Ballet Photo Inspiration for the Enthusiastic Amateur Photographer of Sometimes Surly Teenaged Ballerinas

 

Railroad bridges make for terrific photo ops!

Why drag just one teenager out and about for an elaborate photo shoot session when you can drag TWO teenagers?!?

SO many reason why not, right? OMG SO MANY REASONS. The bickering, in stereo. The complaining, in stereo. The only break I get from them sniping at each other is when they join forces to snipe at ME.

But think of the cute sister photos I can take! Sister photos with one in a graduation gown and one in her ballet togs! 

And if the one sister is already there in her ballet togs, why not just go ahead and take some ballet photos?

I've dragged Syd out and about before to take ballet photos. Sometimes we're both really happy with them, and sometimes we end up with Syd mad that I got her pointe shoes dirty and me frustrated that I couldn't really think of cute photos to take and the ones I did think of didn't turn out cute. 

It's tough to be an amateur mommy photographer with severa myopia and an uncertain aesthetic!

This time round, I'm taking a lesson from my Senior photos shot list and making a similar shot list of ballet photos. I don't have as many specific locations in mind as I do for Will's photos, so hopefully I can assemble a large enough bank of inspiration photos that wherever we end up, I can flip through them and come up with something I want to try.

Here are some of my favorite inspo photos from my Ballet Photos Pinboard:

Teen Senior Pictures image via Treasure Layne Photography

I love this idea of using a bridge railing as a ballet barre:

Ballet Inspired Ames Senior Pictures via Amelia Renee Photography

Lexi Senior 18 Plano Senior via Clara Bella Photography

A Sunrise Ballerina Session in DC via Abby Grace

North Park Ballet Photos image via Jenna Hidinger Photography

I also got some pose ideas by scrolling through photos I've taken of Syd's various class observations and recitals over the years. It both gives me good ideas for poses in general and for poses that it would be cute to have Syd redo for comparison to her baby self:

I'm especially excited to have Syd recreate this one. Look at that teeny-tiny dancer!

Ballet photos are extra fun because you can also play around with clothing. I'm pretty sure my kid likes her emo garb and black Converse a ton better than she likes her burgundy leotard and pink tights! So I think some of the poses and locations I've got in mind will look even better with street clothing.

Just pray for me that I don't get her pointe shoes dirty again! She has literally NOT forgiven me for the last time that happened, even though I swear I just thought that since they were already filthy from dancing AND dead a little gravel wouldn't matter...

Trying to Figure Out Senior Photos for My Kid

First she wasn't interested in Senior photos, then she was.

May that live forever as one of my greatest accomplishments as a parent.

I mean, the kid definitely doesn't care. Tbh, if I'd never brought it up, I doubt the concept of Senior photos would have ever come to her attention. And if they had ever come to her attention, I doubt she would have ever entertained the notion of wanting any for herself.

But such is the nature of parenting. We want ridiculous things for our children that they do not want for themselves, and we convince them that they want them, too, so that we can have the joy of it. For me in this particular scenario, the convincing involved the lure of a shopping trip with her bestie and graduation announcements sent to her dad's family, who might just buy her something off her college dorm Amazon wishlist.

Tangent: you guys, kitting a kid out for a college dorm is NO JOKE!!! I may have to commit larceny to obtain the Woozoo fan that all the other prospective freshman parents are raving about. And a mattress topper AND mattress pad--

--because apparently you need both on top of your perfectly good dorm mattress?

And then, of course, instead of paying a professional to take beautiful photos of my child, I am insisting on doing it myself, because that's obviously half the fun of doing Senior portraits, and I will continue to think that until my Senior, who, by the way, hates posing for photos, pitches a fit posing for her first set of photos as she definitely will. 

I also super want to do some really homeschool-specific Senior photos. That sounds like a cute idea until you remember that homeschooling teenagers pretty much looks exactly the same as any other kind of schooling, except you do it on your couch or outside on a blanket or whatever. And a photo of a teenager on a couch is just... a photo of a teenager on a couch. And a photo of a teenager on a blanket? Um, that's just a picnic? How am I supposed to use photography to embody what it's like to sit on the floor and debate about political art with one teenager lying on my bed and one teenager sprawled across my deck chair? Or visually portray listening to Sean Astin narrate The Great Gatsby while we all sit on, yes, the couch and argue about which character we hate most? 

Most of homeschooling teenagers is literally just lounging on stuff and running your mouths. That doesn't photograph well.

Here are some cute ideas for things that DO photograph well that Pinterest found for me, part of my Senior Photos Pinboard:

Use Scrabble Tiles image from Fix the Photo

I also think it could be cute to photograph 2022 in Base Ten blocks, because you know how we are about our Base Ten blocks!

Senior Boy image via Sevyn Ezra Photography

I think this one would be cute either with her little clothes or with her Girl Scout vests:

Timeline from Fix the Photo

These are super cute poses for my bookish child, and it also got me thinking that it would also be super cute to have her do all the traditional Senior photo poses, but with a book in one hand. And that would keep us from fighting about how she's glaring at me instead of smiling in every photo!

Brunette Beauty image via Lisa McNiel

Kenzie via Catie Bartlett

Okay, we're not doing a traditional graduation (I mean, obviously), but Will DOES have her Slytherin robe that is actually a Josten's graduation gown with a Slytherin patch sewed on, and you can't even see the patch if she leaves the robe unzipped. And I found my old high school graduation cap, also from Josten's, that is VERY dusty and VERY red, and we've got Matt's old high school graduation tassel, also very dusty and very yellow. 

What I'm telling you is I think we could one hundred percent nail this photo:

In the Gown Near Campus from Fix the Photo

I'm also thinking we could do some cute photos based on Will's favorite childhood places, like the park near our old house, the drive-in, the public library, etc., and definitely some photos that have the chickens or the dog in them. Please let me know if you think of anymore cute homeschool-themed Senior photos, because I feel like the Base Ten blocks graduation year is a pretty deep cut and literally nobody is going to get it but me and my kids. So what I really need are some homeschool-themed photos that non-homeschoolers will understand.

Things I Bought for My Teenagers and They Liked: Shashibo

When I buy gifts for the kids Christmas stockings, I still like to include a sensory/open-ended fidget-type toy. Both of my kids are sensory seekers, and one, in particular, is also a fidgeter. They both like patterns and love logic games, although the logic games that they each prefer are very different.

These Shashibo, thanks to being embarrassingly spendy, were a bit of a gamble. The kids haven't aged out of a lot of sensory toys as much as they've aged out of the packaging and marketing for those toys, so I was having a hard time coming up with something that filled a sensorial need but would appeal to a couple of jaded teenagers. The Shashibo looked sophisticated--with a price point to match!--and when I researched I did note a lot of older kids and adults playing with them.

So I bought a set of four. And my teenagers like them!

Here's what we like about them:

They're fiddly.

You can make specific shapes and patterns, but you can also literally just fiddle with the Shashibo, and beautiful shapes and patterns just appear. The flipping and folding feel nice, as does the little tug to separate the magnets.

The patterns are appealing.

The way the color schemes work, there's always an interesting visual pattern to look at as you fiddle with the Shashibo. And when you land on a shape that you like, that's pretty, too, as is the color combo that makes up that shape. 

The Shashibo fit together to make bigger patterns.

This is personally my favorite part of the Shashibo, and the fuel of my great desire to own MORE SETS! The shape that you make with one cube will often work symmetrically with the same shape made with one or more of the other cubes, or different shapes will somehow nest interestingly inside another shape. If you're a pattern lover, it will make you very happy!

Repeating the patterns is challenging.

Syd is, like, a visual-spatial genius, so she usually helps me mimic a particular shape when I get stuck, since my own method for mimicking a shape is just to fiddle with it like I fiddled with the previous cube to get the previous shape.

Since we've got four cubes, whenever one of us lands on an interesting shape by fiddling with a single cube, there's always the question of how can we make that shape with the other cubes, too? But because whoever made the cool shape was usually just doing it through mindless fiddling, it's quite a lot of mental work, sometimes, to figure out how to purposefully mimic it with another cube.

Here's what I don't like about them:

They're EXPENSIVE!

OMG I'm literally embarrassed at how much I paid for these, and I will forever scour garage sales and thrift stores to add to my collection rather than buy anymore new, because I need that money for college tuition now.

They might not be super durable?

This isn't a complaint that I have about them, but a complaint that I've seen in some reviews. Some people say the stickers peeled off of theirs after a while, making the cubes unusable since the stickers are what make the folding possible. I dunno, though--we handle ours quite a bit, but we are always super careful with them, and we've made it to May with them looking brand-new still.

What I really need is for Shashibo to get into the educational supply game, like some of my other fun building toys have. I'd probably manage to justify a large set that was discounted for use in my homeschool, especially if it came with lesson plans and extension activities, something like what Zometools has. I have a BIG set of Zometools AND a bunch of their lesson plans and books of extension activities, and I didn't feel guilty at all about blowing my homeschool budget on them because (turn on the homeschool parent voice) they're EdUcAtIoNaL!

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

World Thinking Day 2022: A (Take-Home) Trip to Mexico

My local Girl Scout Service Unit likes to celebrate World Thinking Day each year with a Girl Scout geography fair focused on countries that host a Girl Guides or Girl Scouts organization. My troop has participated in this fair several times--here we are presenting China, and here we are presenting Mongolia--and always loved it. It was an especially suitable project for a young homeschooled troop, because you know how much we homeschoolers love our projects!

If I had to guess, I'd say that the kids in my Girl Scout troop would think themselves too old to do another World Thinking Day fair, but because of the pandemic, the SU did something really cool this year that was perfectly suited to their ages and interests: instead of a traditional geography fair, they asked troops to come up with a take-home kit that would allow another troop to explore a selected country, and in return they would receive their own take-home kit.

And that's how my Girl Scout troop ended up crafting a Take-Home Trip to Mexico! Here's what we put in our kit:

Plaster of Paris Sugar Skulls

I put the most labor into this part of the kit, and ended up blowing the troop budget on the supplies for it, too, so that we had to cheap out on the candy and forget about fun patches altogether, but I stand by my claim that sugar skulls are awesome and sugar skull models are awesomely fun.

To accompany the plaster of Paris skulls, I included a set of dimensional fabric paint and Syd's essay on El Dia de los Muertos and its traditions.

Recipe

On the other hand, this was the easiest part of the kit! Will and a buddy had recently earned the Ambassador Dinner Party badge by planning and hosting a Mexican-themed lunch for the rest of the troop, so Will wrote up one of the recipes she used and included it in our kit.

Frida Kahlo Doll and Paintings

This was super easy to pull together, because my own two kids recently studied Frida Kahlo as part of earning a Hispanic Heritage fun patch, so all we had to do was pick out of couple of their favorite activities to include in the kit. 

I copied a Frida Kahlo paper doll for each kid, and included the brads to make the dolls moveable. 

There are actually a lot of paper Frida Kahlo dolls kicking around online, so the hardest part might be choosing which one you want to make!

As part of their own Frida Kahlo study, my kids had researched her paintings and chosen their favorites to print and mount, so for the painting matching game I just printed and cut out a set of those paintings, then typed and printed the titles and years separately. It's not the hardest thing in the world to match the paintings to the titles, but there are a few tricky ones to keep it interesting.

Girl Guides of Mexico Fact Sheet

Since the focus for World Thinking Day is on countries that host a Girl Guide/Girl Scout program, the SU likes the troops to incorporate information about a country's WAGGGS organization into their presentation. In all the years we've done World Thinking Day fairs, my troop has never thought up a more interesting way to present the information than a fact sheet. If you've got a way that's more fun, please let me know!

Mexican Candy

My Girl Scout troop called around but couldn't find any local stores that sell Mexican candy--such a bummer! I guess I'd never really noticed that gap in our candy inventory, although when we travel I often find saladitos at gas stations and always snap them up.

By coincidence, though, I'd already bought this giant set of Mexican candy for Syd's birthday--

--and so before I wrapped it I sneakily opened it up and took out enough candy for each of the Girl Scouts to have a piece. It's not nearly as fun as visiting a dulceria, but I guess it's as good as we're going to get here in Indiana!

Map Stickers

This project was based on an activity I did with my Girl Scout troop when we were first beginning to plan our troop trip to Mexico. It's a good way to assess prior knowledge, and to add new places for the kids to memorize. 

My troop wrote directly onto a giant map of Mexico that I printed and taped together, but to keep the kit workable by individual Girl Scouts, I printed small copies of the map, then stickerized them using Syd's sticker maker. Hopefully, the kids will enjoy sticking their maps onto something fun, and then accidentally memorize all the important locations in Mexico without realizing it!

Assembling the kit turned out to be more work than I'd anticipated, oops, and I didn't have optimal participation from my Girl Scout troop, who are all busy in that post-Spring Break lead-up to finals. If I had it to do again, I'd have incorporated it more forcefully into our trip planning sessions, which I DID have optimal buy-in for. Creating the kit was just as educational (if not more so!) than I think using the kit would be, and it taps into the Girl Scout goal of putting your earned knowledge to work to give service to others. 

And best of all, creating a kit to give out means that WE get a kit of our own to do. Hello, United Kingdom, because we're about to taken an at-home trip to visit you!

DIY Robotic Arms for the Girl Scout Senior and Ambassador Programming Robots Badges

 

Step 2 of the Girl Scout Senior Programming Robots badge asks the kid to build a robot arm. Step 2 of the Ambassador Programming Robots badge asks the kid to build a motorized robot.

Let's streamline the process of mentoring a Girl Scout Senior and Girl Scout Ambassador through earning this badge together by asking them each to build a motorized robotic arm!

Each kid built her own OWI Robotic Arm Edge kit, obtained via a grant from the Civil Air Patrol.

You guys, these kits were TOUGH!!! I would consider both my kids adept at reading and following step-by-step directions, possibly even a little more adept than your average teenagers, just because we do a lot of step-by-step tutorials and crafts and hands-on activities in our homeschool.  But they both struggled quite a bit with these robotic arm kits, and each made several mistakes that they had to go back and troubleshoot. 

The older kid wasn't quite as careful as her sister, and she even managed to break a couple of pieces--she stripped a screw that she really needed to be able to unscrew to get back into the plastic casing to see what she'd done wrong (she'd put a piece of the motor on backwards), and she accidentally pulled a wire off of its connection. That one, at least, was an excellent learning opportunity, as it then became the first time she ever stripped wires and soldered them to their connection:

It was VERY satisfying when the motor then worked perfectly!

Other than the couple of times they got stuck (and thank goodness their grandfather happened to be visiting, because he had the patience both to compare every step of the instructions to their work to find the mistakes, and to sometimes disassemble the robotic arm back to that step so they could try it again), they mostly worked peacefully while we listened to podcasts together. We got through the entire 36 Questions podcast while DIYing robotic arms!

Finally, all you have to do is assemble the battery case and add SO MANY BATTERIES--

--and then you've got a fully functional robotic arm all of your very own!

You can see in this photo how a little hot glue was also required. The older kid was so rough on her poor robotic arm!

These robotic arms have already come in handy for more than just earning Step 2 of the Programming Robots badge. The older kid is at work on the Ambassador Designing Robots badge, and used her robotic arm, along with some of the hydraulics that were last used building a cardboard robotic arm the last time the kids earned the Programming Robots badge at the Cadette and Senior levels to make a working model of a robot that could dispense a drink into a cup. 

The kids will soon have yet another use for their robotic arms, as well, as for Step 5 of this badge, they'll each be using the USB Interface Kit to write a program for their robotic arm. So it's a good thing that they got their robotic arms working... even if it did require a bit more hot glue and duct tape than I'd been expecting!

P.S. Want to know more about all the weird math I have my kids do, as well as our other wanderings and wonderings? Check out my Facebook page!

That Time I Got an Abortion and Didn't Get Arrested because Roe v. Wade Existed

Me in the good old days, back before people knew how to focus their cameras.

It was Fort Smith, Arkansas, somewhere around 1992-ish. I was 16 years old and an A student. I had some extracurriculars I loved, some friends I liked a lot, a grey 1985 Lincoln Town Car I drove to school and back, and a boyfriend I was obsessed with. I'd had an excellent high school health class that had actually taught me how to have safe sex, down to the correct type of spermicide to look for  and the importance of latex condoms over sheepskin.

Because I considered myself a smart girl and had had what I still consider to be good sex ed, I've always judged myself for being exceptionally stupid and careless for getting pregnant. But you know what I'm just now realizing right this second as I write this? Here's what I didn't have: access to birth control pills, access to a medical practitioner to talk with about my specific situation, and reliable access to those latex condoms with Nonoxynol-9 spermicide that I'd been taught to use. I would have utilized the snot out of a Planned Parenthood, unless there were people protesting outside it like there often are at my local Planned Parenthood 30 years later, and then I wouldn't have dared be caught near it.

In Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the late 80s and early 90s, at least, from junior high on, there were a LOT of kids who got pregnant. People pretty much all just kept their babies, too--I knew kids who tried to DIY abortions but that never worked, and I didn't know anybody who carried to term and then relinquished the baby for adoption. We were probably all trash, though, because Matt swears that he never knew of a single kid in his entire education through high school who ever got pregnant. But he grew up in a sweet suburb in the Silicon Valley, and I grew up in a city that was known for having the lowest cost of living in the country, and my high school chemistry teacher would threaten us with future employment at the local chicken processing plant when he thought we weren't studying hard enough.

I didn't want to work at the chicken plant, or the factory that made disposable plates and cups, or the one that made lined paper, or the one that assembled washers and dryers when I grew up, and it felt like just the absolute end of the world when I got pregnant. And I didn't even know how bad it actually would be. I didn't fully realize what the negative impact on my education and economic stability, not to mention my long-term mental health, would be if I bore an unwanted child. I didn't think about how bearing a child into poverty, as a teenager obviously would, would mean that we'd both most likely remain in it, doing blue-collar work and living in subsidized housing and forever struggling to make ends meet, forever a half paycheck from disaster, forever locked out of the benefits of the middle class and unable to build wealth in our own generation, much less advance the quality of life of our descendents. I didn't have any thoughts about forced motherhood as a means of patriarchal control. 

My 1980 Lincoln Town Car, which is still my dream car and the BEST CAR EVER.

I mean, I saw all that played out in front of me, saw literally all of those scenarios among family and friends and acquaintances, but I didn't have the insight to recognize them as systemic or connect them to the myriad of societal factors that caused them and that I also witnessed. Honestly, I just focused on how my unwanted pregnancy would ruin my life right then. I did not want to be pregnant, and I did not want to be a parent. That should be reason enough.

Looking back, I kind of can't believe the level of helpless despair that I shouldered, trying to figure out a solution among my limited options. I can't figure out a way to accurately relay what it feels like, to know this thing is happening to your body, it can't be stopped, it's going to change the entire thread of your life in ways you actively do not want, you are going to become someone that you do not want to be and have a life that you do not want to have, and YOU DO NOT WANT IT. 

Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life so far is that my sole trusted adult at that time, an aunt who came over for dinner one night, heard me sobbing in my bedroom, and did the work to get out of me why I was upset and what I wanted to do about it, agreed to drive me over to a clinic in Oklahoma so I could obtain a proper medical abortion from a licensed medical practitioner. It cost almost more money than I could scrape together at that time, and my aunt and I had to pretend to my grandparents that we were going on a fun weekend trip to get me away from home for the appointment. 

And after all that, the solution turned out to be the simplest thing ever: call long-distance, make an appointment, drive to Oklahoma City, give the receptionist sixteen years' worth of birthday money and two months' worth of school lunch money and every quarter you ever found under a couch cushion, put your feet up in stirrups, breathe the nice gas, and just like that, your life is back online. 

My shining moment of high school glory in my favorite extracurricular.

It sickens me now to think about how hard I struggled to access that simple abortion, how much mental, emotional, and physical energy I devoted to it instead of to my education, extracurriculars, and relationships, how many dangerous ideas I considered. I would never tolerate that amount of helplessness, despair, panic, anguish, and fear in a child under my care, if I had any way to provide a solution. Looking back, I kind of can't believe that I tolerated it as a child, myself, especially when in reality the solution was ultimately so simple. Just a phone call and a day trip and a very fat check.

I am SO glad for that abortion. I've never felt angst about it or regretted it--why would I regret something that I needed so badly and was so desperate to get? I've never been sad about it--why would I be sad about anything other than what a terrified, helpless child I was? I don't talk about my abortion only for the same reason that I don't talk about anything else having to do with my sex life--it's personal, and like all the other aspects of my sex life, generally kept to a need-to-know basis. I think about the abortion I got 30 years ago about as often as I think about the tonsilectomy I got 35 years ago, because the whole situation became a total non-issue as soon as I got caught up on my homework and won my first part-time job because I never want to be that broke again. 

What I do end up thinking about quite a lot these days is "abortion." Abortion, the human right. Abortion, the accessibility to which is crucial for humans to thrive and prosper, to live in safety and security, to be able to own and live in their own bodies. I think about "abortion" in the context of being furious when I see evidence of people being denied that piece of medical care, or being shamed for accessing it. I drive by the people protesting outside our local Planned Parenthood, and I roll down my window and flip them off while thinking how much I hate them for what they're trying to do. I see that leaked decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and I feel a pit in my stomach at how much harder it's going to be to live our lives while being deprived of yet more fundamental human rights. 

My younger child turned sixteen this week. She and her sister have grown up with lessons of consent, with their bodily autonomy respected, with great sex ed, multiple safe adults, all necessary and requested medical care, and the knowledge that anything they need, whatever they need, will be provided to them with the best of my abilities.

Before she's seventeen, my younger child and her sister may have fewer rights to their own bodies and less official control over their own fertility than I did back when I was sixteen and sneaking across state lines to find a legal abortion practitioner. I hope that they will never be compelled, by force or by legislation or by simple lack of access or options otherwise, to use their uteruses as incubators, or to have their biologically female bodies perform in any way they do not completely consent to. But my ability to maintain their basic personhood is limited, apparently, by the religious tyranny of a minority of politicians, and by Supreme Court justices who flat-out lied during their confirmation hearings. Politicians who do not even have uteruses or medical degrees get to insert themselves into the medical decisions of those who do, and legislate their personal decisions about their own bodies. 

Blessed Be the Fruit, I guess.