comic junky

carl gave me persepolis 2 for my birthday (i turned 40 on tuesday). whenever i get my hands on a comic i haven't read before, whether it's a gift, borrowed or bought, i devour it from cover to cover, can't stand to put it down until i'm done, and i tend to tune out everything else around me. then i want more. it doesn't matter how good the book is, or how long, comics always leave me longing. it's like a good drug. an addictive drug. i almost cringe when i am handed one...because i know what's about to happen. i don't want to taste the chocolate truffle because i know i am going to want an entire box of them, and there's only one. my appetite for good, quality comics is insatiable. so, in a sense, as pleasurable as reading comics is for me, it comes at a price.

it makes me wonder if there isn't something about the medium itself which produces this lingering hunger. i guess that doesn't make much sense really. i'm sure some people feel this way about a great record, or book of poems. it just so happens that for me, it's comics.

lucky for me, chuck and hank gave me a gift certificate to domy. i can go get one more fix before i head into withdrawals again. thank you thank you my dear friends. thank you.

in the round

cosmo's fascination with flowers has given way to an obsession with circles, balls, all things round. on walks in the stroller, he spots every single manhole cover, or water meter access point, and he wants us to push the stroller over the circle. he laughs and groans with delight. when he is walking himself, he steps on every circle he can find, and the plastic rectangle ones in the grass too. at home he has two favorite new toys, a bag of marbles and a tin full of buttons. he wants to play with them ALWAYS and cries when we put them away. "ball" is his favorite word to say, and he will point out any object in any landscape that resembles a ball.

i often catch myself trying to recreate the better parts of my own childhood. when i was a kid, my mom had a little old-fashioned marshmellow tin filled with buttons of all kinds. i used to love to spread them all out on the floor and organize them into categories, or make various kinds of arrangements. i remember really enjoying them, and i wanted cosmo to have some too. i only had a half dozen or so myself, so melanie and kate suggested that i ask friends to contribute to cosmo's button collection. i like that idea a lot, but in kentucky i found a jar of assorted buttons at a junk store, so it seems strange to ask for more since we are now button rich. however, i like the idea of buttons coming from people he loves. in any case, i was thrilled to find that he loves the buttons as much as i did (and still do) and i imagine his enjoyment of them will change over time. right now he likes to pull individual ones out of the tin, marvel and coo over them, and he also likes them in quantity...he will pour them out, and run his hands through them.

he recently discovered a grate circling a tree outside of a restaurant, and proceeded to run around it, over and over, round and round, laughing and making himself so dizzy he'd stumble. he really loves a circle, that one.

what cosmo learned on vacation

we had a relaxing time out in the country. it was such a relief to just let cosmo run around without fear of traffic, mosquitoes or fire ants. we spent most of our time outside and cosmo had a blast. he learned how to climb a ladder, swing on a big kid's swing and run down a tiny hill. he also got to see a catfish being caught and released, ate some violets in his salad and saw fire flies for the first time. i've heard other parents report that travel often brings leaps in development, and that seems to be the case with cosmo. here are a few pictures and a video.

belated father's day post

Dearest Carl,

On this father’s day, I wanted to try to express to you how much it means to me to have you in our lives, sharing this incredible parenting experience. Your ever growing love for Cosmo is such a joy to witness. I love listening from the other room as you bathe Cosmo each night after our walk--- to hear your patient and proud voice as you ask him to trust you when it comes time to lean back into the water to rinse his hair, or ask him if he can wash his toes with the sponge…then his knees. You are a wonderful teacher a perfect playmate and a careful guardian. I love you, and I love you being Cosmo’s dad.

Happy father’s day.

travelcraft

we are going on a little trip to kentucky. we will be visiting carl's brother out in the country. we love to travel together and i'm looking forward to it. i won't have a chance to blog about some things i have been planning to, but i wanted to share some photos of a couple of bags i felted. one is a gift for dominica, who just turned one. cosmo liked hers, so i decided to make one for him too. he enjoys putting things inside, peering into it, taking them out, and he likes to grab the handle and whip the bag around wildly. hopefully the photos will give you a sense of what i am talking about. happy summer!

in the meme time

i got tagged by the other mother to do a post that lists 7 things about me that you might not know. ok, i'll bite:

1. i have moved 28 times in my life. no, i am not an army brat. only 8 of those were during childhood.

2. i like to put semi-sweet chocolate chips in my cheerios. with the milk, the texture contrast is fantastic.

3. in my early twenties, i lived on a women-only land trust for 2.5 years. we had no electricity, and only a trickle of running water. i learned how to chop wood, grow vegetables, identify wild plants, preserve food, read by candlelight and many other things. i learned how difficult it can be to live by consensus decision making.

4. i worked as a plumber's helper for a few years, mostly on large scale, industrial construction sites. during the summer, the hours were 6am to 3pm.

5. i once got hired 10 different times in one year. i never got fired.

6. if i were stranded on a desert island and allowed to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, i would choose avocado sushi cut rolls-- complete with soy sauce, pickled ginger and lots of wasabi. i am certain i could live on that. happily.

7. though i live with my share of clutter, i am a fiend for organizing. i love to sort things into containers, i love containers. i collect old suitcases and store things in them like photos, letters, videos, maps. my art supplies are logically divided and stored in labeled bins on a shelf in cosmo's room. it helps me to manage my pack-ratism.



ok. there you have it. that's my 7. now i tag chuck, magreen and greendaddy.

whistle while you work

most parents i know bemoan the fact that stupid, repetitive children's jingles get stuck in their heads, haunting them throughout the day and into the night. my friend sarah calls them earworms. i have experienced this, and yes, it can be annoying. however, lately i have been finding it quite comforting. it gives a rhythm and an upbeat mood to my thoughts. the lyrics, or rhymes are usually quite simple, so they don't really interfere with my thinking, but the steady cadence of, say, "the wheels on the bus go round and round" is kind of meditative, and keeps me moving. carl's brother recently sent us a tape of some american folk songs from a record they had as kids. it includes a bunch of railroad songs, a version of "yankee doodle dandy," and "the bluetail fly." we find ourselves listening to it even after cosmo has gone to sleep.

sleepy bear

it happened quickly, overnight you might say. i'd been fearing and dreading the time when i would finally find the courage to try night-weaning cosmo. you see, he's been nursing throughout the night for many months now. it hasn't been a real hardship on me. i always felt like i got plenty of sleep. but i knew, for his sake, that he needed to begin to learn the skill of getting himself back to sleep when he wakes up in the middle of the night. i also suspected that if he learned this skill, he would probably wake up a lot less. i meant to start this process a couple of months ago, but i got the feeling he wasn't quite ready (or maybe it was me who wasn't ready?) and decided to wait. one of my friends was having great success with her daughter at the time, and she's a few months older than cosmo. it made sense to me that if i could explain to him what was going on, it might be easier...he might not feel so confused and betrayed. i wanted to wait until he would be able to understand my words more fully.

so, i guess it was over week ago now, one night he woke up and was nursing, but he wasn't falling back to sleep. he was in fact, thrashing about, climbing all over me, switching breasts etc. it was keeping me up, and it wasn't working as the quick sleep aide that it used to be. so, i stopped the nursing and told him to lie down and go to sleep. he fussed for a bit, then did exactly that. he fell asleep. i was astonished. from that point on, there was no turning back. i still put him to sleep at night by nursing him, but when he wakes up, i go to him, and tell him to lie back down and go to sleep. sometimes i pat his back. a few times he cried and made the sign for nursing, once he even made the sign for "hurt" which just about broke my heart, but i felt so certain that i was doing the right thing for him. each time he cried, it was for less than a minute (often more like 10 seconds), and i just stayed with him and tried to soothe him, and he fell asleep so fast i couldn't really believe it--MUCH faster than if he had been nursing. then, after a few nights of this. he stopped waking in the night. he sleeps for 8-9 hour stretches now, undisturbed! once in a while he will cry out, but when i go to him, he is already sound asleep. i no longer need to assist him in getting back to sleep. he knows how to do it, and does it. once morning comes (any time after 6:30am) i'll nurse him when he wakes up, but night nursing is now officially in the past.

it is tempting to think that i should have tried this much sooner, but i honestly believe that the timing was just right. i don't think it would have gone so smoothly with cosmo had i tried any sooner. i knew i couldn't handle a "cry it out" approach, and i actually have done a lot of research on this topic. i know i had some fear which was preventing me from trying it, but i was also listening to my intuition, and i listened to cosmo. he changed. the previous methods weren't working anymore, so we moved on to something else.

in any case, i am so proud of him, and proud of us.

others people's lives (and mine)

today i found myself searching google maps for satellite views of places i lived growing up. it was a strange and surreal experience to see photographs from the sky of backyards we built forts in, and the empty fields where we played now covered in housing developments. this search eventually led me to pursue names of people i've known from the distant past. i finally landed on a blog hosted by a couple i knew long ago, who i am no longer in touch with. their lives are vastly different from mine, and different from when i knew them, yet there was some kind of common thread. i am really enjoying reading it, sifting through the archives. i've focussed on the posts by the woman i knew the most, and what strikes me is how happy she is about her life. she has lots of love around her, and she feels like she is right where she needs to be.

it occurred to me that this is how i feel about my own life. how lucky. tonight, the stifling heat has lifted. there is a cool breeze blowing, and the sky is a peachy pink, dotted with shades of amethyst. i feel good. i love my life, and i love the beautiful people in it.

in other news, last friday i took myself out on a date. carl was finished with classes and had some time to spend with cosmo during the day, so i walked up to the river oaks theater and saw the lives of others it was the perfect title for what i needed right then. i wanted to be alone, but i didn't want to be at home, where i would inevitably feel compelled to sweep the floors. i also didn't feel like sitting in a cafe and thinking about the cover letters that need to be written, or why i didn't spend my summers during grad school interning at sexy architecture firms (presumably, if i had, i would now have a flourishing career?). i just wanted to get away. simple escape into someone else's story. what better way to accomplish this than sitting alone in an aging movie theater, with a huge screen in front of my face playing a heart wrenching film set in east germany-just before the wall came down? it was perfect. afterwards i shopped at an upscale consignment shop next door, and found some summer pants (which i tried on, at my leisure, no impatient toddler rushing me to get out of the store). they were half off, which is still considerably more than i'm used to paying for used clothes, but still, a bargain. i walked home thoroughly rejuvenated. when i arrived, cosmo and carl were still out. i was at a loss.

so, i swept the floors.

sweetpea

narration: freshly picked sweet peas from the community garden! i think i'll try one. yumm! those are delicious! more. please. ahhh...this is the life.

stoop sittin'

cosmo thinks he lives in brooklyn or something. when we take little walks in our neighborhood, he likes to stop and sit on the steps of other people's porches. he has also taken to insisting that we also sit down next to him, at which point he gets up and moves on to the next stoop.

curious new habit.

little kitchen

i knew those 3 years of cabinet making would come in handy at some point. that, and my life long propensity for scavenging. i got the idea to make cosmo a play stove when i saw a homemade one that pearl and carrie had at their place. it was made by a friend from an old cabinet, and the kids seemed to love it. i've wanted to get a stove for cosmo, but the ones i've seen that i like cost over 80 dollars, and i didn't like them that much. i knew i could make him something, but i wondered if i'd ever get around to it. i ended up using an ikea box/shelf that a friend gave us as the base. i found an old wooden drawer on the street last week, which became the shelving on top. we salvaged some scrap tongue and groove pine panels from the construction site across the street and i used that to make the door, which has a little plexi-glass window. the only thing i spent money on was the hardware, and that came to about 10 bucks. i saved an enormous amount of time by choosing not to paint any of it. i realized it would look much nicer if i just left the natural wood colors, and painted some stenciled burners. i have to admit, i am quite proud of how it turned out, and most of all, that i actually got it done --so that cosmo has a chance to play with it before he out-grows that sort of thing. so far he seems to think it's pretty cool.

rant

we just finished watching the last of the four part series when the levees broke—a documentary by spike lee about hurricane katrina, the aftermath, and the affects on the community, the black community of new orleans, in particular.

even though i already knew a lot about what happened, and how horrible it was, and how fucked up the government response was, and still is—and even though i already knew that the crisis is far from over, that it has only just begun…i was still shocked by the film. each of the four sections seemed to highlight a further injustice. different from the last, not worse exactly, but no better.

i thought about what it would be like to live there when the mandatory evacuation orders came. would i get out? what if i didn’t? what would i have done? where would i have ended up? who would i have been with? in many of the shots of people making their way on foot, through flooded streets, or being rescued by boats or helicopters, or huddling together in the superdome, or waiting [and waiting and waiting…]to board a bus out of town—in many of those shots of people, children are present. you see mothers with babies, toddlers, older kids. i try to imagine myself in any less-than-ideal situation with cosmo, and i just crumple up and sob. caring for an infant or small child in the best of circumstances can be so incredibly challenging. any of us who have kids knows this. when you consider that these families, these young mothers with several children, or older couples with grandchildren, anyone with small children in their charge, dealing with appalling, dangerous, life threatening, hopeless and confusing situations…for days on end, weeks, months—trapped and at the mercy of incompetent, racist, stressed and stretched authorities---who have no ability to care for all of them, and no plan to even start—it is enough to make you go insane vicariously, or in sympathy.

then you realize that the trauma of the hurricane, the immediate disaster, of the storm, levees breaking, massive, unprecedented flooding, and the horrendous “survival” conditions of the so-called shelters…this short term trauma, which actually went on for weeks, even longer for some…you realize this was just the beginning. life after katrina for these people, not just the ones who were there when it happened, but even for those who left—life after katrina is, in many ways, worse than surviving it.

injustice piled upon injustice. insult to injury, salt rubbed into every open wound. motherfuckers not giving people any compensation, any way to rebuild some fragment of their lives after they paid every month their insurance premium outta their measly pay check just to try to protect what little they had…for 50 years, believing somebody would look out for them if something happened. believing people would do what they said they would do in exchange for your monthly payment for 50 years and nothing. “here. $600. that’s all you are entitled to.”

and what you hear about on the nightly news all around the country is the fraud from all those free loading welfare queens spending all their FEMA money on crack or whatever the fuck…middle class white america is so offended by fraud. by theft. by looting. but only when it’s done by poor desperate black folks. the good hands of allstate can fuck everybody inside and out while the good neighbors of state farm rob pillage and plunder the working poor who did what they thought was right all along only to be left. with nothing.
no thing.

tip of the iceberg folks. i could keep going. but i better not. you get the picture. i urge you to see the film. though it doesn’t do anyone any good…the least we can do is look. this is what carl says about the iraq war, and why he refuses to turn away, day after day, as it just gets worse and worse, more and more hopeless, more and more tragic and devastating for the people of iraq, and the families of all who are dying. seeing does nothing. but there is nothing that can be done. we cannot stop it. the least we can do is witness this senseless catastrophe. we owe it to our fellow human beings not to look away.

serious fun

cosmo, like most toddler's, enjoys a lot of different kinds of activities. sometimes he flits around from one thing to another, barely pausing to investigate before his attention is diverted by some glint of sunlight off a speck of mylar on the floor, or a crane fly buzzing against the wall. other times, he becomes enthralled with what he is doing, and stays at it for...well, i wanna say hours, but it's more like 20 minutes or so. the only time cosmo stays in one place for hours at a time is when he is sleeping.


some activities are exciting, funny, hysterical even. like peek-a-boo with his silk curtain, or chase (he gets so thrilled in anticipation sometimes, he almost falls over). other physical games involving dancing, swinging upside down, flipping, spinning, bath time fun, or games with silly faces or sounds make him laugh uncontrollably.

but some of the things that capture cosmo's attention are not funny at all. they are quite serious. stacking blocks. nesting tin cans. playing with white beans. bubbles. looking at books. drawing. he gets a very focussed look on his face, is not easily distracted, and makes little sighing-grunting sounds of exertion, even if he is merely lifting a hollow 1 inch X 1 inch box.




in montessori they call whatever the child engages in work. in our house, we just call it serious fun.

nature boy

cosmo has recently shown an interest in the natural world. maybe he just loves to take walks, and walks happen outside, and so that's where all the exploration takes place. i like to think he is becoming an amateur naturalist. he loves plants, yesterday he kept trying to hug a small rosemary bush in pearl and carrie's back yard. when he spots a flower, he is compelled to go right up and "sniff" it (which consists of blowing air out his nose while his face is pressed up against the flower). in general, he is pretty gentle with plants, he touches them carefully and gasps and makes his "oh, wa-ow" sound, as if he is simply in awe of them.

we were monitoring a gerber daisy blossom as it began to unfurl in a pot on our back patio. when it finally reached full bloom, cosmo was so taken with it that he accidentally pulled off half of the petals in his enthusiasm. i was a little disappointed at first, but quickly realized he didn't mean it, couldn't have known better, and that those petals probably felt wonderful in his fist. plus, watching them scatter before him was delightful. one way to know about something is to take it apart...examine it, play with it, and often even taste it.

i happen to be the kind of person who learns about things (still) by tasting them. if i can't figure out what something is made of, i bite it, or touch it to my tongue. i'm not usually afraid to try plants i believe to be edible, and it's a big thrill for me to forage for things growing "wild" in urban or rural environments. perhaps this is why carl got me stalking the wild asparagus, by ewell gibbons for xmas this year. i don't mind if cosmo wants to eat some clover, or dandelion, because i know these things are safe. but as carl, and anyone with any sense points out, cosmo can't know the difference at this age, and therefore should be taught not to eat wild plants--period. ok. but it seems like such a shame, and as soon as he can make subtle distinctions between shapes of leaves and shades of green, i will be teaching him to identify edible plants in his environment. i don't want him to miss out on such a satisfying simple pleasure. of course, i also don't want him to mistake poison hemlock for wild carrot, like i did in the berkeley hills in my early twenties. lucky for me i got to the emergency room soon enough, and all i had to do was take ipecac. i will definitely teach cosmo to have better sense than that.
earlier this week we went to the arboretum at memorial park. it was the first time we had gone since cosmo has been walking. he kept taking off into the brush to explore, but would get back on the path with a little coaxing. then he would run down the trail vocalizing, just to hear and feel his voice vibrate staccato in his chest with each bounce. tall pines drape the under story of the woods with their long needles. it reminded carl and i of silver icicle tinsel on christmas trees. cosmo enjoyed handling pine cones and looking at the turtles in the pond.

at the japanese garden in herman park last weekend, cosmo's favorite thing was the little waterfalls. he had a hard time staying on the path there too. he admired the flowers, and was careful not to pull off any petals.