These are an exhibit of tedium but the children enjoy them. Chas left toothprints, do you see them?

fingerpainting.
the cornstarch recipe is not as pretty as goopy.

fingerpainting.
the cornstarch recipe is not as pretty as goopy.

fingerpainting.
the cornstarch recipe is not as pretty as goopy.

My brother John told me that, if I were shopping for succulents (which I am), that I should drive over to Big Red Sun in East Austin, because they have the best selection in town (which they do). Above is a wall hanging in an assortment of unique pieces termed “retro botanicals,” variations on (what is probably their signature) Midcentury Modern bonzai-kitsch.

While it wasn’t wise to bring the children (the place reminds me of someone’s home–someone single–the way totems and art mingle in sterile grace with the contrived botanicals) it was wise to bring the camera. What I couldn’t spend five seconds examining was more easily photographed so that I might instead watch the heathens, who were climbing all over everything.

Working in the office.
Multitasking, usually involving children. Here, with Chas:

Working as he is headed towards the power strip:

Pause,

A moment of peace while I work:

Distracted:

I need to clean the upstairs. Wait! what was I working on?

How important is it, really?

Self Portrait Tuesday

It’s hard having conversations with other parents at the playground when I have to keep eyes on Chas. He is fearless and out of control. Ford and Chas are so different at the playground. Chas’ proprioception keeps surprising me; he always seems to correct himself when he starts losing balance; just when I think I have to step in and save him, he saves himself. Mostly. And he has more self-confidence in his physical ability than Ford did at his age.

We were shuffling through a lazy night of low-IQ tv with the kids and landed on E! during an episode of The Girls Next Door. Because it was too mature for the children, we kept oggling for a while, long enough to pique Ford’s interest. About ten minutes into the show, Ford ultimately broke down and asked us, in response to the selective digital pixellation,

“So, are we having satellite problems or something?”

Mom places Ford’s lunch before him: several boiled shrimp, some fried rice, and a crimson red crawfish, and Ford looks at his plate with proud disbelief and surprise.

“Is this a crawfish?”

“Yep.”

He sits there, peering into the crawfish’s tiny boiled black eyes, examining it like some Edwardian curiosity.

“It’s so cute!”

“Want to touch it, mommy?”

“Is this his thorax?”

“Yep, it’s in there. I think his abdomen is in there, too. Well, part of it. Anyway, you eat the tail.”

“Like a shrimp?”

“Yep, like a shrimp.”

“Can I eat it?”

“Sure can. Here (I break open the tail, pull out meat, God this looks disgusting, and hand it to Ford)

“Mmm! I like it!”, grinning. “Can I have some more crawfish?”

I look up at my mother with a faint look of “WTF?” and then we both laugh at how cute this really is.

She tells him, “Ford, I’m so impressed with your adventurous palate!”

“I know,” he tells her into his plate quietly.

And while she and I eat and chat and wrestle Chas through the rest of lunch, Ford continued to eat crawfish. Periodically, however, he obliged the technicolor carcasses to duels sur le table, narrating as he went along.

He’s becoming a very interesting narrator.

Like today, when we were reading the book I Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak, there was a page in the book tenderly illustrating a boy standing on a quaint little hill overlooking a small town, with birds flying overhead and trees in the valley…the words go:

I love the sun

I love a house

I love a river

and a hill where I watch

and a song I heard

and a dream I made

I asked Ford, without reading this charming passage, to narrate this picture himself. Just to compare. Here’s Ford’s rendition:

There was this boy,

on a hill,

and somebody PUSHED him over the hill,

and he crashed onto the town

and shattered in a million pieces

and broke his eyeballs all over the place.

That’s it. That’s what happened. (grinning)

Conversation at lunch.

Self Portrait Tuesday, Self Documentary Series #2