The New Favorite Baby!

My kids love babies - especially Ottar, who thinks and talks about his favorite babies all the time. But lately Ottar met a new baby who is his all-time favorite. And that is saying a lot! He's baby Shamore, who our friends Mark and Josie just adopted from Ethiopia. He is so cute, it hurts my heart to even look at him. And it's not just his looks - he is one amazing baby. Anyway, he has some kind of amazing karmic energy or something. Even Ezra begged to hold him and Ezra never asks to hold babies. Then the next day after we met him, Ezra said, "Shamore is the cutest baby in the whole world!" as soon as he woke up!

We are also getting some serious mileage out of this boy. Now I can say, "Ottar, don't you want to use the tray on your highchair, just like Baby Shamore?" (He hadn't accepted his high chair tray in over a year. But now he loves to use it!) And also I say, "How about if you ride in the grocery cart - I bet Baby Shamore rides in the grocery cart!" And now Ottar will ride in it for the first time in his life! Hooray! I guess this little 7-month-old is Ottar's idol.

This weekend we'll see Baby Shamore again, and hopefully this will result in more of this type of manipulative inspiration on my part. But better than that, we'll be able to hang with this darling little man. We'll feel so honored.

The Messy House Excuse.

Please let the record show that I have an excellent reason for having an unbelievably out-of-control house.

Here's a perfect example. Today, we got home from an unschooler gathering a couple of hours ago. Ottar is overtired but I don't want him to nap because when he naps he stays up until 11 or 12 at night and I refuse to stay up with him! So, he walked right in the door and knocked a plastic cup of water on the floor, and emptied the recyling all over my office. Then he was calm for about 40 minutes, but then announced that he'd swallowed a penny. Then I gave him sardines to eat (they're slippery) and had him help me make a banana "licuado." After this meal he poured water all over the floor from a water bottle, threw markers all over the floor from two different containers, and stuck his hand in the Chili Mac that was out on the table (something I'd tried to get him to eat earlier) and threw it all over the floor, and then dipped his hand again and threw more before I had a chance to stop him. He immediately ran off to jump on the beds with chili mac all over both hands, and when he came back, his hands were mysteriously clean.

Did I mention that I already had to take the kitchen broom away from him because he was trying to clobber his brother over the head with it? And I just stopped him from knocking the 10' tall, 15' long bedroom screen over onto the beds. I am sure I forgot something.

I just had to write that all down so I wouldn't forget. Now I have to go see what is going on in there while I type. Tomorrow I will post the inspirational story from John Holt - or a story I used to find inspirational from John Holt - about how kids in other countries don't do any of this stuff.

The Wicked Witch

I finally have the technology for uploading Ezra's pictures, but my attempts to upload some rocket pictures failed. So for now, here is a picture of the Wicked Witch of the West he drew two days ago.

The Wizard of Oz - A New Phase

It's been almost exactly a year since Ezra's rocket obsession started, and he still loves rockets and plays with them and says he wants to be an aerospace engineer; however the latest fad in our home is dressing up like The Wicked Witch of the West.

This photo is actually of his *old* costume - his new one is a full-length woman's skirt which he wears up around his neck. Then he asks someone to throw water on him, at which point he re-enacts the scene in the movie where the Wicked Witch melts. I think he's done this about 200 times. His favorite activity now is to go out in the hall with Little Brother, who wears a black strappy cocktail dress over his clothes, and carries a huge blue kitchen broom. Then they wait for passers-by in our building to comment, scream, run away, etc.

Great fun!

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!