Twin Trees 2011

Day 1: Traffic makes the drive a half hour longer than usual, but the last stretch was enhanced by a sign in Wevertown reading "Eggs so fresh you'll want to slap the hen" and a game that involved A laughing so hard that she shrieked, "You're making me drool!" "Piano Man" comes on the radio and Dan complains that radio stations only play three different Billy Joel songs.

Day 2: Overhearing the kids playing Go Fish, Dan and I contemplate pick-up lines following that format. "Do you have a rhinoceros?" is deemed too intimidating. C goes to Raquette Lake with his grandparents before Jeff, Sandy, Robin, and Iain arrive. Our campfire includes Violent Femmes sing-alongs and s'mores, and it is determined that Iain has not inherited his father's enmity toward marshmallows. It is also determined that s'mores made with Rolos are not as awesome as they should be.

Day 3: Dan makes omelets and fresh pesto with basil, parsley, and garlic he grew himself. We get sunburns while visiting Hooper Mine and Thirteenth Lake but blueberries provide adequate compensation. Dan attempts to take pin-up shots of me in my swimsuit but I have a bad attitude. (I then contemplate creating a nude Twin Trees calendar as a fundraiser, but can't think who would buy it.)

The old guests head for home and new ones arrive. Corrina, Donny, Dylan, and Arielle get settled in just in time for thunderstorms to keep us up all night.

Day 4: It's still pouring when we wake up. The kids are cheerfully but noisily playing inside and thus I feel rather sorry for Gene when he arrives for the day, but luckily it clears up enough to go to Thirteenth Lake and Hooper Mine. Yes, again.

And again, old guests leave and new ones replace them: C returns before Steve and Denali arrive. Steve, tasked with sorting peas while we cook dinner, is wholly unimpressed with Dan's methods. We consume a shocking number of desserts, since in addition to our own ice cream, we'd managed to wrangle chocolate zucchini cake, banana cake, lemon pie, and fruit from our previous guests and cookies and watermelon from our current ones. The boys play Settlers.

Day 5: We attempt to hike to Peaked Pond, but the kids’ enthusiasm for exploring and loon-watching kept us from reaching it. We only made it back to the Thirteenth Lake swimming area (yes, again) after I challenged them to walk for an entire ten minutes without stopping to eat. Our guests stay later than planned because C and Denali become immersed in NetHack.

Day 6: I beg for and am granted a day in which we don’t drive anywhere, despite Dan’s itching to find cell service. We walk to the creek across from the fire station and bicker about the safety hazards of throwing rocks. A hummingbird visits each hosta flower in turn. The kids complain about the homemade frozen pizza but acknowledge that it’s better than the pizzeria pizza we so cruelly subject them to on occasion. Everyone but me reads Garfield books that some sadist left behind. While making s’mores around the campfire, C sings along to a repeating song, and I wonder how much of his sing-along hatred comes from not remembering the words.

Day 7: We venture down the hill for the first time since Friday. The grocery store, to our surprise, has both organic yogurt and an aisle labeled “Warehouse Snacks.” We explore gift/ antique/ junk shops and the burnt-out ruins of the transfer station.

The heat causes my blood pressure to plummet. Having finished all of my own books I make selections from the camp bookshelf, and determine that John Grisham is a better choice than James Patterson.

(I cannot complain about the weather, though. This was the only unbearably hot day and other than Day 4, every day was sunny and gorgeous.)

A randomly decides to sleep in a tent by herself and stays there all night despite a noisy rainstorm. Dan however does not sleep at all, worrying about his 6-year-old out there. It was a little jarring to send off a little girl wearing a nightgown that matches her doll’s and carrying four stuffed animals to sleep outside alone.

Day 8: Dan cooks up potatoes and eggs for brunch, with the feeble hope that it’ll keep the kids from being hungry for an entire hour. C hadn’t yet climbed Hooper Mine on this trip, so off we went (yes, again), stopping (yes, again) at the lake to swim on the way home. We lazed around for the rest of the day. I flip open a magazine and read, “It can be tough to decide among bikes priced in the $2100 to $2700 range. Cyclists who find themselves faced with this budgetary limit on their hobby have to carefully evaluate how to get the most value for their money,” and giggle at the arrogance.

Tragedy! The baby zebra from the Go Fish game falls through a crack in the porch floor. A wails because “it will miss its mommy.” Dan is delighted when C volunteers to be the one to go under the porch after it. C find the crawlspace “awesome!” and collects both the zebra and an old used glowstick, which I refuse to let him bring home.

Day 9: I give C the next book in the series he’s reading and this renders him unwilling to go to the river with us. We drag him along anyway and A and he have a fantastic time swimming, collecting rocks, throwing rocks, exploring “Itchy Island,” and watching an osprey. Heidi, Brian, and Guinevere stop by for lunch before we head for home. “Big Shot” comes on the radio and Dan is delighted that it’s not one of the standard three he listed on the ride up. I’ve unpacked and done most of the laundry, but think it’ll take a few more showers before we’ve washed all the lake sand off.

Community activism with young children

My kids are old enough that it’s no longer an imposition to leave them with one parent or a babysitter for dinner and bedtime, which makes it easier to attend meetings and events in the evening. My husband and I also have enough low-stress time together now that it’s less imperative to spend evenings together. But that wasn’t always the case and it was frustrating at times to be unable to participate in activist events or the planning thereof. Other people clearly have the same issue; an unfortunate number of organizations’ memberships consist primarily of students/ twentysomethings and people over 50 whose kids are mostly grown, with a big gap in the middle of families-with-kids.

Organizations can arrange things differently to better attract families, but this makes for difficult scheduling around workdays, and when it comes down to it people with young children usually have less to devote to big projects than other demographics. The limits on what families have to offer given the realities of life with young children can make active participation in traditional organizations less viable even with accommodations. So here are some things we did:

For the record, organizers are often friendly to children; my son attended innumerable meetings and events of Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. Most children can be trained to play quietly for short periods of time, and he could look at books/ draw/ eat/ play with small toys on the floor in between breaks of actively engaging with a parent outside. As infants, my kids were often more happy being paced around in the backs of meetings than at home. If one parent can bring the baby along with them that leaves the at-home parent with some breathing room.

We formed a Roots & Shoots chapter that enabled us to focus on community projects with our kids and other families. Ours was based at Five Rivers and opted mainly for environment-themed projects but the program is flexible enough to allow for a lot of different activities. This can be done without connection to any organization or through 4-H or Girl Scouts instead, but Roots & Shoots does provide some great activism ideas.

Writing letters and making actual phone calls to politicians can still make a difference. It sometimes felt like a cop-out but my husband and I did quite a bit of that.

Something we didn’t do, but would be a good strategy, would be to work with parent-focused organizations that are more likely to include children. Schools, La Leche League, and religious groups come to mind. Turning your daytime playgroup into a political discussion group or guerrilla gardening troop is also an option.

A lot of our activism became personal. Some people discount home and lifestyle changes as meaningful on a larger scale but I disagree; I think we all should be trying to live the kinds of lives that support our values. Besides reducing our financial support for industries we don’t like, friends have made changes in their lives when they’ve seen things we’ve done. Eating and growing organic food, reducing resource waste, and minimizing exposure to toxins fit into our family lifestyle as well as our personal activism.

And I don’t discount the connections we made with neighbors and other parents as unimportant either. Community resilience is an important focus of mine, and getting to know people around town is an integral part of that. I have a number of people I would feel comfortable relying on in a personal emergency or a community disaster, and they could form the basis of future community collaborations as they become necessary.

now we are six

Guess which one of our kids has learned to equivocate?

(In the car on 787, following a conversation on what "normal" means regarding both unusual behaviors and antisocial behaviors.)

S: Do you think you're normal?
C: Hmm, yeah, I guess I think I'm pretty normal.
(A is not able to contain a snort.)
S: Do you agree with that, A?
A: Heh. Umm. Hmm.... Look, a train!

The same one who's still very little sometimes

(Several days after she received stickers "from Monkey" because she'd been wondering out loud what her toy monkey would give her for Christmas.)

A: Did you help Monkey write the note on my present?
D: Er, yes, I don't think Monkey can do that on his own.
A: Yes, that is true.

and writes notes like Christopher Robin

Dry erase board on her door:

Not at home. At scool.

and is quite reasonable perturbed by non-phonetic spelling.

A (Pointing at songbook): There should be an E at the end.
S: Huh?
A: There should be an E at the end.
S: Of "Christ"?
A: Yes.
S: Oh, because it's a long I sound?
A: Yes.
S: That would make sense. English words are often spelled in strange and inconsistent ways.
A: THERE SHOULD BE AN E AT THE END!

Twin Trees

Day 1: We can barely fit everything in the car since we decided to bring all of our food and enough clothing to mostly avoid laundry for ten days. We also tote a surprisingly high maintenance monarch caterpillar, a whoopee cushion, and many many books.

The skies darken as we hit Lake George but it only sprinkles a little. The kids and Dan grab slippers and blankets as I unpack them, complaining of cold. It is 70. On a milkweed reconnaissance mission, Dan steps on a yellow jacket nest. A’s two stings are fine, but Dan’s four swell alarmingly, so we make an unplanned family fun trip to North Creek for Benadryl, find milkweed in the parking lot, dance to a local band on the sidewalk, and stop at the river on the way home, where Dan refuses to take the Benadryl.

Dan declares that people shouldn’t run around actin’ like hippies if they don’t practice free love. We both desperately hope that Lynyrd Skynyrd made a whole lot of money from the fake (and egregious) Sweet Home Alabama.

Day 2: It rains. C finds a heavy metal station. We set him to work repairing torn cushions. We realize that we can not see the fireplace from our bed in the Rose Room and consider making a life-size mural of it on the unfinished section of drywall.

Dan suggests that the book I’m reading, The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, could be redone to good effect as “one sexual liaison at a time.” I note that I’ve never found that to be a good community builder.

Day 3: C leaves with his grandparents. The rest of us go to Hooper Mine and Thirteenth Lake. There are many red raspberries, very few blueberries, and a couple just-ripe blackberries and thimbleberries. A draws fairies who are “smiling so hard that their long pointy teeth are showing.” The caterpillar turns green and pupates, allaying my fear that the trip had killed it (it hadn’t eaten since we got in the car). Dan decides to write a novel, gets out his computer, and goes all Jack Torrance.

Day 4: I try the plunger-and-bucket method of handwashing clothes to ensure we’ll have enough. We go into town so Dan can check his e-mail before hauling dirt to cover the new water line. I’ve finished all but one of my books and am way too tired to follow the discussion of Homo habilis DNA in the last one, so grab a 1971 book about hippie communes off the shelf.

We draft a budget, and Dan decrees that the entertainment line is more important than the savings line, which we drop to zero. Unsatisfied with the toy fairies she brought with her, A draws and cuts out several more and acts out multiple dramas with them. After she’s in bed Dan and I walk down to the brook and watch a yellow moon rise.

Day 5: We drive up to Raquette Lake to trade kids with my parents, check out their newly electrified cabin, and experience the wind at Golden Beach. I muse on the viability of growing bamboo as a building material and Dan says we’d need a guard gorilla. Or panda. Upon our return, C and Dan play Settlers while I take a walk and sit on a patch of thyme, watching the creek go by and the clouds turn pink.

Day 6: I wake up without the headache I’d had for the previous 48 hours but it returns by evening. We hike to Ross Pond. C complains that:

• We’re not going to Hooper Mine and that’s the only hike he will ever want to go on
• He’s required to change out of his pajamas
• Finding his water bottle is not his responsibility
• The trail is too far from the parking lotA moth flew into him
• The trail is too muddy
• There are too many “malarial mosquitoes”
• The woods at home are just as nice and easier to get to.

He eventually seemed to decide that his best strategy was to end things quickly, and ran up ahead. (I was impressed with his stamina but it made me feel very old.) I wore sneakers and learned that my fear that I now own no shoes that fit me well enough for a walk of more than a couple miles was correct (my sandals bit the dust before the trip). So when we got back I performed surgery on another pair to make room for all my toes. My parents drop off A and stop for dinner on their way home.

Day 7: Dan can’t go another minute without e-mail so we head back to North Creek. We stop by the swimming hole when he’s done; kids play, a heron visits, and I find a neat little walking path. We determine that my sinus headache may be altitude-related. I get out a puzzle but no one is willing to work on it with me.

Day 8: The phone rings at 9 a.m. and Dan expects it to be word about a job (the decision date has been pushed back three times already), but alas. We got to Hooper Mine and Thirteenth Lake (yes, C complains anyway)- it’s a beautiful day and Merganser ducks congregate on rocks. The kids bicker in the car and, thinking on the commune book I’ve been reading, it occurs to me that a major reason any lasted as long as they did was because everyone was stoned all the time and thus better able to put up with each other. I consider lifestyle changes. C brainstorms ship names. My favorite is the CKR Metaphor.

Day 9: C asks how to make Molotov cocktails; Dan objects when I begin to explain. I play in the creek with A. Dan and I disagree on whether pyromania is a human instinct. Dinner, a haphazard cleaning of the refrigerator, consists of peanuts in melted chocolate and hard boiled eggs.

Day 10: We pack and clean, finding toothpicks all over C’s room and tiny pictures of A’s everywhere. I appreciate the outhouse because it gives the children no excuse to come inside. I also appreciate the Playaways I got from the library; despite the arguments about the horror of wearing headphones, it may have been the most pleasant family car trip in our history. Home on time for the first laundry to dry before bed!

six hours of A

Where is the sun in space?

If I mix the red and black raspberries together I can make a sauce! Every day in the summer when there are berries we can go berry-picking, and on day number one I'll make sauce for me and you, and the next day for Daddy and C, and the next day for me and you again. That way I won't have to pick so many berries on the same day. What color do you think it will be?

(Rummaging through dress-up stuff)
Friend: Ooh, can I be the cow?
A: There's no cow in princesses.

Do you know what rugby is? It's like football, but without the masks.

The new bike is getting outfitted!

Our current child seat setup on the Yuba Mundo. Not as pretty as this but it took less than 15 minutes to put on an old booster seat with two utility straps and an old belt. Cheaper and holds bigger kids than the official option.

Our kids and the neighbor kids took turns getting rides around our circle today, and Dan took A to a dance about four miles away.

happy vernal equinox!

After our St. Patrick’s Day ice cream cones at Stewart’s, the kids and I made ornaments representing signs of spring. Observations, events, etc. We hung up the ones that had already happened (snowdrops blooming, geese flying north, etc.)


and are waiting for the rest.



In future years I plan to use these as an event-driven, rather than date-driven, Advent calendar- maybe marking the dates on the back of each one as we get to hang them up?

I wish he'd chosen a hero with an easier job

C wrote this as part of a homework assignment a few months ago. It broke my heart a little. (The mess in Afghanistan left him feeling betrayed by Obama.)

Barack Obama is President of the United States. At first I liked him more than any other president but then, although he is better than John McCain, he isn't as good as I first thought. Though I still agree with his health care plan, the lesson is that I can't like and trust someone (especially not a politician) too much.

Twin Trees

So I thought I’d written up and posted about our trip to Twin Trees back in July, but it turns out I was only half done. And now I don’t remember what else happened. But here’s what I have:

Day 1: I pack furiously, but confronted with a refrigerator full of a CSA share, I am too overwhelmed to consider planning meals. I leave behind the cheese I’d bought for the trip but Dan remembers to bring socks and underwear this time.
The ride is blessedly uneventful. When we arrive, C immediately claims his favorite chair in the living room and reads a book. A wails, as we’re still unloading the car, “C has something to do and I don’t!” I suggest she climb on rocks, and to my surprise, she thought that was a fantastic suggestion.

We unpack and eat ice cream and send the kids to bed. (C in the Chalet, and I wonder if the fact that he not only accepts, but enjoys, sleeping in a building by himself at his age is something I should worry about.) Dan equates contra dancing with speed dating and we listen to the rain on the roof.

Day 2 dawns bright and sunny; we wonder where we are. Friends call and worry that their child may be too ill to visit. We assure them that vomiting only adds to the ambiance and ask them to pick up our cheese*. Dark clouds have rolled in by the time they arrive. “It’s funny,” they say, “it was sunny right up until we turned onto Thirteenth Lake Road.” How did my ancestors find such a miserable microclimate?

Hooper mine, lemon balm pesto, wine, campfire, s’mores (with vegan marshmallows!), hearts. Dan and I marvel at the functional toaster, and it occurs to us that we, too, could have one that toasts both sides of the bread simultaneously and stops when done.

Day 3: A bickers with her friend all morning (“everyone in the whole world is hurting my feelings!”) but shrieks, “You can’t leave so soon!” when his family departs. We go to Raquette Lake, where it’s windy and cloudy but not actually raining. The kids explore the cemetery when we return. We wonder, not for the first time, why my relatives LIKE to have a view of the road. I read a recipe that calls for a quart of breadcrumbs, which are used as bait to trap the pigeons used as the meal’s protein source.

Day 4: C wants to spend the day in his pajamas and we agree that he doesn’t have to go anywhere that requires clothing. So we spend the mostly sunny day reading; A colors and misuses game pieces and both kids play outside. Dan can’t take another day without e-mail and goes to North Creek for a fix. (I am extremely jealous.) He then demonstrates an effective way of removing dried CSA popcorn from the cob that he learned from a childhood of tic-tacking houses with field corn. I propose that people who hit deer with their cars be required to take partial responsibility for their actions by learning to gut and cook the meat.

Day 5: I think we went to the swimming hole at Ski-Bowl, which has the same lifeguard as last year. Sweet job- there are rarely any swimmers there, the pond is only about 5 feet deep, and he has his friends come over to hang out all day.

Day 6: Our next set of friends gets in around midnight and we stay up way too late chatting.

Day 7: A guest cooks us potatoes and peanuts for our third breakfast before we head out to Hooper Mine again. A climbs to the promontory without assistance. We stop at Thirteenth Lake on the way home and A freaks out when “black plumpy things” attach themselves to her. “The problem is that she doesn’t move around enough so the leeches have a chance to grab on,” Dan opines, as he swims out to a rock. All the children wail because they can’t reach the rock too.

Dan liked last year’s improvised lentil/ turnip/ feta meal so much that he makes it again, on purpose this time. Brian arrives as our other friends leave, bearing a six-pack of beer and a bag of cookies. He knows how to please us.

Day 8: Brian takes his bike to check out the “bike center” at Garnet Hill Lodge but is foiled by typical Adirondack service. So he rides to North Creek and back instead. The grandparents pick up C for a couple nights at Raquette Lake.

I tell Dan that I don’t want to go out to dinner if it means driving as far as Indian Lake (20 minutes). He tricks me into getting in the car to drive to the trailhead for Vanderwhacker Mountain an HOUR away, the last five miles of which on a rocky dirt road that does unmentionable things to our car. It’s muddy and buggy and steep and starts to rain when we’re less than halfway up. Brian and I insist on descending, traumatizing A who’d been promised a fire tower, but as it starts raining harder and harder even Dan admits we were right. We arrive at the car soaking wet and covered in mud, and of course have to creep back along the now-wet road designed for high-clearance 4WD vehicles. We have been officially Vanderwhacked.

Tired and hungry, we stop in Olmstedville for pizza at the dubiously-named Lucky Leprechaun. The waitress is polite and the place is clean, which is remarkable ‘round these parts, so things are looking up. The food takes forever, but when it finally comes I’m impressed that my first slice of pizza is tasty. Then I have a second and realize I was just starving initially. There is a single bathroom that eight people, including the four in our party, all desperately need to use simultaneously. I give up before it’s my turn, determining that it’d be more expedient to just drive home, where I declare that sea shanties don’t make anyone gay.

Days 9: Who knows? Presumably we were recovering from being Vanderwhacked.

Day 10: We manage to pack and clean up early so we’d have time to get home and settle in before I needed to go to work on Monday. But we are foiled on our way out of North River, when A has a sudden bout of (understandable) motion sickness and vomits all over the car. We spend an extra half hour cleaning up in the Hudson. Our car ride is more peaceful than usual, as C is still with his grandparents and A can obsessively listen to the same book on tape as she did on the way up, and I get the first load of laundry in as soon as we get home.

Back in September!


* I later find local cheese from happy cows for sale at Hudson River Trading, so I won’t have to fret so about left-behind-cheese in the future.

driving home from pear-picking

D (as torrential downpour begins): Sorry; I need to stop telling the story for a while so I can focus on driving.

(pause)

A: No matter how many zeros you get, you still have nothing.
C: Of course. But if you put just one other number in front of all the zeros, you could have a huge number! Even one that goes on forever!
A: Like pi goes on forever.*

(At this point I get distracted; we’re crossing the Dolly Parton Thaddeus Kosciuszko Bridge and the rain is stopping; I ponder the surprising effect the Mohawk River has on weather patterns. When I tune back in, C is counting by twenty-billions.)

C: 420 billion, 440 billion…
S: Why are you doing that?
D: Because he’s showing off to A. Leave him alone.
S: But why twenty-billions?
C: Because it’s so fun! 580 billion, 600 billion…

When he reaches 900 billion, he starts interjecting the a cappella equivalent of guitar riffs between counts. And there is quite a grand finale at one trillion.

(pause)

D: Um, did you want to hear the rest of the story now?


* Poor child; I can’t remember the last time we had to calm her angst about pi, but it seems that while she’s much braver about facing it, she’ll never forget.

I'm no longer sure how I feel about the Internet. Or the funny papers.

C (laughing): I looked up a chemical and it talked about its atomic number, so then I had to look up what atomic number meant, and it said it was the number of protons in the nucleus. But then I had to look up what nucleus meant!
My father: What chemical were you looking up?
C: Chlorine. It said it was hay-lo-genic.
My father: Yes, it’s a halogen. Why were you looking up chlorine?
C: Because when I looked up IED the article talked about chlorine.
S: What’s an IED?
C: Improvised Explosive Device.
S: Er, why were you looking up IED?
C: It was in one of the comics.

not part of his job description

A: C, will you make a prince puppet for me to go with my princess?
C: No, why would I want to do that?
A: To make me happy.
C: Er, no, I'm busy.

IT’S sad to admit, but while some children are easy to love, others require more of us — sometimes more than it seems we’re capable of. But given the right combination of awful circumstances, you can discover surprising things about yourself. Loving Theo required lavishing affection upon him and receiving almost none in return. It required a willingness to think like him, to see the world through his eyes, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer constant frustration.

And it required work, a whole lot of grinding, tedious, physical work. More work than I ever could have imagined having to do for another human being. And yet I did it — most of the time with tenderness. These days, when I catch Theo’s eyes and tap my heart, he says sweetly and dutifully, “I love you, too, Dad,” and the sound of his voice, the look on his face, it cracks me up.

this summer we can calculate prime numbers

A: Me too!
D: Me three!
C: Me five!
A: Me 600!
C: NO, A, that's not part of the Fibonacci series!

Proof that anything your kid learns will just be another excuse for an argument.

I wonder if he could sell it at the Little Book House

All the kids in C’s class are doing reports on different countries. For their final project, they are making an alphabet book on their country, with each letter discussing a different topic. (A, for example, could be about animals, and they’d list some animals found in the country.)

Of course, instead of choosing Ireland or France like a normal child, he had to go with Afghanistan. Some of his topic selections? J is for jihad, O is for opium, Q is for al-Qaeda, V is for vengeance (post-9/11 bombings by the U.S.), Y is for yearning (for children to no longer be killed by land mines). I suspect this was not quite what his teacher had in mind. Now he is supposed to add illustrations- I can’t wait to see it when it’s done.

A few weeks ago he sent the President a letter asking him to pull out of Afghanistan. He included diagrams suggesting a withdrawal plan. I thought it was pretty awesome but realized that most parents probably don’t get sappy over their kid’s military strategies.

the problem with encouraging independence

So say you’re eight years old and you just heated up some peas and want to put some salt on them. But the saltshaker is sitting in the dish drainer, empty. You could ask for help, given that your mother is in the next room, but you don’t. Instead you find the big container of salt. You could pour a little bit out to sprinkle on your peas, but you’re feeling helpful and decide to refill the saltshaker. When you do, the salt doesn’t shake out. (You don’t know that this is because the saltshaker was wet and salt doesn’t like that so much.) You get a pencil and poke it in the holes of the saltshaker (breaking off the lead in two place) to no avail. This inexplicable failure doesn’t stop you. The logical next step- getting some Tupperware out of the cabinet, poking some holes in the bottom of it with scissors, and filling it with salt to replace that defective saltshaker. Mission accomplished.

forts, junk, and muscles

C has been spending a lot of time lately building forts inside. He’s renovated a niche in our upstairs hallway with a mini-futon and plants and he keeps on stealing couch cushions to build tunnels. I’m wanting to snag discarded furniture and give him some tools to make something outside, but Dan is less than enthusiastic about the junkyard aesthetic that would lend to our property.

He doesn’t really have a leg to stand on though. It was his idea to grab the discarded wooden utility spools; we made a family fun trip across the railroad track to get them, and attracted some attention as we rolled them home. Even less attractively, we salvaged a metal futon frame he hopes to turn into a utility trailer for his bicycle. We were careful to put it where our bad neighbor would have a nice view of it, which is also where we keep our stack of reclaimed fencing/ pallets.

Unrelated:
To keep from going numb during my work days I occasionally get up and do modified push-ups, leaning against a railing in the hall. This is somewhat less awkward than doing push-ups on the floor in public, though I still get funny looks. Over the weekend I was curious to see how many real push-ups I could do. (12; I have no idea if that is above or below average.) Interestingly, the limiting factor wasn’t my arms (though they were almost there) but my abs. And three days later my stomach STILL hurts. I’m clearly not getting enough general exercise. I suppose that’s not too big a surprise, since most of my non-work hours are spent lying down, trying to catch up on some of the rest that insomnia steals from me.

head wounds bleed a lot

C just walked into my room with blood dripping in his face. He'd hit his head on the corner of the medicine cabinet. Tiny cut, he's not in pain or even as stressed out as he normally is over these things. But feigning calm when your kid's head is COVERED IN BLOOD is really really hard.

And I don't know how to put a Band-Aid on when there's hair in the way.

don't let Tumnus break your heart

A has informed me that she doesn’t believe in Jesus but does believe in Santa Claus. She cites Santa’s presence at the Delmar holiday parade as evidence for this position. I’ve cautiously suggested that sometimes people like to dress up as Santa, but she does not think anyone other than Santa himself could produce a costume that good. Dan wonders if she’ll convert if we take her to a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Some people say they felt betrayed upon learning that Santa wasn’t real. I’m not concerned about that. The big betrayal of my childhood was perpetrated by C.S. Lewis. I read and reread The Chronicles of Narnia at an age when I could immerse myself in fantasy and half-believe that it was real. I longed to be Lucy and set up elaborate worlds with paper and glue and Playmobils and gerbils (one named Aslan).

I was 12 or so when I picked up The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe again and saw the religious symbolism. I was truly devastated. To see that something that meant so much to me was nothing more than a medium Lewis created to forward his religion (which was, by chance, the same ones I’d been raised in, but had never particularly subscribed to) was profoundly disillusioning. Now I can appreciate that most of the books can be read as damn good stories irregardless of Lewis’s intent (or was it that he used the proselytizing as an excuse to justify writing fantasy?) but as a teenager, no.

I’m not the only one who had this experience. I thoughtlessly mentioned it to an unsuspecting friend at summer camp in 1989 and he had to fight back tears.

I don’t think that C is as fanatical a reader as I was. While he reads continuously he never rereads books or uses their characters in his play. If I hand him the first book* it’s likely that he’ll whip through it cheerfully and then go back to drawing up his plans for snowball-throwing tanks**. On the one hand this makes me sad because I’d like to share the experience with him (in a way I really couldn’t with his WWII obsession) but on the other I hope it means that he’ll never experience the same sense of betrayal I did.

Until now I put off giving him the books because of the violence, but given his research on the invasion of Normandy that’s not really relevant at this point. I’ve considered mentioning the allegorical components to him but decided against it. I’m hoping that the joy he may obtain from reading them uncritically*** will override any loss he might feel when he recognizes what’s behind the story. And if he doesn’t read them soon he won’t appreciate it in the ways that only children can. But I still hesitate to do it, remembering how hurt I was and wanting to protect him from that.

* Meaning The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- there’s a movement to reorder the books chronologically but starting with The Magician’s Nephew is WRONG. Gee, you think I have any emotional investment in this?

** Inspired by the go-carts in The Dangerous Book for Boys. Thanks Shannon- I think.

*** I am usually incapable of reading uncritically now which is somewhat of a shame.

he'll sleep tonight

One of my neighbors hired C to shovel his driveway for him. Not sure if he was being nice or if his three teenagers are that unhelpful; I suspect a bit of both. It took C forever but he did it, and he'd already shoveled our walk.