Dispatches from the land of neverending snow
We've been averaging a snowstorm a week since January up here in Ye Olde Newe Aengeland*, to the point where I think all the kids in the state of Massachusetts may have had school on one Monday since the semester began. D: Boston and the surrounding areas have been getting it really bad - I think they've had maybe a collective five feet of snow in the past few weeks and things out there are a complete disaster any kind of transportation-wise. New York MTA had to lend the Boston MBTA two giant rail snowblowers for track clearing, even. (Fun Fact: those machines are honestly called Snowzillas. Seriously, google it.) This has made kid weekends super challenging, and with the current snowstorm finally petering out this morning, Tuesday finds me with a day taken off from work and the kids still here because the roads have been utter shit for the past 48 hours. Thankfully school has been cancelled for the past couple of days, so that isn't a factor, but apparently Kidzilla's class now has Snow Day homework they have to do in case of school cancellation so she's been meeting the news of yet another snow day with alarmingly grown-up groans. On one hand, yeah, there's been a bit of scrambling with the change in schedule, but on the other hand having them here a couple of extra days has on many levels been really fun.
I've decided that Wee Beastie is, in fact, a Neverland fairy. I say that mostly because I often joke that he's too small to hold more than one emotion at a time, so as a result all of his emotions are all-encompassing forces of nature. When he's happy, he's a ball of zoomy radioactive joy. When he's sad, he is inconsolable and Everything Is Terrible. When he's angry it's like a storm descends in the room, he's all violently flailing appendages and screaming. It is certainly a Thing To Behold/worry about.
After he pitched a mega fit last night about having to go to bed which ended with him punching![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cell23 square in the nose (not kidding about the violent flailing), I sat with him for a little bit after his time-out to calm him down and we had a long, surprisingly interesting chat about how he experiences big overwhelming emotions. He concluded independently that angry was his biggest feeling, and when he gets angry it's "too big for me" and that's why he has trouble controlling himself. I told him the quote from Peter Pan about how fairies are too small to be more than one thing at a time, and he got this solemn little expression on his face (hilarious, btw) and was all "Yeah. That sounds correct."
He is, indeed, a funny little bug.
Anyway, we agreed that we need to work on making more space for big emotions. I've been wanting to get him involved in some kind of directed physical activity/martial art so he can vent off some of the pent up physical energy for a while but owing to budget constraints on both sides of the state and the additional difficulty of only having every other weekend to work with on ours it hasn't really been practical. Still, this morning I'm taking another stab at looking at some options for him. The local Tae Kwon Do school seems pretty promising aside from the scheduling hurdle; I may stop by later in the week to take a closer look at it and see if the every/other schedule can be worked with/around. That is if it ever stops snowing long enough for anything to dig out and reopen around here. If anything, their summer camp seems tailor made for him with a week of martial arts, playing with horses and learning to swim, so that is something to sock away money for at the very least.
In other news, along with getting bitten with what seems like every creative idea ever (and thus being paralyzed with indecision about which to work on at any given time, since the Super Bowl I've been having intense needs to Color Things. This led to a rediscovery that I absolutely adore geometric patterns and mandalas, a ridiculous number of which are available free on the internet, so as of Sunday I've decided to try to color one per day, be it with actual markers/pencils/crayons or digitally. I've only done two so far and I'm not sure how the one-per-day bit is going to work out long term as I tend to gravitate towards the ones with intensely complex patterns, but I do indeed find the process very brain-unclenching.
Well, we'll see. I do need some sort of anxiety reduction type thing to do on the regular for a while, but previous attempts at meditation have already shown that I suck at it - in fact sitting still with nothing tangible to focus on tends to make my anxiety worse. (This is why I tend to not work well without music or some kind of background noise - silence freaks me the fuck out.) This is also sort of why I miss having a commute - driving tends to calm my brain down right quick as well. Maybe when the roads clear, considering the free fall gas prices have been in for the past little bit I'll do more of that too.
* I made that spelling up. don't have a historical accuracy cow at me please.
I've decided that Wee Beastie is, in fact, a Neverland fairy. I say that mostly because I often joke that he's too small to hold more than one emotion at a time, so as a result all of his emotions are all-encompassing forces of nature. When he's happy, he's a ball of zoomy radioactive joy. When he's sad, he is inconsolable and Everything Is Terrible. When he's angry it's like a storm descends in the room, he's all violently flailing appendages and screaming. It is certainly a Thing To Behold/worry about.
After he pitched a mega fit last night about having to go to bed which ended with him punching
cell23 square in the nose (not kidding about the violent flailing), I sat with him for a little bit after his time-out to calm him down and we had a long, surprisingly interesting chat about how he experiences big overwhelming emotions. He concluded independently that angry was his biggest feeling, and when he gets angry it's "too big for me" and that's why he has trouble controlling himself. I told him the quote from Peter Pan about how fairies are too small to be more than one thing at a time, and he got this solemn little expression on his face (hilarious, btw) and was all "Yeah. That sounds correct."He is, indeed, a funny little bug.
Anyway, we agreed that we need to work on making more space for big emotions. I've been wanting to get him involved in some kind of directed physical activity/martial art so he can vent off some of the pent up physical energy for a while but owing to budget constraints on both sides of the state and the additional difficulty of only having every other weekend to work with on ours it hasn't really been practical. Still, this morning I'm taking another stab at looking at some options for him. The local Tae Kwon Do school seems pretty promising aside from the scheduling hurdle; I may stop by later in the week to take a closer look at it and see if the every/other schedule can be worked with/around. That is if it ever stops snowing long enough for anything to dig out and reopen around here. If anything, their summer camp seems tailor made for him with a week of martial arts, playing with horses and learning to swim, so that is something to sock away money for at the very least.
In other news, along with getting bitten with what seems like every creative idea ever (and thus being paralyzed with indecision about which to work on at any given time, since the Super Bowl I've been having intense needs to Color Things. This led to a rediscovery that I absolutely adore geometric patterns and mandalas, a ridiculous number of which are available free on the internet, so as of Sunday I've decided to try to color one per day, be it with actual markers/pencils/crayons or digitally. I've only done two so far and I'm not sure how the one-per-day bit is going to work out long term as I tend to gravitate towards the ones with intensely complex patterns, but I do indeed find the process very brain-unclenching.
Well, we'll see. I do need some sort of anxiety reduction type thing to do on the regular for a while, but previous attempts at meditation have already shown that I suck at it - in fact sitting still with nothing tangible to focus on tends to make my anxiety worse. (This is why I tend to not work well without music or some kind of background noise - silence freaks me the fuck out.) This is also sort of why I miss having a commute - driving tends to calm my brain down right quick as well. Maybe when the roads clear, considering the free fall gas prices have been in for the past little bit I'll do more of that too.
* I made that spelling up. don't have a historical accuracy cow at me please.
