Happy birthday to my maniac man on the move!

Dear Cris,

What an important year it has been! You my dear are learning so many things like how to unlock the secrets of letters and to have big aspirations, such as being a practicing ninja when you are 100. On your first day of kindergarten your biggest aspiration was to learn to be a spy. I have no doubt that you could have physically done it, you would have already engineered a pathway to the moon.

You have left the shadow of babyhood behind and now stand straight like a knocked bow string. You can still curl yourself into my lap, barely, but mostly I spend time looking at the back of your head as you dash to complete your next brilliant idea. You push ahead past naysayers, dream droppers, and road blockers, and sometimes even advice givers. Sometimes, sadly, even when that well wisher is me.

You take the world at full throttle and are utterly captivated by it. And you create curious and marvelous things- a periscope out of a rain gutter that stretches in a tree over our back fence (and thankfully wasn't quite long enough to reach the power lines above), custom holsters, trap doors, booby traps, propellers, catapults, bridges.

You have spunk, in abundance, and frequently lead the dance raves or the party, test your boundaries, and, completely shocking to me, even occasionally moon me. Your favorite things are bold and brassy, so it was completely fitting when you begged to join band this year to play trumpet. You were completely undaunted at being the youngest student that has ever been in the program. Yet you had to learn some valuable lessons about the power of persistence, team work, and humility. Keep coming back to those.

I hope you will continue to be undaunted by learning or paradigms of knowledge and know that it is awesome to keep learning about cosmology, and meteorology, and Gaelic, and knighthood- right now- because they are interesting to you and because only through our questions can we unlock the world.

I hope that you will let this world keep spinning you around and never ask to get off until the ride has come to a complete stop.

I hope that you will remember just how much love you have to give out from that very big, all be it, very crazy, heart of yours.

We love you so much.
X-O-X-O

Mom

Yes Mother and the Milk Mischief

"Yes, Mother!" It is a lament, dripping with sarcasm, that is usually uttered by Connor whenever he is annoyed at what I have asked him to do. But I have decided I am also trying to make this my new parenting mantra. I want to be a "yes" mother. Not because I think that my kids should be able to have a carte blanche to do anything they want, but because I feel as parents, and as a society, we spend a heck of a lot of time and energy stiffeling kids' beautiful enthusiasm by attempting to force them to behave "properly"; to not embarass us. Don't make a mess. Don't go too fast. Don't take that chance. Don't eat that. How many times have I told you...

In the photography class I have been taking one of the prompts was to photograph a mess. One day sitting next to the boys, while my out of town relatives were visiting, they started to blow bubbles in their milk. I caught myself about to say "Don't..."this is embarassing" and then I stopped. I looked at those sparkles and shimmers. How beautifully they stuck and stacked together. I thought about how enticing and fun that was to do as a child- even when we got caught.

I didn't really care what the others thought. In fact, perhaps I changed my mind, just because of what they might have thought. Because of the many things I never got to do. Because of the many things kids never get to do, mostly for inane reasons having merely to do with inconveniencing grown-ups. As so wisely stated in The Little Prince by Antoine Saint Exupery, Les grandes personnes ne comprennent jamais rien toutes seules, et c'est fatigant, pour les enfants, de toujours et toujours leur donner des explications. (Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.) So tiresome.

But this was a mess. A mess in the making. A beautiful mess. A silly-fun-giggle-till you fall over-kind of mess. A memory making kind of mess. So instead I grabbed my camera and I said, "Do it again". They delightfully obliged. These are now two of my favorite photographs of all time.

 

One of my favorite graduate education professors, Dr. Kathryn Castle, once said, "you know a child is most able to learn and having fun when they are so intent on doing something that doing that thing becomes more important then the risk of getting caught". Indeed. 

So here are some things I'm trying to more consciously say yes to:
-To slowing down
-To going fast
-To doing it again and again and again
-To experiments
-To inventions
-To recipes
-To messes
-To mistakes
-To being loud
-To acting our age
-To making a scene
-To being seen
-To seeing
-To being heard
-To hearing

Greetings from planet Kutcha Kutcha!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly offers exclusive photobook layouts so you can make your book just the way you want.

A number of months back, Cris told me that at night he never sleeps but that some aliens from planet Kutcha Kutcha come and get him every night and he goes with them. Oh yeah, and we are not actually his real parents. The aliens have brought him here to put him in our care. So in honor of his *SIX* year old birthday (and thanks to a great Groupon!) he got this book- from Planet Kutcha Kutcha, of course!

23: Dash

23

Dash

    1. (noun) A symbol used in writing to connect elements.

    2. (verb) To finish or move off hastily.