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Balancing Girl, Interrupted

I’m the artist formerly known as ‘Type A.’ My children have helped change me, surely for the better. Newborn/baby/toddler bootcamp taught me that a modicum of incremental progress on any front is the new “done.” As in teeny, tiny, incremental progress. If my yard’s a wreck, I might manage to get the rake out of the shed. The next day, maybe I’ll rake a few leaves into a pile before being interrupted. By the end of the weekend, I might get that pile into a bag and put it on the curb.

It’s an odd paradox that children inspire so much creativity yet make it nearly impossible to realize any of it. So I’ve become a guerrilla scribe, stealthily jotting down ideas or songs in stolen moments.  I got a new laptop recently, and it has a built-in microphone. When I get a tune in my head that I want to work on, my policy is to sprint over and record it. If I don’t, within seconds the beginnings of my ditty will be lost to a trike-fight mediation or a work call. It may be months before I even remember that I recorded it. But it’s in the digital vault. The start of something yet to be.

Tonight after the kids’ bedtime, I opened up one of these micro-recordings to see about fleshing it out. I recorded it about a month ago after playing with my daughter at the dining room table. When she’d finished eating her lunch, she climbed into my lap and then stood up on my knees, her hands holding mine for balance. I started singing “She’s a balancing girl in the world; she’s a balancing, balancing girl.” I was singing about her, but it turns out that the song is about me, too. And about most Coconut Girls. Once my daughter was done with our game, she jumped down and ran outside. I saw my window to capture the tune and grabbed my computer.  A couple of lines into the recording, my son ambled over to break up the proceedings. Done and done.

Balancing Girl

Posted in Music.

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By the Coconut Girl – October 6, 2009

Go Fish

Can you find the half-hidden goldfish cracker in this patch of autumn leaves? It fell from my son’s over-filled hand on a hike recently, so I gave it a lift up onto a leaf.  Sometimes I imagine what the map of my life as a parent would look like if were defined only by bits of food left behind: goldfish, raisins, drips of yogurt or milk. I like to draw this kind of life-phase map because it ties important objects and places to a specific time. Like those maps of the expanding Holy Roman Empire in a high school history book. In my life with my children, who are now almost 6 and 3 1/2 years old, I’ve witnessed the way specific activities and places are connected for a time, then forgotten. For a few months, the cabinet where the stereo resides will become their dance corner, the window in the dining room their favorite perch for watching the neighbor’s cat strut through the yard. On our snack map, the driveway would be at the center. Alongside our station wagon where my kids disembark from their carseats, cracker crumbs tumble down their legs and disappear into the gravel. I like to think I’ll remember this tiny detail of our days, along with countless others. But I worry I won’t.  If I map the memories on paper, I can let them go in life. Catch and release.

Go_Fish_2

Posted in Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – October 5, 2009

Domesticity Poem

My trusty old laptop was on its deathbed a few months ago. When I got the ominous ‘blue screen’ at work one morning, I hurried to back-up all my documents. In the process of going through seven years’ worth of files, I came across this poem. I wrote it in November 2006, when my son was six months old.

Laundry Room, 10 p.m.

A leaf
Spun against the drum,
Wet with Tide, not rain.
Flung from a pant cuff,
An unpacked jacket,
Or a child’s no-slip sock.

This fall, no one spoke of.
Down from the limb, sure,
Maybe even a ride inside.

But sold into centrifuge?
They said tornadoes
Didn’t come this way,
That hurricane season had passed.

Posted in Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – October 2, 2009

Sippy cup line-up

Ever since we got our new white kitchen countertop from Ikea last month, I’m seeing in color.  When I pull a rasp or a whisk out of a drawer, it’s as if I’m beholding it for the first time. On Sunday, I grabbed our stack of ubiquitous sippy cups from a cabinet and lined them up on the counter for a gaggle of thirsty preschoolers. I almost needed a fainting couch when I saw how lovely the cups were in the mid-morning light.

sippy_cup_lid

Posted in Bits of Beauty.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 29, 2009

Fight song for couples

With a new baby in the house, the love quotient soars. So does the petty bickering. Here’s a 2-line ditty for when you realize it’s not worth going to the mat over the issue in question. Or when you’ve won and you’re pretty sure your partner can handle a little playful gloating. It’s the brilliant creation of my friend, Christie McKeithen. A shout-out goes to Kristine, too. (Bear with my voice, by the way. The laryngitis lingers.) Anyone know how to turn this into a ringtone?

Fight Song

Posted in Music, Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 28, 2009

Lemon Triptych

lemonsLemonade’s on my mind. And in my glass a lot lately. In August I had to part ways with my cozy treat, chai latte, because it was giving me belly aches. So more lemons are in the fridge these days, along with a mason jar of simple syrup. (disclosure: so are the cans of MinuteMaid in the freezer, for that quick fix.)

A friend of mine and I–both of us avid cooks–used to say that you can tell someone’s a good cook if he has lemons, shallots and extra virgin olive oil in his kitchen. That theory’s temporarily on hold during the mac-and-cheese years of catch-as-catch-can eating.

I’ve had a cold for almost a week, and my sweet, almost-six-year-old daughter has been offering to help me around the house. Today she wanted to make me lemonade.  I found myself teaching her, just as my mother taught me, to cut a lemon on its ‘equator’ for juicing. Then, for contrast, we cut another lemon through its north and south poles. We produced one pair of circles, and one pair of ovals. Wheels and eggs. Then, just for the love of the lemon’s radiant yellow and cleansing scent, I zested a third.  Confetti. A lemon love letter in three chapters.

Posted in Bits of Beauty, Food.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 26, 2009

The Breeze on Tuesday

During my son’s nap on Tuesday, I sat at the dining room table working.  Through the open window I heard the wind kick up and rustle the leaves. I stepped out onto the screened porch.  Joyfully spinning around and around was our beloved 10-minute mobile, fashioned from a clothes hanger, yarn, and some paper umbrellas.

Postscript: A Coconut Girl reader made her own umbrella mobile and shared this picture of how it turned out:

P1030191

Posted in Bits of Beauty, Coconut Girl Videos.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 25, 2009

Where’s stinko?

Find the sippy cup (junior’s, not mommy’s). Homage to Dahlia Lithwick’s spot-on, online mommy-lit novel, “Saving Face.” Hint: it’s all about the lid. Art imitates art…

toy_post_large

Posted in Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 24, 2009

Welcome

Are you a Coconut Girl? Do you know or love one? Watch and see.

Posted in Coconut Girl Videos, Music, Planet Newborn, Wack Art.

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By the Coconut Girl – September 18, 2009