guerrilla snowman builders

This morning I successfully juggled a shower, straightening my hair, making turkey chili, washing all the dishes from the last few days, getting the kids to help each other and get themselves ready to the hats for our winter hike, and got the car started. I checked directions to our group destination as I walked out the door only 30 minutes late and discovered our event was canceled. Sometimes it pays to procrastinate. At that moment of realization, I heard the door open and from the corner of my eye saw a full size person, as opposed to one of my half-heights, walk in the door and I screamed. It was Sue, who relished making me squeal, here to clean the house. She loves cleaning, after 8 years I'm finally realizing that's actually true, and wanted to help out. Yay! I no longer feel defensive about this. So the girls and I went for a hike closer by and fashioned a snowman out in the woods. They brought a carrot. Eleanor's lips were orange. She brought one to eat, too.
Look at the sweat

and tears

that went into this undertaking. Good times. The weather was relatively warm and the snow was perfect packing, rolled up like insulation.

Charlotte is taking great pride in the opportunity to show off her mad writing skills.
Eleanor is digging math today. We covered borrowing and she tried to make pattern puzzles to trick Chris with.

In school, I am stumping some students not used to independent thought with a project based on the work of Romare Bearden.
I brought some of my books to class for an enthusiastic, talented student and enjoyed flipping through them, rekindling adolescent passions

which started around twelve with a queer nostalgia for Route 66, then Kerouac and Neal Cassady but then Diane DiPrima and Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road and onto the sixties and communal culture and the San Francisco music scene and SARK and raves and painting and Basquiat and Pollock and then an obsession to circle the globe with only a few belongings on my back and then STOP! grow up, you're going to have a baby, I reeled back a bit, lost my creative fire briefly, but came back with a job Japan and then an obsession with obscure artists who make work in unique media like Mel Chin and Rirkrit Tirvanija and Yukinori Yanagi and artists like Allen Kaprow, Yves Klein, and Minor White. And now I teach and parent and have cultivated a pleasure in being still. An ethical Beat. More zen than I ever could have been before the responsibility of kids. And now is not my time to be artistically prolific or obsessed with my own desires. I was looking through old photos of the girls and I want to throw up they are so cute and that stage is already over. Sometimes I blink and realize briefly that I am in a wormhole of parenting my young children and next time I blink, it will be over.