Old dreams, new dreamers

It's been 15 minutes since the end of Obama's acceptance speech in Denver, and I'm feeling a bit wrung out. It was a great speech--I wasn't worried about that--though I was anxious all day about how the event would go, especially given the huge venue.

As someone who grew up in Denver, I just *ached* to be there tonight. Looking at the nighttime sky over the stadium, I could almost feel the cool evening air (please, I don't want to be set straight about the air temperature and quality by anyone who was actually there....leave me to my dreams, OK?). I didn't cry until the last minute or so; then the floodgates opened.

Elliot sat between Terry and me as we watched the speech on PBS. He was popping his bubblegum and jiggling his legs around, trying to do origami and getting dirty looks from me every time he folded his paper too loudly. On the one hand, he distracted the heck out of me (imagine what it would have been like if Astrid was awake and among us!). On the other hand, having him there with us brought both Terry and me back to another very happy evening: the night we and a bunch of our grad school friends in New Jersey watched the 1992 election returns. As a family, we've gone through many wonderful changes since Bush/Cheney took over--especially, of course, the arrivals of Astrid and her cousins Lilly and Imogen--but there's been very little to cheer about, and so much to mourn, on the national and international scenes. So tonight we felt hope and optimism that we certainly haven't felt since late 2000--but we also feel tired and, with Elliot there to remind us of the years that have past, a lot older. (But probably not wiser--I feel very optimistic tonight!)

On a not entirely different note, Astrid realized last night that the war in Iraq is just about as old as she is (it started when she was about three weeks old). She's been pretty aware of the war since she was three, but she's really starting to ask questions now.

(Hey, I forgot to mention that she just completed DAY THREE of KINDERGARTEN. No wonder she's asking all these questions....)

Elliot's pillow

On Thursday, after I spent the morning commenting on drafts of my students' final projects, Elliot and I spent the afternoon sewing a pillow featuring some of his embroidery. We found the design on one of the vintage embroidery photo pools on Flickr (I think). He did all of the ironing and a good deal of the sewing; for my part, it was my first time making piping, and I think it came out very well. (This tutorial was extremely helpful.) Here it is:

He's been cozy with his pillow since he finished it. I think he's proud of his work--as he should be.

Enough with the beach volleyball

We've been pretty excited at our house about the Olympics starting. Elliot, in particular, has been looking forward to them all summer. I always enjoy them, too---but I have to say that this time around, my anticipation has been mixed with equal parts dread of....

(Cue scary music)

WOMEN'S BEACH VOLLEYBALL

I'm willing to concede that volleyball played on sand is a qualitatively different sport from volleyball in a gym, and having two players on each team changes the dynamic--so it doesn't drive me nuts to see WBV televised during the Olympics. But when over-the-air evening coverage of the Olympics is so limited, do we have to have so much of the broadcast devoted to the sport of Teensy-Weensy Bikini Adjustment? Are the viewers of the U.S. as obsessed with this sport as NBC seems to think we are?

Sigh.

But don't think for a minute that we're going to let the parade of microscopic bikinis ruin our Olympics. Elliot and I spent much of yesterday cooking for our Opening Ceremonies Feast. The centerpiece of our feast was tofu eggrolls garnished with fresh mint and accompanied by a hot dipping sauce that Elliot made....wow, were they good. We made some less elegant treats, too: Jello Jigglers in the colors of the Olympic rings (except that we had trouble cutting the things into ring shapes, so they were pretty ragged-looking, but they were still refreshing), and Gingerbread Popcorn. Elliot and Astrid made pretty fruit kabobs out of Granny Smith apples and strawberries. I didn't get pictures of any of the supporting players in our feast, but I'm happy I got pictures of the egg rolls. Food really does make for happy memories.

Back to WBV for a moment (I know. I'm driving everyone in my house crazy with this. It's making me crazy). Because we don't have cable, we've been switching between NBC and Telemundo so that we can, well, avoid some of the WBV. But sometimes it's on Telemundo, too. The difference we've noticed (well, Elliot noticed it) is that the Spanish-language announcers come right out and comment on how the women look in their bikinis. The American announcers never say a word about the women's outfits or the constant wardrobe adjustments....which actually makes the whole thing weirder.

"Screw everything," she said....

I haven't gotten to try it yet (it's charging) but I do have my new power screwdriver. Elliot accompanied me to a doctor's appointment today, after which we hit Target (no good electric screwdrivers, or at least none I felt excited about, but they did have Pokemon cards....what a shock!). From there, we hit Home Depot, where one of the workers provided us with a nice wheelchair for Elliot. I don't think I realized how tired he would get from the limping and hopping he had to do before we got to Home Depot---he was *so* pleased and relieved to be able to take trip through the National Park that is Home Depot sitting down.

I don't know how other women feel about those "power tools for girls" that used to be advertised a year or two ago (actually, they're probably advertised all the time on HGTV and other cable channels, but we don't have cable). When I saw pink and light purple power tools at Michael's (I think), I nearly barfed; I also suspected (don't know if I'm right) that they weren't as functional as the kind of tools one can buy at a real hardware or home improvement store. Shopping at Home Depot today, though, I lifted the various electric screwdrivers and drills they had, and with every one, I found myself thinking, "Wow, this is heavy! Don't they have anything a little lighter, sized for a woman's smaller hand?" That's when I realized that there apparently is a market for girls' tools--though maybe not pink and lilac colored ones.

Anyway, I am prepared to love and cherish my bright green Ryobi electric driver, with its lithium ion battery. I will screw everything in sight with it.

The Sprain

On Wednesday, Elliot sprained his ankle at sports camp. It took us until Friday afternoon to find out whether his ankle was broken or not--slow hospital! He's been incredibly patient, and my laptop has been in nearly constant use. (Is there a connection between those two facts? The Battle for Wesnoth has apparently kept him sane when he hasn't been able to run around.)

We're hoping the ankle will be healed enough for him to walk around, at least, by Wednesday of this week, but we know this may be unrealistic, as the darn thing is still quite swollen. In the meantime, we've been enjoying instant movie-viewing on Netflix---Young Frankenstein, DOA (the very old film noir), The Music Man (more for Astrid than for Elliot), and lots of episodes of Walking with Dinosaurs.

I'm finally about halfway through with the shorts I started almost ten days ago. To me, these shorts represent leisure and freshness--leisure, because once I put them on, I've acknowledged that I'm not going anywhere that requires presentability, and freshness, because I have enough of them to wash each pair after I wear it once. In the muggy hot weather we're having, that's a nice feeling.

Nuclear BAAAA

Today my husband and I had the great pleasure of seeing Elliot's class perform an environmentally-themed play, all in Spanish. The play was called La Oveja Verde (The Green Sheep), and it lasted about 20 minutes. Elliot played "Juan," the younger brother of a boy exposed to nuclear toxins. The production included several sleazy businessmen, two vendors guilty of selling tainted meat to a village, four innocent children, two poisoned sheep (one which became the toxic meat), and a dog who began speaking in Portuguese after his exposure to radiation. My favorite line (besides all of those spoken by Elliot) came from one of the sleazy capitalists, just before he dies and is dragged by an angel to the afterlife his villainy has earned him: "AY! Es el fin!" ("AY! It's the end!") Once the play was over, there were two hip hop dance performances, one by the boys, and one by the girls (both to the same song). Then we got to look closely at each student's environmental poster display (some of which included demonstrations of issues such as the chemistry of flame retardants and the evaporation of Lake Chad in Africa). Elliot's poster was about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. All of the children had worked hard on their presentations and were eager to share what they knew with the parents of their classmates.

Elliot is often tight-lipped about what he's working on in school; we didn't really know just how much research and rehearsing he and his friends had been doing. Needless to say, we were incredibly proud of him, and just plain impressed by the whole group.

Elliot Irons

We got back at 7:45 from a very chilly, sort of disappointing baseball game last night, and though I have a yucky cold and wanted to go to bed, I decided to help Elliot with the quilt block he's sewing. I wouldn't let him use the rotary cutter over the weekend because I couldn't supervise him (and I really value each and every one of his fingers), so he traced triangles onto the back of his fabric scraps and cut each one out with scissors. He was a little disgruntled about the labor; he thinks that everything goes very quickly for me just because I have the right tools at my disposal....

The big development is that Elliot got to use my heavy iron for the first time. *Everything* about the experience was new for him, so I couldn't take anything for granted---for example, he didn't realize that the iron couldn't rest face down on the ironing board. He was also frustrated because he sewed about half of his triangles together on the wrong side (i.e., along the long bias edge, rather than the shorter leg), so he'll have to cut more triangles to get the block he wants. (He, too, has been reading Davina Thomas's 200 Quilt Blocks.)

Elliot at the helm

Elliot's been telling me that he wanted to start working with the sewing machine again, so today he did it. I showed him how to stitch triangles together to make quilting blocks, and he quickly figured out how to chain the pieces together so that he didn't have to cut his thread after each one. He made about twenty of them before dinner during the time it took our pizza to bake!

Right before dinner, when her behavior is usually at its most challenging, Astrid rolled my work chair right into my ironing board, which, as you can probably see, is embarrassingly overloaded with stuff (sewing related and otherwise....), and it capsized. It's kind of surprising that this has never happened before, as I insist on using the ironing board as a catchall surface, and Astrid insists on zooming across the hardwood floor on the rolling chair. We were quite glad to hear the oven buzzer go off, so that we could put aside all our disagreements and eat homemade pizza together.

After dinner, the four of us watched Singin' in the Rain, one of our favorite musicals (it was Astrid's first time seeing it--she liked everything but the "smooching,") and we ate apricot nectar cake that Astrid and I made this afternoon. It was sweet and tangy, just like the movie.