Maebius Musing

This year, we are returning to the Great Festival that started my love of drumming, and fully cemented, solidified, and otherwise convinced me that this Path of mine was ‘Me’.  Yep, Starwood.  That bastion of revelry and fun, which can be described, as the website so reads: A place where Scientists sit with Shamans and Druids dance with Deadheads. Where African drums jam with bluegrass fiddles, and political activism meets Earth spirituality - where theatre and life meld - where days are spent in exploration of inner and outer space, and nights blaze with laser lights and bonfire flames.

I found this image form the last time we went, in 2002, thus proving my existance there at the opening spiral dance ‘ceremony’.  That guy in the white shirt and black shorts?  Yep, me.  That cute chick in the green shirt and flowery purplish skirt?  Yep, the wife.   (this is pre-sprogling times of course) The guy in the robes and blue scarf?  no clue, but friendly! 

This year we are going with some friends of ours, who generally attend the S.C.A. event known as Pennsic.  While this wonderful festival is over ten times the size of Starwood, and has all sorts of cool costumes, workshops, and such, I am totally looking forward to the more laid back and spiritual festival event this year.   It may not be the most serious spiritual gathering, and have more of a party flair, but I’m really really looking forward to “coming Ohm”.
All night drumming bonfire circles, fireworks one night, and the freedom to go skyclad if one so chooses, is simply indescribable for those who have not attended.  (Heck, even this usually conservative person felt no real hesitation to joining the spontaneous “dance naked in the rain shower” that happened last time.)

There are 18 days left as of this posting, which means our next weeks will be full of meal planning,  double-triple-quadruple checking the packing lists, and otherwise getting things in gear to spend and entire week living out of our tent with a bunch of strange folks, many hours from our land.

Otherwise, there’s no real deeper meaning to this poist, other than to say…I can’t wait!

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Yay! Summer is in full swingand the day was long and summery.   Blue skies interspersed with puffy little clouds, then the traditional afternoon grey rumblings and windy “Get indoors NOW” rain threats.

Not much to report, as we were rather busy with daily life,  but it was spent mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, and otherwise fiddling with the land outside. Our little one spent a decent portion of the day in the old corn-crib (his “Smash House” lately) pretending to be The Increduble Hulk, and stomping through various parts of the rotten floorboards.  It’s truly amazing how stomping a weak bit of plywood until it becomes a hole, then spending a good 2 hours enlarging that hole to the limits of rotten-ness and stomp-strength could occupy a child of almost-5 in such a focused manner.  Kids R Kool!

In the afternoon, we went to visit our friend Meg, and got to see her sweetie’s house for the first time.  It’s a nice little place, a bit far down a windy road, tucked off to some forgotten sectino of the suburbs.   You wouldn’t expect to find a secluded little patch of woody fields essentially just off to the middle of “town”, which made the trip there kinda magical.   The yard was about as big as our front lawn and nestled in a little dip of the hillside to make the neighbors all-but-vanish.  With trees behind it stretching to “infinity’ (or 1.4 mile) and a cozy garden, combost bin, and fire circle + hammock, it was perfect!

There were a few kids there for ours to play with, and us adult types mostly jsut stood around and chatted.  We didn’t know many folks, but there were some gransparents, nad a lovely older woman in a wheelchair who devoured the snack we provided.

There was planned a spiral-dance with the kids, and a bag full of rattles, sticks, and such, but as soon as they were getting distributed, the wind suddenly gusted, black couds materialized out of the blue sky, and it the temperature dropped 5 degrees.  You know those times, where you can feel/smell the rain, and the ait itself gets charged with electricity?   I joked that if we danced right then, the final moments where everyone crunches together would be accented by the largest *CRAACK* of lightning, and a torrent of raindrops.   Many agreed, but as much as us younger adults wanted to do that, older wisdom prevailed and we moved the party indoors quickly before the gransfolks got soaked.

(Note, there were only approximately 42 large drops of rain which fell, by the time the frontline moved through, so no real torrents, which made us all laugh at the ‘paranoia’ a few minutes beforehand.)
Concerning snacks,  Doug and I made salsa and guacamole from “scratch” to bring to the party.   I’ve never actually make salsa from a recipe before, and always add a dash of vinegar to tarten it up, but I followed the recipe for the most part this time.  Turned out AWESOME! (Recipe below, and thanks Nettle for helping with tomato-processing questions).

The guacamole was our little guy’s favorite.   Three avacados, a heaping spoonful of light sour cream, a glop of lemon juice, smallish scoop of minced garlic, and a quarter of a chopped onion.   Stir to smoothish consistancy and serve.   The guacamole didn’t last long, and some of the older folks were mock-fighting the lady in the wheelchair since she kept surruptitiously moving the bowl onto her lap and lookis around innocently if someone held a chip out.  

All in all, a fun festive time!

Maebius’s new favorite homemade Salsa:

• 2 large tomatos
• 1/2 large onion
• 1/4 cup fresh cilantro
• 1 whole garlic clove (we used about 2.5)
• 1 jalapeno pepper
• Chop all ingredients and mix together in bowl.  Let sit for 2 hours to allow flavour-mingling.  Eat!

We substituted some sliced peppers in oil that were leftover from last season for the fresh jalapeno, and added just over double the garlic recommended.   The whole mess looked suspiciously like Tabbouleh, but tasted much more like the topping Wren used for Bruschetta once.  Tart, not too tomato-y, yet very yummy!

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As referenced in my prior post, I will be taking a self-prescribed holiday from the Intarweb.

I will still check my email, I will check blogs from my friends (Nettle, Kwitchery, etc), but otherwise my browsing will cease, and my online game playing will be generally suspended.

Originally, I was going to start yesterday, but World of Warcraft beckoned me.   I now have, as of Thursday evening, June 5th, 2008.  My first max-level character!!!   I know it seems petty, but with my playstyle, I was surprised I made it that far.  I’m always more than willnig to help lower-level guildmates,  to go questing and help collect 5 stacks of some crafting material in the starting zones, and the like.  Plus, I roleplay and fish, and dance, so I’m not into powerlevelling.   However, I’m there, and the excitement leading up to that DING was quite palpable.  It honestly feels like a huge achievement.  Like stepping back and looking at a garden you planted which is full of little green sprouts after weeks of digging, tilling, and weeding.   I made it.   Yay me.

Tonight, I’m going to see friends of ours in a locally filmed and produced movie (on the big screen!).  It’s not particularly my usual style of movie, and I fully expect the cheesy factor to outweigh much erudite enjoyment.  But, The Abandoned does play on the local theatre screen, with private tickets only.  Which I have to admire, for even helping get some guy who lives near me “published” like this.   Hope it’s not too bad a movie. 

So now, with that out of the way, I’m offline.   See you in two weeks!

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We had some wonderful friends of ours stop up to visit recently, and have scheduled out some camping trips, and a Starwood Vacation this summer. He’s an engineer, she is an awesome “The Body Shop” saleswoman. (I love their Satsuma line). They have a 2yr old son, and watching their style of parenting gave me a good pondering for my own…

(The below is not meant to challenge or downplay the discussed strategies in parenting, merely highlight some differences to my own method, and ponder in an intelligent manner. I welcome debate. Please leave egos at the door, ye sibling/friend reading this!)

It’s interesting to see how different folks bring up their children, and if looked at in an unbiased manner, allows me to change our own thoughts and techniques. Parenting is an evolving art, and no amount of books can prepare you for the squiggly details of day-to-day parenting. It’s fun, it’s frustrating, but it’s entirely awesome to go through.

One big thing we do with our son is allow him to sleep in our room, and even our bed, whenever he wants. Granted, I’ve often lost sleep from from blunt-foot trauma to my nether-regions, fought the sleepy cover-theft-tango, and such, but we enjoy nestling in at night with a story and seeing a little face yawn and close his eyes right by the crook of his arm. We also are pretty well entrenched in the “mom or dad goes to bed with him” routine. If we are watching a movie, or playing outside, weekend bedtimes tend to stretch a bit later than “officially recommended”, but we sleep in the next day.

We’ve maintained that when he gets older, and school starts up full-time, there will be a period of weaning from this system, as he will need to get up before our current schedules allow for. I fully expect a week of hell when bedtime shifts closer to 7pm and it’s “Still light outside!”. I’m prepared to sleep in his room on the floor. However, even now, there are days when our little one actually requests to go in his bed. (This usually lasts until the midnight pee-time, whereupoin he’s back in our bed, but that’s easy enough to redirect when we bring him up to lay down again).

I see the Pro of the [perceived] mainstream method of “kid in own room, at own bedtime, good night now, shut door.” It gives the kid a set routine, which is important. It allows parental quiet-time in the evenings to work, chat, or whatever. In some part of my brain, I’d rather like that, but our current schedule with the wife waking at 5:30 is one factor our basic “mom and kid go sleep in bed now”. Yours truly then gets to stay up a bit later and play on the computer, or dry dishes, in peace.

It’s an interesting balancing act, between structure and coddling. There are many other things we do which seem odd and even “wrong” to some folks I know. We play video games for an hour if he’s been good at school. Some say games are just setting him up to be a TV/gamer junkie when he’s older. Yet we do limit the time. What weekend visitors do not see is the mid-week fuss when he wants to play and we enforce the ‘No’. I’m a huge proponent of outside time, whether we work in the garden (which bores him to tears), or run around with a bat playing the current favorite-of-the-week “pretend”.

Yesterday, we walked the entire fence line, just my son and I, at his lead, pretending we were “adventuring dragons”. My legs were not up for it, and there was plenty to do back home, but it was “Daddy hour” so I hiked through tall grasses and dodged ubiquitous thorn clusters. We found such geographic realms as (A)Reed Forest (near the pond), (B)Buttercup Field, (C)Spyro Flower Hill (so named because of unidentified purple flowers), (D)Thorn Path, and (E)Cow Skull Treehouse, and finally (F)Tree Slide Hill. This was a ton of fun, and something we encourage, though a family member expressed concern with encouraging him to wander so far away from the house.

There are many other examples I could toss out, such as snacking throughout the day, eating something different for dinner (Not that we allow just anything for dinner if he doesn’t like what we have, he just gets bigger servings of sides), and such. Yet it all comes down to one point.

Structure vs Freedom.

There are many points along the bell curve, and I’m finding we fall distinctly on one foothill slope. Are we too far down one side? Perhaps. But I’ll hold my tongue and accept that there are many, many other points along the curve. Life is nothing if not diverse. I like how we live, and will support our son, even if he grows to become the complete opposite of us.
…and if you are at all interested in “The Dragon Adventure”, I’ve created a map using Google Earth. Labels are described above.

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Our little one is entering Kindergarden, and turning 5 years old this fall. (He’s all growed up!) What follows is a photo-spam of his recent school artwork, and him riding the buss when they visited the Kindergarden school this week. Dialup users BEWARE!

He went in for his official evaluation yesterday, and completed the battery of tests with fairly predictable and proud-parent results. Forgive me for a bit of well-intentioned bragging.

As for mental development, he was well over average in terms of vocabulary (he’s reading signs on store shelves now, while his Pre-K peers are learning their letters), and impressed everyone with his creativity, and exuberance to get tested. Average IQ for intellectual/creative/vocab wound up being somewhere around 125 (vocab/language skill was up at 131!).   GO BOY!

Otherwise, our concerns about his general habit of fidgeting during class, not paying attention, and constantly mumbling stories or singing under his breath were slightly assuaged. This type of behavior is slightly disruptive, but…. His ability to memorize lists and such, even though initially outwards he was not “paying attention”, then reciting them back later and getting all creative like saying them backwards, showed that he fidgets because he’s somewhat ‘bored’ with the simple things he does in school. Thus, he fidgets to stay stimulated.

One noticable improvement-area was a possible lack of focus in his left eye. He can not cross his eyes at all, and turns his head to follow a pencil moved towards that peripheral. Granted, I can not cross my eyes either, which my wife never knew. Nothing as serious as needing glasses, just something to watch… (and if he does, they will need to be prism glasses, like vertical bifocals). Otherwise, I’m going to summarize his “evaluation” as him being Gifted, and slightly out of focus, which causes the tired tantrums if he’s been playing games or inside all day. I’m guessing our noticing that video games tires him out slightly is due to effort at concentrating/focusing. All in all, a great report-card!

/cue Proud Papa.

In art, they made collages. The brown label/note reads as follows: “Piet Mondrain / Henry Matisse : Mondrain used primary colors and basic shapes. When Matisse became too feeble to paint, he did collages. We combined both styles for this project.” Our little one made the rather zen collage with three yellow shapes, centered on black. One circle, one square, one triangle. “That’s all it needed”, he said.

Next, we have the portrait class. He has two teachers, one with straight short hair, one with curly hair. See if you can tell which one is which.

Next on our Tour De Artiste, we have the interpretation of “sunflowers” by Vincent Van Gogh. Doug’s is the one of the bottom left, which I think looks remarkably like an orange dragon traipsing through a wooded field. He describes it as “The yellow are dandelions, the green is chive stems, and the orange is our yummy violets because she didn’t give me purple.“. How kawaiii!

Finally, the wall outside their Pre-K classroom, filled with painted flowers, bumble-plate-bees, and a rainbow of hand-prints.

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