Teaching this old dog some new tricks

One of the hardest parts of being a parent for me is to overcome my natural tendencies towards drama and the occasional bout of pessimism. For example, in the face of tired, yelling children this morning, I reminded them that the sun was shining and it was the beginning of a new, lovely week. Did I feel it would be a lovely week? Absolutely not. I am tired myself- tired of my fellowship, tired of winter, tired of not sleeping enough, and tired of crabby kids in the morning. But, fortunately, the sane part of my brain took over and what came out of my mouth was optimism.

This need to suppress my natural response is never so keen as when I am learning something new. I am a really SLOW learner. Ask Ryan who tried to help me ski. Ten years later I may finally be getting the hang of it. Or my knitting teacher who told me she never, before me, was unable to teach someone how to knit. (I do knit now for the record.) It's almost as if part of my brain goes into slow motion when I am learning something new and I absolutely cannot do it without tons of practice. This becomes a self reinforcing loop since taking a long time to learn a skill is a matter of great frustration for me, increasing my propensity towards drama and pessimism.

My new skill of the season is sewing. For some reason, perhaps all the craft blogs I read these days, I decided I wanted to learn to sew. Visions of sundresses and appliqued shirts for the girls danced before me. I even made it a New Year's resolution. So last week, after a slow start (and a special thanks to Elaine who did not laugh in my face when I showed up at her house for a sewing lesson sans fabric, pattern, or machine), I bought a sewing machine. It took me at least an hour to figure out all the movable parts and how to thread the thing, taking up most of my "play time" for that day but within a few days, I was able to thread, change the bobbins, and sew somewhat straight lines on a practice scrap. On I moved yesterday to something a bit bigger. I went to the local fabric shop to buy some more scraps and ended up coming home with some flannel to make blankets for the girls. (Not that they need blankets, but a blanket seemed to be the easiest project I could imagine.) Mistake #1- taking the girls with me to said fabric shop. Now they knew they stood to benefit from my experimentations. Mistake #2- telling Izzy I would work on it yesterday. Mistake #3- allowing Izzy to get up from her fake nap to "help" me with my project. Picture a scene with Isabel asking me every two minutes if her blanket is done yet, me completely unable to sew a straight line despite the fact that I pinned the seam, Izzy resorting to talking to herself none stop (she has a very active imaginary life in which she and her stuffed animals take on multiple roles) in between asking for a progress update, me actually sewing a line straight off the fabric and then breaking the needle, and finally, me totally freaking out and asking Izzy to go down in the basement and watch daddy stain crown molding.

I actually went grocery shopping to chill out and then came home and decided to make myself a smoothie as a treat. Smoothies are the latest craze in the Schroeder household since I discovered the joys of frozen fruit in Whole Foods. Alas, even yesterday's smoothie attempt went pathetically awry as our blender coughed and churned and began to ooze smoothie all over the counter from the base of the glass pitcher. Even smoothies were too much for my crafting ability yesterday! Fortunately, in honor of the Oscars, our dinner consisted of frozen canapes ala Trader Joes so there was no chance for me to burn the house down. Ryan, of course, was so supportive of my craft meltdown that he actually had to support himself with a wall he was laughing so hard.

In the end, I managed to not so delicately pull out the horrible seam from the flannel and sewed a less crooked, but crooked all the same, line the second time. And, despite the fact that I wanted to morph into Medea when Izzy asked again how her blanket was coming, I calmly said that I understood she was excited but that these things take time, especially when mom is learning.