Welcome back everyone!! Today is a very sacred day. It is officially my youngest nieces birthday and for some reason I’m feeling it a lot more than when the eldest turned five. Maybe because there’s no little one coming up behind her. Maybe it’s because she told me that I’m not allowed to call her my sweet baby anymore since she’s not a baby. In any case, all I want to do is wrap her in my arms and squeeze her forever so she can’t grow anymore even though I know, logically, she’s only going to get more fun to hang out with as she gets older.
We had her birthday party on Easter weekend and Ash went full party mode for this one. There was cake and cupcakes and rice krispie treats and more sugar than ten kids should probably have in a year but they all had a blast. When you talk about mom’s who do it all, Ash is one of them. We were up until 1:30 in the morning organizing decorations and Easter egg hunts only to be yanked out of bed at 6:30 by two super excited kids who’d had five more hours of sleep than we had. I don’t know how mom’s do this on a consistent basis. On Monday night when I got home, I was in bed by 9:30 and knocked out just past 10.
(Paige looks like she's being sassy but really she has cheeks full of jelly belly's)
I also love how kids wake up in the morning with the assumption that adults got just as much rest as they did and should be equally raring to go. I don’t remember just when I stopped waking up at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons but I do remember when my parents started waking me up on Saturday mornings to do chores. You know, even with years of practice that habit never stuck. I still hate doing chores and totally maintain the position that weekends are for sleeping in.
I also finally got to do something that I’ve been telling you all I was going to do for ages. My cousin, who had volunteered to help me model my Nurtured sweater and Party Top came with us to Ottawa for Paige’s birthday and since Monday was a gorgeous day, we took both sweaters to the park and took some super pretty pictures. My cousin is one of the sweetest kids I know and pretty much the reason I know that I have a lot to look forward to when Mila and Paige hit their teens. We don’t actually talk often, we prefer to communicate largely by sending each other daily Instagram posts of cute animals and lately, very frequently, she’ll send me posts about things I like to talk to her about like body positivity, self-care, and social injustices. I love it so much. It’s that recognition that she really does hear the things we talk about. That she processes them in her own way and finds the reinforcements of these ideas out in the world.
I tell her frequently that I rely on her to help us change the world because I can’t always rely on my gen to be the change we need. I look at a lot of my cousins who are closer to my age group and, largely, I see the ways that they just propagate the same ways of thinking that we inherited from generations previous who didn’t have access to nearly as much information as we do. In Aaliyah, I really do see hope for a brighter future though. I’ve been around her her whole life and she’s hitting a milestone birthday of her own pretty soon. I definitely have the feels about that too but I’m also super excited to see what she makes of the future ahead of her.
Before I go, there is something else I definitely wanted to talk about. April 24thmarks another day in history. Today is the six year anniversary of the Rana Plaza building collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,134 people – more than half of whom were women - and became the single deadliest structural failure in modern times and the deadliest garment factory accident in history. This horrible tragedy was one of the largest motivating forces in making me question the way that my clothes were made and how I was complicit in this tragedy as a result of the choices that I make about where and how I spend my money.
The second motivating force was watching The True Cost, a documentary about fast fashion which clearly outlined the way that people in third world countries have been exploited by a multi billion dollar industry that has the means and the political power to do better. Particularly, it was Kate Ball-Young the former sourcing manager for Joe Fresh saying that it doesn’t bother her that people are working in factories in horrible circumstances because there are a lot worse things that they can be doing for a living that made sure that I never bought anything from Joe Fresh, Forever 21, Zara, H&M and their kin ever again. While it is probably true that these workers could be doing worse it is more relevant that they could be doing better.
I’m thinking of these things a lot this week because this is fashion revolution week which calls for greater transparency, sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry. If you want to learn more about this movement please visit www.fashionrevolution.org and take a look at the impact that they have had and ask yourself who made your clothes?
That’s it for me for this week! For those in the GTA I hope that I get a chance to see you this weekend. Come say hi! Bring your RSBSY WIP’s and FO’s! We want to see what you’ve made. Until we speak again, PEACE to you and yours and as always, happy knitting.
