As our last summer hurrah, we all took a family vacation to Maui just like we used to do when I was young. It was a trip with all four generations!
I challenged myself to cast on a project on the plane and see how far I could get during our vacation. I didn’t have very much knitting time except on the plane while the kids slept, but I made some pretty good progress on my Sunflower Socks by Charlotte Stone.
Almost done with one sock — over a week of distracted work!
The trip was amazing. We swam with the kids in the ocean or the pools, and sat by the kids’ area to read or talk while Michael ran around. Jake and my dad swam with Michael a lot, helping him strengthen his swimming skills. I took care of Beatrice with my mom and grandparents and great aunt.
Michael had such a great time. He made friends immediately and played in the play structure with them for hours. He loved all the time outside: he was often down by the pool from sunrise to close to sunset. I don’t know how he kept going without collapsing from exhaustion: he never stopped moving unless we forced him to sit and eat or drink.
We took a drive to the Iao Valley and did a short hike to the Maui landmarks. I loved walking through lush tropical forest by the rushing river. If we go back, I’ll hoping we get to do more hiking. The scenery is breathtaking.
We also visited some restaurants we used to go to whenever we visited during my childhood. The food was amazing — I had some form of a poke bowl every day, which was one of the highlights of the vacation for me.
I also got to go snorkeling with my dad, and play with Michael in the ocean. Snorkeling is one of my favorite things to do: I could stare at the gorgeous coral reef and all the beautiful tropical fish all day. I love diving down as far as I can and looking up at the sparkling water high above me.
My parents watched the kids one evening so Jake and I could have a date night. We had a lovely dinner and walk on the beach, and finished with a cocktail and dip in the hot tub. It was so beautiful and relaxing. I won’t lie — it was the best part of the entire vacation for me. We were both so grateful to have a few hours without the kids to enjoy the scenery ourselves.
As lovely as the vacation was, there were several bittersweet parts to it. We were acutely aware of the absence of our deceased family members who had been here with us before. Many small things popped up throughout the trip and reminded us of them: a sadness I cherished because of the memories it came from.
Lahaina is still rebuilding after the fire last year that decimated so much of the island’s life and history. I only have a cursory grief, born of my few visits and childhood memories playing along the streets of Lahaina and visiting the Banyon Tree. It’s nothing compared to the grief and loss of those who called it home. I was glad to support local businesses in the little ways I could. When in doubt, if you have the means, Maui Food Bank is a wonderful place to donate.
There was a living piece of the Banyon Tree in our hotel’s lobby. I snapped this picture of Michael standing in front of it, to mirror the pictures we have of me growing up beside it.
Vacations with the very young are always interesting: as friends of mine have said, it’s just your daily parenting duties in a different, pretty (and not baby-proofed) location. It’s often equal parts exhausting and enjoyable. Now that we’re back, I’m tackling the dusting and the meal planning and the laundry (so much laundry) and easing into the slower autumn season.
It was a glorious trip that I’m grateful for and adored, but at the end of the day, this homebody hobbit is glad to be back in her little cottage.
September has arrived and brought a few more 100+ degree days with it. But in our air-conditioned house with the fans going, I’m still pretending autumn is here.
We had a close call accompanying the hot weather. Near the side of our house, we had a few piles of grass clippings and yard waste — not quite a real compost pile. However, with the heat and the decomposition in the piles, the conditions were just right for spontaneous combustion and a grass fire began.
Thankfully my dad smelled the smoke and found it before the fire got too big. I’m grateful for God’s provision and our guardian angels’ protection. Needless to say, from now on we will be raking flat all piles of yard waste and keeping them far away from the side of the house. We also had a power outage and another fire scare on the property, plus I’m fighting another cold. So it’s been an eventful September!
Beatrice is six months old — I can barely believe it. She’s crawling everywhere, sitting up on her own, and getting into everything she can. She also managed to pull herself upright briefly on the couch a few days ago before promptly falling over, and then a few days later pulled herself up on her crib bars and stood there triumphantly for quite some time. I’m afraid we may have an early walker.
Her teeth still haven’t popped through, though the drool and chewing and fussiness is still intense. She babbles “mamamama” all the time, and is definitely continuing to find her voice. She loves to sing along with people, especially in church. Her grins are contagious, and despite the fussiness she is one of the most joyful babies I’ve ever encountered.
No one can make her laugh harder than her big brother. She always wants to do what he is doing: playing with his toys, crawling after him, watching him run around. He puts up with it very well, and loves his baby sister (even if he has a hard time sharing with her).
Michael recently got a haircut and looks so much older: less like a toddler and more like a little boy. It makes his cowlicks much easier to manage, but seeing him look so grown up makes my heart so full it hurts. His new favorite pastime is playing with “magic sand” with his dump trucks and toy animals.
On Labor Day, we (aptly) labored through canning or prepping for freezing 4 buckets of tomatoes. Michael and Beatrice had a lot of fun playing with their great-grandma as I helped in the kitchen. It’s a lot of work, but well worth it. Having fresh tasting canned tomatoes throughout the winter is such a gift.
We also had some dear friends stop by for a quick overnight trip — a short but sweet evening.
We had a few temperate days, which meant we could have a picnic dinner (much to Michael’s delight). We get some nice shade in our front yard after 4 pm, and a soft breeze usually picks up and dispels the worst of the heat. We love our tiny patch of scavenged grass for picnics and general barefoot revelry.
Our tomatoes and lunchbox peppers are thriving well enough. Our zucchini and yellow squash are both struggling due to squash bugs, despite my attempts to vanquish them with neem oil and a spade. Jake set up an automatic watering system which has kept my garden limping along. I’m grateful, because I don’t have the energy to pour much time or effort into it. I’m embracing being a chaos gardener in this season of life, and I’m grateful for every misshapen tomato and pepper I get.
In the midst of the chaos I’m still working on several little projects. I finished my “Little Women” socks, which fit perfectly. Another pair of socks for Jake are on my needles, as well as some baby bonnets for friends of mine who are expecting. I’m also planning on casting on the kids’ Christmas sweaters soon so I can finish them by December.
I’m slowly piecing my next quilt, and realizing I don’t enjoy the quilting process as much as I enjoy having a quilt. The precision and focus needed to cut the fabric is exhausting. Piecing is fun and so is handquilting, but what I really enjoy is snuggling under a handmade quilt while napping or reading. It’s a coziness like no other.
I chip away at both reading and writing whenever I get the chance. Contact naps and broken sleep have given me more chances than usual, so I’ve been able to add about 300 words a day to my fiction project and continue to stay on track for my Goodreads challenge of reading 50 books this year.
With the emergence of crawling/pulling up we’ve had some very rough sleep regressions. Between Michael and Beatrice, we wake up about 3-6 times per night, sometimes for more than an hour at a time. So it’s been difficult for us with sleep deprivation, baby fussiness, toddler tantrums, and generalized life busyness. Mothers of more than two children, I salute you. I don’t know how you do it.
I’m accepting there are seasons of surviving, and that’s okay. I am told there will be seasons of thriving in the future. I’ve been so grateful for art in this season of life: both the art I create and the art I enjoy. Music, watercolor, reading, textile arts — all have been life-giving in some pretty difficult times. Making art is an act of subcreation, a uniquely human act.
Because of my gratitude for art, I’ve been thinking a lot about making and the place it holds in my life and in the culture. And the more I think about art and humanity, the more staunchly I loathe generative AI.
Recently there’s been a lot of uproar in the online writers’ circles regarding generative AI. Those of you who knew me as a high schooler probably know I was obsessed with NaNoWriMo: a nonprofit organization that encouraged writers to write 50k in 30 days. I wrote (and finished/won) several novels over my ten years of participation. About week ago, NaNoWriMo put out a statement condoning the use of generative AI while calling those who speak out against AI’s use in the arts as ableist and classist (something so ridiculous I won’t even address it, given there are plenty of outraged disabled authors doing a great job refuting this already). They had already fumbled some pretty serious things last year as an organization — but this new statement shows a fundamental, fatal disconnect in both their view of intellectual property and the relationship between art and humanity.
So I’m disappointed and upset, deactivating my NaNo account, and doing a lot of ruminating on art and machines.
There are some things that machines can do to help artists: for instance, I’m grateful for spellcheck and word processors. I’m grateful for YouTube tutorials and Pinterest inspiration as teaching materials. But generative AI is a different story. These LLMs are able to churn out something that looks like art, but only because they have been trained on terabytes of human artists’ images (without the artists’ consent). The same goes for the paragraphs they spit out: trained on words that authors have written, and without consent for this use case.
An author I appreciate wrote a letter to the Writers Guild of America on this very topic: you can find it here.
AI training seems like a thorny situation from the outside, but I urge you to distill the matter to its essential form and take action. Ask who is truly benefiting from this technology in this format. Are we really making work easier and content better through sophisticated Madlibs filled in with other people’s work? No, AI is the guy at the party who sounds clever as he repeats phrases he read online without synthesizing the information in the slightest.
Maggie Stiefvater
Passively accepting generative AI into the creative process is dangerous. Our society already treats art as though they’re entitled to it. To cheapen art to mere machine-created content is to damn it. AI cannot make, it can only mimic. But if mimicries make money, they’ll soon take the place of real human artists. Culture will suffer. The quality of the art that comforts you during difficult times will suffer. The artists, musicians, and novelists who are replaced by cheap imitations will suffer.
All that to say: think before burning resources by using yet another LLM for an artistic endeavor. See if you can barter with or pay a real human with real original ideas for what you want instead. Or better yet, expand your skillset and your soul by learning to do it yourself.
Maybe sleep deprivation is turning me into a grumpy Luddite. But I’d rather be a grumpy Luddite than live in a world where art is done by machines and taxes are done by humans.
five acres four generations 