Another week

It was just another week in the Brockway+Metcalf household. It was so uneventful that I didn't take a whole lot of pictures.

Here's my Arlo with the 6 bucks I bribed him with for picture day. He wore a seersucker suit plus a blue tie-dye tee shirt.  Right before he left for school I discovered marker trails all over the pants. So for picture day, Arlo wore blue shorts, a white-and-blue tie-dye shirt, and a seersucker jacket. Oscar wore a white buttondown with skinny cobalt blue jeans. They both looked pretty awesome.

 

On Saturday, I attended the Dr. Suess baby shower for my friend Ashley. She is 25 and expecting her second, and is such an awesome mom -- present, involved, creative -- that I know she will handle her 2nd with grace. Her almost-4yo son goes to school with The Goose. They have an awesome backyard and host the best playdates ever. Ashley also demonstrates why one should have kids at 21. At one playdate, a bunch of kids were piled up on something and us moms were sitting in the shade gossiping and relaxing. The pile of kids started to topple, and Ashley hopped up and scooped up the kids in danger before the rest of us even got out of our comfy seats. I turned to my fellow late 30s and early 40s moms and pronounced "and THAT'S why you're supposed to have kids in your 20s." The poor suckers that are stuck with us Advanced Maternal Age moms will just have to deal.

On Sunday, it was hot. Beach day. We drove off to Zuma Beach, which Evan wants to be "our normal beach." I love Zuma but I'm still holding out for some unknown awesome beach. 

On the drive, we passed Pepperdine University. We always marvel at how beautiful their campus is, but this time we were floored by the flags. One for every victim of 9/11. It was beautiful, and sad, and just what our family needed a couple days before the 11th anniversary.

 

We settled at the beach. Pods of dolphins were closer to the shore than I had ever seen -- 30 feet from the shore. The surfers were flabbergasted and delighted. 

 

The Goose and I counted dolphins. 

 

The boys wanted to get ice cream. We gave them seven bucks and let them go of and deal with the transaction by themselves. My heart was in my throat most of the time. They did great. Oscar and Arlo are at the right hand end of the building next to the palm tree, walking back to base camp.

Arlo got buried. His minions surrounded him, waiting for his orders. 

 

 

We spent a blissful four-five hours on the beach and then no traffic on the way home. SoCal Heaven. 

Sometime this week I made four-cheese mac-n-cheese and collard greens for dinner, and it was impressive enough that I took a picture. It was pretty delicious. 

Every time I make a big meal like this, I always double or treble it for the freezer. You never know when you need a pan of mac-n-cheese or when a friend might need a easy meal delivered to their house. One of my all-time favorite meals come from my friend Lori signing me up for meal delivery service from our local mom's group when I had the Goose. Now, I had participated in this group for years, delivering meals to families who just had a kid or were having a family emergency. But my inbred WASPiness would never let me say, hey, I need help, and having a meal delivered from another mom once in a while would be awesome. Us WASPs don't run like that, we set our chins and soldier on. But Lori signed me up for the group, and for the first couple weeks of The Goose's life, people dropped off roasted chickens and casseroles and salads. PEOPLE THAT I DIDN'T KNOW, along with friends and acquaintances from my years in this mom's group. And one of them dropped off a chicken pot pie. And I chased down this woman that I didn't know to get the recipe, and it went into our normal rotation: I make two chicken pot pies once every so often, or whenever someone has a baby. Eventually Evan wanted more people to have babies. The pot pies are that good. 

Eventually that woman that made me that pot pie had twins -- TWINS! -- and I made her a cassarole or something. Our daughters eventually all had ballet together and when we moved and were getting rid of our stuff, they happily toted away the porch babygate we installed when we moved in.

Out here in Southern CA, 9/11 is known as "Patriot's Day," and there is no reason made for it. The kids wear red-white-and-blue but they aren't told why. I was outraged at this until a friend told me that the younger kids at school were traumatised by thoughts of buildings blowing up. 

Am I allowed to repost what I wrote on Facebook? 

• In all my many years of living in or near NYC, I had a habit. I'd walk out of the subway station, blink a couple times at the bright light or lack thereof, and take a deep breath of fresh air. And then I'd spin 'round until I found the Twin Towers, and situate myself. And then I would note east-west, south-north, and go on my way, guided by those glorious towers. If you looked at one of them, you saw a building, an office tower, built by a committee, with a couple-few compromises. Meh. But then you shifted your eyes and realized that there was two. TWO! Two gorgeous, glorious towers that will always be the punctuation mark in the Manhattan skyline for me. Tomorrow I will mourn the people that lost their lives in the attack -- but tonight I mourn my compass.

Oscar and I woke up early and we read a book about what happened on that awful day. It had sketchy but evocative illustrations about that day. I explained, in very vague terms, what happened on that day, and what we were doing doing that awful day. How we saw the second plane hit in Times Square, and how frightened we were. And how we eventually made our way home at the end of that terrible day and decided to start our family.

Arlo woke up, and we read The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

 

Here's more from Facebook:

• Today was a perfect workaday day in Southern California. Evan took the boys to school. I dropped The Goose off at her school. I went over to Arlo's friend's mom's house and we plotted out a weekly playdate to practice their reading. I picked everyone up, we swam at our neighbor's pool, we did homework, we went to karate. It was a perfectly normal day except that I woke up early with Oscar and we read a book about 9/11, and Evan and I gently told him about being in New York on that day. Arlo woke up and I read The Man Who Walked Between the Towers to my boys, and I caught a couple sobs in the back of my throat. In the car, I listened to the local NPR talk show discussing "should 9/11 fade into just another day or should it be a day that our generation remembers and memorializes forever." I had to pull over for a couple of gulping raw sobs during that call-in. But, as I wrote last year, 9/11 will always be the day Evan and I decided to have kids. And 11 years later, I spent a day dropping off and picking up and bucking up and disciplining three kids. And other than the early morning book reading, the way I paid tribute to the victims on 9/11 was to go about my day and parent these three creatures that were only a glimmer in my eye and a searing desire in my heart on 9/11. And God, I miss New York.

Arlo hasn't been eating lunch lately. He walks out of school and, famished, drops to the ground and eats his lunch. I decided to drop in for lunch and see if he might be persuaded to eat.

 

I enlisted some of his friends to encourage him to eat. I also stuck around for Oscar's lunch period. 

 

Oscar and his friend Evan. They were happily reading the comics that I clip out of the paper every morning and stick in O's lunchbox to read and share. I think we subscribe to the LA Times just so I can have comics to put in lunchboxes. Oscar's favorite is Lio. We also love Gil, which doesn't run in the LA Times, so I print them off the internet.

 

 I met with Arlo's friend's mom and we set up a schedule of flash cards and reading playdates. We meet at a local park after school every Wendesday and she comes up with wonderful games and activities to use our flash cards and help our reluctant readers. Sometimes we also luck upon praying mantises.

Tuesday and Thursday, the boys started Karate. So far, so good. 

Saturday, The Goose started ballet/tap classes and I started Yoga. (It's Sunday as I write this and I can barely move my arms.) 

Saturday, we had a BBQ for a couple friends with younger kids in hopes that they would cheer my friend Jen, who moved here from NJ for her husband's job. She has two small children and was sad to leave her established home and support system in NJ. Sound familiar?

I invited a couple of the most energetic, involved families I know over and traded them slow-cooked ribs and potato salad for their best tips on living in SoCal with small kids. It was 105 degrees, but my blessed next-door-neighbor and landlord encouraged me to send the kids over for a swim, and we took them up on the offer. We swam. we ate, and then we tucked into desserts and gave Hazel's family lots of great advice for living in and loving living in SoCal. 

Arlo and Hazel had two years at Playhouse together. Before I had a daughter, I always thought she would look like Hazel. Well, I was way off. But Evan and I always loved hanging out in Laura and Anita's class, and Hazel was one of the kids we always loved hanging out with. She's alert and charming and a kickass female. We are happy that she is once again a local friend!

On Sunday, Evan let me sleep to the blissful hour of 8:45. Evan took Arlo to the awesome Hollywood Farmer's Market and spent his birthday gift card at Amoeba. He came home to help Oscar with his latest long-term project (a trifold pamplet extolling the facts and virtues of a geological region of California)and I took the little guys to see Finding Nemo in 3D.

I think it was the first time The Goose ever saw the beginning of the movie. (Disney was very canny when they structured the DVD chapters so you could skip the first one -- where mom and 99% of the fish eggs are killed by the barracuda -- and go straight into the opening credits.) They enjoyed it, but I was busy doling out popcorn and opening up sticky candy throughout. And then, as I have every time I've seen this movie, I spent the last 30 minutes sobbing. 

Before we had Oscar, we saw two or three movies a week. When we were in the weeds of pregnancy, every movie we saw might be the last one we saw before we became parents. I don't exactly remember which was the last film we saw before I gave birth, but it was either Finding Nemo or Spellbound, the documentary about spelling bees and precocious kids and homeschooling parents.

Sometimes it's good to see Finding Nemo in the theater, covered by sticky children, listening to your fellow sobbing parents, and having your heart torn out as Marlin or Nemo realizes how they were wrong and they need to have faith in those that they love.