Some days — heck, most days — all my child wants to do is be read to, all day. I think in part it’s because it’s cozy and close, and she’s avid to understand the world. When we are around other kids, she likes to play with them. But her main favorite activity is to take little adventures through the worlds between two covers.
This is a doodle. Nothing special, nothing skilled. But it’s something, and that’s something.
My sister-in-law and brother love Paris. Bean’s godparents (why isn’t there a better term for atheists? Our other phrase, Emergency Backup Parents, is kind of bulky) recently went and loved it. Another friend also visited Paris a couple years ago. And I? Well, I stayed in an unremarkable hotel on the outskirts of Paris overnight on my 15-countries-in-2-weeks tour back in 1999. I visited Marseilles; toured Fragonard parfumeur; waved at the Eiffel Tower; toured (by bus) the Boulevard de Clichy (past Le Moulin Rouge) and the Arc de Triomphe on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées; breezed past Le Jardin de Tuileries; toured (in person) the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur and Notre Dame; and ate an incredible meal at a forgotten restaurant before riding on through the countryside on the way to whatever country was next. Maybe someday I’ll go back there for a longer visit, with Bean when she is older. I need to update my passport, though.
I started this ATC on a bright green background and used tissue paper to collage. I got stuck along the way, feeling uninspired. I was thinking of fall colors in New York state, and also of how incredibly green and rural it is, and how easily lost one can get in some of these places. Where I live now is dense, urban, and covers a valley floor mostly with concrete. So this ended up being a piece reflecting my own uncertainty in the creative process and my longing for sparsely populated places.
Remembering this, living this — is my meditation practice.
As winter approaches, this is what’s left of autumn.
AEDM is a journey that I take every November, and I am always amazed at what manifests from me. The office is pure chaos, but we can all handle this once a year. As long as everyone is fed and there are clean undies, we’re good.
My very first cat ever was a butterscotch (or marmalade) cat named Kiki. She loved to watch outdoors. We lived on a busy street, so for many years we let her go outside in the back yard during the day on a light chain under a huge pine tree, stocked with food and water, an experience she loved and hated. We also took her camping with us. In her later years, we trusted her to have good sense and stay close, so we began to let her out back unfettered. She loved to sit under the garden ferns, watching and sometimes catching birds. She was a good cat, and she put me on the path to being a cat lover since.
A few weeks ago I experimented with dying card stock with shaving cream and food coloring. It was a thoroughly fun and messy experience. I put a piece of it to use in this drawing.
When we moved here five years ago, I bought a little Meyer lemon tree and put it in a container. Meyer lemons are thought to be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, and they are sweeter and lighter tasting than regular lemons. The tree yielded meagerly until this year. Yesterday I picked two dozen lemons off the tree, and more are coming. Mind you, this tree only stands four feed high!
What to do with all these luscious lemons? I zested and squeezed them, and put it in the freezer. I have a total of three cups of lemon juice, which I am freezing in ice cube trays. There’s a cup of zest. This is all great for baking and cooking. The next task (probably tomorrow), is to roast the little pie pumpkins we bought and puree them. Bean still loves to eat plain pureed pumpkin, and it will be great for pumpkin bread and pie. And again, I freeze it in ice cube trays to make just-right serving sizes for Bean.
I was playing with stencils in this one. I wanted to keep things clean and simple. I was in the mood for green, because I am still waiting for the mountains to turn into that gorgeous winter emerald color, if the rains ever come consistently. The word “listen” came to mind, because there is so much to hear in the natural world. I’m try to bring Bean to as many natural spaces as I can, and give her the chance to move and get messy and hear what the world has to say.
This is my fifth year participating in the monthlong event. I’ve been ambivalent about it this year; every year I feel a butterfly rush in my gut, but this year I’ve waffled about doing it at all. What stymied me is my personal requirement that I create one complete piece every day. AEDM is not structured this way — Leah (the originator of AEDM) particularly encourages rule-breaking — but I don’t want to relinquish this one goal. However, with travel in late November, how will I create and upload daily? Well, I decided to break one rule. Since I will be gone the last 8 days of the month, I’ve spent the last 8 days of October making art for those dates. This way, I will have made art for 30 days and still have work to share for the month.
I decided to work in a very small format — 2.5 x 3.5 inches, also known as Artist Trading Cards or Art In Your Pocket. These mini canvases call for simplicity, and one would think they would be quick to make, but they aren’t for me. Just as writing a short, concise document requires careful thought and editing (and therefore time), working with space constraints presents challenges that take time to work on. As Leah said,
“A lot of people have mentioned being a little nervous, a little jittery. Me too. It happens every year. And I think it’s interesting, but also telling because I think those things that give us a bit of the jitters are also those things that are very important to us. So notice if you feel those jitters and know you’re on the right track. And then go create.”
Without further ado, here’s my first piece.
We went out and covered a few blocks. Bean had fun and got lots of comments about how cute she is. She was a little shy about saying “trick-or-treat” at first but soon got the hang of it. People were very generous! She became obsessed with a giant spider decoration. We had to walk back two blocks to see it a second time; she named it Mike.
I ended up carving a pumpkin after all. Bean named it Wendy because it is winking — Winkie Wendy. Bean is doing much, much better. Her fever broke yesterday. She’s still tired and has a cough, but she is well enough to say she wants to go trick-or-treating, even though I suspect she really doesn’t know what that means. I’m not sure we will go, but if we do, it will be for a very brief outing. She doesn’t really want to wear a costume. Perhaps we’ll don her in one of my blouses (long enough to be a dress) and costume jewelry, and she can go as a “lady.”
She has been waking at 5 and 5:30 a.m., so we’ll see how early she gets up tomorrow after we fall back an hour on the clock! (Please please please sleep; don’t wake up at 4 a.m.!)
Based on her symptoms, Bean’s doctor thinks she has H1N1 (swine) flu. Her temp at 12:30 p.m. was 103.6; an hour ago it was 102.5.
I’m doing my job, being the Mommy bed. I hope Husband and I don’t get sick (at least not at once).
We’d have gotten a flu shot if the damn thing was made available. It turns out that although Santa Clara county is the sixth largest county in California (1.85 million people), we’ve only gotten 14,100 doses. Other smaller counties have gotten twice and triple that much. There are no seasonal flu shots either.
There actually were 79 H1N1 swine flu cases for every lab-confirmed case and about three pandemic flu-related hospitalizations for every reported hospitalization through July 23, according to the new estimates from CDC epidemiologists Carrie Reed, PhD; Lyn Finelli, DrPH; and colleagues.
After July 23, the burgeoning number of flu cases made it necessary to stop counting lab-confirmed cases — which the CDC always warned was ” just the tip of the iceberg” — and to start using mathematical models to track the pandemic.
Bean was better last weekend and on Monday. Then on Tuesday, she screamed and resisted going to music class, which is unusual because she adores going. But she said, “Please no music class,” and I honored that. We went out for a walk around the block but otherwise didn’t go anywhere. Yesterday I kept her home from preschool; she had a cough again, and generally had no energy and was clingy. We stayed inside all day. She got to watch more t.v. than usual. I called the doctor, who suggested that if she’d gotten well for any period of days and now has symptoms, that it’s probably a whole new entity (and not another secondary infection). I’m following the usual protocol. Bean woke at 2 a.m. with a fever of 102, and it’s not varied much. I’m not bothering to change out of my pajamas. We won’t be going anywhere. I feel sad for her when she’s sick.
I harbor a hope that Husband will get home early enough for me to get out to the local yarn store to hang with my friends and knit. I’ll need it. And now, here’s a rare photo. (This child never sleeps anywhere but her own crib, and in nearly all photos I take of her she is moving.)
Since Bean has a small mouth and is still learning to chew, she doesn’t gobble up cookies with chocolate chips or M&Ms in them. She’ll even turn them down. (Horrors!) So I searched for a simple cookie and came across a Snickerdoodle recipe. I made it. Oh my, oh my! They make petite little rounds of cinnamon sugar goodness. I used this recipe here.
I went to bed on the late side, but then, Bean had trouble falling asleep last night and intermittently cried until 10. I went in multiple times to comfort, give medicine, and rock her. Then she woke at midnight, thirsty. And she woke at 6:30 without enough sleep. One of the first things she said was, “I have a fever in my mouth.”
And now she is cranky, cranky, cranky. No fever. She’s just not herself. She’s had some kind of illness (cold, ear infection, cough) for 20 days now. She finished the antibiotic last week, but she now has a dry cough.
It’s been a difficult month for us. It’s had some wonderful times too, and she’s made incredible leaps in her language and comprehension. I’m tired today. I need some energy to get through.
Bean and her Dad took a walk to the mailbox tonight. On the way they saw the moon. And then Bean noticed the stars. She raised her arms and said she was feeding the stars.
“What do they eat?” asked her Dad.
She replied, “Peanut butter. And they open their mouths up wide like hippopotamuses.”
Daily she comes up with some creative and startling associations and narratives!
I had intended forgo the large pumpkin this year, but when Bean and I were at the grocery this one caught my eye. It was so round and such an appealing shade of orange. So it came home with us. I still doubt I will carve it for Halloween (famous last words!), but we decorated it with stickers (mostly I peeled and she stuck). I plan to cut the top open and scoop out the seeds to roast. Bean can have a classic taste of fall.
