After the rain

Joy! Mud! Joy! Mud! Joy! Break for traffic. Joy! Mud! Joy!

Calvin's still taller, but Nellie has taken the wheel.

Friends Nellie and Calvin will be classmates this fall, just like their older sisters. We do hope they aren't expelled for putting each other in a lip-lock.

Janna and Calvin and the frightful prospect of the evening repast.

I wanted to headline tonight with this absolutely lovely photo of Calvin and Janna, who was hear from Durham this weekend and whom we already miss very much. It was a wonderful weekend. Just look at all the beauty and joy in those faces!

Because now I have to tell you about dinner here tonight. Disasterville.

I don’t mean that the food was bad. The small amount that traveled from my fork to my mouth was a perfectly acceptable weeknight, not-going-to-win-prizes-but-decent rice and vegetables thing. It was the savages-- I mean children-- seated to my right and to my left that made the meal something to be endured.

Audrey whined and fretted and finally left the table having eaten exactly nothing. Calvin picked up his rice and chucked it at us in handfuls, so he was taken from the table, screaming. (No we will not act like that at the table, young man. And get your fork out of my eye socket this instant!) Scott and I looked across the table at each other with a combination of shock and resignation that is the flip side of the parenting coin, the other side being the “How can we be so lucky?!” side. Dinner tonight made us both wonder what on earth we had wrought. How did we get from our giddy first date when we ate barbeque and asked each other, oh-so-lighly, about future children, to this grim scene of pouting, threats and spat-out pieces of avocado?

Now that it’s all cleaned up, the dishes washed and the remains scraped off the floor, I must say I am feeling like the sit-down family dinners are-- for the time-being anyway-- not worth the trouble. Yes, it’s good to teach children about ritual and routine, about manners and healthy eating, but then I look at the facts on the ground and I think it might be better to just put some cold cereal into dog dishes and serve it on the floor. I’ll get down there and eat with them if that would make it more of a family ritual.

Not really.

Well, maybe.

I need some sleep before I consider the matter any further.

Rites of Summer: Their First Lemonade Stand

Top of Audrey's to-do list, ever since she saw the neighbor kids pouring lemonade across the street, was to "sell stuff." At last, today I got some lemonade and cups, a bucket of change for the till, some markers, a little table and chairs and paper for a sign. I also secured Audrey a business partner, Alice, who came with her mom, providing the critical extra grown-up needed to make this venture viable. Calvin and Alice's younger sister Nellie played in the house while Audrey and Alice sought their fortunes in the cold beverage business.

Sales were brisk. We moved a lot of product with our unbeatable $0.25 price, inspiring some customers to pay as much as $3. Even the neighborhood kids usually ponied up $0.50 cents. One customer bought two cups and gave each girl a brand-new $1 coin. Our 82 year old neighbor Maggie stopped by on her way back up the hill from the grocery store-- that's right, this woman WALKS to the store, in August, at age 82-- and reminisced about her childhood lemonade stands in Cambridge when she had to press her own lemons. No concentrate back then! We poured her cup extra full.

A few things impressed me, not the least of which was that the girls stayed interested in the project for more than an hour and actually smiled at their customers, in between counting money. Second, the young teens on our street-- who have impressed me before with their good-naturedness- came over to buy and just behaved like such nice people it made me want to go congratulate their parents again. And third, I was startled by the speed with which we almost lost our table and chairs, before I'd even had time to post our sign or bring the kids out, to a passerby who thought they were left for the taking. My neighbor Mika saw this about to happen, intervened (with great diplomacy) and came right into the house to find me-- saving us an ocean of tears.

Our sign was a simple affair-- just product, and price. I decided not to take Audrey's suggestion for wording, which was this:

"IF YOU HAVE MONEY, THEN YOU WILL HAVE LEMONADE."

Overheard: What it sounds like when I'm thinking

From Calvin:

“Ride the abigator!” Once he’s boarded the abigator he likes to press the buttons he can reach. Just the fun ones. With pictures of fireman’s hats!

“Hey! Guess what?” Not a question, just an all purpose greeting.

“We’re on da way!” Announcement while riding his toy car across the living room.

“Time out? Me, too! Me, too!” Like all younger siblings, Calvin is protective of resources: food, toys, love, even a “time out” is something your sister might try to hog all to herself just because she mouthed off before you developed a big enough vocabulary to do so yourself. Well, he’s not letting her get away with it. No-ho! He shoves her over on the time-out step to get his share of time out. Whatever that is.

And from Audrey, one for the ages:

“Mom, when you hear yourself think, what does it sound like?” She asked this as I pulled out of the driveway, when it was actually peaceful in the car for once. It’s reassuring to know that if you just repeat yourself enough, the blather will turn into a sort of Zen koan.

Our July 4th celebrations (complete by 2pm)

Better make sure we take Audrey to the Ladies Room before we get in the car. That was five liters of Strawberry Lemonade.

Two french fries, one bite of fish, three kale garnishes.

Great day out: Children's Museum all morning, til we were tired and hungry, then down the wharf to the Barking Crab for an (overpriced) lunch. No tears, no barfing. Kids asleep by last click of car seat buckles for the ride home.

The secrets in my mind

Chickpea

Audrey stopped me in the hall, wearing this get-up. She tapped on my arm and regarded me, quietly. All business. And she said, "Mom. It's me. This is a disguise."

Earlier in the day I caught her at the bathroom sink making a mess, water splashed all over the floor and the hand-towel soaked. "What happened here? What is going on??!!" I cried. (I should note that I said this in a very calm and nurturing way, with no accusatory note in my voice.) Audrey took a moment to collect her thoughts and then said, coyly, "I have a secret in my mind and I'm not telling you what it is."

For which there really is no answer. Checkmate.

Master Calvin.

Like all toddlers, he is the most interesting mix of manners and savagery. He says "no hank oo" and "peeese" but he also screams "no like it!" and "you top dat!" and "you go way!" He stands in the bathtub and daintily drinks the bathwater, one plastic blue teacup at a time. And I don't have to tell you what he did in that bathwater before he started sipping, do I?

His favorite book right now is "Snuggle Up, Sleepy Ones," or, "Nuggle up, leepy one." After he drank the bath last night and was freshly diapered and ready for bed, he toddled over to me holding this book and I got ready to "nuggle" down for story time with my darling boy. Just as he was about to climb into my lap he shouted "Cheers!" and clobbered me in the face with the book.

And now we turn our investigative reporting on... ourselves!

I have to report this little bit of jerkery that I heard myself spouting the other day. Background: we are moving from our suburban town of Arlington to the adjacent suburban town of Lexington, and I actually spoke to my friend about this "transitioning" process for our family.

First, I want to apologize to the noun/verb TRANSITION, a perfectly good and noble word, for turning into an obnoxious gerund. Totally uncalled for. And second, claiming that we must transition from Arlington to Lexington is a bit like saying that I will transition from the LL Bean style of Mom jeans to the Land's End kind. But with front pleats! The difference, in both cases, is but a few dollars in taxes.

I have since regained some perspective. We're just moving. Period. And we're lucky and happy. The end.