As I look toward my day
And align the priorities of things I need to take care of,
It’s a little tricky to get past immediate issues of helping my two year old refine her social skills.
Her phrase for today while her naked potty training self is wrapped in rainbow silk is “I’m going to walk away” because that is how we handle being in a frustrating impasse. She wants to control (well most everything), but today, It’s hard to share the camera with JereMiah and Abriel. The bigger kids are busy making movies this morning.
JerMiah and Abriel’s project started with JereMiah documenting the impressive simple machine he and Kevin made yesterday. Jeremiah describes the contraption:
“we wanted to make an invention
We weighed down one side then we weighed down another side so it would be balanced then we added a conveyer belt so you could move stuff. It was cool.” The conveyer belt is made with a lacing string and a pastel, fuzzy winter scarf Hung on his bunk bed with S hooks. Attached to the conveyer belt is a stainless steel pan scaled to fit Eva Rose’s play kitchen. The pan is weighted with S hooks and custom fit pieces of clay balanced on a pencil. The amount of engineering that went into creating a working conveyer belt that carries small weights is quite impressive. Since it was Valentine’s day yesterday, the inventors tested their machine by carrying chocolate covered strawberries.
Now there are musical original songs and dances and film-making about how special they are. Hmmm we are building self esteem and self confidence and self expression here while we are also building self respect and mutual respect as they navigate their creativity around acknowledging two year old Eva Rose. Whose actual self is being actively developed every second of every day.
All of this uplifting internal construction and elevation of the soul is within the scaffolding of the actual construction as we literally are building our own sustainable home. A few yards from this space we all share is the beautiful home we are building, all sharing the strong and unique and hard work of it. It’s quite the metaphor for my life and my family.
I have to go let in the dog, the cat and feed us
