As I work on this series of posts about cooking with toddlers, I've been thinking about cooking photography and the history of science and natural history. Do people select the most symmetric slice of cake to photograph? The most pleasantly irregular cobbler? What is most helpful - a field guide with a photo of a typical female cardinal sitting on a branch or meticulously painted images of that same female cardinal?
I've been reading Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison
and it's got me thinking about how we choose to represent an activity -
in this case - whether I choose to show the average toddler cooking
experience, the ideal, the exceptional, the outrageously messy, the
beautiful, etc....
One thing about cooking with toddlers-- flour will spill everywhere. Sweeping and wiping it up can be good fun if you can conjure up the right mindset.
I should say that I adore powders. I have made many drawings/installations in flour, sand, dust, and dry pigments-- sifted, scraped, poured and swept. I haven't made drawings like that in awhile, and looking at these photos of J and I cooking reminds me of how satisfying it is to work with powders. I love making chocolate cake. Mixing one white powder into another, trying to achieve invisible even-ness, then stirring in the cocoa until its evenly distributed--what could be better? Possibly, pools of oil and water and vinegar settling into the depressions. It reminds me of the "real" pretend cooking that my parents would let me do when I was in late elementary school, using the stove and everything. I would mix herbs and flour and water, sometimes oil and leftovers from the fridge. Some interesting (and not always pleasant smelling) concoctions came about this way.
Now that J is 2 years old, she is absorbing some of the significance of birthdays...My ongoing project is cultivating my own creative moments while spending time with my daughter. She is 2. She enjoys telling people what to do. I recently found an agreeable activity for this stage. We go for walks and take pictures. She's in the backpack, pointing and directing, and I take the pictures...
I've decided to transition to just one blog. I have been posting to two blogs, Marks and Sources, as a way to organize my thoughts a bit, but now I think it will make life simpler to have only one. I'd hate to lose all the images I posted to Marks so I'll be slowly moving them over to this blog, reconsidering the images, and writing alongside them...
Camouflage, snow drifts, and aural confusion
While making pizza one evening, my husband asked me if I had been sewing during J's nap. I said no, and he said, oh, it must have been the snow plow. Yes, we've had numerous plows going by this past month, and my sewing machine does make a rumbly sound. It seems to get louder and louder each day.
Sheryl Sandberg, Space Families
This morning I was helping my 2 year old get her boots on. She was holding an octopus puppet, gently hitting it, saying "no hitting." Like all young children, she was thinking through rules and social norms through play. What made this a remarkable conversation was what she said next: "no hitting girls." My husband and I looked at each other, stunned for a moment, asking one another with our eyes, "did you hear what I heard?" Where did she get this?
Tons of places, no doubt...
I find it really interesting that my 18 month old daughter was able to identify her dad and herself in this photograph. Yesterday morning my husband reported that she was picking out cat faces in the drawings they were making together. So this morning, when it was my turn to get up with her at the crack of dawn, I tried it out...
As the parent of a toddler, my floors call for several layers of removal. I sympathize with the weight they’ve accumulated...
All the leaves will fall off of our tree. I told J this today as we were in the backyard, looking at the leaves that are starting to fall. She gave me a very serious look and held leaf up above her head. ..
Hats, glasses and floodlights. My infant daughter's brain linked these three things together. Hats and glasses were synonymous for a few days, then glasses and floodlights. Its gotten me thinking about the delightful connections (or collisions) among disparate items, their names, categories and boundaries...