Mind Games

Our life has been so busy, and so beautiful, lately, that I haven’t taken the time to blog it.  I’m trying to throw together a quick recap post tonight before even more beautiful things distract me further!

In just the past two days – two little days! – the kids and I have gone to:

• a local opera company’s production of Hansel and Gretel
• a holiday parade complete with floats, bands, candy, and Santa
• a touring musical production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
• “First Friday” – a night downtown where all the art galleries, cafes and funky shops stay open late and have special events, where we enjoyed an hour-long trolley tour of the city (mostly architecture and a little history), jazz and yummy food at a favorite cafe, and some gallery wandering

I love live music, and being able to hear opera, marching bands, a musical, and jazz in all sorts of wonderful venues within two days has been delightful.  My kids loved all of these wonderful opportunities, they adore live performances as much as I do.

Leigh is blogging about our First Friday adventures tonight, with lots of photos, because I didn’t get many pictures with my camera and my computer is giving me problems trying to read the few I did snap.  Here’s just one of her shots of our wonderful kids tonight:

We had a great time on the trolley tour, where we learned all sorts of things about the founders of our area and one of its leading architects, about various styles including Victorian and Gothic, the three types of pillars (one of which Nate later remembered as “Ironic”), early industry in our area (cigars!) and how the city got both its name and its nickname.  We learned about the confluence of our rivers and how many bridges and carousels there are in our area.  The kids really seemed to enjoy our tour guide – well, GoGoGirl relaxed so much that she fell asleep with her head in Emily’s lap!  But she laughed about it later, so I suppose she enjoyed the ride as well.

After the tour we went to a great little cafe, where we waited half an hour for a table, but the wait was very pleasant because of the jazz trio playing.  Then we had some yummy dinner – it’s a wonderful place for gluten-free Anna, there are plenty of choices on the menu.  I had a parmesan-sage crusted chicken wrap with balsamic asparagus and sun-dried tomatoes – are there enough YUMs in the world to describe that?

Then we wandered the streets looking for some galleries to check out.

I don’t know if I can even write this next bit without tearing up.  It’s one of those sweet and shining motherhood moments.

We went to a second-floor gallery and started looking around.  KarateKid was really interested in checking out some of the art, and at one point called me over from across the room to admire a painting – one that Leigh & I had spent some time admiring earlier.  It was an interesting piece, much like an impressionist landscape on the top, with the grass part of the landscape then continuing over the bottom half of the canvas.  In several places on the grass were clusters of bright and textured lines – almost like multi-colored wires laid across the painting, giving it a multimedia look.  KarateKid and I talked about it for some time and then he asked to buy it – unfortunately, with its $1200 price tag, I had to gently explain why we couldn’t get it.

We continued around the gallery, looking at more paintings, some jewelry, and quite a bit of pottery.  One of the potters had some blue glazed plates out that had wire and bead adornments that made small handles on the sides.  I stopped to admire those and told KarateKid how much I liked them.  He saw the $58 price tag and remembered that he had $60 in his save-account at home.  He announced that he was going to buy me one of the plates, because I loved them so much.

I tried to tell him that I didn’t need him to do that, his allowance money is his own, he didn’t need to spend it on me, that we could go to other galleries and he might find something for me at a lower price… but his mind was made up.  He said he wanted me to have it because I admired it so much.  Leigh offered to help him out by putting the purchase on her credit card and letting him pay her back later (so I didn’t have to buy my own present!), and the two of them followed the artist’s husband into the other room to complete the purchase.

He was so proud of his decision.  And the plate is GORGEOUS.  (I’ll post a picture if I ever get my computer to behave!)  And it just made me cry, to have my little boy buy me some art.  (For the record, he told me later that I should consider this an early Christmas present!)

Sniff.  Good music, good friends, good food, fine art, and a mature, loving, generous son.  Life is so good.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 1:44 am and is filed under arts, crafts & activities, friends, good stuff, holidays, outings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.