I'm in Love!

Totally infatuated with my new Canon Rebel.  HH and the girls gave it to me for my birthday back in August but I just got a memory card for it, and it was the perfect fall day to be outside taking pictures!  I have never used anything but a point and shoot, so I know n-o-t-h-i-n-g about using this camera yet and all of the amazing features it has, but even what I was able to take today has me head over heels!

Wooohooo!  Can't wait how to actually learn more about using it!

Happy Dancing!

Today I opened my mailbox to happiness and joy!  Inside was a box from Rebecca at Sonshine Thoughts.  A happy box.  A wondrous box.  A box full of luuuuuv!  Last month I came in third in her flash fiction contest based on the adorable book Be Happy That... and LOOK at this loot!

I GOT MY OWL!!!!! :D  You have no idea how happy I am.  No idea.  No, no you don't.  Stop thinking that you do.  She sent the book from which she got her contest prompts, Be Happy That..., which I read immediately and it is hysterical.  The Garden of Eve sounds spooky and enchanting and delicious.  The cover art is gorgeous (I know you can't see it well on my desk there).  And, look!  Revision & Self-Editing!  To revise & self-edit, I need a working WiP.  Which means maybe I'll get my butt in gear and start another one.
The owlicious lunchbox (!!!) and the cutie little windup seal (the ball on top spins and he slides!) were super sekrit surprises.  Thank you, Rebecca!!!

Wait... one more pic...

This is the upper tier (like a shelf) of my writing desk.  On the right are books and owly bookends.  On the left are a zebra head and a porcelain angel - dollar store Mother's Day gifts from my girls (my favorite things, because I love that they go into the store with HH and pick WHATEVER they want to buy and are so proud to give it to me).  In the middle is Sad Robot, who I got at Philly Comic Con (the hand-sketched comic he came with was pretty lame but that's ok because I am not much of a comic reader; I just fell in love with the handmade stuffed felt Sad Robot).  On Sad Robot's left, very small, is a Play Doh rendition of Daphne from Scooby Doo made by Tootsie Roll.  And now Sad Robot is hugging the owly friend he has been waiting for!
LOVE!  Thanks again, Rebecca!

Why We Do What We Do

Today, out on the playground, I told one of my first graders that he needed to tie his shoe.  He has had trouble tying it so far, so I added that I could help him and asked if he's been practicing at home.  His face lit up.  He said, "YES!  AND I GOT IT!  WANNA SEE?"  I watched him very slowly and determinedly tie his shoe with an extremely furrowed brow, so full of concentration.  When he was done, he beamed and I gave him a big hug and told him how proud I was.  Then he went off to play. 

It was one of those moments that reminded me why I teach, why the little ones, and how much I love it.  You can absolutely physically see when they finally meet success at something with which they have struggled.  They just exude pride and excitement. (You should see them when they realize that they can read!)

So it got me thinking about why I write.  I have thought about this a lot  in the past few months, since I haven't had a whole lot of time to write, and I really haven't been beating myself up over it.  And I realized that I haven't been beating myself up because I don't really write to get published.  (Oh yes I did.  I said that.)  Now, I know that the holy grails that most of us writerly bloggers are going for are agent representation and publication.  It's why we pay attention to details and join SCWBI and peruse editors' blogs and do crazy things like locking out life for a month to try to achieve 50,000 words during NaNovember.  Have I been serious about wanting to be published in the past?  Yes.  Will I keep up my subscriptions and keep my ear to the floor in publishing circles?  Yes, because I think it's good to pay attention and I don't want to get lazy should I decide to step up my game.  I'm not opposed to publication (now that just sounds crazy) but as wonderful as that would be, if I'm being honest, it's really not my main goal at the moment.

I write for two main reasons:

1. I write for release.
I spend my days with noisy little guys.  I love it, but there is not a moment of quiet or down time all day long, and then I come home to little ones.  Writing allows me some peace.  My shoulders relax.  My brain is allowed to wander to places that are a little bit darker, a little more foreboding, a little less rated E for Everyone.  My writing isn't graphic, but there is a big difference between YA and age 6, lol.  It reminds me that I am a grownup with more complex thoughts and ideas, and it allows me time when nothing looks like a lesson plan telling me what I need to do next, but instead the world is mine to create, unfurl, quickly or slowly.  I am not responsible to or for anyone else when I write.

2. I write for my children.
Maybe it's all the "dead body shows" (Handsome Hubby's phrase) I watch, like Forensic Files, but I have this weird need to put part of me on paper for my kids.  And I don't mean that I actually even write about myself, but I want to give them an idea of who I am through what I write.  Where my mind wanders.  What I was really like when they were 8 and 3.  I have a terrible memory and I don't remember what my mom was like when I was that age.  (My mom, for the record, is still very much alive and well, lol - Hi, Mom!)  Could I ask her?  Sure.  Easily.  But what I'm trying to capture isn't what you can tell a person through stories about when they were young or what you can see in a photograph.  When my girls are adults with young kids of their own, I want them to know what weird, interesting things were spinning through my own head at this time in my life.  Things that I won't even remember next week if I don't write them down, because they're figments of my imagination.

So... that's why I teach, and that's why I write. 

Why do you do what you do?

Scattered

I'm feeling very scattered today.  There are papers everywhere - the girls both have photo orders for school and both for dance, Tootsie Roll has to take in snack for her Brownie meeting tomorrow but we both work so we can't even get there for the meeting (she can, it's right after school in the building), her birthday party is coming, I have patches to sew on her Brownie vest, somehow have to figure out how to make a Violet Baudelaire costume, nut and magazine sales for Brownies, wrapping paper and chocolate sales for school, rehearsals for a school event, I'm in the midst of changing over the girls' clothing in their closets and drawers from summer to fall/winter so there are clothes everywhere to sort and store, and my principal just recently told us we have to start handing in lesson plans two weeks in advance (which is asinine, because within 3 days first graders have veered from the plan anyway).

I prioritize.  I make lists.  I organize.  I filter and give away and recycle.  I try to minimize, but I bring a lot of work home so I don't have much time and things do pile up.

So this is me saying... Um, yeah.  This counts as my blog post for today. Lol :)  I threw "scattered" into Google and got some interesting pics...

Most of those look too neatly scattered.  :)

Scariest Childhood Memory

Children view the world in a very different way than adults.  If you've ever read the picture book Shortcut by Donald Crews, or seen the movie Stand By Me (I mention the movie since I haven't read Stephen King's novella The Body upon which it is based), you know what I mean.  When you experience a truly scary event as a child, it's like putting a pin in your life map.  Whether or not it was earth-shattering, you view it with a somber seriousness, a memory you don't really kid about.  Children don't have the world experience to put events into perspective - how serious was it?  Was it really as terrifying as it seemed at that moment?

In Shortcut, Crews tells a story about being warned by Big Mama not to take the shortcut home, but the kids do anyway.  They are fooling around on the train tracks, have to decide whether to turn back and go the right way, and they decide to go on with the shortcut.  Of course, the train comes, and the children have a very close call.  It's very edge-of-your-seat for little guys, with the train KLICKETY-KLAKing closer and closer (the font gets bigger and bigger, it's great).  Once the train goes past, they complete their journey in silence.  They don't ever talk about it.  And they never.  Take the shortcut.  Again.

Stand By Me is a coming of age story about four best friends who go searching for the dead body of a boy killed by a train.  The story is more about the journey, but once they find it, the movie comes to a close by describing their lives afterward, what happened to each of the boys as they grew up, etc.  Their lives are sort of forever divided into Before The Body and After The Body.

My scariest childhood memory doesn't have anything to do with bodies or close calls with trains, but I can tell you that when and after it happened, it was more serious to a 9 or 10 year old me than anything.

At the time, we were living in a rowhome (aka townhouse, houses that are attached on both sides to other houses).  Our house was right next to the corner house.  About halfway down across the street lived friends of our family. Their house was for sale. They were getting ready to move and my mom and younger sister and I had walked down from our house to visit.  They didn't have any children my age, so I got bored and decided to go home. 

On the way home, a man that I had never seen before came up to me.  He asked me if I had ever been in the house that was for sale.  I don't know if he had seen me come out of the house, but I said yes.  He asked me how many bedrooms and bathrooms it had, and I told him.  He asked me if I lived nearby.  Now, at this moment, I was honestly thinking that he was trying to find out if I lived in a similar house so I knew what I was talking about, but a warning went off in my head and I just said, "Yeah, down there," and waved in the general direction of my house.  He nodded and kept walking down the street.  I ran to my end but did actually have the sense not to let him watch me go into my house.  I think I just hung out outside for a while.

My mom and sister came home later and didn't mention any man coming to look at our friends' house, so I began to get scared.  I kept replaying the scene in my head over and over to decide if I had given him too much information.  That night, I listened to every little creak in the house and couldn't sleep.

I guess I did fall asleep eventually.  When I woke up in the morning, I was still nervous, but it was a bright, sunny day, and nothing had happened during the night.  I wondered if I had gotten myself too worked up.  I went downstairs.  Our stairs led right to the front door, so if you were coming down, you had a view out the little windows in the door.  I stopped short on the stairs when I saw him.

The man from the day before was sitting on our front steps.  Just sitting there.  I ran to get my mom and I asked her if she knew who he was.  She didn't.  I remember her frowning and looking out the window but not going outside.  Eventually, he got up and left. 

We never saw him again, but I spent probably the next entire month of my life sick to my stomach with terror.  I thought for sure that the guy was going to do something to us or to our friends down the street and I couldn't tell anyone what had happened because if someone got killed it would have been my fault.  Try living with that on a 9 yr old conscience!  Our friends moved soon after, and I was so relieved, but then I worried about the people who moved in.  I didn't stop worrying until more than a year later when we also moved.  WHEW!


This story just reminded me of another scary thing that happened when I was even younger.  We lived in a big house, just my mom and my sisters and me (before the rowhome).  The deck off of our kitchen was a full story from the ground, so it had a full flight of wooden steps to the ground.  One night, I had to be maybe 5?  6?  7?  I went to the kitchen in the dark to get something.  I heard a creak on the deck stairs.  I turned on the light and looked out the window in the kitchen door.  A man was coming up the deck stairs in the dark.  When he saw the light come on and my face look out of the curtain, he stopped, about halfway up the steps, waved at me, then turned and went back down the steps and then he was gone.  Spooky!!!!

Do you have any scary childhood memories?

Something's Brewing...

... and it's a contest!  I meant to host a contest when I jumped back into blogging after my summer hiatusish, to celebrate coming back and to drum some interest back up in these parts (thanks to my awesome bloggy friends who came back even though I haven't given you stuff, lol!).  Of course, then school started, and anyone who either has small children or teaches small children knows that someone who both has them AND teaches them is a little crazed in the month of September.  What can I say, I sometimes bite off more than I can chew.  BUT... I am nearing 300 followers (WHAT!?!?!!!) which totally blows my mind, so we definitely need to dance the happy dance with some fabulous prizes.  I think I want to have a writing contest this time, because I have had an absolute BLAST with the ones I entered this year and each one has pushed me a little further into something I haven't written before.  So now I want to read what you've got up your writing sleeves!  I'm thinking on it.  Will keep you posted.  (Perhaps after 9 girls sleep over this weekend for Tootsie Roll's bday...)

Something is also NOT brewing.  I am currently WiP-less.  *blink*  *blink*  *crickets*

It's true.  I have shelved my most recent WiP since the voice just wasn't there.  I still like the story idea but I need to put it away and come back to it with fresh eyes.  I am enjoying the challenge of flash fiction right now and finding that smaller writing exercises are really working better for me at the moment.  I feel like a flower blooming, but one tiny petal at a time.  Each small piece that I write is teaching me something new and the entire process has been really helpful in focusing on important words.  I also have four books on writing (including On Writing) that have been sitting on my writing desk shelf for the past few months begging to be opened.  With my schedule, I find that I have maybe an hour at night to read or to write, but not really both.  So I think I will crack open those books and let my newest idea (which is just a wisp, a hatchling) simmer, keep chipping away at flash fic, and hone a little bit.

"No, Handsome Hubby, I can't watch Castle right now, I'm honing..."  :)

This Could Have Been Lame But It Isn't

So... it's 11:47pm and I haven't posted yet.  It's ok, I was playing with my kids earlier this evening, and then working on my horror piece.  But I refuse to fail NaBlo on day 4 (omigosh, sad) by not posting.  So instead of rubbing my tired eyes and blabbing about something just for the sake of it, I'm going to share with you some of my mostest favoritist art prints and send you to Johanna Wright's website, where you can find more of her precious prints.  I have the first two and will definitely be back for more!

 Ukelele Days

Under the Weeds

 Winning

 Midnight Picnic

 Gretel's Revenge

 Even Giants Fall in Love

A Much Better Castle

I am so in love with Johanna Wright's art.  Go see more!