Month: April 2008

I used to scrapbook. I had a file box full of scissors, tape, paper, stencils, and pictures. My scrapbook projects were not as elaborate as many that I have seen. I know women who will spend hours crafting a single page. Mostly I just cut the pictures to remove ugly or distracting elements. Then I stuck the pictures onto paper in a fairly attractive arrangement and filled the white spaces with writing. I stopped scrapbooking in 2004 when money was so tight that I couldn’t afford to buy prints from my digital pictures. When I finally had money again, I had no time because we’d started creating and shipping Schlock books. I enjoyed scrapbooking, but I don’t miss it all that much. What I miss is having the book to hand to my kids so that they can read and remember the things our family has done. I miss having our family’s history in a book.

Today I realized that I am more able than ever to put together a book of family history. I have professional quality layout tools. I have my livejournal entries. I have piles of digital photos. I have skill and experience in layout work. I have everything I need to put it all together and print a book through lulu. It is not a small project. Part of me looks at the hours of effort necessary to put a Tayler family book together and I quail at the thought. All that time could be spent on a project that would earn money or recognition. But I think this is a worthy project. The worth of an effort can not always be measured by the amount of money or recognition it garners. This project is a gift to my future self. It is a gift to my children and my grandchildren. They will be glad to have it.

The thing that I need to be careful is to not let this project take over. My priorities are out of order if I neglect my kids in order to put together a scrapbook of things that they have done in the past. Similarly bad is if I neglect the work which pays our bills to work on a chronicle project. So I think this becomes my Sunday afternoon project. On Sundays I can spend an hour or two putting together this book. Over a year’s worth of Sunday afternoons, surely I can compile the previous year’s pictures and blog entries.

I started work on the project today. I’m starting with 2007. I can work my way backward in time from there.

Today was an odd day. I spent all of it feeling like I was wasting time, and yet every time I tried to be productive I was unable to focus. Sometimes I decided that the lack of focus meant that I’m sick, but then I didn’t feel sick enough, so I thought maybe I was just being lazy, but then I’d try to do something and not be able to focus, so I’d decide I must be sick. wash. rinse. repeat.

At least the kids had a good day. The weather was beautiful, so they played outside a lot. This necessitated baths later, but the kids like baths, so it just added to the fun of the day. Just before noon I stopped and counted the number of children in my house and yard. There were fourteen kids from five different families and they were all playing happily together. I love my neighborhood. Some other day one of those other families will end up hosting most of the neighborhood kids for an afternoon. Mostly the kids were outside, so it didn’t feel like too many.

The house didn’t get cleaned, not thoroughly. I meant to clean house. Hopefully I”ll be able to kick myself into gear next week and get the house clean. It is sorely overdue for some scrubbing. Having a clean house makes me feel so much better about everything. I’d like to feel better because we went for another round of “this is never going to work, oh wait I think I’ve fixed it” with the Hold on to Your Horses project. Can I be done with that ride now? All the endless circling is starting to make me feel sick. But each circle does bring us closer to done and I think the next pass will be the point of no return after which we can’t change anything. After that comes the nailbiting wait until we get the advance copies from the printer.

Fortunately I will have many things to keep me busy during that wait. My sister and her kids are coming to visit and then I’ll be taking her up to see the relatives in Idaho. I’ll finally get to see my older sister’s baby (who is probably crawling by now.) I won’t get to see the newest niece. She’ll still be in neonatal intensive care. I wish I could see my sister in Germany too. I’ve been longing to hang out with family lately. We’re also embarking on the final six weeks of school. I’ll have piles of events to attend that I don’t know about yet. And before all of that, I’ve got to get all the layout done on the next Schlock book. We want to put that project to bed asap.

Deep breath. I had a vacationish week while my kids were on Spring break. I think I’m ready to pick up and get back to normal on Monday.

Recently I was pointed at this article: http://www.nysun.com/editorials/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-subway-alone and asked my opinion. The article is from the New York Sun and is an editorial from a woman who took her nine year old to downtown New York and deliberately left him there with money and subway maps so that he could find his own way home. The adventure was by the request of the son who wanted to see if he could do it.

What Lenore Skenazy did is not something I would do, but that is primarily because I am completely unfamiliar with New York. I have no idea what areas are safe and what are not. In my head “New York Subway” is fairly synonymous with “dangerous.” If I was dropped downtown and told to find my own way home, the experience would be highly stressful to me. Because the experience would be frightening for me, I don’t consider it appropriate for one of my kids. I might feel differently about it if I lived in New York and rode the subway regularly. I do agree with the points that Ms. Skenazy makes. My job as a parent is not to wrap my children in a cocoon of safety. My job is to guide their growth.

I find Tomato seedlings a good metaphor for this. Early in the spring I fill little cups with dirt and plant seeds in them. Soon the seeds begin to sprout and grow. In my sunny windowsill, they grow tall very quickly. The first time I grew seedlings I was very pleased by this. Then I planted the seedlings outside and they were all dead within a week. The seedlings had grown and adapted for indoor conditions. They were unprepared for real weather and so they died. Over the course of several years I tried many different plans for growing tomato seedlings. The best way I’ve found to grow tomato seedlings is to start setting them outside during the day as soon as they sprout. This way they can experience the weather and adapt to it. I bring the seedlings inside at night when the temperatures are cold enough to kill or when the weather is too fierce for baby plants to handle. This way I raise up little plants that are prepared to handle the outdoors.

The metaphor is far from perfect and I certainly hope that I do a much better job raising kids than I do raising tomato seedlings. It is my job as a parent to carefully expose my children to things that are hard for them, but which will help them to grow in ways that will be useful later in their lives. With this in mind, I made Kiki and Link mow the lawn today. As they struggled to push the heavy mower, I knew that the struggle will make them stronger and better able to handle other challenges in the future. And when they were done they could look around the yard with a sense of accomplishment. I saw how straight and tall they stood. They felt good knowing that they had really contributed to our household. Nothing builds self confidence better than completing a truly difficult task. Hopefully when they are faced with a difficult task in the future, Link and Kiki will say “well, if I can mow a lawn I can certainly do that.”

Each time I take my kids to the zoo, I eye the zoo memberships and contemplate buying one. Then I remember that we go to the zoo about once every two years, so the extra expense doesn’t seem worth it. But I got thinking, would we go to the zoo more often if it did not cost so much money each time we went? I think the answer is yes, we’d go more often. The only way to answer the question for sure is by performing an empirical test. So I bought a zoo membership for our family and one guest.

Today was our first trip to the zoo using the new pass. I like it already. We did not have to stand in line for tickets to get in, we just flashed the card and away we went. I even got to bring Janci as my one guest. The card also got us a discount on the train ride tickets. It was all so easy and I started picturing myself doing individual mommy/child visits to the zoo. If the zoo becomes a regular outing rather than a major event, then that sort of thing becomes possible. I could do birthday trips to the zoo where the birthday child brings a friend. In a couple of weeks my sister is coming to visit. It would be fun to take Patches and her two young kids to the zoo while the other kids are in school. I definitely want to take the kids up several times this summer. It will be good to have outings since we’re not planning any big family trips. I even picture myself ditching all the kids and going to the zoo by myself so that I can follow my own relaxed agenda rather than working crowd control.

The first hour of our zoo visit was a mad dash from exhibit to exhibit. It was hard to shake the “we must hurry to see everything” mentality. Also driving the hurry was the mesh of conflicting agendas. Kiki would have been happy to stay by the elephants, but Gleek wanted to see the mountain lions, and Link wanted to see the monkeys. The penguins broke the mad dash. Everyone was happy to stand and watch the penguins for a long time. That was where we had lunch. I think Kiki liked the wolves best. Gleek loved the red panda. Patches was enthralled by the turtles, it was the one animal he dragged me over to make sure I saw. Link liked all the animals, but even better he loved tracking our progress and path on the map. Everyone liked the train ride and the playground.

Like most busy days, a lot of the trip blurs together. A few things do stand out. We got an impressively close look at the visiting albino crocodile. Patches has crossed that invisible line after which boys are no longer willing to walk with their mothers into the women’s restroom. He was very pleased with his solo trip into the wilds of the Men’s Room. I think my favorite place in the zoo is the small animal house. There is such a variety of creatures packed into a small space and I can get a really close look at them. Or rather I could get a close look if I weren’t so busy keeping track of excited children. They really did very well at staying together. Even Gleek quelled her enthusiasm enough to bounce in place while she waited for us to catch up. Although sometimes she was the one lagging behind because she was determined to look at every single thing in the zoo.

It was fun. We are all tired and a little bit sunburned. Now I just need to weather the cranky until bedtime.

It turns out that the day after taking my kids on an outing, I have little desire to do it again. I’ve been dragging all day. Combine that with stormy weather and our big activity for today is going to be watching a movie. I did take the three younger kids with me to the grocery store. Perhaps I can count that as an outing.

In other news my sister-in-law’s surprise pregnancy has become a surprise early birth. Babygirl is 10 weeks early. They’ve only known they were pregnant for about two months. So far things are going as well as can be expected, but Babygirl will have to spend the next two months in the hospital. All of that on top of the fact that they’re moving by the end of this month. I’m trying to figure out if there is any way I can help from three hours away.

At least I got some layout work done on Teraport Wars today. We’re inching ever closer to being done with that book. This is important because we’re also inching ever closer to running out of money.

And now I need to get up and do some of the housework that I’ve been walking past all day.

I stood on my porch with tears in my eyes as I watched Link fumble his feet on the pedals and wobble his way down the cul de sac. He was riding a two wheel bike, completely unaided, and enjoying it. Being able to ride a two wheeled bike is a rite of passage. It transforms a little kid into a bigger kid. It is a passage that has eluded Link when all his peers were zooming on their bikes and doing tricks. It was a measurable thing that he could not do and his friends could. He has possessed all the necessary physical skills for two years, but he was afraid. Because he was afraid, he didn’t try enough to get comfortable. Many times I would insist that he try to ride his bike. I would run along, coaxing, encouraging. But the drive to learn was not there in him, and so the efforts failed. Today Link climbed on a bike and just went. He was peddling and wobbly within five minutes. Within 30 minutes he was zooming up and down the cul de sac just like he’d been doing it forever. He spent half the day on that bike and loved every minute. And my eyes watered with joy at his achievement. He did it all himself.

There was no school today. It is Spring break, so the kids are on vacation. I am too. I have plans for outings each day this week. Today we went to a park and to Arctic Circle for for ice cream. In the four days remaining we’ll go swimming, roller skating, to a park with a museum, and to the zoo. The specific days will be dependent upon the weather. In return for this stream of joyful activities, the kids are being asked to do some extra work. Today we did a backyard clean up. We’ll also be doing spring cleaning indoors. It is like a taste of summer. But it is only a taste, because one week from today we’ll have to go back to school for six more weeks.

Spring break has begun. For the next week my kids will be home all day every day. This significantly changes the rhythm of things around my house. I’m planning to treat the time as a semi-vacation for me. I’ll be taking the kids on outings to get them out of the house. Otherwise we’ll all end up squabbling and grouchy in very short order. It looks like we might even have nice weather for most of it. Yay.

The following is a list of the things I have done/ will do to lay out Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars. The list makes the process look neat and orderly. It isn’t. In reality, multiple steps were all mixed up together as I did parts of step 2 at the same time as step 4 or something like that. (It seemed smart at the time.) This list also makes it look like I could get it all done in a matter of days. Not so. Most of these steps took several days to accomplish. And then there was all that time I spent tearing my hair out in between steps and during steps as I tried to figure out how to make things work. I wish I’d had this list when I started, but I couldn’t have written it then. Anyway, here it is. …

How I do layout on the Schlock books.Read More »