Today

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motherhood

Today, I was going to celebrate being finished with the coursework with my doctorate with a little rundown of Christmas music, maybe even a Top 10, along with some sweet pics of Little m doing the Nutcracker or a regaling tale of a weird gig that I did last week.

But I won’t. Because today, it doesn’t matter.

Because today, I was having a hard time keeping my temper and found myself getting frustrated with my little people. My beautiful, vibrant, curious, intelligent little people. The same little people that I carried inside of me, that I nursed in the wee hours of the morning, that I hovered over when they were sick, that I watch on the playground equipment, that I marvel over their growing fingers and toes and vocabulary. The same little people that I tucked in to bed tonight, trying to balance the need for one more hug with their droopy eyelids.

My need as well as theirs.

I’m lucky/blessed to have put my children to bed tonight. To know that they are safe, happy and loved. To not know that ache, firsthand, of those parents in Connecticut.

And yet I ache, all the same, as I imagine the unimaginable. There are no words to express this, just prayer.

Peace be upon them.

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Urban Farm Extravaganza! OK, I might be overstating that a little.

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Container, Garden

 

I would love to have a garden. A real, honest-to-goodness vegetable garden like the one my Mum had at our first house. She fed us, my uncle’s family, my grandparents and anybody who strayed over to our house, summer upon summer.

Until we moved. From the Prairies to Ontario and the town/city where we lived was a 15 minutes drive from the vegetable basket of Canada. So, no more veggies (excepting some half-hearted rhubarb and asparagus patches) and in came lots of pretty flowers and shrubbery.

Not that I minded, but I really wasn’t interested. Belly first!

So even though we live in the desert and my thumb is at best a blackish sort of grey, we decided to do a little bit of container gardening. I wanted the Little People to see that food doesn’t randomly and generically appear at some supermarket. Some things were spectacularly successful and some things were spectacular failures.

This was one of the successes:

Who’da thunk that carrots would have worked in a container? Not I.

We also discovered that basil, lemon thyme and swiss chard were desert container garden superstars.

Our flubs? The lettuce got burnt by the sun and was so peppery as to be inedible. Blech. We also had some pollination issues over at our house. Apparently all the bees hang out in the pond at the front of our house and not at the back. Not cool enough for you, eh? Both varieties of tomatoes (cherry and patio sized) grew well and made lots of flowers, those flowers didn’t always bear fruit. Same story with our japanese cucumbers. By the time I found out how to, erm, hand pollinate my cukes and tomatoes, it was kind of too late in the season to do so. That, and I couldn’t stop cackling long enough to find a q-tip.

So we live and learn and know what to do next year. In the mean time, the Little People and I have had fun watching the little buds come up from the soil and decorating the pots with sidewalk chalk and watching it all get drenched in the monsoon rains so we could do it all over again. Regardless of what worked and what didn’t work, it was a good growing season.

 

 

Sometimes I let them paint (but not often).

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Art, Education, Experiment

 

I love art. I love my kids. I love it when my kids do art. Or so the theory goes.

But I hate cleaning up after “art time”. It makes me bonkers. And therefore, I rarely let them paint. Unless it’s outside and I can hose them and the grass off afterwards. And then they can air dry.

We did some painting and print making last August and they did these beautiful greeny-bluey potato prints. Then Little m decided that it would look better to paint the potato before using it to print. Little c decided it was much more fun to just shmear the whole thing around. And As I was watching them, I was kicking myself (yet again) that we don’t do this more often. What better way is there to learn what the color blue is than to have your hand covered in blue paint?

I don’t lack for ideas, but some days (like today) I lack for energy and the impetus to get the ball rolling. I personally believe that kids need free-form art expression for everything from math skills to science experiments to emotional outlets. Being a musician, I want them to sing while they do it, if they like. By art, I also don’t mean just a colouring book or page, although they have their uses.

I’m not a neat freak, but I’ve got to get over this art=mess business. It’s antithetical to my belief system and makes me a crappy mom. Or at least a mom who hates washing towels…