The End of Chaos!

Well, the chaos is all over now, and our lives are all going to be dreamy and blissful heretofore.

The art crawl is over, and with it, my obsessive need to finish dozens of art projects. Most of them I ended up dropping within a few days of the Crawl anyway, as I have always been one to underestimate my own limitations - but now that I have children it's gotten much worse.

But anyway, I did get the bare minimum done, with lots of help in childcare, cleaning, editing, and tech support. And now I am treating myself to an early summer (I've decided) of reading and learning to knit (for the fourth time.) I refuse to do anything else!

Ottar got to spend the weekend with Bubbie and Papa, for the most part, and that was good for everyone. Ezra got to run around the building and hang around with his "fake cousins" whose mother was my art partner. He also spent a *lot* of time socializing with friends old and new in the building - drawing, painting, and just chatting with them. I think it was a great experience for him to be able to talk with so many people who didn't have anywhere to go. Actually the traffic was pretty light this spring, so lots of people had time to spend with him. Plus he watched some theatre, listened to live music in the atrium, and hung out with Sprinkles the Clown. I heard through the grapevine that he tells people he considers himself a better artist than me. I think that is quite certainly true.

Who's there?

My God, it's like an echo chamber in here. Hello? HELLO??

Going Nuts

Okay, I have one very urgent request for discussing what I, the Mama, am doing these days. I haven't been posting because it is too luxurious. What I've been doing is getting ready for the St. Paul Art Crawl. I committed to the art crawl in January, and this was a bit crazy of me, as I had not even one thing to put on display in my studio. The art crawl is in less than two weeks now, and I have been frantically trying to finish a zine (issue 7, the last one I ever do, I hope!) and a little book about cats, and lots of random cartoons, illustrations, reprints, and whatever else I can crank out.

On top of this, I have to get the entire apartment clean, move out a lot of boxes and furniture (we have no functional bedrooms and we currently all sleep out in a pile in the corner of the apartment - not so great with 1500 people walking through) and I have to get child care for all the weeks leading up to the Crawl, as well as during it, as Ottar, a.k.a. Monkey Man, is going to need to be heavily supervised. He loves to run off on his own, toss things out our fourth story window, and draw on the floorboards with Sharpies (just for some quick examples). . .

Right now we have a 7-year old computer which I have affectionate feelings for, but which is causing us some problems. We also had a broken scanner until 2 weeks ago, a broken printer until 1 month ago, and now we are going to have to get a new scanner/printer anyway, within 3 days if I am going to participate in the crawl!

It's a little nutty around here, to say the least. Fortunately, Kenny has been willing to take the kids out every day so I can get something done here (my studio is in the hall by the bathroom, so I can't even hide when the kids are home) and some relatives have also been helpful in picking up the slack.

Wish me luck!

More Proof!

Aha! I just found the following quote on the Sandra Dodd website:

"Unschooling is *much* harder than school at home because it takes a great deal of self examination and change in ourselves to help our kids and not get in their way!"
—Joyce Fetteroll

*This* is what I'm talking about when I say that just about all the unschoolers I know use some type of transformational psychology in their everyday lives. It's almost impossible to unschool and not have incredible psychological and/or spiritual breakthroughs all the time. . . or to force them upon yourself, which is actually much easier! Because the basis of unschooling is so counter-cultural. Trust your children? Spend huge, unstructured blocks of time with them? Allow them to follow their passions even when they aren't the least bit interesting to you (i.e. in our house - space shuttles and guns!)?

Super radical. Which calls for super radical, unobstructive parenting. . .

Now Taking Requests

Lately I've been so absorbed in trying to get my own artwork together for an upcoming show, that my brain has been blanking out on postworthy unschooler stuff. So I'm taking requests - what should I write about?