Clear your schedule

M and I are not working on the weekends right now and this is a great arrangement, and I will keep to it as long as we can. Saturdays are lazy. Kung fu class for Marko, but we skipped horseriding for Laurel because she's going to do several hours of Girl Scout cookie sales tomorrow and it's 100% ok to say let's just rest. For her, I think rest is more about not seeing other people, driving or getting out of her bathrobe, rather than actual rest. She did take her bathrobe off to go running with M and they were gone a long time. She ran almost 3 and a half miles, which was 2 and a half miles longer than M said they were going to do (so help me if I have another ultra marathoner on my hands here).

Today I got to talk on the phone with a friend who just had a baby. I miss holding babies. Where did all the babies go? She's very far away, so it's doubtful that I'll actually get to meet this little peanut while he's in the squishy newborn phase, but it was nice to hear his cooing over the phone. And to hear her voice and her birth story and all that. Call your friends on the phone, people. Old fashioned, but it feels so good.

Max fell asleep in my arms while we all watched the Great British Baking Show after dinner. Everyone was kind of shoving each other as we nestled into the couch, but eventually we all settled in to each other. It was biscuit week, ending with a gingerbread showcase (M's favorite cookie).

I got the notion that we need to clear our schedule a bit. This is why I like to keep a paper calendar, because it's a visual reminder if you start committing to to much. I also happened to read this past week, from two different sources, something about the benefit of going deeper, not wider. Read the books you have, finish the projects you started, explore the place where you live, that sort of thing.

Snapshot

Today I woke up at 5:55, got Laurel up, and we went on a walk in freshly fallen snow. We didn't say much. She threw a lot of snow into any puddle or stream we passed. Sometimes she reached out to hold my hand.  I try to remember what it was like to be 9, but I can only think of my 4th grade teacher Mr. Antczak yelling. And the clear pink plastic frames of my first prescription glasses. Watching ants cross our sidewalk during summer vacation and my mother's navy pinstripe nurses uniform. I don't remember anything about my feelings.

It was dark and quiet when we set out, but the sun and birds soon joined us. It was the most peaceful hour I've spent with Laurel in a long time.

I worked with my uncle and aunt at their restaurant for a while today. I've been cooking at lunchtime a few days a week. Burgers, chili, steak salads, that sort of thing. This week, there were 2 catered wakes. Today, the place looked festive, with balloons and cookie trays. The mourners laughed and chatted and slowly filtered through the buffet lines. It felt celebratory. My mother watches Max while I work, or sometimes Marlene comes over to our house and looks after him.

There are two enormous, muddy trenches in my basement. What started out as a small fix for a broken laundry tub pipe has turned into an excavation. Today the snow melted into the basement before the plumbers got all the new pipes hooked up and it's quite a mess. They still have some things to do, need to get it inspected and pour concrete before it'll all be done. The replaced pipes were the originals from 1925, so I guess we ought to be grateful for their 90 years of service. But still, I'm left with the question of why do we bury our pipes like that? Makes it so hard to see the cracks and to fix them when they inevitably break. Seems crazy to me. The mud is driving me crazy, but it'll all be gone and re-concealed by smooth concrete within a week. When something is really bothering you, try waiting for a bit. It usually clears up without you doing anything at all. Usually I can't resist meddling, but I'm trying to get better about that.

M made pizzas tonight, and we ate them as they came out of the oven, without plates, while watching Season 4 of the Great British Baking Show. The boys built a giant pillow fort.

I had the distinct pleasure of being greeted several times today by people who were really glad or grateful to see me. I had a lot of different and unexpected things come up today, but there was some kind of flow to it all and I wasn't bothered. This song was running through my head a lot. We are on time/I am on your side, are the lines that stand out the most to me right now.  Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a day of rest. I think all I have to do is take Marko to kung fu and ignore the mud in the basement. I'll eat leftover pizza and take a nap on the couch while M plays Zelda with the kids. Maybe it will snow more. I'll ignore the bothersome mud in the basement. Enjoy my reprieve from doing laundry. Daydream about our summer camping plans.

Max Turns Three

Max turned 3 today and we had a party at our house with some friends and family. Pink cupcakes, because that's what he wanted. Opening presents as soon as each guest walked in with them, chaotic as that was, at least he really understood where the gifts were coming from. I realized sometime in the morning that an afternoon party for a 3 year old who still usually takes naps was probably not great planning. But he did ok, although he was pretty groggy by the end.

Max at 3 is excellent at holding a pencil or a marker and he spends a lot of time drawing maps and sketching out stories. He loves sitting in boxes. He can ride a 3 wheeled scooter. He loves making snowmen. He's growing out of most of his food allergies. He did not cry about going into preschool once this year (although sometimes he would rather stay home and build snowmen). Favorite Christmas song is a toss up between Wham's Last Christmas and Feliz Navidad.

He adores his brother and sister and I love that the three of them play together. He misses them when they are at school and asks about Marko especially. "Where Marko, he at school?" was a common phrase during the fall. He just recently dropped those verb-less sentences, although he still says "blankwet" and "Mom, I very want you."

Comments

I just approved a bunch of comments on old posts and thank you so much for reading and commenting! This morning I was scrolling through the "On This Day" part of Facebook where it tells you the things you posted in previous years and I read a little thing I wrote about volunteering with Emergency Communities in Buras, Louisiana. There's probably a book worth of memories right there, but it sparked some other, completely unrelated memories of cooking vegan pancakes on the Coleman stove for Lance and M and this guy we met while we were camping in Idaho. We were near the Lolo Pass, I think. I was wearing a green dress. I loved that dress. And that's when we started plastering state flag stickers all over the back of M's car. I think we were up to 37 or 38 when that car bit the dust. We meet such interesting people everywhere we go. I have no idea what happened to that guy in Idaho. But some people we meet on our journeys turn into friends. When I saw Beach Bum's comment sitting in the queue, it made me very happy to hear from him and First Wife.
 

Another November, come and gone

Hello! Happy last day of November! Here's a few random thoughts, because I got a nudge that I hadn't written here in a while.

It's been 10 years since we moved into this house. Nine years since Laurel joined us here. M is going to a race this weekend with a running buddy and my parents have the kids so I am sitting her alone, for the first time in a while. I genuinely like the people M has become friends with through running, crazy as they all are to want to go run 50 miles in the mud and winter gloom. He just texted me to say they were passing through Erwin, TN. I hadn't thought about that place in a good long while but immediately remembered that legendary breakfast at Ms. Janet's. Sharing a bunk room with a bunch of 20 year old guys. The daunting 500 miles of Virginia looming before us. Walking the AT was not always a pleasant experience. But reliving the memories? Pure bliss, every time. My internal compass is righted. There's a lot of distracting voices and influences buzzing around me now sometimes. I forget about what's important, and what my current Katahdin looks like.

Right now, my life is all about taking care of kids. My kids, other people's kids. It's an all day, all night, nonstop kind of gig right now. Snuggling restless sleepers and wiping milk mustaches. Blowing on the Nintendo game cartridges so they can play Mario Brothers and drawing maps to nowhere and building tiny snowmen out of the last little scraps of snow lingering in the yard. Giving makeup advice I'm not qualified to give. Lighting an OLO Guadalupe candle when I feel like yelling and praying for grace to anyone who will listen. My new go-to phrase is "Would you like to start over with a hug?" and that often resets us all. I'm teaching them to do more chores. Unloading the dishwasher and running the washing machine and dusting places you don't think of much, but that make everyone sneeze if you forget them. It's not much stuff that I care to write about, but I generally enjoy the doing of it.

Yesterday there was a literal shoot out across the street. Two cars exchanged gunfire and both sped off. A bystander was injured by glass. It was the second time I have watched the police casually roll out the yellow tape there, mark bullets and take photographs, and mill around for a while before packing everything up. It's disorienting to look out your window an hour later and have it look like nothing happened. Police are asking witnesses to call. No arrests have been made.  You know how that story goes.

There was a massacre at a synagogue near us right before Halloween. I tried to write about it a few times but deleted all my drafts. As a family, we processed it in in our own way and then, because life is like this.... the good, the bad, the horrific and then the good again, life kept passing by and I didn't even think about it for a week until the gunfire broke out across the street. And I'll go on telling you about other random things of a more positive nature, because life unfolds this way. 

We went on a road trip to Charlottesville, VA last weekend. We left at 5:30am and driving in the morning was the best idea ever. We made record time and it was pretty relaxing trip down. The kids find my Aunt Mary's house to be absolutely magical, filled with treasures and delights. They adore her dog. Three days was not enough time to greet all of our C-ville friends, but we did our best to make the rounds.

We keep saying we need to buy a new car. Ours is 15 years old and has a 160,000 miles on it. I did a lot of car shopping over the summer, but couldn't seem to pick one. I mostly looked at minivans. The car we have still works, so the issue isn't pressing. I don't think I know how to make a decision when not under duress. Or maybe the minivan is just the wrong vehicle for us.

I just became certified to run an archery range. M is so close to mastering the baguette. (See, it's getting very random now.) I think there's going to be a resurgence in long form blogging again because everybody is sick of social media and the blurbiness of it all. So maybe if the bloggers I used to love following will start writing again, then I will start writing again and you can read more of my thoughts in a more timely and organized fashion. Maybe I'll tell you more about the archery or the bread baking in a future post.

And then finally, because recommended links are always my favorite part of a blog post, as long as it's not shilling something useless, here are a few.

I listened to this more than a few times this morning.

I read this to my kids. And loved it even more than they did.

I'm ruminating on this before doing my holiday shopping.

Bedtime Memories

Laurel doing portrait sessions of all of us, one at a time, posed with stuffed animals. Max standing on his head. Cool breeze through open windows. M's voice reading the Odyssey. The clink of ice cubes in their metal water bottles. The smell of baby soap in damp hair.

The Law

We read a book about Frederick Douglas today. It was mostly about how he spent his childhood and how he learned to read. The illustrator did a beautiful job of conveying the humanity of the enslaved people. When Frederick is being transported to Baltimore, there's a picture of a napping man, holding one end of the rope. Frederick's arms are tied together with the rope, behind his back, but he's gazing out at the harbor, taking in the sights like any kid does when they go to a new place. A slave was a real person, not an era. A kid, who was separated from his mom at birth, who was valued enough for his work to keep him tied up, but not enough to properly feed or clothe or teach. Laurel cried at the picture and hid her face. She knows about slavery, but in a very sanitized way. I decided that we needed to start reading a little more about history, especially American history and examine the the things that have changed over time. Kind of a rabbit hole and hard to know where exactly to start, but if I don't just dive in a little deeper, then I'll never get anywhere with this. I decided that given current events, it would be best to examine what exactly we mean by equal rights guaranteed by the constitution, and political borders.

We started with our neighborhood and how it is called different things and has changed over time. We can walk a mile and be in 4 different city/boroughs, some lines run right through the houses themselves. We talked about the parking law. No parking in Swissvale in the early morning hours, for street cleaning. No parking in Pittsburgh on the second Tuesday of the month. It's arbitrary. Laws and maps are not set in stone. They are designed by humans in an attempt to keep some sort of order. Or to make money, which sometimes results in oppression and mistreatment of some other people.

Frederick Douglass was breaking the law when he learned to read. His "master" was following the law as it stood at the time. So, when you live in a community, it can be good to follow the law, but it's never good to simply follow a law without thinking what it means for everybody.

Here is the constitution of the United States. When I read it from the beginning, I can imagine what it would be like to start a new country or organization. How you try to write out how things should go, but knowing you really can't anticipate all the problems. The language makes me cringe. I remember that I wouldn't have been allowed to cast a vote.

Camp!

Laurel went to Girl Scout camp last week. It was a 5 day sleep away camp about 2 hours from our house. She had never been there before and she didn't know anyone there. But aside from some anxiety about the swim test they gave at registration, she was pretty relaxed about being left there. We helped her make her bed in the cabin and then she basically pushed us out the door.

My heart ached the whole week. I missed her, but it was more than that. I think it was the first time it really hit me that my kids will grow up and go off and do their own things. I won't have as much control or knowledge of what they are doing. This is the natural progression of things, and of course I "knew" that was part of having children. But I didn't know that letting them go, even a little bit and in the absolute best of circumstances, would ache like that.

She had a great time at camp, of course. I knew she would love it. She got to ride horses, which is her favorite thing in the world. Plus smores, camp skits, making friendship bracelets and swimming. She was also pretty proud that she did a lot better at archery this summer than she did last summer.

Time

There always seems to be something you can buy or sign your kids up for to make parenting easier. What first comes to mind was this ad for a "sumo suit" for a baby. Basically it was like a padded swaddling pajama thing that was supposed to help them sleep better. For like $45. Max and Laurel were both terrible sleepers as babies. Very restless, and up frequently at night for years. I was definitely very close to buying that thing for Max, out of sheer desperation, and also out of fear that I wasn't doing it right. Harming my child through my ignorant approach to sleep, or something.

Laurel sleeps like a rock now, 10-12 hours at a time, and even Max at 2.5 years old, sleeps most of the night in his own bed. Even without a sumo suit, or really any particular gadget or white noise or anything. A great deal of the troubles you experience with children simply pass after some time.

I obsessed over methods and gear during my first few years as a parent, mostly to maximize efficiency. Since Max came along I have settled in with the idea that time is the best commodity I can provide them. It's hard to talk about the sheer quantities of time I spend side by side with little kids, dropping pieces of laundry individually into the washing machine, sifting through gravel to find the perfect rock, coaching someone tying their shoes. What do you do all day, people ask. Often I feel like I'm getting nothing "done." But the days pass and the thing that is getting done is kids growing up, our family structure solidifying, and building trusting relationships with other people's children. Worth it, for sure, even if my IRA doesn't think so.

Running Club is possible because of that time. Once a week in the summer (third year now!) we blaze a trail in the park by tying ribbons to trees. We currently have 43 ribbons in 2 colors, just regular ribbons from the fabric store, cut into strips. A few steady regular families join us, plus others who show up once or twice to try it out. After they follow the ribbons, kids organize themselves into games of tag, or run the trail again or catch daddy-long-legs in the field. We end with a cheer....2-4-6-8 Running Club is really great. It's not like the organized sports teams or family 5ks or really anything else I've ever been to. There's definitely an emphasis on being active and being in nature, but I don't really feel like the point is to exercise or get fit. Some kids will run laps and get kind of competitive with themselves, pushing harder each time. But one of my favorite memories is from a particularly hot and muggy evening when the kids made up a version of freeze tag where you can't get up from being frozen until someone else sits down next to you and tells you a story. Lots of sitting in that version of tag. Running Club is a weird mash up of elementary school PE and a Hash without the alcohol. It's what happened when my kids said "what if we had a club that...." and I said ok, let's do it.

39!

I turned 39 today. To celebrate I planned a weekend bike trip to a rail trail I wanted to explore. Originally I planned to park at one end and bike to the other and back over two and a half days. The trail is only about 62 miles long so this wasn't terribly ambitious, but I have never really "bike camped" before so figuring out how to jam all my stuff into two pannier bags was a bit of a challenge. Turns out, I didn't even end up doing that. A mudslide on the trail closed a portion near my first campsite and I ended up skipping that section entirely. My friend Rita came with me and we decided to make camp at a state park near the trail and just leave our tent there instead of taking it down and setting it up in the rain. We biked 50 miles the first day and 25 the second and did a hike up the canyon to check out some cool waterfalls. It was a wonderful weekend, despite steady rain and cool temperatures. We saw tons of wildlife including a bald eagle, a bear and an otter! Too many birds, some that I'm still working on identifying. On our hike up past the water falls we saw more jack-in-the-pulpits than I've ever seen before and there were even some trillium still blooming. It wasn't the trip I planned, but I was happy with how it went. When I started writing on this blog, I wanted people to know that you don't have to have all the answers before diving into an adventure. Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail was a pretty big adventure, and still one of my proudest accomplishments to date. Before I set out on that trip, I had backpacked exactly 3 times. Now I carve out smaller pockets of time to try new things. I'm glad that I still feel brave enough to try new things. For this trip I was worried about running into a bear or having a mechanical problem with my bike that I didn't know how to fix. Well, we did run into a bear, and on the second day I could pretty much only ride in one gear. We gave the bear some room and he eventually wandered off. And it turned out there was a piece of very thin stick jammed in tight and rapped around the gears and that all it really needed was a good cleaning.