Christmas family picture outtakes

Which one would YOU put on YOUR Christmas card?

Overheard in my kitchen

Henry, to James, at the breakfast table, while I was out of the room: "Are a lot of the people you love in Bloomington?"

Buddhism for beginners

We had a busy--too busy--pre-Thanksgiving Wednesday, visiting Lesley and Paul, then the Gleesons, then Mom's, so it was no surprise that by the time we were driving away from Ballantine Road at dusk, Henry was cracking up. Still, the actual breakdown happened in an unexpected way.
"Mama!" he called excitedly from his car seat . "I saw two fawns!"
"Oh!" I said. I need to mention that Henry's car seat still faces backwards, so we don't really have the same view when I'm driving.
"Did you see them?" he asked.
"No, I didn't, but---" He correctly read this as the introduction to a little maternal soft-soaping, and immediately lost his shit.
"Turn around!" he shrieked. "Turn around! Turn around right now! Mommy, turn around!!" We'd driven another three or four blocks and he was already stopping between "turn" and "around" to suck his breath in hysterically.
I murmured pointless, placating things for a few more blocks. By then he was full-on screaming. "Turn around! Turn around!! My penis hurts! I have to pee! Stop this car!!!" We were half a mile from home, and I told him I was going to keep driving.
"No! No! No! Turn around! Mom-MEEEEE! I can't stop something unintelligible."
"What did you say?" I asked. "You can't stop shivering?" This seemed likely, because of his near-hysteria.
"NO!" he roared, repeating his cri de coeur. I still didn't get it. Once more, he mustered all his passion and will to make me understand.
"I (gasp) can't (gasp) stop (gasp) suffering!"
Oh, my love.

November doings

We harvested the first and the last of our carrots. They tasted wonderful.

I made hats.

James built a poppin' hole for two.

The boys dressed themselves.

Henry wondered whether if we scanned herbs from the garden,
the computer would smell good. 

Sweets

This morning, I left the boys to play together while I cleaned the bathroom. When I came back into the kitchen, James was about to spade into the end of a pint of ice cream, and Henry had disappeared, although the chair in front of the open freezer door revealed more, perhaps, than he realized. When I took the ice cream away from James, he burst into noisy tears, which brought Henry out of hiding in the bedroom.
"Why is James sad?" he asked, with a conscious look.
I offered to hold James, to console him. He shook his head and said, "No!" Then he climbed down from his chair, sobbing, and staggered, sobbing, over to Henry, butting his head gently into Henry's chest, wrapping his arms around his waist. Henry bent down and, with exaggerated tenderness, put his arms around James too, patting his back. After a few moments, he looked up at me and said, in a tone of delighted wonderment, "He wanted ME!"

Fright night

Last Halloween, our next door neighbor was shot in the leg by a maniac while she was walking her dog. This year, the festivities were much tamer. Henry has been on tenterhooks for days, although he had no intention of wearing a costume or going trick-or-treating. In the end, he walked along with me to three neighbors' houses and hid in the bushes while James and I got enough treats to share. He had a thoroughly grand time back home, though, plopping fistfuls of candy into other kids' bags. James, too: He wasn't allowed to disburse candy but he stomped around the porch in his jack-o'lantern vest, doubling over and crowing in delight at the hubbub.

Boo!

Peter picked a pumpkin costume for James, on account of his
proprietary interest in  the runt pumpkins we are growing in the yard.

Mom came over this morning dressed as a ghost. She got exorcised. 

Meanwhile, I am experiencing yet another flare-up of anxiety, my old familiar goblin.

A spot of archaeology

"Mommy, Mommy, do you want to see?" called Henry this morning from the front porch.
I came to see.
He and James opened up a shoe box and unpacked a dead barberry branch.
"It's a dinosaur mouth bone!"
"Wow!" I said.
A minute later, I was summoned again to see.
"What is it?"
"Look!" Henry said. "I was digging in the dirt and found this little baby!"

The exhibits

It must be fall

Apples...

and pumpkins.

Auntie time

Ticka, ticka, ticka

Airplane!

Auntie!

Eye of the beholder

Henry called me out to the front porch, where he was watching a neighbor working on his car. The trunk was open and the hood was up.
"Look!" said Henry. "It's a butterfly car!"
And a few minutes later: "It closed its wings and flew away."

A barrow full of boys

Off to the park...

...to look at the train.

Sometimes I worry about this

One recent night, while Henry was having an unscheduled bath, James stood at the coffee table in the living room, building buildings out of blocks. He would build one to his satisfaction, then cover it with a piece of purple felt that's been knocking around the house for the last month or so, and, after a moment, snatch the felt away with a flourish, crowing with delight at the surprise underneath--over and over again. I was in the kitchen, washing dishes.

Without a doubt, Henry and James play differently--and better--when I am not around. The difference is even more striking when they are playing together.

If I am sitting in the room with them, or am visibly watching them, Henry is far more likely to snatch things away from James, push James down, or lie down obstructively in the path of wherever James is trying to go. James, in turn, is unlikely to go longer than five minutes without coming over to tug at my shirt, asking to nurse. Or, these days, to bite me. But if I disappear, productive collaborations are likely.

This morning, they did a spot of cooperative brick-laying, as well as a considerable amount of shoving long thin things into tubes and bottles. For at least 45 minutes, they worked together outside, while I peeked at them through the window from time to time, and listened. Then they came inside to make yogurt out of blocks--together--in an old yogurt-maker. The only hitch came about when they came to find me and offered a cup of yogurt. I dropped it, shattering the glass.

"I'M careful with glass," Henry said. "I'm a big boy." And a few minutes later, more sympathetically, "I know how you feel when stuff breaks."

I know this is good. In keeping with all my demographics, I am (mostly) on board with Free Range parenting. I want my children to have private lives, I want them to develop relationships with each other and the rest of the world that are unmediated by me. I am all for intrinsic motivation, learning through play, and NOT playing with my children except when it's actually fun for me.

However. Quite apart from the fact that this idyll is always in danger of being interrupted by a sudden and ferocious physical attack that I will be unable to prevent, or that it may result in permanent damage to our propertly, collaboratively (and silently) inflicted, there is a something that niggles at me: THEY are doing what they are supposed to be doing, but while they are doing it so beautifully, so usefully, so busily, what is it that I am supposed to be doing?

Speculative fiction by Henry

What if we found a baby dinosaur?
What if the dinosaur was very, very gentle?
What if I petted it?
What if it lived in our house and tickled me?
What if the baby dinosaur grew up to be a mama dinosaur?
What if somebody found out we had a dinosaur?
What if somebody wanted to take our dinosaur to a museum?
What if our dinosaur got into a rocket ship and flew to outer space?
What if an astronaut looked out of the window and saw the dinosaur?
What if he looked out of the window and saw a big dinosaur BONE?

Remember this

We are having such a nice morning. I'm sure it won't last. But I have cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom (well, almost), the house is redolent of rosemary & lavender, Henry helped fold laundry ("I'm a big boy, so I know how to fold things!) and is now single-mindedly constructing a folly of a garage for a Hot Wheel car out of blocks, and James is drawing with colored pencils on beetle-sized bits of paper he tore up.

Last week's iteration.

Last night we were all lolling together before bed and James plunged toward Henry saying "Mmmmmm"--his idea of a kiss. They grappled for a moment. Then Henry sat up and said, "I guess James wanted to pour his love into me."

Some days I don't really enjoy my life much until everyone is asleep, so I want to remember this.

This is for you, Ray Canoy

Police Boy

And Fire Baby

The goddamn wine

Today was dividing-up-the-wine day. The house has been sold, Julia's moving, the china cupboard that once crossed half a country in a covered wagon is coming to live with me, and now I have picked 17 bottles of Dad's wine, my communion supply for the rest of my life. Is it wonderful or horrid, to have this tangible, intimate, but fragile and finite legacy? I certainly don't love wine as Dad did; I wish my legacy were a letter instead, some words, clear and explanatory, meant just for me. I would trade all the half-bottles of Chateau d'Yquem in the world for that letter.

But Dad & I shared our best words over wine. I wish it weren't so, but it was. I needed to be the littlest bit drunk to unlock my tongue with him, and wine unlocked him too. I remember talking one night long past dinner about wine and wool and terroir, the quilts of Gee's Bend and the aesthetics of authenticity. I remember him telling me once, in tears, some while before Henry was born, how much he wished his mother had lived to know him as a full-grown man. We drank champagne on his father's 100th birthday. We tried out variation after variation on rum punch, trying to recreate the cocktail that was a la mode in November of 2000 in Paris, where we spent a month together, eating and drinking our way around the neighborhood restaurants. Most often, whatever we talked about, we seemed to me to be using a code of indirection; I imagined us as miners, pointing our (wine-burning) headlamps not at each other's faces, but at the same vein of ore in the rock, each knowing the other was seeing it too.

So a letter, telling all, would have been entirely uncharacteristic of our relationship. Wine is a much more fitting patrimony. Dad's wine was memory: this wine he had drunk on that occasion, with this person. He bought wine to drink with his grandchildren when they grew up. Dad knew, far better than I did, which wines I had drunk before and liked, which wines I would like that I hadn't yet drunk. His remembering, and paying attention, was like--or was?--love.. Without Dad's thoughts behind it, without Dad to talk to while drinking it, without Dad to invest it with meaning, without Dad to tell me which is good, which is valuable, I don't know what to make of the wine by itself. It just IS. 

The real man behind the curtain

This morning, Henry was wrapping himself up in the bedroom curtain, in a variation of Strange Bumps.
"Who is in here?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "All I see is a big bump in the curtain."
His head popped out. "It's Magic Henry!" he said. Then his whole self popped out. "It's Richard of Oz!"

Gender trouble

Henry fell asleep before 7 last night (an exciting development!) and woke up this morning at the usual time just bubbling over with piss and vinegar.
"I had an imagination, Mama," he said, "that we went in a limousine to a restaurant and upstairs was Go, Dog, Go, and downstairs was a kitchen and men made the food and you served it to us. Men make food, you know. Some men do, and some women do."
"Yes," I cautiously agreed.
"I like men," he said. "If they have round heads and short hair."
"Ah," I said.
"I don't like most women," he said. "I just want to be next to you." A pause. "I like Karen (whose office at the Banneker Center was full of toys and sympathy) But Karen moved to a different city."
"Do you like women if they have round heads and short hair?"
"No, I like women's hair to hang down." He gestured to his shoulders.
I remember very well the physical aversion I felt toward my friends' fathers when I was small child, I suppose because I was in love with my own. Some of them even had -- shudder-- moustaches. And it was just the day before yesterday that Henry told me he was married to me. So I suppose we are going through a stage.
Still, I was curious about his views: were they purely Oedipal, or was there something else? "Do women tell you what to do too much?" I asked.
"Oh no," he said, surprised I was asking. "Women don't talk to people. They just talk to grown-ups."

Henry reports on the weekend

Some things we did:

Jump!
Eat chocolate!
Eating breakfast. Go to friends' houses. Digging.
James worked with drawers with me. I drilled. I sanded them. Tumbling.
Drank a tremendous bump of milk.
I'll do some sawing now, then I'll talk.

Oma & Opa's visit, part 2

Oma and Opa's visit, part 1

Stealing Oma & Opa's berries=JOY! 

Cri de coeur

Pillow talk tonight.

Henry: What would a mouse say if another mouse cut down a tree and it fell on him and he was dead?
Peter: He wouldn't say anything. He'd be dead.
Henry: I know; I'm just pretending.
Peter: OK, what?
Henry: He'd say "Darn it! What happened to me?"

Sleep Dog Sleep

All other things being equal, Go Dog Go, a formidably faithful adaptation for the stage of P.D. Eastman's 1961 early reader classic, would not--I admit it--be my first-choice play to see after going four-plus years without setting foot in a theater. But Oma and Opa are here visiting and we were looking for something to do with them in the evening, and Henry seemed as if he might be old enough to sit still for an hour, so there we were. And watching Henry being transported by the magic and wonder of it, laughing, leaning forward breathlessly in his seat, hiding his face in Peter's shoulder when it got just too good to bear (when the dogs used tools) was certainly worth the price of admission.

He tried to sneak out of the restaurant where we went for dinner afterwards to go back to Go Dog Go; he asked for Henry & Mudge, a book about a boy and his dog, before bed; and he fell asleep in a dog house of his own creation.

In the dog house.

House speaker

One of Henry's favorite conversational gambits for several months now is to ask, of any random thing, "what do you think X is saying?" ("What do you think that cat is saying? What do you think that truck is saying? What do you think the bed is saying?") We like to imagine that he is working on expanding his powers of empathy, although it often feels to me as if he is instead intent on forcing me to confront how utterly pedestrian my own imagination is. ("Meow. Here I come down the street. Get into me and close your eyes!")

Tonight at dinner we were running through a series of these questions. We got to "What do you think the rooms of our house are saying?"
"I don't know," I said. "What do YOU think they are saying?"
"Don't let any mosquitos come into me."
And next: "What do you think the sink is saying?"
"I don't know. What do you think?"
"Rub-a-dub-dub, what can I scrub?"

Touch-a-Truck

James & Reuven rode the WorkHorse.

This truck appeared to be on the scene for actual fire prevention purposes, but anyway, we touched it.

Henry was too shy and too dazzled to actually approach any of the trucks, and there were some doozies: fire truck, ambulance, garbage truck, cherry picker... Here, he sits in the same field as the helicopter, with his back to it, looking over his shoulder. I think the motive here is akin to that which dictates that one never look directly at the sun. The magnificence is too great; it may burn you. James isn't looking either, of course, but that's because he was woofing to a rabbit.

Three-year-olds, I tell you

Henry was out of sorts from the moment he woke up this morning, announcing that he didn't like this day, that he didn't want to go to camp, that he wanted to "break the whole camp," and noooooOOO he did NOT want to go after lunch to Touch-a-Truck, the event of the season for Bloomington preschoolers. I told him to go get dressed while I changed James's diaper. Instead, he went and hid under the quilt on my bed, a favorite game inspired by a favorite literary work, Owl at Home. It's quite straightforward. It's called Strange Bumps.
"What's that strange bump?" I asked. (That's the game.)
He began giggling. I hauled him out, turned him upside down and pulled his pants off. He guffawed.
"Wait, what's that?" I asked. "On your butt?"*
"What?"
"You have a tail!" I said, pulling a four-inch long piece of string from between his buttocks.
He did a dance of delight, whooping.
"I changed my mind," he said when he settled down. "I do love this day. This is a GREAT day!"
"Yes, a day can always get better," I said, moralistically.

*I can't help noting that even now, at 40, I feel dreadfully transgressive when I use the word butt, thanks to my mother's indoctrination. "Fuck" was OK in a pinch, but "butt" and "armpit" were never to be uttered.

Hello, I must be going

In brief, while I've been gone:

James turned 18 months old. The doctor continues to use the same old line ("the only thing he's slow at is getting teeth") about the same four chompers he's had for months now. His height remains average, while his weight is now hovering around the third percentile, and his head falls between the 50th and 75th percentile. He says 'nana (banana), mama & dada, nose (nuh), milk (muh), eye, ear, hair, tickle (tka), digger (dih) woof woof, meow, and vroom vroom. 

I turned my back on him for 30 seconds and found him at the counter, sneaking chicken livers.

Not quite getting the hang of finger-painting.

Although he looks blase here, James is quite the lover, always ready for a kiss and a tickle.

Peter's been schooling Henry at home. 

Henry started a 3-week Montessori summer camp yesterday. Drop-off yesterday was the first time he's ever been left without either me, Peter, Virginia, or my mom, and boy, did he ever not like it. After I unpeeled him from my legs and left, near tears myself, I heard him hurling himself against the door. Later, I learned from both the teachers and from himself, he hid under the furniture and "peed all over the building" (Henry's words). Once that was over, however, he settled down all right, and today our parting was perfectly undramatic. On the one hand, it's lovely to have a tete-a-tete with James in the morning, but on the other hand, three weeks seems like a long time to have Henry gone for four hours every day. I miss him. 

After camp today, a two-hour nap.

Both boys have thoroughly enjoyed our mulberry tree this spring.