Collaborating with my Girls

In honor of the fact that my retirement fund, the one consisting of money I've been working to earn since I was sixteen years old, performing jobs ranging from menial to demeaning, the one I'd planned to borrow from to provide my girls with secondary education, the one that's my cushion to enable me to be a mostly stay-at-home mom, the one that's made up entirely of stocks and bonds and mutual funds and other imaginary creatures, is down $12,000 for the year (freakin' economy), I've been working on updating my etsy shop for the holidays. It had taken a backseat to my teaching and writing for a while, but now that the entire family is steadier within the flow of the school year, I've had more time to devote to crafting with my girls.

Yep, with my girls. I consider all my work collaborative with my two children, sometimes very directly, sometimes very indirectly. For instance, the girls helped at every step in creating our melted and recycled crayon hearts and autumn leaves and their color choices could be quite beautiful, but for the personalized buntings, they rather inspired the idea, chose the colors for their own buntings, and kept me company by playing on the floor at my feet while I sewed: Sometimes my work is guided by a child's passion, such as when I made up a bunch of dinosaur postage stamp soldered glass pendants, and stuffed dinosaurs from new materials or felted wool, and dinosaur doll blankets

all because Willow is obsessed with dinosaurs. She chose the fabric or pattern or stamp for each, and both the girls are dedicated pin-holders when I layer materials. They also like to race around the perimeter of a quilt that I am pinning on the floor, leaving barely enough room to move around it on either side--it's a game to race around and around and around, because they know that whoever ends up falling on the quilt first gets grumped at by Momma, as if I didn't know what was going to happen all along.

Some things are collaborations in honor of my girls. The cross-stitch panels on this little quilt are duplicates from a cross-stitch book that my mother hand-stitched for Willow:And some things are made just because we're big dorks, like this Christmas ornament. We met Darth Maul, y'all, and he is SO NICE!

Some things I make directly for the girls, such as dressesor dolls then make a few extras to sell or give away, and some things I make in honor of my relationship with my girls, such as items to honor or encourage breastfeeding.

It's because I'm a mostly stay-at-home mom (unless my stocks keep tanking)--together all day, the girls do work and I do work, and their work and my work always reflect, even when we do it alone, our togetherness. Momma is always there to hand a girl a marker, to reach under the couch for the last elusive matchbox car, to read a couple of books, to make a couple of snacks, to wash four hands. In return, the girls are always there for me--goofing around in the cart while I shop for supplies, cutting collages while I cut patterns, sitting on my lap while I try to work the sewing machine around them, playing in the park a few feet behind me while I take pictures of what I made. I collaborate with them simply because they're an inherent part of everything I do.

Just try getting some privacy in the bathroom.