Category Archives: Pure bliss

Can I come visit you?

Posted on by

Butter was fighting bedtime. We sat on the rocking chair in the dark near to a sleeping Peanut. It wasn’t that late, and though I was tired, he was being adorable as only a post-darkness, non-tantruming two-year-old can be.

Me: Butterbean, when you are grown up are you going to live somewhere else or are you going to stay with Mommy?
B: (exasperated) I don’t know.
M: …
B: I know. I live snow blower guy.
M: With the snow blower guy?
B: Yeah. Snow blower guy. Lot o ladies. Lot o mans.
M: Oh.
B: Yeah. Mommy come back o lot. Daddy come back o lot.
M: We can come back to visit?
B: Yeah. Mommy come back o lot. Daddy come back o lot. Cat come back…cat make ice cream?
M: Can the cat make ice cream?
B: Yeah. Cat make o lot ice cream. Snow blower guy o lot ice cream. Mommy o lot ice cream. Daddy o lot ice cream. Peanut o lot ice cream. Butter o lot o lot of ice cream.
M: That’s nice of the cat to make so much ice cream.
B: Yeah. Snow blower guy like cat.

Well, sure. I can see why.

Of campfires and pinot

Posted on by

Oh, my, dear readers. You might not be able to smell it, but there’s a good chance you can: Naptime reeks as though someone rubbed a citronella candle in a dirty armpit and barbequed it. Four days of camping with the small people and Spouse was just wonderful.

I know some people don’t like the whole sleeping-on-the-ground thing, the lack-of-shower thing, the cooking-over-an-unpredictable-flame thing. But I think camping is awesome. I love falling asleep and waking under trees and clear skies. I love having nothing to do but hike. I love the lack-of-electricity excuse for going to bed with the kids and waking up in a quiet, bone-chilling dawn.

It helps that I packed well. Bags and bags of food, enough toys, great books, good snacks, plenty of non-toxic bug lotion, clothes for every weather, and lots of wine. When, every now and then, I open a bottle of wine, it takes me five days to finish it. For this four-day trip, though, I packed three bottles. And drank them all.

Because did I mention I went camping with a two-year-old? Peanut, the six-year-old, was in heaven. He collected leaves and climbed trees and ate his weight in scrambled eggs and watched the campfire and begged for more than five hikes a day. Butter, bless him, learned his first lesson in how hard it is to get pinto-bean-sized piece of creosote out of your nostril. And how when your parents tell you not to throw the contents of your shovel, they do it to avoid days of itchy leaf litter in your unwashed hair. And how constant entreaties to get off the picnic table are intended to avoid that big fall where you gouged your forehead open on redwood detritus. He was a filthy, bloody little urchin when we got home, but he had the time of his life.

As did we all. Stinky, uncomfortable, well rested, exhausted, frustrated, and content.

 



Forward my mail to Terminal Two

Posted on by

Effective immediately, I will be living at SFO’s Terminal Two. It was vacant for years, then attacked by the zen masters from Virgin America.

Result?

Sigh.

The food, dear readers. The farm stand with organic produce, Frog Hollow jams, ACME bread; Pinkberry; Peet’s; Andale; and more…

The lighting, dear readers. The lavender, pink, blue lights. Mock if you will, But Virgin does subtle mood lighting very well.

Oh, and the seating, dear readers. Computer bars with outlets galore. Egg-pod-shaped swivel chairs that offer a 360 degree view of the adjacent gates.


Compost bins. Space in which to move and breathe and not be touching other people. Eco-friendly practices and cleaning.

And then? The yoga room, dear readers. You read that correctly. Yoga. Room.

see?


Said yoga room is right outside security. I already had my shoes off for the TSA barefoot tango, so I went into the empty, quiet, softly lit room. I used the eco-wipes to clean a yoga mat and saluted no fewer than ten suns. Luckily, I travel in a skort.

yes, you read that right: in a skort.

So if you want to find me, send all correspondence to NaptimeEatingAndYogaing c/o Terminal Two, San Francisco International Airport.

Yes, I know that if lighting and food at an airport excites me that I need to get out more. But now that I’ve found my new home in T2, it might be a while.

A Brief Interlude

Posted on by

The Five Stages of a Night by Myself:
1. Bewilderment
2. Flood of Nostalgia
3. Depressed Need to Overhaul Entire Life
4. Exhaustion
5. Renewed Energy and World Domination

Spouse and I have been sitting on a gift certificate for a one-night stay at a fancy local hotel; waiting until the youngest sleeps through the night so we can have someone care for both boys while we enjoy a night away. We’ve waited for two years.

And now that he’s Two, he’s only waking twice a night. So we’re getting closer. But twice is night is too much for us to feel right foisting him on leaving him with someone else.

So I took the precious promise of a night away for myself, and walked the two miles away from our house to luxurious solitude.

Oooooh was it nice.

The walk lead me through my alma mater and my old neighborhood. I walked past the hotel to finish the old route home, oscillating between the familiarity and distance of a life I haven’t felt in eighteen years. I saw new and old, jarring and comforting. And I was overwhelmed with nostalgia and a sense of loss. I’m never going to be an incredibly-hard-working undergrad with my whole life ahead of me ever again. That’s gone forever.

So for a short while I was depressed. Then I decided to make some changes to find more joy and forward motion in the life I have now. That cheered me up a bit. Lost opportunities became a Need to Conquer the World. I hurried to my room to write out a plan.

I checked in just in time for the wine hour.

The wine made writing plans for world domination an unreasonable task, so I watched terrible movies on cable. We don’t have paid t.v. at home. I like it very muchly, the badness of bad television.

A few hours after the time I *swore* I’d sleep, I turned off the bad movies and the light.

The guilt of a silent room grabbed me by the ankles and threw me around. A lot.

“How could you leave them?” guilt smashed me against a wall.
“What could possibly make you think you wanted this?” guilt threw me back on the bed.
“What a terrible mother,” guilt shoved me onto the floor.
“What a terrible wife,” guilt folded me into a small package and shoved me in the nightstand drawer.
“What a horrible person,” guilt pulled me back out and threw me out the window.
Bad
Terrible
Awful
Defenstrated
Abandoner.

About an hour of this nonsense and I finally fell asleep.

And woke six hours later, at the same time the boys are normally leaping from stillness to unabashed firecracker-ism.

I fought the urge to go for a run and forced myself to stay in bed. There’s a whole lifetime of “run before they wake up” starting again tomorrow. This morning was my one morning without “before they wake up.” So I dozed for a while and fought the urge to get up and dozed and woke and forced myself back down again. I got up at the unbearably late hour of 8:00 a.m.

I hiked, I ran, I gazed out over the bay.

view from the knee-unfriendly stretch of Stonewall-Claremont

I showered. I snacked. And I completed two lists of simple ways to improve my life, a list of goals for this year, and a list of manageable tasks to complete before school starts in September.

By checkout time, I wanted another day alone. But I was lucky enough to get to go home to three adorable humans, take them organic-strawberry picking with lovely friends, and come home overtired, filthy, and full of vitamins C and D.

An awfully good weekend prelude to a solemn day of remembrance and honor, I think.

Hope you and yours are safe and sound, that our soldiers are soon home safe and sound, and that we appreciate deeply the sacrifice of those who did not come home safe or sound.

Happy Memorial Day.

Welcome to the ’80s, son.

Posted on by

Oh, how I love Berkeley. The weather, the food, and the unreasonable habit the residents have of putting their stuff on the curb with a handwritten “free” sign.

For miles around, Berkeley inhabitants clean out their homes and garages and, instead of selling things on craigslist, formally freecycling them, throwing them away, or giving them to charity, my neighbors just put everything on the curb.

I’ve found brand new shoes for the boys. Furniture. Half eaten jars of salsa. (I didn’t say everything they put out is desirable. I’m just illustrating the “they put out *everything*” argument with a swear-to-god true story.) A fully functioning television. A sweater covered in green paint.

Butter made a find of the century last week, though.

High capacity diskette, baby!

“In *my* day, they were 5 1/4. And were terrified of magnets. And we *liked* it!”

So their education is complete. Peanut’s class got to listen to records on a turntable and Butter liberated his first floppy disk.

Good times, Twenty-First Century. Good times.

A brush with autism

Posted on by

I was at the playground with my children yesterday: the six-year-old Peanut was scootering like a madman and two-year-old Butter was swinging on his tummy. I sat next to the little guy on an empty swing and…just sat.

I hate swinging. Nauseates me and make me feel out of control. I know…you’d never know how treacherous a playground could be for control freaks.

Anyway. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a boy walking too close to another swing and a woman calling him.

“Roland! Roland! Too close. Roland, back up.” He was miming pushing the swing where a teenage girl was going about as high as the swing allowed. Each time the swing got near him, he got as close as he could without touching.

“Roland! You can’t push the swing! Roland!” He didn’t change his motions at all.

“Roland! You can’t push the swing. You didn’t ask her.” He moved back at this. And I stopped watching, convinced he was now safe.

“Why don’t you push someone who would say yes? Let’s ask someone. Let’s ask a mommy.”

I braced my stomach. I knew I’d be asked. I knew I’d say yes. And I didn’t want to puke if he pushed me high.

Roland walked beside me and looked away. “Ask her.”

“Mommy,” he said to me.

“Do you want to push the swing? I would like that,” I said.

So he carefully, and slowly, climbed on my lap facing me.

It was clear the woman who suggested asking me did not intend that. She started sputtering “Roland, let’s push the swing. Roland, that’s not….Roland, you can’t…”

“I don’t mind,” I said to her as I checked to make sure Butterbean was still swinging. I looked into Roland’s eyes, which were searching my face. “Are we swinging? Swinging is nice.” Roland is almost ten years old and weighed so much that I had to keep my toes on the ground as I rocked us back and forth. “Swinging,” I smiled. He kept looking at me. I looked back.

“Roland, why don’t you push her. Get down and go around and push her swing. Get down, Roland.” He paused to process that request, then did as she asked. And walked around behind me.

He stood, trying to get his hands right. He moved my hands on the swing’s chains first up, then down. He got just the grip he wanted. And he leaned against me. Then kissed me on the head. Four times.

It felt like pure love.

And the woman, his nanny, spent a while telling him why he couldn’t kiss my head.

But he can. Anyone else would have gotten an earful about boundaries and acceptable behavior. But in my book Roland gets to have different boundaries and has my permission to kiss my head.

I have no idea what the caregivers and parents of differently developing children go through. Not at all. I can’t imagine what childhood, puberty, and adulthood mean for the caregivers of children living with autism, Down’s syndrome, and other developmental differences. (And obviously I haven’t the faintest notion what it feels like to the people inside those very broad and sometimes limiting labels.) But I do know enough about autism to know that I was very, very lucky that Roland knew what he liked and could express his joy. I’m lucky Roland knew about “yay” and about “thank you” and about kissing. I’m lucky Roland made eye contact with me.

Roland wasn’t inappropriate. He was glad we got to swing. He was glad he heard “yes.” He was enjoying the day. And he told me that the way he knows people say “yay.” He kissed my head.

That was hard for his caregiver, because that’s not what people are supposed to do. Her job is to tell him “no, we don’t do that. You’re not supposed to kiss a stranger when they’re nice. Kissing is too much for a thank you.” I know she chose a mommy for him to push because other kids don’t understand and aren’t used to making accommodations. Moms are expert in accommodating.

I wish Roland never had to hear that kissing is too much for a thank you. My wish is that the whole world decides, effective immediately, to cut people with differences some slack. Empathize, understand, appreciate. If someone is too physical because they have processing or sensory or developmental needs you don’t understand, let go of your personal space boundaries for a minute and accept their physical version of a polite conversation. If someone who has trouble with eye contact won’t look at you, for heaven’s sake, dismiss your social mandates for a while and talk with them on their terms. If someone who doesn’t understand the rules of society gets too close or touches your car or talks too loudly or smiles inappropriately, just relax a bit and meet them on their level. Have some compassion, world.

Please.

My wish is that we all learn a bit more, and empathize a bit more, so people like Roland can have nice days at the park.

Because I would never speak for Roland, but I had a damned fine day at the park.

Mental image

Posted on by

Peanut and Butter each have a toothbrush that plays a minute-long song so they can brush their innocent young enamel and gumlines for the right amount of time.

Because the manufacturer is focused on non-toxic materials and earth-friendly practices, the brushes’ rap talks about turning off the water while you brush and other such lovely green messages.

It also, at one point, says “grab your parents; grab your mom, grab your dad.” I’ve always thought about the families this might alienate, for some have only onehttps://naptimewriting.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=post of those, some are grandparented, some are two-mom parented or two-dad parented.

Either way, I had no idea the kids were really listening until I watched Peanut brush.

As the song said “Grab your parents” he clutched the seat of his pajama bottoms as he brushed and danced.

Turns out he thought it said, “Grab your pants; grab your mom, grab your dad.”

And now that he knows it’s funny enough to make me shoot water out of my nose, he runs around the house singing, “grab your pants,” as he does so. With little Mini Me following and garbling the lyrics even worse than his big brother does.

It is side-stitchingly hilarious. And I need that at bedtime.

Nature or Nurture

Posted on by

My son’s a genius, and I think it’s because I’m so awesome.

Really.

Look, I’m the first to assert that serial killers, bullies, and medievalists are the fault of their parents. So may I take credit for the following?

Peanut and I were talking last night, in a rare moment of the-toddler-fell-asleep-early-and-we-can-take-a-breath-and-have-a-normal-bedtime bliss. We talked about the Universe’s vastness and how the outrageously ginormous solar system is relatively diminutive. We talked about the SETI Project and ways they’re listening for life beyond the planet. We talked about how life elsewhere might look like germs or octopi or monsters, and my brilliant six-year-old interrupts me.

“Mom,” he says. “If we find something out there, if it’s germs or aliens or fish, they’re going to think *they* are people and that we are aliens.”

My dear, sweet, amazingly empathetic six-year-old: you just surmised, all by yourself, what I hoped to teach you over the course of your young life. Look at the situation with someone else’s eyes.

I marveled at his revelation, and, for good measure, threw in a bit of “that’s why when we think of ‘other’ people from another culture or country or who look different, we need to remember they’re people, too, and we need to see things their way.” But I didn’t need to. Because I’ve already done such a good job that he’s wise beyond his years in such matters.

My work here is done, people. I think I just earned a leisurely evening of confections and John Hughes films for my awesome luck parenting.

In like a Liamb

Posted on by

I can only suppose that the cross between lion and lamb is Liamb. Or a Throchee, if it’s trying to be significantly jarring.

I love March. So very much.

It’s giddy-makingly warm here and everything is so adorably excited to be growing. Maple trees ruddy themselves with shocking overnight growth, flowering bulbs dance in the breeze, plum and cherry blossoms toss petals everywhere, and color creeps into every unexpected corner.

Both my boys were born this month. I take special care every day of March to watch them just be. Inhabiting their bodies in ways no adult remembers how to do. Experimenting with the world in ways that produce amazing reactions that teach them the same Earth-bound lessons that thousands and thousands of humans before them have learned. Gravity’s plops and mud’s splats and water’s wily ways.

But these scientists are mine to care for, nurture, prune gently and judiciously, March reminds me.

Spring is one of the few times I feel I might be able to do that. Maybe even well.

Have a favorite month? Have a time of year that offers as much to you as Spring Festival and Nowruz and birthdays and a preponderance of green and white and yellow and pink and purple and blue? Prefer summer’s garden delights or fall’s brisk days or winter’s stark beauty?

March is magical in my little world.

How do you mark the year, dear reader? What makes you pause and appreciate all you have?

Listen to Your Mother

Posted on by

Last weekend I stole away to San Francisco for a bit of heaven.

I started at the Ferry Building and picked up my favorite cheese (ask The Kitchen Witch how good it is) and a sourdough baguette from my favorite baker for breakfast and walked the length of the Embarcadero to an audition at Fort Mason.

Decommissioned military bases make me wildly nostalgic, as though I were part of a cozy military family in the brief post-war period of the 1920s. Every time I pass through a no-longer-guarded post gate I want to pause to adjust the seams in my no-longer-rationed stockings.

The day was magically sunny and cold, the tourists were sparse, and the audition went just okay. I’m questioning the piece I chose and my pacing, but I got a fabulous cup of coffee afterwards and walked back along the beach.

The good news, since I’m doubting I’ll get selected for the highly competitive show cast full of awesome Mamas, is that the San Francisco show in May will benefit 826 Valencia, my favorite resource for students and writers and my absolute favorite pirate supply store in the whole world. The latter is, I promise, one million times better in person. Their New York Super Hero Supply and Los Angeles Time Travel Mart are also riveting purveyors of awesomeness desperately needed in the superhero and time traveler communities, respectively. If you want to learn more about the genesis of the organization that serves school communities *and* pirates, check out this TED clip and marvel at what we can all do—every single one of us—to make writing something every child feels good about.

Saturday Night Fever

Posted on by

This weekend I ran away from home.

Okay, I’m way too responsible and uptight to run away from home, but I negotiated a LOT of free time so Spouse could hang out with the boys. (See how I am now choosing to see that? Good for me! Good for them! Bonding time, not escaping time. Win-win-win-win.)

I got up before dawn with my little tornadoes, frolicked, cooked, attended, and mediated battles big and small for a couple of hours until Spouse tumbled out of bed. Then I left. I walked, I wrote, I surfed the Internet, and I had grownup food.

I came home after four hours alone and had a date with almost-six-year-old Peanut while Spouse and almost-two-year-old Butter slept. My sweet, highly spirited boy and I did some science, some art, some reading, and some side-by-side napping. More importantly, we smiled, we laughed, we cuddled.

When the little guy woke up from his nap I heard him, but Spouse played with him for almost an hour before they discovered us. Eight hours after I kissed them goodbye.

Eight hours. I was so giddy with freedom I danced and skipped (yes, literally) through dinner and bathtime.

(NB: I observed that no amount of battery recharge can make dinnertime with my particular small children easy. Nice to know it’s not the end of my patience-reserves that makes dinner so vision-dimmingly fraught. Quite simply, the nightly, two-hour adrenaline-pumping-fest that is dinner, bath, and bed, is spread heavily across the fragile skeleton of their utterly depleted, frenetic little bodies. So: witching hour is their fault. I did not know that before. I had continually criticized myself for not finding joy in hours 11-13 of my all-child-all-the-time days. Now I’m just going to drink through them, since I’m not the problem.)

(Kidding.)

(No, I’m totally not kidding.)

But back to my colossal Saturday of Joy break…

Oh, Interwebz, how I love operating at my own speed, to my rhythms, in whatever directions I want to go. Good Gravy, freedom feels like warm salted caramel sauce on chocolate and marshmallow ice cream. Why did I not know this? Why have I not worked harder to get this? Is the sweetness relative to the preceeding batshit insane-iness?

And how delightful, delicious, and delectable my adorable and silly children are when I am not running on fumes. My, but I enjoyed my time with Peanut, my reunion with Butter, my gratitude toward Spouse. Amazing, yummy creatures, my guys are.

I hope all parents, working inside and outside the home, get a chance to experience the glory that is solitude. After we get running water to all the world and health care to everyone and stability to the world’s violent regions and food and safety to children and adults alike, maybe we could get all humankind some breathing room and a vegan reuben.

This day has been a long time coming. And I so enjoyed the peace, quiet, and space to complete my own thoughts while doing a novel thing called blinking, that I am willing to proclaim my Saturday break intoxicating.

Drunk on mental health day awesomeness! Woo-hoo! Get yourself some of this!

Cheers!

End of Rope Found

Posted on by

Today was a day to go with the flow. I’m down to one client project, Butter has spent so long resisting nap that I just give up, and all the things I need to do are “wait until after bedtime” things. So I vowed to follow Butter and just be with him all day. No timing naps or tasks or emails. I don’t even pull out my phone for most of the day.

After we drop off Peanut at school, Butter asks to go see the construction site. Sure. It’s a block past the coffee I like and the cheese rolls we both like. So we grab a cuppa, a muffin, and a cheese roll and head to…oh, he wants to get down.

Sure.

He then proceeds to walk all over the neighborhood, closely supervised, touching every single rock and leaf and dog and flower and bee. (Yes, bee; he has this uncanny ability to pick them up and have them walk all over his arm and blow them off and they never sting him. Weird.) We traveled every inch of a one block radius several times. We used the bathroom in CheeseBoard Pizza five times. We got water from CheeseBoard seven times. We watched construction for what might have been two million years. He dug in the dirt and put rocks in his cup and carried them ten feet and dumped them out and started over. All unmolested but safe and loved. Awesome sauce.

For three hours. For the record, I started getting a little twitchy at two and a half.

He finally asked to be held and fell instantly asleep on my back. And I knew I couldn’t take him out or he’d refuse a nap. So I took him home and edited with him asleep on my back.

And when he woke just as Peanut got out of school, I willingly followed them both as they giggled off toward home.

It took two hours to travel one mile. I let them do their thing except for safety and kindness issues. For the first 90 minutes. And then I found my limit.

Children, I cannot go slower than 1/3 mile an hour. I can’t do it. I know I hurried you along a bit toward the end, and kept saying, “I know their yard looks fun but we have to go home.” I was cold. And tired. And Type A. Yes, we can sort through all these rocks and choose our favorites and compare them and leave them for the homeowners who paid for them. Yes, we can crunch through leaves. Yes, we can throw them and laugh and play and rake them all back in a pile with a big stick to start all over again. But we have to get moving after 30 minutes because…because…well, because I guess I just don’t love you enough. I know play is important. I know unfettered and undirected and spontaneous is great. I know adult pace isn’t right for kids.

But I will stab myself in the eye if I ever again spend 5 hours moving at tiny scientist pace.

So. Lesson learned. Never, ever, ever, ever spend more than four hours doing what the children want. Ever. Ever.

Never.

Ever.

A few of my favorite things

Posted on by

Butter loves sitting in Peanut’s lap. Any time the older brother sits on the floor, the little guy wanders over, turns around, and plops down. They read books, eat snacks, and play games this way.

After four months, Butterbean is finally telling us when he needs to pee. Over the past week he has gone from starting to go, then stopping and telling us and holding it on the way to the toilet, to telling us in advance. We hit a major milestone this weekend when he figured out he can sit down by himself, when he wants. Apparently he wants to sit every two minutes.

Holidays this year will include some of my favorite people. It’s nice to be home and have family and friends around us. Thanksgiving was wonderfully nice. I anticipate more of the same for the Apathy Party, Solstice, Hanukkah, and Christmas.

Every pound I gained last week was worth it. And now I really mean the “mindful choices and more water and vegetables” efforts I have been flirting with.

Since the antibiotics, Butter’s ear infection has subsided. Now we need four weeks without illness to clear them.

He has a few more words this week.

Sleep is a bit better.

Client work has dwindled to one nice project.

Commitment to attachment parenting has been renewed and both children seem pleased.

Boot and Cape Weather has arrived.

I dare not hope for more.