Airport Santa

We're headed to Cabo for a week at Cascadas del Baja. Yahoo.

Do them both. or What does he like to eat?

We do Hanukah and Christmas.  Though the later this year was about a few days early, on the 22nd of December.  Above is the note Simone left Santa.  It is a two-sided plea to find out what it is Santa likes most to eat.  We left blackberries and blueberries for the reindeer and home-made anise cookies for Santa with a glass of milk.  One of the reindeer walked right over David who had fallen asleep on the couch and left a few footprints.  Santa left Simone a note on the plate itself thanking her for the delicious snack. I was relieved as I feared Santa might order up a steak for next year while he had the chance.  

A party about stories

This party started off with the adrenaline and excitement of being together with good friends and conversations in the globe to catch up and share confidences, ambitions... the view.   BUT Then, Tom Skerritt handed out movie scrips and assigned parts to guests randomly.  Those who were tagged to be directors or actors went off to practice a bit.  The rest of us enjoyed hearing John Jacobsen describe the shape of a great story.  The cave that the main character falls into and climbs out when ready to face the greatest realization of all. 

The actors were ready. Ann Dornfeld & John Hempelman directed by Kathryn Hinsch and Tom Skerritt started us off with a classic scene from The Graduate.  Then Jeff Seely, Blaise Arcas and Monica Stephenson has us in stitches as they performed a couple pages from The Sliders.

Then we circled the room telling our own stories and what storytellers we turned out to be!  

Santa stopped by the tower.

Naomi saw this image and asked me, "Mama, how cold was the North pole?  Did you like working in the toy shop?  I'm glad you are back, Mama."

Round and round

Every year we do this gig.  It's the downtown carousel.  

Arrives when December rolls around and the girls love it.

14 GREAT Children's books (7 for a 3 year old and 7 for a 6 year old)

All 14 books have a few things in common.  They have kooky unpredictable plots. They have terrific illustrations.  They have marvelously moody characters that evolve and transcend their predicaments.  Naomi and Simone each received a book a day during the first seven days of Hanakkah.

Naomi who is three years old, started out with three of the extraordinarily well written and brilliantly drawn books of Berkeley Breathed.  

Iggy Peck is one of Naomi's favorite books of this list.  She can recite most of the pages and has built many a wild structure after reading it.















Library Lion is a beautiful book by Michelle Knudsen.

Things go frightfully wrong for Chico Bon Bon, but he can build anything and little by little he figures out a way to use his craftsmanship to get out of his terrifying situation.  This book was a little too scary for Naomi at first but she talked about it and got herself through it and now wants to hear it again and again.















For Simone who is six years old and just getting her reading legs, we started with "Because of Winn-Dixie" by Kate DiCamillo.   My friend Toni Redmond suggested this book for the launch of our 1st grade Book Club.  (It's going great.)  What a deep and lasting read!  Simone quotes parts as well as pulls ideas from it to help illustrate what is going on in her world.  I teared up a few times and of course laughed too.  Superb book.  Enjoy!














The next six books are about 10 year old mad-scientist named Franny K. Stein.   Franny's creepy perception of the world, heartfelt concerns for the fate of others and madcap adventures captured Simone's imagination.  These well written books are by Jim Benton who did the Doonesbury series.  A friend of ours, Joan Pedersen, a reading tutor, recommended these as they crack kids up.  Simone literally laughed out-loud as she was reading and her younger sister Naomi was in stitches when I shared them with her.















In "Attack of the 50-Ft Cupid" quirky Franny is trying to understand Valentine's Cards so that she can create homemade cards both her teacher and her classmates will enjoy.  After many hilariously inappropriate valentine cards, Franny does succeed and she does so while also juggling her mom's present of a lab assistant. Nice thought for sure and she does need help in her laboratory making things like miniaturized cows you can put in your pocket for those milk-on-the-go days.  Unfortunately, her new assistant is not particularly precise and accidentally creates a 50 ft, flying baby who can't stop shooting arrows at everybody.  Suddenly, Franny needs to think fast so she can rescue her home town from this cute monstrosity.  Suffice to say, in the process of saving the day, she discovers a few surprising things about herself.

This search for GREAT new books came about when my friend, Nicole DeWolf, put a moratorium on trinkets in her house.  So for Hanukkah, she gave her three boys 24 books.  We decided to follow suit, at least for the first 7 days of Hanukkah, and it was a huge success!  On the last day, the girls begged me for lego people to populate the K'Nex Super Swing and so wrapped up a couple mini lego sets.  As we were building the legos, Simone asked, "So, ah, Mom, what do you have for us to read tonight? " "Ahem."  Luckily these books are the kind you can devour time and again!  "Let's start with When Dinosaurs Came with Everything."


Enjoy!

Violin

It was nerve wracking for sure.  Simone considered not even going to school the day of the recital but when the time came for her to play...she did it.

We did it.

Kevin is making it safe to Gulp it down

My friend Kevin Flick is heading up a team at PATH focused on creating a household water purification system for the third world.  Prior to this Kevin worked at Microsoft designing game related devices and before that he designed prosthetics.  In his backyard he regularly creates challenging obstacle courses that Simone and Naomi love to navigate.  Kevin has a keen ability to imagine how other people think and can design devices that are intuitive for them to use.  Today, he is doing in India testing out one such device.  

Kevin and the team brought the water purifier to a number of families to watch them carefully as they assembled it.  He took the picture above while in the village of Wailal (near Hyderaba, the capital of the state Andhra Pradesh, India) where a father, mother, two children and the father's parents live.  Kevin said that they get their water at a nearby pipe when the electricity is on between 3:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.  Initially they had difficulties assembling the device, but eventually got it together (40 minutes) with no instructional aids. As usual, it was a very communal effort, with the whole family joining in to puzzle out the novel device.  Now that they have seen this, Kevin and his team, with a few tweaks, can make it even easier to set-up.

Here is the team that is working together to ensure the success on the ground of the water purification device. User interface is handled.  Now on to the next problem, how to entice families to buy them!

Another water purification device is being made by Water 1st.  My friend Debbie Dubrow used that centralized solution (rather than a distributed device for each household) when she raised money online (Passports with a Purpose 2010) to build a village in India.

How lucky we are to be able to safely gulp it down!

Massive art involving tens of thousands of individuals and best seen, in many cases, from outer space.

Indian kids creating a humongous elephant.

Bill McKibben's recent article in Grist, talks about the massive art coming out of the 350 initiative. The name, 350 Earth, points to the number of parts per million that most scientists agree is an acceptable upper level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Today the level is about 390 parts per million.

When I saw these images, it reminded me that more than a decade ago, I was working on a NEA grant (along with corporate sponsorships) to underwrite a series of site specific art that could not be completely seen by one person, nor could they be completely experienced in the first person.   It was not about the environment, in fact most of the works were about the self delusion that comes from our deepest beliefs be they faith, passion, politics or simply intuition, the fact remains that if one approaches these beliefs rationally they simply don't hold water.  

The art works I wanted to create could only be experienced second-hand.  Many observers needed to share their piece to put these jigsaw like works together and in most cases the media would need to gather those stories (and hopefully images) to piece together the complete work of art.  It was a heady piece for sure.

One of the art works was to be deep under the ocean and only a few submarines and a couple divers would ever see it in person, and they would only see a small part, but they could photograph those pieces and if those were to be assembled, one would experience the work of art.  Another piece was a mystery story told on billboards spread across the United States on Route 50.  A few truckers or cross country drivers might actually see all of the billboards, but for the most part, multiple travelers would need to work together to piece the facts and discover how things started or how things turned out. (Depending on whether they saw the beginning, middle or end.)  Another work from that series was three massive drawings created in a desert that could be glimpsed from outer space. To see the complete drawing, one would need to layer the three images one on top of another.  One aspect of the series that I was particularly liked was that for it to succeed, the media had to be willing to connect the dots.  


...but I digress...these works from the 350 "Art for Climate" series are born out of ....

350eARTh: Art for the Climate from 350.org on Vimeo.

....the site-specific environmental works from the 1970's. Works such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria's Lightening Field, Michael Heizer's City or Trisha Brown's laundry piece with dancers climbing in and out of a string of clothes hanging 20 feet off the ground in an alley during the Judson movement. Then came Christo and Jeanne-Claude's gigantic orange-wrapping series, James Turrell's Roden Crater and more recently Andy Goldsworthy's prolific "temporary" outdoor works that we only see because they were photographed.

The elephant from India other images in this post involve tens of thousands of people and can, in many instances, only be seen from outer space.

This enormous Solar Sun was created in Cape Town, South Africa, out of 70 high powered solar "cookers".   After the event, the parabolic stoves were donated to the Khayelitsha community where many people do not have access to electricity.  

What a "cool roof." Molly Dilworth used reflective paint to create an outline of the NY and NJ coastline after a 7 meter rise in the sea level. The building is a school in the new Times Square Plaza in NYC. The solar sun and cool roof actually deliver a climate solution. Each of the solar stoves will last for 10 yrs and require no fossil fuels. The reflective paint on the roof saves the mid-town school by reducing the need for air-conditioning.

I suspect that this is a spot where windmills would work marvelously.

The image above reminds me of Katrina.  It is a picture of a person standing on their house to avoid a flood. The work was created in the Dominican Republic and this is a satellite image. One can only imagine the massive scale of this one!

Snow day or Ahhh L-I-F-E

Woke up for my morning run and look.  This marvelous fine powder is falling on Seattle.  

This is the first snow of the year.  I have to get out there!

The air is chilly at 5:15am.  

First stop is Starbucks.  By the time I get there, my deaf friend, Joe Heller, is already at the counter writing a note about his brother, whom he'd like me to meet but whom doesn't rise as early as us.   Joe and his brother are living in the Morrison up the street from me.   I write back as I don't know sign language, and offer to come by the Starbucks later next weekend so I can meet his brother.  

Using numerous scraps of envelopes and packaging pulled from the recycling bin, we continue the note writing for a while and he tells me that when he was 34 he fell into an elevator shaft, broke his neck, ribs, arm and hip and over three days managed to climb out.  I am sure every word is true as Joe is frank, honest and open in a lovely way I am trying to emulate.  He has been homeless most of his life but now he and his brother have spots in the Morrison Building up the street.  I want to know how it is that he survived to share this riveting story but my window for running is tight. I need to hit the pavement so that I can get back to the house before Simone and Naomi wake up.   I write, "Joe, we'll have to pick up the thread another time.  See you tomorrow morning bright and early.  I'll be waiting on pins and needles to find out how you survived?" 

...And out I head into the crisp white city.   


Suddenly it dawns on me, what if I never heard the rest of Joe's story.  It could happen.  


My friend Kay Nosler, died last week.   There is much I don't know about her.  She read voraciously and got out to plays, music and lectures so there was always a great deal of material for us to ponder and I miss those conversations.  It was like we both had balls of yarn we would knit together between laughs.  One ball of yarn was a story we heard on NPR, another was an interview on Charlie Rose and another was a story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and together we'd weave those into a lasting discussion about our experience of life lately.   Suddenly I miss her so much that I can't swallow and the air keeps going out and not going in...but I keep running and sort of move through waves of collapsing lungs until they hit some limit and inhale so much that I feel dizzy...then it smooths out.  Jogging through mourning seems to work for me.   It is what I did when Keith Grinstein died, Italo Scanga, the dancers, all the way back to when my father died.  

Which leads me to another reason I am writing this morning.  We had a particularly marvelous dinner party at the Tower last night.  Martha Enson, Kevin Joyce and their daughter Ruby as well as Monica, David, Annabel and Sophie Stephenson came over.   I loved how eager we all were to discuss and share and learn about each other ...we glanced (or I should say "lanced') the top of dozens of stories and I am eagerly awaiting the next opportunity to gather up those plots (so much was happening in each of our lives) and continue the discussion.   

What a nice feeling.   

Ahhh  L-I-F-E.

Honestly, are you honing in on the virtues or letting them slide?

My good friend Valerie Tarico writes a monthly column about developing virtues.  She starts each post with a note about the particular character trait including a few quotes to ponder, discuss and share and then ends with an example of how one might teach that particular "virtue" to their kids.

Here is what she said about Honesty:

Character Corner: Honesty — musings, quotes, and parenting tips from WisdomCommons.org

by VALERIE on JUNE 16, 2010

Naomi Lahaie and Gwen Hampden

Laura remembers feeling humiliated when, as a child, she was caught in a lie.  But her daughter Julie, age eight, seems almost indifferent when confronted with evidence that she has been dishonest. Last week, for example, Julie went to her friend Anna’s house two doors down without permission.  She turned up home an hour later, saying she had been in the back yard the whole time. 

Laura knew otherwise (she had called Anna’s mom), and she asked probing questions. But Julie stuck to the lie.  When finally confronted with the evidence, Julie just screamed that Laura always spied on her and didn’t let her do anything.

What is honesty?

Honesty is saying what we know or suspect to be real, even when we don’t like the consequences. It is also much more.

Because most deception is actually self deception, true honesty requires that we recognize our natural human penchant for fooling ourselves. In particular, honesty requires that we guard against self-serving biases: our tendency to seek confirmation for what we already believe while ignoring contradictory evidence; our tendency to put blame on others and take credit for ourselves; our tendency to think that what is good for us is good for the world and even to make the gods themselves in our own image.

Honesty is a lifetime process of catching ourselves in falsehood and, however reluctantly, turning away from it.

Five Quotes to contemplate, discuss and share.

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle.  Washington could not lie.  I can lie, but I won’t. 
–Mark Twain

We tell lies when we are afraid… afraid of what we don’t know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us.  But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. 
–Tad Williams

We must all beware the very real and understandable human tendency to ignore or subvert facts, and findings of science, that discomfort us for reasons of ideology, politics, religion, or personal taste.   
–William Brody, President of Johns Hopkins

When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback. 
–Bill Copeland

The truth needs so little rehearsal. 
–Barbara Kingsolver

Bringing it home to your kids

1.  Rather than focusing on lies, focus on trust, integrity, and self awareness, the virtues you are working to build.  

2. Don’t “test” your child’s honesty.  When you know he or she has committed an infraction, simply state what you know to be true rather than probing for a confession.  Then move on to talking about natural and logical consequences or motives and feelings.  Or, if emotions are too heated, suspend the conversation till all can calm down.

3. Preschoolers frequently blend fantasy and reality.  Rather than treating this as a lie, label it imagination:  “Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true?”  “That would be so fun!”  You can turn it into a game with an even wilder story of your own. 

4. All cultures sanction “white lies.”  Don’t expect perfect self disclosure from your children any more than you do from yourself.  If you want honesty about things that matter though, do make trust a core family value. 

5. Model a balanced pragmatic approach to personal faults.  Perfectionism is the enemy of honest self appraisal.

6. Acknowledge how difficult honesty can be at times.  Reward honesty with respect.  Partner with your child in problem solving to rebuild trust.

Simone Lahaie at the Cafe Vita's pizza oven

If you enjoyed Valerie's post, here are a few others to check out on her wisdom commons site:

• Character Corner: Forgiveness
• Character Corner: Mindfulness
• Character Corner: Kindness
• Character Corner: Intention/Purposefulness
• Character Corner: Independence
• Character Corner: Idealism
• Character Corner: Humility
• Character Corner: Helpfulness
• Character Corner: Gentleness
• Character Corner: Ethics