amo...amas...amat

You know those mornings when the kiddies wake up with way more energy than you? Well, that’s every morning I guess. But sometimes it’s just so much more apparent than others. That’s what this morning was.

Usually I can count on an episode of Curious George to occupy the Curious Daisy while I make Clementine a bottle, pour myself some iced tea, and, if I’m lucky, gather a thought or two together. This morning Daisy woke up ready to go with zero interest in Georgie. She was bouncy. And talky. And ready to GO! I pulled out a scrap piece of bead board I keep on the sunporch for just this sort of emergency. Sometimes it serves as a stage for tap dancing, today it was a ramp for bouncy ball racing.

We spent a solid hour and a half racing bouncy balls down the ramp. One at a time. Twelve at a time. Up the ramp, down the ramp. Rolling, bouncing. We had a competition in which Daisy would try to bounce the balls into a baby bathtub (a.k.a Conkie’s boat) and I had to bounce them into a tiny bucket. 

It was one of those things that was meant to be a makeshift time-filler, and instead it became the centerpiece of a very fun morning. We apparently woke Gerow up from laughing. The board is tucked back into the sun porch ready to emerge again to save me from an energy filled morning. 

I organized the pantry. Very very exciting day. (Actually two days. I did most of it yesterday, but the final labels were put on today. You can’t count it as complete until it’s properly labeled.) It’s almost as exciting as last year when we first got the pantry, which, in its former life, was a staircase.

So where’s the amo, the I love, in this post? Well, clearly, I love a label maker. I also love…duh duh duh duh (that’s a trumpet)…an over the door shoe hanger thingy. 

Check it.* I’ve got a day’s worth of bottles ready to go. This replaces my old system in which the bottles were flopping around in a cabinet, the nipples were on a dish drainer on the counter, the rings were…somewhere, the liners were likely still in the target bag on the dining room table. Although Daisy managed to get fed even with a system like that, I wasn’t willing to risk it a second time. 

Daisy’s cups, lids, and straws - which had survived a similar system - are above that. At the top are extras of tinfoil, wax paper, and such. 

It’s a beautiful beautiful thing.

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*I’m watching The Wire as I type. Check it just kind of slipped into this blog post, then I realized they had said it on the show. It totally amused me that it slipped into a ‘mom organizing her bottles’ post. 

Driving out to work today, running late and with Clementine in tow (not how I planned to go to work), I was thinking of what I would write about today. It had been a laaaaaaame day. It started with an argument. I took my anger out on our dried up old Christmas tree. I defrocked it successfully, but trying to wrestle it out of the house was catastrophic. My arms were scratched, my fingers sliced up. Judging from the volume of needles on the floor, the fight may have been a draw, but it was hard to see it that way. Though considering I’m still picking the needles out of my bra, I think the Christmas tree may have gotten the last laugh.

Anyway, driving out to work today I was clearly not in a good mood and was trying to think about what in the world I’d write about on a blog that is supposed to be things I love. Then I got to work. I tutor kids who are homeless. My job rocks.

The two girls I was tutoring today are just spectacular little girls. Slow as molasses but sweet and sharp. It takes forever to get them to solve a math problem, but when they finally write that last digit, it’s correct. So tutoring them is less about teaching and more about sitting next to them and poking redirecting them. The younger of the two has less homework so she tends to eventually have some free time. We do math-related games while her sister finishes up. Today she wanted to draw half pictures, in which she drew one side of a picture and I mimicked it on the other side. (Totally involving math/symmetry - I love it when math sneaks into play time.) That’s our masterpiece above. We were both quite proud. 

I love working with these girls, and it really did turn my day around. But there is this other side benefit…

The best pictures that have ever been taken of me are done by the school security check-in camera. Not just today. Every time I go. I have not been feeling so cute these days, so it’s a real ego boost to not only see myself looking pretty on the big screen (okay, ancient computer monitor), but also to have the treasure printed up as a sticker I can wear. Granted it has ident-a-kid plastered all over my face, but that’s okay because it cannot diminish the smoking sort of glamor I’ve got going. 

I’m hesitant to post the picture because it’s not the best one I’ve taken at the Gaines photo booth, but really, how can I not post it after this build up? Usually I smile, but as I saw myself in the monitor, I thought that I really needed to start a collection of these, so I went for a different look. It better reflected my mood anyway.

I told Dave about this and then showed him the picture. He said it looks like a still from a security camera. Obviously he’s not seeing the beauty. Maybe you’re not either. Don’t worry. There will be more. You’ll see the light.

I told Dave that we were going to have our family portraits done at Gaines School from here on out. He was not willing to go there, but did suggest that he and the girls can go to Olan Mills and we’ll photoshop my ident-a-kid portrait into theirs. Marriage is all about compromise. 

I love my job. It’s all about the kids. Really. 

I love what a quick happy-making stop this can be. Today we stopped for a few minutes to watch the sheep eat. When I worked at Whit, it always brightened my day to see the lambs on the way home. And then, of course, there’s Freckles, the Texas Longhorn. 

I didn’t know a lot about Freckles until I did a quick search for his name a few minutes ago. (I had it in my head that his name was Ferdinand, but apparently the famous bull book was over-influencing my thoughts.) Apparently, before he moved to UGA, he had taken part in The Great American Cattle Drive. I also didn’t know that Freckles companion, K.C., is a cloned cow. K.C. apparently stands for kidney cell, that from which she was cloned. 

There’s lots to learn when you forget the name of a bull. 

The UPS guy dropped off a package this evening - always exciting stuff happening around here. It prompted a quick game of Mailman, in which Daisy wrapped things in boxes and delivered them by tricycle to everyone the house. Then we opened the actual package (toner - oooooh). Naturally Daisy was hoping for bubble wrap as the packing material, but instead it was paper. We unrolled it to find it was the width of the living room. Time to break out the markers. 

We collaborated on a rainbow, then traced each other’s hands. I turned Daisy’s hand into a dinosaur. She told me the dinosaur lived in a forest with giant trees, so I drew those. It eats purple spiders and bugs and giant giant purple crabs. We drew each thing as she talked about it. (The giant giant crabs are top right.) She summed up our drawing by telling me it was a story about “Daisy Dinosaur who lives in Rainbow Two Handy Tree Forest and eats spiders and bugs and CRABS! Don’t forget the crabs.”

Let me just start out by saying that I love Daisy’s watercolors. It’s her favorite form of art (besides emptying an entire bottle of glitter onto a speck of glue, but that’s more performance art, I think). So there may be a bit of bragging going on here. 

Usually I’m big into the ‘process over product’ line of thinking when it comes to toddler art. If you don’t spend way too much time reading about toddler art (as I do), that phrase might be unfamiliar. Basically it’s emphasizing that they’re still learning about the materials themselves, and the exploration is more important than the final product. If you’ve ever seen a toddler create a strikingly beautiful, colorful painting - the kind that made you think, “I just have to frame this one!” - and then two seconds later the marvelous colors have morphed into a monochromatic brown because the toddler just had to mix every paint color together, then you have experienced process over product.

Sometimes, if the painting is that good, I switch to the ‘process be damned’ philosophy and deftly switch out the beautiful piece for a blank piece before all the colors are blended. (cont.)

With watercolors, though, I don’t have to worry about process and product and which is more important to experience. I leave Daisy alone and always end up loving the product. Actually, now that I’m typing this, I’m thinking maybe it’s because of process-focused thinking that we got to this point. There were months there were every painting was a mix of colors - but the watercolors themselves blended in such a way that at least the browns were varied, unlike tempera where it was just…so…brown.

Daisy still mixes up the colors in the paint tray (standard Crayola issued watercolors), but lately I’ve noticed she’s combining cool colors with cool, and warm with warm, and as a result there’s a lot less brown going on.*

One big reason I think it has worked all along is because we use watercolor paper here. I think it makes a huge difference in the painting - both the verb and the noun. The painting experience is more satisfying and the colors are more vibrant. It allows for a long work time and can put up with the toddler extremes of water use - none at all or a liter for every brush stroke. (cont.)

For the new year, I’m going to try to have a watercolor station set up for when Daisy gets home from school each day. We need a bit more of a routine than we currently have (which is none) and that should buy me enough time to do whatever it is Clementine or Daisy or Julio needs (or God forbid, myself) as we ease in to the rest of the day.