I love the way this image captures the slip-slide of an elementary school concert. Or perhaps, it’s how I feel much of the time, like the kid with the black and the white sock. I’m a bit rumpled. Speaking of the elementary school, there’s a goal to acquire many more ukuleles. I am pretty sure the world would be a much better place if more people knew how to play ukulele, a word you even fall in love with just by spelling it.
I loved, at the concert, glimpsing my friends’ weeks-old babe. I captured basically the back of their heads (and their two sons’ heads). Three of the four watched the eldest child perform with her class onstage. Experience tells me that four out of five, even barely, in a photo, is about as good as it gets most of the time when your family expands. I think this past year I got two good photos with all four kids and just decent one of the entire fam.
We, as humans, especially in an age that takes so many pains to measure just about everything from ratings to scores to votes to earnings to… are in a funny place. This kind of scrutiny can only lead to the conclusion that you don’t measure up. I’ve found it as a theme in so many things I’ve read recently about seemingly disparate subjects: take these examples, the media obsession on the post-baby celebrity body; the notion that we have begun to outsource practically everything and the fear that once a second child arrives cool goes out the window forevermore (my pal Megan wrote that last essay).
Anyway, as I attempt to clean the house that will never feel as orderly as on a design blog and as I attempt to raise the children who will forever do it, to a greater extent than is expedient, their own ways, and as I attempt to write things that matter to me that will never reach as many people as I wish (how about, you know, everyone who reads?) I hope that I can let myself remain inspired by the askew photo of the kids and the mismatched socks and the ragtag school and the sound of ukuleles, which I now know how to spell.
