Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Double Posting from my school blog - Documentary Observation Exercise.

(Because this almost served as a look at a day in my life - minus most of the housework and homework I do)

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8am - this is my weekday ritual of wrestling my 7-year-old out of bed and into his clothes.  This child needs something like 13 hours of sleep to function well, so morning always comes too soon. His reticence and petulance are most evident at this time of day. Check out that body language. It's also the time of day when I rediscover, over and over again, how long and lithe this body has become that I once built inside of my body.

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9:30am - my younger two boys have been told that they cannot play video games unless they can agree on what to play in advance.  That proved too difficult, so they resorted to pretending the laundry baskets are rocket ships again.  (Which may have been my plan all along.) My 3-year-old is potty training, so he only wears pants when he leaves the house. His little legs have lost most of their baby fat, but he's still got it in his cheeks.  And he still fits in a laundry basket.

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We call her Bunny, and despite being only 18-months-old, she has developed a radar for portable electronic devices.  And she gets laser-beam-intent on figuring out how to navigate them.  While sitting on the kitchen floor.  Such a digital native. Also - this captures the conundrum of her hair really well.  She won't hold still enough to do a real braid, so we go through a dozen disposable hair elastics every day, and it takes up to 20 minutes to wrestle them all into her hair.

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Dishes - one of the tasks I tackle multiple, multiple times every day.  Because I didn't want to try to find beauty in cleaning my boys' bathroom.  Poetry in the Prosaic. Emily in the reflection.

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I did a lot of gardening in the late morning, mostly preparing beds and soil for planting that should have happened last week.  But the light outside was too harsh for a good photo.  So right as I was finishing I dropped my gloves and trowel on the rug in my garage and grabbed the camera.  I finally managed a photo with enough depth of field to have something in focus. I am a visual texture junkie, and so these lambskin gloves make me happy to look at.

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My 7-year-old came home from school with his April writing journal.  This is an entry about how he was kind when he let his younger brothers play with his plush snakes while he was at school, (he would never think to share when it was inconvenient for him - the turkey) but I love it because it captures a lot of things about our mornings.  My son has drawn himself with his red and blue star backpack and his scooter, and his friend that comes and waits in our front room every morning while my son drags his feet brushing his teeth and getting his jacket on is standing outside the front door.  He even drew his 5-year-old brother wearing his favorite color, green.

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Bob left this behind after class.  Everybody stayed a few moments after the film ended to process and decompress, and I think this poor stem is a pretty apt metaphor for how emotionally barren we all felt.

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The carpet and rug at the top of the East Stairs of the D-Wing of the HFAC.  Mostly because I love all the texture going on there.  The patterns in both carpets, and the difference in frieze between the two fibers, and that nubby little strip of rubber between them.

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As soon as I got home from class, this girl was ready for bed.  She is a thumb-sucker of the first order.  She also has a blankie that she has attached herself to. (See the fabric between her fist and her neck? It's also under her pointer finger as she manages to simultaneously suck that thumb and rub her sweet spot on the blanket)  I also kind of love that shine in her hair, because thank-heaven my babysitter bathed everyone and got them into pajamas for me.  And the way her hair falls in her eyes is maddening in real life, but adds a lot of interest to this photo. Also - taking this photo while holding her was a trick.

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My 5-year-old, and his joy-face, upside down, hair still wet from his bath. Chewing on his shirt, and his scar on his cheek from the stitches he had to get after splitting his face open in preschool a while back.  All reminders of his apraxia. I don't see the scar when I look at him anymore, but I see it when I'm looking at photos. And yes - those are Boba Fett pajamas, and they are compounding his joy.

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While my boys were doing gymnastics in the living room, I looked out the front window and noticed that the setting sun was backlighting these pansies so they sort of glowed.  I had to set the camera on the ground, back it up for focus and zoom in to get a shot, but I think it captures some of the luminescence that was happening.


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And while I was in the front yard, I also got a shot of my tree peonies, because they are gorgeous, but they last about 3 days. Fleeting, fleeting ruffley things, in the most electric shade of pink.

1 comment:

...life, the way of the hummingbird said...

i love this post Emily ... it makes me miss all of you, but especially you all the more.

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