crooked house

Vivi Models

We got this fancy dress at the Giant Baby and Children's Sale last Saturday for 4 bucks and it may very well have been the best 4 bucks we have ever spent. Vivi has worn it pretty much every day since then. This is the selection of jewelry she almost always wears with it. The pony bandaid is a deliberate choice.  She asked me to take pictures of her in this outfit today. The pursed lip thing is something I'm afraid she picked up from me when I look in the mirror.

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This is one of her more artistic shots. When she viewed this photo, she expressed displeasure about the slightly rolled sock so please keep that in mind when judging the styling here.

Anguish.

During the shoot, she inexplicably ran to get a comb, which she matter-of-factly inserted in the keyhole and proceeded to pose next to. During further discussion I gleaned it is supposed to be Alice's key.

Fiddling dramatically with the "key."

Pose with light switch.

Solitude.

A slightly Toulouse Lautrec effect.

Luke Caught His First Fish!

Give a boy a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a boy to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give your sister a fish and freak her out with the glare of its glassy dead eyes. Somebody better teach your mother how to prepare and cook a fish from scratch if you keep this up, kid. (I am quite impressed -- I do not think I have ever caught a fish.)

What I Want for Mother's Day

Custom silhouette charms of the kids. One of my minor obsessions is collecting charms. I've seen the generic silhouette charms around but never really coveted one because, well, they are generic heads. But this artist will make actual silhouettes of your children's heads using photos you submit. Genius. I'm putting in my order right now. Are you reading this, D?

Rite of Spring: Mayflowers

Nicholas Roerich, Kiss to the Earth.

On Sunday we went looking for mayflowers. They're called mayflowers but they come out in April here in Nova Scotia, at the tail end of winter. Their tiny pink and white blossoms, so delicate in comparison to the thick hairy brown stems and broad rusty leaves that protect them, smell heavenly -- sweet, wild and, beyond that, indescribable. Finding them -- and you can only find them in the wild  -- means that it is definitely spring.

Luke, unconvinced that mayflowering would be very exciting, brought his Lego Ninjago sword, which he used to fight off a number of invisible monster skeletons he happened upon. He also explained to me, as I peered into the underbrush looking in vain for tiny pink and white buds, that just the sight of his sword would be sure to terrify any bears we might stumble across, as surely at least a few of their ancestors must have been killed by swords. I nodded and kept looking for mayflowers, wondering how the bears might've communicated this ancestral fear of swords to their children. Sylvie, pushed along in her stroller by her father, bounced over tree roots and babbled about owls.

After some fruitless searching, we came out onto the hiking trail that has been made out of a defunct railway line. Luke and Vivi, who by now had tumbled out of her stroller, started to lag behind and to complain. Grampa's sharp eyes managed to discover three tiny unopened mayflower buds on the side of the trail. "Maybe it's still too early," I said and suggested that we make a quick detour to the nearby town graveyard, to see the children's grandmother's grave, before going on to the playground.

Luke's grandfather's name and birthdate are inscribed to the left of his grandmother's but of course, as Grampa is still with us, there is only a smooth empty space where the date of his death would go. "Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?" said Luke cheerfully, as  he pointed one by one at the blanks where the month, day, and year will be.

Vivi caught sight of a small gravestone carved in the shape of a teddy bear. She ran off toward it. I went after her, to make sure she didn't take any of the flowers away. It was the grave of an 8-month-old baby. "We love you, silly bird" was inscribed along the bottom. Sylvie giggled and stumbled away in her bumble bee boots. I followed her, looking down at my feet, my eyes suddenly filled with sunlight and tears. And there, in the dead brown grass all around the children's grandmother's grave, were dozens of mayflowers.

 

Thank you, Gramma Linda.

Retro First Moment

An iPhone photo of Luke, at his grandfather's house, reading the comics page for the first time. The comics page in an actual newspaper -- we don't subscribe to any physical papers anymore. I taught a lot of kids to read (or at least helped them learn) but  it is so much more amazing when your own child starts to do it, as exciting as when he said his first word or took his first step. It's as if he were the only child in the world clever enough to figure out how to do such a miraculous thing.

Before the Birthday Party

Luke turned seven on Good Friday and we had his party on Saturday in the church hall just up the street from our house. Last year I gave myself barely half an hour to set up so this year we went two hours early. That was a bit too early.

Sylvie insisted on wearing a pair of plastic high heels throughout the entire event. They had clumps of marabou-like fluff on the tops with  purple jewels nested in the middles. For some reason the purple jewels offended her sensibilities so she tore them off, leaving only shreds of fake marabou. Inappropriate summer sun dress also chosen by Vivi herself.

I should've had the sense to take aftermath photos but I was too exhausted at that point. I am afraid the Easter bunny was rather lame this year.

Dreams of Riches

Grampa: Steph, how does it feel to be rich?

Steph (puzzled): What do you mean?

Grampa (laughing): Last night I dreamed you won the lottery.

Steph: Oh wow, I hope your dream comes true. Wouldn't that be nice, Sylvie, if we were all rich?

Sylvie: Grampa have bad dream? Like my dream treasure cat?

Steph: No, honey, Grampa had a good dream. Not a nightmare, like your bad dream about the Cheshire cat [from Alice in Wonderland]. He dreamed we were rich!

Sylvie: That bad dream.

Steph: No, it's a good dream! I was rich and Daddy was rich and Lukie was rich and Vivi was rich!

Sylvie (looks appalled and insulted, screeches at the top of her lungs): I NOT A WITCH! (bursts into tears.)

Sprinkles on Frosting Birthday Party Invitation

While looking for birthday party invitation ideas for Luke's upcoming birthday,  we found this gorgeous hand-lettered assemblage made out of sprinkles on frosting. I also love Rose's "theme." Luke had already decided that his was going to be "Roblox, Ninjas, and Angry Birds."  Don't know if we have the time and the patience to make an invitation like this one, though.

First Day of Spring...

And baby's got a new pair of shoes. Rainbow glitter with bright pink bows.

This Life is In Your Hands. And A Spoiler Alert.

 This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone is a memoir by Melissa Coleman that got a lot of attention last year when it first came out. Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue, were among the first back-to-the-landers of the late 60s and 70s. They moved to a plot of land in rural Maine that adjoined the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing, the couple who wrote Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which is the book credited with inspiring the movement. Eliot and Sue built their own home, grew their own food, and Sue gave birth to two little girls while they did it. It sounds Edenic, particularly for children, and partly, it was.  (This NYT review of the book does a good job of describing the basic events of This Life is In Your Hands and also the sort of see-sawing the book does between the poetry of the family's life, rooted as it was in nature, and an increasing sense of ominousness.)

It's easy for people who have never attempted to be self-sufficient through farming to romanticize the idea (witness the current resurgence of what Emily Matchar calls the New Domesticity, which admittedly doesn't seem as hard-core a movement) but the fact is that it makes for a very hard life. (I am guilty of romanticizing it myself -- in  high school I gave a speech on my version of "the good life" in which I would retreat with my little family to a cabin in the woods, where I would homeschool my children and we would all survive, I guess, on nuts and berries.) Coleman, who is now a nationally recognized expert on organic gardening, actually had a thyroid disorder, largely untreated, that spurred him on to ceaseless physical labour. And if I were going to try to accomplish what he did, I think I'd want one, too. From Melissa Coleman's descriptions of her mother, Sue, it seems to me that she  suffered terribly from post-partum depression and that this was horribly compounded by the relentless, back-breaking work that homesteading actually entailed, not to mention possible malnutrition.

Now here is where the spoiler comes in. Consider yourself warned. One day, busy preparing a feast for some visitors (as if she doesn't have enough to do), Sue shoos Melissa's little sister Heidi, who is around three at the time I think, out of the cabin, telling her to go float her toy boat on the pond. Heidi actually comes back once or twice, begging for attention, and Sue turns her away. You can guess what happened to Heidi down at the pond. She drowned.

Melissa Coleman doesn't blame her mother for this in the book, but she doesn't exactly absolve her, either. After reading it I was left feeling absolutely bereft for the poor woman, whom I was unable to track down via google, hoping to learn she has found some sort of peace. And I must admit I was also left feeling a bit pissed off about Eliot Coleman's (and the Nearings') subsequent success as  folk heroes.

Now of course children die. They die in car accidents in suburbia and of childhood cancers and all kinds of things. But all it takes is a short stroll through a pioneer-era graveyard to see how many children died when there was no choice for anyone but a  "lifestyle" of relentless physical labour in order to put food on the table. A lot of those deaths were from childhood diseases we can now vaccinate against (if we aren't against vaccinating) but many of them were from accidents that happened when parents didn't have the time and the energy to hover over their kids.