My kids are 6 and 8 years old, and I love (almost) everything about this age. I can tell it’s the golden years: when they’re independent enough to make their own breakfasts, but little enough to still want cuddles. I love the stories and the reading and the drawing and the games… I hate the homework. I am constitutionally ill-suited to doing homework every afternoon.
Last year, my buddy Ryan Gosling helped me out. I had a colouring book of his face, and I coloured it in with colour change markers every day, and found a level of Homework Zen I did not know I possessed. This year? I finished the book, and a normal colouring book doesn’t hold the same magic…
So today I struck upon a magical plan 🪄
How to survive homework
My mom was a quilter, and I have a basket of her most delightful fabrics. It’s a mish-mash of quilt fabric and shwe-shwe and @skinnylaminx off-cuts, and I am going to make a Slices of Joy picnic quilt out of it!
The kids and I chose the most wonderful (joy-sparking) fabrics today, I’ve ironed them in preparation for Monday Afternoon Homework (the most daunting of them all!) and tomorrow I’ll start cutting them into squares. I hope to impart a sense memory like the one I have from my childhood, the sound of my mom’s scissors against the dining room table…
And then, every day during homework, I’ll lucky dip a fabric to sew (cover your eyes and ears, real quilters!) I’ll sew them 10 across (I think?) and then once the bag of squares is empty, I’ll sew them all together into a picnic quilt. My son has already said how magical it will be if it’s ready by Christmas Eve, so I guess that’s my deadline? 😉
I find hand sewing both soothing and satisfying (instant results!) so this feels like a pretty sweet way to pass the time…
Wish me luck! 🧵 🪡
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