Yoga, Knitting, Kids

Me: (wrestling with five double pointed needles as I start the sleeve of Lyla's jumper) Arrgh
Q: Do you actually enjoy knitting, Kath? It seems to annoy you and then you never seem particularly happy with the result.
Me: (now even more irritated) That's not true, I love knitting and I think I'm getting quite a bit better and I'm usually pretty happy with what I make.
Q: Ummmm, ok.
Me: Bleurgh!! (throws knitting to one side, stomps off to get a glass of wine)

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Damn triangle pose


The next morning I grumpily drag myself to yoga, I'm stiff and out of shape, I struggle to get into the poses and I have to force myself not to just give up and walk out.

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We have decided to keep Lyla at the Schoolhouse for another year, but we are already thinking about the numerous kindergarten options (first world problems, which kindergarten should we choose!). I've been thinking a lot recently about the philosophy of the Schoolhouse, how they believe children learn best through play.  Their focus is on the process over the product.  The art projects she brings home are huge splodges of colour, scribbles, stories that are a stream of consciousness, everything is completely her.  There are no hand print turkeys, no Thanksgiving work sheets or anything that an adult would ooh and aah over.  It's all about her exploring, discovering, learning so much.  I don't think she has an end result in mind when she is doing these activities, or if she does, it is secondary to just the pure enjoyment of it.  The splashes of paint all over her, the mud squelches between her fingers, the crazy combination of sand and bubbles in the warm North Carolina November rain. 

How sad to lose that, to learn to sit in a little row of chairs, completing worksheets, listening to your teacher talk at you.  Only half an hour of music this week, budget cuts.  Alright, now we are going to paint turkeys, no not like that, use this colour instead.  We force the joy of the process out of our kids and out of ourselves. We are so focused on the end product and when we finally reach it, it is never good enough.  So here's to savouring the small, every day things, to meeting yourself exactly where you are, to enjoying the feel of soft wool in your hands, muscles stretching just a little bit farther, mud pies and little kids remaining little kids for just a bit longer.

Lyla at Four

I can't believe she is four, insert cliche about the inevitable passage of time, children getting older, I'm getting older too, I think I hear a Stevie Nicks song.  Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to write a little something about Lyla at four.  That's sort of the point of this sometimes blog, something to look back on and help us remember. 

I don't have a picture of this but Lyla at four is summed up for me by the image of her riding her bike ahead of us on the pavement around our neighbourhood.  Her helmet is on a bif skew-wiff, her leggings are covered in paint and mud, her calves are adorned with Strawberry Shortcake and Hello Kitty band-aids, and she is zooming off ahead of us, her long, skinny back wobbling from side to side like she's dancing.  We yell, "slow down, you're going to fast, BRAKE!!" and occasionally she listens and comes to a screeching halt, then she's off again, long legs all over the place.

This gives an idea, although it was taken after the cool weather hit, so the bruised legs aren't in view!

She can't get out of the car fast enough at school in the morning, "Morning Miss Tara, today is Annyuee's birthday and I'm going to make decorations for it at school, is Quinn here yet, I have my wellies on coz it's raining..." I don't know if there is ever a point at school when she stops talking.  She is so confident and easy-going. I'm having a hard time deciding if she actually still need a bit of babying sometimes or if I need to be able to still baby her sometimes.  She wolfs down lunch with glassy eyes then says, I think I'm ready for lie down with a podcast and I pick her up and get her warm milk and just hold her for a while. She can be such a little tomboy, racing around with the boys, getting covered in mud and sand, but then still wants to be a sparkly princess for Halloween.

As she gets older, home stops being her only influence, she has school teachers and other kids and yoga teachers and whole host of other people. I have a strong desire to be a "curling" parent, racing out in front of her, clearing away all the bumps.  Letting her navigate those bumps on her own, and giving her the right advice when she asks for it is the hardest thing I've ever done.

Summer Fun

Here's a bit of a photo dump of stuff we've been up to recently.  The end is approaching (drama queen!) much too fast so I'm trying to make every week full of fun stuff.

We went for a walk on our favourite trail.  It's amazing to remember that the first time we went there she was a tiny baby in a Baby Bjorn, she walked the whole thing without a single piggy-back ride for the first time.  We collected pocketfuls of flowers and got a bit rained on but it was a gorgeous day.  Damp and humid and the air smelled green and earthy.  We found wild strawberries too although they didn't taste that great.

We took a last trip to the Meijer Gardens and packed in playdates galore.

She did Bug Camp at the Nature Centre and seemed to really enjoy it.  It was maybe a little bit young for her although she fit the age range.  That year of school has been kind of amazing.  That and the extra year of life maybe! She seems so confident and curious, hope it lasts!

And we added two more fruits to our upick stash, blueberries and raspberries.  Blueberries are such a treat.  They are the only fruit or veg that I won't buy at the supermarket so we really only have them once a year.  Picking that first fat juicy one off the bush is one of my favourite things in life!  The little sour jobs in Meijer bear no resemblance at all.

List o' Summer I

So, how's that summer bucket list going? We've done our first fruit picking, strawberries.  They are lovely this year, a bit late it seems but sweet and juicy and gorgeous.

Isn't that colour just amazing?

We attempted strawberry jam for the third year in a row and still don't have it right, it's lovely but much more like strawberry syrup than jam, not enough pectin?

We made pretty lovely vanilla ice cream, although I don't know how anything with that much cream, eggs and sugar and an entire vanilla bean could be bad.  The custard looked weird and, of course, there were about a thousand steps but it is pretty fantastic.

We made dancing hoops and ankle bells

My video skills are truly excellent

We also went to Bookbug and bought a couple of chapter books.  I wasn't at all sure that she would be into them but she so is! We started off with this

I don't remember it being quite so grim, or maybe I'm just ultra sensitive in trying to shield her from anything vaguely violent or troubling.  I'm not even sure she knows what a gun IS. Anyway, she really loved it.  Real page turning stuff.  Maybe she's just so sick of Brown Bear Brown Bear and the Hungry Caterpillar! So now we are onto Winnie the Pooh which she seems very into as well, despite the archaic language "Pooh strolled a small spinney of larch trees".

Limbo

This winter seemed to go on forever, we were aching for some colour, the first tiny green leaves, blossom even?  Instead the pond remained stubbornly frozen.

There was sickness too, hi preschool!, colds that seemed to run into each other, noses that never stopped dripping, coughs that hacked, and the first tummy bug. Totally unprepared for that one. It turned her into a sleepy, floppy mess, she fell asleep on the couch in the middle of drawing a picture.

We ate pancakes on Pancake Day, although not the sort of pancakes she'd ever had before, thin, with lemon and sugar, what's not to like...

We went to the Meijer Gardens to try to convince ourselves it was spring...

And eventually the first dabs of colour appeared...first in a pair of sparkly shoes

And now summer is really here, the wonderful Michigan summer and our last one.  We don't know how much of it we'll see before we are off to the seasonless land of perpetual sunshine. So we will make the most of every day we have here, whether it's three more weeks or three more months.  So, here's the plan, the list o' summer, I'll take pic and write about every one...maybe.

• Go to the beach
• Pick strawberries
• Build a magnificent sandcastle
• Walk on the trail
• Make perfect, homemade, vanilla ice cream
• Pick blueberries
• Go to Chicago
• Make a summer dress or two
• Make a peach cake
• Make a strawberry pie
• Have a picnic in the back garden
• Paint
• Get ice cream from the ice cream truck
• Have a goodbye party
• Zoo camp
• Nature Center camp
• Eat local fruit and veg from the farmers market
• Eat dinner on the deck
• Make a hat
• Read a chapter book
• Er, that's it...

Snowpocalypsemageddon 2011

We had a bit of snow here a couple of weeks ago.  Kept us housebound for a couple of days for the first time this winter.  The boy from Texas thought he could drive to work (those cornflakes aren't going to make themselves!) before the snow ploughs had been out and got stuck half way down the drive.

Preemptive nostalgia

Lyla (putting on a puppet show): OK, it's the interval now, time to go and get your chocolate ice cream.

Me: Is that what you had with Grandma and Papa when you went to the panto?

Lyla: Yes, and Grandma had vanilla ice cream in a dish and Papa had chocolate.

Such a small, natural, wonderful thing, but a moment I didn't know about, I wasn't there.  She is having more and more of these moments, she'll break into a song I've never heard before (What comes next, Mama?  Search me!), a random child will wave to her in the store (I play with her at Stay and Play).  The strands that bind us are being snipped, the hoops of steel loosened.

She'll have more and more of these joyful moments of play and discovery and friendship.  Real friendship, not play dates set up by her mum so she can chat to a grown up for an hour or two.  And I want to think that all of these moments away from me are joyful but of course they're not.  I'm sure there are (and will be) moments of sadness and struggle.  A scolding from a teacher, no one to offer a friendly hand with a coat, a best friend suddenly not a friend, the wrong kind of dress or words or accent.  My heart breaks thinking of those moments.  I want to be there with her every step of the way, holding her hand, avoiding the bumps.  If I'm constantly by her side then nothing bad can ever happen to her.  Right?  But what would she lose by missing out on those less than happy moments?  For every best friend turning away from her at lunch, there's shrugging it off and giggling with another friend in the playground.  For every struggle with a coat there's a moment of learning, an "aha" moment that's truly self-taught.  The good and the bad are part of life, part of learning and growing up.  I'm trying to raise a grown up, not a three year old. 

But here's what I can control...home.  Home as a sanctuary for all three of us from the days highs and lows.  A place of calm and enveloping love and acceptance.

Dance around the living room music

I'm not known for my impeccable taste in music.  The Spice Girl's 'Viva Forever' can still move me to tears. Um, yeah.  So, taking that into consideration, I LOVE these kids tunes, really love them, dance around the living room with Lyla love them.



Brobee like dem, BANANA!




I won't wear green, it's the colour of a bean...words to live by.

I love this too, but it won't let me embed it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veN2gyCEj8s

Bit sad that now I first hear of the Ting Tings from Yo Gabba Yo Gabba.

Big Adventures

I'm constantly amazed at how adaptable Lyla is during trying times.  I think most kids probably are. Not when you're late for school and trying to get coats and shoes and mittens and backpack and a million other things on, no, then she can be a real pain.  Or if you need a quick stop at the shops and it's getting near lunchtime, no, not then either. She'll whine and moan and kick up a fuss.  But drag her half way across the world in smelly, cramped metal box and she behaves better than most adults.  She smiles at the flight attendants, gets excited over her aeroplane food, spends ages reading the inflight magazine and examining the sick bag.  "But what's it FOR, mummy?"  When we first arrived, we took the train from the airport to mum and dad's and at one point, after staring out the window for a while she asked calmly, is this China? No love, but it used to be.

Look! Everything's tiny!!

We spent a couple of days down in London and got caught up in the bad weather and had to deal with delayed and canceled trains.  A 2 hour journey suddenly became a 5 hour journey involving coaches and rushing from platform to platform as the herd mentality kicked in, PLATFORM TWO NOW!!  And there literally wasn't a cross word spoken. 

This is her arriving in Chicago after an 8 hour flight, getting down with some Santana...

I suppose they might be able to teach us a thing or two about chilling out, going with the flow, being happy.