Category Archives: Excursions

Pulling for Annabelle

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My aunts Diane and Peggy and my uncle Darryl are visiting my mother and stepfather this week so on Sunday afternoon we met up in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, which made a convenient gathering place between Philadelphia and Washington. My mom’s family lives out West and I don’t see much of them. Peggy has met Noah several times, but never June, and Darryl and Diane were meeting both kids for the first time.

We’d planned to meet outside so the kids could run around if we had to wait, but the older generation arrived first, and the weather, which was supposed to be sunny and warm, turned out to be cold and drizzly, so when we arrived, we went straight inside to the food court.

I felt a bit awkward at first, especially when Darryl greeted Noah as “Jonah” and I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not. Noah shot me a doubtful glance and I shrugged. June was rather alarmed to see so many new grownups at once and she clammed up, but it didn’t take Noah long to warm up. Soon he was chatting with everyone and impressing the aunts with his vocabulary, though it didn’t seem to me he was saying anything unusual. Is “I’m six, but soon I’ll be seven” an advanced sentence? Maybe it was the syntax.

After the hugs and handshakes and introductions, we headed for lunch. On the way to the tables, I informed my mom that for the first time since she was six months old, June is back on the growth charts, at twenty-two pounds and thirty-one inches. She’s at the very bottom of the chart, but good news is good news. Peggy and Darryl said she looked only a little smaller than their grandson Josiah, who will be two in May.

After we staked out a table in the crowded food court, we split up to get our food. Once everyone was back, June sat in Mom’s lap and ate French fries and Thai noodles and vegetables from Beth’s lunch and mine. Noah entertained the group by singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” in German, a trick he learned at his spring break drama camp last month. Usually when my mother and her sisters are together there’s a lot of joking and laughing, but aside from Noah’s antics the mood was more subdued than usual.

The reason was Annabelle. Diane’s daughter Holly is four and a half months pregnant with her first child and she and her husband Matt recently learned that the baby, a girl they’ve named Annabelle, had spina bifida (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spina_bifida). Diane’s taking it hard. In fact, my mother was worried that seeing my kids might be hard for her. I’m sure it was, but she seemed to enjoy talking with Noah and quizzing him on his reading as we walked from the food court to the Maryland Science Center (http://www.mdsci.org/). He could read the banner on the front of the museum. He knew what “gem” means.

There were plenty of distractions in the Science Center. It’s a very interactive, hands-on museum. Noah enjoyed turning knobs to make balls roll in a track, playing a harp equipped with motion sensors instead of strings and making huge bubbles with a device that looked like a guillotine. Pop helped with this last one by blowing the bubbles into shape after Noah hoisted the blade. Noah and I put photographs in order to track an embryo’s development and again to show a woman aging. Mom and the kids stood in front of a sensor that measured their heights. Mom, Diane and Peggy, for reasons unknown, submitted to an electric shock. In the children’s room, June had a blast at the water table. It was here she let her guard down and let the aunts hear her talking, using two of her well-worn phrases, “Can you help me?” and “I want it back!” after another child took her cup.

On the way out of the museum, Noah and Darryl played with a tug-of-war machine that was rigged to give the weaker contestant an advantage. (It was something about the angle of the rope. It’s hard to read the explanatory signs while chasing a toddler around.) Mom and Peggy stayed behind to shop for Noah’s birthday present at the gift shop while the rest of us headed to Håagen-Dazs so Diane could treat us to ice cream. Outside the museum Noah tried to dance with Diane a little too vigorously (she has bad knees). Diane explained to him that he had “unlimited energy” while her was “limited.”

“I know what those words mean,” Noah said. By now he’d figured out she was interested in words and he was showing off. He then gave a pretty decent definition of both words.

If Noah was still in fine form, his sister was showing signs of exhaustion. She’d only had a half hour nap on the drive over to Baltimore and she looked about ready to nod off into her cup of dulce de leche ice cream, so we said our goodbyes and headed home.

The next morning we had an appointment at the pediatric cardiologist. At June’s two-year appointment last week the doctor noticed an irregularity in her heartbeat. It was subtle; the medical student she had assisting her with patients that day couldn’t hear it even when they had their stethoscopes on June’s chest simultaneously. It was almost surely nothing, Dr. A assured us, but just in case, she gave us a referral to Dr. H for a follow-up visit.

“Are we worried?” I asked Beth once Dr. A left the room.

“No,” she said, and we really weren’t. Beth had a heart murmur all through her childhood; so did my sister Sara. Still, we made the appointment. It was on a day Noah had off school so he came along. I dressed June in a long-sleeved t-shirt with a heart on it, as a joke or a good luck charm.

After a short wait, Dr. H came out into the waiting room. He explained he was going to do an EKG and a sonogram of June’s heart. This was when a little thread of panic started to uncurl in my chest. I don’t know exactly what equipment I’d expected him to use, surely not just another stethoscope; he is a specialist after all. But an EKG and a sonogram sounded more serious than I’d thought.

I don’t know if June picked up on my mood change or if she suddenly remembered the vaccination and blood draw at her last doctor’s appointment, but when it came time to leave the Legos and the bead maze in the waiting room to follow the doctor to the first examining room, she told Beth she was “scared.” Beth reassured her it would be fine.

I couldn’t see June’s face in the examining room because she was sitting on my lap, but Beth told me later she looked very uncertain the whole time she was hooked up to the EKG. Dr. H let Noah hold the tangle of cords while he studied the printout. He said it looked perfectly normal.

We moved on to the next examining room. Dr. H popped in a Magic School Bus video (Noah’s choice) to distract June while he smeared her chest with goop and rubbed the wand across it. And then for the first time since she was inside me, we watched her heart beat. It’s a wondrous, humbling thing to watch, no matter what the reason. Dr. H looked at it from various angles and cross sections. He said he saw the irregularity now; every now and then her heart pauses between beats. I couldn’t see it but Beth did. Dr. H decided to repeat the EKG to see if there was anything he’d missed on the first one. Again, it looked perfectly normal. She was fine, he told us at last. She has a slightly irregular heart rhythm, but there’s no cause for concern. Relief washed over me. We got coffee and pastries at the Starbucks in the lobby and our mid-morning snack felt like a celebratory feast.

That night Sara called me. In the course of our conversation, she asked if I knew about Annabelle. I said yes and she told me she’s been reading Matt’s blog (http://thedawgrun.blogspot.com/). I asked her to send me the url.

Today I read all the posts about Annabelle, starting just before the diagnosis. The tone of the post in which Matt mentions a “a slight elevation in some chemical or other that has to do with neural-tube disorders” reminded me of my nonchalance before June’s heart appointment. Like me, he was pretty sure there was nothing to worry about. Unlike me, he was wrong.

Sometimes it seems like parents live under continuous sniper fire. Mostly we dodge the bullets, so often that we become desensitized to them and fail to worry about every possible thing, but sometimes the bullet hits.

It’s not fair.

All we can do is brace for the shock, and if it comes, take what comfort we can from our team, those who are pulling for us. Holly and Matt have received tremendous support on and off the blog and they seem up to the tremendous challenge they are facing. I haven’t seen Holly since my sister’s wedding ten years ago and I’ve only met Matt once, so anything I say or do is just a small part of that support, but for what it’s worth, I’m pulling for Annabelle, too.

Loveliest of Trees

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Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

By A.E. Housman

(http://www.bartleby.com/103/33.html)

Like many of you, no doubt, I first encountered this poem in high school. I’ve always liked it, but guess I wasn’t as far-sighted as the twenty-year-old speaker because fifty springs seemed pretty long to me then. Now that I have used up more than forty of my allotment and my parents are in their mid-sixties, it doesn’t seem long at all. My mother recently told me that as she approaches her sixty-fifth birthday, death seems a lot closer, a lot more real. She’s already a few years older than her mother was when she died.

Of course, the poem is as much about life as about death, about enjoying life and savoring its fleeting beauty. There’s a word in Japanese for this, “hanami,” which refers to the act of viewing cherry blossoms and appreciating the “ephermeral nature of life,” (unless the staff writers at The Washington Post are putting us on.). For me, the cherry trees will always be a reminder of June’s birth, because they were just starting to bloom when she surprised us by entering the world six weeks early two springs ago.

Beth and I first started going to see the cherry trees in bloom along the Tidal Basin in 1992, the very first spring we lived in the Washington area. I still remember the magic of that first visit, the delicate beauty of the blossoms, their extravagant profusion, and the holiday atmosphere as people picnicked and strolled around the water. We’ve been back every year since, except one. Having a premature baby in the hospital undergoing phototherapy re-arranges your schedule and your priorities. Even that year, though, we did try, but we missed the hard-to-predict peak and couldn’t get back in time to see it. We have been to the blossoms as a couple, as parents and with extended family on the rare occasion that relatives were lucky enough to time their visits in sync with the fickle blooms.

We made our yearly pilgrimage this morning. The idea was to arrive early, before the crowds and we did make it out of the house by our 8:30 target, despite a meltdown on June’s part and foot-dragging from Noah who had no idea why we would want to go, since blossoms are “not special.” Nevertheless, when we arrived at 9:15, the crowds were already there. Cars were circling around; parking was scarce. This year for the first time, the Park Service is running a free shuttle to remote parking, but it didn’t start running until 10:00, so we parked in remote lot at Hains Point and walked to the Tidal Basin. It was cold, probably around 40 degrees, and there was a stiff wind blowing off the Washington channel. March is apparently not going out like a lamb this year. I sipped my take-out caramel macchiato to keep warm.

“I’m cold! I want to go home!” Noah complained. I wondered if it was really worth the hassle to drag the kids down here every year. It was a lot easier when we lived in the city and we could walk to the blossoms from our apartment. Parking wasn’t an issue and no one whined or complained during the outing. Some years we would go more than once. I remember going alone one year after Beth and I had already gone and camping out under a tree to read or maybe grade papers. I stayed for hours, working, listening to the radio on my Walkman, and taking in the beauty of an early spring day.

Then in less time than I thought it would take, we were there. We hit the peak perfectly this year. Almost every tree was in full bloom, their branches laden with puffs of white and the palest pink. They look like popcorn trees or cotton-candy trees or something out of Dr. Seuss, a more fragile cousin of the Truffula tree perhaps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lorax).

We ate a breakfast picnic on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. After the bran muffin, lemon pound cake, coffee cake and orange juice were devoured, Beth bought Noah a cherry blossom festival magnet in the gift shop and soon he was running around happily, shaking hands with trees, hiding behind them and snapping pictures of them. He ended up taking more photographs than anyone else, including two of those featured here.

We didn’t stay long because it was cold and June got cranky. “Aww…Do we have to go?” Noah asked. I would have liked to walk the whole perimeter of the Tidal Basin, as we used to do, and will again someday, but it wasn’t in the cards for us this year.

To look at things in bloom, less than an hour was little room, but it had to be enough.

A Death in the Family: A Memorial

Beth’s uncle Gerry died early Monday morning, at home, surrounded by family. He was a well-traveled man, with a hungry mind, a crusty exterior and a dry wit. He had a Ph.D in math. He could fly planes and speak Polish. While bed-ridden with the cancer that killed him, he was teaching himself ancient Greek. Gerry is survived by his wife Carole (Andrea’s oldest sister), his sister Patricia, his children Meghan and Sean, his daughter-in-law Aine, and six grandchildren: Micheal, Tristan, Holly, Kawika, Rebecca, and Eanna.

Gerry was sixty-nine years old, so he didn’t quite have his three score and ten, but even if he had, it would still seem like too little room, much too little.

R.I.P. Gerry Ryder.

http://www.news-register.net/page/content.detail/id/507538.html?nav=516

Back to the Drawing Board – Postscript

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June got into the Purple School off the waiting list only nine days after we heard she didn’t get in. Beth came into the bathroom Friday evening while I was undressing for a shower and let me know she’d just read the news in her email.

We stood there just looking at each other for a moment, waiting for the other to speak. I’d known this was a possibility but I expected if it happened at all it would be months from now. Noah also got in off the waiting list, but in June. I’d pretty much forgotten he was even on a waiting list.

“I think we should do it,” I said cautiously. “I’m still bruised, and I’m going to be self-conscious as hell about my co-oping but I think we should do it.”

Beth agreed and said she was going to ask for an opportunity to find out exactly what the concerns about our co-oping with two-year-olds were, so we could have a chance to address them. So pending that discussion, we think we will probably enroll her.

It changes so much, knowing June will have a fun, nurturing, affordable, high-quality preschool to attend for the next three years and that we will not have to go through the stressful, crazy-making preschool admissions process that’s standard for middle and upper class parents in our area. I had started to research other schools for her 3s year and I was a bit shocked at how much non-co-operative preschools cost. All and all, I was dreading the whole admissions scramble. It still stings a bit, knowing we didn’t make the first cut at our first-choice school, especially since we know people on the admissions committee, but I can get over that.

We took the kids to the Easter egg hunt sponsored by the Takoma Park recreation department this morning. The first time we took Noah to this egg hunt I was really surprised to find the eggs were not hidden. They are just laid out on a field that’s marked off into separate areas for different age groups. When the whistle blows, the kids rush in and grab all the trinket-filled plastic eggs they can. The hunt in the two-and-under area is pretty relaxed, with toddlers ambling around and carefully picking up eggs. June ended up with five eggs to the several dozen her brother scavenged from the more rough-and-tumble five- and six-year-olds area.

It just goes to show that sometimes you have to hustle for the egg and sometimes you only need to bend down and pick it up.

Back to the Drawing Board

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June said “I love you” to me for the first time yesterday. That was the good part of the day, the part I’m holding onto. About a month ago she was loving a lot of things: Beth, her “best bear,” her hair (I’m not kidding). But shortly after the word “love” surfaced in her vocabulary, it disappeared. Then yesterday, after a diaper change, and for no apparent reason, she looked at me and said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, June,” I said, sweeping her into a hug. I was already in a good mood. We’d just come back from the “twosies” circle time at the library. It’s a special version just for two-year-olds, with extra stories and a craft project at the end. Enrollment is limited so I asked permission from the librarian ahead of time to bring a not-quite-two-year-old. The librarian cheerfully agreed to give it a try.

June didn’t do any of the hand motions to the songs, even though they are familiar to her from the regular circle time. She never does, not at the library anyway. At home she does them all. In fact, just the day before she’d stood up on the changing table so she could watch herself do “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” naked in the bathroom mirror.

At the library, she either sat in my lap or ventured a few steps away to stand near the librarian. I don’t think she took her eyes off her the entire time, even as the group dwindled from twelve toddlers down to eight, as restless or cranky children were carted off by their parents or nannies.

I’d been somewhat skeptical of her ability to do a craft, but it was very simple. All she had to do was decorate a seal cut from poster board with crayons and stickers. She made a few tentative scribbles with the crayons, but then she lost all interest in them as soon as the stickers arrived. I don’t know why stickers are so universally beloved by little kids but apparently June is no exception. Her face lit up when I showed her what to do with them and soon her light blue seal was covered with red hearts and a couple of stickers depicting fruits.

“Noah always brings things home from school to show you and now you have something to show him,” I told her.

The librarian came by, admired her work and affixed a popsicle stick to the back for a handle. This was even better. Now she could hold the seal with the handle, and she did for much of the rest of the day.

“She did great,” the librarian said as we left. “She was very attentive.” I thought about how much she was going to like nursery school in the fall. She’s really enjoying community playtime and library activities and she loves to play at the Purple School itself while Noah is at drama class. It’s already a familiar place to her.

Outside I chatted with a nanny to a boy who is in the 2s class there this year. I mentioned we’d applied. “It’s a good school,” she said enthusiastically.

We were, in fact, supposed to hear from the membership committee that very day. Beth had missed their call at work the day before and we were waiting for the representative to call back. I was a little keyed up about it, checking my email and phone message a good deal more often than usual. As the day wore on, I grew puzzled. Why hadn’t Beth called with the good news?

She came home early, a little before six and I went to greet her at the door. She gave me a hug that went on too long. I knew before she said it. “We didn’t get in.”

Apparently the preference for siblings of alumni (though not the one for siblings of current students) was revoked this year and there were concerns about our ability to co-op with two-year-olds, though we’d never heard any complaints or criticism about our co-oping when Noah was in the 4s class. None of it made any sense.

I went back to the kitchen to finish dinner while Beth interacted with the kids. Figuring out whether to toast the hot dog buns or heat the baked beans in the microwave first seemed like an overwhelming decision. At the table, Beth asked Noah about his day while I moved food around on my plate and finally managed to eat most of it.

During the course of dinner, Noah lost a tooth. It’s been fifteen months since he lost both of his bottom front teeth and he hadn’t lost any since then so it was a noteworthy occasion. One of his top front teeth had gotten so loose it twisted around almost perpendicular to its original position and remained that way for several days. Beth and I were amazed it stayed in his head so long. It makes an impressive gap in his smile. He looks a lot older now, more like the seven-year-old he’ll be in two short months.

I felt a wave of unreality sweep over me. The “I love you,” the unexpected rejection, my son’s new smile. “This day has been too much,” I said to Beth quietly.

After Beth and Noah had left the table, I sat watching June, who was gobbling down her second veggie dog. She glanced at me. “What crying, Mommy?” she asked.

Noah, oblivious, called from the hallway, “I don’t think Mommy is crying, June,” he said in the amused tone he uses when she has misinterpreted something. But of course, she hadn’t.

More than anything, I wanted to sleep, to be done with this day, but it took until 9:45 to get June to sleep and then I just lay awake until late in the night, turning things over in my mind. What had we done wrong? What should we do now? It’s too late to apply anywhere else. Of course, two-year-olds don’t need to be in school, but I think she’s ready and she’d enjoy it. I was also looking forward to a regularly scheduled break from her and perhaps the chance to work a bit more. I’ve been updating my resume and I recently submitted it to a clearinghouse for freelance researchers, writers and editors.

The 2s class only meets for five hours a week and I would have spent a lot of that time either in the classroom or walking back and forth between home and school, but the hours increase each year and I was looking at June starting school as a turning point, the time when I might start to regain a little of myself that has been submerged in motherhood since I lost my job almost three years ago. Now I feel like I know a lot less about how the next three years will unfold. We have options, of course. We can hire a babysitter if it’s time for me we want, enroll June in kindermusik or find a playgroup if it’s enrichment or socialization for June we want, but it’s not the same, not what we planned. And even though we were encouraged to re-apply for her 3s year, we’re certainly not regarding it as a sure thing anymore so we might end up doing applications at multiple schools.

When I got June dressed this morning I noticed matching fluorescent green paint stains on her shirt and pants. She’s been painting a lot recently but we don’t have any paint of that shade. It must have been the remnant of some long-ago art project in the toddler room of Noah’s daycare another morning when Beth or I decided the gold turtleneck would look nice with the gray corduroys. Today some orange paint joined the green paint on June’s sleeve. I wish we could pick and choose which of Noah’s childhood experiences to pass down to June as easily as we do with his clothes. But of course, we can’t.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

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“I might be going to the co-op today. Do you want anything?” I asked Beth. We were standing in the bathroom, snatching a brief conversation in between the everyday crises of a weekday morning. Noah was dragging his feet about getting ready for school. We were out of eggs. Our internet connection had gone missing.

“Eggs,” she replied, naming my second reason for going.

“I’m after yogurt,” I told her. “I’m going to measure what we have and see if there’s enough.”

“What do you need it for?” Beth asked.

“The cake,” I answered, smiling a little. The cookbook had been on the kitchen counter open to the recipe since the day before.

“Oh, the cake!” Beth said, sudden realization showing on her face. “Happy Anniversary!” she said. We exchanged a quick kiss. Our grown-up celebration, when we leave June with a paid sitter for the first time ever and have brunch at Savory, will be Sunday so it had slipped her mind that the actual day was today.

Now if you’re scratching your head and thinking, “Wasn’t there an anniversary post on this blog not six months ago?” we celebrate two, the dating anniversary in July and the commitment ceremony anniversary in January. I guess we do it for the same reason we celebrate the kids’ half-birthdays. We like celebrations and we like cake.

The cake is a moist, dense spice cake with a lemon glaze. It was our wedding cake and I’ve made it almost every January 11 since 1992, the year of our commitment ceremony.

Our commitment ceremony was largely a homemade affair. We were just months out of grad school (the first round for me). Beth had a part-time job at ERIC (www.eric.ed.gov/) and for most of the time between my proposal in July and the ceremony in January I was unemployed. I started working at Project Vote (www.projectvote.org/) in mid-December. Our parents were less supportive of our relationship than they are now, so we were on our own when it came to planning and financing the ceremony.

Except we weren’t, not really. A friend with bakery experience decorated the cake. Another friend helped us track down all the pink and purple potted violets and purple eucalyptus branches available at local florists and one of my college advisors paid for them. Guests brought food and made speeches and wrote touching notes in the guest book. Although we were pinched for cash (we had a thousand dollar budget), it ended up being just what we wanted, small and personal and meaningful. Better still, it served as a turning point in our parents’ acceptance of us as a couple. Five of the six parents and stepparents attended and after the ceremony the two who were having the hardest time letting go of their vision of how their daughters’ lives would unfold started to come around, one quickly and the other gradually.

We didn’t have enough yogurt so after Beth and Noah were gone, June was bathed and a load of laundry was started, we ventured out into a cold and drizzly morning, headed for the co-op where I purchased yogurt, eggs and an anniversary card.

I made the cake in the afternoon, shortly before Noah’s bus came. I managed to get most of the ingredients into the bowl while June was in the high chair eating a late lunch of vegetarian hot dogs and succotash, so I only had the add the last few, mix them up and pour the batter into the greased pan while she clung to my legs and screamed. This is the hallmark of a successful baking experience by my current standards. I had a moment’s hesitation before pouring out the batter. It seemed thin. I wondered if I’d only put in one cup of flour instead of two. I was almost sure I’d put in two, though, so I slid the pan into the oven and hoped for the best.

When Noah got home, the clouds were clearing so we played outside a bit, and then the focus of the day shifted to getting him undressed, into his bathing suit and back into his clothes by 4:00 p.m.. He had a swimming lesson at 5:30 and he watches television from 4:00 to 5:00 most weekdays. June usually watches with him so I used most of the hour to work on an editing project I’m doing for Word Girl (www.wordgirl.biz), interrupted every five or ten minutes or so by June coming in with her little cup held out Oliver Twist-style while she pleaded “Mir ov?” (Translation: “More olives.” Sliced black olives are one of June’s favorite afternoon snacks and she can really put them away.) When only fifteen minutes remained, I checked to see if the cake was cool and I poured the glaze over it. Then I outlined it with a ring of red frosting from a can (leftover from Beth’s Buzz cake) and drew a sixteen in the middle. Finally I sprinkled pink and purple sparkles (meant to evoke the pink and purple violets) liberally over the whole creation. Noah came in to see it when his television was over and he declared it “beautiful.”

Beth was home by 5:05 and we hurried to get everyone’s shoes and jackets on and to get out the door. We were going out for pizza after Noah’s lesson and it seemed quickest for everyone to leave together. June, who had been trying to organize the expedition–“Shoes on! Mommy jacket on! Where Baf?”—now trotted happily down the driveway, holding my hand. Despite the fact that she usually has no idea where we are going, she is always up for a trip. We got everyone buckled in. Beth turned the key in the ignition. And the car didn’t start.

Beth closed her eyes in frustration. Just the night before she’d come home early to attend Math Night at Noah’s school when they got in the car, the battery wouldn’t start. They’d walked to school instead and afterward her auto service came to jump-start the car. She’d driven around a while and we thought it was fixed. Everyone got out of the car. June’s face crumpled and she began to cry when I took her out of her seat and she was snatched from the brink an outing.

“I think we should still go out,” Beth said. “We should do the fun part, go out for pizza.” So she called the Y and rescheduled Noah’s lesson for Sunday afternoon, then we all trooped out to the bus stop. As we waited for a bus, she said, “I’m glad we’re a hardy family and can change plans like this.”

Once we were on a bus, we called to order ahead and once we arrived at zpizza (zpizza.com/), there was a small pineapple pizza for the kids and a pesto, eggplant and pine nut one for the grownups ready and waiting. The eggplant slices were cut into a flower pattern and they were so pretty against the green background of the pesto that I almost didn’t want to take a slice until Beth, who was waiting in a long line for drinks, had a chance to see the whole effect. But it seemed foolish not to eat when the kids were eating because who knew when they’d been tearing around the restaurant like maniacs, so after I cut June’s slice into pieces and slipped Beth’s card onto her plate, I ate.

The pizza was delicious, the kids did not descend into any truly uncivilized behavior (though June did deconstruct a stack of booster seats so she could sit in each one in turn) and we left the restaurant happy.

As we approached the bus stop we noticed a 17, the bus we needed, pulling away. They come every twenty minutes so we were in for a wait. As we got closer to the stop we noticed there was a line of buses (all different routes) standing at the stop and not moving. This was because traffic wasn’t moving. At all. We might be in for an even longer wait than we thought. I took June out of the stroller prematurely when I thought I saw a 17 approaching the stop (it was a 16). This was a grave error, because once unrestrained she wanted to run. She did not want to sit next to me on the bench. She did not want to be held (my mind flashed back to the afternoon when I had been trying to mix cake batter and it had been imperative that she be held). She squirmed and cried and twisted through a very long wait. Once we got on a bus, it limped along until the traffic cleared a couple blocks from the stop and we were on our way home.

We got home around 7:45, much later than we expected, so we couldn’t watch Fraggle Rock and we decided to skip Noah’s bath. We sat around the table to eat cake. I was a bit nervous slicing into it–had I really put two cups’ flour in? And it was fine, a moist, dense spicy cake, deeply familiar, and deeply comforting. Because even though it was rainy and cold and Noah missed his swim lesson, the important things still turned out fine. We had each other’s company, hot pizza waiting for us, a beautiful cake at home. And no matter what the weather or what plans go awry on it, January 11 will always be a beautiful day.

Sweet Sixteen Months, or Five Days with June

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20070727-01

Noah’s science camp this week was a full day one, instead of the half-day camps he’s had so far this summer. He and Beth left the house every morning at 8:30, 8:15 if they decided to visit the playground near the Montgomery College Takoma Park campus (www.montgomerycollege.edu/tphome/) before camp started at 9:00. June and I boarded a 2:55 bus to pick him up at 3:30 each afternoon. This schedule gave June and I more time alone together than we’ve had in several weeks. Here are a few things we did while Noah was off making a race car powered by the air escaping from a balloon, a dump truck with a hydraulic system made of syringes and glow-in-the-dark slime.

Monday Morning: June Turns Sixteen Months and Is Taken For a Boy and a Six Month Old

June was enjoying the toddler-sized play structures at the Westmoreland playground, especially the staircase with a railing that allowed her to walk downstairs unassisted, when a voice called from the roof, “Hello!”

I looked up. It was a girl about Noah’s age. “Hi,” I answered, probably less surprised than she hoped. Noah likes to climb up there too.

The girl was lying on the roof with her face hanging over the edge, a few inches from my own. “How old is he?” she asked, gesturing to June, who was spinning the cylinder with noisemakers inside.

I glanced at June. When people hazard a guess at her gender they are more often wrong than right, since she mostly wears Noah’s hand-me-downs and a lot of the clothes we have bought for her came from the boys’ aisle of the consignment shop. We just like boys’ clothes better. Today, though, June was wearing a pair of white pants with red, orange and yellow flowers on them, hand-me-downs from Kathleen’s daughter Caitlin. They even have red bows at the ankles. True, she wore a plain red t-shirt and navy blue sneakers with them, but this is about as girly as June gets, unless it’s a dress-up occassion. “She’s a girl,” I said, “And she’s sixteen months.” Exactly sixteen months, to the day, I thought, but didn’t say.

“How old are you?” asked the girl.

I laughed, surprised at the question. We are so often called upon to report our children’s ages and so infrequently our own. “Forty. And how old are you?”

“Six. My mother is twenty-five. She works for State Farm. My grandmother is a babysitter. She watches her.” She motioned to a preschool-age girl standing near-by. “Where do you work?” A long exchange ensued in which I tried in different ways to explain that I stay home with my kids and she kept asking me what my real job was. Eventually, I told her I used to be a teacher, but on hearing I wasn’t currently looking for a teaching job, she was still unsatisfied. Finally, she hit on the answer herself. “So you’re a babysitter for your kids?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Lucky mom,” she commented. She looked back at June. “What’s her name?”

“June.”

“But June’s a month!”

“It is, but it’s also a name.”

“My name is Vanessa.”

“My name is December,” the younger girl piped up.

“She’s lying,” Vanessa said. “She always lies about her name. It’s Catherine.” Catherine/December looked abashed. Soon after Vanessa’s grandmother came to collect them and they left.

That afternoon as we waited for the bus, a man at the stop looked at June and said, “About six months?”

“Um, no, sixteen,” I said. Okay, she’s little. She was even wearing size 6-12 month clothes at the time. But she was also standing on top of a wall, taking sideways hops along it in one direction, then the other. Is she that hard to recognize as a toddler girl, I wondered, even in floral garb, even walking on a wall two feet off the ground?

Fortunately, June was not bothered in the least. She began trying to climb down the wall so she could walk on the sidewalk and perhaps even dart into traffic. I was mean and wouldn’t let her.

Tuesday Afternoon: June Multitasks

I often ride the exercise bike in our basement with June bobbing up and down on my thigh. This week I was aiming for twelve minutes a day. (And I did it!) It’s about as long as June can last without getting fussy and five times twelve minutes equals an hour. It’s not much as far as aerobic exercise goes, but it’s something, and something is better than nothing. I never know when or if she’ll nap alone so I like to spend that time (if I get it) having some one-on-one time with Noah or getting a jump on making dinner. (I have this crazy preference for cooking without anyone clinging to my legs and screaming.) Plus anything I accomplish with June awake feels like a bonus.

Tuesday afternoon we squeezed exercise time in right before we needed to get on the bus to get Noah. I held June in one arm, while using the other to flip through a book of Roz Chast cartoons (www.planetcartoonist.com/editorial/success_rozchast.shtml). The book was an experiment; I had reached a new level of multitasking.

I looked down at June. She was busy, too. In one arm she clutched her favorite bunny, in the other she held a Maisy book (www.maisyfunclub.com/), which she propped (upside down) against my chest to free an arm to page through it. “Book,” she muttered over and over, pronouncing it clearly, even with a pacifier in her mouth.

Wednesday Afternoon: June Watches a Horror Movie

I decided to take advantage of Noah’s longer absence this week to watch a movie. June’s usually pretty good about playing independently as long as I am sitting still in an accessible place, so she likes movies, too. Soon she will be too old for me to watch much besides kids’ TV with her in the room, so I picked Stephen King’s six-hour miniseries The Stand, or rather the first two installments, to watch this week. I’ve been wanting to see it since I re-read the novel earlier this year. Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” that good old horror movie-music standby, plays during the opening credits:

All our times have come
Here but now they’re gone
Seasons don’t fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain
We can be like they are

Come on, baby… Don’t fear the Reaper
Baby, take my hand… Don’t fear the Reaper
We’ll be able to fly… Don’t fear the Reaper

(www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/him/dontfearthereaper.html)

Apparently, June is one baby that does not fear the reaper in the least. She danced her little June dance, which consists of bending and unbending her knees while enthusiastically bobbing her head to the music. A few minutes into the film a crow pecks at the eyes of a child’s discarded Raggedy Andy doll. It’s meant to symbolize the coming plague that will wipe out 99% of the human race. The girl who drops the doll is only a little older than June and looks a lot like her. It’s a chilling moment, or it was until June pointed at the screen and said, “Duck!” in a delighted tone. In June’s world, any large bird is a duck and any duck sighting (ducks in book illustrations, rubber ducks in the tub, or best of all, real ones in the creek) is cause for celebration. The crow appears frequently in the film. As an added attraction, Molly Ringwald, on whom I had a little crush in high school, plays of my favorite characters. June and I settled in for a good time.

Thursday Evening: June Hails the Ice Cream Truck

I fear it might be a sign that we are patronizing the ice cream truck too often this summer that as we walked toward it, June pointed and said, “Mo,” June-speak for “More,” or more broadly, “I’d like some of that please.” She has also been known to run to the door when she hears its siren song and say “Truck!”

Friday Morning: June Observes Proper Etiquette…When She Wants To

Since we all get up more or less at the same time (whenever Noah rouses us) our narrow little bathroom can get pretty crowded in the mornings. And since June likes to be where the action is, early Friday morning found her methodically emptying a low bathroom drawer of its washcloths and then replacing them. “Thangoo. Thangoo. Thangoo,” I heard her say. We often thank June when she hands us something or puts something back where it belongs. If we are not quick enough, she thanks herself.

On the bus home from picking up Noah, June was very cranky, writhing in my arms and sobbing. She’s cutting a molar and has been napping poorly for a few days. She’d just quit crying and had collapsed against my shoulder when a woman with a girl about June’s age boarded the bus. I waved at the girl. She waved back. Noah waved. She waved back. By now the girl was staring at June and waving at her, no longer interested in Noah’s or my waves. She grew increasingly emphatic, her waves resembling karate chops. No response from June. Apparently, it was not time to wave.

After a late afternoon nap and a big dinner she was in better spirits. All four of us sat on the porch and sipped watermelon coolers Beth had made and listened to the patter of a badly needed rain. Or rather Beth, Noah and I sat. June toddled around the porch, sucking watermelon juice out of a cup with a straw, babbling happily and waving at passing cars.

Vanessa was right. I am a lucky mom.

Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow

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M is for Moms/20070609-01
20070609-02

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels–until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

From “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop
(www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-fish/).

We finally marched in the Pride parade’s family contingent this year, after years of considering and never getting around to it. In June 2001, our first Pride season as parents, we didn’t even manage to watch the parade, even though it passed a mere three blocks from our apartment in the very gay neighborhood between Dupont and Logan Circles in D.C. We tried to go, but Noah was a month old, and getting out of the house was a major undertaking for newbie parents like us. By the time we made it to the corner where we meant to watch, the parade had come and gone. We moved to the suburbs the next May and we didn’t even try to go the next few years, as Pride conflicted with our annual trip to Rehoboth Beach. Noah, who loves pageantry of all kinds, didn’t see a Pride parade until he was four, but when he did, he was favorably impressed with the Mardi Gras beads everyone was wearing and the people throwing candy and the generally festive atmosphere. He even expressed a career goal of being a man who dances on a float in his underpants for a few weeks after the parade. He enjoyed it so much we decided the next year we’d march with Rainbow Families (http://rainbowfamiliesdc.org/). After all, if watching it was fun, marching should be even better. But that year Noah was invited to a birthday party the same day as the parade. We thought we could just make it (even with two-and-a-half-month-old June in tow) but the magician’s act ran late and we ended up not going.

This year when Noah was again invited to a birthday party (for a different boy) on the same day as the Pride parade I experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu. This is just never going to work out, I thought. But Beth pointed out that even though the party was at Sean’s parents’ farm (an hour northwest of Takoma and at least an hour and a half from the parade site) it ended at 3:00 and the parade didn’t start until 6:30. We’d miss some of the stroller/scooter/bike-decorating pizza party that started at 4:00, but it was do-able.

So we all set off for Sean’s parents’ farm, Black Ankle Vineyards (www.blackankle.com/our_story.html), late that morning. The party was a several-hours-long, whole-family affair. The farm was lovely, with lots of room for the kids to run around, cows and chickens for them to visit and a pickup truck to drive them around. Beth and I enjoyed adult conversation (that scarce commodity) with other parents and June had a blast, too. She insisted on playing everywhere Noah had played after the screaming herd of six-year-olds had moved on to their next game. She wanted nothing to do with the tiny inflatable wading pool where Maxine’s one-year-old brother Malachi and Joseph’s seven-month-old sister Isabel splashed. Only the big kids’ pool would do, so I went wading with her. When the big kids played on the Slip ‘n Slide, she watched with interest until they were finished, then she tugged at my hand so she could go toddle up and down its length with Sean’s two-year-old sister Lucy.

We ended up staying until 3:30, a half hour after the party’s official end time, because we didn’t want to miss the piñata and the cake. Once the cardboard and crepe paper Sponge Bob was demolished and its contents disgorged, and the farm-equipment decorated cake was sliced and eaten, I changed June out of her bathing suit and into a clean outfit, denim shorts and a “Let My Parents Marry” t-shirt. Jazmín’s mom Margaret noticed it and said to June very seriously, “I agree!”

We piled into the car and drove to the city. By the time we reached the church, which was serving as the staging area for Rainbow Families, it was 5:30. Beth drove off with June to park the car at the end of the parade route and I took Noah inside. He read aloud with excited recognition the words on the Rainbow Families banner hanging outside the church and the hand-lettered “Love Makes a Family” sign someone was carrying. He remembered both from the Rainbow Families Kids’ Camp he attended one Saturday in April.

In the church basement parents and kids were decorating their wheels and eating. The large room hummed with the energy of scores of exited kids and someone played a rollicking tune on the piano. Noah carefully chose a red crepe paper streamer and a plastic rainbow-colored one to wrap around his scooter. Then we went to eat. I found him a slice of plain pizza, but detecting a few specks of green herbal matter on the gourmet pizza from Alberto’s (our favorite takeout pizza from our urban days), he declared it “not plain.” He dined on potato chips and apple juice instead. I put a cereal bar in my pocket for him to eat later. I thought his scooter was finished, but he told me he wanted to make a sign for it so we headed back to the decorating area and snagged the very last piece of cardboard. Clearly he was paying attention at Kids’ Camp because he knew exactly what to put on such a sign. He instructed me to write, “I Heart My Moms!” and to fill in the heart with rainbow stripes. As a finishing touch, he decided the point of the exclamation point should be heart-shaped. I was torn between trying to get him to do it, since I knew he could, and doing it myself because time was short and people were already drifting out of the church. I took the path of least resistance and lettered the sign myself.

We sat on the grass outside the church, waiting to line up for the parade. As we waited, we spotted Beth and June. I handed Beth a couple slices of pizza. “Alberto’s!” she exclaimed, recognizing the rectangular slices. I’d forgotten to bring any decorating materials for the stroller, but Jack Evans, a D.C. council member, was on hand passing out Mardi Gras beads and I found some scraps of yellow and purple crepe paper lying on the street and soon we were in business.

Rainbow Families was near the front of the parade (in deference to bedtimes) so we got moving pretty quickly after lining up. Once we’d been marching a couple blocks and we came to an area thick with spectators, Noah realized the thunderous applause coming from the curb was for us. He didn’t say anything, but the surprise and wonder of the moment was clear on his face. Suddenly I felt wonder too, a wonder I haven’t felt at Pride in a long time.

Beth and I have been going to Pride since 1988, when we went to Cleveland Pride, not quite a year into our relationship. I was twenty-one and almost as nervous as I was excited to be in a crowd of that unknown quantity, the adult homosexual. Since our baby dyke days, we’ve been to Pride in Iowa City, D.C. New York, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. When Beth worked at HRC (www.hrc.org/), she often had to staff the booths at D.C. and New York Pride and it became almost more business than pleasure for both of us. It’s been a long time since it was anything more emotional than a pleasant afternoon or evening outing, not that different from Takoma Park’s eccentric little Fourth of July parade, an opportunity for the community to gather, celebrate and be a little silly. But when I saw that look in Noah’s eyes, I was momentarily transported to a time when Pride was truly thrilling, when the crowd in its vibrancy, diversity and exuberance could bring tears to my eyes. Victory filled up our little boat and everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

Living in a liberal enclave like Takoma Park, where signs supporting gay marriage dot the lawns of gays and straights alike, and no new acquaintance blinks when I mention Noah and June’s “other mom,” I must have thought I didn’t need the applause of strangers. But strangers or not, they are my people and I think I do need to hear them cheer at least every now and then.

Maybe I would have predicted this reaction if I’d thought more about the actual experience of marching in the parade and less about the logistics of making it happen. I know from my decades of spectatorship that the contingent of parents and kids always gets some of the most enthusiastic and sustained cheers, often second only to PFLAG (www.pflag.org/). So many in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community feel estranged from their own families that the sight of kids with their “I love my moms” and “I love my dads” signs and the middle-aged to elderly marchers with their “I love my gay son” and “I love my lesbian daughter” signs always touches the crowd in a profound way. Also, in a community whose children so frequently come into existence after years of planning and saving for adoptions and inseminations, there are a lot of people longing for children who don’t yet have them. As we marched, I thought I saw some wannabe moms pointing and melting at the sight of June, who was obliviously playing with beads and trying to eat the crepe paper on her stroller.

The parade wound its way through our old neighborhood. We showed Noah the street where we lived when he was a baby, the playground where we used to take him, and the office of the non-profit where I worked before going back to grad school. (“You used to work in an office? Like Beth?” he exclaimed. It was apparently a revelation.) By the time we’d reached the Thomas Circle neighborhood, where Beth used to work at HRC, his energy was flagging and Beth was pushing him along on his scooter more and more often. Finally, the parade was over. After few blocks, on our way to the car, I noticed that most of the couples pushing strollers were straight and I felt a little shock of re-entry. At the car, I stripped the stroller of its beads and crepe paper so it would fold up properly.

A man in a car waiting at the light asked in a slightly disgruntled tone if we’d come from “a homosexual march.”

“Yes!” said Beth cheerily and hopped into the car. We divvied up the candy we’d gathered along the route and drove home with its sweetness lingering in our mouths.

Postcards from Spring Break

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Things have only gotten worse for Noah at school. There was the glue incident. (A scuffle over a bottle of glue left another boy with his face covered in glue and Noah holding the bottle. Interpretations of how the boys got into this tableau vary). There was the cutting in line incident. (Noah maintains the girl cut in front of him and he was merely reclaiming his spot, but only he was punished.) And so on. He’s so deep in dutch with Senora A that he has to sit out free-choice play frequently and he’s a regular at the school disciplinarian’s office.

More disturbing are the things he’s been saying about school. While he and I walked through the college campus on our way home from drama one afternoon shortly before spring break he saw a sign for a job fair and wanted to know what it was. I explained and he said he wished he could go to the fair and get a job and not have to go to school any more. I told him three quarters of a year of kindergarten was not enough schooling to become a meteorologist (his current career goal) and he conceded he’d have to keep going. Then one night when Beth was giving Noah a bath, his rubber duck told her, “Most of the things Noah does at school are wrong.” It breaks my heart he feels this way when he’s accomplished so much this year, learning to read among other things, and doing it all in a foreign language he’s quickly mastering.

So Beth and I have a meeting with Senora A and a school counselor later this week. Meanwhile, Noah’s ten-day spring break was a welcome respite for everyone. When he got off the bus two Fridays ago I greeted him, “Welcome to Spring Break.”

“It’s not Spring Break until Monday,” he said, ever the stickler for accuracy.

Here are some snapshots of what happened over the course of spring break, starting with the weekend before it officially began.

Day 1
At the cherry blossoms Noah’s mood was all over the place. One minute he was grumbling that he didn’t like cherry blossoms and the next he was running gleefully up and down the path. We picnicked near a plaque that informed us that this particular cherry tree was donated by the class of 1972 of a Catholic school from New Jersey. Noah studied the date and decided the plaque was a time machine that would take us back to “the year one thousand nine hundred and seventy two” if he jumped on it.

“How old were you then?” he asked. In April of that year, I was almost five and Beth was nearly five and a half, we told him. “How would you like to be young again?” he asked.

“Go for it,” I said and he jumped. As we spun back through the years toward five, I gave Beth a lingering kiss. We must have gotten stuck for a moment at twenty.

Day 2
In the morning Noah had a real honest-to-God tantrum, the first one he’s had in a year and a half. He and Beth were playing computer games together and when she said it was time to stop, he seemed fine and began to walk away from the computer. Then without warning he was crying and waving his arms and hurling his body around the study, seemingly completely out of control. Beth remembered what to do, dropping to her knees to get on his level, putting her arms around him and speaking soothingly. Once he calmed down she asked him if was upset about anything, maybe something at school? He said no.

Attracted by the noise, June kept crawling into the study and I kept retrieving her so Beth and Noah could talk. I wanted to leave the door open so I could eavesdrop but eventually I gave up and closed it. June stood outside the door balancing against it with her palms. When Beth and Noah emerged I asked her if she got anything out of him and she said no.

That afternoon we had lunch at the Taste of Takoma festival a few blocks from the house. Noah was still grumpy and wouldn’t eat. Then Beth made the wondrous discovery that the moon bounce was free this year. I went home to clean house while Beth and June watched Noah jump for a full hour. They came home; he ate a big lunch and was happy the rest of the day.

Day 3
At 2:50 pm, June and I arrived at the Round House Theater’s spring break day camp. We’d signed Noah up for the camp before his school troubles intensified but Beth and I were both hoping that three six-hour days of make-believe followed by a short family getaway to Ocean City would be just the mix of fantasy and family time Noah needed. Still, I was a little nervous picking him up because he’s been so negative about everything recently. Noah’s friend Maxine was also attending the camp and I chatted with her mother as we waited for the kids to be released. When we were invited in, we found ourselves in a long rectangular room scattered with art supplies and full of kids running around collecting lunchboxes and backpacks. Maxine came over with her arms full of art projects to show her mother. Noah had just a paper bag painted black, with small white paper cups glued to it for eyes. A cat, he told me. Every day at camp they went somewhere and today it was Music Land, he said. They’d made costumes and instruments and played in a band. It sounded too good to be true. Dress-up and music are among Noah’s passions. His group all dressed as animals. “I wish you could see my cheetah costume,” he told me wistfully, but somehow, he’d lost it. We looked around for it unsuccessfully. I asked if he had an instrument to bring home like some of the other children. No, he’d spent so much time on the missing costume he never got around to making the instrument. All this sounded pretty familiar. Noah misses free-choice play working on half-finished school projects about as often as he’s forced to sit it out for behavior. But he seemed pretty happy and not to mind, presumably since no one had made an issue of his not finishing.

After camp we went out for ice cream and to play on the Astroturf. (In downtown Silver Spring, there is a vacant lot the city covered in Astroturf to create a temporary green space where a skating rink is to be built. The turf attracts a real social cross-section– teenagers, singles, families of all income levels and races, anyone who wants to sit outside, which as it turns out is almost everyone. Due to overwhelming popular support for the turf, the skating rink may be scrapped and the turf made permanent. Here’s hoping.) I meant this to be a treat, but as it turns out, the turf is a two-adult activity, one to sit with June and one to tear around with Noah. He didn’t want to run around by himself, so we headed home. Mulling his day over, he decided that he didn’t like the cheetah costume he’d wanted me to see so badly because “it wasn’t very successful.” This is something Noah does frequently these days, revising his first report of events, always in a more pessimistic light. I wondered what his final assessment of drama camp would be.

Day 4
I needn’t have worried. When I picked him up the next day he said, “I’m sad tomorrow is my last day.” Maxine had even more numerous and complex art projects than the day before. Noah had a single tissue paper flower on a ribbon, but he was happy and excited to tell me they had gone to Sports Land and attended the Olympics. Campers invented and demonstrated their own games. Noah made the tickets and Maxine made the concessions. The paper flowers were medals, Maxine told me. No, Noah said, they’re flowers.

“Maybe medals that look like flowers?” I suggested. Maxine’s mother and the theater’s receptionist chimed in their agreement.

“Hers is a medal, but mine is a flower,” Noah asserted. Maxine agreed. Everyone was satisfied.

As we left I told Noah I had a surprise for him. April is Maryland Math Month and Noah had brought home a sheet of math games and activities, one of each day of the month. He wanted to do them all, but some required books we didn’t have. Beth told him we’d have to skip those, but I had made a trip to the library and to Borders and acquired all the books. Noah’s face was joyous when I told him. Today’s book was an I Spy book. For those of you unfamiliar with the I Spy series, every page is a photograph of a jumble of objects with a rhyming riddle directing you what to look for in the picture. The math sheet activity involved counting and sorting objects by attribute. We went to the café at Borders where I thought we could work at the tables. This turned out not to work since June was so antsy. “You have ants in your pants,” I told her.

“Tiene hormigas en sus pantalones,” Noah chimed in and I laughed at the translation.

We ended up moving into the children’s book area where June could crawl on the floor and play with a beanie baby display while Noah and I pored over the book, looking first for the objects in the rhymes, then for red circular objects. The day before Maxine’s mother had offered to drive Noah home the remaining two days but something made me turn her down. I wanted to make this after-camp time special for Noah and it seemed easier to do that away from home. Now I knew we were in exactly the right place. If we’d taken the book home we would have been distracted by something– television, computer games, laundry, cooking, whatever. As it was we were both totally present and focused on our task and each other. I put my arms around him as he pored over the book and nuzzled the top of his tousled hair.

Day 5
By the final day of drama camp, June had what child psychologists call situational awareness. She knew what was coming when we walked through the doors of the room and she began scanning it eagerly. The room was a visual treat– full of colorful objects and kids running around, but she only had eyes for Noah.

Mystery Land was Noah’s final destination. Each group had a mystery to solve. His involved the disappearance of all the lights at the Round House Theater. It turns out a window-seller (who wanted to create demand for windows) was the culprit. Before we left, Noah went up to each counselor and said, “See you this summer!” We’d told him he was going to the spring break camp so he could decide if he’d like to attend the longer summer version. I guess he made up his mind. We made a quick trip to Whole Foods for a smoothie and while we sat at the counter we looked at the I Spy book some more, but Noah wanted to get home quickly to pack for our trip to the beach. On the bus home, I looked down and noticed that June and Noah were holding hands.

Day 6
It was mid-afternoon when we got to Ocean City. After inspecting our quarters, a deluxe suite with a balcony overlooking the ocean and a Jacuzzi tub (the kind of accommodations we could never afford in-season), Noah and I went down to the beach. We ran around in the surf in our boots until I saw Noah was getting pretty wet. We retreated up the beach and built a sand castle, which we decorated with shells and a beach grass flag. It was the castle of a weather wizard, Noah said. He took a short section of beach grass, which he identified as the wizard and another he said was the wizard’s nemesis, who wanted to steal his power to control the weather. The game proceeded without much need for input from me, other than my listening and asking the occasional question. I lay on my side alternately watching the rise and fall of the waves, and Noah’s play. When it was time go up for dinner, we headed back to the room, where a cold and sandy Noah took a Jacuzzi bath. He said he did not like Jacuzzis, but he couldn’t suppress a grin when the bubbles came on.

Day 7
At the information center at Assateague Island National Seashore (http://www.nps.gov/asis/), Noah was back and forth about everything. He couldn’t decide whether or not he wanted to touch the horseshoe crab, whether or not he wanted anything from the gift shop, whether or not he wanted to do the Junior Ranger activity sheet. Finally he settled firmly into a bad mood, lying down on the floor and saying he didn’t want to go hike the trails, he wanted to go back to the hotel. “Noah, get up right now,” Beth said firmly, and for a wonder he did. We hiked three short trails: forest, marsh and dunes. The whole time, Noah alternately grumbled and dashed ahead of us, seeming carefree and happy to be out of doors, asking me to read all the informational signs and pretending Hacker, the villain from PBS’s Cyberchase cartoon, had stolen the many missing signs and that he was on a mission to read all the remaining ones before they disappeared. We saw the famous ponies, but Noah didn’t seem all that interested. His reward for completing all three trails was the chance to ride his scooter down a paved trail near the beach.

That night we had pizza at a restaurant on the boardwalk in Ocean City. As we left, Noah announced, “I have great news. At 7:50 p.m. Noah Lovelady-Allen will be performing tricks on his scooter on the boardwalk.” And he did, zipping around, trying to make the little wooden scooter do a wheelie. After the performance, we took a walk down the boardwalk. It was cold, but the lights were bright and Noah zoomed ahead of us on the scooter, weaving around pedestrians, nearly crashing into many, hitting none.

Day 8
On the way home from the beach, we stopped at two lighthouses, one at Fenwick Island, Delaware (http://www.beach-net.com/lighthousefi.html) and one in Saint Michael’s, Maryland (http://www.cheslights.org/heritage/hoopers-str.htm). Noah has been in love with lighthouses since he was three and touring them and photographing him in front of them has become a hobby of ours. At the first lighthouse, which was closed to the public, Noah refused to be photographed. He’s been camera shy for the past year. (Disclosure: I bribed him with a deck of Old Maid cards for sale in the hotel lobby to get his consent for the Jacuzzi photo.) I decided not to push it. So at the second lighthouse, I was surprised when he agreed with only minimal coaxing to pose on the steps of the Chesapeake style lighthouse. Once inside, Noah delighted in exploring. He was particularly interested in finding the ropes of the pulley-operated fog bell on each level of the lighthouse. He and I went up the narrow, winding stairs to the top while Beth stayed on the lowest level with June. When we came down, he insisted Beth go up and see the top, so I stayed downstairs with June while they went up. We thought we were finished when Noah insisted I go up one more time to go out on the walkway. I had not noticed the tiny doorway at the top level when he and I were up there, but he’d found it and opened it while he was up there with Beth. I hesitated because the grounds were about to close and I wanted to use the restrooms before they did. “Beth could take a picture of us up there,” Noah bargained. That did it. Up we went.

Day 9
The night before Easter as I lay with Noah at bedtime he said, “I’m going to keep a lookout for that bunny!” Last year around Easter I got some very pointed questions about the Easter Bunny. Noah finally decided it was not a giant bunny at all but a man in a bunny costume. With this revision, he was able to swallow the story. I was sure it was his last Easter believing in the bunny and I doubted Santa Claus would make it until Christmas, but this year Noah actually seems to believe more easily than last. I wonder if he has a greater need of magic right now.

The bunny came, unseen, and brought chocolate bunnies for each child and jelly beans for Noah. In the afternoon I hid plastic eggs on the front porch and the lawn for Noah (he was unwilling to get our real eggs messy) and then he hid them for me. Once we came inside, we scattered them on the living room rug for June to hunt.

Day 10
Easter Monday was the last day of spring break. Beth was back at work after a four-day weekend. I had a busy day planned—a trip to the pediatrician to get June’s one-year shots (she couldn’t have them at her one-year appointment because she was one day shy of her birthday), a trip to the library, laundry, etc. But June had a truly horrific night and as I lay in bed that morning feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all, I began scaling back. We’d go to the doctor, but everything else was negotiable. Noah had come into our room and was playing with June, touching different parts of her body gently and telling her their names. June watched with grave attention. Beth called from the dining room that Noah’s cereal was ready and he said, “Bye, Juney. I gotta go eat my breakfast.” Then he hopped off the bed, dropped into a starting position and said, “Ready, Set, Go!” and dashed off.

We went to the pediatrician for June’s shots and out to lunch in the city. Then we came home, watched television and looked at the I Spy book. We did not go to the library; the laundry stayed unfolded. Instead of homemade broccoli, lemon and egg soup I boiled some rigatoni and made a salad. I wanted to take it easy because the next day spring break would be over and we’d be back to our routine.

Ready, Set, Go!