I've Got the Whole World in Her Hands

So if you're feeling kind of stressed about the start of the school year, about lesson plans and class prep and grading and just the pure logistics of the kids' school and your school and office hours and playdates (Example A is Tuesday office hours: the kids and I start at the public library for story time, then I drive them and their packed lunches to my partner's office, where he meets me in the parking lot and we switch cars, and he feeds the kids their lunch and takes them to school while I drive over to my office hours with my work stuff, and find a parking spot and walk to my office, then leave promptly at the end of my office hours to walk back to my car and drive back to my partner's office to get the car with the car seats to drive to the kids' school to pick them up--stressful, right? And we haven't even talked about the evening hand-off twice a week so I can teach!), and you haven't crafted anything lately, which you REALLY like to do, because you've been too busy writing your syllabus, and the house is a wreck because you've been too busy to clean, AND the yard needs to be mown very badly...

...then I suggest that you take your kid's suggestion that you spend the entire morning with her drawing a pretend map of a world. You are to use your biiiiiiiig Strathmore sketch pad (leaf rubbings are still on the docket for sometime) and crayons, and there will be lots of ocean and many fanciful continents--

--and also bridges between the continents and sea plants for the people to eat and outer space and volcanoes that erupt into outer space.

The big kid and I filled one entire sheet of paper with our map, collaborating together, and we were going to do the other side of the paper together, as well (the world has to have an other side, of course), but she got impatient while I was out hanging up the laundry and just did the back side herself. It was amazing, of course.

The little kid did not want to draw, but she did want to sit near us at the table and play with ponies, so there you go:I have a few more interminable teaching tasks to do tomorrow--a lesson planned around the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces that we'll be reading, an assignment sheet for my students' first analytical paper of the semester, a bonus reading to scan and upload, as well as some miscellaneous plans, in-class writing assignments, and hand-outs to revise for this semester--and then that's Week 2 done and all I have to do is teach it, and I WILL NOT plan anything for Week 3 (which is mostly peer review days and instructor consultation days, anyway) until I have made the kids some nice autumn pajamas, and bonus points for some matching jammie pants for myself.

But if that stresses me out too much, there are always kittens to watch. This one is attacking a shoe!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!