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Spirit Doll

Oct29

Traditional Akuaba figures

In the summer we started working on spirit dolls at our women’s retreat. I have always wanted to make one in the style of an Akuaba—an African fertility goddess-type figure—however, I felt like it would be quicker to make a different style and so that was the one I began working on in the summer. After letting her languish for months without finishing her, I realized after our fall retreat that I really wanted to make one according to my original vision. So, in two days, I worked feverishly and made this little beauty:

I love her! She’s just what I wanted to make. My boys say she looks like a gingerbread voodoo doll and she kind of does. That’s okay. I know what she really is!

Happy Halloween!

Oct27

This time last year I was entering the third trimester of my pregnancy. It feels almost surprising to me to look back at my pictures and posts from that time. I love having it be my past experience now—it feels great. And, in some ways it seems so far away that it is hard to believe that it was just last year. I’ve reposted several links from old posts to my Talk Birth Facebook page recently because of that feelings—I’m like, remember just LAST YEAR you were PREGNANT??!!

Today was our playgroup Halloween party again and here we are (Lann took the picture so isn’t in this one):

Yes, I have three troll pins on 🙂

When my first son was three, my friend sent him a skeleton sweatshirt that glows in the dark. He wore it for about three years! Now, it has passed on to my younger son and he has been wearing it for a year. So, imagine the delight when we found these cool sweatshirts at KMart this week. I got one for each of them (these glow in the dark too) and I couldn’t resist getting a smaller skeleton sweatshirt for Alaina as well. (Hers doesn’t have the cool hood-mask though.)

Three little skeletons!

American Girl & Nursing

Oct8

I’ve long loved American Girl dolls. While I’ve decided to finally decree “enough” on the full-size dolls, I continue to want to add to my collection of the mini dolls. This year in honor of the 25th anniversary, the company has special edition mini dolls in their holiday dresses. I went back and forth about whether or not I should buy them and finally decided to order a couple as my “reward” for juggling so much this session and making it through to the end! I opened up mini Josefina when my Monday night class ended and when my online class ends tonight, mini Kit will join her 🙂

To relate this post to my overall themes of this blog, I thought I’d mention an experience in the past when reading an American Girl book. In their “history mystery,” Riddle of the Prairie Bride, widowed father of 12 year old Ida Kate sends for a mail order bride. She arrives with her one year old baby and it soon becomes clear that something is amiss. She does not meet her description from her letters, gives inconsistent answers and so forth. Ida Kate investigates, mystery is solved, and true love reigns on the prairie. What’s the connection you may ask? Because, I always keep an eye out for “breastfeeding as normal” content in kids books and I loved that in this mystery the first clue that the prairie bride is not who she says she is is that she didn’t nurse her baby! (And, a one-year-old baby at that! Wow!) The book states, “She feeds him milk from a cup rather than nursing him as mothers do…” (Ida Kate notices the baby patting on the front of the mystery woman’s dress and instead of nursing him, she gets a cup of milk for him). I also liked the use of the word “nurse” instead of “breastfeed.” Cozy, familiar, desirable, and NORMAL. (With the emphasis on the process and not the product as Diane Wiessinger would say.) Of the top of my head, I also remember that in one of the AG short stories–Josefina’s Reward I think—her older sister has to hurry back from what she is doing to “nurse the baby” (who is also over one year old and walks and talks in the book).

(These breastfeeding bits don’t really make up for the bottles sold for Bitty Baby, but anyway.)

Mini Josefina in holiday finery

Holiday mini Kit is still in her box waiting to reward--luckily I have two regular mini Kits (plus one big Kit) to keep me company 😉

Natural Learners

Oct5

As long as I have homeschooling on the brain lately, I want to quickly share some things I had saved in my drafts folder. This will most likely be my last homeschooling post for a while and I’ll return to my usual topics!

Quite some time ago (pre-children), I wrote the following in response to a 2001 Time magazine article about homeschooling that bemoaned both that homeschooled children were “not allowed to have a childhood”  (forced to be miniature adults and grow up too soon) and that they somehow also “miss out on learning ‘real world’ skills” (in school) such as conflict resolution that will benefit them in adulthood. In the article, a strong statement was made that I’ve never forgotten that riding the school bus is a valuable and important part of growing up and imparts irreplaceable life lessons summarily denied to poor, deprived homeschoolers. (Luckily for my social and personal development as a complete human being, I did get to ride a school bus to our local Vacation Bible School each year for a number of years.)

Truly, is there anything inherently valuable about things like riding the school bus? I lived my childhood and it was rich and full in a way that is impossible to create when you spend 8-9 hours per day institutionalized. Why is sitting at a desk, artificially grouped with children all your own age, being spoonfed information, and restricted from developing your own personality and preferences (i.e. everyone must learn algebra), what childhood “should” be? Why do so many adults go through crises as adults that involve having to “find themselves” and develop their “true selves”? I would hypothesize that is because they never got to explore themselves and their identities in childhood, which is actually the ideal time for such growth and development. Government schooling is somehow seen as the better way for children to spend childhood instead of letting children develop, grow, and learn in the actual world in which they will live as adults.

I also had saved a quote about natural learners from the book, Providence, by Daniel Quinn. Quinn is the author best known for his philosophical novel Ishmael, which I read as a young teenager. I remember considering it to be a life changing and fascinating read, but it has been a LONG time since I read it—my primary memory of it is how he challenges the very human conception that we are the “end” result of evolution. That’s it, evolution has finished, we’re here now. Anyway, Providence was less illuminating/interesting. It was primarily an autobiography with an emphasis on how the author developed Ishmael (which went through more than 6 versions over a period of like 13 years) as well as an exploration of his religious development (which includes some time spent in a monastery and ends with animism).

While he was writing his book, he worked in educational publishing and I appreciated his remarks about education:

One of the great, persistent myths of education in our culture is that children become reluctant learners as they grow older. In fact, what they become reluctant about it going to school, where they’re bullied, regimented, bored silly, and very effectively prevented from learning…We know what works for children up to the age where we ship them off to school: Let them be around you, pay attention to them, talk to them, give them access to as much as you can, let them try things, and that’s it. They take care of the rest. You don’t have to strap small children down and teach them to speak, all you have to do is talk to them. You don’t have to give them crawling lessons or walking lessons or running lessons. You don’t have to spend an hour a day showing them how to bang two pots together; they’ll figure that out all by themselves–if you give them access to the pots. Nothing magical happens at the age of five to render this process obsolete or invalid.

Review & Recipe: The Artisanal Kitchen Balsamic Vinegar & Olive Oil

Sep13

I am a long-time fan of balsamic vinegar and so I was excited to try a sample size bottle of the “Full Bodied Authentic Modena Aged Balsamic” offered by The Artisanal Kitchen. It arrived in a super cute little bottle (I’ve also been a sucker for mini-sized versions of things!) along with its companion product, “Extra Virgin Three Olives Olive Oil,” another indispensable part of my kitchen supplies. I decided to make my favorite salad dressing using both samples. I do not follow a specific recipe for the dressing, just make it to taste using:

Ample quantities of balsamic vinegar

Roughly equal portion of olive oil

Splash of lemon juice

Dashes of garlic powder, onion powder, salt & pepper

I then serve myself a generous portion over organic baby mixed greens, home grown sprouts (thanks, Mom!), and some french fried onions (bad!). Sometimes I add some pieces of steak to make it a full meal 🙂

Not all vinegars are created equal, so I was pleased to discover The Artisanal Kitchen Balsamic vinegar was light and fruity in taste. While still possessing the sharp tang that makes a balsamic vinegar SO tasty, the flavor of this one was lighter and sweeter in taste than many others and was delicious. The Three Olives olive oil was also high quality and light in flavor and feel. I heartily enjoyed my salad and will be making more dressing using these products soon.

I also received the following chicken recipe to share:

BBQ chicken topped with caramelized red onions made with The Artisanal Kitchen Aceto Balsamico di Modena

Ingredients:

Instructions:

  1. Put the olive oil and salt in a medium-size frying pan and heat on low. When oil is heated, add sliced red onion to the pan and cook over a low flame for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until onions are caramelized. Next, add The Artisanal Kitchen Balsamico di Modena to the onions and continue to cook on a very low flame, stirring frequently, until the onions have turned a dark brown color. Scrape the balsamic residue off the bottom of the pan, mix with the onions and cook for a few more minutes to allow the remaining balsamic to be absorbed into the onion mixture.
  2. Cook chicken breast on the barbeque and, once done, lightly salt and drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar over the top. Place a few tablespoons of onion mixture on each chicken breast, garnish with a parsley leaf and serve.

—

Disclosure: I received complimentary samples of these products for review purposes.

Being Succulent

Sep12

From the The Bodacious Book of Succulence by SARK:

“We are succulent with our shredded fantasies, our unread books, our misguided perfectionism, our hiding in bed eating rows of cookies, or neurotically running to and away from things. We are succulent just like this. Just the way we are NOW!….”

I like the way this book emphasizes that you are succulent right NOW—you don’t have to do anything special to be it (of course, I still get the “do something and you’ll finally be wonderful” message anyway!).

I had a rough weekend in which I felt overwhelmed by to-dos and “shoulds” and was crabby and snappy at my family and then extremely hard on myself about being crabby and snappy and so on and so forth in an endless spiral of ick. I have known for a long time that I honestly think that if I just read the right book and did the RIGHT thing, I would finally be PERFECT!!!! And, it just sucks when I remember…again!…that I’m not and that it isn’t possible and that the pursuit of doing it all “right,” really ends up making me less than in many respects in the end. I also feel like all the reading I do can mute my own intuition—how can I know what I truly feel and believe, if the words of 5 dozen self-help authors are chasing around inside my brain and each making the “most sense”? (I feel similarly about parenting books—I try so hard to parent the “right” way and wonder if I’ve lost touch with my own sense of what the right way is, by always reading and trying to incorporate other people’s right ways…?) Seriously, there was so much messy should in my brain this weekend I honestly could not distinguish what I really wanted to do from the shoulds—right down to, “I should be having more fun and being a more delightful person.”

P.S. The spellcheck attempted to change, “neurotically” in the quote above to “erotically.” ;-D

Tried to get a family picture of all our succulence—and, fittingly, it turned out kind of blurry ;-D

 

Rainy Wedding

Jul25

Wedding Day, 1998. Cake is a homemade cheesecake also made by Lynn 🙂

Today is our thirteenth wedding anniversary. We planned a lovely outdoor ceremony at Meramec Spring Park and this time thirteen years ago, it was pouring down rain. While we still got married outside (in the dirty old pavilion rather than by the Iron Works as we had imagined), our wedding site was actually evacuated later in the afternoon!

When we returned from our honeymoon in August, there was a copy of a newspaper article in our mailbox. Our family friend, Lynn, had a newspaper column at the time and she’d written this beautiful poem about our wedding day:

Rainy Wedding

by Lynn Saults

We cannot know what will bring perfection.
They had supposed that it would be a day
of exalted blue heights,
a tree-columned cathedral day
in the loftiest, most elegant
sapphire domed summer.

Sun blessing stone,
birds blessing sky
and in the gentle benevolence of that day
the bride and her ribboned maidens
would drift, pale and clear as flowers
toward the welcoming arms of her groom.

To wed in the blue and white
softness of a summer morning
would be perfection.

But the day hung like an iron bell
tolling rain, rain, rain
all down the metalled sky.
The stones stood dark and forbidding
as thunder upon the earth,
and all our tinseled plans
for a bright and delicate day
were washed away in gray cascades
above and below us.

Yet, there was another kind of beauty there:
Small boys slid like silver minnows
in that heavy green light between the trees.
Garlanded little girls yearned
toward the coming of the bride,
tugged at their mothers’ hands,
pulled at their mothers’ hearts
with the brevity of their innocence.
Family and friends gathered
and sheltering, made a chapel
of their bodies and faces and wishes.

There, in the unplanned darkness,
was unlooked for wonder,
joy beyond ornament,
song beyond instruments.

At last the bride came and like a white flame
blazed among her maidens,
in brilliance more stern and starlike
and vastly more magnificent
than the ribbons and confections
we had planned for that day.

She blessed us as she passed,
toward her waiting bridegroom
in the unadorned steadfastness of her love,
and in the wake of that radiance
we turned to one another,
a silent hymn of faces
now wet with more than rain,
having glimpsed in that lambent bride
the flaming sun heart of human love.
Small, fallible, mortal,
we could not have dreamt or designed such a day.

It was Perfection.

——-
I read this poem every year on our anniversary and it makes me cry every time! Before we got married, people would say things in semi-ominous tones like, “just wait. After you get married, everything changes.” We still laugh about this—nothing changed except for that it felt really fun to be married instead of just dating 🙂

I occasionally read articles that say things like, “marriage is lots of hard work” or, “parenting and marriage are both very, very tough.” I’ve truly never felt like our marriage was hard work. And, while I daily feel that parenting is tough and emotionally very complicated, I would never describe my relationship with my husband as “tough” or difficult in any way. I actually feel like he is my oasis of calm, peace, and love in what sometimes feels like lots of chaos. He is steady and even and I always feel as if I can be completely and totally real with him—there is no feeling or thought or experience that is too awful to share with him. He has seen the places where the “meat has been chewed off my bones” and he still says I’m the greatest person in the world. So, while it is fully possibly that being married to ME is tough—I’m pretty intense—being married to him is not. It is gentle and sweet and whole.

After the ceremony and before the rain re-started, we were able to get some pictures in front of the Iron Works after all.

Self-portrait taken on his birthday this year.

Book Review: Ben Behind His Voices

Jul22

Review: Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey From the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope
By Randye Kaye
ISBN: 978-1442210899

Rowman and Littlefield Publishers

Hardcover, 320 pages, $26.95; Kindle, $9.99
http://benbehindhisvoices.com/

Reviewed by Molly Remer

Ben Behind His Voices is a mother’s poignant memoir of her young adult son’s struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. It was instantly engaging and kept my attention throughout. The author, Randye Kaye, is a radio personality and voice actress and the mother of two children. When her oldest child, Ben, is 17 he begins exhibiting increasingly strange, confusing, and disturbing symptoms. After being shuttled through a variety of diagnoses and treatment providers while steadily becoming worse, he is diagnosed at age 21 with schizophrenia. Randye is obviously a devoted parent to Ben and a committed advocate for her son and the book chronicles a roller coaster of experiences with psychiatric hospitalizations, medication challenges, bright spots of hope, relapses, group home placements, and readjustments of expectations. Perhaps most touching are her struggles to accept the “new normal” of her family’s life and to let go of her old expectations and hopes for her son, while still celebrating the caring and worthwhile person he is, albeit one who is coping with a formidable disability.

A particularly nice feature of this book are the textboxes inset throughout containing facts and information for family members of those with mental illnesses. Much of this information is based on Family-to-Family peer support materials from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (Randye becomes a trainer for this program).

Though written about very emotional events, there is a dispassionate quality to the writing that kept me from feeling fully connected to the narrator.

A fascinating character study as well as an exploration of family adaptation and coping skills, Ben Behind His Voices would be a particularly interesting read for students in psychology, social work, or human services as well as anyone who has a family member with a mental illness. As a mother of young sons, Ben Behind His Voices was a difficult book to read—Randye’s thoughts and reflections about her own son as a young boy, made me look at my own little guys with a pang of “what if.”

——-

Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review purposes.

Family Adventures in Polymer Clay

May7

Last time I made new polymer clay sculptures, my boys wanted to join in. They have always liked sculpting things and got into it, making a whole little series of figures each. My older son (7.5) made these little cuties:

Close up of the mom with her baby

My younger son (5), made a whole series of little ball creatures:

Two of them looked like they had another ball stuck on to them and so I said, “oh! Are these holding babies?” He looked a little sheepish and said, “no, it is eating that other one.” LOL! This is classic, classic Z ;-D

Later, he said he’d changed his mind and this one above, “actually IS holding a baby.”

This was my own little series I made at the same time:

Giveaway: Great Gals Book/Journal

Nov17

This giveaway is now closed. The winners were Jodi and enjoybirth!

GREAT GALS: Inspired Ideas for Living a Kick-Ass Life by cartoonist Summer Pierre is a creative and fun combination of journal prompts, journal pages, quick quizzes, inspirational quotes, black and white art, and mini-bios of dozens of amazing women, both past and present. You can use the book for journaling, doodling, exploring your creativity and your thoughts, but you can also use it for a quick dose of women’s wisdom and inspiration. The women profiled range from Cyndi Lauper to Lucille Ball to Emily Dickinson to Ani DiFranco to Julia Child making this book just plain awesome. As the press info notes, this is NOT “your typical inspirational women’s journal”—the goal is empowerment and honest, assertive self-exploration. It would make a fun holiday gift for any woman, young or old, who is interested in living a powerful life.

Luckily for you, I am able to offer TWO copies of Great Gals as a giveaway this month! To enter, just leave a comment telling me which woman in the world—past or present—you find the most inspirational. I will draw winners via random number generator next Wednesday at 9:00. For an extra entry, you can share this giveaway via Facebook and then post a separate comment letting me know you did so.

You can watch a trailer for Great Gals here and you can check in with the author/illustrator via her website.