Author name: Sandra Tayler

School Projects

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The teacher assigns a project to my child who then explains it to me. The communication chain seems simple, particularly when it is also facilitated by a note directly from the teacher to parents. I am very grateful for those notes, because projects tend to transform inside my children’s heads. Patch is supposed to research and present on traditional clothing for one of the Utah Native American tribes. The teacher pictures him using class time to make clothing out of butcher paper. Patch pictures me making two buckskin dresses, three pairs of leggings, several loincloths, six pairs of moccasins, a vest, and a top hat. Beaded. When I express reluctance to do all of this sewing, Patch’s eyes get wide with panic because his assignment will be wrong. Talking with the teacher clears everything up and Patch begins to happily plan and cut butcher paper clothes.

Gleek tells me intensely that she has to pick a science fair project that will make the world a better place. It has to be meaningful and helpful. I know that the point is to learn and practice scientific method, so we settle on and experiment to test the effect of fertilizer on algal growth in pond water. It is an experiment that has been done a bazillion times before, which is fine. We don’t need to change the whole world with one project. We just need to change one child by helping her learn. That in turn will help change the world eventually.

I both love and hate school projects, but most of the reasons I dislike them are due to translation errors as the instructions pass through the brains of my kids.

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Orem Writes

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The Orem Public Library is running a series for writers during the month of January. They’ve even made a handy flier for you to peruse.

See my name there on January 30 for the blogging panel? I do and it makes me really happy. You don’t want to miss any of the other evenings either. It is a great line up and it starts tomorrow.

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Courageous Link

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Imagine that you have a child with sensory issues. These issues aren’t really an elephant in the room, they’re more like the coffee table you always have to sidestep in order to cross the room. Yes it is an obstacle, but you get so used to stepping around it that you hardly notice anymore. Link is that child. I used to have to cut his fingernails while he slept because attempting it when he was awake was either a two-adults-pin-the-child-down ordeal or a multi-hour long negotiation. Haircuts were similarly traumatic to the point that he spent most of his early childhood in various stages of buzz cut to completely shaggy because then we only had to have a confrontation about it very six months or so. I was so very grateful when Link took charge of his own fingernails. The arguments vanished and I stopped thinking about sensory things as an issue at all. It stopped affecting my daily life because Link was managing for himself. That let me forget that Link still deals with this stuff every day.

Now imagine this child with sensory issues gets an infected ingrown toenail. To prevent catastrophic infection, a minor surgical procedure is necessary. Link is now 15 and outweighs me. There is no way I could hold him down anymore. Fortunately I did not have to. We sat together and talked, noticing how it is one thing to logically agree that yes this needs to be done, but a different thing completely to sit still while someone sticks a needle into your toe. Link was marvelous. He was anxious, nervous, and jumpy, but he held still when it mattered. The procedure also demonstrated that he has super powered nerves in his toes or perhaps heightened perceptions of sensory input in his brain. It took half again as many deadening shots as are usually necessary and Link could still feel some pain. I watched my son and knew what courage looks like. It looks like holding still when every instinct tells you to flee.

It is done. The healing can begin, and hopefully we’ll not have to do this again ever.

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Adventures in Social Media

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I want to fund a picture book, The Strength of Wild Horses, and the obvious choice for that is to run a Kickstarter drive. However those who are wise in the ways of Kickstarter have advised me that the project has a better chance to fund if I do some community building first. This makes sense to me.

Completely separate from my Kickstarter project I have been thinking about ways to build community and about some ways I’d like to do that which are difficult to do from this blog. Or rather, I could do them from the blog, but I am interested in seeing how it would feel to run a different sort of place on the internet. I want to run a series of posts talking about different picture books, how they show character traits which are common in high energy ADHD or Autistic kids, and how parents can use those books to help kids and their siblings to come to terms with these traits. It was to accomplish exactly this that I wrote Hold on to Your Horses in the first place. I’ve had a growing list of books for years and would love to find a useful way to share that list.

I’ve also been thinking about stages of parenting. I’m in the middle of parenting headed for the endgame. Several times I’ve had parents who are just starting out come to my blog hoping to find posts about the early years of parenting. There are some. Patch was only a year old when I began blogging, but I’ve grown as writer since then. I’ve grown as a parent since then. My perspectives have changed and I have new thoughts about old topics. I thought it would be interesting to run a series where I link to an old post and then provide commentary from my current perspective. It isn’t the same as me going through being a young parent myself, but it would help me delve into those topics. It is certainly a worthy experiment.

I’ve also been thinking about cross promotion. Many times people find Howard because of Writing Excuses (or some other project) then they find me because of Howard. Having multiple creative pursuits reaches into different groups of people. For a long time I’ve been dependent on Howard’s internet stature as the primary promotional tool for my creative work. Except we have different audiences and I’ve been feeling like it is time for me to strike out on my own to build my own community which is not annexed to his. In the long run I must do this if I want to be able to afford to create the things I want to create. I need to believe that Hold Horses and One Cobble are works strong enough to be the foundation of a community.

All of these thoughts connected with the advice to build community in advance of running a Kickstarter and the result is an experiment that I intend to run for the next several months. I’m going to extend myself a little bit further online to see what I can accomplish. I’ve picked venues where I’m already comfortable and have been for awhile: Facebook, G+, and Twitter. These are places I like to play already and so I’m just introducing a new game into those spaces.

On Twitter I’ve just set up an account @OneCobble. It will be a simple feed of links back to this blog. This provides a simple way for those on Twitter to follow the blog without me feeling like I’m spamming everyone with links to blog entries. People who want to see every single blog entry will follow @OneCobble. Others will be able to blissfully ignore it.

On G+ I’ve used the new communities feature to set up a One Cobble at a Time community. This is where I’ll post those blog links with commentary. I’ll also post links to articles of interest. I’m sure I’ll come up with other things as well. I’ll be deliberately trying to encourage conversation about these topics.

I’ve also set up a One Cobble community on Facebook. At first I expect it to be nearly identical to the posts on G+, but I’m quite curious to see how the two communities develop differently. If they don’t become different, it will be because I’m talking to myself and I’m pretty sure I’ll get tired of that in a hurry.

Facebook also has a Hold on to Your Horses page. This is where I’ll post about those picture books. It is also the measure I’ll use to figure out when I have enough community support for a Kickstarter to be successful.

A month from now I’ll evaluate to figure out which of these ventures is adding happiness to my life and which is adding only stress. I’ll see whether I can feel an increase of interest in the things I write and do. Perhaps at the end of that month I’ll pull back inward. I don’t know for sure. I just know that this feels like the right experiment.

I haven’t yet sent out invitations to these new feeds and communities. I’m still debating whether I should or if that feels spammy to me. (It is pretty important to me that I not annoy people by misusing social media tools.) If I do, it won’t be for at least a week. I want to make sure that I’ve already got interesting things in the spaces before inviting everyone. However if any of you blog readers want front row seats while I figure this stuff out, I’d love for you to join me. You’ll be like the guest who arrives early and helps set out the snacks for everyone who will come later. If none of those things sounds interesting, feel free to hang out here. I’ll be keeping this place the same.

Let the social media experiments begin.

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In Which My Brain Skitters Across Many Topics

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At 6 pm I couldn’t figure out what to make for dinner. I had a cupboard full of food ingredients and a row of cook books, but every time I tried to put my mind to solving the problem of dinner, my mind went somewhere else instead. Mostly it mused through some social media outreach I’m planning for Hold Horses and Cobble Stones. I’m both excited by the possibilities and a little worried that I’ll get worn out by it. However when I yanked my mind firmly back to planning dinner, it then galloped off in the other direction to consider the beginning of the year accounting. It is how I spent most of my work day and I’ve gotten it mostly complete. Yet those last few tasks are like a book laying open in the middle of my brain and I keep checking to make sure I remember where I stopped. Then of course I can also consider which step comes next in the project of repainting the front room. My brain also has thoughts about that, but nary a coherent thought about dinner. Fortunately we had frozen meatballs, which the kids did not appreciate nor eat, and left over sloppy joes, which they snarfled down joyfully.

My big conclusion is that I wish the thought of making pretty websites was as exciting to me as the thought of making a pretty dress, but it just sounds drudgerous. Drudgerous really ought to be a word. Wait, that conclusion didn’t match anything that came before? That means it is a fairly accurate representation of how my brain is running this evening. At least we made it through dinner, played a game as a family in which no one had a temper tantrum, finally convinced Link that his ingrown toenail really does need a minor surgical procedure to fix it, and then got 50% of the children into bed.

Did I not mention Link’s toenail before? We’ve been dealing with the thing for a couple of months. I hauled him to the doctor last Friday, but the very idea of letting someone else poke at his feet was unnerving. So we came home with antibiotics and care instructions. They didn’t work. So we’re headed back on Wednesday morning. It is just one in a long line of odd ball doctor visits which means I’m once again good friends with all the office staff. We’ve had a scratched cornea, an abdominal strain, chronic heartburn, and now this toe. We’re not at the end either, coming up is a case of minor eczema which we really ought to get checked, Gleek probably needs braces, and Kiki tells me she’s got wisdom teeth coming in. I dub this the school year of endless minor medical expenses which all add up.

So tomorrow I have a work day. Wednesday will be eaten up by toe treatment. Then Saturday will be entirely consumed by academic testing for Gleek and Patch. I really hope Patch feels better by then. He’s been running a low fever off and on for two days. This test determines whether he’ll be able to stay in the school program that I feel is right for him. I’m trying not to stress about it, or at least to hide my stress so that Patch does not pick up any of it. Fortunately my brain is highly distractable this evening. If I wander into the front room, it will probably start thinking about paint again.

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Taylers and Their Screens

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It is Sunday afternoon and the kids have been watching Phineas and Ferb for hours. Howard and I have watched snatches of the show as well, because the cleverness reaches out and grabs us as we pass through the room. Kiki watches while sketching. Link watches while seated at the computer, multi-tasking between an online game and the show. Gleek bounces around the room, teeters on Howard’s balance board, does a puzzle, or shoots bands for the cat to chase, all while also watching the show. Patch is the only one to give the show full attention, but then he’s the one curled up under a blanket with a pot nearby just in case. I could tell myself that Patch’s illness is the reason we’ve allowed this marathon video session, but the truth is that the TV is on more often than it isn’t. Usually it is showing a video game, but it is on.

When Kiki was two years old the bishop of our congregation (think pastor) issued challenges to families for two weeks and then had them report on the outcomes of those challenges. These challenges were things like: read scriptures for an hour a day, live off your food storage, or no electronic entertainment. When I heard about that last one, I felt quite smug. Howard and I owned a television, but it lived in the basement and was only hooked up to a VCR. We watched shows recorded for us by others and I took Kiki down there to watch Winnie the Pooh or Hercules which were pretty much the only kid movies we owned. Going two weeks without electronic entertainment would hardly have been a challenge for us at that time. Now it would represent a major pattern shift. We would all suffer electronic withdrawal and would struggle to find new habits. Yet I would not trade my life now for the one I had then. The introduction of video games has solved problems and provided avenues for growth even as they have become issues for overuse.

Yesterday I imposed a time limit on screens. Not only did I declare the limit, but also clarified that a one hour turn meant video games OR computer, not one hour on each. The kids did not argue with me because we’ve imposed limits before. In theory we’re always using timers to regulate turns. Timers went off and so did the screens. The boys earned additional time by doing extra chores. I allowed this because with the temperatures in single digits playing outside was an option with limited utility. Sleep reset all our brains, and Patch was sick, so not a single timer was in use today. In theory yesterday was better run, but that day was cranky and today felt nice. The kids did not just watch the shows, they giggled together and shared jokes. Kiki and Gleek joined together in a chorus of one of the songs. Link and Kiki re-enacted a particularly funny scene. They all had ancillary activities. Their minds and imaginations were engaged.

Thus it goes in our house. We have cycles of heavy video game usage, heavy show watching, and then periods where we eschew these things to play board games, draw pictures, or ride bikes. Our habits change and the biggest change is that I no longer feel like I am failing when my kids engage with electronic entertainment.

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Cranky Saturday

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I went to bed exhausted last night and woke up cranky this morning. I’ve tried to keep it under wraps, not spit it randomly at the other people in my house, but I have not always succeeded. Things got done, but without focus or a feeling of accomplishment. The evidence I have of competence is the fact that I made dinner, the kids did some chores, the stack of pages ready for editing when I have brain enough, and a patch of “Castle Stone” colored paint in the middle of a dirty white wall. I’ve now passed the point where calling off the project is just as complicated as completing it. So painting is in my future. But hopefully on a day when I can feel less cranky.

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Events I’m Excited About

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I’ve kept my events for 2013 close to home and fairly sparse. Home is where I want to be this year and I have plenty of projects to keep me busy all year long. However there are a few events coming up that I’m excited to be involved with.

Orem Writes: Talking about Blogging
January 30 7pm Orem Library.
For this event C. Jane Kendrick and I will be talking about our experiences with blogging and answering audience questions. I’ve never met Ms. Kendrick before, but I’m very excited to get a chance to talk to her because she blogs like I do, where telling stories on the blog is the point of writing rather than using the blog as a promotional tool. I’ve been reading her blog regularly for the last month (ever since I discovered it) and thoroughly enjoy it.

Life, The Universe, and Everything Symposium
February 14-16 Downtown Provo Marriott
This is an event that Howard and I enjoy every year. If you are interested in writing genre fiction or in talking about it, you simply can not get a better event for the price. I haven’t seen an official schedule yet, but Howard and I are usually teaching something interesting during the event. When we’re not teaching, you’ll be able to find us in the dealer’s room where we’ll have set up shop under the big Schlock Mercenary sign. I’ll definitely have copies of Hold on to Your Horses and Cobble Stones available. Depending on how quickly I work I may even have the 2012 edition of Cobble Stones. Please stop by and say hello.

LDS Storymakers Conference
May 10-11 Downtown Provo Marriott and Conference Center
I’m really excited about this conference. They’ve given me an entire hour to talk about blogging, why I love it, and how a blog can be more than just a marketing tool for authors. I expect this presentation will be greatly shaped by my conversation with Ms. Kendrick in January. I’m also teaching a class on structuring your life to support creativity. Howard is teaching World Building and Focused Practice. The conference is more expensive and it definitely teaches from and to and LDS viewpoint, but it offers a world of education to anyone seeking to write as a career. Well worth the time and expense.

Writing Excuses Workshop and Retreat
June 10-16 Chattanooga TN
Registration for this event is full this year. Though you can still apply for a scholarship spot until January 15th. Howard, Brandon, Dan, and Mary will all be there running the event. My attendance is probable, but there are some family commitments which are in direct conflict and I can’t say for certain how I’ll be able to resolve those conflicts. Hopefully this retreat will be such a huge success that they’ll schedule another one.

In the second six months of the year, I don’t have any professional appearances scheduled. Which is fine, because that seems pretty far away.

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The End Game of Motherhood

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The endgame of motherhood is to make yourself obsolete. This is how you know you’ve succeeded, when they launch into their own lives and no longer need you. It is a hard thing. It is why I find myself crying on a sunny morning in a bright new year feeling sadness because we’ve just concluded the final holiday season when all the kids live at home. Kiki will come home for Christmas next year. I know she will. But it will be different. I don’t know about the year after that. Too many changes loom in the next few years for me to be able to predict what life will look like. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to go back and redo anything I’ve done in the past seventeen years. No major regrets haunt me. I just wish this holiday could have lasted longer, that I could have savored it more, or stored it up for later. If only moments could be preserved like home canned food. I try with blog entries and photo books, but the memory of a moment is not the same as the moment itself. All of the moments for this holiday are gone.

The future is bright and full of possibility. I’m excited to see where Kiki will fly. I’m excited to launch the other kids into their futures too. But I now know–in a way that I did not before–that I will cry. Again and again I will cry. Because it feels like I am departing the heart of my life and I don’t want to. I’m going to miss this. Life will be different and I will find new ways to enjoy it. But just now I can’t imagine it being any better, because this part has been the best bit. I finally understand all those fervent exhortations to “Enjoy them now. They’ll be grown before you know it.” It was usually spoken by some stranger to me when my toddler and baby were climbing precariously in a shopping cart. I thought the advice givers were wrong. They were and they weren’t. For some mothers the best bit is when the kids are little, that is the heart’s home that they miss. I don’t miss the baby and toddler years, though I enjoyed them while I was in them. Right now is what I will miss. I’m going to miss four at home, two teens two kids, all of them running in different directions, squabbling over the cat, and the incessant sound of video games. This is my heart’s home and just now it feels like I will spend the rest of my life missing home.

I have eight months left. No wonder I have no desire to travel anywhere. I just want to be at home while home is still here. There is time afterward to figure out which new dreams will flow into the spaces that are opening up in my life. New happiness will come. Old dreams will become possible again in ways that they aren’t when I have primary care of developing human beings. I will find laughter and adventure. Things will be good, but they will be different and I can’t quite picture how it will be. So today I cry a little. Then I wipe my eyes and proceed with the day. No sense wasting what I have by grieving for what has not even happened yet. Once the kids come home, they hug me and all is well for now.

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Halfway Out of the Dark

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“I don’t want to put the Christmas tree away.” Kiki said on January first. She wasn’t the only child to express this sentiment. It was not mere chore avoidance, the kids honestly felt wistful and sad about putting away the trappings of the holiday season. I felt the same myself, but we proceeded, because the New Year was already marching on us and we had to become ready for it.

There have been years where Christmas was scoured from the house on Boxing Day, mere hours after the holiday was complete. Other years it was allowed to linger until New Year’s Day only on principle but my fingers were itching to put it away. This year we all left the holiday reluctantly, wishing for another week of setting our own schedules, another week of brightness in the dark. I pulled out the boxes and began putting things away, hoping that the actions would help us all re-set our brains into a non-holiday mode.

“Hey kids,” I said drawing four sets of eyes to focus on me. We were at the dinner table, which I find is a good place to make announcements since they’re all seated in the same room and relatively quiet. “School starts tomorrow, so after you eat I need to to pull out your backpacks and go through them to make sure that you’re ready.” This is the sort of announcement which often triggers a scrambling panic as one child or another remembers that there was this homework assignment they were supposed to do. Instead, four sets of eyes blinked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. What is this school thing, and how does one prepare for it? They’d packed away their school thoughts so thoroughly that they didn’t even know where to start finding them.

I sympathize. We used to get up how early? 5:30? Really? How did I do that? I rolled out of bed to the blaring alarm and had to carefully remember which steps came next: put on robe, wake Kiki, make breakfast. In October, November, early December these steps were habit. Now the habit feels rusty, as if it belonged to someone else and I’m trying to fill her shoes. I didn’t think the holidays were particularly transformative, but somehow they feel like a watershed, a turning point, instead of a pause. It is as if everything before belonged to a different era. “It’s weird, Mom,” said Kiki “but I kind of feel like I ought to be starting college, not going back to the last semester of high school.” I don’t think it is weird. Or if it is, then I suffer a similar weirdness. I want to move onward because there are things coming which I hope to reach. Yet I don’t want to leave the holiday break because the ground is cold and dark between where I am and those things I want to reach.

“Christmas, halfway out of the dark” proclaims Doctor Who A Christmas Carol. It is a ridiculous show which defies logic and delights me year after year. I think part of the reason it works for me is because of that phrase. It acknowledges that winter is a long dark journey. We celebrate in the middle by stringing up extra lights and singing special songs, but then the lights are put away and I have half of the dark journey left to go. It is the harder part because I am traveling away from the bright holiday season instead of toward it. I’m headed for spring, but it is hard to believe in spring when the world is frozen solid and I have to remember the steps to getting up at 5:30 am.

The decorations are tucked into the closet under the stairs and the tree is stashed away for the year. I am left with a front room which feels bare and in dire need of a new coat of paint. In the next few weeks I intend to supply that paint. It is one of the January projects I will use to give myself focus. Things I can focus on and accomplish in the short term as I step day by day into a time when the sun gets up before I do.

“I think we should have a two-month-long festival of lights.” Howard said while looking out the window at the first grayness of dawn. He did not want to put away the holiday brightness either. But we did. And the kids went to school, landing us on a Thursday which should have first-day-back-to-work enthusiasm. Except Thursday is when I usually begin winding up a work week. It is the day for finishing off and reassigning, not for beginning. So I light a candle despite the daylight which finally showed up outside the windows. Then I begin to feel my way through the day, with many pauses while I try to remember what should come next. Task by task, step by step, slowly traveling out of the dark.

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