projects to keep sane...

October 31, 2006


projects to keep sane...

Every year as the leaves begin to fall and the days start to get a little greyer, I go into project mode. Call it a method to sanity. Call it my key to living in Montana during winter. I do like to ski and play in the snow of course, but I would rather just live somewhere else in the winter (Arizona, Mexico, Hawaii...) Summers here do make up for it all (floating the river, hiking, messing around in the garden...) but in the meantime there is the matter of surviving winter unscathed. So, this is the time of year when everything in my house gets painted, beaded, super-cleaned, moved around and basically anything else that crossed my mind during the summer months but I was just too busy to do. Sooo, project season having commenced, here is a picture of my latest. I am painting my kitchen table and it is BRIGHT (or at least the chairs to it are). It shall match my kitchen with it's so-yellow-it-hurts-your-eyes brilliantly. I need help waking up in the morning and the yellow glow helps. ANYWAYS, here is a picture of the as yet unfinished table and chairs. I also included a picture of my last project, a mosaic mirror I made for my super-neices wedding present.

Stylin

I was looking through some old pictures the other day and I found one that was particularly sad... in a funny way. I must have been around 12 in it... it was the year of the Sally Jesse Raphael glasses and I was STYLIN (as were my brother Shaun and cousin Heidi...)
I vow here and now to save my own children from such blunders in fashion... or do I?

Styles come and go so horribly. My mom was famous (at least in conversations started by me around our family table ) for dressing me in little polyester leisure suits when I was a toddler. Now that I am a mother, I realize the amount of time and money that go into dressing your child and a small sad part of me knows that my kids (as teenagers) probably will think I dressed them like deranged little adults too. The thing about the above picture is that I was a preteenager. My mom probably got some giggles from how I was choosing to present myself. In my future it may prove to be some small form of revenge against tweeager attitude... beware my children...

My Girl and the Cheetoh...

my daughter was a very calm baby. i needed to start out that way because honestly that came as quite a suprise to me. the reason for this was my only experience of my offspring up to that point had been her brother who had been a dramatic child from the very beginning (he even showed up three months early, talk about drama!). he has always been someone who is never quite content with the slow pace of life that i prefer. he was so frustrated before he could walk or talk he would spend hours straining to pull himself up and when he fell he'd cry a bit and then do it again. he learned how to talk early. his personality actually was quite a blessing considering his prematurity.
enter kloe. as a baby she was happy as long as i was there holding her. she reached all of her milestones in a relaxed manner as if she knew she would get there someday but right now she would rather just be held. but one day my peace loving baby disappeared. in her place was someone who knew how to rock the house. this new child knew how to entrap her brother into a web if trouble while she came out looking the innocent. this child could produce a whine so pure, so incidious that it would take hours before i realized my stress level was only increasing by the volume of the whine. after all, this was my little baby and i was in denial that she had changed.

now she is three and a half . she has morphed again into only a part-time whiner plus part-time enchantress. she is also a professional fighter, especially with her brother. all toys are worthy of a good fight. it turns out that pinecones, rocks and sticks, no matter how many there are in the world, are also worth fighting over. i also learned this morning that her opponents need not be other children as she picked a fight with the purse i set next to her in the shopping cart. apparently the purse was menacingly trying to touch her and invade her space...

lately she has been having bad dreams at night and afterwards she usually will sleep next to me for ten or fifteen minutes before going back to her own bed. last night she had one and while she was in bed with me i sleepily asked her what her bad dream was about. she informed me that there was a mean cheetoh chasing her and trying to eat her. well that confused me enough to wake fully up. i thought about it, worried about it, wondered what had happened to the child to make her afraid of a cheetoh. i mean really, we never even EAT cheetohs. then it came to me. i asked her, "do you mean a big kitty?" and she said,"yes! a big cheetoh!".... yes... i did understand, a big CHEETAH:-) she is so funny.

Guitars

Today I am sitting here trying to learn how to play a song. It is actually sort of exciting for me because when I first got my guitar this was the song I wanted to learn. It's "Baby, Now That I Found You" by Allison Krauss. I thought it sounded easy enough to play and I loved it. Turns out it was too hard for me. This week I dug out the tabs I had printed out when I first started playing and started trying again. Not only can I play it but I can actually sing to it at the same time (this usually is substancially harder for me). It is exciting to have such a concrete proof of advancement:-)
I grew up in a family where both of my parents played instruments- my dad really likes bluegrass. All of my older siblings could play too, to some degree or another. I just was not interested the whole time I was growing up, I don't know why. The person who switched me around was a lady named Suzanne. She cuts and highlights my hair and once in awhile she would play music for me while the highlights were taking. I was INSPIRED. I love the songs she writes and plays and I knew I really wanted to learn how to play to. I'm so glad too- playing guitar is so calming to me. The only other thing that takes me so out of myself is when I'm taking pictures. When I'm playing all I'm focusing on is my fingers trying to make the music and every situation I'm thinking of could be a potential song if only I could find the right words and notes. When I'm taking pictures I start to look around at everything as a potential picture. That really makes everything look extra beautiful all of a sudden.

The thing that Suzanne taught me was that anyone can be inspiring as long as they really are passionate about what they are doing. And you can choose to keep learning, no matter where you are in life. Also, I can play guitar and take pictures with my kids right by my side and I think (I hope) that maybe that will teach them how learning something new can make you happy.

Waffles

I've been a mother now for 6 years and 1 week. In a way it feels like it has flown by, but of course there are days that feel like they go on forever.

It is hard to remember a time before kids. I wish I could jump back and forth between time and treasure both the time I have with my kids AND the time before them, when I could be more spontaneous and flexible. I don't think I took advantage of that time before. That is one of the very good things about children- they teach you to seize the moment. I make any time I have away count!

Even when there is nothing life shattering going on, if all I can do is go to Barnes and Noble for an hour and drink coffee and look at books I don't intend on buying, that hour counts and is savored.

Another thing that my kids have taught me is that my patience was not as strong as I once thought.

Before kids I thought I was a well of calm- probably because I had shoved out anyone making waves in it. My children not only make waves but they do back flips and splash the water all over. My attention is divided.

One morning a couple of weeks ago my daughter asked me to give her a second waffle. I made it with such care and brought it to her. She took a bite and made a face saying, "Mama this is YUCKY". So unappreciative! Not a patient person, I walked over to her saying,"Kloe, it is F-I-N-E", and I took a big bite to prove it to her. It was horrible. Disgusting. Nauseating...

... turns out the dish soap was right next to the syrup. Quite a humbling moment for me, one of those moments that builds character. And makes you brush your teeth three times in a row.

Anyways, I have at least 15 years left of these fine moments. By the end of it I expect I will be perfect in patience?