rich, and my one student who wasn’t sick or already on holiday got to do boat moon balance pose for the first time (aka half moon balance).
this week in yoga: praying for an end to violence. as i’m sure goes for all of you who read this blog.
i hope my good friend rachel at 6512 and growing will not mind being quoted on the single most eloquent beginning-of-a-solution to this problem of violence that i have read: “Mostly, I don’t know anything. But, maybe affordable health care should be easier to obtain than a semi-automatic weapon.” first, we might begin with acknowledging: we do not know how to get out of this. we don’t know. but how desperately we want for our children, all children, to be safe.
balance. this is a place a yogi strives for, although striving is of course usually missing the point. still, we dance along the edge of that perfect blend of strength and flexibility. too strong, and one becomes rigid. too flexible, and one is unable to set a strong foundation. (i can help my son remember my coparent’s birthday, while still refusing to be bullied into conceding to my coparent’s demands in our legal document.) finding the balance. putting too much effort into a pose, the pose becomes inflexible; we strain, the heart forgets to open, we stray from the breath. surrendering too much, collapsing into the bones and letting the muscles droop, the pose loses the integrity and beauty of its form. sukham, that balance point between effort and surrender, strength and flexibility, is that state of ease we hope to come to.
it seems obvious which direction we have strayed, as a society, away from the balance point. we are so afraid of one another, and we value fierceness and independence and strength far above flexibility and openness. we are disinclined to open our hearts, to give and be flexible because we fear vulnerability, we fear being taken advantage of, we fear….
(quinn, being the expert family colorer, is on commission from rich’s mom to color this fuzzy poster for b pancake, and he has already completed his task. i had a moment of worry that he might try to claim it for himself and forget it was a gift, but he developed a storyline on his own that b pancake would like to have some fierce animals watching over her while she sleeps, so she won’t be afraid.)
i don’t know anything, and it becomes more readily apparent to me all the time. but arriving at that place of surrendering to “i know not” is paradoxically closer to the solution than rigid self-assurance, as joseph campbell suggests (if my feeble attempt at paraphrasing such an amazing man comes anywhere close to doing him justice). and while i am way out of my league, i might as well quote his holiness the dalai lama: “the only option is to live and work together harmoniously, and keep in our minds the interest of the whole of humanity.”
i feel lucky to have a busy five year old to keep me here in the moment, and give me breaks from thinking of unthinkable events. i feel so blessed to be surrounded by abundance, love, a warm wood stove, thick blankets, cheery christmas lights, plenty to eat, and time to spend doing frivolous things like melting crayons onto waxed paper and hanging “stained glass” in the windows of a house that no one but our family ever drives up to.
(this is a vintage craft from my childhood, something my mom used to let me do on nana’s old hot plate, and i scored a mini version at the antique mall the other day. abandoning his perfectionist moment of “but what if i make it all dumb?” when he felt how slippery and tactilely fun it was to have your crayon melt as you color with it, he made about a dozen designs.)
(i’ve heard it said that the eskimos have a lot of words for snow, but i wonder if we have kinds of snow here that they never needed to name in the far north. like, “snow that falls in wet clumps and coats the ground in slimy slushiness.” or, “the ground is white because of three inches of hail.”)
since i’m quoting liberally today…
“i have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
these three are your greatest treasures.
simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”
~from stephen mitchell’s translation of the tao te ching
i feel a shift. since my previous post i can report that all matters coparenting are in a better place. i’m going to leave this post rough and stick it up there, making room for much more joyful posts coming soon.
wonderfully mysterious
i walked out into the first rain of december this morning (uhhh yeah, we’re a little behind here on the coast but shhh don’t tell anyone our secret! we like everyone to think the weather always sucks here!) and i actually felt happy about rain, so happy that i opted to walk in it, rather than under the eaves of the buildings of my workplace, where i usually lurk on my way between my office, my lab, and the building where the tea water is located. i soaked it in, just feeling happy. i think i am a happy person in general, but there may just be a teensy extra spring in my step something more like giddy right now. i filled my mug with jasmine tea, mmm.
i did a bunch of work, counting down the hours until yoga class… thinking back over a nice chat i had at the laundromat on monday…
speaking of yoga, my kiddo is really into it right now. ever since i parked my mat near the woodstove, he wants in on the action, and we’ve gotten into a little routine right before bedtime. unfortunately, he is really into poses that are not super relaxing and it gets us amped just in time to try to settle into bed, but it is still fun to see him into it. last night he kept flipping over into plow, basically the whole time. i did get him to rest in child’s pose by giving him a nice backrub, but otherwise he is all about being fierce animals and making up brand new poses with new names he makes up on the spot. i taught him lion pose (good for opening your sinuses!) and he adores it. now he asks me to do tree pose while he does lion pose, which scares the tree into toppling over on him. he asked for his own yoga mat, in pink.
yesterday we were just about the only patrons of the aquarium, and spent a long time in the shark exhibit, drawing sharks, rays and salmon in our drawing books.
i’m headed to the post office now, before they close. it should be really fun. because right at the moment nothing, not even a line at the post office, can get me down.
oh, and, i got this fortune cookie at lunch on tuesday:
“someone thinks you are wonderfully mysterious”
woodstove salutations
i’m sure you’re not supposed to post it on your blog if you have a crush on somebody… (what if he googles me? hahaha.)
most of the time i find that yoga class is a good place for me to go to quiet down my brain, which is often on runaway train mode. but sunday morning i woke up before 5 and did some yoga at home, because… well, right now, being in yoga class is even more distracting than normal day to day life. and i figured some woodstove salutations would be better use of my time than practicing my asking-out speech in the bathroom mirror some more. this might be good for me, in the sense of stoking up my home practice (which has been practically non-existent).
my yoga teacher, who is all about kula (community) and just about every time we have class, has a birthday or sympathy card out for us to sign for someone in the community… well, she seems to be picking up on some sort of energy and doing her part to help it along (seriously folks, she assigned us to give our partners back rubs. if that doesn’t build “community”, i don’t know what does). in fact, the more i blab on and on to everyone i know (and the entire internet) about having this crush on this guy, the more surrounded and supported and cheered on and buoyed up i feel by my friends, my community. they are ready to drop everything and do reconnaissance work for me, pray for me, or do other magical things that i can only wonder at. i can’t help but feel that there is something good coming. often i’ve gone into crushes/dating with the sense of feeling not loved enough, and like this next thing is going to be what fills me up with the lacking love. but right now i feel incredibly loved! and thinking maybe all this love and support bodes well.
maybe this person will not turn out to be right for me, and since i’m allowing myself to be very hopeful… that might suck. i feel strong.
i really don’t have time for a relationship, and right now, i don’t care. giddiness is so much more fun than worrying about silly things like time.
i’ve decided i can’t really get behind the feeling of embarrassment anymore. worst case scenario: he says no and we continue having to be in class together… um, but who doesn’t like to be asked out? even if he thinks i’m gross, i’m still thinking he is cool, and that would be embarrassing… why, exactly? i am so not embarrassed that i just told you i have been talking to a mirror.
i even moved my mat. unprecedented in the history of human behavior. hear that, universe?
after writing the first half of this post, i went home yesterday and got my laundry together and hit the laundromat. and in true small town form… guess who else does their laundry on mondays? (sing with me: it’s a small town, after all….) seriously. and he was chatting with yet another hippie we apparently know in common. we were like a waldorf convention promoting monday as washing day.
and that is why i’m clicking publish on this post, dammit. i wore earrings to do laundry. i think my frequency of showering might even have taken a slight upturn! and for reasons i cannot begin to understand, i have a clean stovetop. i wore earrings all day in fact, knowing full well i would probably not be seeing this person again until thursday, at class, when i will not be wearing any jewelry. after i bumped into him at the ‘mat (hardy-har), friends nodded (via text, god bless it for times like these) and laughed and said things like “that figures. law of attraction at work” and even my mom said she and her ladies had just gotten done praying for me so “that sounds about right.” (everybody wave to mom, she is now following my blog via email! yay!)
so i figured i’d get some more ladies on the job of putting the good energy out there into the universe, my blog ladies whom i love dearly… and my blog guys (don’t think i don’t know you’re there, cj and tim… unless you skip over the mushy posts, and i wouldn’t blame you if you do!) and with that, i will go and hang up my chest waders to drip dry, as i’ve spent the better part of today hiking upstream counting and measuring hundreds of recently-spawned adult salmon… i think there might be a metaphor in there somewhere too, but i can’t think what it might be. 😉 if the spirit animal theme for this post is salmon, then the gemstone must be the lapis lazuli in my earrings, which google tells me is essentially good for, “blah blah blah true love blah.”
66% quality of life improvement
actually i have no idea how to quantify it, but there is some wonderful change-for-the-better in the works in coparenting land. as mentioned, there have been quite a few changes lately in our lives, and lately the daily transition times (change is our theme!) have been a bit more bumpy. since quinn was around 2, we have had multiple transitions a day between mama and dada. starting out, we had mama droppping off on work days, then stopping in to nurse down for naptime, then picking up at 5pm, 5 days a week, and a sunday evening drop off and pick up for dada time. we reduced my work schedule to four ten hour days a week when quinn was around 3, and sometime after that my presence at lunch/naptime was no longer needed. still, right up until this week there were transitions twice a day, six days a week. lately, wherever quinn is, or whoever he is with, is where/whom he doesn’t want to leave, and there has been a lot of resistance and some rugged, drawn out, pick ups and drop offs.
we’ve also been talking about re-initiating more overnights with dada. we did have a once-every-other-week thing going for a while, but that waned to nearly zero since my ten day research trip in june. summer is like that, it gets hectic. so overnights work into the new plan as well.
i was hesitant to introduce more change at this time, but i think it actually amounts to greater stability for quinn and in the bigger picture, results in less change to deal with on a daily basis. since it seems he has been experiencing the daily change as upheaval to some extent, this seems like a good time to alleviate some of that.
so, we just went from twelve transitions a week…. to FOUR. (66% higher quality of life, shazam!) quinn will have 2 overnights per week with dada, and we’ve scootched his normal evening times with dada (on some of mama’s non-work days) over to the days he’s already with dada. so he will have longer continuous stretches with both of us, without changing how much waking time he has already been spending apiece. he’ll now have two stretches with each of us per week, rather than two per day. and i will only have to see coparent 4 times in a week, and if you’ve been following along, you probably understand that that is a happy thing for me.
not least of the benefits, is that i will have one night a week now (thursday) where i have alone time when there are things i can participate in as if i have a social life. things like yoga class, music jam at the barn, and i think there might even be a tai chi class on thursdays, something i’ve been wanting to check out. my evenings alone up until now have been wednesday and sunday, which for whatever reason, happen to both be nights when all the sidewalks are rolled up in newport. not that thursday has some amazing rocking scene going on, but at least there’s yoga.
i find it interesting to note the feedback i’ve received on our new schedule. most of it is congratulatory, of course, but so many responses seem to fall into either the “tripping on the past” or “future tripping” categories. i have been feeling so “in the flow” and frankly, brilliant, coming up with this schedule that keeps so much the same for quinn yet is fundamentally better for all involved. and hearing things about how it would have been great if i’d come up with it sooner, or hopes that i’ve covered with coparent that it’s not just for while he has a girlfriend, and other sorts of what-if future scenarios, is sort of a bummer. when i analyze it for myself, it is happening at just the right time and season of our lives. yes, it’s true, this does simplify coparent’s life in a way that might grant him longer chunks of quality time with gf, but i think he’s pretty clear that i’m trying to simplify my own and quinn’s life as my main motivating factors. and if gf time is one of coparent’s motivating factors, then, well, that makes sense. but he has also expressed feeling bad that i have to do all the driving (wanting to reduce that burden) and also has quinn’s best interest at heart. he can see the struggle it has been for quinn, and quinn’s parents, at all the pick ups and drop offs, and he can see how this is going to relieve so much of that. and as for “why didn’t i think of this sooner?” up until this age, i’ve felt pretty strongly that seeing both of his parents on most days was highly beneficial for 2 and 3 year old quinn, in developing his attachment relationships with each of us. now that he is four and a half, he has a little more of a grasp of the days of the week and also a firmly established trust in the fact that mama always comes back, and that he will see dada again very soon. this is the right time, but not before. (for us. with all of this, i would never want anyone else to think they should be doing coparenting the way we are, if it doesn’t feel right… wee disclaimer there.)
i said in that recent coparenting post that we are writing our own manual… to be sure, standard “dissolution with children” legal scenarios offer guidelines for how to adjust parenting time schedules as the child reaches certain ages and milestones, so i’m not completely reinventing the wheel here. i appreciate our way, because we are able to lovingly personalize it to quinn’s unique timing and personality and milestones, rather than a format prepared by legal minds based on average families. and the fact that we are able to cooperatively come up with win-win solutions between two people between whom “it didn’t go so well” (as my therapist would say with a wry smirk) and leave all the legal adversarial stuff out of it, is where i think we’re deviating from the norm and forging ahead through uncharted territory.