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Aug. 24th, 2004 11:13 pmWhen I was about a year old, my parents rented a house, and asked the owner if they had a gate for the stairs. (It was a furnished house they were renting from an academic on leave, I think.) The woman reacted with absolute horror: "Oh, you shouldn't gate the stairs! You should let her climb! Let your little one climb!"
Wacky House Rental Lady would strongly approve of my house, because the bottom of our stairs are fundamentally ungateable. And Kiera loves to climb. The only thing she likes better than climbing is discovering that a parent is coming up the stairs after her: she thinks that's a really cool game, and she will shriek happily and start climbing faster.
Most recently, she's decided that she knows how to come down. Does she come down feet-first on her hands and knees, like I've tried (repeatedly) to teach her how to do? No, she wants to go bumping down on her butt. She thinks she knows how to do this well enough that she doesn't need help, and will do it without us right there.
Fortunately, when I came up from doing laundry on Monday and found her going bump, bump, bump down the stairs, she was being very cautious and holding onto the banister spindles with both hands. When she has a parent to catch her, she's much more reckless. Seeing her try to walk down the stairs does not fill me with confidence as far as, you know, taking my eyes off of her for five minutes while I do laundry is concerned. My mother says that when we were that age, she just brought us along when she did laundry. How she managed a baby and a basket full of laundry, she doesn't remember.
My parents invited the girls over for a visit today, so I had a couple of hours to myself. I went up to Wal-Mart to see if they had any high chairs that met my requirements. (No.) I also went to ArtScraps, this little shop close to my parents' house. (It's at 1459 St. Claire Ave in St. Paul -- http://www.artstart.org for their website.) I had seen this store a million times but had never gone in. I'd always figured it was a run-of-the-mill art supply store. No! It's far, far, FAR cooler than that. They sell crafty surplus items, basically, for teachers and parents (and artists). Leather scraps, cloth, contact paper, beads, buttons, cardboard cones, seashells, piles of old National Geographics....... I didn't buy anything, but I'm definitely planning to go back the next time we need craft supplies.
Then I went to a coffee shop and wrote for a while. I finished editing "Perfection," and did a little bit of outlining for my next novel.
I've noticed that I have this tendency lately to feel guilty, no matter what I'm doing, that I'm not doing something else. I felt guilty while running errands for not going straight to a coffee shop to write. (I can always run errands with the kids in tow, it's just a lot more work.) Then I felt guilty while at the coffee shop for not being more productive; I finished editing a short story, but I didn't have any fully-baked short story ideas I could immediately launch into. Ed has encouraged me to write some short stories set in the world of Freedom's Gate, which I agree is a good idea, but I haven't had any ideas.
Wacky House Rental Lady would strongly approve of my house, because the bottom of our stairs are fundamentally ungateable. And Kiera loves to climb. The only thing she likes better than climbing is discovering that a parent is coming up the stairs after her: she thinks that's a really cool game, and she will shriek happily and start climbing faster.
Most recently, she's decided that she knows how to come down. Does she come down feet-first on her hands and knees, like I've tried (repeatedly) to teach her how to do? No, she wants to go bumping down on her butt. She thinks she knows how to do this well enough that she doesn't need help, and will do it without us right there.
Fortunately, when I came up from doing laundry on Monday and found her going bump, bump, bump down the stairs, she was being very cautious and holding onto the banister spindles with both hands. When she has a parent to catch her, she's much more reckless. Seeing her try to walk down the stairs does not fill me with confidence as far as, you know, taking my eyes off of her for five minutes while I do laundry is concerned. My mother says that when we were that age, she just brought us along when she did laundry. How she managed a baby and a basket full of laundry, she doesn't remember.
My parents invited the girls over for a visit today, so I had a couple of hours to myself. I went up to Wal-Mart to see if they had any high chairs that met my requirements. (No.) I also went to ArtScraps, this little shop close to my parents' house. (It's at 1459 St. Claire Ave in St. Paul -- http://www.artstart.org for their website.) I had seen this store a million times but had never gone in. I'd always figured it was a run-of-the-mill art supply store. No! It's far, far, FAR cooler than that. They sell crafty surplus items, basically, for teachers and parents (and artists). Leather scraps, cloth, contact paper, beads, buttons, cardboard cones, seashells, piles of old National Geographics....... I didn't buy anything, but I'm definitely planning to go back the next time we need craft supplies.
Then I went to a coffee shop and wrote for a while. I finished editing "Perfection," and did a little bit of outlining for my next novel.
I've noticed that I have this tendency lately to feel guilty, no matter what I'm doing, that I'm not doing something else. I felt guilty while running errands for not going straight to a coffee shop to write. (I can always run errands with the kids in tow, it's just a lot more work.) Then I felt guilty while at the coffee shop for not being more productive; I finished editing a short story, but I didn't have any fully-baked short story ideas I could immediately launch into. Ed has encouraged me to write some short stories set in the world of Freedom's Gate, which I agree is a good idea, but I haven't had any ideas.
