Just Happy Cleaning Windows

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Both of my children attend a Montessori school, where one of the basic philosophies is that children’s play is valuable work and should be regarded as such.  To this end there are various “practical life” stations in the classroom where the kids have scaled down versions of adult activities, like laundry hanging, dishwashing, and sweeping.  (I’m waiting for the class to have a few more useful ones, such as “cooking dinner” work, “putting self to bed” work, or “zymurgy for toddlers.”) One of the favorites is always “window washing” work.  I’m not sure why this is such a big hit, though I think it’s partly because it’s simply fun to spray a water bottle.  I purchased a set recently from a Montessori supply website, though I could probably have just put the whole thing together with stuff from the dollar store.

My intention was primarily for the girl to use it, but the boy grabbed it and proceeded to wash every window in the house.

The girl got into it, too:

She particularly loved the squeegee, and once when the boy tried to use it, she snatched it back from him and proceeded to whack him on the head repeatedly with the hard plastic side in a fit of rage. This landed her in time out rather quickly.  The boy, to his credit, never cried or lashed out at her, but instead walked over and sat down in front of her.  “It’s okay, sweetie pie,” he said. “I’m your brother and I love you.  Can you say sorry and give me a hug?” They gave each other a hug and promptly returned to window washing, while I got teary-eyed.

On another occasion, the girl picked up a towel and began to wipe off the fridge, completely of her own volition.  Seriously, this must be how they get the school clean.  I wonder if they’re licensed for child labor.  Should I notify the authorities?

She then made the sign for milk, so I handed her a sippy cup thinking she must be thirsty.  She instead proceeded to do this:

See? She realized that the fridge wasn’t actually dirty when she was cleaning it, so she purposefully dripped milk on it and then wiped it off, which gave her a great deal of satisfaction:

The thought process mystifies me–I wish I knew exactly what was going on in that little brain.  Does she need to feel that her work is purposeful? Or did she just want something to wipe off?  I’d like to think that it’s the former, since really, don’t we all want our work to be meaningful?  It reminds me of the Van Morrison song, “Cleaning Windows,” in finding happiness and satisfaction in simple, purposeful work.

Or maybe, sometimes spilling milk is just making a mess for the fun of it.

Embrace!

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There’s a new exhibit titled “Embrace!” at the Denver Art Museum.  They invited artists to install installations and paint paintings throughout the building–directly onto the walls of the museum itself.  Check out the link to the Daniel Libeskind building–I think it’s stunning.  One of the interesting features is that there are no 90 degree angles in the building–the walls all jut out at odd angles to one another, and the pieces in this exhibit all take inspiration from and use that to their advantage.  Come April, these works will be painted over, only to remain in pictures.

The DAM is incredibly kid-friendly and we’ve had memberships since the new building opened.  On weekends during winter and every day during the summer you can check out kid-sized backpacks and art tubes with activities in them.  Some galleries have “I Spy” cards to play with the paintings, and there are interactive games on every floor.  In one work entitled “Bubbloo,”  a  light projector casts bubbles on the floor and kids (and adults, if you can get around the kids) run around to stomp on and pop the bubbles.  The central area of this piece is flanked by large beanbag chairs, and on most days you can lounge on these and watch a chaotic slew of children frantically try to pop all the bubbles first.  Occasionally this leads to a closed-head injury, but hey, it’s all for the sake of art.

I took the boy to see the new exhibit, and it’s really, really cool.  A disclaimer: taking pictures of a fast-moving kid (the boy) in a low-light setting (the museum) and without a flash yields a lot of blurred pictures.  Think of it as a purposeful design element.

In what used to be the gift shop is a piece titled “¿Being Home?” The artist asked immigrants to Denver to say one word that described their experience, and then did this:

Being Home? by Rupprecht Mathies

See all the big words hanging from pegs on racks? Those are huge pillow words that you’re encouraged to play with, and the boy had a ball with them.

Next was a very cool installation “Chamber,” where there’s a big room with projected words and images that flit about you in a dark space, meant to be reminiscent of being inside a fireplace, only with technology instead of organic flames.

Chamber by Charles Sandison

The boy found this to be a bit overwhelming and didn’t want to spend a bunch of time in there.

The DAM  has little stations where you can do art activities.  These change on a regular basis so there’s always something new, and they’re related to a piece nearby.  This time we found an area where there were cut up pieces of cardboard, a hole puncher, brads and twist ties encouraging you to repurpose this found material into art.

You can see a bit of the piece it relates to behind the boy in the pic above, and here’s a larger shot.

Rain Has No Father? by El Anatsui

The artist flattened liquor bottle tops and connected them with small copper rings to create this large undulating form, which the boy said reminded him of the mountains.

After all of this we were both a bit hungry and so went into the atrium that connects the old and new buildings, in which one can buy coffee and snack, which I did.  They have wooden blocks there for kids to play with that mimic the Denver Central Library, which is right outside the window.

Denver Central Library

The boy used this as inspiration for his own library re-creation:

And then a map of his Denver:

Denver Map-click to see captions larger

I have NO idea what “the clock place” is, but that’s what he insisted on.

After this we walked over to the Library, checked out some books and headed home.  We didn’t get to all the pieces in the show, so will have to go back at some point, but I highly recommend going to check it out if you get a chance, and take the kids! It’s been fun to take the boy (and now the girl) to the Museum and watch how their reaction to the art changes as they grow, from just sleeping in the carrier the entire time (philistine!) to playing with the light bubbles to now actually being able to have opinions on which pieces he likes and doesn’t.  And let me tell you–my kids are quite opinionated.

Oceania

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Back in June, I picked up a hank of a lovely blue and green, thick and thin, handpainted yarn at the Estes Park Wool Market. I had always intentioned it for a hat and when the weather turned cooler, it was time to get going.

It was actually tough to find a pattern that worked for the yarn.  Initially I made the Utopia Hat, which looked great until I blocked it, after which it swallowed my head.  I redid it with fewer cast on stitches but screwed up the math and didn’t have an even number of pattern repeats and had to rip that out, too.  I tried the Unoriginal hat, but didn’t really like the pattern and that one would have been too small.  Finally, I found The Cabled Hat of Awesomeness (rav link), and it lived up to its name.

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Yarn: Cloud City Fibres Thick and Thin, 78 yards

Size 11 Needles, CO 72 stitches, one extra pattern repeat

I realize looking at this picture that there is a small bit of schmutz on the second from the left cable.  This is basically how all of my clothes are–there is always some small remnant of child goo attached to it.  If I cared about this, I’d never be able to leave my house.

I was worried that the combination of thick and thin, multicolored yarn and cables would be a bit overwhelming, but I think this really works.  Multicolored yarns can be tough, as they can settle into large blocks of color depending on the pattern.  It was interesting to see how the colors shifted with the number of cast on stitches.  At 96 (with size 8 needles), it looked similar to the one above with hardly any pooling.  When I tried to redo the hat with 66 stitches, it left large blocks of color.  When I tried 60, it basically created stripes. With 72 stitches as pictured above, all the colors mixed together evenly. Here’s a closeup shot (colors are truer in the above pic):

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It was hard, too, to find a good needle size.  The yarn goes from being a super bulky to almost a DK size.  I started with 8s and my hands were cramping up terribly just trying to force it.  I wrote to the people at Cloud City Fibres and they suggested a 13, but the hat looked way too lacy.  I settled on 11s and they worked. (It sort of felt like Goldilocks! “These needles are too big, and these are too small, but these ones are juuuuust right.”)  In some places where there’s a bunching of the thinner yarn, you can see some gaps but it’s not bad.

This also used up a lot less yarn than I thought it would.  To figure out the exact amount, I brought out my trusty kitchen scale.  Weighing the total amount of yarn (287 yards) and then the hat separately, I realized that it only used 78! I’ve got a little over 200 yards left and am trying to decide if I should make matching fingerless mittens or a cowl…

New Toys

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Not for the kids, for me!

I’d been wanting to get a swift and ball winder for some time now, and saw a set on sale recently and bought it.  It’s a metal/plastic Laci’s Swift and ball winder, and while I love having them, I think if I could purchase over I’d spend a bit more and get a wooden swift.  For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, a swift is a contraption on which you put a hank of unwound yarn to keep it untangled while you wind it into a ball.

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Something called a ball winder should be self explanatory, though I bet those among you with baser inner workings could come up with an alternative meaning.  Basically, it rapidly winds up the yarn into a little yarn “cake” from which you can pull your working yarn from the center and work tangle-free without a pesky ball rolling all over the place. Here’s a pic of a triceratops tentatively checking out a finished cake.

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The boy loves helping me with winding, and it’s fun to do together.  I love having a craft that is all my own that the boy (and, hopefully, the girl when she’s a bit older) can share with me.  Sometimes the boy “knits” with me, and it’s really cute.  He’s a bit too young to teach for real yet, but he’ll get the hang of it quickly when he starts.  Or if he starts.

I saw a recent Ravelry post where someone was lamenting the fact that their children did not share in their knitting, and it made me a bit sad.  I mean, I’m completely aware that the kids aren’t going to be into everything I am, but I’d love it if the kids were into this with me.  I think it’s beautiful, creative, and you get such a sense of accomplishment when you finish something tangible and can actually wear it.

More importantly, it’s something unique that the kids and could I do together.  Some parents play sports with their children, some go shooting, I’d love to knit with them.

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When we were all done, we had a nice little pyramid of yarn, all ready to go for a secret project! Can you guess based on the colors? (Hint: they’re NOT the colors of a collegiate sports team)

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Unbelievable

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Today, no one was listening to a word I was saying.  Toys were not getting put away, dishes were not being washed, and thumbs were not coming out of mouths.  I started going on a bit of a rant, when the boy looked at me, fake pouted, and said quite sarcastically, “Ohhh, it’s so hard being mama.”

Little snot.

I wonder wherever he could possibly have learned to speak that way.

Doing It All By Myself

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The girl has become quite the little independent one.  When I drop her off at school, she screams (and I mean SCREAMS) if you try to carry her in instead of letting her walk.  She also insists on carrying her tiffin by herself.  Once I tried to help her by holding her tiffin as she clambered up the step into school.  She promptly sat down and began to wail until I handed her back the lunchbox.  She then placed it neatly on top of the step, struggled a bit to climb up, then picked up her tiffin and continued to toddle along.  This easily adds a good fifteen minutes to drop off in the morning, but there’s no way around it.

It’s pretty cool how capable she is, and rather tough, too, at least for an 18 month old.  Even with a faceplant off the slide, she picks herself right back up again, dusts herself off, and is ready to go:

Doing Things Once…or Twice…or Forever

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I’m a big proponent of letting your children injure themselves.  Wait…that didn’t come out quite right.  What I mean is that when my kids are doing something stupid that could get them hurt, I think sometimes it’s better to let them get hurt and learn a lesson rather then continually telling them to stop doing whatever it is.  This doesn’t apply to things in which mortal injury could befall them–I’m not letting them learn how to cross a street by dropping them in the middle of Speer Boulevard or anything, but for minor infractions it works well.  The central flaw in this amazing parenting technique that I am now sharing with you is that four-year olds have notoriously short memories.

For example, the other night at dinner, the boy was playing around while sitting on his chair and barely sitting on the front corner of it.  I was sick to death of telling him to sit properly, and just waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the boy and the chair go flying in opposite directions.  His plate careened across the table and conveniently landed onto the high chair tray without breaking.  The boy lay prostrate on the hardwood floor, crying.  Eric and I just waited in our chairs for him to get up.

When he finally did, blood was dribbling from his lip and we sort of panicked, scared that he had bitten through his lip.  As it turned out, he hadn’t quite made it that far but it was still a pretty bad cut.

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We got him an ice pack and some ibuprofen, and that made things better.  Of course, at that point the only thing he could eat was ice cream, so ice cream for dinner it was.  While eating his ice cream, the boy slid to the corner of the chair and sat in the EXACT SAME POSITION he was when he first fell.  At this point, I now have an injured child who is rewarded for his actions by getting “I-bee-profen” (which he loves) AND ice cream AND is still engaging in the action that all of this was supposed to prevent!  Yet again, the scoreboard reads: Parents 0, Child 1.

Stay tuned for other innovative parenting techniques and my successes with them.

Girly Girls and Boy-ey Boys

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I wasn’t sure when gender identity is established in kids, but I’d thought it happens pretty young. Turns out that the initial establishment of gender identity happens at 18 to 30 months! While it takes a few more years to fully mature, I was surprised to learn that it begins that early.  I wonder how much of that has to do with how we treat and dress boys and girls differently, even from birth.  I always thought that I could just dress the girl in the boy’s hand-me-downs, and while the overall effect is adorable, you realize exactly how gendered kids’ clothing is from the get-go. Here’s a pic from a recent weekend day. Eric thought she looked like Jeff Tweedy dressed this way. (Of course, Eric sees Jeff Tweedy in everything, in the same way that religious fanatics find images of Jesus in toothpaste splatter.)

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Before I had kids, I assured myself that I would raise children in a open fashion, without making a boy do only “boy things” and vice-versa.  Some of this is ingrained in society and impossible to escape. Look closely at toy advertising–it is rare to see a typically gendered toy (such as a doll) being played with by a boy, or a Lego X-Wing fighter set played with by a girl.  There has been some progress, in that I’ve seen toy kitchens advertised with boys and…well…that’s all I can really come up with.  Disney is not about to use boys to market its “Princess” line.

Still, I think that it is generally more accepted now for girls to do things that have traditionally been the realm of boys, such as sports, whereas it is frowned upon for boys to engage in girl activities, like ballet.  It is interesting that the circle of possibilities has expanded for girls whereas it remains relatively narrow for boys.  Some of this can probably be attributed to feminism and its effects (Girl Power!) and some of it can likely be explained by homophobia.  For instance, the boy is into many things that are  “girly,” like wearing glittery barrettes.  I cannot tell you how many people have told me, only half-jokingly, that I should be “worried” about my son, as if having a gay child would be something dreadful.

For the boy’s birthday, I bought him a dollhouse as he had been asking for.  I found a good deal on a nice wooden house with matching furniture and proudly gave it to him on his birthday.

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He took one sad, disappointed look at me.  I thought he was going to tell me that he didn’t want it because it was for girls.

Instead, he wailed, “But Mommy! It’s not pretty enough!!”

That’s my boy.

Toy Story

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Last week I took the boy to see Toy Story 3D.  Remembering the disaster that was our last movie theatre outing, this time I came armed with yarn to tie the glasses onto his head, banned popcorn, and knew that the terror alert level was low.  (Last time, halfway through the movie, he cried, “I can’t see anything!” Looking through his 3D glasses, they were coated in a thick crust of popcorn butter goo.)  The yarn worked like a charm, and there were no PTSD-inducing scenes. All in all a successful outing this time.

I hadn’t seen Toy Story in years, but largely remembered the story.  Now, I understand that any movie that involves talking and walking toys requires some degree of a suspension of disbelief, but for the most part the film stays true to the rules of the universe it sets up for itself.  In the last scene, Woody and Buzz race to get into the moving van taking their owner to his new house.  This is where Pixar loses me.  I can accept that toys could open the back of a moving van door, I can accept the firecracker taking them through the air to land through a moonroof into the car, but there is one thing I cannot accept.

The back of the moving van is largely empty.

Now, as someone who has moved multiple times and finds it to be a huge pain, as do most people, this is too much disbelief for me to bear.  There is no furniture crammed in, no random garbage bag filled with soft clothes, just boxes stacked up only filling one third of the van.  How could a single mom with two kids and a two story house fit into a ten foot moving van with SPACE LEFT OVER? Or why wouldn’t she have rented a smaller van? Really, Pixar, you couldn’t spring to at least draw the couch in?

Sigh.

We then watched a bit of Toy Story 2 last night at home, which is an even funnier movie, I think.  I loved the other movie references thrown out to adults: the “Jurassic Park” scene, when T.rex is running and you see his image in the side-view mirror, the “Star Wars” story line,  and some others I probably missed.  Then I realized, for the boy it will be the other way around.  When he sees “Star Wars” for the first time, he’ll exclaim, (big intake of air) “It’s just like Buzz and Zurg from Toy Story!!”

And thus does the timeline of cinematographic history go awry.