When my brother was younger - like, four years old - one of the friends he spent a fair bit of his summertime playing with was one of the boys who lived in the house next door. This little boy - the neighbour boy - was a source of some grief for my mother. For one thing, the kid enjoyed being barefoot, and his parents didn't seem interested in enforcing a no-barefeet-outside policy, so his feet were often filthy, and when the boys would come into the house for a snack or something to drink, there would be this trail of small but gross footprints across the linoleum in the kitchen, and the tiles in the front entryway, and my mother has a really, really low threshold for grubbiness - I mean, our house had a shoes-always-on-outside-and-never-on-inside policy - so after seeing those trails a couple of times, she pretty much banned neighbour boy from the house. The bigger thing, though, was this kid's attitude was not compatible with my mother's world view on how children should behave. Mum thinks kids should listen to their parents - they don't necessarily have to always agree with their parents, but they should listen, and, when commanded, they should obey. Now that I've typed that out I realize it makes Mum sound like some sort of unfeeling parental dictator, and that's not true, except maybe the dictator part might be accurate, because she was absolutely the boss of her kids. And in her absence, we were supposed to listen to other responsible grown ups - so if we were visiting a friend, then that friend's parent was the temporary boss, and we should listen to them, unless they were telling us something that ran counter to one of Mum's instructions. It was essentially her way of trying to teach us to respect our elders, I guess, and not be annoying nuisance kids.
Neighbour boy didn't get this lesson - or, well, maybe he did but just disregarded it, I don't know his life. He was firmly of the opinion that he didn't need to listen to my mother when in our house, that would get her blood pressure up. I don't remember what she was asking him to not do anymore, but his response was to stare up at her belligerently and say, "I wanna do what I wanna do." She didn't know how to respond to that - sure, she couldn't change what he wanted to do, but that wasn't what she was after anyway. She just wanted him to exercise some self control or something. Which I suppose is a tall order for a four year old, but as she was venting about it later, she pointed out that her own kids would absolutely stop doing something that was bothering someone else if they were asked.
Anyway. Remember how yesterday I said something about needing to prepare slides for the upcoming semester? I thought I'd put a pretty good dent in that today. So far that has not come to pass. This is my scene:
Sure, the file is open, but my fingers aren't on the keys or the touchpad, they're on the needles, and I'm cranking away on my Wychwood, because I'm working the armhole piece now, and I'm feeling much more confident about being able to actually finish with the available yarn, which makes me want to just keep going, because I am so freaking close to having this piece now!
I should really work on those slides a bit more.
Maybe after just a few more rows.
**Fun side note to family history storytime: Mum remembers very vividly an episode from her early childhood, she would have been about four or five years old, I think, in which she had run to her father, complaining bitterly about her aunt - my maternal grandfather's sister. The woman was staying with them in the guise of helping out with the kids - two of Mum's three brothers were already in the scene, and Mum's the eldest, so we're talking about a situation where there are three kids under the age of five, and I think both my grandparents were working to make ends meet at the time. (I'm less clear on this, largely because I don't know what my grandmother worked at - my grandfather cooked in restaurants, that comes up in family storytime pretty regularly, but stories don't mention what my grandmother did. I should ask my mum sometime. It's entirely possible that my grandmother was a stay-at-home mum who was a bit overwhelmed with all the littles crawling all over the place.) In any event, my mother's aunt was not a pleasant woman - at least, not as far as her nieces and nephews saw it. She had given my mother some instruction that Mum disagreed with, so Mum went to her father to protest. She says he looked at her, deadly serious, and said, You know you don't have to listen to her. Mum says it was as if a heavy veil was suddenly lifted - the world was brighter, and she felt so free and light and happy. (Meanwhile my grandmother was all Wait, wut?) She still says it sometimes when someone - usually my father - tries to tell her something she doesn't agree with. My dad told me I don't have to listen to you. With a big smile.
Neighbour boy didn't get this lesson - or, well, maybe he did but just disregarded it, I don't know his life. He was firmly of the opinion that he didn't need to listen to my mother when in our house, that would get her blood pressure up. I don't remember what she was asking him to not do anymore, but his response was to stare up at her belligerently and say, "I wanna do what I wanna do." She didn't know how to respond to that - sure, she couldn't change what he wanted to do, but that wasn't what she was after anyway. She just wanted him to exercise some self control or something. Which I suppose is a tall order for a four year old, but as she was venting about it later, she pointed out that her own kids would absolutely stop doing something that was bothering someone else if they were asked.
Anyway. Remember how yesterday I said something about needing to prepare slides for the upcoming semester? I thought I'd put a pretty good dent in that today. So far that has not come to pass. This is my scene:
Sure, the file is open, but my fingers aren't on the keys or the touchpad, they're on the needles, and I'm cranking away on my Wychwood, because I'm working the armhole piece now, and I'm feeling much more confident about being able to actually finish with the available yarn, which makes me want to just keep going, because I am so freaking close to having this piece now!
I should really work on those slides a bit more.
Maybe after just a few more rows.
**Fun side note to family history storytime: Mum remembers very vividly an episode from her early childhood, she would have been about four or five years old, I think, in which she had run to her father, complaining bitterly about her aunt - my maternal grandfather's sister. The woman was staying with them in the guise of helping out with the kids - two of Mum's three brothers were already in the scene, and Mum's the eldest, so we're talking about a situation where there are three kids under the age of five, and I think both my grandparents were working to make ends meet at the time. (I'm less clear on this, largely because I don't know what my grandmother worked at - my grandfather cooked in restaurants, that comes up in family storytime pretty regularly, but stories don't mention what my grandmother did. I should ask my mum sometime. It's entirely possible that my grandmother was a stay-at-home mum who was a bit overwhelmed with all the littles crawling all over the place.) In any event, my mother's aunt was not a pleasant woman - at least, not as far as her nieces and nephews saw it. She had given my mother some instruction that Mum disagreed with, so Mum went to her father to protest. She says he looked at her, deadly serious, and said, You know you don't have to listen to her. Mum says it was as if a heavy veil was suddenly lifted - the world was brighter, and she felt so free and light and happy. (Meanwhile my grandmother was all Wait, wut?) She still says it sometimes when someone - usually my father - tries to tell her something she doesn't agree with. My dad told me I don't have to listen to you. With a big smile.
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