My new blogging program tells me this is my two-hundredth post.  It was also the blog’s fifth anniversary about a week ago.  When I started writing here, I had a kindergartener and an almost eleven-month-old baby.  Now I have a kindergartener and an almost eleven-year-old boy.  Five years ago I was also deep in mourning for the loss of my academic career, though I tried not to write too much about it. I wouldn’t say I’m over that loss by any means, although it’s better certainly, especially now that I have a fledgling freelance career. Five years ago my father was alive and Beth’s was, too.  That pain has receded a little as well. Daily life pulls us along, away from the past and away from pain.  Having kids makes you live in the now, and that’s often a good thing, especially on a day as sweet as Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is not my favorite holiday but I do like it.  On the first day of February, I posted on Facebook, “Steph has put a heart-shaped eraser on her desk and now considers her Valentine’s Day decorating complete. This holiday does not capture her imagination quite like Halloween, though she does like the candy.”  June’s preparations were somewhat more elaborate.  She drew hearts on strips of paper and taped them to the exterior walls of the house, one on either side of the front door.  She started making valentines some time in early January, storing them in a Clementine box she decorated with more strips of paper on which she drew rows of hearts and flowers.  Two weekends before the big day, Beth took her to a valentine-making activity at the public library where they had construction paper and doilies and foam letters which allowed her to make fancier valentines than the ones she made at home with the paper, crayons and scissors with which we supplied her. Despite getting an early start there was a production rush at the end, as she lost interest in the project for a few weeks in the middle.  Her cards to my mom, stepfather and sister went into the mail the day before Valentine’s Day, too late to arrive on time, and she was making the last few for her classmates over the weekend.

Noah decided not to make cards for his classmates (or anyone) this year.  Last year he did but many of the kids in of his class didn’t, so I suspect this year might have been the last year for a lot of kids. His class had a party and he did bring home valentines, from about half the class, mostly girls.  What he also brought home was a large tower of candy he won for guessing how many pieces it contains.  He guessed 958 and it had 1,027 small pieces of candy (a mix of Tootsie Rolls, Sweet Tart hearts, M&Ms, and Hershey’s kisses). June’s haul, consisting of a paper bag of candy from classmates and a box of conversation hearts from her after-school yoga teacher (devoured on the walk home), was considerably smaller, but it did contain a box of Darth Vader gummy heads, from a classmate named Luke, no less.

While the kids did homework, I put the finishing touches on the second draft of one of the grants I’m writing and sent it off.  The kids and I ate a dinner of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches I cut into heart shapes with cookie cutters while we waited for Beth to come home. June said her sandwich was so beautiful she didn’t want to eat it. The kids hadn’t eaten much of their candy, but they were wound up nonetheless because they knew there would be gifts when she got home. I’d called Beth at 5:45, partly to see how close to home she was (Union Station was the answer) and I was on the verge of calling her again when she walked in the door around 6:35.  I ushered her into the bedroom so she could sign the valentines I’d bought for the kids and she ate her dinner, and then the great exchange of chocolate began.  There were chocolate-covered dried strawberries (a gift from Noah to the family), a chocolate heart, filled with wrapped chocolates (a gift from June to the family).  The kids got more conversation hearts and plastic hearts filled with M&Ms and June got a little Snow White figurine with two outfits, made of rubber.  (You stretch them onto her. It’s very odd.) Beth got me sea salt soap and sea salt caramels (very yummy). I wrote in her card that I’d secured babysitting for Saturday afternoon and suggested we see The Artist.

Soon after we’d opened everything there was a knock on the door. I was expecting canvassers or proselytizing Adventists (we live near a big Adventist church so we get a lot of that) but instead it was Zoli (formerly known as the Bobcat) and her mom who had come to hand-deliver a valentine to June.  We tried to give them some of our chocolate, unsuccessfully. I suspect there might have been a lot at their house, too. It’s a day of bounty, and not just in terms of sugar. It’s been that way consistently for me for a long time, and for that I feel very lucky.

I got a lot more than candy yesterday.  I had the chance to do meaningful work in a quiet house, a walk home from June’s yoga class through woods filled with purple crocuses, the treat of listening to June proudly read the words I wrote in her valentine, almost unassisted (and she probably could have read them all if my handwriting were better).  I have a date with Beth to anticipate.  At bedtime I got a hug and an “I love you,” from Noah.  And here’s what June wrote in my valentine: “You are the Love that I have you are Love that I Love I Love you.” Does it get much better than that?

I’ve been spending a lot of time in schools recently, two high schools, two middle schools and two elementary schools in the past nine days. I’m writing a grant for two D.C. public charter schools and I needed to visit their campuses to interview the principals. Then we got the news about Noah’s middle school applications: one thick envelope and one thin.  He got into the humanities magnet but not the math and science magnet, so that simplifies our choices. We attended a meeting for admitted students on Thursday evening.  And then as she does every Friday and Saturday, June had basketball practice at one elementary school and a game at her own school.  In between, we attended a girls’ high school basketball game, a field trip for the Purple Pandas.

Writing these grants has been a real learning experience, both in terms of re-learning how to write grants and in learning about charter schools.  (The grants not actually finished, but I’m waiting for feedback between drafts.)  I’m not an education specialist, but I have been impressed and moved by the dedication of the school officials with whom I spoke and with their sense of urgency about closing the achievement gap.  The middle school serves a majority low-income Latino population, with a high proportion of English language learners.  The high school is largely African-American and poor, too. They’ve made impressive gains in recent years in test scores and in the case of the high school, in college acceptance rates. They are applying for grants to pay stipends to the teachers who currently volunteer to stay after school to tutor kids and to increase the number of college campuses the high school students can visit.  I really want them to win, but I know they are up against many probably equally deserving schools and there’s only so much grant money to go around.

Both schools are part of the Chávez network, named for Cesar Chávez.  Their mascot is an eagle, an homage to the symbol of the United Farm Workers.  By a strange co-incidence, the mascot of Noah’s middle school is also an eagle. It was a strange thread tying these campuses together.  The cafeteria of the charter high school is called The Eagle Café; there were posters of eagles in a couple of the magnet middle school classrooms. Everywhere I went, I was seeing eagles.  Halfway through the tour of Noah’s new school, I started humming, “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Of course, there are significant differences between the schools.  The charter schools are open enrollment; that’s part of their mission.  The magnet Humanities program has a competitive admission process and an advanced curriculum.  There was some diversity among the admitted students at Noah’s school. I saw kids of all races, but it was definitely a majority white crowd.

Do I feel some white liberal guilt about this? Yeah, I do, because Noah’s school sounds like it will be such a wonderful place for him to learn and grow over the next three years.  At one point during the orientation, Beth leaned over and whispered to me, “I want to go here.” I knew what she meant.  In their English class at the beginning of sixth grade they will be reading Watership Down, The Hobbit, and Animal Farm (I lost track of the reading list after that). In seventh grade, they study and perform Shakespeare.  (There’s a stage built into the classroom for this express purpose.)  They learn to use a university library for research in the seventh grade. They design car bumpers and pretend to be a forensic unit investigating a food poisoning case in science class. They take a media class every year. One of the sixth-grade projects is to make an animated film of a Greek myth (using Garage Band, a favorite program of Noah’s) for the soundtrack.  In eighth grade, they take a five-day field trip to New York City for the purpose of making documentary films, which are shown at the end of the year at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring. Now tell the truth, don’t you want to go there, too?

As we left the school, Beth asked Noah, “Are you ready to be an eagle?”  He responded with the shriek of a bird of prey.  I suspect it was a yes.

The next night we were at the high school both kids will most likely attend. It’s our home school and both the math/science and humanities magnets are housed there, so no matter where their interests take them, they will probably end up there.  Mike, June’s basketball coach, had gotten the idea that seeing a basketball game might improve the girls’ game. (The Purple Pandas have lost all six of their games so far, but their morale remains high, thanks to Mike’s sensitive and positive coaching.) The Pandas wore their team shirts and sat together, watching the game pretty intently for five and six year olds.  At half time, they were invited down to the court to exchange high-fives with the home team.  This was the highlight of the game for a lot of them. They kept asking, “When will it be half time? When will we do the high fives?” There were cheerleaders at the game and Beth and I wondered if June would be more interested in their uniforms and routines than the game, especially when we saw the enormous bows that had in their hair for some reason. June definitely took notice, but as we walked back to the car, she was running up the sidewalk as fast as she could, darting to the left and weaving to the right, pretending to be a big girl, running across a basketball court, heading straight for the basket.

I want them to fly like eagles, all of them, on basketball courts and athletic fields, in classrooms and on stages and in science labs, the kids who enter middle school years beyond grade-level work and those who enter years behind and those who are smack dab in the middle. Is that so much to ask?

This morning, shortly before 9 a.m., I got a sheet of notebook paper and wrote “Noah’s Favorite Thing: a To-Do List!” across the top. This was a bit of teasing on my part.  He does not particularly like it when I make to-do lists for him, but it was the last day of a three-day weekend and I wanted to make sure he got all his homework and chores done so we didn’t have any unpleasant surprises at bedtime or tomorrow morning. The kids always get a day off between the quarters so teachers can prepare report cards. Between Martin Luther King Day always being on a Monday and New Year’s Day falling on a Monday this year, it’s as if our school system has just given up on Mondays this month.

I didn’t really mind an extra day home with the kids, though.  I’d worked several hours on Saturday and Sunday so I didn’t have anything urgent to do, and thanks to a well-timed play date with Riana (formerly known as the Ghost Crab), I was going to have the morning alone with Noah, which is a rare treat.  Accordingly, the first two items on his list read:

Read—Extra!
Go to Starbucks w/ Mommy (Shhh)

I didn’t want June to be jealous and I thought if we brought her home a treat she wouldn’t mind finding out that we’d gone without her after the fact.  We set out right after Riana’s mom picked up June.  It was a soggy sort of day.  We got an inch of ice and snow on Friday night and this was our first day since then with temperatures above 40 degrees, so everything was wet.  Water dripped from downspouts and little pieces of ice and snow fell from tree branches and rooftops as we walked.  The sidewalks were clear but we both wore boots for splashing in puddles.

As we walked Noah told me about his day with Sasha yesterday.  They’d had a marathon play date that started at 1:30 with two hours of sledding near the creek, progressed to Sasha’s house for a snack of banana, flatbread and chocolate tea, and then moved to our house where they spent hours playing B’loons Tower Defense V.  Sasha stayed for dinner (Beth made baked ziti) and then they played more B’loons until Beth drove Sasha home at 7:20. Mostly what Noah wanted to tell me about was the sledding, how they had pretended they were bobsledding in the Olympics, and how they’d invented some new Olympic sports, how the best sledding trail, the one that’s “really fast and dangerous” didn’t have enough snow for sledding so they had to content themselves with the other one, which was also pretty muddy, and how the more liquid mud splashed up when their sleds went over it and how when that happened they sometimes “caught some air.”  He was joyful recalling all this.

Once we got to Starbucks Noah asked hopefully if he could get a 16-ounce vanilla steamer instead of his normal 12-ounce one.  I was feeling indulgent, plus it was extra milk in addition to extra sugar, so I said yes.  He got a blueberry strudel muffin to go with it. I was restrained and had a latte with no sugar or syrup or pastry.  We sat at the bar and watched a man in a cherry picker try to repair a light in the shopping center parking lot. (It was such a dark morning they were still lit.)  Noah thought it looked like a mythical being with a long neck.  He still says things like that, and when he does it seems hard to believe he will be in middle school next year.  But he will– we find out in a couple weeks whether or not he got into either of the magnets where he applied.  I told him when he’s in middle and high school he will appreciate getting this day off more than ever because he will just have finished taking midterms. Then I explained midterms and he said after all that he might want more than a one-day break. I tried to imagine him taking midterms and glanced down at my coffee cup and then the days when I used to push him in the stroller to the Starbucks in Dupont Circle and feed him the foam off my lattes did not seem very far away, even if he does stand as taller than my chin now.

When we got home we read for over an hour from Forge, a historical novel about an escaped slave who fights with the American soldiers at Valley Forge.  It’s the sequel to Chains, which Noah read for school this year.  The protagonist is fifteen — many of the soldiers in the book are teenage boys and the drummer boys are even younger. I knew this about the American Revolution, of course, but it strikes you differently when you have a ten-year-old boy, a drummer no less.  I have to say I am happy he does his drumming in our study or at school, and no one shoots at him while he does it.

We quit reading just before June was due back home so he could vacuum the living and dining room floors I’d cleared of toys before June covered them up again.  June actually returned before he’d finished.  She’d already had lunch at Riana’s house, so I escorted her to her room for an early Quiet Time before her afternoon play date with Merichel.

When June came out of her room forty minutes later she had a stack of Dora books she wanted me to read to her and even though Dora is not my idea of quality children’s literature, the idea of cuddling up in bed and having some one-on-one time with my younger child in between her many social engagements seemed appealing.  Before I read to her I reminded Noah of the items left on his list (homework, percussion practice, typing practice) and I made him lunch. I fixed him some leftover ziti with butter and grated parmesan and a bowl of applesauce with cinnamon sprinkled on top.

“Ziti with parmesan and butter. What could be better than that?” Noah said with satisfaction as I placed his lunch in front of him.

“A castle with princesses and ponies,” June piped up.

You’re going to eat princesses and ponies for lunch?” I said in mock surprise and soon she was over at the toy castle, pretending to be a dragon munching on the royals.  But I was thinking silently that I know something much better than noodles or princesses: a morning with my firstborn as he stands on the threshold of midterms and whatever else middle school has to offer.

On Wednesday morning, the morning of the twentieth anniversary of our commitment ceremony, June crawled into bed with us at 6:40 a.m.  We all dozed a bit longer and around 7:00 Beth got out of bed and was walking around my side of the bed on her way out of the bedroom when I put my arms up for a hug.  The cue reminded her. “Happy anniversary,” she said.

The kids went to school and Beth went to work and the day unfolded like a normal weekday.  I read a few chapters of Catch-22, which I’m reading for my book club, and I exercised and cleaned the refrigerator.  I worked on a set of instructions for growing hydroponic green beans, cucumbers and lettuce.  I found out I’d landed a job writing three grants for a group of D.C. public charter schools. Okay, that last part was not so routine.  I haven’t written a grant since 1994, when I worked for Project Vote, so I greeted this development with a mix of excitement and trepidation.  But I can’t even start until I attend a series of meetings with school officials in early February so I can put it out my mind for now.

That morning Beth posted a picture of the two of us at our commitment ceremony on Facebook, along with a copy of a newspaper story from the Philadelphia Gay News, about how our commitment ceremony announcement in the Philadelphia Inquirer was the first one ever for a gay or lesbian couple.  (At the time my father was the managing editor of the Inquirer. He did not participate in the discussions about whether to publish the announcement but I imagine the fact that I was his daughter must have been a factor in people’s minds.  If nepotism did help break down the door for other people behind us, I have no problem with that.)

One of the things I love about Facebook is all the positive feedback you get on milestone posts.  All day long the congratulations poured in on both posts.  It made me cheerful every time I checked it and gave the day a festive feel, even if I was at home alone, writing or doing chores for much of it.

Shortly after June got home I started cooking dinner.  I wanted to get an early start on the eggplant-bulgur casserole because I was also making a cake, the spice cake with lemon glaze I make almost every year on our anniversary. It was our wedding cake.  June helped pour the ingredients in the bowl, mix the batter, consulted with me on what shade of pink to dye the glaze (it was a very deep pink, almost red) and helped spread the glaze on the cake.

While we ate dinner, we listened to one of the three mix tapes we made for our ceremony.  (Our ceremony was a very low-budget, DIY affair so we provided our own music.) I haven’t attempted the play the tapes in years and I wasn’t even sure if the one I’d selected would still play or if it would be warped, but it sounded fine after two decades (or almost two decades- a notation on the case indicated we’d re-made it in 1994. I don’t remember why).  It was the one we played last, the most upbeat one.  It starts with Prince’s “Let Pretend We’re Married” and the Eurhythmics “Would I Lie to You?” and goes on in that vein.  It’s a fun tape and I only had to rush to the tape player to turn down the volume once so the kids would miss some not quite age-appropriate lyrics.

The music, familiar and yet from such a different time in our lives, and the photo of Beth with her early 90s trademark flattop really took me back. Sometimes it seems like it hasn’t been that long since we were in our mid-twenties and childless and new to living in the big city, and sometimes it seems like another life entirely.

After dinner and before cake, we exchanged gifts. Beth got me Stephen King’s latest—11/22/63— and I got her a gift certificate for Giovanni’s Room, a gay bookstore in Philadelphia.  And why would I get her such a thing when we live in suburban Maryland?  We had a kid-free weekend in Philly ahead of us, that’s why.

We drove everyone up to Mom and Jim’s house on Saturday afternoon after June’s basketball game, dropped the kids off and enjoyed two nights and one day to ourselves in the City of Brotherly Love.  We had two very nice dinners at the Kyber Pass Pub and Cuba Libre. If you go to the first, the vegetarian meats (BBQ and fried chicken Po Boys) and the fried vegetables (okra and sweet potato fries) are very good. If you go to the second, you must order the buñuelos con espinaca. We visited Reading Terminal Market and had lunch there.  I got a vegetarian cheesesteak at a stand where the service was so bad it crossed over from aggravating to comic, but the cheesesteak was not half bad once I finally got it. We browsed at Giovanni’s Room and came out with a few books. We spent a lot of time in our hotel room and in a local coffee shop reading. We saw a non-animated, R-rated movie, the lesbian coming-of-age film The Pariah, which was well acted and a good story, though there were some odd things going on with the camera work, probably meant to indicate the protagonist’s emotional state.  Our room had a gas fireplace and a Jacuzzi and we employed them both.

We walked a lot on Sunday and made some serendipitous discoveries, stumbling upon the President’s House where the first two Presidents lived while the Capitol moved to Washington. The building is no longer there, but they have rebuilt parts of it, with low brick walls to show where walls went and some chimneys and doorways recreated.  You can also look down into the ground to see the actual excavated foundations through glass.  There is a lot of information posted on signs about the house and its inhabitants, including the nine slaves who lived there. It seemed a fitting place to visit during MLK weekend and we would have lingered longer and read more if it had not been so very cold (in the twenties most of the day and quite windy).

We also found the block where I lived from the ages of five and half to almost nine, quite by accident, and from there I remembered how to walk to my elementary school a few blocks away, so we did.  I don’t think I’ve seen it since 1976 but other than new playground equipment (and what I believe to be an addition) the soaring one-hundred-year-old red brick building looks just as I remember it.  It was odd, but not unpleasant to be walking around our old neighborhood on Sunday, because it was the second anniversary of my father’s death. As we walked along the blocks where he must have walked so many times, I imagined him in his thirties walking with a little-girl version of me, maybe headed to the playground, maybe going for ice cream or to peek inside antique stores.

On Monday morning we picked up the kids and heard all about their trip to the Franklin Institute. June loved the giant heart and veins you can tour (what kid doesn’t?) and the movie they saw in the planetarium about black holes and Noah liked the city that changed colors depending on environmental choices the citizens made.  June left Mom and Jim’s house laden with necklaces, a jewelry box and a wicker doll high chair.  (Mom is downsizing in preparation for her move).  On our way out of the Philadelphia area, we made one last stop, for soft pretzels, and then we were homeward bound, arriving mid-afternoon, in time for undone homework and weekend chores.  Our anniversary celebration was over.

But I still have one song from the commitment ceremony tape running through my head. It’s “The Queer Song,” by Two Nice Girls.  It makes me think how much has changed, not just over the past twenty years, but maybe the past thirty.  The speaker is re-assuring her love interest, who is still insecure in her sexual identity:

I’m gonna take you to queer bars
I’m gonna drive you in queer cars
You’re gonna meet all my queer friends
Our queer, queer fun it never ends
We’re gonna have a happy life
Both of us are gonna be the wife
I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be
It’s queer queer fun for you and me

(If you don’t know this song, it’s worth knowing that it’s sung partially to the tune of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)  I have to reach far back into my life to remember a time when the idea of my own happiness being possible would have produced a subversive, defiant thrill, but I do remember.  I do.  I would not say my life is a never-ending parade of queer, queer fun—it has as many disappointments and sorrows as anyone else’s—but there is happiness in it, too.

As the Presidential election will no doubt remind me on a more regular basis than I’d like, my family’s happiness is still a hard pill for some people to swallow. That’s why this was a commitment ceremony anniversary and not a wedding anniversary we just celebrated. I have faith we’ll get there, maybe soon. Gay marriage will be on the table again in Maryland this year, as it was last year and a few years before that. I try not to get my hopes up.  I do want to be legally married for both symbolic and practical reasons, but on the deepest level, both of us already are the wife and we have been since that mid-January afternoon when we were twenty-four and twenty-five and stood before our friends and family and dared to imagine living a happy life together.

Friday morning at breakfast I told June that she would have an unusual afternoon. After playing outside and watching television (these are the usual parts of her after-school routine) she’d have a bath and we’d have an early dinner because we were leaving for basketball practice at 5:40 and we wouldn’t get back until bedtime.  June perked up on hearing this. She loves starting new things, which is why she’s already starting her third team sport a few months before her sixth birthday.  She’s allowed up to two extracurricular activities at a time. Fall was soccer and ballet.  Winter is basketball and yoga. Yoga will be an after-school class on Tuesdays, which I think will make things easier in terms of weekend scheduling because basketball actually meets twice a week—Friday evening practices and Saturday morning or afternoon games.

That afternoon she came home, played in the yard while I took clothes off the clothesline, watched Maya and Miguel and Arthur, her current favorites, took a quick bath and then got changed into a t-shirt and bike shorts underneath sweatpants and a long-sleeved shirt. I ordered pizza and the kids and I were eating before 5:00 p.m.  After dinner I pulled her still damp hair into pigtails and we were on the porch waiting for our ride at 5:40. It had been a stunningly beautiful sunny day after a four-day-long cold snap and it was still quite warm, if dark, so June was happy to climb on the porch walls and jump over the row of candy cane lights that still adorn our yard.

June’s team is an all-girl, mostly kindergarten team being coached by Maggie’s dad Mike, who was giving us a ride because Beth is not home early enough. In the min-van along with Maggie, Mike, June and me, was another player (the youngest one, who’s still in preschool) and her older sister, a middle-schooler, who’s serving as Mike’s assistant coach.  We drove to the elementary school where practice is held.  The gym was packed. All the kindergarten teams were there and there were probably at least fifty kids, plus parents and coaches. Among the kids on other teams we saw two of June’s classmates, including Malachi, and a former nursery school classmate.

Some of the time all the teams practiced together—watching fifty five and six year olds all running around the gym and dribbling was particularly impressive—but mostly they were split into their teams.  Mike obviously put a lot of thought into the games and activities he designed, and he followed Maggie’s interests.  There was a game called “Protect the Princess,” in which laminated printouts of Disney and Star Wars heroines and villains were scattered on the floor.  The girls had to try to dribble the basketballs on the villains while avoiding the princesses. The game I played with them was “Magic Rock.”  The girls were fairies passing each other a magic rock (i.e. basketball) while a witch (me) or troll (Mike) tried to block them.  If they could complete six passes before the witch/troll intercepted the ball, the villain fell asleep and the fairies won.  There was another game called “Loose Ball.” All the players except one had to stand facing the wall while the other one tossed the ball into the air as high as she could and yelled “Loose ball!” at which point they’d all turn around and scramble to catch it. During the course of this game one the girls made a basket, completely by accident. I wondered if we’d found our center because those baskets are eight feet off the ground and the average girl on the team might be over four feet tall if she stood on tiptoe.  (June’s not even three and a half feet tall.) I wondered if any of them would ever score in a real game.

During the team meeting Mike produced the team shirts, purple much to June’s delight, and the girls voted on a team name from a list Maggie had brainstormed ahead of time (though there were a couple more candidates added).  The Purple Pandas won, with the Purple Penguins a close second.  (One girl suggested the Purple Grapes because her soccer team was called the Orange Oranges.)  Mike talked about being a team and being a good sport and solicited opinions about what that might mean, then he asked them to each name something for which they were thankful. June said that trees made oxygen for people to breathe, but the gym was too loud for me to hear most of the other girls’ responses.

In the van on the way home, Mike asked the girls what they liked about practice. June wasn’t specific– she just said, “I loved it!”  Later she said she liked dribbling the ball and the “Protect the Princess” game.

This morning June wanted some temporary tattoos applied and Beth replied in an off-hand way that it was a good idea because basketball players have a lot of tattoos.  Well, that settled it. June selected a butterfly and an assortment of suns and moons, including a band of them that went around her leg just above the ankle.  She had one on every arm and leg by the time Beth had finished to her satisfaction.

This afternoon’s game was in a different elementary school gym, this one at June’s school.  When we got there the 12:00 teams were still finishing up and the 1:00 teams were drifting in so it was a bit chaotic. We saw a boy who used to attend June’s preschool leaving. When the teams were sorted out there were two kindergarten teams and two second-grade teams.  There was a half-hour practice period before the game, much of which was shooting practice.  I’d thought the fact that all the kids are so far from the basket might eliminate June’s height disadvantage but she never made a basket during the practice time (none of her shots even reached the bottom of the net), even though a few of her team-mates did. The youngest player, the one still in preschool, actually made the most.

The Purple Pandas were playing an all-boy team in green t-shirts.  Malachi and one of June’s former preschool classmates were playing on that team and they both got baskets.  (Ram also got a “bleedy nose,” as June put it later.  I didn’t see how it happened but I saw him crying and comforted by several adults and later I saw someone come to clean the blood up off the court.) Actually Malachi didn’t just get a basket, he got the majority of his team’s baskets.  I knew he liked sports and now I know why.  The kid’s got game.  The green team shut out the Purple Pandas, who often looked shocked when the green players knocked the ball out of their hands, despite having been warned by Mike both Friday and today that this would happen, that it wasn’t rude or mean, it was just part of the game.  As the game progressed the girls got better at running to defend their basket when they lost control of the ball, instead of just standing there looking shocked. So that was progress.  A few of them, including Sally (formerly known as the Raccoon) and her first-grade sister showed some hustle by the end of the game.

They all seemed happy after the game and when I asked June if she had fun, she gave me a smile and a nod.  I don’t think it’s realistic to expect basketball will be June’s sport in the long term. Gymnastics is probably more like it, based on her small size and wiry strength (not to mention her performance on the monkey bars on the school playground after the game, but I think she’ll enjoy the next two months of practices and games, and who knows, maybe one day she’ll even toss that ball in the air and see it sail through the hoop—nothing but net.

And so this is Christmas
And what have you done
Another year over
And a new one just begun

From “Happy Christmas/War is Over” by John Lennon and Yoko Ono

The kids go back to school tomorrow.  We split their winter break in half so we had five days at Mom’s and five days at home. This was a very satisfactory arrangement. It felt like a substantial visit with the extended family and a nice block of time for nuclear family togetherness as well.  We didn’t do everything we considered—Beth decided against going into her office to straighten it up and do some filing, and we never got organized enough to go to see the U.S. Botanic Garden’s holiday exhibit, but we had a long outing and a short one, we had family friends over on New Year’s Eve Day, and Noah played with three school friends and June with two, and we (mostly Beth) did a lot of cleaning and straightening and hanging pictures and fixing things around the house, so I think our time was well spent.

Thursday: Sentimental Journey

There’s a Degas exhibit at the Phillips Collection that’s been there since October.  We tried organizing a three-ballerina expedition with Talia’s and Gabriella’s families in the fall but we could never find a date that worked so we decided to go and see it ourselves before it leaves town.  The Phillips is in Dupont Circle, the D.C. neighborhood of our childless (and Noah’s babyhood) days so it’s full of sentimental appeal.  We visited a few of our old stomping grounds, including Café Luna, where we ate lunch (pointing out to Noah the Thai restaurant next door where we ate dinner the night before he was born) and Kramerbooks a combination bookstore/restaurant where we had desert after the exhibit and bought books.  I got my next two book club books (Catch-22 and Les Miserables) and June picked out a couple of Dora books, including one in Spanish.  I find it satisfying to buy books in a store these days as bookstores are disappearing rapidly in our area (and probably yours too). I like to support them when I get the chance, in hopes they will not go completely extinct.

In between, we visited the museum.  June enjoyed the ballerina paintings (and looking at herself in the mirrored wall with a barre) but she went through the exhibit at her usual brisk pace, which meant we could not linger as long as the adults might have liked.  Noah liked the sculptures best and was also interested in the computer images of what lies under the visible layer of paint.  When we finished with Degas, we visited some other parts of the museum.  We went into the Rothko room, much to the alarm of the guards, who insisted that June’s hand be held at all times.  (The paintings in that room are not under glass.) June gave the guard an exasperated look when she heard this.  Clearly he did not know how well behaved she is and how many tiger paws she has (twenty-three, third place in her class- not that she’s keeping track).  For a while the kids played a game of Noah’s invention called “Guess the Medium,” in which he’d have June guess whether a piece of art was done in paint, chalk, water color, etc. I caught a glimpse of them spontaneously holding hands in front of a painting (though later Noah claimed he’d done no such thing).  It was a lovely, lovely day, just like old times, except completely different.

Friday and Saturday: New Year’s Eve

We didn’t do much on Friday. Noah went over to Sasha’s and the rest of us hung around the house and June played with new Christmas toys while Beth and I cleaned in anticipation of our New Year’s Eve Day guests.  Saturday morning we cleaned some more and made peanut butter cookies with Hershey’s kisses baked into them and I set out our spread of sparkling juice, fruit, crackers and fancy cheeses, cookies and candy.  Noah helped by making little labels for the cheeses, which he stuck into them with toothpicks. They looked like little flags.

Joyce, her husband Smitty and their nine-year-old daughter Gwen came for lunch.  Joyce and I once shared a tiny, windowless, computerless office–which we affectionately called The Shoebox–with five other adjuncts and teaching assistants at George Washington University, when she was a graduate student there and I was an adjunct, back before our kids were born. We reminisced about that and caught each other up on our current lives (she’s an English professor at Ball State University now) and we ate a lot of cheese while the kids made videos on the computer.  I always enjoy seeing Joyce, even though her visits are far between now that she lives in Indiana.

We listened to Christmas music all through the visit and into the evening.  After our guests left we watched our last Christmas movie Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, before declaring ourselves done with Christmas (okay, we will finish the sweets). We didn’t stay up to welcome in the New Year.  Beth and I were in bed before ten p.m., but we had a very pleasant New Year’s Eve nonetheless.

Sunday: New Year’s Day

New Year’s Day was another quiet day, full of grocery shopping and little home improvement projects. Noah and Beth took turns showing me how to use various functions of my new iPod so now I can listen to music, the radio and podcasts, if I remember their instructions.  I made black-eyed peas for good luck in the coming year and I finally made good on a resolution to get June some play dates already. She hasn’t had one in months and she’s been asking for ages to have someone come play.  She and her friend played instruments and danced and played Chutes and Ladders and had an earnest conversation about how no one should make fun of Rapunzel because of her long hair.

Monday: The Last Hurrah

Monday was the last day of the kids’ break.  We drove all the way out to Bethesda to have breakfast at Cosi because Noah was in the mood for square bagels.  There’s a Barnes and Noble nearby and Noah was also wanting a couple more 39 Clues books he didn’t get for Christmas, so he bought them himself.  June picked up a discounted Bambi book for herself as well, also using saved allowance.  I was feeling positively virtuous for having patronized two bookstores in five days, even if one was a big chain.

I snuck in a short editing job while June watched television and after lunch, Beth went out for coffee with Lesley and the kids had a play date extravaganza.  June had another friend over and Noah’s twin friends came over, too.  The big kids played with hexbugs and huddled together on our bed playing a game on Noah’s iPod.  The little kids played Chutes and Ladders and staged a medieval lesbian wedding between two of the Playmobile castle women, witnessed by reindeer and snowmen figurines. Later they ran around in the back yard, jumped on the mini-trampoline, played the Cat in the Hat game and made masks from June’s mask kit.  Everyone played so well together I was able to read a longish Margaret Atwood story from The New Yorker in relative peace.

The whole five days felt relaxed and fun and productive at the same time.  The house looks better than usual, as Beth did some deep cleaning and I feel ready to return to work tomorrow (that is if the snow flurries we had this afternoon don’t turn into something serious enough to cancel school).

Sara asked me over Christmas if I’m happy and I gave her a mixed report, but on consideration, I think I really am a lot happier than I was a year ago when I could see June’s preschool years drawing to a close but I had no idea what that would mean for me (see my 1/9/11 post).  Even though Noah will start middle school in 2012 and it’s bound to be an interesting year politically, I feel that the big changes for me have already happened with my transition from stay-at-home mom to part-time work-at-home mom.  The New Year’s just begun– we’re two days in and I’m ready to see what the rest of it holds.

Day 1: Christmas Eve

My mom had a full house for Christmas—she and my stepfather, our family of four, my sister Sara, my aunt Peggy and Uncle Darryl, their twenty-something kids Emily and Blake, Emily’s five-year-old son Josiah and her friend Sir. We were nearly the last ones there, arriving in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve day. Everyone was there but Sir, who was taking an evening train, so things were hopping right from the beginning. Peggy and Darryl live in Idaho and Emily, Blake and Josiah recently moved from Boise to Brooklyn so I don’t see them often. Right after we walked in the door I tried to introduce June to everyone, and, despite having seen recent pictures of him, I misidentified my cousin Blake. In my defense, his hair is much shorter than in the pictures. Later I told Beth I was glad to have gotten the most embarrassing moment over right out of the gate. And then my uncle got me and Beth mixed up, so maybe we’re even.

Mom and Jim’s house was beautifully decorated for Christmas, as it always is. There were evergreen garlands and big ribbons on the porch railing and the stairway and mantel. Mom had poinsettias on either side of the fireplace and her Dickens village (http://www.department56.com/content.aspx?cid=VLDV&ms=PRD&msi=58999) was on display, as was her Santa collection. Because she and my stepfather are planning to move to Oregon some time in the next year and she wants to lighten her load, she let Sara and the kids pick a few Santas to take home when we left. (June, who knows a thing or two about grandmothers, talked Mom up from two to four. Noah initially declined the offer and then changed his mind and picked two.)

We spent the afternoon getting re-acquainted (or in some cases acquainted). The adults talked and wrapped presents. June and Josiah drew on a big tablet Mom gave them (a superhero for him, a nutcracker and elephant and assorted other things for her). Then they chased each other around the house pretending to be zombies, because nothing says Christmas like five year olds shouting, “I’ve already eaten your brain!” and “No, you haven’t!” June showed off for Emily and Blake by counting to one hundred in Spanish. (There was a repeat performance for a larger audience on Christmas day and then Sara counted to twenty in Italian.) Sara asked if Noah was too old for her to read to him and he said no and produced a 39 Clues book. At one point I rounded up the kids and we rolled out the gingerbread dough we’d brought and cut cookies. Josiah was quite skilled at it and turned out perfect cookie after perfect cookie. I didn’t cut too many cookies myself because the kids kept me busy with requests for greased cookie sheets and more dough and help transferring cookies to sheets. I credit Lesley with giving me the confidence to take on a messy project with my kids plus a boy I’d just met.

We had chili for dinner (Sir arrived while we were eating) and put a very tired June to bed. Then after more wrapping, stocking stuffing and note-from-Santa writing (Noah helped me with this chore) we went to bed, too, a bit past our bedtimes.

Day 2: Christmas Day

It’s hard to sleep in a house with thirteen people. There were people still up and conversing at 1:20 a.m. and people up for the day at 5:30 a.m. (that would be our crew). There were people sleeping on under-inflated air mattresses and sofa cushions on the floor. I actually slept in a bed so it would be churlish to complain about my night’s sleep, but it was an awfully early start to the day. Noah crept downstairs at 6:00 a.m. (when he was allowed out of bed) and came back up to report Blake was sleeping on the living room floor, at which point we realized we’d need to wait for him to wake up before the kids could open their stockings. Sara was sleeping in the sunroom, which was separated from our room only by a pair of French doors so we needed to keep the kids both quiet and in the dark. There was nowhere we could speak above a whisper or turn on a light. People were sleeping everywhere. Technology, in the form of Beth’s iPhone and Noah’s iPod, came to the rescue and the kids were amazingly quiet until we heard Josiah downstairs at 7:30 and present-opening commenced.

Mom and I had talked ahead of time about how to open presents. We usually open gifts one at a time, taking turns in a pre-set order, youngest to oldest. I’ve always liked the ceremonial aspect of this, and being able to see people’s responses to gifts. But with so many people and so many presents we knew it wouldn’t work this year. This pleased Beth because her family has a more free-for-all style and our way sometimes makes her antsy. We put Noah in charge of handing out presents and people opened them as they got them and mine all piled up at my feet as I tried not to miss anything, but of course I did and for days afterward I was still finding out what people got from each other. (This in my mind illustrates the superiority of the traditional method.) But even in the accelerated version, it still took until nine a.m. to finish. The kids got too many gifts to list, but Santa came through with the mermaid doll for June and Noah got the headphones he wanted. I got a refurbished iPod nano, some Starbucks gift cards and candy and a book (http://classiclit.about.com/od/poeedgarallan/fr/aa_poeshadow.htm) and other nice things. Beth and I got and a mixer and a cutting board and I got her a shoe rack because the shoes that are always in a jumbled heap in the hallway get on her nerves. At one point during the present opening, Mom looked out the window and noticed frost on the grass. “It’s a white Christmas,” she concluded, but Beth said frost didn’t count.

We had brunch around ten—scrambled eggs, English muffins, bacon, veggie sausage and grapefruit. Mom and Jim’s dining room gets a lot of late morning light in the winter, and during the meal, she leaned back in her chair and said, “I’m feeling happy now in the sun with all you here and my dining room walls.” (They are newly painted gold.) The rest of the day passed pleasantly. June got a lot of art kits for Christmas. She assembled the picture of the princess and the winged unicorn you construct out of glittery puffy stickers on a wooden frame. Sara helped her with the magnetic mosaic kit while I cracked hazelnuts for Christmas dinner stuffing. Then Beth, Emily, Noah and I played Forbidden Island (http://gamewright.com/gamewright/index.php?section=games&page=game&show=245), one of Noah’s gifts from Mom, a very fun and complicated co-operative game. Afterward June and I took a much-needed nap, and then I read You Have to Stop This (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10757817-you-have-to-stop-this) to Noah. (This was one of his gifts from me). He was starting to feel sick and about forty minutes into the book he went to the bathroom and threw up. He spent the rest of the day in bed, listening to an audio book, and falling asleep early. He missed Christmas dinner, but we saved him some cranberry sauce and a roll, since those are his favorite parts of the meal. We listened to some of Sir’s original music and had pie (two kinds- apple and mixed berry) before Sir had to catch a train back to New York. And then we were twelve.

Day 3

The next morning Noah had made a complete recovery. He ate a big breakfast and before he was finished, June was hard at work on more art kits. She painted the paint-by-numbers butterfly (eschewing the numbers and making her own design). Before some of the late risers we up, she’d finished this and started on a mask from the mask kit—a queen, with red glasses, blond hair, red hair ribbons and a gold crown with green jewels (she used up almost all the jewels on her first mask).

As Peggy, Darryl, Emily and I sat at the breakfast table in the next room, Darryl looked up from the newspaper and asked the table at large to guess the official word of the year. We all stared back at him silently. “If you think about it you’ll guess,” he predicted encouragingly.

Suddenly it came to me. “Occupy,” I answered, knowing I was right and I was. We’d been discussing the Occupy movement the night before so it was in the front of my mind, but I think spending Christmas in such a fully occupied house might have helped, too.

The house gradually emptied. The day after Christmas was quieter because people spun off on separate expeditions. Mom and Peggy took June and Josiah to the Please Touch Museum (http://www.pleasetouchmuseum.org/), where it was reported they had fun and got along very well. Beth and Noah went out to lunch, as did Sara with a friend from high school and her husband, leaving me to read one hundred pages of my new book in a single day (something which would not have been unusual, say eleven years ago, but is now). When Sara returned, she and I went for a walk down by the creek and through Mom’s neighborhood, talking about work, and life in general. I haven’t seen her in a year and a half so it was really nice to have a long chat with her. When we got back to the house, Noah, Blake and Beth were playing another game of Forbidden Island and then Beth, Emily and Blake played Q-bitz (http://www.mindware.com/p/Q-bitz/44002), another Christmas present. Noah elected to play with own side game with the pieces because he didn’t want the time pressure of needing to race against other players.

We all came back together for a stir-fry dinner. While Mom and her helpers were cooking, I gave June a bath and Josiah made a mask for June, “a girl mask,” he specified. As I set the table, I kept inventing errands for June (take this toy upstairs, find out what people want to drink) because I was trying to keep her out of the family room, where a war movie was playing on television. Finally I ran out of ideas and had to tell her to stay out of the room. She was not pleased, and neither was Josiah when Emily took similar action shortly afterward. Fortunately, dinner was ready soon after and then it was June’s bedtime.

Day 4

Two days after Christmas, Sara and Peggy’s branch of the family left for parts North and West. That morning was nearly as challenging as Christmas morning, though without the need to distract children awaiting presents. They woke nearly as early as they did on Christmas and other people slept later, so I was shushing them from 6:00 a.m. until 8:45 when Beth and I gave up on keeping them quiet and went out breakfast, leaving the kids in Emily’s capable hands. Shortly before we left, I put my hand on Noah’s back and said, “A little quieter, please.”

“Sorry,” he answered. “I’m not a quiet person.”

While June and Josiah made yet more masks, Beth and I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and a nice talk at the Regency Café (http://www.regencycafe.com/). One of the advantages of a houseful of relatives is abundant babysitting.

When we returned the kids were playing June’s new Cat in the Hat game (http://www.icandothatgames.com/cat/), which segued into Hexbugs (http://www.hexbug.com/). When Peggy’s crew left, the house felt strangely quiet and empty, considering there were still seven of us in it. Mom sank into a chair, looking done in and said, “It was a good Christmas.” Sara gave June a parting gift of French braids and left for the airport. And then we were six.

We spent a quiet afternoon and evening. While June and I napped, Mom played Forbidden Island with Noah (I’m thinking he likes this game) and afterward we watched Frosty the Snowman and Frosty Returns on Mom and Jim’s big-screen television, which gave us the opportunity to compare the detail work on the animation (the older one is better, especially the snowflake effects). The irony of watching programs about snow while rain pelted the roof was not lost on me.

Day 5

Three days after Christmas the last of the occupiers left Mom and Jim’s house, leaving it calmer, quieter, and tidier no doubt, but perhaps a bit lonelier. Mom has always told me she’s dreamed about having a full house at Christmas (often in the context of wanting more grandchildren) so I’m glad she got her wish. I think it was a Christmas we’ll all remember.

p.s. If you were at my Mom’s house and you’re reading this, please feel free to Occupy the comments section. I would love to hear from you (and also those of you who weren’t there).

The first year I went it was not really what I was expecting. No real information was sent home other than the date and time. I knew Noah had been practicing songs in music class for a few weeks so I expected all the kids to get up on stage or bleachers or something, though I wasn’t sure how so many kids would fit because the whole school is there in two shifts and some kids go twice, as I will explain. But in fact only the fourth and fifth graders perform in a visible way. Back in Noah’s day it used to be the choir, but sadly, the choir fell victim to an expanding school population with no money for an extra music teacher, and it is no more.

The program now starts with the advanced strings and wind sections of the school band. Then all the kids in the fourth and fifth grade are divided into three groups of a few classes each and they either play the recorder or sing for the rest of the first half of the program. Meanwhile the younger kids sit on the floor facing the stage while parents sit on folding chairs at the back of the room. In the second half of the program, the younger kids on the floor sing the songs they’ve practiced in music class along with the older kids up on stage. (In a way it’s nice because it’s more inclusive than the old way of doing it, but knowing how important being in the band is to Noah, I’m sad the more talented singers at June’s school don’t have that creative outlet any more.)

The room was festive. There was a fifteen-foot high inflatable Santa with a spinning present on one hand on one side of the stage and a Nutcracker on the other side. Paper snowflakes decorated the walls near the stage and more hung from the ceiling of the stage. I caught sight of June as her class filed in but she didn’t see me. Her blonde pigtails and red Nordic pattern sweater made her easy to find in the crowd. (It was the same sweater Noah wore to the Holiday Sing when he was in kindergarten. Don’t ask me why I remember. I just do and the idea of having June wear it appealed to me. It was surprisingly easy to convince her. I just suggested it and she said yes.)

There were Kwanzaa songs and Christmas songs and Hanukah songs. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was the crowd favorite, but I walked home with “Feliz Navidad” and “In the Window,” a very pretty Hanukah song in my head. Also this one, which the kids didn’t sing: “War is over/If you want it/War is over now” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Xmas_(War_Is_Over)) because as strange as it seems, the war in Iraq is over, our part in it anyway. This is more a solemn than a joyous thing to contemplate, but it’s a good thing nonetheless.

When the songs were over, the kids on the floor were allowed to get up and turn around and wave at their parents. June saw me and beamed and I smiled and waved back and then slipped out of the room to hurry back to home and work.

The next day was Saturday. I worked a little and June had her last ballet class (they danced to some songs from The Nutcracker) and she and Talia and Gabriella followed it up with a free tap/jazz class because the first ballet class of the year had been cancelled and the students were allowed to make up the missed class by attending another one. Afterward all three ballerinas went to lunch at Eggspectations (http://www.eggspectations.com/usa/index.html) with assorted parents and siblings to celebrate the end of class.

That night Beth and I went to a birthday party for Lesley. It was a surprise party, made surprising, I think, by the fact that she’d already had a party two weeks earlier. (We went to that one, too.) When a preschool teacher as beloved as Lesley turns fifty, people go all out. One party is not enough. The parties were thrown by different people, with different guest lists, so we got to see a lot of people, including several parents from Noah’s class we hadn’t seen years and Becky, the nursery school music teacher, whom we miss a lot. It was a fun evening.

Sunday I worked some more and in the afternoon we went to see The Nutcracker at Onley Theatre (http://www.olneytheatre.org/). Before the show I bought June a little nutcracker figure (given that she broke, not one, but two Nutcracker snow globes last year it seemed like a better bet than another snow globe). June tested how wide each nutcracker could open its mouth before settling on one in a white and gold outfit. She angled for a second souvenir (a book with a CD) and I considered it, but it was a bit pricy. The sales clerk warned her to be careful with the little wooden doll because it was really a decoration and not a toy.

The theater space was medium-sized and kind of rustic, with wooden beams decorated with evergreen garlands and big ribbons. We piled up all our coats on June’s seat so she’d been tall enough to see, and it worked, but only because there was a child in front on her and a child in front of that child. June perched on her elevated seat and watched the first act with close attention. She applauded a lot and every so often put her arms up in the air in the same poses as the ballerinas. Noah paid close attention and applauded a lot, too. It was a nice production, somewhat more elaborate than the one we saw last year, though not a really fancy one. (I do hope to splurge on a top-notch one some day. My kids have never seen a version where all the children coming running out from under the giant mother’s skirts in the second act. That was my favorite part when I was a kid.)

At intermission, Beth and June went to the bathroom while I went in search of snacks, since June said she was hungry. By the time we found each other she only had time to eat a few of the pretzels I bought before it was time to go back to the theater, so she was still hungry. She was also tired and kind of antsy by this point. The people in front of us had re-grouped so three out of the four seats in front of us had adults in them and June’s view was now blocked. Rather than ask Noah to take an obstructed view, I moved June onto my lap, which meant I needed to crane my neck to see around her. Sometimes she sat up straight, sometimes she slumped against me, sometimes she stood in front of my seat, a few times she slid to the floor and sat there. I think she actually paid better attention last year when she was four, but this might have been a longer production. She was watching when Clara appears back in her living room at the very end. “It was all a dream,” June announced loudly. She seemed happy to have figured this out on her own. (I’d read her the synopsis of the first act before it started, but the lights went down before I could finish reading the synopsis of the second act so she was on her own piecing together the action.)

As we walked back to overflow parking lot, the kids argued over the remaining pretzels and Beth said anyone who continued arguing would not get anything at Starbucks, and lo there was peace. The sword had already broken off June’s nutcracker, but we decided this was appropriate because the nutcracker gets broken in the ballet, too. Also, Beth promised to glue it back together once we got home.

We came home. Noah and I bagged three bags of leaves I’d raked earlier and Beth made Vietnamese spring rolls for dinner. We ate in front of the television, something we hardly ever do, so we could watch The Year Without a Santa Claus before it was time to put our sleepy daughter to bed.

The new week has started and I am knee-deep in things to do, but I am wondering if I can somehow manage to make gingerbread cookie dough to take to my mom’s house to bake there. It will be a hectic week, but soon it will be Christmas day and I want to arrive with something sweet for the many relatives who will be there.

We were in Rehoboth for our annual Christmas shopping weekend, a family tradition that has multiple benefits: we get away from the distractions of home and chores and focus on our shopping while supporting actual brick and mortar stores and a local economy (if not our own), June gets to visit the one true Santa in his house on the boardwalk, and I get a little much needed off-season beach time to tide me over until spring break.

So I walked on the beach at night and the kids and I built whole villages of sand castles during the cold, windy days. June decorated hers with carefully chosen pebbles and shells and Noah smashed his with the bottom of his bucket as soon as they were built. When they tired of this, they buried treasure (more shells and pebbles) and marked the spot with an X. June cried when Noah buried what she claims were prettier shells than she’ll ever be able to find again and they couldn’t find them, but then she got over it and they were burying treasure again. On Saturday June and I were on the beach at 7:35 with the last pink of the sunrise and both kids and I were there at 4:25 with the first pink of the sunset. We got a good bit of shopping done, too.

The weekend was pleasant, but unremarkable to the point that I don’t have much more to say about it. I think this has a lot to do with June being in the Santa sweet spot. She’s old enough not to be afraid to sit in his lap any more (having conquered that fear last year) and too young to be skeptical and full of angst about it like Noah was in first grade (see 12/10/07). So there wasn’t much Santa-related drama. After breakfast on Saturday June found a mermaid doll at Browse About Books (http://www.browseaboutbooks.com/), fell in love with it and insisted Beth take a picture on her phone in case Santa needed photographic evidence, but he didn’t. That afternoon, she clambered happily into his lap and told him she wanted the “McKenna Mermaid doll” (http://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Girl-122080-MacKenna-Mermaid/dp/B001R59PX0) and he seemed to know what she meant. It was all very satisfactory.

Life is pretty satisfactory for June these days. She loves kindergarten, loves riding the bus, loves the rhythms and routines of school. She looks forward to her turns as line leader and door closer, and keeps careful count of her tiger paws. She’s learning to read and working very hard at it. Because Spanish is more phonetic than English she can sound words out better in Spanish, but she’s more likely to know what they mean in English. I’ve watched her switching back and forth from English to Spanish books and back again as she struggles to find something she can read by herself. She is this close, able to read quite of a lot of words, but not quite fluent enough to sit down and really read a book. The contrast with Noah at this age is striking. He learned to read in kindergarten, too, a little later in the year, but seemingly without effort. One day he couldn’t read and the next day he could. June’s more of a step-by-step learner. That’s why Noah was a sight words reader and she’s a phonics-based reader. Either way, it’s a joy to watch, even if we do have to read a lot of words as she points to them, over and over and asks what they say. Do you know how many words there are out there in the world? There never seem to be quite as many as when you have a child who’s on the verge of reading.

I volunteered in June’s class on Tuesday. When I came in the door her face lit up and for a while she had trouble concentrating on her work because she kept glancing up at me, at the table where I sat date-stamping homework papers and putting them in the kids’ folders and cubbies and folding and stapling coloring sheets into little booklets. Of course that’s why I go, to see her excitement at having me there, and also for the chance to spy on a bit of her school day as I relieve the teacher of some of her clerical duties. Señora T read two books, and gave a short lesson on ordinal numbers (the kids had to line up, five to a line and then the remaining children had to say who was primero, segundo, tercero—first, second, third, etc.) First they did it in order, and then she started mixing it up. There was also a short grammar lesson on the topic of “¿Que es una oración?” (“What is a sentence?”) and a free play period. June was at the stencil table, filling in a sprinkling of stars at the top of her page for a night scene. Other kids drew (one of June’s friends presented her with a drawing of a Christmas tree) or painted, or did puzzles, or played with blocks or toy cars or pretend food in the supermarket area. There was an injury when food went flying and I had to escort a girl to the nurse’s office with a scratch on her nose.

When school let out June asked if we could play on the playground before walking home and she showed me how she can go all the way across the monkey bars now. She’s been working on this all year, devoting many of her recess periods to mastering this particular piece of playground equipment. At the beginning of the year she tried the bigger set (the one she fell off) but she has since switched over to the smaller set, which is more her size, and she can indeed go all the way across. I watched her do it again and again.

It reminded me of something that happened over Thanksgiving weekend. We were at a playground in Wheeling, with Beth’s mom, three of her aunts and two of her cousins. This playground is well known to both kids, but they had a new piece of equipment June had never encountered before. It consisted of four chains, strung on a wooden frame. There were plastic handles on the sides, but June wanted to walk all the way across without falling and without holding on. Over and over she tried, and over and over she fell.

“I am going to keep on doing this until I don’t fall,” she told me, and I thought, oh no, how are we going to leave this playground because I didn’t think she could really do it. Well, you know how this story ends, right? She kept on doing it until she didn’t fall, and then she did it a few more times for good measure.

Five pushing six is a magical age, full of challenges to master, words to read and monkey bar and chain bridges to cross. It’s a good time to be a member of the June Club.

To pick up where we left off, wasn’t I just telling you a story about how I was asked to bring June home from school early on a day when I had nothing urgent to do I and didn’t do it? Oh, the irony. Tuesday of last week I’d started work on a project that was much more difficult than I anticipated. By Thursday I was wondering how I was going to make the deadline, which was the day before Thanksgiving and co-incidentally Beth’s birthday. So of course in the wee hours of Friday morning, without any previous sign of illness, June woke up vomiting. Obviously, she’d need to stay home from school.

I did squeeze in several hours of work in between snuggling with her in bed, reading book after book to her and playing game after game of Chutes and Ladders, but it set me back. I told Beth I’d need to work over the weekend. I had a very productive day on Saturday until I started to feel queasy at the computer in the late afternoon. I’ll spare you the details but I spent the rest of the day and most of the following morning in bed. Noah fell sick a few hours after I did and he actually seemed worse off. I could hear him moaning in his bunk off and on all night. He slept most of the next afternoon. By that time I was recovered and back to work, probably running on adrenaline since I’d slept so poorly the night before. I was really glad I’d taken the kids to get Beth’s gifts the previous weekend because there was no time this weekend when all three of us would have been up for an outing at the same time and I don’t know when we would have managed to shop for her.

But luckily we’d already taken care of this errand. Beth had asked for some reusable cloth produce bags so I decided to buy two at the Co-op and let the kids fill them up with treats for her. I have to say it was possibly the most satisfying buying-gifts-for-other-people experience I’ve had with the kids. They accepted guidance readily but had enough of their own ideas that it didn’t feel like me making all the decisions and paying for it to boot and then saying, perversely, that the presents were from the kids, yet at the same time we didn’t buy anything completely random and inappropriate either. They each picked three items. Four out of the six contained chocolate (chocolate-covered pretzels, a dark chocolate bar, a black and white cookie and a box of chocolate toaster pastries). This is about the right ratio of chocolate to non-chocolate gifts to buy for Beth, I think. We also picked up a wedge of Brie and some rosemary crackers. I had renewed Beth’s subscription of Brain, Child (http://www.brainchildmag.com/) weeks earlier so her birthday gifts were in the bag, so to speak. Potential crisis averted.

By Monday everyone was well enough for school and work and it seemed like we were back on track. Except Tuesday morning, Noah was feeling poorly again and he stayed home. I worked and read him a few chapters of The Emerald Atlas and then around noon, heeding a nagging inner voice, I made a phone call to June’s school. June had been complaining about her head itching since mid-October. Lice had occurred to me immediately and I knew Lesley does lice checks periodically at preschool so after school on the very first day June mentioned the itching, I took her over to the Purple School for a visit and an impromptu lice check. Lesley didn’t see anything. I checked it off my mental list of possibilities and then for weeks we wondered why June’s head was itching/ We stopped using her detangling spray and considered trying all new hair care products. Finally, I started to think we should get her checked again, just in case.

You know where this is going, right? I must have taken June to Lesley before the lice really got settled in her hair because the nurse pulled June out of class to check her and called me back at 12:45 with the news that she did indeed have lice and I needed to come get her immediately. So, I brought her home and that was the end of the school week for both kids.

Later that afternoon, we had 504 meeting for Noah with the disappointing outcome that he did not qualify for any accommodations under his ADHD-NOS diagnosis but that might under his dysgrahpia diagnosis, but that will require input from an occupational therapist and possibly yet another meeting (our third this fall) to determine. I think we might have been more upset by this if not for the lice.

The rest of the afternoon and evening was a blur of activity. There was bedding to wash in hot water and dry at the highest setting, brushes and combs to soak in rubbing alcohol, and hair to rub with smelly lice-killing shampoo and then comb out with the nit pick. We spent hours on the kids’ hair but sometime during Noah’s, which surprisingly turned out to be much worse than June’s, we started to think we might need the services of a professional. I found a few companies online, made some calls, conferred with Beth and made an appointment.

So the next morning the kids stayed home from school and Beth stayed home from work and at nine a.m., a professional nit-picker walked in our door. Beth said making sure we were all properly deloused was her birthday present to herself. We all had our hair combed and picked (and we all did have lice, in varying degrees). It took about three hours for her to do all four of us. She said Noah was in the worst shape and had probably had them longest. Since he never itched (no-one did except June) who knows how many months he was walking around with lice? I don’t like to think about it.

I did four more loads of hot water laundry, and made Beth’s birthday cake (with some help from June) and some brandied sweet potatoes to take to YaYa’s for Thanksgiving. Beth made vegetarian stuffing and gravy. All day we ate well. Beth shared her chocolate toaster pastries at breakfast and her Brie and crackers at lunch. In the afternoon she ran some errands and got herself a free birthday cupcake at Cake Love (to save for later). For diner we got Burmese takeout and then ate cake and ice cream. The can of pink frosting I was using for accents turned out to be almost empty and created more of a graffiti paint splatter effect than the roses June and I were originally going for, but I liked it.

It was that kind of birthday, not what we expected, but with its own sweetness. We did get an extra day all together before the holiday weekend, so I hope it was lousy only in the most literal sense of the word.