still life

Yes. There is still life here. But not much...
Tummy bugs still wreaking havoc.
Tired!
I haven't been able to trap flutters of inspiration for this week's photo assignment either...
I'll catch up - just for fun - later.

brugman*

Listening to Squirt expanding his vocabulary. How he learns to capture what goes on around him. How he gets better and better at telling me what he wants, what he sees. Amazement. He'll come out with a word I can't remember 'teaching' him (like 'couch'. Unlike 'nincompoop'. Which I did teach him, and it comes out fluently.) and it just puts a huge grin on my face (and his)! Watching this progress in such an up-close way, on such a micro scale is... amazing! Educational! & definitely entertaining :)

He's got a very absolute two-word-sentence limit. Whenever he tries to add a third word to the mix the last two words become a missmatched hash - which is funny in its own league. Glasses, worn for sick-day ease, were a source of mixed entertainment (note to self: get glasses fixed - they perch precariously now). 'Glasses on' worked. So did 'mamma glasses'. 'Mamma glasses on' invariably became something resembling 'mamma gl..loop' (actual NL: 'mamma bl...lop'). The only exception to this rule is 'mamma water drink' (excuse my skew translation of toddler-Dutch to English - I can't do a better job without losing the essence here). I guess his mind thinks 'water drink' is one word. The technical implications of an exception like that boggle my brains, but I'll leave it to the experts for now. I'm too sure I'll miss something if I take a time-out to excavate the science!

I love how he tries words on, for size. He'll drag mamma, pappa, oma, opa AND Moroccan friend N into the mix to see if it works on all of us. This boils down to us all owning cars together. Or eating, being outside or in, upstairs or down, at work, at home, wearing shoes, socks, having legs and tummies. Still fine, communally speaking. More questionably, we're also taking a shower and going to the bathroom, as a group ;)
He also knows when something or someone isn't 'here'. He'll answer 'gone' (NL: 'weg') when asked. I think that's so cool :)

He seems to understand certain concepts, but not others, which is interesting. Yesterday, he was having lunch at the coffee table - just for the fact that I was too tired to sit up at the dinner table (still flu-ey). So I was lying on the couch watching him eat, and out of the blue, he pointed at the table and stated: 'table'. I was appropriately impressed so he proceeded: 'food table.' Yesss! Pointing at the couch, I asked him what it was. 'Couch.' This was going really well :) 'Mamma on the couch' was met by his 'mamma couch'. 'Food?' met by 'table'.
So when I asked: 'where is mamma?', I was told I was on the table. Of course. As you are.

Which goes to show we're not quite there yet. Thank goodness! Because I'm having way too much fun watching and listening to him trying it on and spinning it as only a toddler can!
There will be plenty of time for him to talk me onto a table, or into a corner, in neat compound sentences. If his progress is anything to go by, he'll become a master at that, a lot sooner than bears thinking... But please: not for a long time yet!


* Brugman: Father Brugman (1400-1473) was known for his fiery sermons. His name has far outlived him in the Dutch expression 'talking like Brugman', for someone who talks much and quite convincingly.

opinions

In my flu-addled brain, something from my reminders post kept swimming in and out of vision. Caught it, just now. Where I'm boldly stating that 'care not for the opinion of others...' so speaks to me. Because it does, but not exactly like that. Other people's opinions matter to me. Keri Smith might feel differently. At least she doesn't have a comment option on her blog. So maybe she really doesn't care. Quite possible.

But what I need to learn, to put it more accurately, is not to put too much emphasis on other people's opinions. And if I'm really, really being honest? I only mean that when it comes to unfavourable opinions. Opinions that make me question myself, my output and my choices.

One thing Shannon's (amazing!) e-course and Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way made abundantly clear to me? How much easier it is to criticise and rediculate (not a word, is it?) yourself than it is to praise and be positive about your own undertakings, whatever they are.
Affirmations really sound too inane for words. I know. I'm still an absolute beginner. But when you really think about it: why is it so much more uncomfortable to be a little-over-the-top nice to yourself than it is to - equally over the top! - undermine?!

So what I meant to say before, is that I'm trying to take special care to appreciate favourable opinions, while not putting too much stock into the ones that (unwittingly) harm. Which on first glance probably reads as crazy as any good affirmation does. But in the end, we sort of shape our own world by choosing what to believe. Apparently, it's easier to believe the bad and worse.
So I'm going to live on the edge. I consciously urge myself, from now on, to believe what I like :-)

blood

Oh, & I just found this - too true & amusing :-)

reminders

Due to an army of tummy bugs on the rampage, making our house their home for an extended layover, I'm going to keep it simple. No home-grown fun today... Just some things I stumbled upon. Some things that I could use reminding of, on a more or less regular basis.

On Keri Smith's blog (author of 'Wreck This Journal', a.o.), from her Rebel's Manifesto, this one so speaks to me:

care not for the opinions of others. they are based on their own thoughts and fears.

And she posted this, a while ago:
























Love that! Nicely in line with The Artist's Way, the old(ish) classic I'm working through - when I'm not running to you-know-where!

I still don't think of myself as an artist. But that's okay; I'm not sure being an artist is - really - what I'm aspiring to be. Then again, it might be. But for now, I just want to be more creative, daily. And it's working, mostly! But funny thing about the above? Substitute the artist-related words for life-related words and it makes just as much sense! Mostly. If you want it to. Well, you know what I mean :-)

These are things that (can) get in the way of being honest, authentic - as an artist and a human being. Not the be-all-end-all, but a good start for thinking!
I'll be pondering them. You know where...

eggs

So, like I said; last weekend, I spent some time with an egg. A lovely brown speckled egg. We bonded and didn't much care what people thought of our unlikely relationship. We were so absorbed in each other, we didn't actually have eyes for other people, anyway. Oh sure, we heard some jokes at our expense, but didn't pay much attention.
Sadly, as it goes with flings, ours ended as quickly as it began; at the end of the day we spent in mutual admiration, I had my friend for dinner... But I'll always treasure the sunny spring day we spent together. And luckily, I've still got the pictures :-)

But the photography workshop I'm taking asked for a white egg, first. So I had to forget all about my first love (egg-wise, that is) and start it up with another pre-feathered friend! White on white and white on black, here are the pictures:


Now let's get back to my first friend! So me & my egg - with Man, Squirt & visiting father-in-law in tow - took a roadtrip!
The province I live in is poldered. The land that keeps my feet dry wasn't even here before the late 1960s. Nothing here is older than that; everything only slightly predates my birth. Nothing like a new town to make you feel young ;-) I have no issues with this place on a daily basis, but every so often my feet need to touch old land. I need to see trees my arms could never circle. I need to see crumbling walls and gable stones stating '1758' as if it was yesterday.
It was fun to discover me & my egg were birds of a feather (no pun intended! Neither of us were birds, and it's safe to say, neither of us ever will be. Sad...)! He loved it out there, and it was fun to see how much flair he had posing with the old, the crumbling and the rusty:

These are my own personal favourites:



We also hugged some trees, watched the grass grow and sniffed some culture:
And at the end of a long & lovely day, we rested on some steps together. Me & my egg...
So that was last week's photo assignment! I had a lot of fun - and a lot of pictures :-) I love taking orders when it comes to photography! Never in a million years would I have come up with the idea of investigating the photogenic quality of eggs, but as soon as I read the post last Saturday, my mind was swimming in possibilities :-) I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

P.S. I'm sorry not all photos can be enlarged - I have no idea how to change this, and honestly, after this photo-rich posting, I'm pretty exasperated with B.log.ger and its image publishing feature! Tips welcome!

demise

An egg, hard boiled for safety. Ready to go on a trip around the world. Or one or two provinces of this little country, anyway. Which is an oddity in itself, all part of the photography workshop I've signed up for - but more on that later!

This is what happens when you leave an egg on the table around here :-)

Luckily, it was boiled. Happy coincidence that I was already focused on egg-picture-taking or I would have cleaned the mess and regretted the missed opportunity later!

care

In the morning, before Squirt took his tumble, I had dropped a plastic container holding spag bol (well, something like it, anyway) on the kitchen floor. It cracked & spilled. Of course. I tried to clean it before little man crawled through the dregs, and in a 'mental note: clean pants later' kind of way I succeeded. Also, he was wearing one of his old shapeless onesies because I had had to change him three times the day before, for various reasons, and that's what was left. And, as I had spent the morning cleaning the attic and spare room, I was still in 'shower later' mode, which isn't pretty either.

So Squirt took his spill and we had to get to the doctor's office quickly. And that's how we looked. Squirt in his sauce-stained pants and his overly washed onesie, me with my unwashed hair in a careless ponytail. I had only just taken the trouble to put on 'real pants' instead of the tracksuit bottoms I was wearing! I'm painfully getting why old ladies tell you to always wear clean underwear because you don't know what the day will bring. It's not limited to underwear. Really.

And then Squirt started 'talking' to the doctor's assistent. And I said, as a sort of joke, 'oh, that's normal, he always talks like that!' The guy looked at me critically and asked me what Squirt was saying, then. I told him I didn't know; he's only 16 months old, and while he has a vocabulary of 50-odd words (which is impressive for his age!) I can't make sense of everything that comes out quite yet. Which was okay, because the assistent had thought Squirt was older than that. But still.

And then what happened yesterday!
Man took Squirt out on the train - a free ride to and from the town where he works, just for fun - and decided to change diapers in one of the bathrooms at his workplace. It was a bathroom for the disabled, so it had an alarm pull cord installed. You can connect the dots, I suppose ;-) Squirt happily pull-pull-pulling the cord while Pappa was obliviously bent over naked baby bum when security came bursting through the door using a passkey...

It all adds up! Had the proposed Electronic Child File been in place yet, I'm sure Squirt would have been flagged for showing possible signs of neglect AND abuse! That's how easily our efforts to be responsible parents can be misconstrued (hey, my kid might have fallen down the stairs, but I got him to a doctor real quick!!).

It has been quite a week!

bumps

A couple of weeks ago, I tumbled onto Sara's blog, FULL HANDS. She writes about incorporating bicycling into her daily family life. Reading and clicking around a little, I got the impression that cycling is pretty much an alternative lifestyle to many Americans, and there seems to be a thriving community of people on bikes connecting through blogs!
Pretty cool to read about, and at the same time so alien to me! Over here, in this flat little frog country, everyone (apart from the newest immigrants) learns to ride a bike early on, and most of us stick with it throughout life. In many instances, it's much easier to grab the bike than to go by car, and this country is geared to cyclists - to the extreme! You'll find bike lanes and separate paths almost everywhere, and riding a bike is - pretty much - as safe as walking the sidewalk (I guess I have to add that walking is quite safe here, too).
Now I'm an oddity in my own right for not knowing how to drive a car - but that's a different story :-)

On Sara's blog, I read this post. It's not so much about riding a bicycle, although the author of the excerpt - Joe Kurmaskie - is taking cycling to a whole nother level, even for a weathered Dutch girl like me! But what he writes about raising children, exposing them to the elements, so to speak - that is so true, and really touched something!
There is no way for children, or adults for that matter, to experience only the good. To protect yourself and the people you love from all possible mishap means you'll miss a lot of beauty, too. Besides, there is no way to stop bad things from happening altogether...

When I read that post, my punchline was going to be about Squirt taking a nosedive over the side of the couch, and quite possiby swallowing my nose stud. As you do. About how I didn't imagine Kurmaskie was talking about those particular life experiences, per se.

And then, life happened a little, again, and the post didn't get written. Until today. When Squirt fell down the stairs; backwards to start off with. Top to bottom, hitting all 13 steps on the way down. Ending up with two bumps, bruises and a friction burn on his forehead and chin... And thank the little angel on his shoulder, that was all. Well, that and a severely shocked mamma. Who can't get over how unbelievably stupid it was not to close the perfectly fine baby gate for whatever, whatever reason! And who really doesn't want to think about how much worse this could have been...

Resulting in the - not so much punchline, more like stern warning that there is a lot to be said for experience and against overprotection, and I agree. But not taking basic measures to prevent calamity from happening is plain stupid. No one can argue with that!

Okay. That wasn't funny. At all. I'm going to get me a cup of coffee and try to get the shakes to stop! Squirt was checked over by a doctor and pronounced 'fine'. He's sleeping off his own hangover of sorts - probably deciding when it might be safe to trust the female parental unit again... ;-)

plans

It has been quiet here, again, lately. Busy busy busy? Yes, that too. But admittedly, after spending a lot of time looking at other people's blogs again (I did say I've been busy, didn't I?), I'm having another Blog Identity Crisis. The whole 'what do I want to share' thing. And I haven't settled it. Yet. It's ongoing and subject to evolution.

But I have signed on to an online photography workshop! Which will give me another chance to get busy with image, neglected a little, of late. That is, when I don't count the pictures I'm always taking of Squirt. Which I don't. For art-ish-tic purposes at least.

The course will start on the 20th of March, this Saturday. So hopefully, soon, this blog will see more posting. Purposeful posting :-)