Butterfly - Preparation

... watching America's funniest videos ...

We have been doing everything a person could possibly do to get ready for Butterfly with the kids.

 We have story boarded the plot.

We have looked at the way contracts are made, so we can figure out what was good about the house contract and the marriage contract for Pinkerton, and bad for Butterfly.

We have listened to utube clips of the song.

Those aren’t always easy to find. But Mary was sewing and I was looking for clips that we could see, and translating the words for the kids, since they were in another language.

Mary congratulated me on being so articulate with the words.

... pickle on a fork -- my fav snack ...

“Oh, I have no idea what they are singing.

The sub-titles are in Spanish,” I replied, continuing, “ the kids want to know what the lyrics are saying and I can make up enough to keep them interested.

Last night we were listening to pieces of the score while sitting at the table where Mary has been mending clothes she forgot she even had – a lovely black wrap around handkerchief skirt that needs repair because she has run over it with her chair at work and torn.

The long red Chinese silk she was mending is going to be mine some day, since Mary only wears black.

Yet she made it out of material Wyona gave her and Mary is not willing to part with the skirt yet. It will be a good fit when I finally get it.

... concentrating on the sewing project ...

Naomi has a pink corduroy skirt that is too small for her.

That was our next project. Mary and Naomi are making a designer bag out of it for Naomi to take to the opera tonight. Since it was lined, we just sewed the lining shut at the bottom and took a bit of the hem to make into a shoulder strap.

Mary let Naomi do the sewing, which was good for Naomi but bad for Rhiannon. Rhiannon feels entitled to do anything Naomi can do – whether here is a 3 year difference in age between them or not.

“No, you can’t run the sewing machine until you are seven, like Naomi.”

I want to add, you are going to run it soon enough and if you are like some of the rest of us, you will eventually drive the needle through one of your fingers, so just wait a while ... but I know enough not to realize say that for it would only engender fear in Naomi and not in Rhiannon – who was my target for the warning.

When we were finished for the night, I saw Mary unplug the machine. She hardly had the connection out of the wall, when Rhiannon hop on the sewing chair and put her shoe on the foot pedal  and pressed it full throttle– since she had watched long enough to figure out how to do this when she is seven – or when she is four if no one catches her at it. 

As David Camps says, Why is it that everything that is fun is run by electricity?

Rhiannon came upstairs for a snack mid-day: a dill pickle and some crackers. I sliced the dill pickle, two of them and put them on a plate for her.

Wrong.

She likes her dill pickles pierced with a fork and eats them popsicle style.

The favorite TV show was on: America’s Funniest Videos.

... watching TV -- America's Funniest Home Videos ...

Having Netflicks means they can watch episode after episode of things going wrong in people’s lives, things that shouldn’t make us laugh, but that do.

The kids got to walk to the school while Mary and Leo voted yesterday. Mary went to Yoga and invited me along.

Yoga is my hardest kind of exercise – it is just so s-l-o-w.

She told me it was a good thing I didn’t come along. They spent the time breathing – in one nostril and out the other.

Yup.

That is not the exercise for me.

The kids and I stayed home in the morning and swept the patio so that Leo can seal it for the winter.

The trouble is, he needs a couple of sunny days for the sealant to work, and it has been rainy lately, which is a blessing here.

All of the lawns that depend on nature for their water are long dead.

The best that can be said is that there isn’t much need to run the lawn mowers in Aylmer.

Arta