Yesterday: a linen dress.
Today: Nels catches a bumblebee. She races around on the coffee table, before we let her free. It was hard to get a picture of her. She’s really booking, here:
Tonight: we went on a cross-town bike ride with a group.
(Phee eats an apple.)
At the end some people wanted pictures and we all gathered up. Except one: our daughter Phoenix sat in the gravel and said, “I don’t need my picture taken, to prove I did something.”
She’s frakkin BALLS-awesome.
OK, don’t really actually look into mola artwork. Because you’ll find I can’t compete. This is more, a technique I am trying out for some patching I need to do. I picked up the top couple scraps in my little scrap bin and got to work. It was very satisfying stuff.
Even the private-side of the work is pretty cool.
More, soon!
I lie. The tire shop wasn’t sketchy. It was just a used tire shop, we’re bumped down from the days of Les Schwab and young handsome men running in slow motion out to the car.
I should say, our finances are, though. Sketchy. We’re scraping by to afford our little conference trip. And in the last couple days we’ve had to “emergency” surgery a cat, then “emergency” replace tires that were sprouting a crop of wire. I use the air dick quotes because, I guess it was all emergency stuff. If we didn’t surgery the cat she could have fallen gravely ill (and she was in pain), and if we didn’t fix the tires, we could have crashed on the road. So, damn, kind of non-negotiable expenses.
The kitty is fine. She’s all stitched up and hopped up on kitty drugs. I’m very grateful for her recovery. She is very dear to us.
Nels, a funeral for a bird. He voiced a lovely and earnest and powerful prayer before we buried her.
In other news: cute husband, who has helped create cute daughter. They are dressed as nerds today, for some theme. It works.
I also gave blood (of course) and my daughter held my hand through it all. Later, Nels rode on the back of the bike and held the basket with my embroidery supplies, for the class I taught. It was fun stitching, and showing people how to do some simple things. One student was an eight year old girl and that was about a thousand percent awesome.
It was good stuff.
My life could be a little sitcomish, if you squint. Not the sit-coms I watch – well, I kind of don’t watch any. But, kind of silly and down-homey and provincial. Like, this afternoon my kids came and woke me up and they were so kind. I was taking advantage of the kids’ stay-over with my mother – staying in bed until ten or so after a poor night’s sleep. The kids showed up after movies and breakfast of steak and eggs and suchlike their grandma cooks them. (Um, have I mentioned how much it totally works out to live next door to her? It is really, really working out.)
Anyway some time after I get up and shower and pull my shit together, Phoenix cleans her room and I look around for my son while I make tea. I’m not too serious about finding him, as every day I’m half-resigned to the half-private and independent lives the kids often lead during the day. My mom comes over. She’d put out an artificial white Christmas tree on the corner with a “FREE” sign, and looked out the window an hour later to find it gone. All-pleased like she struts over for coffee, to discover the tree on my porch. Delivered by a very satisfied young man in his little suit jacket, I should say. We’re deciding if we’re keeping it, or putting it back on the corner. Nels admits it’s a little early for Christmas, but perhaps we could store it in the garage.
Nels and Phoenix run about outside mostly, later with friends out of school. And by the way, Nels’ four front teeth were recently lost and the new ones are coming in and it’s about a thousand percent adorable. I’ll have to give him an interview on video, for posterity.
I’m sick today – a sore throat. I’ve been laying low and hand-embroidering while watching the kind of television program I do like to watch, mainly really really grim (well it’s either that, or grim but also slapstick). I took the advice of a friend online and rested, and I’m glad for it now that I’ve discovered I’m sick, and my sister is visiting later in the week. A little red meat for dinner, more tea, and back to handsewing and couch-time with family and friends.
I’m handsewing more. It’s a learning experience. Learning that I suck at handsewing. Whatever. By this “whatever” I mean as follows: I think I am this incredibly bush-league person who gets decent enough at a variety of talents but ever gets very good at any particular thing. This previous sentence is fact; the part that’s interesting is I struggle with accepting my fair-to-middling-ness. I feel guilty that I never reach Awesome. Yet it isn’t even that I’m unwilling or unable to put the time in to do something really well. It’s just that at a certain point I plateau and can’t / don’t push past it. This is Me; this is my life (Trust me – Cooking! Yoga! Blow jobs!). It kind of makes me feel terrible and it kind of makes me laugh.
I am working on being grateful for a body that works and for a life where I can exercise my creativity and impulsivity. These are wonderful forces in my life.
Today I made a sweet-enough little wrist pincushion (recognize the fabric for the applique’d patch?). For stitchers these devices are quite useful (you keep needles and pins handy instead of buried under piles of fabric alongside your work station or wherever else). I’d love to gift this to someone; I am not sure who though. I sized it to fit my rather small wrist (6 1/2″) and slip over my, shall we say, petite (= stubby) hands.
I like up-close pictures of stitching work because the way these pictures look is how I feel when I am sewing and things are going well:
(You can see more delicious up-close photos of this project here at the Flickr tagset.)
My daughter is having intermittent bouts of difficulty. She has grown to be a very good citizen who is also at times very hard on herself. I seem to be a source of her power and a source of her self-hatred. She is alternatively child-like and affectionate to me, then suddenly deeply troubled and wounded. Her hurt surfaces even at times when I have done nothing, in that moment, to hurt her. Nevertheless I know this is my fault because I have not been a gentle parent. I try to wait patiently for her. I try to do better as a parent. It is hard.
I seek to surround myself with humane parents. Because I look around me and see so many who act as if their children are these huge impositions in their life. The kids are messy or “rude” or they crawl into bed at night and they Need To Learn Limits. Etc. Etc. I see so many non-parents act as if children are obtuse, messy, smelly, clumsy, “rude”, scary, sub-human, second-class citizens. It is a grave disservice we do to our children. They are people first and foremost. So many of us are too tiny, pent-up, and fearful to do better by them.
These days my sins are not those of a person who does not recognize the Sacred within my children (and all other people), but rather a person who has a hard time just slowing down to Be. This is the gift my daughter needs. I hope I can give it to her the next time she feels open to requiring me.
* Because that blue/gold bit on the pincushion is a couched stitch! Hahahaha… ha… heh. Eh. Meh.