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What’s the Big Idea?
It’s been a long time since the Shark Blanket Incident…
It all started so innocently. My five-year-old son was fascinated with sharks. He and I were browsing casually through the latest stack of library books about the noble beasties, when an illustration caught my eye. Oooooh, outlines of eighteen different shark species all drawn to 1/8″ scale! (My husband now flinches if I say “Ooooh” when looking at a book.)
The image of a quilt full of these sharks (all enlarged to 1″ scale) popped into my mind, fully formed. After that, it was just a matter of figuring out the means to the end. My recent acquaintance with fusible webbing and my then-insatiable appetite for new fabrics provided a rich soil into which the seed of this idea could drop. It all happened so quickly!
The next thing you know, I was greeting hubby at the door after work with the news that all he had to do was copy all the sharks onto the paper backing of my wonder-under. The payoff would be the rejoicing and education of our darling boy as he snuggled up to sleep under a sea full of his favorite creatures and effortlessly learned all their names while gazing gratefully at what would surely be his favorite object in the universe.
Bowing graciously to the inevitable, you-know-who was soon dutifully scaling up sharks at the rate of one every fifteen minutes or so. I’d iron ’em onto various colors of broadcloth and we’d slap ’em onto the deep blue sea in no time (well, not counting the three hours it took to draw them)! That was the plan anyway.
At 2:00 in the morning, after laboriously cutting out hammerheads, tiger sharks, great whites, nurse sharks and fourteen other species, and after peeling (little by little, in agonizingly small scraps and strips) the paper backing, we ironed the last shark (by this I mean the-last-shark-we-ever-wanted-to-see-again) into his place on the ocean background. ‘All’ I had to do the next day was whip up a pieced backing with the scraps, toss in the batting, tie about a hundred knots all over the blasted thing and hand sew the edging.
But after Saint Russell’s example of calm perseverance in the face of someone else’s bright idea, I could accept my tasks with grace.
It is not unusual for my ideas to be bigger than I am, and for Russ to perform heroic feats of bridging that gap. I like to think of this as part of the great ‘complimentarity of marriage’ that otherwise might just be empty theory. Memories of our shark quilt, our do-it-yourself reader’s theater, our experiment-with-thirty-Thai-recipes party, our 400-donut Fat Tuesday extravaganza, and many other moments when he helped make my dreams come true remind me that we are friends as well as partners in parenting and ministers of the Sacrament of Marriage.
I’m waiting for just the right moment to mention using pizza boxes, file folders and envelopes to sort dozens of pictures of plants and animals into kingdoms, phyla, classes, and species. I’ll let you know how it turns out!
Note: This article appeared originally in Canticle magazine. Since then, I have managed to finish educating all my ‘free range kids’ without ever sorting out the entire biosphere into pizza boxes. Sigh…still seems like a neat idea, though!
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