Library storytime and techno parade

This morning I brought AwesomeCloud to one of the little libraries around here for storytime. I like their storytime. It's held in a big space, so I'm not getting constantly tripped on by toddlers. Cloud is one of the oldest kids there, but that seems to be good for him - he does not yet seem to be "too old" for anything. Even "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" is still a challenge for him. That's not always a good thing, but it's a thing, and so it goes.

Before storytime, the kids all gather around the train table. Cloud was playing nicely with the only other preschool-aged boy there. But when the track became misaligned, he started to call out to Mama: "Hewwwp!"

"Don't slam it," I called across the room. I was kind of stuck in a rocking chair just outside the children's area, with mounds of coats and purses walling me out. "Just push it gently into the hole with your fingers."

"Hewwwp!" he screamed, banging on the train track harder.

"Ask your friend to fix it for you," I suggested. "Just say, 'Excuse me, can you fix this?'"

"NOOO!!" cried Cloud. He was really wailing and red-faced now.

"Come here," I invited. "Do you want to rock?" Whenever he hurts himself or otherwise gets overcome with emotion, if there's a rocking chair handy, I offer to rock him to comfort him. He knows what that is now and will occasionally ask to rock without me having to mention it first. Fortunately, I was already in a rocking chair, so he came right over, climbed in my lap, and let me rock him.

"Now that boy is fixing the track," I observed.

"I can't... I can't talk," Cloud wailed. I guess he was trying to explain that he was too flustered, or shy, or whatever, to take my suggestion and ask the boy for help. Cloud then begged to go home, but I assured him that storytime would start soon and then he'd have something completely different to do and he'd forget all about this. And it did, and he did.

When we got home, I cooked us some mac'n'cheese with broccoli, and afterwards I decided I wanted to drown my sorrows in ice cream. So I told Cloud we were going to the store to get some ice cream. You'd think I said Santa Claus was coming back. We had one of the most festive trips to the supermarket ever, and now I'll probably pay for it in begging because this is the kind of thing Cloud doesn't forget for a long, long time.

After ice cream, I put on my Fatboy Slim CD and we had a techno dance parade featuring maracas, a tambourine, and some jingly cat toys, because I am a bit of a masochist but also because it seemed like a good activity to do on a rainy day, and because I was anticipating my husband calling for me to come get him so he could leave me at home alone for the rest of the afternoon to rest in peace. Which I am doing. Except that I'm also trying to mend his steampunk vest, which is proving difficult because it's very thick and the needle doesn't go through the material very well. And now my back hurts from the effort of pushing it through.

The value of a Chinese New Year party run by white parents

Tomorrow is our Chinese New Year party, hosted by the adoption agency, a little bit past the actual date as tradition holds (so that people can still come if they have other Chinese New Year parties to go to, or perhaps so that we can hire the good dancing troupe when it's in the budget).

I'm on the planning committee, which is a little funny when you consider that I can't plan my way out of a paper bag, but there you have it. I managed to be useful this year - I painted a lovely dragon banner for the year of the dragon, Cloud and I took a great little trip to Chinatown with Auntie C to buy gifts and trinkets, and I had the amazing good fortune to find someone with a dragon head while both of our previously used dragon heads were busy becoming unavailable. You can't have a lion dance without a dragon head. Our tradition is to have the little kids line up behind the dragon head and follow it around the room, doing whatever kind of jiggling, swaying dance they're physically capable of. It's not very authentic. Nobody there has actually spent significant time in China. None of the ethnically Chinese people were old enough to learn how to throw a real Chinese New Year party when they were adopted, and in fact most of them are still very, very young. Cloud is about average age and he's not even 4 yet. Also, a bunch of the kids are from Kazakhstan.

I had a conversation with someone about cultural authenticity, and he defended the idea of it. I agree with him, actually. I want cultural authenticity too. I'm glad that he cares enough about Chinese culture to defend it; a lot of people don't. A lot of people like to fawn over the cute Chinese kids, and are happy that we have our families, but when it comes to things that are actually Chinese... well, China is the country that makes all our stuff and buys all our national debt. And that's not something to think happily about. They talk funny and they have all those human rights issues that we'll just avoid talking about because-- hey, these kids sure are cute.

And we parents realize that when we throw them a Chinese New Year party, we're not giving them the real deal. We don't know what the real deal looks like. We make some of it up, and we add American traditions like the balloon guy and the gift raffle. We eat food that's mostly typical of an American Chinese buffet, with a few special desserts across from the French fries and General's chicken. We let the kids go off and play with each other, not exactly a sea of Asian faces but not exactly alone in a crowd of platinum blonds either.

And we realize that someday the kids will look back on these parties and know that they weren't authentic. They'll know that the lion dance wasn't THE lion dance. They'll have mixed emotions about our efforts, but each parent hopes that one of those emotions will be, "At least they tried. At least they gave us something."

We can give them other things, too, in life. Mandarin lessons, history lessons with an emphasis on respecting Chinese culture, maybe a trip back to China. We can give them the opportunity to take what little we've given them and run with it, expand it into a cultural identity that fits themselves. We hope they'll try, that they'll appreciate a small head start instead of resenting us for doing too little or too much.

There are some people who claim that removing a child from his original culture is cruel. If we adoptive parents are so aware that we're doing an inadequate job, shouldn't it be better not to do it at all? Maybe. Maybe maybe maybe. Always, there's something that could be better than it is about everything in the world. Anyway, there's more to life than parenting to culture. I'm betting on a post-racial future, a future in which Homo sapiens as a single species is given more weight. (It's coming! Thanks, geneticists, for all your recent discoveries!) A future in which we remember what we'd meant by 'melting pot'. One thing that probably won't happen in the future is the ability to see how far we've come already. Within a lifetime; decade to decade; year to year. When I was growing up in the '80's, Asian people were still novelties to be gawked at and joked about in White America, and Westerners were the despised enemy in China. Now there are Gaps and Walmarts in China, and Chinese people named James and Jessica in the US. It got better, and it will keep getting better, and all the cross-racial mish-mashing that is going on will contribute to the erasing of racial lines and the strengthening of Homo sapiens.

And when should we start, if not now? Who can wait until post-racialism is normalized? The good stuff in life is all achieved before it's all safe and comfortable to achieve things. Anyway, we're not trying to contribute to a race eradication movement. Race eradication is a nice ultimate goal, someday, but all we're trying to do is our best for the kids we have. So, yeah, it's a challenge; a little challenge. Authenticity is nice. But the world changes so fast, what the hell is authenticity anyway?

It's people failing to remember how things used to be before they were the way they were recently. It's people holding onto flawed memories from a specific point in time, ignoring the fact that time is a continuum. It's an esoteric idea that people strive to grasp from some entity that they perceive as 'authentic'.

We can all do that! That's no problem! Recent studies in neurology have hinted that the part of the brain that perceives the long view of life is different from the part of the brain that perceives the short view. I'm a long view thinker, mostly because I found out that most people neglect the long view so I was going to embrace it as my own. But even I use the two different views separately from each other. Even I forget one view while I'm considering the other.

My son has a whole life ahead of him, in a society that I grew up in but still very different, and he has many philosophies and opportunities available to him. But in the past two weeks, he has managed to stomp on my injured toe a minimum of 20 times. And he has picked up the hilarious phrase, "Nice dragon, Mom!" which he blurts out at random while I'm working on the New Year banner.

Thanks, kid. I think so, too.

The kung fu/Arisia weekend

Well, AwesomeCloud missed most of Arisia. This is a good thing. I had to be on a panel as soon as we got there on Friday, and when I got to the table, my husband reported that the Kiddo had been behaving very well. The table was completely set up and ready for business, so obviously he hadn't been too disruptive. However, as soon as Rick left us, Cloud subjected me to a solid hour of whining, writhing on my lap as I tried to look professional for potential customers, and demonstrating a generally klutzy three-year-old lack of coordination. You know how small children flail mindlessly whenever they're bored? And how the closer they are to something that should not be knocked over, the more carelessly they flail? Yeah.

So, I'm not going to complain that he was terrible, but I will say that having him stay over his Auntie and Uncle's house Saturday and Sunday was probably more fun for everyone. Someday Cloud will be useful at cons. Maybe when he's six. Right now, he usually falls somewhere between, "He was good but bored and restless" and "He couldn't stand being anywhere near the table."

And, to be honest, it's tough being a vendor. You need a lot of stamina. At least he's not traumatized by crowds, right?

On Saturday morning, all three of us skipped out on Arisia, leaving the table closed for business, to attend Cloud's kung fu belt test/ceremony. I'd been under the impression that he had his orange belt (which was accidentally yellow) and was earning his purple belt, but actually he was going from his yellow belt to his orange belt. Whatever. The colored belts are just for fun at this age anyway. They can throw in as many colored belts as they want in there; at the age of 3, there's no way he's going to outcompete an adult novice at real kung fu, and the real purpose of the lessons is to teach him how to pay attention, follow directions, and challenge his body.

In fact here he is demonstrating a skill he has worked long and hard on - kicking. Learning to kick has been a long, hard road for him. His leg strength and his sense of balance have always been weak areas. In fact, when he started kung fu, his Early Intervention therapist told me to warn the instructor that he was 'floppy'. He's still, maybe, a little bit floppier than he has to be at his age. I don't know; maybe it's a personality quirk. But part of the issue was just a lack of strength, and he's been addressing that(with some encouragement).

I've started telling him, "If you practice kung fu every day, you'll get really good at it." And then I get down on the floor and do push-ups with him, or sometimes without him, and as a result I've been getting a little better myself.



I haven't tried doing pushups while raised on pads, though, like Tai Si Hing is getting ready to have Cloud do here.


Oh, and apropos of nothing, this stormtrooper is a cake. It's about 10 inches taller than I am, but still a cake. Just sayin'.

Anyway, Kid has an orange belt now, and I think I've already seen some improvement in his ability to follow directions. Also, we made good sales at Arisia and met lots of good people.

Arisia 2012, here we come

AwesomeCloud doesn't have a costume, but he does have a vendor's table at Artist Alley. We're still working on teaching him the phrase, "Buy our books!" Maybe this is the year it clicks.

Arisia is a great con, and although we'll be busy with 9 panels between my husband and me, and our intern will be present only on Sunday, we anticipate having a lot of fun. It's close by in Boston, so we're commuting. Even better, Cloud's kung fu purple belt test is Saturday morning, and we both want to attend that, so we're skipping out right in the middle for a kung fu ceremony!

Oh my goodness, I'm tired just thinking about it.

Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to say in my five panels...

Oh hey, my panels are the following:
Fri: Nonfiction Comics
Sat afternoon: Finishing What You Started (comics)
Sat evening: Race, Gender, and Disability in Comics
Sun afternoon: Minicomics
Sun evening: How Comics Are Made

I don't think I'll be speechless for any of those. I could just start yammering about any or all five topics at a moment's notice. But I should really show up with a plan.

AwesomeCloud's first self portrait

So far, Cloud hasn't been known for his artistic skills, his ability to concentrate on where his pencil is going, or his inclination to care. He enjoys scribbling on whatever I draw. But drawing something himself? Not really... until now.

Here are, as far as I know, his first two self-portraits ever! (aside from whatever bits of glue and crayon scribbles were labeled as 'self-portraits' by his preschool teacher, and there probably have been some, but I can't absolutely be sure. Almost everything he draws looks like the path taken by his trusty imaginary train.)

Invasion of the culture snatchers

"You never know what could happen," my mother intones. My father goes off on some diatribe on using guns as a means to protect one's family.

My family has embraced the 'culture of fear', a term I use because today's level of parental fear seems to be a cultural thing and not based on any actual, tangible trends or occurrences. According to the news, horrific crimes occur to children every once in a while. National news reports children missing several times a year, in various states, occasionally up to three simultaneously. Admittedly it's pretty scary to be sitting in front of the TV and hear someone say, "A 9-year-old girl from Indiana was reported missing today; 5-year-olf Thomas B. the boy missing in Texas last week still has not been found, and the 11-year-old we reported on last month is presumed dead."

However, I don't watch TV. If a child goes missing in my town, I may join the search party. So far, that has not happened yet. Statistically, it's highly unlikely to. Pick any random town, and odds are good that some crime worthy of appearing in the national news will occur there within a block of 30 to 50 years. In my town, we've had a spate of young gang members shooting each other through their bedroom windows. National news? Nope. Still waiting.

Pick any random child in that town, and the odds that a crime will occur to that child is... well, 99% of kidnappings, murder, and abuse are perpetrated by someone close to the child, often a parent or someone the parent is intimately involved with. Barring that, there are not so many incidents.

What I really need to protect my child from is not the murderers and pedophiles lurking behind every tree, or the gang members poking guns through our windows, but all the many, many people who try to restrict him for his own hypothetical safety. People who tell ME that I'm the one doing it wrong, and I should restrict and shelter him more. Those people are everywhere. They're in his school. They teach his kung fu class. They're in our family.

No, I will not carry a gun in my purse to shoot dead the evil person who will surely accost us while we're taking a walk. (Really?! How, tell me, is THAT such a brilliant idea?) I will not prohibit him from riding the school bus, nor ride the city bus alone when he's developmentally ready for that. I will encourage him to learn to be independent. Most kids in his generation are being boxed in and held close by their parents and school systems, and if I can avoid making that mistake with him, he'll have a huge advantage over his peers.

You can see the phenomenon in my own generation, how broken and scared some of us were, how we stepped out into the world with hardly any self-sufficiency skills and then turned around and moved back into the safety of our parents' homes. I know at least five adults in their 30's and 40's who still rely on their parents. I know a few in their 20's, but it's a tough economy and they may still take flight. We didn't grow up with the level of paranoia that's pervasive today, but our generation still has some examples of the effects. What is my son's generation going to be like? It will depend on the successes of ambitious kids who break out of their chains and take crash courses on how to be responsibly independent, some who will fail that course and a few that will succeed, and on parents who buck the trend and work hard to teach their kids to believe in and rely on themselves.

Real-life risk assessment is famously hard, and it's a well-known fact that almost everyone in the world is bad at it. But that doesn't mean that I should just resign myself to being bad at it and reassure myself that, hey, at least my kid won't be the one American that gets brutally victimized by a murderous pedophile once every 5-20 years. No, what I need to do is accept that my son is probably also going to be bad at risk assessment, and I should teach myself how to be good at it so I can teach him to be good at it.

Good risk assessment doesn't teach that if a little caution is a good thing, then a ton of caution is excellent. It doesn't teach you to prepare for worst-case freak occurrences first. Yes, it would be nice if awful freak occurrences didn't happen. But you shouldn't prepare for them FIRST, because you can't anticipate them! That's why they're FREAK! And if you tell me you're successfully avoiding them by preparing for them first... I won't believe you.

And I'll think of the much more tangible sacrifices you're making in your kid's life.

But it irks me that I'm essentially fighting everyone, that the culture of fear is so pervasive in our culture that it has essentially become our culture, and that I don't really have any philosophical allies. Except my husband, because he doesn't wonder what other people think he should be afraid of. He's evidence that risk assessment is easier if you do it yourself. And thank goodness.

Train-riding kid

My boys went to Boston to visit friends and ride the T.

I stayed home and... uh... untangled yarn. And listened to Trans-Siberian Orchestra. And not a whole much else.

Cats - an anniversary (and now that I've added these pictures, I'm kind of shocked at the difference)

Nervous Riley

Comfortable Riley

Skinny Ban Lu

Healthy Ban Lu

December 23 is the two-year anniversary of the day we brought Riley home. Getting a cat two days before Christmas is a really crazy and stupid idea, I know - but it actually wasn't that bad. The proximity to Christmas was mostly a coincidence - Trixie had died close to Thanksgiving, which was also a coincidence, and letting a month pass between your old cat and your new cat is a reasonable thing to do.

My husband's school vacation started around then, so we were all available to go down together.

Riley's shelter was in Rhode Island, and we were planning to be in RI that day anyway, to see family members and visit graves.

Most of the Christmas festivities weren't even at our house, so Riley and our other cat Melody didn't even have to endure a whole day of crinkly paper, loud children, and tons of people-food.

Also, AwesomeCloud had only been home for three months. Three months between Cloud's entrance into the family and Riley's! We were keeping the festivities very low-key for his sake. In a certain way, it was the perfect Christmas for a new cat.

And then a month later we brought home Ban Lu. We had offered to take them home together, but Ban Lu was being held at the shelter for medical reasons, and the shelter then contacted us in January saying he was terminally ill and were we still interested? Yup, we were. What's a terminally ill cat on top of a crazy hyperthyroid cat and a newly adopted toddler?

Obviously, the story has changed now. Ban Lu is still with us, and he's fit and healthy. It's not that the shelter vet was wrong; the vet's diagnosis was mostly accurate. His digestive system really was going to kill him. It's just that we found a way around that, and once he was able to eat normally, he was also able to live normally. And Riley still has hyperthyroidism, and we still think of her as crazy, but actually she's improved tremendously.

And AwesomeCloud... well... I don't think we could have a Christmas as low-key as that one anymore.

I still miss Trixie, though. She's not the only loved one I've lost near Thanksgiving. She's not even the only beloved cat who passed away near Thanksgiving. And there will surely be more in the future.

Maybe this is one reason why I'd like to get into fostering cats. Foster cats hardly ever die in your possession. They move on quickly, replaced by more and more foster cats; they do not live with you for 15-20 years until you can't imagine life without them before dying. I have no problem saying goodbye to someone going out into the world, on to bigger and better things. But I'm not so good with grief.

We went Chinese house!

Today was a mostly Chinese-themed day. I've been lax in introducing Hanyu into the household, so today I looked up a bunch of verbs in the dictionary and tried to get AwesomeCloud to practice them with me.

pǎo - run
tíng - stop
tiào - jump
tī - kick

He wasn't very interested when I tried to do it at home. He mostly just wanted to watch TV.

But this afternoon he had a kung fu class, and we somehow arrived several minutes early, so while we waited, I had him running around the kwan and following my newly learned Chinese verbs, and then he started to get into it. I think that more practice will help. He responds just fine to words that he's learned before, although he speaks very few of them himself, and is a little resistant to coaching. If I just keep trying, the Chinese vocabulary, what little of it I can offer him, will sink in.

Kung fu itself is a lot of work, as well. The class is taught a little above his age level, most certainly above his maturity level, and he's expected to work hard and practice high levels of concentration. The older kids who take kung fu seriously are good classmates for him, and help him focus a little bit better. (The 'older' kids are four years old, five at the most. So we're not talking much of a range of abilities.) I'm trying to make the work easier for him by psyching him up for class before we arrive, and by practicing at home.

And yes, I realize that no matter what I do, AwesomeCloud is still a three-year-old taking kung fu. He is clearly more humorously adorable than he is fantastically skillful. In his little kung fu uniform with the little orange belt... he makes everyone fawn and giggle at the same time.

But life is full of difficult tasks for people to overcome, and teaching oneself Chinese is definitely a very difficult task, requiring a lot of self-discipline. If Cloud learns a tiny crumb of self-discipline at age 3... I'm not saying he'll be fluent in Chinese in no time, and able to kick the butts of anyone who looks at him funny no matter how big... but if he learns a tiny bit of self-discipline now, he'll open the door to learning a lot of self-discipline later.

And he probably will need it. It's a big ol' world out there, and I can't teach him everything.

It would be really cool if he learned kung fu IN Chinese, but that's not really what this kung fu studio is about, and that would be kind of too much of a niche market for our area, anyhow. (I bet there are a few in Boston.) It's not about being Chinese there; nobody else there is even Chinese. (All those moms who worry that there are only three other Chinese students in their kids' kindergarten class... yeah, we can't do that here. Here, I inwardly cheer if there's a kid who's not blond, and even that doesn't happen every time.) It's about learning kung fu for the self-discipline, and using the self-discipline to learn other things, such as but not limited to Hanyu. And he will get the extra bonus of being able to say that he's studied kung fu (as opposed to tae kwon do or peewee hockey or Suzuki piano or whatever). Now, whether it will bother him that all his kung fu teachers have been non-Chinese people... that will be up to him.

I just want him to have some Chinese people in his life, in some context. And not just in restaurants. Someday, when he's old enough to understand, or probably before, I'll explain that the Asian population has a majority in the world, and that Asian-type people outnumber us pale-type people by almost 3 to 1. I will also tell him that thanks to human migration, he and I have a common ancestor who is not all that far back. But I also want Asian-ness to feel normal to him, and that's quite an achievement around here.

Fortunately, it's not impossible. You see, after kung fu, our family had the great honor of dinner with the Chinese students from my husband's school. They were delightful. They loved AwesomeCloud. They answered my questions about speaking Hanyu. I went over my newly learned verbs with them, and they reinforced and slightly corrected my efforts. They even managed to coax a few words out of Cloud.

When we left their dorm, Cloud happily referred to it as, "Chinese house!"

I'm always glad when he uses the word "Chinese" with a positive tone. He told our friend at the restaurant that she was Chinese, but he said it proudly. If he's not always interested in learning vocabulary when I'm practicing it on him, at least he seems to feel that Chinese things, and being Chinese, are good.

I will be sad and angry when he hears people state otherwise. I'm sure that's coming soon. I hope that maybe non-China-loving people will try to be diplomatic when they're around him when he's a little older. I hope he doesn't allow any anti-Chinese sentiment to sink in until after he's developed a sense of cultural and individual pride.

Traditions that are dying a painful, ungraceful death

I'm going to miss door-to-door caroling. I've actually been door-to-door caroling. Someone even gave us hot chocolate. It's a memory I'll always cherish. Has anyone else ever been door-to-door caroling?

The tradition was well on its way out when I was a kid. It's not like I did it every year, nor did my house ever get carolers when I was growing up. But it's the principle of the thing. Nobody carols anymore. Nobody likes strangers anymore.

Maybe they think that "We want some figgy pudding" is actually a euphemism.

Weird things I scream at my kid

I screamed at my kid, "I'M SORRY! IT WAS A MISTAKE! I MEANT TO SAVE YOU THE MAC'N'CHEESE WRAPPER BUT I FORGOT! I! AM! SORRY! I'M SORRY!"

Then I told him that he needed a couple of minutes to pull himself together, and that I was going downstairs and I'd come back when he felt better. So what does he do? He stands at the bottom of the stairs and begs three times in rapid succession for a treat.

And just now I told him, "Might I suggest that you be careful how much you bother me about treats. My threshold for whining is fairly low right now, so you may not want to bother me very much."

I love the fact that AwesomeCloud talks. I love it to death. Now I'm setting on that long, slow path of teaching him language comprehension and rational negotiation. Oh, how the years drag on.

AwesomeCloud's sense of materialism

My son is three. Therefore he loves his toys. He really loves his toys. He walks around clutching a tractor in one hand and a plushie cat in another hand, and if he needs to use his hands to do something, like use the potty, he stands there, clutching his toys, and howls until I do it for him. (Eating is the exception. He lines his toys up on his seat, because they're not allowed on the table, and reaches down to touch them between bites.)

When he goes to a library or a preschool or, as happens rarely, a friend's house, he immediately selects the 4 or 5 toys he likes the best and he holds onto them. He'll run around playing and shrieking with a fire engine, two school buses, a caboose, and a delivery truck (for instance) all clutched awkwardly to his chest. If one falls, he carefully stops to pick it up and then rearranges his whole collection until his grip on it is solid.

When we transition from one place, or one task, to another, his preferred toys change too. If I tell him to get in the car, he drops his previous handful on the floor and runs to get some very specific toy out of a pile in the other room. Sometimes it can get very specific. Not just any tractor; the green tractor. Not Brown Cat; Orange Cat.

I find the whole thing hilarious. I see greater messages of human behavior in his antics. Some people still cherish their possessions just as strongly when they're adults. Those people have their rationales - "I didn't have much growing up, so I'm making up for lost time." "I've lost valuable stuff before, and I don't want that to happen again." "I've worked hard for all this stuff. It took me years to build up my collection." "It's what makes me happy in life."

I have mixed feelings. I get the urge to purge stuff as often as I wish to keep it. The two instincts sometimes conflict with each other, and I sometimes have to make hard decisions against myself.

I think what I really want is to have less stuff so I can feel more strongly about wanting to get and keep stuff. It's easier to furnish a bare room to your liking than a cluttered room. So I try to bring my rooms a little closer to bare once in a while so that I regain the impression that, if we get more stuff, it'll be okay.

New hobbies are the most difficult. I'm supposed to be teaching myself how to design and sew geeky plushies. But sewing supplies take up so much space! There's nothing I can do about it. If I want to get anywhere with the sewing, I need to get more stuff. I don't want more stuff. Well, I do, especially if it's free... but...

I've been holding off, dragging my feet, wondering if maybe we can jettison the accumulation from an old hobby before adding a new one. I look at my piles of yarn and wonder if I should kill the crocheting. But I don't want to. I crochet quite a bit and I enjoy doing it. Not a whole lot; not enough to turn three baskets of yarn into storeable items anytime soon. But it's certainly not a dead hobby.

In anticipation of Christmas, and the addition of more toys, I've been trying to guess which toys Cloud has outgrown, or are redundant, and boxing them up in the basement for removal later. But he's onto me. He found the boxes under the basement stairs, and now, every couple of days, he goes down to see what toy he hasn't played with in awhile. Nevermind the fact that I generally choose toys that have sat around untouched in his room for a month or more. If they're in the basement boxes, they feel new again to him. And precious all over again.

Also, the number of small, almost-junky-but-not-quite toys he accumulates is staggering. You know, not the McDonald's prizes, but the toys a notch above that? The ones that don't look like trash anymore because you have some actual McDonald's prizes to compare them favorably to? It's fun to let him pick out a cheap cheap toy at a yard sale, figuring you'll box it up in a month or two and in the meantime it's worth $0.50 to let him clutch it for a while. But when it comes time to purge all those old $0.50 toys, it's harder than it sounds.

Once I do finally get them all in a box, there he is ready to rediscover his old/new toys all over again.

And I don't really want to break the cycle by getting rid of the boxes immediately after filling them. Rediscovering his toys is fun. Well, it's fun to him. That's good enough.