rainin' babies
music has influenced my life greatly GREATLY, but my relationship with music has changed since i've had children. up until a few months ago, all koruna would let us sing was "i've got peace like a river". it's still the only one she lets us sing to her at night, but at least now during the day we can sing "deep in the heart of texas" or "she'll be comin' round the mountain" or "happy birthday" over and over to every stuffed animal in the house.
i dig the music that koruna reintroduces us to. i dig how many times a day i burst into song. i dig the sound of my voice mixed with hers. life with children is musical, no doubt, but i find it difficult to make room for the music i love - the music that i know nourishes and informs and alters me. as the noise in my daily life increases, i often choose to sit in silence when i get the chance instead of turning on some tunes. but i want that to change.
tonight, runa and i were running screaming laughing in the front yard when she said, "there's babies rainin' down on us! there's babies rainin' down on us!" i stopped running and asked her to repeat it again.
i had to take her and hug her and try to sing her one of my favorite formative songs - it's not an easy one to sing.
What I'm thinkin' is so delicate If I breathe, you know, I'm gonna lose it......
http://youtu.be/Fzy0FfCUkjA
i was just a girl when i first loved that song. and the sound of it still makes my heart feel like it's gonna explode. i hope music does the same thing for koruna and marvel.
american gothic, south austin style. january 2012
we whooped it up again with shana the other day and took the 5th portrait in our american gothic, south austin style series. (our first with marvel.)
this series (which can be seen on my portraits page) was inspired by a random photo that ian and i took of ourselves years ago in anticipation of our travels to india in 2006. (see the last photo at the bottom of the portraits page.) we started the series with shana when i was pregnant with koruna in 2009.
i am always amazed at what shana can capture. a 2-and-a-half-year-old and a 4-month-old ain't exactly easy to corral. i dig the photo below. rooster is sneezing and mars is just DONE.
i hope we hope we get to keep adding to this series until all four of us are old and gray.
i love my family.
work
i walk into my husband's studio every once in a while just to watch him work. i brought marvel in today because i want our son to watch him, too - to see ian's ponderous attention to detail, his meditative patience. it seems to me that ian's work is to closely observe reality and to honor and depict his experience of it. not a bad life's work.
watching ian in the studio this morning made me think about my own work. i (and my partners) have owned herndon heald for 5 years. since starting that business, i've become a wife and a mother of two and i find that each day requires of me a tremendous amount of work.
ian and i have always had a pretty easy relationship - we really get each other. but now that our duo is a quartet, we have to work at things we didn't have to before. i've always heard that marriage and parenting are a lot of work, but i understand that now in a way i didn't before. in this context, i believe the word 'work' holds two different meanings:
it means labor like, "damn, i'm working hard at this..."
and it means achievement like, "wow! great work!"
in the moments when i feel burdened by of all the work of family life - exasperated by each day's seemingly endless chores or the maddening protests of children - I TRY to remember that THIS is my life's work, that loving and caring for these 3 exceptional people might just be my greatest achievement.
and that soothes me.
solstice 2012
celebrating solstice is our winter tradition. in past years, we've created a solstice tree, but this year we decided to make a solstice sun. koruna really got into it. our new holiday tradition.
an old family tradition is decorating sugar cookies. my mama usually does the baking part, but runa and i tried our hand at it this year.
the whole family got in on the cookie decorating. we usually have a contest for best-lookin' cookie but this year we were just trying to corral the chaos.
sugar is a pretty new phenomenon in koruna's world so this was quite an event.
i'm enjoying mixing new traditions with old.