I aspire to knitting like some of my friends, which is to say I knit, but I don’t produce much: I have successfully completed a tooth fairy bag and a waistband for some wool longies for a four year old. So I am not worthy of this bag, but I love it anyway.
Thanks ~A~.
We were married today, 2557 days ago. He left this morning at 5AM for a four day business trip. That nicely sums up the current state of affairs, from my perspective. He’s gone a lot pre-dawn, and too exhausted most days when he comes home truly to care where he is.
Money is tight–not too tight, but not diamond-jewelry, new-TV giftable either. Not that we celebrate in that manner, anyway. We’re pretty subdued for most of our stuff. 7 years just seemed important to me somehow, like the 7 year itch could be kept more fully at bay if we had a wonderful day together. He’s taking Friday off since he’ll have been gone all week. His boss ragged on him a bit, “Why are you taking Friday off when you hadn’t planned on taking Monday off anyway?” Personally, I think that’s a good question.
I’m trying not to be bummed, but I am. His idea for an anniversary gift is one I love, however. We’re going to plant an apple tree in the front yard this weekend, when he comes back. REALLY sappy line from a bad movie, but one I like for today:
I’d rather fight with you any day, than make love to anyone else
My son at two.
Montessori Mom linked to my site! Wow! Does that mean I am a real homeschooler now?
I am such a geek that this gave me warm, affirmation fuzzies. Kate, you can be sure I will be posting more details now!
Speaking of homeschooling, Schnaygirl and I got to show off the results of our efforts today. I can’t not include her in this because she was truly instumental in getting me off my duff to DO it. It’s awesome, and we’re so happy with it.
We had some of our favorite ladies over for lunch today to send off our beautiful Brazilian goddess on her two month trip home. Alas, I did not finish the earrings, but she did choose the pattern she wanted so I have a direction for her :cough cough: Christmas gift. She got chocolate, then, for her belated birthday.
Some higher power sprinkled good-behaviour dust on all our children, because it was truly an idyllic day, to such extent that the kids actually let the mothers eat at the table AND the sun came out just at coffee and dessert, so we all transitioned nicely to the backyard.
I really enjoyed having them over, and I thought about those who couldn’t make it. Indiegirl took some pictures of the kids, and I’ve included some of the ones of mine here. 
I had breakfast with my Grandmomma today. I was cleaning the kitchen from a particularly slack evening last night, then I made pancakes and orange juice for the kids. We talked the whole time I was doing that, me using the headphones attachment on the phone.
We didn’t really discuss anything of great importance, but I was enjoying hearing her voice as I went about my motherly duties. There is a connection I have with my Grandmother that I have with no one else. My mother was not nurturing, and her mother, once a super Granny as well, was broken into bitterness by life’s long, cruel circumstances. My Grandmomma, however, was only able to bring forth one child. She miscarried another, then never conceived again. She adopted a second son, and the two boys of the same age completed her family. They both married early and quickly produced their first children just three months apart, my cousin and I, both girls. Three grandchildren later, my Grandmomma found herself surrounded at last with the bounty of children she’d always wanted, and she reveled in it.
My grandmother was the blessing-and-curse MIL we all both fear and wish for. Unbelievably attached to her sons, she truly demanded to be informed when they so much as went out to dinner, lest she call and not get an answer at their home. She cried like a baby and held a family intervention when both sons chose not to continue attending her church, and worse, any church at all. Her intrusive entitlements extended to the grandchildren. If she didn’t like the answer she got from a DIL about a health concern, Grandmomma would take the child to her own choice of pedatrician for a second opinion. She’d nag the parents incessantly because their smoking stank up the children’s hair and clothing. She’d give the children soap and shampoo along with their other birthday gifts, if she believed the children were looking particularly disheveled that year.
But as with few others on the planet, I can see her motivations were always well-intentioned and pure: she cared for the child first, come what may. She may have been misguided at times, she may have been wrong at times, but even her daughters-in-law never questioned her heart. As one of those children, I was protected, loved and nurtured with a ferocious intensity. 
She was also the MIL who would babysit on a moment’s notice, even overnight. She never turned anyone away from her table, certainly not her grandchildren, no matter how young the infant. She’d buy clothes and groceries when it just wasn’t going to happen otherwise. She took the grandchildren to church, to restaurants, to plays and on vacations. She’d spend weeks– literally weeks– with the kids at her house, folding us into her life and rhythms.
All I can compare it to is old-world family life, Southern American style. I grew up in a truly multi-generational family of origin, knowing my great-grandmother well (she died when I was a young adult), being known by her mother (who died when I was a toddler), and having personal relationships with each of my Grandmomma’s siblings. We ate together every week, we planned picnics so large they were suited only to parks, we vacationed together, celebrated together, grieved together. My children will not grow up knowing that kind of family community, and it is a loss I fear: the loss of the awareness of belonging to a great web of people, of the safety inherent in such a belonging.
As one of the grandchildren absorbed into their life like that, I remember my grandparents’ kitchen. Grandaddy was the cook, but Grandmomma was the manager. We’d have tea every morning, and the aroma from the steaming cups mingled with the smells coming from grits, oatmeal or pancakes, forming the base of an indelible scent-memory that lasts to this day. Unlike the cold cereal or instant grits my mother served me, I could count on my grandparents providing a hot breakfast, punctuated with milk or orange juice, eggs and sausage, bacon or ham, over which we’d linger for more than an hour sometimes, just chatting and enjoying each other. I was loved, and the fact that it took two hours to complete breakfast proved it to me. As much as I don’t eat it regularly, breakfast remains my favorite meal.
The 70s happened. The children borne to my Grandmomma’s generation became liberated from the ideas and belief systems cherished by their parents.Cousins drifted apart. Love remained, but the sense of remaining physically close with one’s family went by the wayside, quite literally. Children had grown up, bearing children of their own. Within that decade, my parents’ entire marriage began and ended, climaxing in a bitter divorce and a first for the entire family: children chose divorce. Children chose to come out. Children chose to move away. Children married outside their faith, their nationality, their race. The family began to fragment. Still vital and active in their 50s and 60s, my Grandmomma and her sibs kept their Sunday dinners together, and the holiday traditions they began remained strong while my generation enjoyed it’s childhood.
The 80s happened. Unthinkably, three of our nuclear families moved to Virginia. Holiday traditions in Charleston remained, but they were more difficult now that travel was involved. Birthdays became a card and a call. My own mother kept me and my baby sister away from my Grandparents because she didn’t like their opinions about her life, or their perceived influence on me, and I didn’t have birthdays or holidays with them for 7 years. Alone in a neglectful, dysfunctional household, my memories of safety and belonging to something else drove me to freedom. On my 18th birthday, I bicycled the three miles from one grandmother’s house to the other’s, and reclaimed my place in the web. My sister denies ever having a place there. Another fracture, another strand undone.
The 90s happened. All the grandchildren were now grown. We were going to college, making choices of our own. Making families. My great-grandmother lived to meet and approve my future husband. My Grandaddy loved P-daddy, and lived to give us his blessing. By the time we married in 1999, my large, great family was unrecognizable and my Grandaddy was dead. Some of my Grandmomma’s sibs did attend the wedding, but a hurricane kept the Virginians away. When my first daughter was born, no one from the larger family came to visit. In 2004, three weeks after we moved to WA and a week before I delivered my younger son, the last family Christmas Eve Party was celebrated in my father’s house, marking the end of a tradition established by my Grandparents in 1956. Clearly unable to attend, we called from the living room of our rental house.
We have developed our own family traditions, P-daddy and I, from even before we were officially a family. We mindfully set about doing so because we believe in growing this family, our own family, into something larger than it is; something enduring, that will enrich all our lives for much longer than the period during which our children live with us. Those traditions served us well when we unexpectedly moved across country in the dark of winter, far from any family. The children we are privileged to raise know what to expect with the coming of each season, the celebration of each holiday. They inherently know that this is way their world works, and they count on it. Moving oceans meant little to them because the fundamentals of their lives did not change. One Grandma they loved had always lived far away. Now, all Grandmas do. That’s life for them; good life. They know they are loved, and their web stretches far.
For my part, I am not so easily mollified. I miss my Grandmomma. I miss her daily, weekly, on holidays, on birthdays…she shares her May birthday, sometimes with mother’s day, sometimes with our second child. I sorrow that she will never see this home, this life, that P-daddy and I have carved for ourselves. Her leukemia and neuropathy guarantee that. While I acknowledge the reality that in my new role as a mother of some of those children she adores, I came under criticism and scrutiny from her that I resented, distance softens those feelings just as it attenuates our interaction. I don’t just miss my grandparents, I lament that they are not a part of our daily lives. Although we lived on the coast, my Grandaddy loved the mountains, and to this day, I cannot drive through the mountain forests here without exclaiming aloud how much he would love it here.
So this morning, with the scent of pancakes and coffee interwoven with my Grandmomma’s voice, I felt at home. I felt the grounding love for my own children and the tug of the loved child I once was, both informing the adult I now choose to be. And I know my Grandmomma approves. I still have her voice, and she tells me so.
We have our new tent in our possession now. Last month’s sucky camping trip left us yearning for wilderness camping, which isn’t happening any time soon, but we can settle for PARKS with lots of TREES! Woohoo!
Here’s the tent:
We don’t have a school at home, but we do have a schoolroom. We have a dedicated room where we keep most of the supplies, especially the Montessori materials. Yesterday the kids kind of went bonkers and had a 7 hour work period. I couldn’t get them dressed, couldn’t get them outside. Eventually I just started taking pix, because it was what I could do. I didn’t get everything, needless to say, but the big ones were particularly proud of their maps and art work.
Winters here in the PNW are very strange. The temperature is actually pretty mild, and it can fool you into thinking “hey, this isn’t so bad.” Truly it isn’t… you’re not as likely to be shoveling snow and breaking icicles off the car as you would in the same latitudes, anywhere else in the country. However we do get the blustery winter winds, and given our direct proximity to both massive glaciers and the freezing gold Pacific ocean, the wind can and will knock the warmth right out of you.
Add to that the rain: the famous rain of the Northwest that seems to fall all at once during the winter. We’re also far north, compared to the “sunshine days,” as G calls our past in South Carolina, which means the days seem particularly dark for us. Sun up and sun down are very close together, the sun is just not as close to the latitude as we’re accustomed to, and with the marine cloud layer and constant rain you end up with this forecast:
44 degrees, drizzling rain and blue. Every day. For three months.
It does stop the constant raining, long about the middle of January, but it stays blue (but getting brighter every day) until May. Occasionally there are “sunbreaks,” a phenomenon which is just exactly what it sounds like it is. Just as in the South a cloud may stray across the sun, here in the wintry PNW, occasionally the clouds will part, temporarily letting in the sun.
There are extreme benefits to this, but it’s difficult to remember what they are while you’re in the midst of it. Last year, at the end of November we travelled to SC and made certain to call our friends here, as we lazed half naked on the beach. That cruelty will be rewarded this year, as we are without travel plans for this winter.
We had coping mechanisms last year. We would make sure to see our friends for indoor playdates; we visited museums and the human habitrail; as homeschoolers, we had plenty of engrossing, hands-on, at-home activities. My personal favorite coping mechanism was the sunbreak alert. We stayed dressed, because at any given moment someone–whoever notices first– will scream “SUUUUUNN!!!!!!!!” and we all dash outside. We installed natural-spectrum lighting inside.
This year, we are taking steps. Not only is the school room SO IN ORDER that it has never shone this bright, (SCHANNNNNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYGUUURRRRRRRRRLLLL!!!!!!!!) we have turned the garage into a sort of hobby shop / gym. Our large easels are out there (spill pain on the floor? why, go right ahead?), as is the futon and some large muscle equipment. We have a stereo out there and hopefully, that’s going to be the Wiggle Room in lieu of hours of free-roaming, outside activity. Uncle Monkey gave the kids a giant, colored, light-tube tree, so that will be out there adding to the groovy coolness, as will racing stripes on the floor for them to ride their bikes and trikes in dizzying circles.
Here’s to less squirreliness! Think it will work?
