I miss you

This week has been crappy/busy. Every day filled with eighty-nine OTHER things to do, so that every time I sit down at the computer it's usually nearing midnight and I'm officially mushy headed. I am looking forward to the weekend: to skiing on Sunday, and writing, and posting, and catching up with all of your blogs... what have you been up to this week?

I failed NaBloPoMo

I didn't even mean to. I simply forgot to write yesterday--amidst snow falling and my father-in-law's birthday, and conferences at work and, well, life. Now I'm torn. I can either revert to my pensive ever-two-days posts, or continue to bombard you with daily chatter.

NaBloPoMo is kicking my butt

I have nothing to write about today because anything I actually want to write about would take far longer than the 1.4 minutes I have left to post before bed. The time, where does it go? EVERY DAY is like this. I've been bucking against the idea of waking up earlier in the morning to write--but I just got my Pam deadline today, and I have to have a whole lot more written by Decmeber 2. So. Up early seems to be my only choice. Seriously, I want to know: how do you manage your day? Especially those of you who write--how do you work that time in? How do you make it all happen? I'm feeling kind of crazed about it all right now. I keep wishing I could wake up one morning and have time be the way it was back in high school, or even better, like when I was nine.

Remember that? The way it took forever to get to Saturday? The way the weekend lasted forever? The way an afternoon could be all day. What happened to that? What's with all the business? And holy crap, how is it possibly almost Thanksgiving?

Whimpering

I had a day from hell, that seemed like it would never end. And I have a sore throat and am PMSing. Does whimpering count as a post?

Because it's Monday

And because I can't eek out anything more than this, I'm wondering what you're top 10 favorite foods are. Foods you can't live without. They can be entire dishes--or individual ingredients. Mine: pomogranets & mangos chocolate coffee fresh salad (especially with micro greens, sprouts, etc.) grilled cheese & tomato soup cheddar, manchego, and chevre baklava sushi french toast + maple syrup avocados

(not necessarily in that order)

Runners up: honeycomb dates coconut tom ka (Thai soup) pad Thai bacon omlettes

Pell-mell Tuesdays

Every minute of the day was allocated for something. Gah! Do you ever have days like that? I'm still getting the hang of it, and mostly I suck. If left to my own devices I'd be the haphazard, spontaneous, bohemian Aquarius that I am, to the core. I’d forget to eat, and then have pancakes for dinner; I’d write for hours on end and skip washing my hair; I’d sit in cafés to people watch past 10pm, and loose count swimming laps at the pool. But because I am not left to my own devices, I sometimes struggle to stay afloat of the waves of laundry, the books that need reading, the posts that need writing, the drafts that need revising, the kids that need shoe tying, and the small boy who needs smooching. Not to mention the big one. Who I feel like I've barely seen this week. I hate crossing paths, barely. I hate when we only sink into each other's arms in bed. When the entire day is parceled out.

Not all days are like this, but Tuesdays for some reason often are.

What was your Tuesday like? And also, what would you be like if left to your own devices?

Celebrating right now

For DH’s birthday: I woke up to make pancakes and pick fresh flowers before heading out the door for work. In the evening we went out for dinner at an lovely little Italian place. Good wine. Excellent food: smoked/grilled fresh mozzarella with eggplant; pumpkin ravioli with duck; veal saltimbocca. Bean was a delight. A perfect example of manners and peaceable dining. He noshed on the pumpkin ravioli and daintily pretended the breadsticks were chopsticks. A perfect evening.

DH's birthday comes two days after our anniversary—not our wedding anniversary, but our first-got-together one. Eight years. Pretty cool to know someone for nearly a decade, and to feel like time has flown.

Is this what it feels like forever? Time speeding up exponentially with each rotation of earth around sun? Until decades tumble down upon each other, and thus is a life? Is this really how it goes? Each moment so full, so poignant, so messy and rich and joyous, that it all seems like yesterday. I look at Bean, our shiny-eyed rascal of a boy, and I can’t see a baby in him any more. He’s all little boy. Rough and tumble and sweet. It makes me catch my breath.

We spend so much time looking forward to things, and then, so much time looking back. The moments in between, before the fruit is picked, before the seeds are spit. Sheer present; so hard to hold.

Remembering.

Back to alarm clock wake ups

Back to waking up when the sky is stained pink and the birds are loudest. Back to those first blurry moments of dawn, watching my guys sleep nose to nose like racoons. Back to work. And definitely not into the swing of things yet. I'll resurface soon. Please don't go away.

Stupid deleted post.

Stupid tabbed browser windows. A whole post deleted. Full of good sentences, including cookie crumbles and random ramblings. ARGH!

Makeover

Doing some redecorating, excuse the mess. :)

Monday

In the studio smoke from the raku kiln drifts in through the open windows, where water runs in rivulets, like tiny tributaries or capillaries, trembling with early summer rain. It’s been raining softly off and on all day, and I kind of like the way it drenches things: scrubbing the sidewalks clean and soaking the tilled soil in my garden making it easier to turn over into raised beds.

Tonight I sit at the wheel and try new clay: porcelain. White and supple and so soft beneath my fingers, like milk. It takes so little effort to center, to pull up cylinder after cylinder, bowl after bowl. I make eleven pieces. More than I’ve ever made in a night. Four soup bowls, four tall mugs, two plates, and a vase. I can hardly stop myself. The clay slips with little effort in a circling center between my fingers, and the studio is full of banter. Marven Gaye is on for a while, then Beck. Conversations rises and falls like a flock of pigeons alighting for bread, then lifting off into the sky to settle on the ridgeline of a roof somewhere.

I love throwing pots in the studio while my guy loafs around, glazing pots in the opposite corner, making people laugh. My mind stays close to its center, at the wheel. I don’t veer into worry, or anxiety or tiredness; like gardening, the simple act of using my hands in a directed purposeful way fills my soul with a sense of even-keeled grace I easily loose track of as the day whips by me, all talk and clatter and eager kids.

I come home empty, in a grateful, open way. Ink and gesso on the pages of an old book; clay on my jeans; a bottle of massage oil on the bedside table. The day is done.

Countdown

Monday morning & rain, hard against the windows. EIGHT days left of school. An unbelievable amount of work to accomplish & saying goodbye to my beautiful friend who has been at my house all weekend & who is moving to California. Everything she owns is in her car & I adore the way she giggles and her courage. Mondays sometimes suck. Today I'm not sure which way it will go. Maybe coffee will help. How's you're Monday going? PS--If you post a comment--do so only once. There is something bizarre and whacky going on with my comments and I get like ninezillion of the same one because they don't show up for the commenter right away (I don't know why.)

rollercoaster

Feels like I was on a rollercoaster all weekend. Hanging out with a sick Bean, soaking up sun, spending time with really good friends, feeling moody and then, logically coming down with a fever tonight. I'm trying to get my bearings now, and feeling dizzy both literally and figuratively.

One down, two to go

This is what my desk looks like right now.

I'm submitting a series of three essays. One is finished, and damn good, I think. Two to go, with a bunch of raw material to work from. Harder topics though.

I've been sitting nearly all day, playing chicken with words. When I couldn't stand any more hunching at the computer with the cat on my shoulders (that's where he's taken to lounging. I'll get a pic one of these days) I put on a jacket and went out into the freezing cold. The wind chill was brutal, but the sky was blue and it felt good to be out with my camera, feeling my lungs work and my boots crunch over frozen snow.

Now back to the second essay with some dark orange infused chocolate and perhaps some chai.

Little things

Celebrating little things: potty training (thank you for all the tips!), my first art show (it's up, and my pieces look beautiful!), finally finding a baby sitter, starting a clay class with DH (the past two weeks have been so hopeful, so tenuously joyous, so tender), and really pretty underwear.

Also this: planning to do a little piece of art every single day for a month. It's my uberlist this year: starting small, each month, with something that reminds me to be, to breathe, to grow. Care to join me? Come on, even if you've never made art in your life. I dare you.

Winter longing

The cold has finally arrived. “Come on,” it says, “hunker down.” It sends us snuggling under comforters, or to the couch to curl around a book, sipping green tea from a tall mug, as its long fingers creep in under the lintel. It gathers around the window glass, leaving hooray etchings where condensation lingered not long before. The fields are finally dusted with snow---after weeks of off-kilter weather; and all day, in spite of the sun, wondrous, dizzy snowflakes drifted slowly earthward. Not much accumulated, but enough to feel like winter might really arrive. Enough to exhale and feel like though we’re close, we haven’t pushed off over the brink yet. I put on an extra sweater, and though I my feet are cold, I know that I am lucky.

This year has hurtled by me like the herd of wild horses I once watched be rounded up in the tiny French costal village of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Like them, the days have whirled by, nostrils flaring, eyes large with terror and adrenaline. I was nineteen then, and lithe from a week of rock climbing and sleeping under stars. I remember how I could feel the horses hoof beats reverberating in my heart.

Things were slower then, than now, when instead of measuring my growth by cliffs climbed, or cities traveled, I have the small miracle of a boy who grows each day, and sends love smashing across my heart like that stampede. I look down at my hands and see how a fine filigree of wrinkles are spreading out across my knuckles. I hold my son’s new palm in mine.

Its funny to feel like I’ve been waiting for winter, but somehow that’s the truth. I’ve been waiting for the inevitable stir-crazy introversion that occurs after days and days spent inside looking out. I’ve been waiting for when the time is right gather myself up, and to sift through the collection of artifacts that my soul has become.

Tag

I was tagged by the beautiful Boho to write about 5 things that I haven’t already told you… hmm…I’ve already told you more than is decent to tell, but here goes. 1) I was six when I first kissed a boy.

2) I love drawing free-hand maps of the world. I love to draw the blue water pressing up against the tiny irregular shapes of the islands and continents. Drawing maps reminds me how both miraculous and insignificant we are, in the scope of the cosmos.

3) If I were to entirely reinvent myself and be someone completely other than I am, I’d be a veterinarian or a midwife or both.

4) If I could learn anything right now by osmosis, it would be to do the meringue beautifully.

5) I live each day with intolerable delight and great terror, simultaneously: I grew up somehow believing that I am capable of anything.

You're it. What are five things you haven't told about your self?

(And because they are all attempting NaNoBloPoMo, the following lovelies have no excuse but to write...A writerly rebel, an amazing wannabe, a lovely blog vixen, and a perfect peach)

Grinning

I won a door prize today at the school book fair. And I never win things. Just another good thing that’s come my way recently, as though a corner has been finally turned…and then I realized, all the good stuff started to happen just after the democrats were voted in. A coincidence? I’ll take it.

What matters?

The day of Halloween was warm and clear. Sun filtered through the classroom window at an angle, falling in big rectangles of brightness across the carpet and children’s heads as they read. Later, they used orange and black construction paper to make decorations for the classroom, and exchanged small handmade gifts; like Valentines on Halloween. It was one of the few days since September, where I stopped pushing academics and just let the kids be kids. It felt good to watch them cut and paste paper bats and ghosts, to hear their childish voices rising up with laughter, and to settle down in the reading corner with a picture book while most kids were working, to read with a few kids who are usually acting out. It’s hard to do this in the classroom today, with the No Child Left Behind standards based national “accountability” push.

Earlier and earlier kids are being pushed towards the brittle analytical material that numerals and letters make, and away from the things that matter to small children—imaginative play, paint, singing, learning to be kind to one another. I hate having to make this choice each day—between what I know will nurture their souls, and what I must teach so that they can get by with facility in the world of test scores and top-down administrations.

I often ponder the purpose of public education (as a standards based approach to learning whatever is deemed necessary to learn.) Sometimes it feels so much like a very intentional training program to prepare children to become good followers as adults; to think inside the box, to play fair and square and wait their turn, to not shine any brighter than the next kid over.

Sometimes the push to teach six year olds to type, to write whole pages, to read chapter books seems foolhardy. It can be done of course. But why? Is there any research that shows concrete evidence that early mastery of these basic skills is any type of indicator for later success? I don’t know of any, and my own experience speaks to the contrary. I went to a school (Waldorf) where kindergarten and first graders were given space and time to play, to imagine, to paint big pictures, and to wonder. Where fairy tales, and treehouse building went hand in hand with learning the alphabet and how to count. I didn’t learn to read solidly until third grade. Did that stop me? Did it somehow limit my potential? I think not.

Today, after two nights with only 5 hours of sleep (Bean is either going through a bout of separation anxiety or teething—or both, but he’s been inconsolable often throughout the past two nights), I felt my patience wearing thin. I was trying to teach consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel patterns to a group of kids, while somehow, expecting the rest of the kids to be self directed—and they were not (could not be). So when I felt my patience slipping I decided to take them outside instead of getting angry (it was not their fault, they were trying, the stuff is hard to grasp.)

They burst out the door with sheer abandon. And then I watched them revert from being anxious students to care free children.

They built sand box houses for their stuffed animals; they pretended to be driving a space ship; they pumped high on the swings and squealed with pure joy. They were kids. And so often I forget how little they really are—I forget that they imagine their stuffed kittens to be real; or that a tree can become a space ship—and instead I focus on the fact that they need constant remindings to be sitting still at meetings, to be listening, to be writing neatly, to be following directions.

I want to know tonight—what was your first grade experience like? What did you learn? How do you think it affected who you are today? And how (if you elementary school age kids) is your child’s first grade experience different than yours was?