School starts back next week. Lola is off to high school, and into a student bubble cohort. The grade 11-12s are going to school in the basement of a Jewish community centre across the road. Grade 7 are only allowed … Continue reading COVID Diaries Week 25: Ambivalence.
I find myself at a loose end today. Everything is very quiet. The kids are entertaining themselves, the dog sitting for one dog has ended. As for our dog, she was spayed this week so she is very low energy … Continue reading COVID Diaries Week 20: Normality
When I became a parent, I had a reawakening of my curiosity gene. Watching my kids learn and experiment into the world was a magical moment in my life, one that I brought, whole, to work. It reminded me of … Continue reading Dis!Organize Ep. 19: We Become Seekers.
A neighbour of ours is a fine arts professor at Emily Carr University. He saw Zoe’s art exhibition and wrote me an email about her Current Mood selection: great pandemic show! I found the durational moods portrait series particularly interesting as … Continue reading COVID Art: Current Mood, Heavy Weather
Maybe because there is nothing better to do, maybe because she has similar existential angst afflicting us adults in COVID-times, Zoe has been on an art rip. Almost everyday some creation emerges from her bedroom/studio. It is abstract, and deeply emotional. … Continue reading COVID Art: Kids Edition
School school is done for the year, for sure. My Mum’s next door neighbours get their kids up at the normal time for school, the kids get dressed in their school uniform; they have two lessons in the morning with … Continue reading Getting Schooled
Cycling home tonight on the last day of the year, I was thinking about the year (and the decade!). I am very grateful for many things, professional and personal. This decade the fam grew up and they are doing ok. … Continue reading Week 13: Gratitude.
You are aged 10. It is the end of August, and hot. You are mucking about with a couple of friends, just hanging out, lying in the grass. School is long gone; but also right around the corner. Everything feels … Continue reading The Death of Summer – A Japanese Memory (懐かしい)
A few months I attended our strata AGM, where we discussed various needs of the community. One of them is landscaping – we have several small problems with waterlogging and…kids trampling the flowers. It was agreed that we would pull … Continue reading My 7-Year Old Daughter: The Activist
Fairly regularly, in my neighbourhood, a block gets shut down to road traffic so that the local community can emerge from their homes and hang out. Usually, it is very kid-centric, food, treats, games, sports, and always plenty of chalk … Continue reading A Community Block Party That Mattered
I am one parent like millions of others who has been inspired, glavanized, motivated by my children and my responsibility as a parent. Children have as much to teach as to learn, parents know that. I try my best to take it all in and reacquaint myself with my inner child. I know there is valuable learning for me, right here, right now. Here are two quotes gleaned from the genius creative combinatorialist @brainpickings. From Nietzsche‘s Thus Spake Zarathustra (free ebook): The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred … Continue reading Curious Kids: The Sacred YES.
This Much We Know 