Friendship

Friends forever.
Maybe longer.

Big came up to me the other day and said "You were in college 15 years ago?"  After a bit of confusion, we eventually we figured out she'd been looking at my diplomas on the office wall and hadn't been reading my bachelor's.  If she had, the number would have been a bit bigger, which was what threw me off at first.  I'm old.  That thing is practically written on papyrus with an inked quill.

Which made me feel a little nostalgic.  Grateful that I can still remember that many years ago, too.

Do you have any friends dating back that far?  I'll admit that I really don't.  Between my undergraduate and graduate degrees I went to four colleges in four states.  I've also moved four times since finishing that last degree.  They say things come in threes so I wonder what it means that I've got so many "fours" in my life.  Apparently I just need an extra whatever it is in order to get the job done.  But I digress...back to my lack of "knew you from the cradle" friends.  My friends these days are "mommy friends", people I've met through play groups and school and whatnot since moving to my current state while pregnant with Big.

My last custom order, though, was four necklaces for four women who have been friends since college.  One of the ladies ordered them to give as gifts during a girls' weekend back at their alma mater.  I won't give too many specifics (since they're my age!), so as not to be forced to admit that not all of my gray hair has been caused by my children, but I will say that I don't have enough fingers and toes to count all those years.  Besides, if you've managed to retain more brain cells over the years than I have, you can figure a couple of things out from the pictures anyway.

I was given pretty much free reign with these, and the end result was different from my original design.  Better, in my opinion.  And from what I've been told, they went over well.

I love custom orders.  The items I make for the shop still let me be creative, but there's something different about coming up with an idea that's tailored for a specific person, to reflect their personality and history, and then experiencing their reaction to what I've done.   That adds a little extra magic to the process, at least for me.  Next up on the custom order train is a cuff bracelet for my mom.  It'll let me play a bit more with my new favorite toys, a set of stick figure people.  Not today, though...today I'm planning on doing nothing more than making and eating some homemade pizza and enjoying the (hopefully good) commercials in between downs of some pesky football game.  :-)

Science: It's a Girl Thing

Girls can do science!  Putting together a tri-fold board presenting your results, on the other hand, is something of a challenge.

- me, last night (and in reality, probably more rudely put than that)

Big has a science project due next week.  She came up with a topic, made hypotheses, came up with a workable procedure, and conducted the experiment itself just fine.  Now it's time to summarize the results, type everything up, and put together the presentation.

This process was accompanied by much growling and complaining and gnashing of teeth.  And that was just me...I'm not sure how Big felt about it.  I assume close to the same since the evening ended with a mess in my living room and a kid who locked herself in her room far, far away from anything resembling either the experiment or her mother.

It's morning now.  Just after 7AM on a Sunday, which is an hour no one should ever have to see, in my humble opinion.  But here I am because my brain didn't get that memo and has been racing all night.  Major thoughts about the science project debacle, minor ones about a custom jewelry order I had all ready to ship out today but decided wasn't quite finished.  So I had to completely unpack it, make the change, and box it all back up.  Shredded packing material is nice and cushy, but gets EVERYWHERE, by the way.

Mission accomplished on the shipment (I like to get the small jobs out of the way so I can focus all of my energy on doing my best worrying about the big ones!) so now I can get back to telling you about last night.

We left off with Big locked in her room.  I was sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by various pieces of paper that somehow had to find their way onto a display board.  The gold standard trifold (the mere mention of which strikes terror in the hearts of most of my mom friends!) was too large for what Big had planned.  She hated having all of that empty white space so we'd tried something different, and basically it backfired.  As the architect of that particular plan, the outcome was obviously all my fault, as was everything else from her hatred of broccoli to the melting of the Polar ice caps.  When I screw up, apparently I don't mess around according to my kid.

Slowly it occurs to me that my child's love of and aptitude for science was being overshadowed by the fact that she fails Glue Stick 101.  A perfectly good experiment about which she'd been completely excited just five minutes prior was in pieces around me because she's can't attach one piece of paper to another piece of paper and make it look pretty.  Really?  Not on my watch.

I'm not proud of it, but what I ended up doing was reprinting the messed up pieces, fixing a few poorly cut and/or glued spots, and laying everything out so that it sort of filled the board.  All Big needed to do was actually glue everything in place.  Which I then went up to her room and told her I would help with in the morning.  Earned me MAJOR mom points, I even got hugs out of the deal.

It's done now.  Looks good, if you ask me.  But more importantly, the science part is solid and she still wants to work in a related field - marine biology - when she grows up.

I'm working on a custom piece right now, a charm necklace celebrating a young lady who, to quote her mom, is "a viola playing fencer who wants to be a malacologist (they study snails) and play with the National Symphony."   I'm having the best time working with that!  Who wants that kind of creativity squelched by a two inch tall tube of glue?  So keep on doing science, and all of those other unique things you do, girls...Mom's got your back when you need it!

Since I'm not even ready to give a sneak peek at that necklace, I'll leave you with another charm I just shipped out (not the one that had me up all night!).  This one shares more of those positive vibes I'm constantly sending my girls' way, hoping they'll sink in via osmosis or something.

Wishing you a day full of dreams, life, hope and love!