Feel it in your Elbows...

Hazel asked me a series of questions just now about what things were made of...went through plastics, and petroleum and...at the end of this discussion she concluded that glitter is basically decomposed dinosaurs.

...and I then heard her tell Calliope (quite soothingly, while leading a yoga-like meditative session during which they were both covered in glitter):

"...and bend your arms and feel the dead dinosaur body in your elbows..."

3 year old BURN!!

"I don't like the selfish things you talk when you're mad at us." - Calliope, who was trying to convince me not to go to conditioning class so she could stay home and play legos, and I think was trying to exploit my inherent parental guilt. She was unable to convincingly elaborate, but I was still impressed. Well played, little wiseass, well played...

She took this selfie on my phone, too.

These kids are too intelligent for me...I'm gonna be in trouble soon.

In Need of Rest I wrestle with the idea of success

When your computer freezes and then dies at 3:16am it's nice to have a phone to vent through, to take a moment to take stock of how effective you've been able to be over the past few hours/days...

In the past two days, while feeling woefully inadequate, I have managed to feed my kids. And play with them. And they made a volcano in our kitchen and then experimented with various substances to see how they would effect it - acid? Base? Solid? Liquid?...and then they baked mini vanilla cupcakes, doing all the math and measuring and mixing...

I took them to a trampoline class, four jiujitsu classes (and assisted in two), I saw two doctors, taught an acting workshop (and had so many kids thank me and hug me I thought my heart might explode), arranged meetings between three different organizations and reached out to connect an additional two, discussed logistics involving multiple countries and zero budget, cuddled with my husband and cats while watching parks & rec, cuddled with my kids and cats, discussed puberty and civics and  politics with my kiddos, listened to so many stories and worked on developing my first (recent) guerrilla art piece, finally connected with other parents for play dates, coaxed a shy child into participation and fun, saw a few friends, counseled a few friends through crises of differing sizes, thought seriously about how to find paying work to keep us out of debt and feared for so so so many things. 

I fear I am forgetting something...

But am I doing ok? It takes everything I have not to list off the things I HAVENT done yet- I need new headshots to even get in to any auditions Which I need to search for and find, and I really want to be creating anyway and it's so hard to start with nothing but I want all my effort to go towards people who have nothing, not even homes, sometimes not even each other...so...so I do my best as a down to earth stateside support system...and hope that maybe, perhaps, dayenu, that is enough for the world, even when it doesn't feel like it was for me.

Carmen Kitty helps me with my existential angst...and my work.