kaleidoscope vision

It's cricket season here in Annapolis. We'd kept them at bay well into August, but by the time we returned from our trip they had settled comfortably in the basement and garage and were regularly sending scouts to do reconnaissance in the kitchen and playroom. And who can blame them? Our house is a pretty nice place to live for a bug; the crumbs are positively ubiquitous.

The only problem is that they make grotesque roommates. They jump out and scare you in the laundry room. Their song is an ominous soundtrack making the otherwise pleasant task of getting the scooters out of the garage uncomfortably tense. So...we murder them. It's true. We become ruthless cricket killers in August.

But then a couple of days ago, Frances - fresh off her first reading of The Cricket in Times Square - found one sauntering across the kitchen floor, and decided to catch it and make a pet of it. She named it Chester, and while she and Gabriel foraged in the backyard for things to make him comfortable in his new home, I poked holes in the lid of a jar. We soaked a tiny square of sponge with water and gave him a few fish flakes. Then the children huddled around Chester in his jar, cooing and yelping with delight whenever he wiggled his antennae.

At one point Gabriel looked up at me and solemnly declared, "Mama, he's adorable. We love him."

And that is how our tormentor became a beloved pet. Isn't it funny how shifting your perspective can turn a story upside down? When Mike and I went in for what has turned out to be a triannual visit with a psychotherapist who works with children this past week, she talked about turning the kaleidoscope. Shifting your vision. Finding ways to approach a tense moment with children from an unexpected angle, and thus diffusing a fight-in-the-making. When you turn the lens, the whole view changes, and what had been escalating in a bad way can end in laughter or a brisk walk around the block.

Or you might come home from Ikea with a nightstand that looks deceptively simple to assemble (when will I learn?) and find yourself on hands and knees at 9:30 pm, having studied the pictures and taken apart and reassembled for a very long time, trying to breathe, trying to imagine why we ever went to Ikea in the first place...only to wake up in the morning with more cardboard beckoning to be creatively repurposed than you know what to do with.

So I cut out a couple of sharks and let the kids go at them. They entertained each other with wild stories about their sharks (rather bloody - see those red-rimmed gaping mouths?), mixed paint colors, found art supplies I had forgotten about, and ended up with a couple of truly fantastic big fish. We're planning on affixing them to sticks to make enormous puppets.  

And with the aid of some very deep breathing, I made it through the nightstand assembly and it looks very stately next to our bed, adorned now with Tina Fey's book, Super Sad True Love Story, and a book on the middle ages that I think I'm going to read but probably won't. Ah well. I'll enjoy its presence so close to my head - rather than see it as evidence of my failure to read enough.

So yes. We are finding pets amidst pests; sparkling sharks in the sad detritus of an Ikea ordeal! I only hope I can access this kaleidoscope vision as we move ahead into the fast-approaching, fast-paced school year.