Finally, a free morning with no rain, perfect for walking over to the park with a bushel basket of stuff for a photo shoot. Our property is so shady that a good product photo shoot basically requires going to the park, and while I can do a few items and still supervise the girls, if Matt can come, too, then I can do forty items while he supervises the girls. Of course, we're young parents, so we can't actually go to the park with the girls without getting a little "friendly" advice about steps we could maybe take to parent just a little better. Mind you, I'm all about the "it takes a village" idea, but that's only if the other people in the village share my particular parenting values. And I have one particular parenting value that pretty much no other parent shares, it seems: on the playground, I do not say to my girls, "be careful," or "that's dangerous," nor do I prohibit them from doing any activity on the playground that they apparently feel themselves capable of trying. If, in my heart, I'm pretty sure that they will fall and collarbones will be broken, I'll casually spot them, and I've talked them through many a challenging feat, but I will not physically assist them. I want the girls to be brave and self-reliant, and to challenge themselves, and to develop a knowledge of their own bodies and the capabilities and possibilities of those bodies without my overhead dominance. Who am I to tell them what their bodies are incapable of doing? And they usually surprise me and don't fall, and when they do, they usually climb right back up in the tree. The girls have thus tended to learn some playground abilities, such as climbing up and down a ladder or navigating the open distance from a ladder to a platform, way before a lot of other kids their age, probably with more bruises, but who remembers bruises?
So when Sydney is climbing a ladder and a mother, ignoring me standing right there, runs up and snatches her off that ladder, as happened a couple of weeks ago, or when she's again climbing a ladder (she's big on ladders lately) and a woman comes up to Matt standing right there and tells him, "That's dangerous. She could fall," as happened this morning at the park, it pisses us off. Matt, of course, who is unreasonably calm when faced with unreasonable people, simply replied, "She's fine." The woman argued, "I saw her fall just a few minutes ago!", and Matt said again, "And she was fine." Who can argue with such implacability?
Here's Sydney on that same controversial ladder: 
Awesome kid.
Anyway, now that I'm down off my soapbox, here are some highlights of today's photo shoot, most of which I'll probably be writing about in more detail later in the week:
Stash-busting: 
Yes, I did make even more soldered glass pendants out of reclaimed images, but Girls Love Astronomy, too:
And, spinning...
Dizzy!
Did you make yourself dizzy today?
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