Ordinary Time

I was listening to a Hidden Brain episode one day last week about how our brains become easily accustomed to something. It's why the fifth bite of chocolate cake is just a tiny bit less amazing than the first, why we become sensitized to smells, and why things that feel scary at first become less and less so the more we do them.  One of the really interesting bits of information was that the more a person lies, the easier lying becomes. (Don't worry, I'm not heading into political, let's rehash the debate territory. I just don't have the bandwidth. It's safe to keep reading if you feel the same.) I heard this on the heels of yet another discussion with a parent over their child's lying.  I've mentioned before that lying as a behavior related to past trauma is one of the very last behaviors to be mitigated by connective parenting. I knew that often lying was very much a trust and safety issue; children lie because it is a way to keep themselves safe in si...

We'll do an update today since yesterday we were having fun at the circus.  K. is having a great time at my brother's and has done a lot of things. But he is also working. Today was fence pole installing day.  The weather was cooler the last few days which has been really lovely.  The answer to the age old question of, Why did the chicken cross the road? is... They don't. Chickens don't cross roads, they just continue down the center of them running at top speed while the car behind them creeps s-l-o-w-l-y along behind them.  Java's eye is much better and looks pretty much normal again. (For those who missed my FB post, she got stung on the eyelid last weekend.) L. and G. announced to me the other day that people are really, really weird about identical twins. We bought another fan. The owner's manual I bought that goes to the new van arrived today. I will be happy to learn what some of the buttons mean. I'm really liking the van. I love that I don't hav...

Earlier this week a friend of mine shared a link for a circus that was offering free tickets to families with disabled children. Because we can actually go places again we decided to try it. It has been a very long time since we had taken anyone to a circus .  Circus Vasquez turned out to be great fun and they put on a wonderful show. Even those among us who weren't entirely sure that seeing a circus was what they wanted to do ended up enjoying themselves. We ended up with great seat, just a few rows back from the ring. Being so close made it a whole different experience from being in a huge arena. I also liked having just one ring because I didn't feel as though I was missing things.  I tried to take some pictures of people, but the lighting proved behind my capabilities. This was the best I could get. Since we didn't pay for the tickets, we splurged on some treats. At intermission they had set up a photo opportunity with giant bears and R. really wanted to get her picture...

but H. continues to astound me with her art. She drew these this afternoon. 

We don't go out to eat or order in food all that often. I dislike paying half (or more) of my usual grocery total for one meal. But there are some days..  Days when some people have had a hard afternoon. Days where the house is hot and turning on the stove does not sound like fun. Days when J. won't be home for dinner. Days when you realize that because of the previous car situation some people haven't left the house all that much. Days when the grumpy quotient is rapidly rising.  On those days it's either slog your way through until bedtime or do something to change your trajectory. So I announced that we were going out to eat, loaded everyone up, and headed for Portillo's. We enjoyed the air conditioning in both the car and restaurant and just about everyone chose a chicken sandwich which is this crew's comfort food. Life was looking a little rosier for everyone by the end of our outing. Plus, thể house was cooler since the sun was lower in the horizon by the ...

"Children are designed, by nature, to play and explore on their own, independently of adults. They need freedom in order to develop; without it they suffer. The drive to play freely is a basic, biological drive. Lack of free play may not kill the physical body, as would lack of food, air, or water, but it kills the spirit and stunts mental growth. Free play is the means by which children learn to make friends, overcome their fears, solve their own problems, and general take control of their own lives. It is also the primary means by which children practice and acquire the physical and intellectual skills that are essential for success in the culture in which they are growing. Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or 'quality time' or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways." - Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinc...

All I've done this week, besides sweat, is to start threading the loom for the fabric I'm weaving. This is what the loom will look like for a while.  The back beam folds down so I can sit right in front of the heddles to thread them.  Some of the heddles all threaded: Here is the whole warp. You can see the hundred or so ends that are all threaded on the left and all the ones still left to go.  If the weather cooperates, I should be able to have it threaded by the weekend.  But that's not terribly interesting, so I really wanted to talk about the prevalence of fiber work in fairy tales. It's really very prevalent... the spinning wheels in Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin for example . But I was listening to a podcast this morning while I did the barn about various origins of fiber words. (It was actually more interesting than that description makes it sound.) When they were discussing geographical origins of various words, the name 'gauze' as a fabric name ca...

Yesterday was J.'s and my 33rd anniversary. That seems like kind of a big number. To celebrate we went to a local community theater production of a play called Leading Ladies. It was funny and enjoyable and just the right way to celebrate. We then went to grab a bite to eat, so it made a very late night.  There are a lot of memories from 33+ years together. (Here is my seque to my actual topic.) And sometimes when there are so many memories, it's easy to forget some of them until something triggers one. There is a great episode of Frasier that revolves around a rather ugly candlestick that no one actually likes. But as each person faces the decision to get rid of it, they remember things events that they wouldn't have thought of except for the visual image of the candlestick. In the end, they still don't like it, but they also can't give it away. Which is why, as I was sorting through all the stuff that had come out of the big van and deciding what to move to the sm...

This week hasn't been nearly as productive as last week was, so I'm not sure what I'll have to share. The lack of productivity was not due to the fact that we were back to having six children at home, but because of the heat. Well, the heat and the fact that our air conditioning has stopped working. We're pretty sure that the system is as old as the house which makes it forty years old. And having just had to buy a car and are scrounging enough money to pay the upcoming property taxes, there is absolutely nothing left to fix the air conditioning. It's been a lot of sitting very still. Well, those with a new PS5 have been sitting still while working a controller. It's pretty much been the ideal scenario for having a new gaming system because there really very little else for them to do.  Yesterday, J. drive K. to Iowa for him to stay with my brother for a couple of weeks. K. really likes cows in theory and now he'll get to see if he likes them in reality. Th...

I came across this poem this morning. It seemed to fit well with my post from Tuesday . And I really like Mary Oliver.  Invitation by Mary Oliver Oh do you have time          to linger                    for just a little while                              out of your busy and very important day          for the goldfinches                    that have gathered                              in a field of thistles for a musical battle,          to see who can sing                    the highest note, or the most expressive of mirth,          or the most ten...

Nineteen years ago J. and I had five children and drove a smaller minivan. With three children in car seats, the van was extremely crowded. It was also at this point that we started to seriously think about adoption. Our car situation was one of the problematic things to figure out. There was literally no room for another child.  Enter my mother-in-law. She knew our small van was a tight fit even without another child. Having had full-sized vans for years, she loved them and knew how useful they were. So she and J. went looking at vans. (I don't go car shopping. I bought my first car after college and swore off the activity afterwards.) They found a new 15-passenger van. I was not excited. It was huge! How on earth was I going to navigate that boat through the narrow streets of Evanston and Chicago? It was just too big. And fifteen passengers?? Why did we need so many extra seats?  I was eventually worn down and resigned myself to driving a vehicle just a few feet shorter than...

I came across this phrase as I was doing research for my action research project and I was immediately taken with the phrase. It's so accurate, isn't it, as to how most people feel these days; they are literally starving for time. I'm convinced, though, that what people are actually starving for is unstructured time. Space to pause and think and be instead of do. But there seems to be some unwritten societal rule that time not filled with tasks and activities is wasted. And while we are all so busy not wasting our time, our schedules are making us sick. Here is the whole quote. "Melanie Rudd, who studies consumer psychology at the University of Houston, wanted to know if awe, by focusing our attention on the present moment, might expand our perception of time. Anything that could do this might be a great discovery 'given that there is a huge time famine in many societies in the world,' as she puts it, 'and this has a huge impact on mental and physical healt...

Last week with my very empty calendar and only two children at home, I planned to get a lot done towards actually getting the fabric woven for the dress I want to make. So on Monday, I happily started to measure out the warp I need. I wound the first warp chain and started to panic that I wasn't going to have enough yarn. Since the yarn was a thrift store purchase of unknown provenance, it wasn't as though I could just get more. I decided to leave pause for a bit so my brain could stop panicking.  On Tuesday I decided that it wasn't doing me any good to make contingency plans if I wasn't going to need them. The best course of action was to measure out the next chain. This would be close enough to half that I would have a better sense of how the yarn was holding out. This was a very use choice as I happily discovered that I was going to have enough. By Friday I had wound all 502 ends of a nine foot long warp.  In process on the warping board. Some of the completed warp c...

Everyone has arrived safely home from Guatemala! It sounds as though it was a truly phenomenal trip. Here is a picture that one of the adults sent me of G., L , and K. in Antigua. Y. had decided to go back to the hotel to rest.  Today is B.'s, G.'s, and L.'s birthdays, but we will celebrate tomorrow. Today TM stopped by so we could meet his new puppy! I love other people's puppies. This is Bandit and he is five months old. He is going to be a very big husky. Bandit was particularly interested in the ponies and Buddy has never met another creature he doesn't like. Trying to get Bandit and Aster to sit nicely next to each other for a picture. It was not overly successful. When I was at the thrift store the other day getting children appropriate clothes for the trip, I paused to look for a coffee grinder because I was tired of crushing Vienna's seven pills twice a day. I didn't find a coffee grinder, but I did find a mug warmer! I am so excited. I had one years...

I've always known that at some point it would just be me and J. along with H. and R. at home. I've also always wondered what that was going to actually look like. After this past week, I can tell you that it will look okay and I have crossed it off my list of items to vaguely worry about.  For the first time sin a long time, I have had absolutely nothing on my calendar (which is not great from a business standpoint, but lovely to have all the unscheduled time), so this was kind of an extreme trial. We're we going to get along or was I going to lose my mind. I actually had no idea. We ended up having a lovely week. Both H. and R. can do things such as get themselves dressed and one of H.'s household jobs for the past couple of years has been to get R. breakfast. This meant that I only needed to worry about getting myself up and dressed to get out to the barn because H. and R. we're fine inside. I also made the decision that the mornings needed to be spent in some sor...

H., R., and I did a little more gardening this morning before it got too hot. H. is extremely helpful and capable. She planted a bunch of sweet alyssum under the peonies next to the front walk. (We will finish planting this flat before fall!)  Here is a better view of what she did.  I continued to weed some very overgrown areas. Look! I rescued some iris. There is still a lot more iris in that patch of overgrowth to the left that need to be rescued.  Here are a couple of successes from Monday and Tuesday. The pond is looking as though someone actually lives here  The frogs who live in the pond and probably don't care about landscaping. Then I came across this beautiful flower while weeding Monday. I had completely forgotten I had planted it last year until I unearthed it from the weeds.  If I were filthy rich I would probably hire a gardener. I really do love a well-tended garden, but you would be hard pressed to know that from the current state of mine. 

Did you know that even if you do just an hour of gardening a day, that even by the second day things start to look better? This is probably a known fact to many of you, but it feels a bit revelatory to me. My typical mode of gardening is to do hours at a time to get as much done as possible. This leaves me feeling completely done in so that my motivation to garden more is very low. There always seems to be so much to do that just an hour hardly seems worth the effort. But, I guess that hour is better than nothing which is what happens for weeks after one of my compulsive all day sessions. I sometimes have difficulty finding the middle ground.  But this week, because I want to do something with H. and R., gardening for a bit each morning seemed like a good activity. They both enjoy it and I can usually find ways they can both help. Even with just a couple of hours I'm noticing a difference. There's my life tip for you. Reasonable amounts of time spent on something really do make...

Over the weekend I was given a couple of decade's worth of back issues of Handwoven magazine. I am in heaven! So many patterns, so much information... I haven't even made a dent in really looking through them. This morning I was looking through one as I ate breakfast and came across a short article about dyeing wool with bindweed.  I paused.  Bindweed, check (so much bindweed) Girls who could use some occupation, check Mordanted fiber (what you need to do to fiber you want to dye with natural dyed), check  A completely free day, it looked as though we would be doing some experimenting  H. and R. were all in, both for rescuing the flowers from the bindweed and for the dyeing experiment. We spent two hours weeding this morning and ended up with possibly a lifetime supply of bindweed. (It's amazing how much better a garden looks when you actually spend some time weeding, isn't it?) The afternoon was spent making the dye solution and then dyeing the fiber. Here is what w...

TM and his SO came by this evening with a birthday gift for me. Or, should I say gifts... There are a lot of gorgeous perennials here, including a wisteria, one of my all time favorite plants. I'm so excited. I suppose I need to do a bit of weeding to figure out where they should go. The chicken was very interested.  And I'm happy to report everyone made it safely to Guatamala this afternoon. Also, Emmy is still annoyed I'm keeping the ponies in dry lot jail. 

It's been a very busy two days, so the update is a day late. Yesterday was my birthday. To celebrate, J. and I went on a date to Costco and spent two more hours driving around getting all the last minute things the four leaving for Guatamala needed.  J. and I did get to go out to dinner, so that redeemed the endless errands. Tomorrow K., Y., L. and G. need to be at the airport at 6:00 am. The airport is about an hour away, so it will be a very early morning. Yesterday was also spend spraying clothes because some mosquito borne diseases do not have vaccines. I spent the day demonstration weaving at Fine Line Creative Arts Center for their arts ramble, a type of open house/art fair. As always it was lot of fun. On top of all the errands yesterday, we also had a pony rodeo. When I went out to give the ponies their lunch, I didn't hear them yelling at me which was odd. So I paused to locate them, but... no ponies. There were no ponies because somehow the dry lot gate had opened and...

I've spent all day doing bills and paperwork and such, so staring at a screen to write something just isn't in the cards. So I'll take advantage of the fact that K. was out taking pictures and shared some with me. Here are a couple:

In the ongoing PS5 saga, my pastures were cleaned to such a point where I received a text from a child asking what to do if the wheelbarrow wasn't completely full, but they could find no more poop to pick up. Such was the urgent need to earn money to buy the disc reader. Then yesterday, a package was delivered to our house and I hear Y. telling L. and G. that they had an early birthday present. This announcement was followed by shrieking and then absolute silence. I was baffled. Y. explained to me that K. had bought the disc reader for them for their birthday the day before with his Amazon account. I had no idea this was happening. You can imagine how much of today has been spent. It was extremely generous of K., though as Y. pointed out, he had some games he wanted to play and they were only available on PS5.  Our children working together is more the norm than sibling bickering and fighting, and this has been true since W. and B. we're little. I also know that this seems unus...

I'll tell you up front that I am doing a bait and switch with this blog post. First I'll share a picture of Vienna. I'll even tell you that Vienna is doing extremely well. She even was a little spicy for the farrier yesterday. It shows how much back to normal Vienna is these days. The farrier was so happy that she wanted to cheer for the spicy pony who was giving her a bit of a hard time. I'm so happy to have my little brace pony back to herself. It's been a long 5+ months.  But that's not really what this post is about. I needed to open with a pony picture because I didn't want this to show up in the thumbnail and have someone assume my support of it as a result. I'll say it right out loud. This is wrong. This is child blaming writ large. A more accurate version would say, "Parenting a child with past trauma is constantly filling your child's cup with love, only to watch it bleed out of them and have them say, 'I don't feel loved.'...

First off, I have finished the sampling process for the fabric I plan on weaving. I would show you the finished sample, but in a photograph, it's going to look very similar to what I had already made. It's how it feels that's the difference, and that isn't something that comes through a photograph. Once I get the actual fabric started, I'll show a picture of that. In theory the sampling is the most time consuming part. Weaving the yardage should be fairly straightforward.  What I really want to show you are these little Structo Looms . Aren't they adorable? They were given to me as a gift because I teach young people fiber stuff. It is the perfect way to introduce students to four shaft weaving. The one that is warped is threaded in a very odd way. I may rethread it to a 2/2 twill structure which would be more useful.  Of course this also means I need to find a place in the studio for them to live. With just three years of homeschooling left, I have been slowly ...