List-It Tuesday: What's New?

I've been absent from List-It Tuesday for a while! This week the topic meshes so well with my wanting to share the exciting things coming up for me in this new year.

Just a quickly written list...here are the details.

Learning: I signed up for a one-day professional development workshop at the Eric Carle Museum, and I really hope it runs, as they haven't met minimum enrollment yet. It's called Beyond Books: Art Inspired by Eric Carle, and we'll be painting lots of stuff, which sounds good to me. I also signed up for a six-week continuing ed class at the Rhode Island School of Design--Embroidery + Embellishment. I haven't even attempted a night class since having kids. Providence is a 45-minute drive, the class itself is three hours long...but the draw of being in a class where embroidery is considered a valid fine art medium is just too good to pass up. And finally, I'm in Diane's e-book course. It's just a thing I've been thinking about for so long I decided it's time to find out a little more.

Teaching: I'm leading two classes at our winter session of co-op, which is slightly shorter than fall and spring. My printmaking workshop is full (full!) with a dozen kids, and I'm excited and also a little wary, truth be told. I've planned a possibly ambitious schedule of process-based exploration. I hope we can fit it all in without destroying the room. I'm also teaching a class on vertebrate classification--early elementary, so pretty basic, but I've gathered some good stuff together. (I don't use curriculum, generally. I'm a gather-and-be-flexible kind of instructor.)

Sharing: I began the new year at my other blog with a three-part series (one, two, three) on the importance of process over product art for kids, but it's just as relevant to adults, too. I'm pretty passionate on this topic, actually. I also hope to share the details of the five-part printmaking workshop as well as the adorable little animal classification booklet I put together for the co-op class, once I figure out how wordpress hosts documents.

More lists can be found over at Artsyville here! What's new with you?

List-It Tuesday: Overheard

Yes, it's Thursday. I've had a couple of Weeks Like That, okay, and only two days late is actually pretty impressive, considering. The topic this week is overheard, and it's just too juicy to let slip by.

My daughter takes a preschool gymnastics class. Last year, when both my older kids were in school, I spent the 45 minutes sitting and knitting. Most parents stand at the viewing window and chit-chat, but I was too tired and achy from Lyme Disease to stand for more than ten minutes at a time. (Sad but true.) This year I have my eight-year-old with me. He does his math chapter and then we play some Uno, or he might read while I knit, or, usually, some of all of that. Today, I eavesdropped a bit. Some of these were said by parents, and some were said by the group leader who runs the before-school care for kindergarteners. In case you can't read the scan (the scanner doesn't like the spiral binding) or my handwriting, here is what it says:

* You're not being a nice boy. You're staying right here. Who's going to win this battle? [This was said by a caregiver--not sure if she was a nanny or a grandmother--but it seemed pretty clear to me the kid was winning.]

* Every single one is like chipped but a handful. I don't know what I was thinking when I registered for these. [Sigh. A few of the moms have a "like" speech impediment, as you'll notice. It like drives me like crazy.]

* They're like up the walls.

*Then it all like slowly unravels.

*I was feeling in control of my life for like a little second.

* It's definitely like guilt.

*I'll be making like 15 things for the school bake sale.

* Please sit down on your bum and eat. Sit down and finish your lunch. I'm going to have to glue you to that seat.

* Do not put that over your face like that EVER! You can see through plastic. You can't breathe through it.

*If you did say it don't say it again because it's not appropriate.

It's worth it to go back to Aimee's post and check out all the links...some good overheard stuff this week!!

List It Tuesday: I Love Where I Live

This week's theme is "What I love about where I live," and I felt it needed to be a photographic list as much as possible. So here goes.

I love my yard, especially the view off the deck.

I also love the animals that visit our yard or make it their home. The bird feeder is hanging from the tree directly behind the corner of the deck (you can't see it in this photo). A bunny has been lurking around underneath that white pine. We occasionally see deer, although I know they visit overnight when we don't see them, too, and I love when the wild turkeys march through. And I adore the reptiles and amphibians, like this common snake

and, of course, the red-backed salamanders.

I love that we live so close to the ocean. In less than fifteen minutes, I'm at the beach. Just knowing it's so close calms me; if I need to get there, I can (and sometimes I just do).

My kids are growing up with an intimate knowledge of the ocean; I love that. One of our favorite beaches is a barrier beach, with this salt pond behind.

We love it here. It's calm and shallow and we swim next to little fish and sometimes come across crabs and even horseshoe crabs, and I love that my kids (and myself!) have the chance to "know" these creatures in their own habitat, not just behind glass at an aquarium.

It's a slightly farther drive, but we can also easily get to some great tide pools.

There, we can find hermit crabs and snails and sea stars (although not this year), again, in their own habitat, where we are careful and grateful visitors.

I also love that in almost any direction we drive from home, we pass horses or cows.

And every time I go into town, I drive by a pond that is gorgeous in all weather. This photograph was taken on a very grey day last fall.

We are surrounded by all of this, yet we're only about 40 minutes from Mystic, CT, 45 minutes from Providence, RI, and 90 minutes from Boston.

I realized when I was thinking about this list that it doesn't include any particular stores or communities of people. Back before I had to cut out gluten, I'd have told you I loved a certain coffee shop, and the pizza place in town, and how we used to pick up our CSA share at the co-op, order a pizza for dinner, and then browse in the used book store. But the used book store closed, the CSA stopped letting kids on the farm so I couldn't work off half our share anymore, and most of us can't eat regular pizza. My love of this place is very much centered on the landscape. Whenever we idly talk of moving I always say I don't want to be any farther from the coast than I am now, and since it's about four miles "as the crow flies," that limits our options a bit!

What do you love about where you live? Is it the landscape, the community, or both?

List-It Tuesday: I Am A Sucker For...

 

When I saw the topic for this week's list, I knew I needed to put it on a lollipop background. I played around with some new watercolor pencils to make this (#2!!). Here's a bit more about the items on my list:

1. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, if one of my kids comes to me to offer a hug, or because they need a hug, well. That becomes my automatic priority, right? I'm still waking my youngest up for a bathroom trip before I go to bed, and those sleepy hugs and kisses she bestows as I carry her to and from bed...my goodness. Sometimes it's the highlight of my day, hands down.

2. Art supplies are like a Happy Drug. And books! Full of ideas! Techniques! Pretty pictures! I'm such a sucker.

3. Many a night I've agreed to this request against my better judgment, knowing that 6:45 is a better bedtime than 7, that everything will go just that much more smoothly if I don't read that one more story. And our marathon read-aloud sessions once the school bus is gone and my coffee is poured...one more story, Mama? Of course.

4. Bird seed costs a lot! But I love seeing the birds visiting the feeder. I will stop what I'm doing for a bird almost every time. Not too long ago the two youngest kids and I saw three--three!!--flickers grazing for insects on the grass. Joy! Over the weekend I spotted a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk in a beach parking lot in the pouring rain. Of course I stopped the car to watch and try and get a decent photo through my windshield. Whenever we run low on birdseed I go to the store and put another ginormous bag of it on the credit card because apparently, bird seed has become a line item here. I signed up for Cornell's Project FeederWatch this year. I can't wait to get my packet of information.

5. We get lots of requests for donations in the mail (because we donate). And when we are on a tighter budget, I can recycle most of them, but I can't pass by the appeals from the Food Bank. One day a couple years ago I received their report on the state of hunger in Rhode Island. I was so appalled (I read the whole thing) that I signed us up for a monthly automatic donation. There was no appeal envelope or request in with the report, just the cold, hard facts, but it was the biggest incentive for donating more that I'd ever read. I've recycled a lot of donation requests recently, but the Food Bank is also a line item.

Next week's topic is "what I love about where I live." I can't wait. Those of you who know me well know I love to list what I love about living here. I think next week's list might have to be a photographic one, hmm... maybe you'll play along too? 

Linking up with Aimee at Artsyville!

List-It Tuesday: 15-Minute Creativity

 

The topic this week is "creative things I could do in 15 minutes or less." This was a fun list to make, using a combination of watercolors and Pitt artist pens.

How about you? What can you do in 15 minutes or less? Go!

Linking up with Aimee for List-It Tuesday.

List-It Tuesday: Nostalgia

It's List-It Tuesday, so here I am again with my list. This week's suggested topic was "things that make you nostalgic," which stumped me. So, like the good English major I used to be, I turned to the dictionary. The second definition, the one I incorporated into my list, is, I think, the one we all most associate with the word: "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition." No wonder I was having trouble! My husband has described me as the least sentimental person he knows. (I will get back to that in a moment...)

The first definition of the word also shed some light for me. "The state of being homesick: HOMESICKNESS." When I was ten, I lived away from home for about six months or so. It was not a good situation. (Hello, understatement, and backstory! It's not coming, sorry.) At the beginning, I was excessively and sentimentally homesick; I can't even think about how excessively and sentimentally. I got over it, because it wasn't changing anything. As hard as I've thought about it, I can't remember ever being homesick in that way again, not at college, not traveling by myself, not at all that I can think of. Safe to say I detached.

The excessively sentimental side of me went underground, too. The items from my childhood that I've thrown out or let slip through my fingers--you'd be appalled. (When I got engaged I threw out an entire box of letters from old boyfriends. I figured it was wrong to keep them, and I've never missed them, although I didn't realize at the time that letter writing would basically become extinct, and quite soon. At the very least, they'd make excellent collage fodder now.) I know people who are sentimental about houses...no. The house to which my firstborn came home from the hospital, where he took his first steps, was also filthy with lead paint, super duper tiny, and in a neighborhood where lawns were regularly sprayed with nasty chemicals. I was extremely happy to leave it. And while I do own special objects, I'm hard pressed to think of any loss of thing that would devastate me.

But I am sentimental about my children's childhoods...perhaps even excessively so. I've tucked away all manner of odd flotsam and jetsam, and they can decide, when they're older, if they want to keep any of it. I have tried, to the best of my ability, to take note of as many moments as I could, not just the highlight-reel moments but the everyday ones as well. While I danced with my first baby in the sling throughout the night in the dark living room of that old, small house, because he couldn't sleep otherwise for colic, I looked down at that sweet baby face and thought, I will remember this night, this song playing softly, this lullaby I sing to you, this beautiful, ordinary, just-us moment. Over and over and over I have repeated the attempt to cement a moment fast in my mind and my heart.

And thus, this week's list is more of a heart-wish than a list. I cannot be accused of living in the past, or even wanting to. But if I could jar up just one day from each year of each of my children's lives--if time travel existed, I'd visit them all again, even just briefly.

And see? I am sentimental, because just writing this post has made me tear up just a bit. And you? What makes you nostalgic?

List-It Tuesday

About all I've been "creating" lately is lists, so when I saw Aimee was starting up List-It Tuesday again I figured that, at least, was something I could do. This week's theme is resolutions for the remainder of the year, but instead I decided to take a few minutes (stolen between supervising the bedtime routine and packing my son's lunch for the following day) to write down all the things I'd like to make, when I can re-work this crazy schedule and find the time.

You can click on that to make it big enough to read, I'm pretty sure. I scanned it, so the far left edge is a little blurry in spots. The stamps were an impulse buy at Target yesterday, and I am so bad at stamping alphabet stamps; I have to work on getting the pressure just right so I get a nice stamp of the letter but none of the edge. My list is not as gorgeous as Aimee's, but it is written down now, so when I get those precious itty chunks of time, I don't wander around going, What did I want to do again?

Where have my creative energies been going instead? Mostly in getting ready for my co-op classes and supporting my kids' project-based learning (here and here, and I'm not up to date on posting about it all yet). I think I'd be doing a little better if we could ease into the day, but with one in school, too, that's not possible. So I'm just hanging in until things even out, which I hope they do soon. Meanwhile, I have the goal of at least once a week producing a slightly prettier list than my usual scrawled-in-the-daily-planner type of list. Although, I think those workaday lists are pretty fascinating and just might share some of those, too!