One Good Thing One Creative Thing Day 3 and 4

Day 3
One Good Thing: After Kevin and Alder went to sleep I stayed up listening to this and knitting by the fire.
One Creative Thing: I spent three hours knitting on a simple scarf, a longways knit alpaca in purple with a diamond pattern (pictures to come when it is finished right now it looks like a caterpillar).

Day 4
One Good Thing: Well really lots of good things. I got to sleep almost to nine. We went out for breakfast to here, and got there just before the crowds. Came home and Alder and I did projects in the wood shop for hours. Made a yummy dinner form things found around the house and ended up with gnocchi with sauce and steamed broccoli. Another night of knitting by the fire until I ran out of yarn.
One Creative Thing: While in the wood shop I started working on Alder's holiday gift. So far there has been a lot of sanding and cutting. Alder hammered nails into a board and drew pictures.


I remember spending hours down in the shop building things. Whether it was the tug boat that my father and I made that still stands on my dresser wit the film canister as a smoke stack or the pencil box that I build and stained myself when I was eleven it was always an amazing space to be in. Even yesterday as I worked on my project I found myself remembering exactly where certain nails were by feel rather than reading the labels on the jars.

There was a special joy involved in handing Alder the child's hammer for the first time, it is an identical one to the one adult one just a little smaller and lighter. Then handing him the cup that says "kid nails" on the outside on tape that has been there since I was a child, so old that it fell off and the glue holding it on became a gold dust on the table. Just like my father I set the nails in just deep enough that they would hold and let him hammer away at the board.



Hammering is difficult for little hands and he soon switched to drawing at the card table as I sawed and sanded, public radio in the background. Here I was an adult showing my own child the same things my father did, handing him the same tools and telling him some of the same stories. Next week when we are all at the cabin I hope there might be a few moments that all three of us are down there working on something, three generations touching the same tools bringing all of us joy in the making.