Many times during the pandemic, it’s felt like my hold on reality was tenuous. My body has been hurting, and it keeps getting worse. My brain was overloaded with the daily onslaught of requests. It is literally burning right now, right around its outer membrane.
After a particularly hard week, with major parenting struggles in addition to the regular parenting demands, I was teetering on the edge of not being able to cope when I walked into my new rheumatologist’s office.
I want to introduce my kids to voices that historically haven’t been amplified.
I asked our children’s librarians for books about Indigenous people, and by Indigenous people, and they provided me with an big bag of books from board books all the way up to YA lit.
These are four of my favorites.
The Chaplain is working more. I am walking, sewing, and reading less and parenting more. Quiet time has become an elusive ghost of a former life when I got to be alone for a period of time each day.
It feels like we are all in a constant negotiation for what we need, the kids and The Chaplain and I, and none of us are quite getting what we’re looking for.
So it was as we rearranged our dining room around a new piece of furniture, and my grandmother’s teacups came to the kids’ attention. They asked if we could have a tea party.
Today is a day of mourning for Native Americans. It has been so for fifty years. As our country awakens again to the tragedies that have dogged us at every stage of our history, it’s difficult to find a holiday that can be celebrated without mixed feelings.
Truthfully, what holiday was ever free of baggage? These days were already burdened with the small and large issues we have with them, wrapped up in financial woes, boundaries with family members, or our own dark personal struggles.
If you go back to my very first blog post, I talked about the pressure of trying to make all the holiday magic by myself. In the couple of years since then, I’ve realized that I don’t have to do it alone.
I wanted to pop in with an update on costuming with the kids.
My goal was to create a mid-18th century working class look, with all the visible stitching done by hand. For the sake of time, all the inner long seams were machine sewn, then hand finished.
Because this is supposed to be fun, I didn’t want to go down a rabbit hole of ideas about how the costumes “should” look and or get too neurotic about what was Historically Accurate.
