Iveyrock

My new laundry basket

Today has been quite a day. We have run the gambit of emotions in this house, from completely silly to complete meltdown; many times. At the end of the day, I am left thinking again about what a strange life being a stay-at-home mom is.

One of the things that I find so unique about this job, is that there is no one in this house with me as I parent. I am here by myself almost every day, and I answer only to people under the age of five. (I am relatively sure their standards of acceptable behavior are different than typical jobs require.)

Every aspect of my day is my own. The times I lost my temper, and said words I regreted even as I was saying them. No one else heard me, no one else was here to reign me in. There is no one here to spell me off, to tell me to take a break, to tell me to shape up or get out. I am responsible for stopping myself. (I walked away; called my husband, called my mom)

There is no one here to see my best moments. The times I’m exhausted, and my head hurts, and someone needs one more thing. The times I do not loose my temper. The times I choose to be silly and break the mood. The times I find just enough energy to change the dynamic. I don’t get paid, I don’t get promoted, I don’t get a review or feedback. I do get children who want to show me what they are learning, who want me to laugh with them, who want me to be a part of their world.

And then there are the thousands of silly, magical, or just ordinary moments that make up our days. No one is here to laugh at my daughter’s two-year-old logic. No one sees how cute the baby was, when he was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. No one saw my son give his never-been-opened crayons to his baby sister, without batting an eyelash.

So many of the funniest moments aren’t anything that can be shared, because you just have to be here. And the moments where everything just falls into places – my favorite little times of the day – are just so comfortable and beautiful because they are my family, my house, my hard work.

I love being a mom, but it is a strange, hard job.

This is the year that Ian would be headed to preschool, if he were going. I haven’t been planning to ‘do’ preschool at home at all, just continue with our normal routine. However, I am finding that it is really hard to let go of my ideas of what school is supposed to look like, and what that means for us as a family. I have been spending nights worrying that Ian will somehow be deprived, that I am taking something away from him, that he will someday wish he had gone… which is all especially silly, since I wouldn’t be sending him to preschool even if I didn’t plan to home school.

I am really struggling with the balance of my conviction that what my four year old really needs is time to just be four, and the pressure that I feel to give him “preschool”.

my wonderful (home schooled) husband has patiently talked me down a couple of times now, and we have come up with some very loose structure to the year, so that Ian and I can feel like we are “doing” school. (Things like, a book list, so that when we go to the library I can keep an eye out for books I want to read). One of the things on my list, incidentally, was to put up the clock that has been in a box in the garage for a year. We don’t have any clocks with hands in the house, and I want to just put one up, so the kids are aware that they exist.

Monday was a particularly hard day for me, because it was the first day of school in our district. I felt like I somehow needed to mark the day, but had no idea how. Some homeschooling friends of ours came over, and brought toys for us to borrow. They are lending us a train set with tracks, and Wedgits.

Their daughter also drew Chava a drawing, which Chava is very proud of. We had a great time playing, and it helped me to feel like we had done something with our day. After they left, Ian set up the train tracks. Pretty soon he was intently repelling the trains around the track, using the magnets. He was pretty excited about it, and I asked if he knew what made that work. He said, “Yup. Sometimes these magnets make things stick together, and sometimes they push them apart.”

He then spent a good amount of time building the Wedgits. They rounded the day off with some drawing, inspired by the picture given to Chava.

The second day of not doing preschool, we went to the pool with some friends. It turns out that Ian’s oldest friends aren’t going to preschool either. The kids all got to play, and I got a chance to catch up with some friends I haven’t seen in awhile. As we were leaving the pool, Ian looked at the clock on the wall, and said “mommy, that clock says it’s two o’clock.” It was actually the minute hand pointing at the two, so I explained how the hands worked. On the way home he asked me to tell him more about clocks, and when we got home he got the one out of the garage and figured out how to set it. I was thinking, “There goes my entire year of lesson plans. Thanks a lot, kid.”

This morning, before I had even cleaned up from breakfast, Ian found an old science kit catalog with a volcano in it. He said, “mommy, can we build a volcano today?” (Where did that even come from? We’ve never talked about building a volcano, and the one in the picture isn’t one you make. At this point, I feel like I am on some sort of preschool reality show.) My wonderful, oh-so-helpful husband was laughing at me on his way out the door. Ian has spent the entire day looking at pictures of volcanoes online, and asking me to read about them. (In the process, he’s learning to navigate websites, something he’s not done before). We haven’t even gotten to making a model of one, but I am pretty sure that’s in our future.

So, the moral of the story (it’s a preschool story – gotta have a moral) is that I worry too much. Thank you to my veteran homeschooling friends, who are helping me to talk through this process – I’m sure I’ll have more posts about this as the year rolls on. I am surprised by how much of my own experiences and expectations I am having to work through, and we aren’t even home schooling yet.

Our garden actually produced a tomato! (For those that are counting, that’s exactly one fruit per crop planted – one strawberry, one raspberry, one tomato)

My favorite part is, these plants were given to us by the neighbor, who found them growing wild where their garden was last year. They’ve grown better than anything we’ve intentionally cultivated (besides the rosemary, which appears to be un-killable).

Maybe we’ll actually get more than one tomato.

Regardless, the kids and I were pretty excited about this one.

I tried some bread-baking  again yesterday, although this time I doubled the recipe. I wanted a loaf to freeze, but I was a bit worried about kneading all that dough. Turns out I was justified – that was not a fun process at all. However, as I was kneading bread with every muscle in my body, I thought back over the times that I’ve made bread before. I was thinking about various bread ingredients, and suddenly I remembered about potato water. Before I was pregnant with Micah, I used to make bread using potato water. The yeasties love the starch.

I made a mental note to try potato water next time, although I wasn’t sure when that would happen. I usually just boil up a potato that is clearly past it’s prime; but we are doing pretty well with our potatoes currently.

However, today the kids were getting squirrely, and I happened to remember the ink pads that I had stashed away in the laundry room. The kids haven’t done stamping before, and Ian has asked about it several times. I got the ink intending to cut up (you guessed it) potatoes to use as stamps. So I happily went to our pantry, found our smallest potato, and chopped it up.

The kids had a great time, and I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I had toyed around with the idea of carving a stamp into the potato, but gave that up as too complicated. So I just gave them a couple of different shaped slices.

I was intrigued by how many different ways you can actually stamp with a potato. For some reason I was startled to find that they are textured inside. How many times have I cut up a potato, and never noticed that? I would have said they were smooth. The skin has a different texture of it’s own.

Ian and I discovered that you can make lines with the edges. Chava discovered that you can use the stamp pad itself to stamp the paper; at which point I called a stop to the whole experiment and sent the kids to the bath. They had fun, I had fun, and I got to use a couple of pieces of potato to make my potato water. Which means more bread making in my future.

(since I had my camera out, here is a free picture of potatoes boiling)

Aunt Karen arrived with more records for our record player. These are records that I listened to when I was a girl, and some of them have my grandmother’s name on the case.

Ian is still fascinated with the record player, and I am fascinated with his fascination.

We have a CD player/radio in the playroom, but Ian only uses it every couple of weeks. He has been playing the records constantly since Aunt Karen brought them. They are scratchy, and slow, and he loves them.

Aunt Karen also taught him how to text (that’s what aunts are for, right?). Maybe that averages out to some sort of neutral, on the technology front.

The light in my house

My children are all very young, and I’m sure as they grow our projects will change, or maybe even phase out completely. I can’t speak to how it will look in a couple of years. But I can share some ways that I have worked through creating art with very young children.

When Ian was very small, he was my only baby. I could let him use messy stuff more freely, since I was right there to oversee, all the time. He was allowed to finger paint in the playroom, or color in the den. On the other hand, because he was my only, I didn’t have a lot of art supplies, and I was much more cautious in what I let him use.

Then Chava came along, almost from birth wanting to do everything her older brother was doing. The practical result of this was that her early childhood has been the opposite; more parameters on when and how we do projects, and much more freedom to use supplies. (Micah doesn’t do projects yet, but I suspect his turn is coming soon.)

So far, creating with small kids has been a mix of structure, creativity, and flexibility.

Our current guidelines are that projects are done in the kitchen, or outside. I have a schedule for doing chores, so I don’t need to stress about mess as much. If I don’t get every last hole-punch swept up, I know that I will be doing a more thorough sweeping later. If we don’t get every bit of crayon wiped off the table, it will get wiped again after we eat lunch. This also allows the kids to help more with clean-up, without me hovering and micro-managing.

There is a certain amount of creative thinking in allowing toddlers to use art supplies. Chava wanted to do exactly what Ian was doing, before I was comfortable letting her use scissors or glue. Instead, she was allowed to do something along side him that had a similar result. For example, she was allowed to use stickers while he used glue. For a long time, she would bite the tops off of markers. So Ian got to use markers, and Chava got to use crayons.

I also work to find ways that the kids can use the supplies they want in a way that I am ok with. They are allowed to use as much glue as they want, but it took me forever to figure out that a little bowl of glue with Q-tips works far better than handing a two-year-old a full bottle of glue.

Flexibility comes in at just about every point in the process. Allowing little kids to explore the materials for themselves, rather than getting stressed about using them a certain way. Giving them materials before I think they are ready, and finding out that they can handle them just fine. Letting go of my expectations of the end result. Knowing that allowing really young kids to use art supplies means a little less time doing my own thing, and a little more time actively monitoring. Knowing that eating a little crayon won’t hurt a toddler, or the crayon. Worrying less about the water on the table, and allowing them to find out what happens when they dip their crayons in. And then draw with the crayons. And then draw with just water…

6 years later, and it’s been extraordinary.