Monday Moonday

That's what my kids call it. It's also the day that they doing paintings at their daycare.

I assume it's Monday --> Moon --> water --> watercolor painting, if I have my correspondences right.**

I'll share some paintings we did at home the other day. Probably not on a Monday, but I'm sure you'll forgive me.

We use cheapo craft store watercolor paper, which we often cut in half. This time I went whole hog into Waldorf style and rounded off the corners beforehand!

Because I save money on the cheapo paper, we use the expensive Stockmar watercolors. What saves our budget is that it's concentrated stuff, which we dilute way down and store in little glass jars in the refrigerator for many future sessions. (Because they are made with natural pigments and binders, the diluted paint will start to smell very bad -- rotten egg bad! -- if left out at room temperature, especially the blues.)

This is Napoleona's. She usually fills the whole page with swaths of muddy colors (she's not very good at remembering to clean her brush between colors). This time she ended the painting with all the little dots in the bottom right corner. I also notice that she made a "frame" of paint.

This one is SillyBilly's. He often treats painting like drawing, making lines of paint to make shape outlines. You can see that in the blue here. But this time he swirled things around a bit and it came out much softer.

This one is by Anthropapa. I like how he let the wet paint colors bleed into each other a bit.

And here's mine. I was going for a sunset over the Santa Monica Mountains kind of look. (Unfortunately they look like this right now because of more wildfires lighting up the evening sky. I had no idea about that when I did this painting.)

**There is a Waldorf cultural tradition that the days of the week have correspondences.

This is nothing new; alchemists and astrologers assigned planets for each day long ago, hence their names. (It helps to have a few foreign languages to see some of them: Tuesday (Tyr's day from the Norse) is Mars day -- Mardi in French. Wednesday (Woden's day from German) is Mercury day -- Mercoledì in Italian.)

And so there are also the things that go along with the days and their planets: colors (blue for Moon/Monday, red for Mars/Tuesday) and foods (Rice/watery on Monday, Oats/fiery on Tuesday) that Waldorf early childhood teachers work with in particular.

Thanks Be

We had a quiet day around here at Lake Wobegon Anthrohaus. Anthropapa made an amazing turkey dinner (complete with dressing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, and biscuits), I made the gravy, and the kids made...noise.

Really, they were quite good. They helped clean the house, helped take out the garbage and recycling, played nicely outside, helped set the table, and were very good at the meal. SillyBilly even got up at naptime to go poop! (Sorry to insert the scatological here, but it's been a big deal lately, as my devoted 6-7 readers know.)

After we ate, we talked about what we were thankful for. We mentioned our warm clothes, the nice daycare the kids go to, Mama and Papa's jobs that they like, and all of our loving grandparents and friends. The kids mentioned 1) the food and 2) Mama and Papa.

At least we ranked #2.

I must say, as a fairly crafty person, that I'm thankful that my kids are interested and talented at crafting. It's something we can always share. Here is a small selection of their most recent works:

They each made a beautiful leaf banners at daycare. This one is Napoleona's.

SillyBilly and I made this paper plate turkey the other day while we had some one-on-one time. He cut the tail slits and did the coloring; I cut out the head and legs and taped it together. Yay impromptu crafts!

The kids and I made this construction paper Indian corn from directions in the latest Your Big Backyard magazine from the National Wildlife Federation.

Even though a good chunk of my readership does not celebrate Turkey Day, I still wish a happy day to you all and hope that you all have manifold things in your lives to be thankful for!

Then Again, Apparently I'm Clueless

Did I say yesterday that warm milk was the key to calm children?

HA!

Even with a splash of eggnog and extra cinnamon in her milk, Napoleona was a pill today. She seems to be going through a particularly bratty stage, and I haven't yet found the key to helping her through it.

The worst part is that we've often done a divide-and-conquer manoeuver on the weekends, where Anthropapa will go run errands with SillyBilly, while Napoleona and I have a quiet morning at home. She'll play nicely while I putter around the house.

To be fair, she did play nicely for about a half hour while I cleaned off my desk. Then after snacktime she just seemed to go off the deep end a bit. Using rude words, saying No! to everything, being extremely silly and not attending to anything I'm saying, and so on. I couldn't even get her to settle down to put on her shoes to play outside!

Personally, I think the idea of "terrible twos" is completely off base. Both of my kids have been much worse behaved at three than at two. Even their daycare provider told me that Napoleona's been having trouble sharing and playing nicely, in contrast to earlier in the year when she was the inspiration for lots of nice creative play.

In the Waldorf world, we talk about how a child under three years is still closely bound to the mother, not just emotionally but on the etheric level. At three the child begins to have awareness of being a separate person, and indeed the child's etheric body begins to separate from the mother's and becomes more focused on the child alone.

In theory, this would explain some of the behavioral issues of this age, and why many people consider four-year-olds to be wonderful!

But enough of my parenting woes. Instead, I'll (hopefully) amuse you with a picture of Anthromama in the early years. Please note that the pudding smears would explain the root of my inordinate love of chocolate, and my subsequent, shall we say, zaftigness.

Thank you Grandma Mimi for your old printer/scanner!
If this turns into a blog of old baby photos, it's all your fault.

Feeling a Bit Like a Fraud

Seems like I usually talk about all the good things on this blog...fun crafts, beautiful trips, good parenting, funny things the kids say, and so on.

Today I just had an icky day with the kids. Their daycare was closed for Veteran's Day, so they were with me the whole day. Evidently I have lost the ability to entertain/wrangle/stand to be with my kids for that long. That's really embarrassing to admit.

We only got about 1/2 hour of playing outside, they were seemingly especially active/wrestling/jumping off furniture/not listening/screamy/weepy, and except for a few golden moments (we played an impromptu game of Go Naked Fish -- Go Fish, but everybody gets to see the cards because 3 year olds can't hold them up properly! -- a little craft project, and building a gnome village/castle/museum complex out of blocks) the rest of the day was filled with tears, yelling, and overall unhappiness.

I also spent about an hour in their room trying to get them to take a nap, only to find them "waking up" a half hour later. That's the worst for me, getting no down time when we've had a bad day, and them already tired from a very minimal nap yesterday.

And somehow their daycare provider gets them to take naps simply by having them lie down! Grrrr.

So there won't be any pearls of Waldorf wisdom today, nor any NVC methods-in-action. Though I am reminded by something funny I heard said by a presenter at a Waldorf homeschooling conference:

Some days, the best you can say is nobody got hurt!

I guess I can be satisfied with that.


**Edit: After musing on the day a bit, I can see that it wasn't really that bad. True, I didn't model the behavior I'd like for my children, and my needs weren't especially met. But everyone got fed delicious, nutritious meals, I ran a load through the laundry, and I did have some nice play time with the kids. Napoleona even celebrated my birthday by singing and giving me a cloth-wrapped "present." (She does this at least once a week. Today's birthday presents were two sand dollars, some postcards, and a picture drawn on their big DoodlePro.) We also had a silly hairdo moment in the morning, with all three of us adorned with tiny hair clips and pony tails or braids. Sorry, no photos.

Autumn Walk Haiku

Cool, crisp autumn air--
ate lunch sitting on a log,
fed some sweet horses.

My feet are aching
as they crunch through the dead leaves.
It's time for a nap.

Saturday Surprises

Today's been a pretty good day, so far. After a wonderful pancake breakfast, the kids and I went out in the backyard for the first time in many days. It's just been too cold, and often rainy, to play out there. (OK, the kids could probably have played out there just fine. I just don't usually have the energy to do much outside stuff after picking them up from daycare at 3 pm.)

While they played (SillyBilly got out some of his tools to hammer on something or other, Napoleona made leaf/dirt stew at the play kitchen. I don't know where they get this gender-specific stuff from!) I decided to try to tackle the leaf situation.

Our yard is ringed with maple trees. They are quite beautiful, but it is truly shocking and amazing how many damn leaves there are. And how heavy a leaf pile is after it has sat out in the rain for several days. After trying to budge the medium-sized leaf pile I had made before Halloween, which needed to merge with the main large leaf/brush pile in the corner of the yard, I decided to give my arms a break and sweep off the steps leading to the basement.

As I was sweeping off the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, I had my first surprise of the day when I saw this wildly trying to get away from me and my evil broom:

I think I was more excited than the kids were, especially after I told them they couldn't touch it! After looking at far too many herpetology websites, I think I've narrowed it down to an Ambystoma jeffersonianum (Jefferson salamander). It was probably enjoying living under all the leaves piled up next to the house, where the hose occasionally leaks and keeps things nice and moist. I deposited him (her? It's hard to tell with salamanders.) in the thick leaves at the edge of the brook, where I figured it was most salamandery.

After SillyBilly and Anthropapa went to run errands, Napoleona and I went inside because the leaf pile had turned my arms to jelly. I decided to make cookies, from the wonderful Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book. Wonderful, except some of the recipes clearly assume you already know how to bake. I decided to make the ginger snap recipe as a test run for possible Christmas cookies, and (second surprise) it simply stated to mix all the flour, spices, molasses, and butter in the bowl to make dough.

Now, I didn't think that somehow mixing a stick of cold butter into flour and molasses would work! I knew I shouldn't cut the butter into the flour, because ginger snaps aren't flaky. I clearly had to cream the butter and molasses together.

Then I realized the error of my decision to make cookies -- whenever I try to cream butter with an electric mixer, the butter just either flies all over the place or clumps up annoyingly, so I like to cream the butter the old-fashioned way, with a wooden spoon. With my leaf-defeated arms.

It all worked out fine, and here's a nice picture of Napoleona, rolling up cookies all by herself, thank you very much. I tried to help her with some, and she complained LOUDLY. So, she made a whole sheet of cookies all by herself.

What's up with all those gnomes and fairies?

[Fairies and gnomes] actually come from people's experiences of elemental forces that help the plants to grow or the minerals to form. These "sightings" or "sensings" occur cross culturally, although we are pretty steeped in the European tradition of how these "elemental beings" are talked about and represented in visual form. There is a kind of "truth" in how they are represented in paintings or knitted figures, because the person rendering them is trying to convey certain archetypal truths.
-- Rahima Baldwin Dancy, Waldorf in the Home

One thing that many people notice about Waldorf early childhood classrooms are the gnomes and fairies. Little knitted or felt gnomes might live in a basket ready for children to play with, or silk fairies might hang from golden threads above a springtime nature table.

Kindergarten teachers might lead their children in a circle game about gnomes marching through the forest with heavy sacks of jewels, or sing songs about fairies helping the bees to find nectar in summer blooms.

So, what's going on with this? Why all the emphasis on mythical beings?

Waldorf early childhood methods emphasize imaginative play. We also try to foster the child's natural sense of being "one" with the world and with nature. Children love to be outside, playing with water, mud, sticks, rocks, and flowers.

Children also have a natural feeling that everything around them is "alive." Rocks can talk, trees have feelings, and certainly there are invisible beings all around us helping with natural processes. Fairies and gnomes are a physical manifestation of this feeling of the aliveness of nature.

On another level, fairies and gnomes could be seen as representations of the opposing forces that human beings must try to balance: Fairies are pure spirit, hardly touching the Earth, and working with the forces of life and growth. Gnomes are pure matter, living and working under the earth in the mineral realm, and working with the forces of death and hardening.

Here in our house we have lots of gnomes and fairies around. We've got one in the fridge, for example, who lets us know he's happy with the food selection by making loud knocking sounds occasionally. The kids have numerous little gnomes made of felt, wood, and that dashing knitted fellow you see above. I feel that bringing in a bit of this archetypal, elemental world is one way to work imaginatively with forces and processes that are otherwise invisible, and it encourages the kids to use their imaginations.

I'll give one last personal example of why I like to incorporate the "little people" in my little people's lives:

At night we can see some lights in the distance out of a window in the kids' room. One night I told them that perhaps those were the lights of a far-off fairy castle. I wove a story about how the fairies were so busy all day helping the plants to grow, flowers to bloom, etc. that it wasn't until nighttime that they could rest in their castle. We talked about how they have grand processions (are those lights over there flaming torches lighting their way?) and how they love to dance after they've eaten their feast (are those lights the glow of the stoves in their huge kitchens?). The kids were full of wonder and their eyes shone.

The kids often refer to the fairy castle lights, even though I told that story long ago and haven't mentioned it to them since. They really took in those images and can work with them in an imaginative way. They have never once made the connection between the fairy castle's lights and the building that sits there in the daytime!

Halloween Lantern Walk

Another autumn, another Waldorf Lantern Walk.

To elaborate for those of my 6-7 loyal readers who aren't familiar with the Waldorf world -- Halloween is no exception to our general avoidance of commercialized holiday celebrations.

There is no trick-or-treating. There is no candy.

There are costumes, and darkness and light, and a small treat at the end. (Biodynamic raisins, this year.) It's a bit of Halloween, a bit of Martinmas, all rolled into one.

At Rudolf Steiner College and Sunbridge College (the two largest Waldorf teacher training colleges in the US), the students, faculty, and staff create a beautiful Halloween experience for the children of the community. On campus grounds they create scenes from fairy tales, pirate adventures, undersea realms, water fairies, and other imaginative pictures for the children. Years ago, RSC also had a "Perilous Path" for older children, complete with goblins jumping out at those brave enough to walk the path (the children only need say "I am the light!" for the goblins to be dispelled).

Many of the scenes are enacted in silence; some are stories abridged to a few scenes, while others are simply tableaux. In this way, the children's imaginations are inspired. For the youngest ones, just being out after dark, walking along a dimly lit path, is magical!

The college students also get a taste of the work and joy of creating a community festival, similar to what many of them will do once they are teachers at Waldorf schools.

For several years Anthropapa and I participated in Lantern Walks. One year we were the King and Queen of the Undersea Realm, complete with a quite fishy song Anthropapa wrote for us to sing! "Come dance with us, come swim with us, under the sea so blue..." With our fellow students, we swathed a small classroom in blue and green cloth, draped a stack of folding tables for our royal dais, and strewed the room with ocean creatures made of paper and cloth. One student with metalworking skills made us crowns and a trident!

For the last two years, the Lantern Walk has gone right through our backyard...so our jack-o'lanterns are part of the overall decor, and the kids had the thrill of watching some friends put up an enormous (full-size) tepee next door! Our yard is also graced with a small fire ring as a result of the Rumpelstiltskin story taking up residence there last year. But the best part is that tonight from 5:45-8 pm, we had to turn all the lights out in our house. That meant candles, and lots of them. Even pooping before bedtime in the dark!

This year's favorites, according to SillyBilly and Napoleona: Snow White & Rose Red (complete with Bear!); the Witch and Wizard Stirring Their Potions; and the Pirates Digging Up Treasure, Fighting Over Treasure, And Then Making Up And Sharing The Treasure.

Impromptu Parenting Tricks

This morning got off on the wrong foot. Or, for a slightly less wacky metaphor, the tall people in the house woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

Normally, the Huntlings like to get up early on the weekends. Yes, on the days when we could all sleep in...they don't. This weekend, however, they slept until 8 am both days. Woo hoo!

Because they're little and not so coordinated, when they open their door they make an amazing amount of noise just turning the doorknob. So I always wake up before they make it to our room (Did I mention this is a small house? Hmmm...I'd say it's 700 square feet, tops. So everything is audible pretty much everywhere else in chez Anthro.)

Anthropapa is a deeper sleeper than I, and seems to need more sleep. So, when Napoleona came in this morning and said "Good morning, Papa!" in her chirpy little voice, and pounced on him, she scared the bejeezus out of him.

This made Papa a little cranky. For the entire day.

At lunchtime we were discussing the annual pumpkin carving extravaganza. We have three little pumpkins and one big one. The big one's mine, the two kids each have one, and the other's up for grabs. I told the kids that I thought it would be better to do one each day so that we don't get overwhelmed.

Calling on all of my NVC powers, I asked them if they agreed to this plan. Napoleona, her usual agreeable self, said yes right away. SillyBilly, his usual too clever self, said yes but only if he got to go first. Napoleona then no longer agreed with the plan.

Then Anthropapa piped up with this brilliant plan: Whoever falls asleep the most quietly and sleeps the longest at naptime can go first!

That Anthropapa, he's a sneaky one. Resolve our conflict and get some quiet time too.

Did the kids take a long nap?

No. No nap AT ALL.

I foolishly deviated from our normal nap routine, thinking that Papa's challenge would encourage them. Not.

So nobody carved any pumpkins today. After "naptime," the kids were being particularly wacky, so to avoid Papa's head from exploding with annoyance, the kids and I did some other crafts. Which I'll have to show off to you later, since Blogger is evidently still having problems with image uploading.

Twittery post

Seems like short-attention-span land around here. Or maybe I'm just saving up all the thoughtful, meaningful posts for NaBloPoMo. Bwahahahaha...I'll never tell!

* * *

It's raining here right now....we needed that. Though I'm sure the mold levels will now officially go through the roof, it's getting cooler and the leaves are really turning beautifully now.

Earlier today I was working by an open window when I heard a bunch of kids walking back to the Waldorf school from the playing field nearby...they were lustily singing "Doe, a Deer." Sweet.

SillyBilly evidently knows how to open his bedroom window. The one that looks out over the one-story drop down to the concrete outside the basement door. After some nausea- and tears-inducing freakouts (on my part), I think we've imparted to him that it's not OK to open the window. And I think he doesn't understand how to work the little tabs that pop out to stop the window from raising more than 3 inches. But I'm sure he'll get that one of these days...

We got out the down comforter from storage and put it on the bed last night. Mmmmm, snuggly. Now if it would only cool down again to merit it!

Imaginative play triumph #4,239: yesterday the kids were making "second breakfast" with their wooden play kitchen after we finished real breakfast. My dear little hobbits! And today, Napoleona was going around the house putting small, colored wooden blocks here and there, saying that they were candles..."cool ones, Mama, the ones that only burn you a little bit, for one day. The burning hot ones are for Christmas time. These are for Halloween night."

We splurged on going out to dinner tonight. Turkish food, yum. I am constantly amazed and grateful at the kids' ability to eat just about anything. We had baba ganoush, tomato/cucumber salad (Çoban Salatası) with shredded feta cheese, lamb kebab, and tiny dumplings (Mantı) in yogurt and tomato sauce, with rice pudding and caramelized milk pudding (Kazandibi) for dessert!

Still trying to figure out why the kids have been kinda whacked out the last few days. Perhaps it's just tiredness from the vacation...evidently they have been taking big naps at daycare. Or maybe it's their souls that are tired, from being driven all over creation and being away from home for so long, as Anthropapa suggested to me tonight. We'll have to spend some time outside in the fresh air tomorrow.

Bittersweet

Yesterday it was my birthday,
I hung one more year on the line.
I should be depressed,
My life's a mess,
But I'm having a good time
-Paul Simon

OK, that's a slight exaggeration. I wouldn't say my life is a mess, though there is a steady level of chaos. But overall, I am having a good time.

Yesterday we had the traditional Anthrofamily birthday bagels with lox and cream cheese for breakfast, and a sushi dinner with chocolate cake for dessert (the disfigured cake was redeemed with some chocolate sauce drizzled on top). I got some sweet presents, including random "precious" items from the toy shelf lovingly wrapped up by the kids. Napoleona kept throwing her arms around me, smothering me with kisses, and saying Happy Birthday Mama four gazillion times.

Yesterday was also the anniversary of my stepbrother Jonathan's death at the World Trade Center. I never knew him, but I have become close to my stepfather over the intervening years and have seen the toll this tragedy has taken on him. Now that I live near NYC I think about Jonathan often. I think about his children, 11 months and 3 years old at the time of his death.

My birthday was not "ruined" by the events of 9/11/01 as many people comment. Changed forever, yes -- the reality of our mortality and life's transitory nature has been brought close to mind.

I've known mothers who will not let their family members out of sight without saying "I love you," out of fear that one of them might die without hearing those words one last time. I cannot live in fear like that. I resolve to make sure in every way possible that my family knows how much I care for them, but from a foundation of love, not fear.

Everything that I read and hear of Jonathan tells me that he lived with exuberance and joy, and that friends and family rejoiced in his passions and affection. That's a better role model, I think.