Last night Caleb came out into the living room carrying one of his small chairs.
M: Caleb, what are you doing?
C: Mommy, I want to show you how much I love you!
M: Ok…
C: (climbing up on the chair and reaching as high as he can) I love you this much!
M: Wow, that’s a lot! I love you too. How about we put the chair back now?
C: I love you all the way to the moon and back!
M: Well I love you all the way to the sun and back.
C: Mommy, we can’t go to the sun because it’s too hot and we’ll get burned.
Caleb has been bugging me for a little while now to teach him to sew. On the surface, this is adorable, and oh golly gee, he wants to spend more time with Mommy! And wow, he wants to learn about what Mommy is doing! But when you really think about it, the 4-year-old kamikaze approach to life is not what I would call well-suited to the sewing room.
I’ve been working so hard on getting things ready for the Etsy store and other projects that I feel like I’ve been neglecting my mother/son bonding time. So this weekend I relented.
Our first project together was this little stuffed felt heart. I had to prop up the pedal so he could reach it. Originally I thought he could sit on my lap and I could control the pedal, but I think getting to use the pedal was part of the appeal of sewing! He had an amazing amount of control over the pedal, though. You know, at age 4, those synapses are still building their neural pathways…when I said “stop” he would keep going for a few more stitches…but he never went fast enough that I got scared he would sew through his finger (One of my biggest fears in teaching a new person to sew). And he seemed like he really, legitimately wanted to learn to sew, which is more than I can say for other people who have asked me for lessons. I showed him how to leave a hole open on the edge and flip the heart inside out, how to stuff it and how to stitch it closed.
In hindsight I should have attached a little loop of ribbon to it and called it an ornament, but I didn’t. It’s a little bit of a funny shape and so the 4-year-old boy that he is decided it was a boomerang! He took it to school today so I’m sure to never see it again – hence the quickie cellphone picture. At least I have something to treasure. Of course, he was not happy about the picture either…
