The Bookshelf Quilt is Finished

The glorious day has finally come that the bookshelf quilt is finished!

Its finished size is approximately 65"x95", so more or less within the standard sizing for a twin-sized quilt. I'd made the older kid's dorm room quilt more of a full size, thinking it would serve her better over the years, but with the bed lofted that extra quilt width is really in the way, so it turns out that a twin-sized quilt really IS the best size for a twin-sized bed, ahem.

The grey background fabric is a really nice piece of cotton yardage that I found at Goodwill--our local Goodwills have raised the prices on most items to a shocking degree, but you can still find great deals on fabric cuts.. probably because the staff don't know what they even are.

Most of the books are stash/scrap fabric from my own collection, but about halfway through piecing the blocks I realized that picking through my fabric to dig out the right scraps, then painstakingly cutting around all the other random cut-out bits and old seams and crap to make them the right sizes was taking WAY longer than it did to just sew my jellyroll pieces into books... so I hopped over to Joann's and had the kid pick out a couple more jellyroll sets. I do really like the scraps that I used, though, especially the red/green batik canvas that used to be bedroom curtains in the house before this one, and the Pegasus prints that I sewed a ton of stuff for my horse-loving older kid with, and all the various other bits and pieces of kid clothes and home projects and pretty things long past:

Here's my view from the ladder I'm perched on. My partner is rightfully refusing to help me because I rightfully got mad at him after I'd asked him to help me and then caught him PUTTING DUCT TAPE ON MY QUILT. He thought it would look better if it was photographed hanging, and apparently duct tape is the best way to hang a handmade, heirloom quilt that his wife is barely 12 hours from having completed:

Kind of reminds me of the time that our newborn first-born daughter would not stop screaming so he jokingly screamed back at her, and I flatly informed him that if he EVER screamed at my child again I would divorce him.

And he never screamed at the kids again! Ahem.

I'm the proudest of those blocks with the leaning books. I got the idea from this tutorial, but I think I ended up doing mine a little differently:

The couple of empty blocks were my partner's idea, and it was BRILLIANT. I felt like I could only get away with putting a couple in there, but OMG what a time-saver, and obviously a bookshelf has to have some room for more books!

I still don't love the look of the stacked book blocks, but I do like how they break up the space. They've grown on the kid, too, mostly because she likes to do the same thing on her own bookshelves:

I'm so happy to have this quilt finished, and I'm so pleased that my kid is pleased with it--

--but dang does it make her imminent departure real. I spent most of the summer feeling a lot of anticipatory grief about both kids going away--and pretty far away, too!--but now that we're just about in the moment I'm sort of... I don't know. Kind of in a state of just pushing through and getting stuff done and being sad about it later? I am firmly reminding myself not to get all wrapped up in my own feelings so I can keep the focus on the kids and their experience, but I did also mention to my kid that although I was super happy and excited for her I would probably cry, and when I cried it didn't mean I wasn't happy and excited for her. She was all, "Yeah, I HAVE met you before. Remember that time that you randomly burst into tears, oh, let's see... THREE HOURS AGO?" And my other kid accused me of not letting her out of my sight, which is completely untrue, but yes, I likely have been staring creepily at her because I want to memorize her face before she sails literally halfway across the world.

So, I dunno, you guys. I am freaking out but also feeling like I'm too busy to freak out and if I just hold off on freaking out now I'll have plenty of time to freak out later. But my kids are going to very exciting places to do very exciting things, and they both have handmade quilts to accompany them.

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I Read Act Natural and Now I Feel Better about My Own Parenting, Ahem

Okay, if you’re just reading the reviews and you haven’t read Jennifer Traig's Act Natural yet and you’re wondering why so many people are griping that there’s a ton of talk of infanticide in this book--um, yes. There is a TON of talk of infanticide in this book. You might not have expected that if you were looking for a history of parenting, because, well, obviously, so here’s your friendly neighborhood trigger warning: there’s tons of talk of infanticide here!

But also… it’s super interesting! And also relevant! Like, Traig claims that the early medieval constant reference to “overlaying,” ie. rolling over onto your baby and accidentally smothering them while co-sleeping, was often a euphemism for infanticide. I would be very interested to know if there are any actual, verifiable stats on this, because I think it would be an insightful addition to the current co-sleeping controversy. How unhappy would that one already-unhappy NICU pediatrician have been when, in response to his lecture about the dangers of co-sleeping that he made me sit through before releasing my baby to my custody, I’d informed him that many of those historic references were actually murders? My baby would have been in a foster home by the end of the day!

Most of the infanticide discussion is in Chapter 1, the ancient history of parenting, and the context, then, is why there would be so much infanticide in a world without modern medical technology. The answer, in part? In a world without modern medical technology, you don’t have reliable birth control, and also don’t have the ability to get a reliable abortion. Combine that with the already abysmal infant survival rate, and I, at least, can see how entire cultures came to the idea that newborns weren’t exactly locked in on existence right at first. Just imagine me doing the little hand-gesture towards my brain and making the explody noise, because that blew. My. MIND!

Also exposing children to the elements, or to whatever animals might want to eat them or whatever other adults might want to snatch them up. And sending them to baby farms to be slowly starved to death out of sight and mind. Traig reports that in Paris in 1780, there were about 21,000 infants born. Seven hundred were nursed by their biological mothers. Three thousand had in-home wet nurses or were placed into Parisian “nursery homes.” SEVENTEEN THOUSAND were sent to baby farms elsewhere in the country. Oh, and also orphanages and foundling hospitals! People used orphanages WAY oftener than I thought they did. Traig reports statistics of over 40% of infants being abandoned to foundling hospitals in certain geographic areas over specific periods of time. I have since worked into my casual conversations the common surnames for foundling children: do you know anybody with the surname Columbo, Esposito, Vondeling, Temple, or Iglesias? If so, I have some bad news for you about one of their ancestors… You could tell Traig was high-key gleeful when spilling the tea about all the famous Western dudes we’re supposed to respect who actually dumped most or all of their kids off at orphanages. For instance, Jean-Jaque Rousseau had five children, and ABANDONED ALL FIVE TO FOUNDLING HOMES. Like, yikes!

I think I would have picked all of the above, though, over being a medieval European baby mummified in filthy swaddling for 24 hours at a go and hung on a hook or propped near an open fire where I was likely to burn to death. 
The one flaw in Traig’s book is that it is mostly a white European cultural history of parenting, and doesn’t much address other cultures than those. That’s fine, obviously, because otherwise the book would have to be nine times as long, but the lens isn’t specified in the title, so it would be understandable for a reader to be disappointed at the lack of other perspectives. 

Because Traig’s cultural history is necessarily too brief to thoroughly flesh out all the hot goss and scandalous tidbits that she drops, my favorite thing about her book is all her references to the historical works that I can now go find and read myself. I’m most interested in the craziest-sounding of the parenting tomes, so apparently I’ll be flipping through several early 20th-century parenting books and cackling about all the cocaine use. I’m also interested in the mid-1990s hippie birth and parenting books, especially when contrasted to the other extreme also coming around then: we’ve got both twilight sleep, which I already knew was a Whole Thing even before I watched that one Mad Men episode, and that stupid “your birth is not progressing” timetable that I am now learning was made up by one bored dude killing time by tracking a whopping total of 25 women over the course of one overnight work shift when he’d rather be elsewhere. 

Tangential shout-out to Channel to a New Life, the hippie birth film that I watched on VHS during one of my hippie birthing classes, and that I later walked my best friend over to watch with me at the hippie parenting center because I literally NEEDED him to experience this with me. It involves an outdoor water birth, of course, aided by one guy playing the drum and another guy holding a crystal that has had dolphin song channeled through it, and ends with the newborn’s preschool-aged sibling stripping nude and hopping into the bloody birth pool to play. The video was “lost” (I promise it wasn’t me!) long before the parenting center eventually shut down, and I’ve never found another copy. If you ever see one, pleasepleaseplease snap it up for me!

My other favorite thing about this book is the random miscellaneous factoids that Traig drops throughout. Such as: did you know that Dr. Spock has an Olympic Gold medal? Or that L. Ron Hubbard wrote a recipe for baby formula that some people still use?!? Or that the original edition of Aesop’s fables featured some VERY suss tales? Or that it was a terrifying evangelical children’s author, Favell Lee Mortimer, who invented both the flash card and the titling trope of [insert topic] Without Tears? I also really enjoyed finding connections to some of my other Special Interests--I already mentioned Dr. Sears, who I used to be OBSESSED with and would now actively enjoy gossiping about, but Traig also references the Satanic Panic scare of the 1980s that led to those messed-up accusations that the McMartin Preschool was conducting Satanic rituals with young children that led to the equally messed-up made-for-TV movie Do You Know the Muffin Man, which was released exactly in my unsupervised TV watching wheelhouse era. Here it is on YouTube:

I would have had an absolute cow if my own under-tens had been watching that on heavy rotation. Like, Good Lord, did my parents care about me AT ALL?!?

In conclusion, I guess I’m just really glad that I live in a time in which my obstetrician didn’t show up and dive right into my vagina with bare autopsy-hands…

Just kidding--I had a nurse-midwife, and actually she was super mean to me! That’s probably a future chapter of Traig’s, how the dummies of the early twenty-oughts were so obsessed with “natural” medicine that they’d choose a body-shaming midwife over a perfectly nice obstetrician. Sigh. But don’t worry--Traig also has a lot to say about Dr. Sears!

P.S. Find me on Goodreads, where I'm reading 104 books this year!

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Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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I Found These Super Cute American Girl Doll Storage Containers, and I Am Definitely About To Have a Mid-Life Crisis

Because the best way to spend a rainy, gloomy afternoon is sitting on the floor all by myself playing with organizing the kids' old toys!

A few weeks ago, I had a little time to kill after dropping my kid off at college and before starting on the 4-hour hike home, so I decided to stop in Columbus, Ohio, and do some shopping in the Big City.

I mean, not like Nordstrom/Macy's/Sephora shopping. I mean World Market/Container Store/LEGO Store shopping!

In the Container Store I found these super cute American Girl doll-sized latching plastic containers, and they are the perfect size to store all the little sets of American Girl doll accessories. Look at all those tiny baking and picnic supplies, all organized in their adorable wee bins!

I didn't buy enough to hold all of the millions of miscellaneous accessories that my younger kid, especially, has for her American Girl doll, but here are similar mini containers on Amazon that you can buy in bulk, so I might stock up.

Of course, I'm the only one who's touched the kids' American Girl dolls in years, and then it's only been to lovingly wash all their little clothes and wipe the dust off their little faces and brush out their hair and gently nestle them into the bigger storage bins that I selected and bought for them. That was... rough, honestly. Transforming the kids' old playroom into the teenager's bedroom required that I once and for all put away a lot of their childish things, and doing that whole remodel right after sending my older kid away to college was probably not the best timing for me, emotionally.

Like, yay for the kids being ready and happy for all the growing up that they're doing, but I was pretty happy reading books and baking cakes and stomping in the creek with my four- and six-year-olds, thank you very much. I'm not entirely sure what I'm meant to do after this younger kid leaves for college really soon. Get a full-time job, sure. Do some DIY projects around the house. Learn to crochet. But, like... what am I MEANT to do? 

With these kids, I always knew exactly what I was meant to be doing. Raise them. Make play dough for them. Take them on adventures. Cook themed family dinners. Buy them matching pink Converse and purple Dr. Martens and spiky orange backpacks. Take them on picnics. Get them a cat. Get them a dog. Send them to summer camp. Coo over their art projects. Raising these kids has literally been my life's purpose for nearly twenty years. 

Those backpacks, though!!!

And now what? I just... semi-retire? I send them care packages and text messages and letters, take them on summer vacations and fuss over them during winter breaks? And what about the other 23.5 hours in the day? I'm simply... doing whatever? What else is even meaningful TO do?!?

Y'all, I'm pretty sure I am ramping up for the BIGGEST MID-LIFE CRISIS THAT EVER CRISISED. Like the most slowest-motion car wreck ever, I can see it coming, but I do not have a clue how to stop it. So, start popping the popcorn, I guess, because I feel like things may get wild around here in a few months...

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I Read The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and Now I'm Not Quite as Emotionally Illiterate (Although I Am Still PLENTY Emotionally Illiterate...)

The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents by Lisa Damour
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book has been a running joke around the house this Thanksgiving break. Both teenagers are home for the holiday, and the college student, seeing the book on the coffee table, turned to her younger sister and said, laughing, “OMG is this for YOU?!?”

“It is for ME!” I retorted.

Just between us, it *was* originally for her, ahem, but I was less than a chapter into the book before I realized that it actually *is* for me. There’s not much that I actually do need to change about the way that my teenager handles her emotions, but there’s a LOT that I, as her parent, could be doing to better help her learn to manage them.

My biggest takeaways are as follows:

1) The goal is to help teenagers have reasonable emotional responses, not just help them be less sad. Sad things and stressful things are SUPPOSED to make you sad and anxious! So even though it’s uncomfortable to witness and I know it’s even more uncomfortable to feel, I shouldn’t try to rescue my teenagers from their anxiety about college applications or their nervousness before a big test or their sadness after losing out on a cool opportunity, etc. I mean, I don’t rescue them from stuff like that, but I DO feel helpless and anxious and guilty as hell about their negative emotions. But Damour writes, “Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us grow up.” Apparently, learning to manage those emotions is an important part of the learning process, which is of course not news to me, but it actually also kind of is news? I… should probably learn how to do that for myself, tbh, because managing my painful emotions for me probably isn’t why God invented Delta-8…

2) A lot of the time, you don’t need to fix your kid; you need to fix YOU. One of Damour’s pieces of advice is literally to every now and then apologize to your kid for whatever mean things you might have done to them lately that they were too polite to call you out on at the time. I actually tried that one the other day, using those words almost exactly. My kid blinked, thought for a beat, then smiled and said, “Okay”--y’all, I think there actually was something I had just apologized for! I followed up, of course, with the usual litany that she should always feel free to let me know when I’d overstepped, but I remember enough about being a teenager to also remember that adults are terrible pretty often and how exhausting would it be to have to call out every one of them every time? Blech. I’ll just go ahead and keep a monthly blanket apology on my calendar, thank you very much.

On a related note, Damour writes the following passage that I thought was very interesting, because I have noticed this, especially with my college-aged kid:

“And, like me, you may have noticed that our teenagers also tend to be many steps ahead of us on topics related to social fairness and quick to point out our blind spots or narrow-minded thinking.”

I definitely get salty when my child tells me something that I said is narrow-minded, but yikes, who wants to be a bigot? Thank goodness for these kids who can save me from my Gen X Southern grossness (although I’m still not sure why they also want to save me from open-toed shoes?).

When the kids aren’t chastising me and I get a turn to parent them, I thought that this statement was reassuring: “Studies show that teenagers benefit from having high standards set for their behavior.” That one’s easy money, of course, since I already do that, but this was a perspective that I hadn’t thought of before: “These conversations often go best when they’re less about what we want for our teens and more about the priorities teens usually have for themselves.” That makes a lot of sense, and I can see how it also helps build self-motivation. It’s a good perspective shift for me to have to rearrange my thinking from why *I* want my kids to behave a certain way to why *they* should want that for themselves.

Damour discusses numerous mistaken ways in which parents think they’re helping their kid but are actually doing them harm. I pricked up my ears at this note that speaks to the ongoing--and especially current--censorship attempts in many school libraries:

“[S]everal psychological studies have confirmed that reading helps to foster empathy. Far from being harmful to teenagers, reading compelling narratives of lived experiences builds compassion and the ability to take another person’s perspective.”

I find this information really helpful! My kids have always read widely and at will, but I sometimes feel hesitant about the books that I assign them as schoolwork. Not only do they STILL both rag me about Bridge to Terabithia, which broke both their hearts that time that we all listened to it together on a long road trip, but I can easily think of numerous book passages that I personally find upsetting, and I always sort of thought that, well, who am I to deliberately put something upsetting into their young minds? They’re already empathetic; must I really make them also experience, say, the depths of dehumanization suffered by the Jewish people in Night, or the scenes of sexual assault in The Kite Runner or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

But this month my teenager and I are actually listening to the audiobook of Twelve Years a Slave, a book I’ve never read before and only suggested because I wanted a narrative depicting the lives of enslaved people in pre-Civil War America and the teenager balked at the runtime of Uncle Tom's Cabin (20+ hours!!!). It is harrowing, and upsetting, and there’s a part in which a slave owner is openly discussing sex trafficking a small child that really disturbs me, but it also humanizes these concepts that seem historical and abstract, and makes them real and immediate. I get, now, why we shouldn’t try to shelter our teenagers from material like that.

And yes, 12 Years a Slave is banned in some places.

Another part that I found very helpful was Damour’s discussion of how/why parents should talk to their kids about suicide. Previously, I think I’d gotten the idea that we shouldn’t talk about suicide, I guess because it might encourage someone considering it, or promote a suicide cluster, or otherwise put the idea into someone’s head? Fortunately, earlier this year I earned a certification in Youth Mental Health First Aid, during which we were explicitly instructed to openly discuss and ask about suicidal ideation with our kids. So now that’s something that I do. Damour also gives this explicit instruction, and accompanies it with these reassuring words: “[R]esearch show that asking nonsuicidal teens about suicide does not leave them feeling worse, but for teens who are feeling suicidal, it relieves distress.” That’s hugely helpful to hear, and I think probably a lot of parents would find it to be new information.

Damour has caused me to think about children’s emotions in ways that I hadn’t previously. Like, I haven’t been spending my entire parenting journey encouraging my children into emotional numbness or anything (I hope?!?), but I’d sort of thought that my job was to help them calm down when they were upset, all that “Take a deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth” stuff. But I guess that immediately calming down isn’t the goal; the goal is processing, and Damour encourages us to engage with our children about their painful emotions. She writes (about girls in this particular quote, but also about all kids), “[W]e want to reinforce her right to express her anger by giving it our attention.” I love that. Supernanny and the naughty step and time-out corner, etc., were big deals in my very, very early parenting years, and they didn’t really work for my kids, and now I feel pretty shitty about all that time they spent shrieking in the corner while I sat across the room and pretended to ignore them. They were in pain, and leaving them alone to sort it out themselves probably wasn’t actually very helpful or healthy. I like much better this advice to engage with my older kids about whatever is distressing them.

I also really like two other pieces of advice: that teenagers find regular ways to be of service to others, and that teenagers make time for pursuits that are “meaningful and important to them and are not done for the sake of a grade, a credit, or their college applications.” Happily, this isn’t a parenting issue that I struggle with (yay for not feeling like a failure!), but it’s good to be reminded of its importance and reassured that I’m not on the wrong track for making volunteer work mandatory and encouraging my teenager to spend as much time on her art as she does on her homework.

Overall, this work is probably the most interesting and pragmatically helpful parenting book I’ve ever read, so much so that I’ve already enacted numerous takeaways. I’m also thinking a little bit more about increasing my own capacity to accept and manage emotional discomfort, while I guide my teenagers through developing these skills in themselves.

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The Cavetown Concert Made Me Cry

Matt and my older kid both seem to lack the music appreciation gene, so when my younger kid, around the ages of 12-13, started to get really into music, omg I was thrilled. Finally, someone to listen to music with! Someone to make mixtapes for! 

Someone to go to concerts with!!!

Cavetown and Ricky Montgomery are a couple of the kid's OG loves, at the forefront of that first wave of music that she discovered for herself. I love these guys, too, in a complicated mix of nostalgia for that awesome little tween I used to have and genuine appreciation for how genuinely good they both are. Cavetown, especially, is always going to be, for me, the experience of driving to and from ballet daily with my newly-minted teenager, listening to those earnest teen folk-pop anthems on endless repeat. 

I was VERY excited, then, for the teenager and I to join the rest of Central Indiana's emo teens at our first Cavetown/Ricky Montgomery concert. Imagine: mother/daughter bonding to the dulcet crooning of Ricky Montgomery! 

This is an accurate depiction of my level of happiness for the entire evening:

Fun fact: this is the photo I now text the kids whenever I want to enthusiastically agree with something they've written. They both have steadfastly refused to give me any positive reinforcement in any manner for this, even though it is objectively awesome.

In the interests of Family Bonding, we dragged a couple of less-enthusiastic companions with us, but then immediately ditched them when they weren't willing to stand up front with us for two hours before the concert started. Vibe killers, the both of them!

I'm pretty sure I had an out-of-body experience when Ricky Montgomery came onstage, I was so happy and excited. Like, my god. I fell in love with his music during the pandemic lockdown, when I thought that we were all going to die. But we didn't die, and now here I am, at an outdoor concert with the people I love the most, listening to this music that I listened to back when I thought I might never go to another concert again.

I tried taking some videos of my favorite songs, like I saw all the other cool kids doing. But, um, nobody told me that you're not supposed to be loudly singing along when you take your videos, ahem. So please join me in my own combined horror/amusement at the following clip, in which you can clearly hear me both sobbing with happiness and loudly singing off-key to my favorite Ricky Montgomery song:

Bless. My. Heart.

Here are some of my other favorite Ricky Montgomery songs:

 

Most of them are from his pre-pandemic album that I played on repeat all during lockdown. Lockdown Julie would have loved to know this day was coming!

Check out this gross guy, though:

That's a photo of him in between sets, as we're all just standing there, putting his foot directly in front of the teenager's body, then leaning his ass back into her. The teenager immediately got my attention, because GROSS, but we weren't giving up our standing spots for nothing, so I nudged my foot in right beside hers, then, like Indiana Jones switching a golden idol for a bag of sand, I sidled into her exact spot while she took mine.

I waited a beat so that I could experience that, indeed, this absolute nasty asshole of a man was, indeed, pushing his nasty ass against me, and then I said VERY loudly, "Can you stop pressing your butt against me!?!?" 

The nasty asshole jumped away like he'd been slapped when he realized at this moment that he was assaulting not a teenaged girl, but a shouty late-40s woman, and everyone turned to look at us, including his female concert companion, and I gave him SO much stink-eye while he lied about "saving someone a spot," and he left us both well alone after that.

Seriously, though, imagine a world in which a teen girl could go to a public place and not be assaulted in some way by a gross man. If she can't avoid it at a Cavetown concert, of all places, then where in the world IS she safe?

 Fortunately, no other incidents occurred, and eventually, there came Cavetown!

When it comes to Cavetown, my emotions are deep. I literally love him the way that I love my kids' friends. He's easily young enough to be one of my own kids, and I've been listening to him with my own kid since before his voice changed. To me, Cavetown's songs feel like it felt to have that young teen--witnessing a new social maturity, a new and uncomfortable level of self-awareness, those first signs of the anxiety and depression that it feels like all teenagers these days suffer through, the accompanying respect and acceptance of a diversity of people that these same kids are also graced with--how can it have been so few years ago, because it seems so far away?

But look at us now.

Here's "Juliet," with just a little off-key singing on my part:

And here's where Ricky Montgomery came back out and I lost my mind with happiness again:

I really love that they're all just wearing their comfy clothes to perform in:

They're already working hard--I *want* them to be comfortable!

Also, apparently that song was a popular moment to make into a Tiktok! Here's another I found:

Here's where I realized that I was going to cry during this set, too, because all these kids here, and in particular my own kid, have worked so hard and been so brave and look where they get to be tonight:

Thank goodness for concerts. Thank goodness for Cavetown. Thank goodness for a beautiful summer night, and a crowd of young people screaming the lyrics to the song that was your kid's favorite when she was thirteen.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tiny Julie Would Have Read the Snot out of The Baby-Sitters Club Graphic Novels

Especially if you compare that to how much fun Grown-Up Julie has reading them!

I am pretty sure that The Baby-Sitters Club (and my grandma) gave me my terrible penchant for snarky gossip. Even as the 10- to 12-year-old that I was when I first read the novels, if I'd had another kid to talk about books with I would have happily snarked away about how bossy Kristy is, how disloyal Stacey can be, and what a pushover Mary Ann often is. Also, I didn't like Mallory, and I wasn't sad when she left the series.

But I LOVED The Baby-Sitters Club, and well after I'd graduated from its target age range, you could still find me on long evenings in the public library, trusted as a high school page to be the sole staffer in the basement children's department just because the library stayed open well after any reasonable child's bedtime, reading through a couple more Baby-Sitters Club novels in between straightening the picture books and using the staff pinback button maker for my own nefarious purposes.

I've written before about that magical year for reading that was 2016, when the kids discovered so many great books, like Percy Jackson, Warrior Cats, and the new graphic novel versions of The Baby-Sitters Club, then drawn by Raina Telgemeier, still one of my favorite graphic novelists. I checked out every Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel as soon as it came to the library for quite a while, and read them as avidly as my younger kid did, but then she got VERY into listening to long chapter books on Playaway, became happily accustomed to searching the library catalog and requesting them for herself, and as I was kicked out of the kid book selection job, I forgot all about The Baby-Sitters Club.

Fast-forward to this summer, when some search term or other on the library catalog brought one of the newer graphic novels into my first ten search results, and I was all, "OMG! There are more Baby-Sitters Club books!", and I requested every single one.

So that's what I did during a recent stormy weekend. You don't need electricity to read The Baby-Sitters Club!

And remember how when I was a little kid I didn't have anyone to talk about books with? Well, motherhood fixed that problem for me, because my college student sat on the other end of the couch and burned through all these graphic novels with me, only looking up so we could cozily snark on all the kids... and, with my new adult perspective, their parents!

With my 46-year-old eyes, I'm kind of now coming to see that the flaws in each flawed character, combined with their extreme competence in their various academic, extracurricular, and career pursuits, IS the fascinating draw to this series, at least for me. Mary Ann lets her father walk all over her in an infuriating way, and can completely take over the childcare of both a baby and toddler simultaneously.  Stacey can be selfish and vain, but with a diabetes diagnosis and two major moves in about a year, wow is that kid resilient. Kristy is the world's biggest bossypants, and damn, she can organize the SHIT out of a backyard day camp!

Like, gee, do I personally happen to know anyone who considers themselves both deeply flawed in a lot of ways and also extremely competent in a lot of different ways?

Ahem.

I am also extremely impressed at how the series allows big changes. I read Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye on the couch, said, "Holy Shit, College Kid! You're not going to believe what they do to Stacey!," and flipped the book to her. She read it and said, "OMG WUT?!? What the hell?!?!" 

Spoiler alert: Stacey moves away! She's one of the central characters, but her dad's job gets transferred back to New York City and she just... moves away! And then in the next graphic novel, the kids are all, "We miss Stacey so much sigh," but, you know, Jessie's a ballet star and learns sign language and there's a whole thing with a ballet school clique and life goes on.

Like, how sad and what a bummer and it really sucks because Stacey's awesome but, at the same time, such is life, especially when you're a kid. People move away, and life goes on. It's probably great for kids to see that modeled and normalized. 

It's much the same with all the really flawed parenting, because I do think that a lot of these kids' parents suck quite a lot of the time. But... you're a kid, so what are you going to do? Even when your dad is being really unreasonable, he's the parent you've got to deal with, so if you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation, then you've got to negotiate wearing your hair down like it's a hostage situation. If your mom is getting married and moving you abruptly out of the only home you've ever known you're probably extremely distraught but you're still going, so you might as well lean in and help out and rack up some good credit (Kristy's mom does NOT appreciate that kid nearly enough! One of my kids would STILL be rolling on the floor in utter hysterics if I'd tried to pull that on her!). 

In conclusion: am I about to go get on the pre-release list for the newest Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel, set to be released in October? 

Yes. Yes, I am. Although I'll probably wait to read it until my college kid is on a school break and can sit on the other end of the couch to read it right after me so we can gossip about it!