What January Looks Like

January in our home has been a lot like this: Getting serious about homeschool this month, we’ve been studying the story of Black Beauty, thanks to a generous friend who gave Miss Wildflower the novel this holiday season. We’ve reproduced a little bit of Monet, and we learned about Impressionism.Wildflower’s rendition of Monet’s Water Lily Pond Symphony in Rose, but then, you knew without my telling you didn’t cha Little Eagle needed a hat tooDark nights that begin far too early, and lastly, Our new indulgence –vinyl. PapaBear and I have been talking for a long time about how we’d love our kiddos to grow up with actual, tangible albums in our home, but that’s something we are good at, talking. We are great dreamers. Have we travelled the countryside with nothing but a backpack, nope, but we’ve dreamt about it. Have we raised seven children while working independently as artists, nope, but we’ve talked about it. And let’s face it, the talking is the important part. Why are you wasting your time with things that aren’t worth dreaming about? So when we saw this record player at our local flea market in the last few minutes before they closed, we had a quick decision to make. Without the usual long ‘talk’ (here’s where it went wrong my friends), we quickly decided, sure, it’s a bit more than we’d like to pay, since it’s used, but if we were to buy this model new, we’d be paying a lot more. We plugged her in, checked out the record player, listened to the story about how the rest certainly works and then we gave the shifty, old man his money. Now, normally, I don’t refer to older people as old or shifty, but this guy was special, and yes, this part of my story is tainted by the outcome. See, when we arrived home, we quickly plugged her in, and since we didn’t have any records, we slid in a CD, a little Sarah Mclauchlan to be precise, and guess what. She didn’t sing. Neither did anyone else we tried to coerce into the CD player. And so, we travelled back to the flea market this past weekend to kindly explain our situation. Long story short, the shifty, old man didn’t give us back our bones; nope, but he did give us a story that changed several times, a hole in our wallet, and then, as if it didn’t hurt enough, smacked us right in the face with the lesson. Ugh. “I’ll sell it for you” he said. Right. Well… A) I’m not waiting around for our money back, since he clearly can’t be trusted in the first place, and B) I’m not shifty enough to sell a broken product. So we picked up our socks, our broken record player, and whatever was left of our pride and headed home. “We’ve still got all of your dad’s records in the barn” Papabear reminded me once he stopped shaking with anger. Turns out, he was right. They’re musty and dusty, but there’s a new home in our house for my parent’s record collection, some with my mother’s teenage penmanship scrawled across her obvious favourites and some with my paternal grandfather’s name carefully written. I can imagine that if there ever was a time that my parents were happy together, these records could have been at the centre of it all. And Papabear and I, we’re going to let it go. We’d rather not carry around unnecessary anger, so we’ll keep her and the records. I know this because we’ve talked about it. ** since this article went live, Papabear has admitted to not being entirely ready to ‘let it go’ What does your January look like?   xo Haymama  ]]>