The healing journey of a widowed, unschooling badass in Delaware.
Our learning lifestyle found a fun sync when my younger son’s Fun-A-Day build matched with a Bitsbox project.
After completing this alien abduction scene, he started on a new coding program and one of the games he had to create was called Mars Needs Milk.
I love that learning has no boundaries, bells, time limits, or compartmentalized subjects here. We learn in every season and in everything we do.
I’m a sap. We saw Thor: Love and Thunder today and I cried…a lot.
Somewhat necessarily, Marvel is killing off more and more of their earliest on-screen heroes and the survivors are dealing with grief. Avengers: Endgame and WandaVision used grief as a central motivation for key characters and the latest Thor installment carries on Marvel’s skillful handling of this emotion.
By “skillful,” I mean “fucking triggering.” The Marvel Cinematic Universe(MCU) was born in 2008. Mary and I were newlyweds a year out from becoming parents. I wasn’t a huge Iron Man fan as a kid, but we both loved movies and it looked like there would finally be a great super hero movie that wasn’t another Spider-Man (okay, we liked the X-Men flicks too).
Not long after, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor hit the big screen and Mary found her favorite super hero. We had two babies by then and had to wait for the DVD release. Date nights were rare and we watched most of the MCU from our couch.
Eleven years later and Thor is in the theaters again. Our sons are huge fans and my girlfriend joined us for a matinee.
I won’t spoil anything, but there was a lot of loss throughout the film. This fictional world still has a strong connection to Mary and my fears regarding death.
My body didn’t feel right after an active weekend and my head was swirling with a resurrected grief. I was drained and not ready to create, or do anything, for that matter.
I pushed myself to the Lego table to try to focus on something simple. Lego is the oldest therapy I know and just the sound of pieces being moved around takes me back to a carefree time.
Spaceships are a comfort build as all my sets as a kid were space themed. They are also a mental torture as so many have been made by Lego, fans, and myself.
The balance of challenge and familiarity worked. I put my hands to use and found calm in creating.
My girlfriend and I can be kind of gross, in a sweet, synchronous way. She is also participating in Delaware Fun-A-Day and we were independently inspired to create toadstool homes.
She drew while I built and we kept our creations secret until they were almost finished.
I was struggling with whether to have a resident or not when I got to see her drawing.
Her spider visitor gave me the idea to add some creatures.
Frog is very shy, can you find him?
A homeschool mom joined the kids in having fun and built a costume party with an unlucky baby as the featured guest.
Steampunk is a favorite theme that is hard to explore without the right palette.
Classic ship elements like the sextant, spyglass, and pirate wheel (although used in an unusual way here with the single rotor), complement the brown shades of this amateur aviator’s craft.
My older son assisted our resident mythmaster in creating Medusa’s cave and an unfortunate adventurer.
I particularly appreciate the stone figures with various missing limbs and the detail of her latest victim starting to turn to stone.
My younger son partnered with a friend to build after I proposed an adaptation of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
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They researched how to make waves out of Lego and learned a new technique to create the curved shape of a wave.
Once the centerpiece was complete, they added a beach with animals, texture, and a sand castle.
I love fun. Spinning tops are simple toys and not the kind of thing one would expect at an art show.
Our mythology enthusiast struck again with a sassy Apollo leading the sun across the sky.
An impromptu fire provided the perfect backdrop.
It was an exciting day of building. Four different creators worked independently and together on amazing projects.
One young lady was inspired by Greek mythology to recreate Pandora’s Box.
I helped with a couple engineering problems, but she brought all the creativity and focus.
