a lesson in melted wax

Inspired yet again by The Artful Parent, I decided to try to help George a little with his fine motor skills by way of sprinkling, a practice he frequently enjoys, mostly by sprinkling the rice out of his sensory bin onto the dining room floor. I so love all of TAP's "stained glass" activities and felt like our big dining room windows could use a little cheer, since the daylight is getting shorter and considerably less bright. More grey. Pretty, and a welcome change, to be honest, but cheer never hurts. 

We had some old Stockmar beeswax crayons that didn't mind sacrificing themselves for a good cause. If Nathan cared that I (possibly) ruined the parmesan-specific cheese grater, he hasn't said so. 

I had to stop myself from saying spread them out, now, George. Don't lump them all in a pile. Distribute them evenly, for godssakes, or all you'll get is a brown wax lake.

I wanted to say those things. I certainly thought them. I demonstrated my own sprinkling on my own small sheet of wax paper with perhaps a little too much zeal. I couldn't help myself; I'm bossy. I'm a perfectionist. The poor child comes by it honestly when he says with a frown, "But I'm not good at it!" Because I tell him it doesn't matter, that trying is the thing. That everyone is bad at all of it, to start. But I hate it, too, being not good. Alas. There his wax was, in piles. He took a nap and, with the baby in the Ergo, I placed his and mine next to one another between sheets of butcher paper and ironed. 

Mine is on the bottom, his on the top. My confetti, his painter's dropcloth. 

Mine boring, measured, neat. His messy, unpredictable, with bubbles and swirls and colors I didn't grate. Colors, actually, that I said to myself as I grated, I wished we had. An olive green would be nice. A sienna or a plum. Something to more accurately reflect the season. Beautiful.

By contrast, the carefully sprinkled colors on my mine became muted and dull, desaturated as they bled into the milky wax of the paper. I traced and cut triangles and sewed them together to make buntings. I kept the pieces of mine small, but cut George's generously to make a big, bold decoration for our Fall windows. A reminder to me: back off and let the kid do his thing. 

Pardon all the pictures (and the dirty windows), but it was a sight to behold. 

one of those

Some days you need a reminder that your kid is cute and fun, just two after all, and not deliberately making you miserable with the most ridiculous, terrible, clichéd garbage you never thought would be a part of your reality. Let me paint you a little picture. A woman is wearing an outfit cobbled together of things that were left downstairs when the rest of the laundry was taken up to be put away. She has an infant in a carrier on her front, and she is holding a small boy up in front of her. They are in a mall. The small boy is screaming. Is she swinging him, for fun? Is he screaming with delight? Oh no. No, no, no. Also, the baby is crying. 

We're having one of those days. One of those everything-goes-wrong kind of days where you try to turn it around with a trip to the Children's Museum but that doesn't work out either, and you resort to the mall's play area which proves to be your gravest error yet. A day when you beg the universe for a break and instead get a diarrheal cat. 

If you'd have seen me moments prior to the swinging/screaming scene, you'd have caught me calmly saying, over the fussing directly beneath my face, George, I know you're disappointed, but we will walk until Zelda falls asleep and then come back to the play area. Let's find a place to buy a snack. You would've seen me try to quiet the fussing with a quick nurse, then hurriedly corral one boob back into my shirt while I chased after my toddler who had seized a golden opportunity and run off. I was doing pretty well...and then I wasn't.

His priorities are not your priorities, I repeated to myself, as I carried him to the car. It didn't make me any less frustrated. For all the gentle parenting resources I could list, all the redirection and communication tactics I know, sometimes I'm still that lady. The "did you see that lady?" lady. Ach.

So I put him to bed when we got home -- a nap was sorely needed -- and looked at these photos of the art project we did yesterday. An exercise in tape and placement. I asked him: Would you like to make a pond or a tree? I cut out shapes and he put them where he wanted. We taped them on, one by one, together, and with markers he added some eyes to the fish, some bubbles.

The pride on that face. To say he was pleased with himself would be an understatement. I thought because he's not able to draw figures that look like figures yet his finished product would be more abstract, less "correct" about where everything went. But sand was at the bottom, the frog was at the top, and the plant was planted right in the dirt. Go figure.

He's pretty alright, that boy. Even though he tees me right off sometimes. He apologized, by the way. I'm sorry, Mama. Sorry for being a rascal.

I know, I said. Let's just try again. 

outsiders

Our back yard is a major work in progress. We don't own our house, but I've always been a fixer-upper of my living spaces, regardless of whether or not they are technically mine. What matters, as far as I'm concerned, is that we enjoy and really inhabit our home; the walls can return to white when we're ready to leave. 

This summer will be George's first as an appreciator of the outdoors. Last summer he was pretty little and we spent some time outside but the hats' chinstraps were annoying and he'd grown so adept at shoving things into his mouth in a single motion that, when surrounded by grass and pebbles and mulch, Mama and Papa didn't stand a chance in the battle against mouthfuls of nature. This time around, he's more trustworthy on his own and I'm looking forward to watching his sandy hair turn yellower in the sun while we play with the chickens and spray each other instead of watering the garden. I decided he needed some backyard activities, and the obvious choices were a given: sand box, water table. But somewhere I saw a photo of kids playing with an oversized chalkboard and it looked like just the creative outlet to complete our backyard kid oasis. 

It was simple and the materials cheaply bought: $8 for the paint and $6 for the board, plus a bucket and a package of sidewalk chalk from the dollar store, bringing the total to $16. We had the rope and screws, but I suppose if you didn't, it would be another dollar or so. I wanted it to be steady, as our yard isn't the most level surface, so we drilled it into the fence and nailed the rope into the fence behind the chalkboard. 

George is big into putting things away, so half the fun seems to be in choosing a chalk, then putting it back in the bucket and choosing another. He took to it with no direction, which is, to me, the hallmark of a good play space, one that will actually get use. 

Hanging out with the whole family outside this evening was so fun, and made the coming warm months even more exciting. I can't wait until our garden is in full effect, when we can pick dinner from the ground while the baby colors in chalk and the chickens cluck around our feet, pecking for bugs. 

Feel free to stop by; we'll just be chillaxin' out back.