teacher marks our height against the wall

First day of 9th Grade for my youngest, just past dawn tomorrow morning.

The older kid? 11th Grade.

we don’t notice any time pass 

but I do….I see the empty nest on the horizon.

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swamped!

Yo! My youngest is in the midst of her last week (ever) at her school. Completing your 8th Grade year is a Big Deal in a Waldorf school. I am swamped with all manner of details and loose ends, not to mention that I went to not one, but two (YES, TWO!!!), poetry readings already this week (only one was an open mic; the other, I sat dutifully and listened).

I want to share so many things with you, dear readers, but it will be a few more days before I can catch my breath.

I leave you with this perennial favorite for any end-of-the-school-year. This is the same as the version I had on my very own 45. Now get out your invisible mic and belt it out with Lulu:

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Thankful Thursday–colored chalks, Marblehead, Chris Smither, new cat (!!!)

I woke up this morning with all good will. Let’s start with that….

The use of color at a Waldorf school. Witness the chalks that the teacher uses to create….well, just that, to create:

My first visit to Marblehead, Massachusetts (yet another wealthy New England town that made its fortune on shipping, ie, trade in spices, cloth, rum, tobacco, sugar cane, and slaves (as if humans are the same as the rest of the things on this list, but that would be another post entirely, wouldn’t it?)

Chris Smither, who we saw in Marblehead on Friday night, at the Me and Thee Coffeehouse

old enough kids (old enough for me not to be in the thick of motherhood, but young enough for me to still be in the thick of motherhood)

8,000 blog hits which I reached TODAY in spite of having a blog which features a. poems (who reads poetry any more? and most of them weren’t even about sex) and b. gratitude, o, cynics, and c. not photos of naked women, or naked women with large breasts, real or silicone-d, or naked women with small breasts, or posts about Justin Bieber, Radiohead, &c.

I just used &c instead of etc. I have never done that in my life. How cool is that?

So, I know that 8,000 is a relatively low number for blog hits and it’s sort of measly, but I like it. In fact, I love it!

I have been blogging for almost a year and I only wanted to throw in the towel once (about 2 weeks ago) for about 3 days and I love that, too

new cat

What’s that twinkly? Yes, you heard right. New cat, who remains as yet unnamed (we think Strider, but eldest daughter protesteth). Here she is, retrieved from the vet that was fostering her for Dakin. She’s a beauty, but was in pretty bad shape from her previous owner and probably from the stress of living in a shelter down in Springfield for 2 months…she had fleas, earmites, nausea. She’s scrawny and has lots of matted fur and a distended belly. She’s around 2 years old and gets up and eats every time I go in the room where she’s staying for now. We love her already

You know what happened by this evening, right? This is what I found out at about 4 pm…

While I’m glad that I called and emailed the White House (oh, yes, so grateful for that), I really want Obama and the entire Democratic party to grow a pair. So I guess I’m not thankful. But trying to stave off ranting by being grateful for all the other stuff.

I better stick to beauty…

and smart, talented men:

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Thankful Thursday–the advent of advent and my amazing daughters (including a long history of my ethno-religious background)

Howdy, loyal friend. I’ve had a rather busy day and a bit of a sad day; this is in part why this post comes quite late. Not my favorite thing, such a late Thankful Thursday.

But, you know, I’ve come up with quite a lengthy post. Can I get a witness?

My youngest daughter made an advent calender for the family this week. It is amazing. She is amazing. I am amazed at her mind and hands. Her abilities to think through projects and to create things of sense and beauty. Both of my girls have amazing abilities. I think part of this comes from their Waldorf education. Maybe some of it can be attributed to them having inherited good brains. Maybe some of it has to do with good parenting. I’m not really sure, but I’ll take it. I think most children are exceptional, so it’s not that mine are necessarily more exceptional, but they are mine, so I notice and I rejoice.

I didn’t grow up with Christmas in a traditional way, mostly because my father was Jewish and my mother, who converted to Judaism but not really (that’s another matter altogether) would not have Christmas in our house out of respect for my father. She had grown up with Christmas as a young girl in Germany, but it was during the war and she had a childhood-from-hell (I kid you not and am not exaggerating in any way, but that’s another story and perhaps not mine to tell). To further boost the eschewing of Christmas, both of my parents were atheists. We did have Hannukah for a few years when I was young, but because my father didn’t give a flying !@#$% about it, it didn’t stick either. My father, in spite of growing up in an Orthodox household in Hungary (maybe it was Reform and I’ve got this wrong), was basically a hands-off religion guy. He just didn’t care about it. I now am so thankful for this, but it wasn’t always easy growing up as the only kid who didn’t have a religion per se. Now where I live, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting* someone who’s at least a quarter Jewish, let alone half-Jewish, let alone a goddamn atheist. So FINALLY, for the last 11 years of my life, I fit in!

We never had a Christmas tree at our house when I was growing up. We did, however, go to Germany when I was 4 and there we had a real German Christmas. I even remember live candles on the tree. And a fish in aspic which I thought was gross and scary.

We also celebrated Christmas at some friends’ in Canada after I was about 7. These became our life-long family friends who are more like cousins and aunts and uncles to me, especially since I came from a very small family and half of my relatives live in Germany. So, our family friends in Canada became family, period, and we did Christmas there for many years. Now isn’t that a kick in the nuts considering all I just said about Christmas?

Anyway, I have a long history of feelings about Christmas, but my children took to it with gusto. My youngest is still very enamored of it.

A few years ago, maybe 5 or 6, I guess we started to get the girls advent calenders. This was foreign territory to me and somewhat distasteful–too Christian or something, unlike certain parts of Christmas which I had been able to enjoy more easily and to separate from anything religious. There are certain things that are clearly pagan and so I could justify allowing and including and enjoying them even as a non-Christian, half-Jew. I think advent calenders aren’t really religious or pagan anyway, but something about them smacks of religion for me. Maybe the sparkly white kids and angels who are usually depicted all over them.

So, my Annie is away for the week at a class field trip to study geometry. She left the advent calender that she made for us so we could open a little tab and see a new picture each day. In spite of a troubled mind and a troubled world, in spite of death and sadness, I am especially happy that I have such amazing and beautiful daughters. And I LOVE the advent calender. SO MUCH.

Here it is. It is simply lovely (not too fancy) and organized, quietly beautiful and elegant, sort of like Annie herself:

I am most impressed by the way she had to measure it all out, line things up and use 2 pieces of paper in the planning and the way she drew a different secret tiny picture for each little window.

This is it, people, this is the satisfaction of being a parent. I feel blessed and filled.

See you soon I hope….g’night!

*An announcement from the management: Don’t tell anyone, but it’s Friday morning–so wrong since this is a Thankful Thursday post. But the management was up thinking about the phrase you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a (insert noun) for a good part of the time she should have been sleeping.

You know what I love? I LOVE folk expressions, not just idiomatic, but old-timey idiomatic phrases rarely heard any more. Heck, they are so rare that I only know about 3 of them. In any case, because I love cats and because I loathe the mistreatment of animals, that phrase is actually quite offensive. But it’s also rich and bewildering AND gets its point across like no other phrase I can think of. Can you help me? Is there another idiomatic turn of the language that accomplishes that meaning? And can you forgive me for using a string of words that is offensive? What if I do it again? Like this: you can’t swing a dead cat in the Pioneer Valley without hitting a massage therapist.  Not only am I half-Jewish, but I’m a massage therapist to boot! I now think I can retire that phrase. God is it offensive! What would the Dakin people think?

 

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Thankful Thursday–boxes, glass heart, cupcakes, and a wee bit of Gerard Butler

First, I love the boxes that I get at Atkins. When I shop at Atkins, I don’t have my groceries bagged; rather, I grab a box from their Wall of Boxes and stick everything in there.

The Wall of Boxes has a lot of cardboard “crates” in which bananas, melons, hmm, that’s all I can think of, bananas and melons, have been shipped.

The Wall of Boxes also has A LOT of wine and beer boxes. These are the boxes to which I gravitate. They don’t have the huge “breathing” holes nor do they have gunky leftover leaves of plants in the bottoms. The beer and wine boxes tend to be the perfect shape for putting underneath my desk to collect the household paper-recycling and to load with clothes and household goods to send off to the Goodwill (soon, soon, I swear). These boxes are also perfect for packing a cupboard’s worth of foodstuffs for several days on the Cape.

But the real reason to love these boxes is the graphics:

This is the other side of the lemons’ box:

You may not be able to read the fine print, but it says that the trademark on the design goes all the way back to 1928. Pretty cool if you ask me but since you didn’t ask and this is my blog, I get to say what’s cool anyway. Queen of Sheba and Lord Grand Poobah, I am.

GIANT 47 POUND ROOSTER:

And this one, over which Violet nearly flipped (“Mom, Mom, can I have it?”) (blurry photo=apology from twinkly):

So that’s all pretty good for Thankful. But there’s more.

Violet was away at camp for 2 weeks and here I will gush. She came home with hair like this:

And she made, among other amazing things, this:

Alternate view, since it takes a minute to “get it:”

It’s an anatomical heart. Made of glass. Unbelievable that kid of ours (again, sorry about the blurriness of the photo)

If that’s not enough, Annie obtained a cupcake-decorating book last week, so she’s been making cupcakes like mad:

That’s about it for today. It’s a lot, isn’t it? All of this saved you from a Thankful Thursday about men in kilts. Maybe next time:

He’s wearing a pink shirt. You know how I feel about a man in a pink shirt, don’t you?

I just realized this is Gerard Butler in an ad campaign which sort of sucks and makes me want to remove the photo. But he’s so beautiful, I’m just gonna leave it. Plus, those beautiful graphics on the shipping crates are all about advertising, too. This brings the post a little bit full circle. Full circle. Another thing for which I am grateful.

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