We are watching Swiss Family Robinson. That youngest kid, Frances, bugs the crap out of me. That has nothing to do with anything. Around here today we did not build a multi-terraced awesome tree house, nor did we design a fabulous sun hat out of leaves and flowers. We did feel rather accomplished when we successfully made our own grids and filled in the multiplication facts.
After completing their tables the kids double-checked their numbers with calculators and then made little flash cards with a cool ring of small papers that we bought at MUJI. There was enough of an art element to the whole thing to keep the whining somewhat contained.
A while back I mentioned the project with "multiples" that had to do with our school pictures. Our friend Maria is a brilliant photographer and she not only handled the kids' individual "school" pictures this Fall, but she also agreed to help out with the "class picture." She and her husband (another talented photographer) laboriously created a composite of all the students that are in The Boy and The Girl's class this year...
Sorry. I know that this "Everyman"/anonymous thing gets old at times. I've filtered the heck out of this, so it loses most of its charm. Essentially with the help of wigs, mustaches, a couple of paper masks and some very lame "costume changes" (that's the one thing I would do differently -- we ran out of the apartment without properly thinking through the clothes detail -- we switched some cardigans, and at one point The Sister got down to her tank top to donate her shirt to the cause... anyway...) we positioned the kids over and over on the bleachers at the park (that we had to gain access to by going under a fence), and from all those shots our friends produced this beautiful, brilliant masterpiece. The cute and quirky details/nuances are lost here (again, sorry), but I'm so happy with it I wanted to document that it exists. Missing out on school pictures -- the product and the process -- was actually something that I was quite concerned about when making the decision to go or not go with the scheme. This was so fun (the process and the product) that it stands as a reminder that for everything that is lost, something can be gained.
Tonight at a Cub Scouts awards ceremony I chatted with a couple of moms that I really like from school. Sounds like I'm not missing much. Things are going on in pretty much the same manner by pretty much the same people. It's like when we get in the car to leave the city and drive down streets and past landmarks that we walk by everyday, yet from the car window things seem foreign, the scene seems flat; people are strangely anonymous -- comprising something that we feel little connection with. It's even weird to think that there is an entry point -- that we usually enter the fray and take up space there. Thinking about school feels similarly distant these days. That's not bad or good -- just interesting.
Today The Boy took something flat and made it multi-dimensional.
He used skewers and red thread to make do-not-pass ropes then turned out the lights and led us in the room for the flashlight tour. His voice inflection perfectly mimicked about 80% of the tour guides we've had through the years, but his content wasn't so accurate. Rather than saying that animal hides were used to cover the door he referred it as "animal blubber," and when the light beam hit the papoose he called it a "caboose." The Dad corrected him and without missing a beat Judd the Red Chicken said with a straight face, "As some pointed out it can be called a papoose, but in lesser known tribes it was referred to as different things. Even a cackoose." It sounds kind of funny when I write it (oh, kids just say the darndest things!), but at the time I was like: "Knock it off." Just as Swiss-Family-Frances suffers my disdain, if I'm going on a flashlight tour of the Plains Indians I expect my guide to stick to the facts.
