MamaStories

I made this little animation a long time ago. I found it while clearing out my hard drive. It’s not perfect, but still cute. Click on the image to see the movie.

Amie now loves two-step artwork. She painted the Deep Blue Sea and was excited about waiting for it to dry before she added Baby Beluga. She sang the song throughout the process.

After reading a Caillou book about growing carrots (which is the only edible vegetable in her book), she also wanted to make a sign. She drew the carrot paying close attention to a picture of a carrot. Then we stuck it to a stick, so it can mark where she sowed the seeds. No real seeds yet, I’m afraid, so she sows them in the bedcover. Then she also needed a marker for herself, of course!

This is an old one of mine. So much fun, all those lines! But I doubt Amie would let me finish such a detailed drawing… maybe now she will…

Barnyard Crime by Annie LaVigne

I’ve been terribly remiss in neglecting to add Mickey’s blog to my blogroll. I read Mickey’s weekly blog almost daily and always (1) either cry with laughter, (2) or choke laughing (when I’m munching or drinking something). This week’s entry is particularly hilarious!

Mickey is the other part of Harriet and Mickey, who run the show at illustrator Annie LaVigne’s company - and at her house too, it seems! Check out her funny and witty and generally amusing drawings and prints and send a droll e-card to your loved ones… at Harriet and Mickey.com.

Some more pages from my 2004 zine The Puffin!

Pages 9 and 10 make me laugh. I like the second last drawing (page 11) best of all. I still remember that meal in detail: how the food tasted, what we talked about, the atmosphere in the kitchen, even at the end of what kind of day it came. I’m sure that if I hadn’t drawn that scene on the spot, that whole event would have been lost to my memory.

I got my first Moonlight Chronicle way back in 2004. I loved it and subscribed to a couple of future issues. I got so hooked on that great feeling of opening the mailbox and seeing that small but thick envelope nestled there, with one or other MC stamp and Dan’s crazy handwriting on it.

So I requested all the MCs I didn’t have in one big order. What a feeling, getting that big box and sitting down for days on end to read through all of them! It was one of the most worthwhile splurges I ever made (did?), a close second to buying the complete collection of Glen Gould playing Bach!

I kept on receiving my MCs until issue 49. Then, for some reason, probably the one we call “life”, I failed to subscribe to new issues. I almost forgotten all about it when Amie discovered the big tin box I had stored them in.

She loves books, of course, especially small ones that easily fit her small hands. And she loves drawing and drawings. Books + drawings = Moonlight Chronicles!

She sat down and “read” through half of them! Commenting:

- Mama, Mama, there’s a house in here!

Leafing through two more, her frown growing more and more threatening. Comment:

- Mama, this is no good! These books don’t have houses in them.

Then, flipping through the next issue, with great relief:

- Ah! There’s a house!

I sat next to her on the floor, also reading, haphazardly, issue 41, then 30, then 7. I know Dan’s life story, so I didn’t get lost in the chronology. I think it was the first time in days that I was so relaxed!

Dan’s a goodhearted hobo who lives an enchanted life in a tepee and several handmade constructions (”hobbit-holes”) in a meadow by a creek near Joseph in Eastern Oregon. His life is enchanted - he searches for his style in drawing, a smaller ecological footprint, a closer bond with nature, and ruminates about life. But his little journals also reflect the hard side of that life, the isolation from his family and the discomfort of living simply. And all that in such direct language and illustrated, of course, by his neat little drawings.

Check out this cool documentary about Dan on the Oregon Public Television (not very recent, but it still reflects his life).

- Mama, are there more of these? (Amie asked)

- Of course!

- Can we get them?

- Of course!

13 more Chronicles have been written since I jumped off that wagon. We saved some money with our so-far-successful $200/week regimen, and with DH on board, I wrote to Dan and am now joyfully anticipating catching up! So is Amie!

We had a wonderful Sunday filled with family fun. A visit to the Science Museum (DH and I have lived in Boston for almost 10 and this was our first visit!), shopping together (wonderful to see Amie interact with strangers in the store), building and flying paper airplanes (from this wonderful book), reading books and playing with animals.

At the end of the long and tiring day, Amie sat down on the floor and spontaneously took some quiet time. She opened her arts and crafts box and cut pieces of paper (with her ziggy-zaggy safety scissors), colored them, and glued them to a page.

I had nothing to do with it! It was one of those rare and harmonious moments when everyone was doing something exclusively by him/herself.

Part of our shopping today involved a certain do-it-yourself-hardware store, where I found a couple of simple binding posts with screws, like so (couldn’t even find a picture of it on Google Images!):

… So that I could finally assemble our “Bambi,” which we cut out of recycled cardboard and painted a while back.

It’s a pull toy! It just took me a while to get sturdy enough fasteners, and these binding posts are very cheap, strong and reusable!

I think we’ll make more of these, if Amie likes it - she certainly did look forward to this one. I’ll have to get the hang of coordinating and weighting the limbs and whatnot needs to get moved by one pull, because this baby Bambi moves even clumsier than the newborn one in the movie!

More about having actually watched Bambi later…

Years ago, in 2004, I put together a (literally) small “zine” called The Puffin.

It was a zine for family and friends, inspired by Dan Price’s awesome Moonlight Chronicles and Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters blog (before he became so insanely popular).

I just happened upon the original .jpg version of The Puffin - I no longer have a complete copy for myself, all 50 went out the door - and laughed myself silly!

As a way of illustrating what my life was like before I became a mom (very academic - okay: nerdy!), I thought I might share some of the pages with you.

Here are the first couple of pages that make the draw-for-your-life pitch and the first page of the rest of the journal, which puts the drawing philosophy in practice. Enjoy (click on thumbnails to see original size)!

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

More will follow.

Ah, no… I don’t draw in my journal anymore. I still do draw, in Amie’s Map Book, our communal Drawing Book and on the occasion of all our crafting, of course. But no longer in my own journal. Why? Sigh. I can only speculate. The best excuse I’ve come up with is that, once drawing “vivified” (jump-started) my journal again, I quickly fell back into my old journaling habits, which are back to being prolific and energetic, but drawing-less. I do miss it though, not so much when I’m writing, but when I’m rereading my journals.

This just in:

Rock-n-Romp, a kid-friendly rock show series, is coming to Boston. R-n-R founder Debbie Lee is coming up from D.C for the Boston kick off and she is bringing Neal Pollack, the author of Alternadad with her.

They will perform with Boston Music Award nominees the Bon Savants and the psychedelic rockers Wonderful Spells, who promise to play for you, live, the kind of music you listened to BEFORE YOU HAD KIDS. This while also keeping your kids engaged: they can watch the band, experiment with instruments, dance or just run around and hang out in a safe and friendly environment.

And Neal Pollack is going to read from his all-too-close-to-home book Alternadad. There will be more literariness from author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka, who won Child’s Magazine “Best Books of the Year” in ‘05 for his book Punk Farm.

WHEN: Sunday, February 24, 2008 from 3pm-6pmWHERE: Great Scott, 1222 Commonwealth Avenue, Allston, MA 02134

TICKETS: $8.00* in advance or $10* at the door. *Each ticket admits one adult and one child. NEAT: An adult must accompany child and a child must accompany an adult. Get tickets via Rock-n-Romp Boston or Ticket Web.

See you there, perhaps?

In the meantime the Manush House is finished. I decided not to glue the bathroom/kitchen and the staircase onto a cardboard sheet. It would make it more difficult to move the doll house around and take it places (if ever Amie wants to do that).

Here’s the whole house (so far), with some of the proud owners taking advantage of the new facilities (note the Mama in the bathtub, the Baba in the kitchen!) and their guests, Mickey and Minnie, asleep in the living room/bedroom.

Reader Anja had suggested I send a little story about the doll house to Mothering Magazine. I was considering it when two days later said magazine arrived in my mailbox and there already was a story about making a fairy house out of trash. What a coincidence! It’s great to know more people are doing this!

In the meantime I had also sent word to Annie’s HomeGrown - the staircase is made out of three of their boxes. They loved it and guess what: they will feature the house in their next newsletter! Everyone sign up!

(*) I am happy to have made this doll house almost entirely out of trash: boxes of all sizes, aluminum foil, plastic containers and styrofoam, as well as some pictures out of magazines all bound for the recycling bin. Only the paint, glue, staples, tape and ink were new.

You can review the progress on the doll house (in chronological order) here, here, here and here and lastly here.

More pictures:
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That’s it for this installment of the Manush House. Amie is already lobbying for another addition: a bedroom. I am thinking: a piano! The living room needs a grand piano. I’m on the lookout for a good box.

Some scissor work on the IKEA catalog and the Manush kitchen and bathroom are fully equipped and ready for their new occupants. But where are they? Oh, they’re at the zoo.

Yes, there are even curtains!

What remains is fixing the whole thing - kitchen/bath unit and staircase - together onto a large cardboard sheet that will give it some stability (right now the box falls over too easily). Once it’s totally done I’ll try to take some better pictures.