Scrapbooking with a Toddler

The last time I did much scrapbooking was about two years ago, when Sunshine was just barely crawling and I could keep her entertained with a few toys while I worked.  Recently, I discovered a package of pictures in my desk from my trip to Jasper in 2009 with my girlfriends.  Deciding it was time these pictures got put away, I bought a small 8x8 album, printed a few more pictures to fill the pages, and dug out my scrapbooking supplies.  While Lily napped last week, I scrapbooked.

Keeping Sunshine busy was another story this time.  One afternoon, she was happily watching Piglet's Big Movie when I started working.  On the other days, she wanted to see what I was doing and to participate.  I gave her a few scraps of paper and let her turn them into smaller scraps of paper with my scissors and paper cutter.  I showed her how to use the glue stick to stick bits of paper to another piece of paper.  And I tried to keep my paper and pictures out of reach.

Once, however, she got her hands on a small pictures that I had just cut into an oval to add to my album.  Because I had the scissors, she had the paper cutter, and the picture was soon under the blade.  When I rescued it, there was a gash across the middle of the picture.  I told her that she couldn't cut pictures and pasted the photo into my album (the scratch isn't too noticeable).  For a while after that, she cut up pieces of paper, repeating, "We don't cut pictures."

I'd never made an 8x8 album before, but I found that I really liked the size.  It was easy to put a few pages together quickly and to stop when Lily woke up.  Twenty 8x8 pages was just the right size for one weekend's worth of pictures as well.  And I had enough room to work on that album while sharing my desk with a two-year-old who also wanted to "scrapbook."

As I flip through the finished album, I feel a sense of accomplishment.  I like the artistic and creative elements of scrapbooking.  Putting the pictures in order, with a few notes or details about each, is like putting a story together.  While I didn't get any writing done last week because I was scrapbooking, it was a good break.  I was still being creative.  And even if Sunshine at times drove me nuts by asking for help or cutting up things that I didn't want cut up, it was time that we could spend together working on something.

Book Review: Prodigal Daughter

Last semester, my creative nonfiction class read Myrna Kostash's "Open Letter to George Ryga," a hilarious and interesting essay about (ironically) book reviews.  While I'm not familiar with George Ryga, the idea of an author inviting a reviewer out for coffee to ask her why she didn't like his books seemed audacious to me.  On the day we discussed this essay in class, Myrna was there to talk to us about writing creative nonfiction, which she's been writing since it first emerged as a genre in the 1970s.

So when I was reading a local Catholic newspaper a few weeks later and saw Myrna's name along with a request for reviewers for her latest book, I quickly emailed the University of Alberta Press asking for a copy.  Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium landed in my mailbox a few weeks later and I started reading it over my Christmas break.  It went to Alberta and back with me, and I've tried to pick it up again a few times since we've been back.  But I haven't finished it.

Somewhere in the first half of the book, Myrna lost me.  Maybe it's because I was too tired and missed something critical in the first few chapters.  Maybe it's because I usually read while nursing Lily and listening to Sunshine's nonstop chatter.  Maybe it's because I'm not really familiar with eastern European history.

There have been parts of the book I've really enjoyed.  Some great stories, some great writing.  The book itself is a beautiful book—the kind of book you just want to hold and stroke.  This isn't a cheap, poor-quality paperback.  It's got a lovely smooth, soft cover and thick pages.  Thus I'm quite impressed with what a small university press can produce.

However, as I said, the story lost me.  Most of the book has been about Myrna searching for Saint Demetrius—though why she's so interested in him I'm not sure.  The story jumps around between her various trips to Greece (I'm not sure how many times she's been there) and other countries in Eastern Europe and her time spent at home in Canada (mostly near Edmonton, Alberta).  There's also big leaps in time, as the story starts with her childhood in the 1950s, goes to 2000, and then jumps back to various years in between.  Most of these leaps are clearly indicated, but it still left me confused as to a timeline for events.  When was she where and what questions lead to other questions?

Perhaps it was the subtitle, "A Journey," that lead me to expect more of a storyline, some sort of logical progression through her questions and answers, rather than this leaping around in time and place.  While I learned more about eastern Europe than I'd known before, I felt like I had no framework within which to fit this information and why it mattered to Myrna, much less to me.

So while I dislike not finishing a book that I've started, I'm afraid that's what I'm doing.  I'm going to send Prodigal Daughter to a friend of mine who is Russian Orthodox, in the hope that, since she knows more about the topics discussed in the book, it will make more sense to her.  And maybe I'll check out some of Myrna's other books or shorter works.  This particular book, however, left me confused and disappointed.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

Cross-Training Writers

One important aspect of any creative writing program is cross-training.  Writers are expected to take courses in several genres, not just the genre they plan to work in or complete their thesis in.  Thus the introductory writing course here covers the four genres offered: fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry.  Right now, I'm in the middle of the drama section—something I've never attempted writing before.

I'm finding this section both interesting (it is fun to try something new) and challenging.  We just handed in a four-page stage play, which is basically four pages of dialogue.  While I've attended lots of plays, trying to recreate that on paper was tough.  Honestly, all my characters can do is talk?  Everything I want to happen has to fit into their speech?  That's hard! 

At the same time, I can see how that could help my fiction writing.  Strong dialogue is important in fiction as much as in drama, so if I can write dialogue that's good enough to hang a whole story on, then it will help when I'm writing short stories and novels too.

Our next project to is a five-minute complete screenplay, which is due on Monday (as a draft) and which I haven't started on yet.  To be honest, I'm a bit worried about it.  I've probably talked before about being a novelist at heart... short is hard to write.  Sure, I've done it (and I've even had three of my short stories published now) but most of my ideas run longer (one of those published stories is actually the first chapter of a novel idea).  So doing a complete story within five minutes seems daunting.

Even as I see the value in studying drama, I'm honestly not sure I can see myself taking it any further.  I've considered finishing the four-page stage play that I started—but I could also just convert it to a short story and send it to Pages of Stories.  Trying to get a play produced sounds like a huge amount of work (the director of a local theatre came to our class on Monday to tell us about that process) for very little pay.  I'm glad that others have a passion for stage and screen, because I like theatre and movies as much as anyone else.  I just can't see my writing going that direction.

Work-at-Home Mom

An articled title "A Life Less Balanced" in the August issue of Island Parent recently caught my attention. Not because of the title—I started reading it just because it was the next article in the magazine, which I read cover to cover. A few paragraphs in, however, I was hooked. Writer Yasuko Thanh talks about balancing work and family—about her own choice to put her daughter in daycare despite the fact that she works from home and others' choices to work from home so that they can be with their kids.

Thanh mentioned one work-at-home dad:

Local web designer Michael Oomen didn't plan on working from home while raising children. Oomen says it snuck up on him. He moved from taking night classes at the University of Victoria to working from home when his son Sam was two years old.

"I had a viable home business plan," says Oomen. "The appeal of keeping one parent close to home for the kids was really important to us, as a family." He describes his first year as a cross between the movies Mr. Mom and Groundhog Day. Now he has a second child, Tessa, who is seven months old.

Challenges come hand in hand with perks. He says that working from home requires good time-management skills. "There is basically no such thing as free time with two young kids. There's only the time you have when they're sleeping or distracted. I really have to take advantage of the time I get to meet my commitments, and I always meet my commitments."

I knew even before I had kids that I wanted to be at home with them. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and so was my mother-in-law. I respect them for doing that and I respect our dads for making it possible for them to do that. At the same time, I struggle with wanting to do things beyond paint pictures with my three-year-old and stack blocks with my eight-month-old. Writing has been my career choice in part because I can do it at home.

Not that it's easy to do at home. When I set myself the submissions challenge just before Christmas, there were days when I didn't think I'd make it. I wanted to spend a few hours on the computer researching a market, revising an article, composing queries—and I had a toddler wanting snacks and a baby wanting to be bounced and the toddler wanting to go outside and the baby needing to eat... It felt like a never-ending list of demands. Some queries went out very quickly.

I could thus identify with Thanh and Oomen in the article as they talk about trying to balance both sides of their lives. "Balance is a great idea," Oomen says. "And if you know anyone who feels balanced, tell them to call me. Sometimes just taking the dog for a walk or reading the paper at a cafe is enough to balance things out. Then I'm ready to get back into things. For us it works."

A phone call to another mom. A morning at playgroup. Watching the girls at the park while reading a book. I'm learning to take a break, focus on the girls, give up my to-do list—and yet also take advantages of naptimes and quiet times to get some writing done. Maybe my house looks like a hurricane hit and maybe my client is still waiting for me to edit his novel. Maybe balance is just a girl on each hip or two three-year-olds on a teeter totter.

Seven Quick Takes Vol. 4

On Wednesday, I dashed out the doors with the girls to get Sunshine to her music class downtown.  We ran a few errands and got back just after noon.  It took me a few minutes of standing on the doorstep, going through my pockets, to realize that I'd locked us out... so we went for a drive again and then spent the rest of the afternoon getting to know the new neighbours before my husband got home to let us into the house.

*     *     *

Lily is learning to crawl.  So far, she can inchworm herself forward and turn herself in circles, and occasionally boost herself up onto her hands and knees before flopping back down on her belly.  Last night, we were visiting friends and I left her to play in the living room with Sunshine while I went back to the dining room to take my turn at Settlers.  In a few minutes, I looked up the hallway to see Lily coming just as fast as she could!

*     *     *

So far, my classes this semester are very easy.  I have two classes which have no textbooks and no reading assignments—one is basically an Aboriginal Storytelling class with lots of oral, in-class work and the other is a photography class with a few camera assignments.  The third class is Writing 100, which is into drama now, and actually quite interesting—though I think I still prefer fiction and nonfiction.  I'm enjoying the bit of extra time to do other reading, writing, and editing.

*     *     *

My husband put new tire inner tubes on my bike the other night and installed the bike trailer hitch for me.  We'd been waiting to do this until Lily was six months (as the instructions dictated), but then got busy with other things.  I loaded them in for a ride on Tuesday afternoon and made it around the Ring Road at the University... just barely.  I had to stop three times to "check" on the girls in the Chariot (while Sunshine told me, "Keep riding, Mommy!").  It was good to see that they were having fun (even saying "wheeee!" though I was barely going faster than a walk) but I should have been doing this since we got the Chariot.  In thinking about it, I realized that I haven't been biking since before Sunshine was born.

*     *     *

About the kidney stone... I'm fine.  The hospital painkillers took care of the pain pretty quick, and then I was just tired and nauseous for the rest of the day.  It's hard to believe such a tiny thing can cause so much pain!  The stone itself is about the size of the end of a ballpoint pen, but I guess the tube it gets stuck in is smaller.  As the Psalmist says, how wondrously made are our bodies!  When I googled "kidney stones," all I learned is that doctors don't really know why stones form, other than perhaps dehydration.  As I'm notoriously bad for not drinking enough, I've been working on having 6-8 glasses of water every day.

*     *     *

In Writing 100, my prof told us that we each had to watch a play, independent movie, documentary, or series of short films and "review" it for the class.  One night, when Sunshine was whiny and needed something to do, I ventured onto the National Film Board website and viewed a couple short animated clips with her.  She enjoyed that, so we watched a couple more later in the week.  I reviewed those four in my class and my prof said, "When I go to the NFB website, I get so overwhelmed with all the choices.  How did you choose those ones?"  I said, "My two-year-old picked them."

*     *     *

Last night, my husband and I were sitting on the couch chatting and mentioned to Sunshine that we were going to go out in a little bit.  She ran around finding her jacket and her shoes and telling us where the Jeep key was.  We said we'd leave soon.  The next thing I knew, she was in the den, saying, "I need help!  It's heavy!"  In a minute, she appeared, dragging Lily's car seat, saying, "She needs her car seat."  It took us several minutes to explain to her that we were just going next door, not in the Jeep, but I've never seen her so excited to go for a drive before.

Book Review: Flight of Shadows

Sigmund Brouwer was one of my favourite authors growing up.  I read the entire Accidental Detectives series and am still annoyed that I'm missing one book in the Winds of Light Series.  He's an author I admire for the variety of what he's written—everything from westerns to Biblical fiction to historical fiction to sci-fi-/futuristic fiction, children's board books and YA books and adult books.  I've met him at Inscribe conferences twice and he's an incredibly inspiring teacher.

So even though I already had a large stack of books in my review pile before Christmas, I jumped at the chance to read Brouwer's latest offering, Flight of Shadows.  This novel is a sequel to Broken Angel, which I haven't read yet, but Brouwer fills in the backstory well enough that this book can stand on its own.  At the same time, the hints of backstory make me curious about the rest of the story, so I might have to track down the prequel.

Caitlyn works as a maid in a big-city hotel, but she's not an ordinary girl.  She's the result of a genetic experiment that left her with a set of wings, which she keeps carefully hidden so that she appears to have a hump on her back.  The wings give her the glorious freedom of flight—but also set her apart from the rest of society and mark her for those who want to find her and use her special abilities.  Soon, Caitlyn is on the run—from Mason, the bounty hunter who has been chasing her since Appalacia, and from Pierce, the National Intelligence agent who's been ordered to bring her in.

In this futuristic society, where people live in city-states for protection and there are rules about everything, Caitlyn finds help from an unexpected source—a street-wise man named Razor who can move comfortably among all four classes—Illegals, Industrials, Invisibles, and Influentials.  Yet Razor has no idea what he's up against, and it will take all of his illusions and tricks to stand against those who want Caitlyn.

It's been a while since I read any Brouwer, so there were several things that jumped out of this novel at me.  First, the short chapters.  I remember Brouwer telling a group of writers once how to create suspense.  He's a master at it.  Each chapter left a character in danger, a question unanswered, or something puzzling happening—and then switched to another character.  Second, all the characters.  At times, I almost got confused keeping them together, especially since there seemed to be more bad guys than good guys.  At the end of the story, it was nice to see one of the bad guys come out on the good side.  Third, information is given only on a need-to-know basis.  Even though Caitlyn is the main character, we know no more about her (unless you've read Broken Angel) than Razor does.  Backstory is provided as other characters in the story demand it, not when the reader wants it.

Flight of Shadows was a suspenseful, interesting read (one that, at one point in my life, I would have read in one sitting because I didn't have a toddler and a baby to demand that I put it down and give them attention).  At the same time, Brouwer put a lot of thought into the society and situation that he created in the novel, as he outlines in an afterword:  "My hope is that the novel's fictional setting will remind you that the real America, with all its imperfections and infighting, is still a glorious democracy and a unique bastion of freedom, a legacy built by the women and men who have sacrificed for it over the last few centuries."  The novel is indeed thought-provoking and would be great for a book club discussion.



This book was provided for review courtesy of the publisher.

The Fuzzy Pink Blanket

One night, while we were at my in-laws' during Christmas, Lily didn't want to go to sleep.  It was past bedtime and we'd had a busy day, so I knew she was tired.  I tried nursing her.  Cuddling her.  Cuddling her on the other side.  Nothing helped; she flailed, pushed, complained.  Finally I rolled away from her, leaving her in the middle of the queen bed with her soother and her fuzzy pink blanket wrapped around her.  One corner of the blanket fell over her face and she reached up her hands to hold it there, closing her eyes, sucking her soother, and occasionally squeezing or patting the blanket.  In a few minutes, I tiptoed away.

The power of a special blanket isn't new to me.  Sunshine also has The Blanket—a large, fuzzy yellow Winnie-the-Pooh blanket.  When she was first born, it lined the cradle for her, softening what seemed to me a very hard mattress.  When she moved into her crib, the blanket moved with her, now wrapped around her.  If we traveled, the blanket went with us.  Naptime and bedtime routines involved the soother, the blanket, and some cuddling.

When Lily was born, Sunshine's blanket began appearing out of her crib more often.  She tucked in Dolly and Pooh Bear as Mommy was tucking in Baby.  Or she just needed to hold it and snuggle herself while I fed Lily.  After we moved to Victoria, the blanket was again almost always with Sunshine.  We tried to tell her that blanket and soother belonged in her bed, but she kept quietly bringing them downstairs.  Now, most of the day, the blanket stays on her bed, and looking back, I realize that was a stage when, during a big change in her life, she needed something reassuring.

And really, don't we all need things like that?  I've commented before that having pictures on the wall—the same pictures that decorated my bedroom walls growing up—have made each of the places that we've lived feel more like home.  Most of us sleep better in our own beds as opposed to in strange beds—like my girls, we want something familiar and comforting before we'll completely let down our guards and fall asleep.  We are all creatures of habit, who find routines and take comfort in ordinary things that are always there when we need them.

Story for Story's Sake

In one of my writing classes on Monday, our instructor asked us to write down a list of all the writing rules we knew.  Pens began scratching.  Mine moved non-stop—after all, I'm the editor of a writer's newsletter that regularly publishes articles on the "do's and don'ts" of writing.  There are thirty-some-odd students in the class, but when we each read one rule from our list, there wasn't much overlap.

Then our instructor told us to tear that page from our notebooks and toss it in the recycling bin.  For that class, for the rest of term, he was throwing out the rules.  There was only one rule now:

Story for story's sake.

Those rules, he said, shut down our creativity.  He demonstrated by sitting on a stool, shoulders back, head up, arms making broad gestures, ready to write—until he remembered rule after rule that slowly weighed down upon his shoulders and bent him forward, until he was hunched over an imaginary computer keyboard, trying to type within those rules.

In this class, he speaks about the power of oral storytelling—regaining the enthusiasm we once knew for the power of the story, when as kids we ran up to our mom and said, "Mom, Mom, you wouldn't believe what happened to me today..." and then the words just gush from us because we are so excited about this newfound ability to tell.  Oral storytelling allows us to shut down that inner critic, to just let the words flow from us.  Freefall writing, basically, but orally.

As I walked away from the class, his words stayed with me.  I remembered writing my first novel when I was fourteen—before I knew all the "rules" of writing.  Words poured from me onto the page, until I'd written one novel, then another and another.  I had the basics of grammar, but I didn't worry about "show don't tell" and "avoid cliches" and "never use -ly words."  I simply told the stories of the characters who were talking inside my head.

Then I started university.  Went to writer's conferences.  Read writer's magazines and writer's books.  Began to understand how much I didn't know as a writer.  Began to see the difference between really good books and ones that just didn't cut it.  I developed an editor's eye—that comma is wrong.  This modifier is dangling.  That sentence is corny.  This character is flat.  And then the ideas stopped.  I almost feared beginning classes last semester, because I feel like I haven't had a new idea in years.

So as I sit in this class, listening to this instructor tell us about how he shuts down his inner critic and sits down and writes—start to finish on a novel without editing or rewriting or second-guessing himself—I find new hope for myself.  It's not about the rules.  It's about the story.  I want to write story for the story's sake.

One Small Stone

Robbie Burns was the poet who wrote, "The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often askew."  Our schemes for this Sunday included going to morning Mass, work training for my husband, a dance class for me, and lunch and supper somewhere in between.  Those plans ended when I woke up at 5 am with a sore back.

I frequently get a sore back from nursing Lily in bed.  Usually a change of position helps, but in this case, it didn't.  I wiggled around for a bit, then went to the bathroom for a Tylenol.  I don't often take pain medication (when I was growing up, we only had aspirin in the house for the dog's arthritis), but I wanted to sleep.  When the pain continued to get worse and Lily woke up, I went downstairs to ask my husband to rub my back.  Before he could get started, I was writhing on the floor in pain, pressing on my back. 

"Is it that bad?" he asked.  "We're going to the hospital."

Sunshine had strong opinions about waking up that early in the morning.  I struggled to get dressed through the pain, recalling a similar morning nearly three years ago when I first went into labour.  I'd rather be in labour, I decided; the pain was less and the contractions at least gave you a break between them.  The pain had now moved around to my abdomen and none of the pain-coping mechanisms I used during labour—rocking, rubbing, deep breathing—was helping.

The city was fairly empty at that hour of the morning.  As we drove, both my arms began tingling.  I whimpered and rocked in the seat and at one red light—where there was no other traffic—told my husband, "Just go!"  He got the message and began driving faster.  At the hospital, he dropped me at the door and went to park.  Twisting in the chair, I managed to dig my health care card out of my nurse with now numb fingers, tell the nurse when the pain had started and when I'd thrown up.

Finally she got me a bed and wheeled me out, but then I lay there for nearly ten minutes, whimpering and wondering what came next.  Then another nurse arrived and wheeled me further into ER and hooked me up to IVs.  As the drugs began flowing into my body, I could feel the pain dissipate.  It went from 10 out of 10 to 6 out of 10—manageable.  I drifted into a doze and when I woke up nearly an hour later, remembered my husband and the girls and sent the nurse out to find them.  I had visions of Lily—my "mommy's girl"—howling in the waiting room, but she was fine.

They went home and the doctors and nurses continued to come and go.  Had I ever had anything like this before?  Spleen problems?  Kidney or gallstones?  Ovarian cysts?  No, no, no—I'm generally healthy.  Finally, as the pain responded to different medications and the doctor ran blood and urine tests, they concluded it was a kidney stone.  A little stone the size of the end of a ballpoint pen.  They discharged me just before noon, drowsy and a bit nauseous but pain-free.

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching movies with Sunshine and talking to a friend on the phone.  My day of pain seemed trivial compared to my friend's eight-month battle with chronic exhaustion and illness or a fellow blogger's daily struggle with pain and fatigue.  How easily we take good health for granted.  And how "wonderfully made" are our bodies, that one small stone can wreak so much havoc.  I hope never to deal with that sort of pain again, but also to wake up every morning thanking God for His many blessings.

Tidbits of News

And so a new year begins.  My husband started classes again yesterday and I start tomorrow.  This afternoon I should brave the line-ups in the bookstore to get my books for this term.

We drove back from Alberta on Sunday.  The drive passed mostly uneventfully.  We left the snow behind at my in-laws and had bare, dry highways for the whole drive—even the Coquihalla.  We watched the temperature go from -20* in Alberta to around 0* on the island... snowing when we left, raining when we arrived.  Gas prices went from 96.9 in Alberta to 120.0 in Vancouver and then 112.9 on the island.

But now we know that the girls can do the drive in one day (if you count 16-18 hours as "one day").  I was worried about keeping Sunshine busy for the drive, but what turned out to be the best distraction for her was simply music.  She had a favourite CD (her "little girl singing song") that we'd turn on and she'd watch the scenery go by while listening to it.  Lily mostly slept.  On the return trip, we finally pulled out the little laptop we'd bought for Sunshine (half price at Toys R Us before Christmas) and that entertained her off and on for most of the drive.

I was also quite impressed that we managed to fit two girls in car seats, two duffel bags, a diaper bag, a bag of clean diapers, my husband's huge backpack of books, and a stack of presents (bigger coming back, somehow) into the Jeep for the drive there and back.  Sure, I was packing light (we did laundry at my mother-in-law's) and we packed that Jeep so that nothing wiggled, but who needs a minivan?

Since then, I've been unpacking and trying to settle back into routine.  My Christmas ornaments are still scattered around the house, but the bags are unpacked.  A huge to-do list looms over me for January: edit and layout FellowScript, edit a novel, go to classes, start exercising again, review a couple books.  Some good news arrived with the stack of Christmas cards in our mailbox when we got home, however: three acceptances from the pieces I sent out before Christmas.  Here's to more writing in the new year!

January Write Mama

Welcome back to the Write Mama Blog Carnival!  I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and I wish you a very happy new year!

Congratulations to Danette of Help! S-O-S For Parents, winner of the ATCO Gas Blue Flame Kitchen Holiday Cookbook from the December Write Mama contest.

Mothering

William Neeson presents Top 50 Mommy Bloggers on Parenting posted at Sonography Technician, saying, "Luckily, in the age of the Internet there’s an army of mommy bloggers willing to share their tips on how to manage your kids. Not every tip offered is for every family, but they may offer inspiration that makes the massive challenges of being a parent easier."

Jenny Conley presents Daycare Drama posted at myevil3yearold, saying, "I have a wonderfully evil 3 year old that makes me laugh. Hope she makes you laugh too."

Pamela Jorrick presents Please excuse my technical difficulties posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.

Writing

Florine Church presents 12 Amazing Authors Who Died Far Too Young posted at Bachelorsdegree.org, saying, "This article does not intend to come off as ageist by any means, but for consistency's sake chose writers under 50 — when Americans attain eligibility to join AARP."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Write Mama using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.