Sonar X-Toothless

A photo of Sonar X5 from a couple of weeks ago (I’m catching up), revealing a gap where his first lost tooth used to be.  

The December 23rd Post

I know.  Too many posts on one day.  Why not just make one big post and be done with it.  Because it’s my blog and I’ll do it how I want to.  Besides, I’ve been sick in a house full of people for days and I’m feeling just a little silly and gratuitous in the sudden quiet.  

And because a serious face would be neither possible nor desirable:

Recent Lessons

Lesson 1: Occam’s Sewing Razor

When the squeak on the sewing machine becomes so maddening, and the top thread is breaking every five minutes, before I stick my head into the partially dismantled, Running sewing machine, I should consider making sure that the needle is installed in the correct orientation.  That didn’t solve the squeak.  Still had to stick my head in the machine to find that.  But now I Know.  

Lesson 2:  My eyes are bigger than my hands

I am enamored of the art of much knitting.  Sometimes I see a really incredible design and I must try it.  Often it’s about Trying a particular technique, a particular decrease, a clever little design element.  Lately (i.e. for the past several months), the projects I have fallen in love with have been either large or complicated (or in two cases, both).  This all by itself slowed down the knitting considerably.  On top of that, I got myself into a sort finger/hand/wrist/arm/shoulder spiral that is difficult to get myself out of.  This brought the knitting to a screaming halt.  So there are three lovely, but oh so far from finished, big and/or complicated projects staring at me, begging to be finished, but I can knit no more than a few minutes a day, if that, without bringing about the need for icepacks and narcotics.  

This is not fun.  This is not right.  It has also led to more sewing than knitting this Christmas season.  

Also, these projects are also intended for other people.  Other people who know about them and hope to actually hold them in their hands someday.  I feel an obligation to finish them, which makes the knitting feel more like Work than like this cool hobby that I do because I get a little thrill from taking a long piece of string and knotting it just so over and over (and over and over) and Voila! Clever, three-dimensional, useful object!

So I have learned that I really do prefer simple designs that I can hold in my hands, carry in my wee bag.  That aren’t huge.  This is what I really really prefer.  Now, if I can just get through the big complicated things, so I can get to some small simple things.  

Lesson 3: Should vs. Could, a lesson from Billy Jean King

I saw some round-table discussion on You Tube or something.  Oh, I remember, it was from Oprah, and O was chatting with Billy Jean King, Maria Shriver, and Gloria Steinem.  I forget what they were talking about, but Ms. King said that one of the ways she overcomes stress and guilt and all such self-defeating sorts of thinking is to replace “should” with “could” when it pops up in her head.  I.e. I should scrub the fingerprints off of the lightswitch plate in the kitchen.  vs.  I could scrub the fingerprints….  “Should” is a do it or feel bad about it kind of word, whereas “could” is a word of potential and, more importantly, choice.  As in, I could choose to do it or not.  

I was thinking that the holidays should be happy.  Ding ding ding.  The holidays ‘could’ be happy.  Which is a weird one, because either one suggests that the holidays aren’t actually happy, when really they sort of are, but they’re also sort of stressful.  But the source of that stress may be trying to live up to some idealized fantasy of what it ‘should’ be.  If we consider the idealized fantasy as something that ‘could’ be if we had infinite time and resources and and and, it becomes much easier to let that ideal go and still be satisfied with what the holidays actually are.  Which in my case, is a time when I get together with at least some of the people that I dearly love, or at least touch base with many of the important people in my life.  

More people ‘could’ choose to not worry about whether they have the most perfectly decorated tree, or the most Christmas lights on the block, or the perfect gift, and just look around and breathe in what is already around them.  More people could.  Yes, indeedy.  

*smooch*

Rituals

Day 22 — 45,403 and counting

When I say that I like Friday night high school football in Texas, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.  I’m not some rabid, season-ticket holder, though I go to most home games (at least through halftime).  The only school shirt I own is a hand-me-down.  I’d mostly rather see the band than the football team (but then I was a band geek).  I don’t even have a kid in high school.  I am aggravated when the athletic boosters step over the line and make offensive statements in the giant spirit signs that line our main street on game day.  And I am indignant when the football players get advantages that other athletes and other disciplines do not enjoy.  That happens, almost every week.  

And yet.

There is something really marvelous about a high school football game in Texas.  Last night I went to a good one.  The air was crisp and just a little cool.  The wind chilled our noses.  The band played loud and proud even though they’ve already shifted most of their activities to concert work.  The stands were packed, the yells were loud, the air horn startled us every time.  A good slice of our town was there.  People who haven’t been to a single game all season came to this one.  At least one person who has never been to an American football game of any kind was there.  

Five teenage boys took leave of their senses to spend three hours in the chilled wind with no shirts and their bodies painted in the school colors, so that they could run up and down the sidelines with giant flags when we scored.  Girls in tiny skirts with glittery cheeks (and sweatpants, and turtlenecks, because they were smarter than those five boys in the paint) stacked themselves into impressive pyramids from which they tossed and caught the smallest of their number in stunts that I can only imagine their mothers find hard to watch.  It was so much fun.  And our team won, which made it even better.  They played well, they acted right, and they’re moving on in the playoffs.  It was a scene repeated all over Texas and the rest of the United States last night.  

I haven’t ever been able to find just the right words to explain why I enjoy a high school football game.  Then my kids led me to the right words.  

Tonight we were all sitting here in front of the computer, and I was doing random searches of whatever popped into their heads.  We searched speed stacking.  Ipswich lace (really it was Partner that threw that one out; he recently read this book—good idea, not a great ending).  Pseudonymous Bosch.  Treasure Island.  And hula.  Which led us to some You Tube videos of people doing hula.  The kids were really into the guys who do hula.  Which led us to a conversation about why people hula, and different styles.  Which led to a search of haka.  Which, beautifully enough, led us to this NPR story about the Trojans of Trinity High School, in Euless, Texas, of which, I’ll quote a smidge:

“The rituals are precisely defined:  There must be music and dancing, chanting and marching.  Sticks are twirled and thrown spinning into the night sky.  The tribe’s future — its strong, beautiful young men and women — paint their faces, don costumes and perform amazing feats of physical prowess for the pleasure and admiration of their people.”

And that refers to high school football, not the haka that the Trinity players perform before each game.  

Oh, and the Euless Trinity Trojans beat the Plano Wildcats 42-35 to advance to their next round of the playoffs as well.  We’re not in the same class, but maybe we’ll see them in Dallas in December.  

Kid stories

Removing the grass one swing at a time. 

I love walking places with the kids.  We have a chance to notice things.  Lots of things.  Like street signs and grass and the incredible numbers of butterflies we had around here the other day and house numbers and what is in that trash can and cars and such.  

Yesterday, while walking to the local youth educational institution to retrieve Sonar X5, Sonar X3 and I were waiting to cross the street.  Halfway across, the red hand on the crosswalk signal started flashing.  Sonar X3 pointed to the sign and said, knowingly, “the flashing red hand means don’t dilly-dally.”  So true.  

***

Settling the kiddos down to bed the other night, I was stretched out on Sonar X5’s bed, and he curled up next to me.  I rolled and curled around him and told him we were spoons stacked together.  He stuck out his legs and stretched his arms straight down and told me he was more like a fork.  

***

Sonar X8 isn’t thrilled about the mountain of homework he has to do every night (frankly, I’m not either, but that’s another story).  Most times he does the work without much prompting, but sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.  Today was one of those days where he went off and started working quietly, but clearly he was not immune to distraction.  A row of five, single- and double-digit addition and subtraction problems were printed in one corner of the math worksheet.  After correctly answering each of the problems, he drew plus signs between the answers and wrote their total in the right-hand margin (also correct).  Then he decorated the ends of each—hm, what is the line called when operations are written vertically?  Horizontally it would be the equal-sign, but vertically, while it means the same thing, it must have a different name?  At any rate, he decorated their ends with little curlicues.