ElementalMom

Yesterday was the Marina holiday party. It’s like that, when you have lots of chaos in your life; you have to wait for some sort of external motivation to do the decoration thing. Otherwise, your brain is saying “oh goodness, that looks and sounds like more work…”

So. Considering that we live on a boat, and a boat does not provide much room either for storing or for putting up decorations, you have to be compact. We have precisely one box of decorations. And this is how we arrayed them:

The “tree” in the lazyjacks:

The stockings on the sailcover (Kaia has her own!):

The finished product. The kids stuffed fabric gift bags with rags, and we threw a tree skirt over the boom, for the illusion of gifts under the tree:

One of the really cool things about living in a marina is that there’s always something fascinating happening. While we were decorating, our neighbor Jay was fishing, (while Chris socialized) and the boys kept running over to see what he’d caught.

At the party later that night, the inestimable DJ played Santa. Rowan and Kestrel had seen Santa once before, but it was all terribly new for Aurora. I’m not sure if she was more intimidated by the Santa she didn’t know, or by the monkey, which is bigger than her.

So there’s the beginning of our holiday. I think our next big adventure will be the attempting of gluten-free cinnamon rolls…

Taken by my pal Steven, on a more-or-less recent visit.

We eat a lot of sprouts, on this boat. Not only are they little nutritional powerhouses, but they’re yummy finger food, they lend themselves to recipes well, they’re easy to store in the tiny storage space available on a boat, and, well, they’re fun. Just recently, the Sproutpeople, my favorite supplier, ran a sale on sprouters for children, so with my last order, I bought a few. The results were marvellous.
First, assembly.

Then, selection of seeds to sprout. You’re supposed to soak them first, but the boys played with them like sand for a while.

At that point, Aurora lobbied heavily for her favorite kind.

Seriously, wouldn’t that make you want to eat sprouts?

I’m working on writing a book about moving aboard the boat. I’ll write more about that more on my other blog. But I’m doing a lot of cannibalizing of content from this blog and the other one. Most importantly to this post, this morning, I rewrote Rowan’s birth story.

Most of my readers here know that Rowan’s birth was insanely traumatic for me. An unplanned, unwanted cesarean, that birth catapulted me into a year of depression followed by some of the angriest years of my life, and a vocation of activism in the arena of birth. No woman anywhere should have to go through what I did, and yet, the (unnecessary) cesarean rate in this country continues to skyrocket. It’s a crisis, it’s a human rights violation, and it’s a complete international embarassment.

But that’s not what I am writing about this morning.

I wrote the story once, when I was still recovering, and it was the sweetness and light that women usually describe their cesareans as. “Totally necessary” they say. Bullshit, says I. But at the time, I’d have killed you for suggesting mine wasn’t. I wrote it a second time, once I was recovering, in the depths of my depression, in the hopes that women reading it would learn from my journey and not have to take the same one themselves. It was all about figuring out where things had gone wrong, in order to make different, better choices later.

This time, I am rewriting it as what its deepest meaning and highest purpose (for me) might possibly be. Rowan’s birth is what finally, unequivocally taught me that if I wanted it done right, I had to do it myself. That relying on the System for anything at all was a sure path to madness, and that while independence carries its own problems, those problems are at least unilaterally the result of your own choices, and not someone else’s. Someone else who almost certainly has their own paycheck and ass as a higher concern than your  well being.

So here’s to Version 3 of Rowan’s birth. It’s taken me seven long, hard, uphill, introspective, kick-in-the-teeth years to get to the place where I am grateful for the lesson, moreso than grieving of the process that got me here.

OK, I’m his mother, I’m biased, I get that. But is he not beautiful enough to break the heart?

Jason just took these shots randomly the other day.

As I’ve mentioned a time or two before, Aurora is growing fast. Way faster than her brothers did, mostly because she has them to look up to, and an intense motivation to catch up to them. I didn’t post the other day when she started crawling, but she is. It’s still not super-organized; more like, she moves with purpose in several disorganized ways. But move with purpose, she does.

This morning, the kids were cuddled up in the salon. It’s cold here, and the salon, being the highest part of the boat, stays warmest, so the boys have been sleeping up there, in the “spare bunk”. It’s a neat space for kids, and they’re really loving being up there, not only for the heat, but for the novelty. So as soon as Aurora wakes up, I take her up there to hang with her brothers.

You can see from the first photo to this one, she’s definitely making progress towards Rowan and his Bionicles. Yet another advantage of being a little girl with two older brothers is that she’s never going to have to have the discussion with people that yes, despite being a girl, she’d like LEGOs, thank you. Her brothers have huge collections already, (you can see the bags behind the couch there) and are really interested in sharing with her. Both of them have gotten clear on the idea that the small ones can be swallowed, but that the big ones can be played with, so they’re both making big block creations for her to play with and gnaw upon.

And there’s the reach. Aurora has targeted the Bionicle… and you know what’s awesome? Rowan’s letting her. He’s specifically put one of the “big piece” Bionicles within her reach. Is that awesome big brotherness? Oh yeah…

Quite a few folks told me that having three kids was just spectacular, back when I was waffling about whether or not to increase our family size. Two was great, Rowan and Kestrel were awesome, and the boat is not huge, blah blah blah. And I’ll never know whether it’s the addition of the third, or whether it’s Aurora herself that makes it, but there’s something about the dynamic of the three that brings them together into a cohesive unit. I can’t wait to see how things go as they grow up. It’s entirely possible that this could change. But right now, I’m doing this post so that some day Rowan and Kestrel can look back at when Aurora wanted to be just like them.

A mom on a local unschooling group I’m part of recommended a singing program, boy’s choir, that was gearing up to do auditions. She has two sons, one not much older than mine,  one 14, in the program, and they were both loving it. Sure, some schoolish aspects, but both the boys were learning tons about music in a way that really inspired them, and left them talking after class for hours about what they’d learned. So, since Rowan has expressed strong interest in singing, we decided to check it out.

After the first session, I ended  up with flashbacks. Hideous school flashbacks. Ugh ugh ugh. But that’s not the point. I was sitting next to this other mom, and she was every bit as horrified as I was. It was like in the last two sessions, it had gone from a freeform, kids-on-the-floor doing breath work and learning music, to being this weird, sit-in-your-desk, let’s give out tickets for the most obedient and compliant groups, kind of nightmare. Rowan’s not even enrolled (I made it clear that he was going to take a few sessions to warm up to deciding if he was even interested), but the teacher was already correcting Rowan. And that’s the part I need help/reassurance with.

They were going over material. And over it. And over it. Rowan was clearly bored senseless, and so decided to improve on the drawings in the notes they’d been given. So he was corrected for drawing, not singing. Then they started singing, and again, the teacher wanted to know why he was writing. Turns out he was keeping track of all the items in the fill-in-the-blank song they were singing. Finally, she called his team up to sing the piece, and he had it cold. And I could
see from his look that he was just unimpressed.

So here are my questions…

1. The voices in my head are telling me that it’s somehow wrong to be absolutely delighted in how your kid chooses to entertain himself, and that’s it’s not OK to be so pleased at his ability to maintain autonomy in the face of authority. Tell me there’s a way to shut that voice up? How long until I can strangle my Inner Compliant Student?
2. The other mom, and some of the significantly older boys I talked with, say that the experience we’ve had the last two sessions is aberrant, and we should stick it out, because everything will change, and once it does, it’ll be awesome for him. Rowan’s unimpressed, and talking about moving on to other things, but he’s clearly disappointed, because what he wants to do is become a better, stronger, “more musical” (his words) singer. Having had a great-grandfather in opera, and a grandfather in rock n’ roll, he’s got pro singing in his blood, and he’s very interested in that. He was
   asking for training when we found this, and it seemed like a great opportunity. Am I damaging him by encouraging him to stick it out based on the recommendations of folks who know what I’m upset about and looking for? Or do we just walk away? Rowan’s not sure, neither am I.

Thoughts? Comment below…