Tonight, C’s bedtime story was The Velveteen Rabbit. Fresh from a bath and rosy-cheeked, she curled up under the covers and held her own stuffed bunny close under her chin, her eyes gleaming in the low light. Serene and soft and warm in that way that only tired toddlers get. I have always loved The Velveteen Rabbit. And the obvious parallelism of the moment wasn’t lost on me – my baby in bed with her soft rabbit held close, and the boy in the story with his deep love for…
There have been several big snowfalls in a row this winter. I came home from a rare Sunday spent at the office and could barely get the car into the driveway. I didn’t want to shovel. The teens were occupied, hanging out with their cousins; my wife wanted to nap. I wanted to spend some overdue quality time with the toddler. But I needed to clear the driveway so we could park two cars in it. Could I get two birds with one stone, maybe? “Come help me shovel,” I…
Sometimes a writer just gets it right. Tolkein’s “butter, scraped over too much bread” is a masterclass in understated imagery. I get you, Bilbo. I’m feeling thin, too. Stretched. I said so to my wife tonight. I tapped the fingertips of each hand together and pulled them apart, slowly. The gesture illustrated stretched clearly, but it wasn’t right. It was intentional, gentle, taffy-making. This stretched is more haphazard, not linear; a wearing, tearing friction, the result of too much too frequently without realizing how thin things had already gotten. There’s…
November is over. Halloween gave way to National Novel Writing Month, and I completely forgot I had written this post. So here it is now. The rest of this post is written by Past Trevor of October 31-November 1, with a quick edit by Present Trevor. Future Trevor was unavailable at press time.. * Peak Halloween looks like this post I made on Facebook: I love Halloween. I love making costumes. But boy, am I feeling Halloweened out this year. It’s become something of a tradition that I take the…
“Knock knock,” I said. “Who’s there?” Whistler had told knock-knock jokes at me through the bathroom door for five minutes earlier. Clearly, she wasn’t done. Only this time, I was on the outside of the door, butting in on her quiet moment. “Sock delivery,” I said. That wasn’t a joke. I really did have an armful of socks. She was strong enough to carry her own laundry upstairs, but wasn’t quite strong enough yet that she could do so without spilling socks all over the stairs. “Sock delivery who?” “Sock…
The change started in January. In short order, the girls’ parents were married, and only six months after I started on a new career path, so did their mom. These weren’t massive changes, functionally, but I could tell the kids felt it. A subtle shakeup to the background noise of their lives. Whistler and the Fish met those developments with excitement and an easy acceptance. Then, less than six months later, we decided to change not just little things, but everything. We decided to move. It would mean a new…
I used to suffer pretty obvious perfectionism, through a combination of talent and insecurity. When I was in high school, if I couldn’t do something super well, I’d stop bothering to try. University was hard, and as you might imagine, my time there was less than illustrious. There are elements of perfectionism in my girls, as well. DD8, my Little Fish, is one. She will often bang her head against a problem until she either batters it down through sheer force of will, or melt down in the process. The littlest,…
We love space and science over here at Love Make Share, and we were very excited to get up really early and watch NASA TV’s live-broadcast SpaceX’s Dragon capsule being nabbed by the International Space Station. Without diving into a bottomless pit of discussion about the mission, it was important and cool for a few reasons: The Dragon’s ascent stage, the Falcon-9 rocket, finally managed a controlled landing on a barge in the ocean. Yes, a robot rocket lifted a robot spaceship to space and then landed itself on a robot boat. The Dragon…
I had a much harder time coming up with what to say about my Whistler’s birthday than I had talking about the profound experience I had with my little fish turning 8. In the summer, we had a bit of time to enjoy the event, to consider and to reflect. Not so with Whistler. Her birthday came hot on the heels of the wedding, so her seventh was more of a throw-money-at-the-problem sort of situation than a moment of contemplation. I think that it was harder with Whistler’s birthday, too, because her development as a…
True to the name of this blog, we frequently make things as a family. Often I’m part of the process, but when my eldest, 8, came to me the other day, I encountered a new angle that I hadn’t expected. “Trevor, I want to make a craft with you,” she said. “I need your help.” “Okay, little fish,” I said. “What do you want to make?” Her eagerness turned into despair. “That’s why I need your help. I don’t know what I want to make.” This is an experience I…
This is the story of my eldest daughter and a blanket that she’s had forever. It’s an old Indigo blanket. The kind that’s rolled up in a fleecy log near the checkout and you, like fifty thousand other germy consumers, absent-mindedly run your fingers along it and think to yourself, “This is nice.” It’s the kind of purchase that makes sense in a compulsive way, when you don’t know anything about it other than it feels soft when rolled up like a burrito in the impulse-buy line. It’s awful. My…
