Life at the Chicken Coop

Parenting/Sewing 101

Sometimes when I'm working and stewing about a problem, I tend to link the project and the problem together. Let me illustrate. The other night, as I was working on this (see below) for her, I noticed the fabric that I had to pull and overexert myself to get in the right place tended to pucker and clump.

My thoughts naturally went to Lucy and how stubborn and unruly she's been lately. And I've been fighting it. Tooth and nail. It seems I'm always trying to coerce her into staying with me in public, or not scratch Miles, or keep her clothes on. And she is fully intent on doing exactly what I tell her not to do. At the end of the day, I'm exhausted, mentally and physically. I wonder if I'm doing all the wrong things with her, or if she's just going through this phase and nothing will work, or if I should just send her to a Swiss boarding school and let them work on her.

(I couldn't resist this outfit at the thrift store: $2 for a sweatsuit and a flood of memories from my Care-Bear-loving childhood)

Then, as I was taking out the stitches from the pieces I had to forcefully keep in place, I thought about Lucy and how coercing and forcing are not working. She's puckering. I'm feeling frazzled and at my wit's end. Sewing the pieces back in place, I was more gentle, acting merely as a guide for the cloth and the bobbing needle. It worked. The calendar turned out how I had hoped.

And I found my solution to raising this wiley Lucy. She has no idea how much she's strangling my pride.