Lovely Gibran

About two weeks ago now, I was invited to attend a blessing way for Jenny, preparing her for childbirth. Two women brought this poem to share. I'd never heard it before but it was so perfect that I've been thinking about it ever since.

On Children
     Kahlil Gibran

    Your children are not your children.
    They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
    They come through you but not from you,
    And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

    You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
    For they have their own thoughts.
    You may house their bodies but not their souls,
    For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
    which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
    You may strive to be like them,
    but seek not to make them like you.
    For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

    You are the bows from which your children
    as living arrows are sent forth.
    The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
    and He bends you with His might
    that His arrows may go swift and far.
    Let our bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
    For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
    so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Categories: Mom-ness

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Park Times

We are blessed, living close to a number of good-ish parks.

Categories: House | Sloane

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Lobster Fest!

"We" here at ashleybristowe.com are a bit behind in the postings. So for your viewing pleasure, a photo from March. Gramma Margo came out to Calgary for Sloane's birthday, and she brought a whole schwack of live lobster with her direct from Nova Scotia. What to do but hold a big ol' Bristowe Turner Lobster Boil.




Dada? Dada? Dada?

Categories: Family | Sloane

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Those Were The Days

At this point in my life everyone who knows me knows I hate forwarded "funny" emails. So the ones people DO bite the bullet and send (risking The Wrath) are generally excellent. Today I received one about preparing for parenting, which had many hilarious points, but this part I loved:

Lesson 8 
> 1. Hollow out a melon. 
> 2. Make a small hole in the side. 
> 3. Suspend it from the ceiling and swing it from
> side to side. 
> 4. Now get a bowl of soggy Cheerios and attempt to
> spoon them into the 
> Swaying melon by pretending to be an airplane. 
> 5. Continue until half the Cheerios are gone. 
> 6. Tip half into your lap. The other half, just
> throw up in the air. 

Although Sloane successfully feeds herself these days, I've been in the mind of parenting little babies of late - friends down the street have a four-month-old into which Turner and I managed to get five spoonfuls of orange stuff last night 
using the above method. And later this afternoon we welcome Keitha and Astrid of the House Of Hot Sauce for our first ever sleepover-with-kids. I have been practicing my re-starting-the-propellor-mid-flight sounds for the last few days.

Also I quite loved this:

> Lesson 7 
> Go to the local grocery store. Take with you the
> closest thing you can 
> find to a pre-school child. (A full-grown goat is an
> excellent choice).
> If 
> you intend to have more than one child, then
> definitely take more than
> one 
> goat. Buy your week's groceries without letting the
> goats out of your 
> sight. Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.

Definitely take more than one goat. Beautiful. We used to employ the trusty buy-the-deli-counter-sushi-and-crack-it-open-immediately,-surreptitiously-feed-to-child-whilst-sprinting-through-store method of getting groceries, ourselves. Not 
working so much these days, so I can really relate to the goat analogy. 

Categories: Friends | Mom-ness

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Extra-curricular

Um, I guess we're those kinds of parents. You know, the ones who worry that we're not enriching our child enough.

Like:
Are we reading her the right books? Will she remember the art work in this one when she's 20 and think, "oh my god, that's when I decided to be a marine biologist/artist/dragon!"? Will she get to old age and tell her biographer, "Yes, if my grandmother hadn't saved those old Babar books from when my mom was little... I think I would never have become a mushroom farmer. Do you remember the one when Cornelius ate the poisonous mushroom? He turned green and died! It made a great impression on me. From a very early age I knew I could change the public view of fungi."? You just don't know what might stick, what might be seminal in hindsight. Nope, you just have to get every damn good book out there and read it 350 times. Just to be sure.

Are we doing a good job with the nutrition? We want her to be adventurous with her eating, but balanced of course, and cautious when necessary. So let's bring the leftover bok choi and brussel sprouts for her after-school snack. By 5pm she'll eat anything!

When it comes to the physical stuff though, we know we're doing ok. The trampopoline in the backyard is a great thing. And then we also let her jump/climb on the furniture. Great for the balance, that. I came from a great tradition of climbing on the furniture. The other day Brucio came by with a pile of old photos he'd snagged from Grandma's archives and among them was a picture of me and my siblings with our grandparents. My first thought was, "I did a lot of headstands on that couch."

So it was kind of an inevitability that Sloane would end up in gymnastics. The local program is, frankly, way more than fabulous and worth every single dime. Darlene, who runs FitKids out of a church hall in Inglewood, is way more than awesome. The equipment is top drawer, exactly what you'd see in a competitive gym. Everything's weighted and safe and there's always a theme to the week's rotations. Sloane fricken LOVES it.

The before-Easter class had a special treat, the reverse bungee:

Categories: Sloane

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review

Categories: Loki & Fre

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Happy Easter, Old Skool

For several (...okay, many, many) years, I've wanted to do psankye on Easter. I'm 1/4 Ukrainian, but my grandfather being... male, "my heritage" mainly manifested in periodic anecdotes about language loss and Ukrainian flags dangling from the rearview mirror. Mostly not so much with the arts and crafts. Especially when I was growing up in Winnipeg, I'd watch the neighbour kids head off to dance lessons once a week with flowers in their hair and be jealous.

So, yeah, it only took me six years since I moved back to Calgary, but I finally finagled my way into being invited to do psankye at Alexis' parents' house. All under the guise of teaching Sloane about her heritage, of course.


Our fabulous host, Christina Bahry, shows off the various (indelible! and inedible!) special Ukrainian easter egg dyes.

This was the post-holiday email I sent to Alexis about the event:

"Your parents were total saints about the fact that we brought a toddler into their house, and proceeded to engross ourselves in an activity involving concentration and indelible dye for several hours, obliviously leaving them to tag-team babysit Sloane. Meanwhile we drank up three pots of their coffee, smashed eggs on the floor, and yammered on about our own blathering ideas... after which they basically had no choice but to feed us lunch. Not only did your mom pull a huge crayon-marker set from out of nowhere in a very timely fashion, but she also spirited up a surprise: one fully remembered-and-wrapped-plus-card birthday present for the wee girl. ...In what I can only assume was Easter-inspired delirium, your parents suggested we make it an annual thing and I readily agreed before they could change their minds."

We made three eggs between us adults and carted them around all weekend, to the various Easter stuff we did, to show them off and brag about how authentic our Easter experience had been this year. Ya, late-bloom Ukrainian crafthood in my mid-30s: that's my story.



The red one is Margo's - widely regarded as the best effort this year - simple, beautiful. Mine's the way-too-complex one in front (I think that black-and-yellow crisscross circle bit at the front there is supposed to be the traditional 'sunflower' pattern... yeesh), and Turner's is that one in back, showing off the traditional repeating patterns to best effect.

I really enjoyed the whole artistic element of the psankye stuff and was only half-joking when, after Christina presented me with a bunch of supplies to take home, that we'd have the 2009 event at our house. Of course, whereupon I'd show off the 7000+ practice eggs I'd done in the meantime... In my vision, I've put up high-near-the-ceiling shelves along every wall to display my many many creations, and the house has a not unpleasantly pervasive eggy smell. Also, my hair is in wrapped braids & I'm pulling a tractor through the kitchen, but nevermind...



After approximately 8.5 minutes of her "heritage", Sloane wandered around the house touching stuff and generally proving that a chinese checkers game and an ornamental wood tea set are waaaaay better real toys for kids than all the Barbies & bits of plastic "toy" junk out there all put together. Also, we showed her the very adorable communion photo of Auntie Alexis on the wall, which everyone enjoyed.


* Please note, some egg-zageration (har!) has been employed in this post for comedic effect.

Categories: Friends | Sloane | Ukrainian

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Aaaaw, So Cute

The cats have recently taken to bringing up "presents" from the basement. These take the form of old (as in, over a year old) poops left in a crawl space by our original cat, Rooney. ...I had no idea he was regularly using that crawl space for this purpose, but it's obvious, now. Although it sounds really disgusting, they're really just calcified turds at this point that resemble old clumps of flaking concrete. But they're definitely poops.

Actually, I've found it heartwarming. It's like Loki and Fre are saying, "WTF. Some other cat has been shitting in our basement. Here's the proof."

(I won't subject you to photos!)

Categories: House | Loki & Fre

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Earthship Nation

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Michael Reynolds on THE COLBERT REPORT last night!!! (Warning, really slow load. Cue it up, push pause, and come back in five minutes.) Looks like dudes who made Garbage Warrior finally went and hired Reynolds a publicist.

Go Earthship, it's your birthday...

Categories: GeoHope | House

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