Silence

There’s been so much happening in the world.  A few years ago, when this blog was new and the only outlet for my mental energy besides everything I was doing at home, you would have heard from me about it regularly.  Indeed, a lot of posts have winked into potential existence in my mind, responding to this that or the other thing, but deprived of mental sunshine and nutrients (because those are going other places), they never even sprouted a first set of leaves.

One thought has been growing, though.  How quick we are to throw people away.  How much we focus on punishment instead of help or understanding.  How afraid we are.

Some related things, since I'm out of time:

Ta Nahesi Coates, interviewed by Diane Rehm, with (among other things) a poetic understanding of the fear that underlies toughness and which drives violence against others, which can even channel love into violence.

A clarifying political science look at why xenophobic racist politicians seem to take off with terrifying ferocity at certain points in time.  The question they don't answer is how to put out the fire, which is where I hope a discussion can continue.

And my Twitter feed full of brave people standing up for the right to bodily autonomy and stepping away from shame in front of the Supreme Court this morning.  Having experienced pregnancy, childbirth, and raising several children, I am quite convinced that in a moral world, each person must have control over what happens to their uterus.  And cannot be allowed to control anyone else's.  That does mean that people without a uterus won't get to decide anything about any uteruses, but that will be ok.  Really.  (This one is harder to provide a link to, so I'll just put the Twitter hashtag #StopTheSham, which of course means the full mess of humanity on all sides of the issue, fair warning.)

It was the best of vacations, it was the worst of vacations.

The best because we saw almost everyone we most wanted to, despite snow and illness and bothersome things like jobs.  The best because the snow was beautiful and the kids gleefully threw handfuls of it at anyone and no one, had shovelfuls of it mischievously thrown at them by their DiDi, and enjoyed wild sled runs steered expertly by their cousins (Shmoogie hesitated, but got on board in the end; Bayboh would gladly have gone, but we restricted him to butt-sliding, which he got pretty good at, considering his restrictively small snow suit).  The best because we were there.

The worst because eight days isn't long enough to see everyone.  The worst because two hours in a restaurant (children or no) isn't long enough to make up for years of not seeing your best friends.  The worst because we thought we'd left a mild stomach bug at home but actually brought a vicious one with us (so very sorry if we gave it to you!)  The worst because we had to leave again.

Noncooperation

He sees the toothbrush coming and is instantly flat on his face to avoid it.  

When I don't fight him right away, he's curious why not and discovers I have the camera out.  

I haven't gotten the shot yet, though, so I hold up the toothbrush again and he whips back into position.  Over and over again.  Camera, curious.  Toothbrush, face down.

I get the shot in the end, and I get his teeth brushed, too.

Twenty-Three

The walk to school yesterday was warm and drizzly and very exciting.  "Mommy, be careful!  There are worms ALL OVER!" 

 "There are, like, a hundred worms!"

"Let's count them!" cries Shmoogie, who loves to count things.  She is at 15 before I even get the stroller moving out of the carport.

Together, she and Mr. P count as we walk and he bikes carefully up the sidewalk "16...17...18!..."  But Shmoogie decides she must enforce some standards, "No, that one's dead.  You can't count dead ones.  You can only count live ones."

There's a near tragedy when Mr. P's tire catches the tip of one worm, leaving it slightly bloody and writhing on the pavement.  It takes several tries before we successfully airlift it to the grass and Shmoogie deems it alive and countable. 

We arrive at school with a count of 23 (including one extremely impressive foot long specimen), certified by Shmoogie herself.  The ten minute wait for best friends to arrive only heightens the excitement.  "You can tell R," offers Shmoogie, "but I get to tell L."

Soon, R is spotted heading our way across the field.  Mr. P shouts out, "R!!  WE SAW TWENTY THREE WORMS THIS MORNING!!!!"

I watch, wondering a little anxiously how this is going to go, relaxing as soon as R smiles back and shouts, "COOL!" 

Cherry Pie Day

Shmoogie never met my dad, but she knows cherry pie means it's his birthday! 

The oldest relative I remember had a portrait of a several generations ago ancestor on her wall her whole life.  And the one thing I know about him is that he loved oysters and, I think, pears.  I wonder how many of us live longest in memories of our favorite foods?

New Thing

Bayboh can climb up onto the kitchen nook benches all by himself. 

This makes him very happy.

He can see out the window, "Birdie!"   He can grab things off the shelves that have hitherto been unreachable!  He can climb onto the pedestal table that barely stays upright with his weight on the edge! 

He can be repeatedly snatched off said table by a safety-conscious but unfeeling adult, and deposited, wailing, back on the boring old floor.

January 19

Time-poor as I am lately, I don't have a lot of words today.  I do have, though, a small interesting thing I learned, which I would have shared with my father, were he still here.   At first, I was thinking I would have shared it with him because it was exactly the kind of thing he would have loved.

And then I thought, that's ridiculous.  He used to circle back on his route home so as to have to do the biggest hills more than once.

But now I'm thinking again and although he was a dedicated cyclist himself, he was also an environmentalist. And a person fascinated by human ingenuity.  So I think maybe he would have loved it, afterall.  

Realistically, were he still alive, I probably would have emailed him the link. Well, realistically, I probably would have SMSed it, but since he died before any of us got iPhones, SMSing wasn't really a thing we did then, certainly not for sharing links. 

And, realistically, my comment with the link wouldn't have been "I thought this was cool and I thought you would think it was cool, too, so I'm sharing it because I love you."  It probably would have been something more snarky, something more like, "I might actually use my bike to get around if they'd install these on the big hills between me and everything I want to get to."

We might have had a bit of a conversation, then.  He might have told me that if I'd just try, I'd eventually be able to do hills, even relish them.  He might have guilted me about climate change and how could I say I cared if I wasn't willing to go through a little inconvenience to cut down on my car use?   And I might have defended myself, held myself up as an example of a "normal" person who wants to bike more but has a fear of traffic (he was all for dedicated bike lanes and off-street paths, so that wouldn't have been controversial) and a fear of hills. 

Or I might have started with that, explained that I was thinking about what stopped me from biking for actual transportation and realized it was pretty much those things, fear of cars and fear of hills, and that I idly wondered whether a thing like a ski lift could work for bikes.  And that Google and Wikipedia had led me to this video and I'd been so pleased to have had the idea and within minutes found that such a thing exists!  

From there, we might have speculated on why there's only one of these bicycle lifts in the world. Or maybe we would have thought about how it worked and how it could be improved.  Or which would be the best locations for such a thing in my hometown. 

You can have a lot of conversations with someone after they've died, except they all turn out to be conversations with yourself. 

The Force Awakens

The first movie I ever saw in the theater was Annie and I was enchanted.  I have a dim memory of enormous shiny glass doors at the entrance and I know I sang Tomorrow at the top of my lungs and in very poor tune for a long time afterwards.  I named my teddy bear Molly, after my favorite orphan (she was cute and maybe my very young self recognized a kinship in brown pigtails that I would never have with red curls, no matter how much I idolized the main character).

That year, I picked out the box with the Annie mask and red vinyl smock for Halloween and wore it with joy for the next two years.

 (Those vinyl smock costumes have a story behind them!  I never knew!)

Then came Star Wars, which I watched obsessively on VHS, always demanding that mom fast forward through the scary part with the Sand People before she could leave me alone.  I wanted the Halloween box of Luke Skywalker that year, but they were sold out, so I took Darth Vader.  And spent the next several years perfecting a Vader-worthy breathing style by pressing my tongue against the sharp edge of the tiny mouth hole.  I felt it gave a very convincing slurpy rasping effect.

At some point, maybe when I decided I could handle the Sand People scene without fast forwarding or adult company, I got to watch the other two movies.  But they were way too scary and I did not love them.  I spent most of first grade terrified that the floor would open up below me and I'd come up a frozen block of carbonite.

I did love Ewoks, though, and the fake fur teddy bear costume my mother actually sewed for me (I think I helped fashion the head wrap, using a rag of a thin bathrobe in a surprisingly appropriate color) took me  happily through most of the rest of my costumed Halloweens.

So I found myself on the first Sunday morning of this year, when we finally had tickets and a babysitter, briefly contemplating an attempt at Leia buns in honor of the occasion.  Let's be honest, though.  We're lucky we both got showers before handing off two excited kids and a cranky snotty baby (discovered that evening to have a double ear infection) and making our escape.

Hmm.  That lead in was longer than I'd intended.  This was supposed to be a quick post where I tell you what I thought of the new movie.

It was fun!  I loved the casting.  I can totally imagine little-kid me being even more excited to be Rey for Halloween (especially with how cool and not-vinyl Halloween costumes are these days) than I was to be Luke or Vader.  (Except that little-kid me would have been way too terrified by this movie to even get past the third or fourth scene, much less fall in love with it.  Even adult me kept wishing they’d just cut half the action sequences and let us have a little rest.)  As an old fan of the original, the nods back to that one were fun (especially because the audience so obviously loved them; I slightly regret that we didn’t see it closer to the release, when I know the crowds were even more excited.)

Grown-up me loved even-more-grown-up Leia the best, though (and Carrie Fisher has definitely been the best thing in the little press I've read).  How often in the movies do you see a woman her age (and a mother, even! and with some grey hair!) portrayed as commanding, beautiful, complex, and warm, all at the same time?   I also totally want to be able to do my hair in that nice crown-braid thing she had going on.

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For an interesting take on other aspects of the movie, both positive and negative, I’d definitely recommend the Feminist Frequency review.

You could be really good!

A good Lego build is a beautiful thing.  The cleverness and care of the design, the perfect clarity of the instructions, the satisfying smooth-but-secure connections...  Mr. P was very generous and let me "help" on a few parts of his Christmas present.

The Airjitsu Temple

That night he told me, "It was really fun watching you do Lego for the first time ever, Mom. With practice, you could be really good!"

This thing is amazing.  It even has a shadow puppet theater built into the basement that lights up and moves when you turn the crank!   I believe that's what Mr. P refers to as a "play feature".  (Thanks, YouTube.)

 I'm really curious to see how long this one stays in essentially its current condition.  It will be very tempting to cannibalize for parts!