I can remember the first time I met Aaron Salsitz.  It was three years ago, after dropping off Joe at kindergarten.  His son Xander and Joe were in the same class for one year before Xan went off to first grade.  We chatted in the parking lot for twenty minutes.  We talked about his time in the Navy, about basic training, and about how his growing up in Michigan had helped him pass the swimming test.  I heard about his wedding, his motorcycle accident, and his passion for Waldorf education.  I liked this guy right away.  I don't think I've met any one else as open-hearted.
I got to know Aaron and Emile throughout the year and developed an admiration for how they walk through life.  Their priorities are family, community building, and living with intent and gratitude.  They live their values 100 percent.  They sign their e-mails "peace and love," and they actually mean it.  It's not something that they're striving for, it's something that they've achieved.  They are the real deal.
Their children, being a product of these values, are a pleasure to know.  Xander is confident but also kind.  He runs across the playground with a streak of inner joy and curiosity.  He's magnetic.  You want to know this kid.  Molly's got "it" too...  this poise that can catch you off guard, but not in a "stifled child" sort of way, in a comfortable, natural way that tells you, "here's a child that's being raised in a respectful and thoughtful way."
This is the family that the knit-a-thon is for.  Xander has been in the hospital since the beginning of March and has had TWO bone marrow transplants because the first one didn't graft.  Please check out the knit-a-thon blog and consider sponsoring me.

Something I've Been Working On...

More to come later...

http://knitforsalsitz.blogspot.com/

Sponge!

Me:  Danny.  Did I see that you drew on the wall upstairs?
Danny:  Nooooooo...  SPONGE! (*grabs sponge and runs upstairs*)

And we never spoke of it again.

Trying to go slowly through this day carrying calm and quiet in my heart.  On days when I've only had four hours of sleep, this is something I have to strive extra hard for, be more conscious of.  I might also have to be okay with skipping group violin lesson, frozen pizza for dinner and letting another day go buy without putting up a fence around the garden.

The Best Mothrs Day Card Ever

"Thank you for teaching me how to observe and to be patient and be kind and to live happily"

Mother's Day Tea/Getting Going on the Garden

Matthew had a Mother's Day tea in his class this week...

I didn't want to be intrusive with my camera but I did get a few quick pictures of him in the classroom...

And we came home to these in our driveway...

... 40 bags of soil and compost for our new raised beds which will  contain tomatoes, peas, carrots, zuch, and herbs.  And also these hand-me-down perennials...

The baby pea plants are already in the ground...

Garden Baby

May Day

Some pictures from the May Day celebration at school...

Bagpipes always make me weepy...

The early childhood May Day was significantly smaller scale but equally sweet... 

Mrs Carolyn made crowns for everyone and Danny got the extra...

He was so proud...

Dear Joe,

Thank you for a very special night.  The music was beautiful and I always love an excuse for dressing up...

 

I swear I didn't tell them to look dotingly at dandelions, they were just doing that when I came outside.
These are the pictures from "The Big Spring Concert"  All the students from The Ann Arbor Suzuki Institute preformed.  There were mini cellos...

And a whole lot of violins...

You are on the left in front, standing, wearing the black tie.  You really appreciated the opportunity to play in such a beautiful space.

Matthew hated his bow-tie but was a champ...

Danny did such a good job.  The violins didn't go on until the very end, so it was a long wait...

The bass players were quite moving...



We see the kids at school lugging their basses down the hall and I have always thought, "Oh Lord, please don't let any of my boys choose bass."  But I'm a total convert.  It's a beautiful instrument and it makes such a peaceful, surprisingly quiet, ethereal sound.  I think I was also so moved by this piece because of the age of the students.  It's impressive to see the little virtuosos, but it's a completely different thing to see adolescents playing up on stage with poise and confidence during such an awkward time of life and being so completely successful and creating something beautiful.  We're lucky to have access to The Ann Arbor Suzuki Institute of Music  and I can't say enough about how excellent Joe's teacher is.

Cute baby alert...

He mostly slept, but he did wake up for a while and try to eat my scarf...

I wanted to get some portrait type pictures of you and your brothers but we ran out of time before the concert started because I tried to also squeeze in a haircut for you and then my camera ran out of batteries at the very end.  But it was worth it because your hairs really needed to be "de-domed" and I think it came out very well, significantly less poofy...

I took you to this place and after the stylist finished (I'll throw in here that she only charged TWELVE DOLLARS!) she gave you a little calculator as a prize.  Now, I didn't realize this until you got this calculator, but for some reason you had no idea what a calculator was.  Imagine getting all the way through first grade not knowing what a calculator is.  IT BLEW YOUR MIND.  "You mean I can just put the numbers in here and it GIVES ME THE ANSWERS???"  Plus, as you dramatically pointed out, "it's SOLAR POWERED."  It is now a prized possession and has a honored spot on the bedroom shelf.  After you showed it to Danny he said, "I want to get my haircut dere.  But WIFOUT my two brudders."  He wants a calculator soooo bad now.  Maybe Santa will bring him one.

A flock of white throated sparrows came to our backyard.  Mattie and I sat on the back door step and watched them eat dandelion seeds.  We could hear them singing "poor Sam Peabody Peabody Peabody" all afternoon.  Here they are in the grass with their little stripy heads...

 

Chris got the bike he's been dreaming of for four years...

How can you not love a man whose dream it is to have a bike that fits all his kids on the back?  Or who immediately jumps in the fray when he gets home from work?  Or who prefers cloth diapers, knows how to make a baby laugh, makes fingernail cutting hilarious and gets all his days off scheduled together so you can go meet your new nephew, leaving him behind with three kiddos?

We are on day one of a twenty-four day strech of work.  We'll miss ya, babe.

Puppet Play for Danny

Here are two Lotte Reiniger shadow puppet stop-motion movies I found on YouTube that inspired me to do a shadow puppet play for Danny's party...

An earlier video of Cinderella...



And Jack and the Beanstalk...



For Jack, his mother and the ogre puppets, I took some screen shots from this video, enlarged them at the printers and traced to make the puppets.  I happen to know a shadow puppet expert who I consulted and she gave me advice on materials.  They were cut using an exacto knife from dura-lar (thin plastic sheeting) covered with black contact paper.  The other puppets I drew myself and that is why they weren't as good.  I did like how the cow came out though...

She was made out of a few different pieces because I ran out of black contact paper.

Chris and I made the screen with a queen sized Ikea flat sheet and a frame that we already had (we used to use it for the gate to the garden, so there was chicken wire that needed to be removed.)  We stretched the sheet over the frame and stapled it down, then Jenni and I painted it with acrylic paint.

I loved how Lotte Reiniger depicted the growing beanstalk and the detail of the seed sprout, so I tried to do that with my beanstalk too, because that is after all, how beans grow.  I cut the bean-stalk out, removed the "negative image" and stuck the "positive image" (which was what was left on the sheet after I cut out the stalk) on some green gels that I got from Dick Blick dot com, then cut around the edges to free the puppet from the green gel.  Does that make sense?  It does when you look at the puppet.  Then, during the play, we put a blue gel over the light bulb so the screen turned blue, it looked so good!  Unfortunately you can't tell about the blue from the picture...

If I could do it again, I would use a thicker sheet of Dura-lar since my puppets were pretty big (the ogre was two feet tall and I used 0.05 thickness.)  I think thicker would have made them easier to manipulate, less floppy-ish.  I would also rehearse all the way through AT LEAST ONCE, which we couldn't seem to find the time to do.  We only got half way though the story when we did a practice run and the second half of the performance suffered for it.

Still, I think the kids enjoyed it...

And people laughed when the hen laid her golden egg...

I had planned to pin the sets to the screen, but that proved too tricky so we just taped them to a dowel and made them into their own puppet...

I'd like to get better at this art form, and maybe make some puppets that are articulated.  Wouldn't it be fun to have a small business doing shadow puppet plays for kid birthday parties?