•cold breaths•

I told Penn I'd just gotten an important voice message from our landlord. Penn sat up straight in the bath. "What did he say?" He's going to sell his house in March so he has money to fix parts of our house. Like the air conditioner. Right now, if it were hot, we wouldn't have a way to blow cold air into the house, because the A/C is broken. Penn looked serious. "We'll make cold breaths. And we'll build a garage up to the side of the house, and put the car in and close the [outside] garage door... while opening the [inside] garage door, and we'll turn the car's cold air on. So it will go into the house." I didn't have the heart to tell him the car A/C is also shot... xox

•gratuitous jammies post•

With bonus golden-hour shot of family on the UFO at Arroyo Park. Happy Holidays, everyone!

xox

•turkey•

Happy Columbus Day! I mean... well, our Thanksgiving always involves Pittsburgh and Columbus, and lots of beloved people. It is always a true reason to give thanks. May your holiday be full of family, blood and otherwise!
xox

p.s. That gorgeous hand-knit in the picture is my friend Laura's doing.

p.p.s. Below, a video of some turkey-roasting hijinks from last year's holiday. I couldn't resist posting this, mainly because I still don't know quite what to make of it. I give you... Turkey Cord 2011! Any ideas?

•every so often•

I think, I'm doing it. The sun breaks through the clouds, the pavement shines with promise. It's a good feeling. xox

Penn's "habitat."

"Can I sleep in my habitat?"

•food boast•

In case I get whine-y and complain, let it be known that today was a good food day. Pumpkin bread was baked with coconut oil & delivered to friends. A persimmon was et. After a run, two soft eggs went down with water. "Soft egg" is what Penn calls a soft-boiled egg, and I like the convention. Okra was breaded with korma spices (and whole coriander!) and fried in olive oil whilst I endured the final presidential debate on the radio, and warmed up Christmas soup. Note: actual soup frozen in December is especially delightful to discover in October. Ten months, well-spent! A pumpkin beer from Uinta Brewing Company helped a great deal. Dessert was a pomegranate.

Today, the forecast was tornadoes. Nicely averted.  xox

•artichokes•

I told Penn "True Blood" is not a movie. It is a television show about artichokes. 

Later, amidst the usual bedtime tears, my suddenly-five-year-old wanted to know,
"Are you gonna watch an artichoke show? I don't like artichokes, but if they're not going in my mouth I want to see it." Then, "You get to watch stuff and I don't!"

Well, yeah. And perhaps the eventual slumber of a five-year-old is better for it. 

Recently, a friend lamented having showed her daughter an animated film about dragons. The movie introduced the verb "killing" into the toddlers vocabulary. Another friend, the mother of a boy who I've credited with teaching my son the art of constantly pretending to have a gun in his hand, recently mentioned that her husband is very anti-gun. So. File all of this under no-matter-what-we-do? We've tried to relax about the gun obsession, in an effort to give it as little energy as possible. And we've started "Movie Nights" with Penn, in an effort to have a little bit of popcorn-riddled fun. A part of me wonders what he would be like, raised instead in the woods with hand-hewn chess pieces on a stump covered in checker-board moss. That I painted on, chia-ball style. What if. What if we raised our child with select omissions? No guns, killing, Darth Maul, black teeth, poison, or even that bad man who sent the planes with the bombs.* What would a five-year-old Penn be like, without his tart awareness of the world? Awkward though it may be, it's an awareness. 

Just musing. What is it that you wish you'd kept to yourself? For just a little longer?

xox
*Penn's description of Hitler.

•fall•

I don't care how August you are. If the night air smells of molasses cookies and a kindergartener just had his first day of school, then, my friend, you're Fall. Nail in the coffin was that split pomegranate on the curb this evening. File that under "seasonally appropriate." Autumn starts now.

•oslo gin fizz•

Norway = amaze-balls with a side of awesomesauce. Will blog more if possible, but this Norske vacation is hard and fast, with an ever-changing obstacle course of family and four-year-old emotions.

At Vigelund Park...
xox

Something More Than Babysitting

 

Yes, the child is out of focus here and below. 

He was moving more than you might imagine to look 

at this, and it turns out I'm not so good at catching 

fast-moving kidlets with my phone camera. 

Last night, Lis and Troy both had work-related commitments, so I’d eagerly agreed to spend a few hours hanging out with Penn.

After dinner, we gathered up some plastic bunnies with parachutes and set off for the park with them. Penn explained to me in great detail how you have to climb to the very highest point on the play structure, and then drop the bunnies just so, allowing their parachutes to fill with air and ensuring a good jump. He decided we should take not only his bunny, but the second one—the one his mom and dad use—because it’s better to have a second one, in case one person wants more turns. Because sometimes, sharing just isn’t the most fun you can have, you know?

He asked me if we could stop by his friend’s house to see if she could go to the park with us. So we wandered down to the co-housing community where she lives, the community that Lis and Troy and Penn are also a part of, though they don’t technically live in the community.

Of course, it didn’t take us long to run into someone we know. Because Lis often invites me to join community meals at the common house (and because it’s the kind of place where everyone and their goldfish belongs to the food co-op Lis and I both work for), I’m familiar to many of the members. And Penn, of course, is well known and loved.

So we stopped and chatted. And then we went and knocked on Tatum’s door. It was close to bedtime for her, but she and her mom came outside to spend a few minutes with us before Penn and I walked on to the park. Brie and I chatted and the kids ran around, giggling madly as they pretended to sneak up on us and poke us in our backs. We would break the conversation to feign shock, the kids would run away, and we’d go right back to the conversation.

Once we’d walked our friends back to their house to get ready for bed, we turned around to see another friend, Amy, across the walkway, going to visit Holly at her house. We all greeted one another warmly, and as we chatted, Holly heard us and called hello to us out her kitchen window.

It was pretty much exactly as blissfully warm and community spirited as it sounds, and what really struck me was this: Not one person even asked why Penn and I were hanging out, or where Lis and Troy were that evening. It seemed as if everyone found it entirely normal that a loving, non-parental grown-up would be out and about in the neighborhood with her four-year-old friend on a spring evening.

Eventually, Penn and I wandered on. We climbed the play structure exactly as Penn had described to me, and we dropped the bunnies from the great height, and their parachutes filled with air to help them land safely. 

And then it was getting later, and Penn was yawning, and a tired-whiny note was starting to enter his voice. And I knew just how he felt, so I picked him up to carry him home. The night air was cooling, and his little body was warm and solid as he leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. We walked several blocks that way, in silence, until my arms couldn’t take it anymore, and I put him down and we held hands the rest of the way home, through a neighborhood where everyone knows us.

•tiny change•

Goodbye, "ToddlerBlog"!
*sniff*
xox