Dec 23 2009
I mentioned the other day that Aurora is starting to talk up a storm, and someone asked me what her first word actually was.
It does my heart good, after two prior attempts at gender-neutrality that failed utterly, to let everyone know that Aurora’s first official word was:
Yup. Her word was “truck.” Just the first, my friends, of many, many things that will be as they are because she’s the little sister of two very enthusiastic and generous older brothers.
Dec 22 2009
Aurora’s vocabulary is skyrocketing. She wants to know the words for everything, all the time. This is where being the third child is so much cooler than being the first or second, because she has brothers who fall all over themselves to help her out. This morning, Aurora selected a picture book for Rowan to read to her. Not me, mind you. I was right there. But she wanted Rowan. How cool is that?
Dec 20 2009
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Dec 20 2009
Yesterday was the Marina holiday party. It’s like that, when you have lots of chaos in your life; you have to wait for some sort of external motivation to do the decoration thing. Otherwise, your brain is saying “oh goodness, that looks and sounds like more work…”
So. Considering that we live on a boat, and a boat does not provide much room either for storing or for putting up decorations, you have to be compact. We have precisely one box of decorations. And this is how we arrayed them:
The “tree” in the lazyjacks:
The stockings on the sailcover (Kaia has her own!):
The finished product. The kids stuffed fabric gift bags with rags, and we threw a tree skirt over the boom, for the illusion of gifts under the tree:
One of the really cool things about living in a marina is that there’s always something fascinating happening. While we were decorating, our neighbor Jay was fishing, (while Chris socialized) and the boys kept running over to see what he’d caught.
At the party later that night, the inestimable DJ played Santa. Rowan and Kestrel had seen Santa once before, but it was all terribly new for Aurora. I’m not sure if she was more intimidated by the Santa she didn’t know, or by the monkey, which is bigger than her.
So there’s the beginning of our holiday. I think our next big adventure will be the attempting of gluten-free cinnamon rolls…
Dec 15 2009
Check this out.
Putting Obama on Hold, in a Hint of Who’s Boss
President Obama didn’t exactly look thrilled as he stared at the Polycom speakerphone in front of him. “Well, I appreciate you guys calling in,” he began the meeting at the White House with Wall Street’s top brass on Monday.
He was, of course, referring to the three conspicuously absent attendees who were being piped in by telephone: Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; John J. Mack, chairman of Morgan Stanley; and Richard D. Parsons, chairman of Citigroup.
Their excuse? “Inclement weather,” according to the White House. More precisely, fog delayed flights into Reagan National Airport. (In the “no good deed goes unpunished” category, the absent bankers were at least self-aware enough to try to fly commercial.)
That awkward moment on speakerphone in the White House, for better or worse, spoke volumes about how the balance of power between Wall Street and Washington has shifted again, back in Wall Street’s favor.
I can’t even believe this. No wait, I can. They can get away with it, so they do. As they say, them who has the money makes the rules, and for the period of time where We The People had the money, we failed to make any rules at all. Wall Street is better at it than we are.
The rest of the article is a really good read. I recommend it.
Dec 14 2009
If you manage nothing else today, go get the new eBook from Seth Godin and a ton of other fabulous folks, here. And read it immediately. Print pages out and festoon your tree or menorah or whatever with them. Print copies and give to everyone you meet. Because it rocks. And it Matters Now.
Dec 13 2009
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Dec 12 2009
Grief, as they say, is a wheel, rather than a ladder. This would explain why the unexpected speedbumps hit you so hard.
I was putting together a holiday playlist on iTunes. For me, Jethro Tull is strongly identified with fall/winter, and no playlist for those times is complete without selections from Heavy Horses, Songs from the Wood, Catfish Rising, Minstrel in the Gallery. Ian Anderson is a brilliant lyricist, and his stuff has always spoken to me.
So it’s probably not surprising that the confluence of Ian’s lyrics and my own grief would be one of those hideous speedbumps. “A Christmas Song,” written so long ago, pokes fun at Ian’s hard-drinking father. Needless to say, I identify. “The Christmas spirit is… not what you drink.” God knows we had enough alcohol-fueled holidays, when I was growing up.
But it was Ian’s reconciliation song, “Another Christmas Song,” that had me standing in the companionway, sobbing.
Hope everybody’s ringing on their own bell, this fine morning.
Hope everyone’s connected to that long distance phone.
Old man, he’s a mountain.
Old man, he’s an island.
Old man, he’s a-waking says
“I’m going to call, call all my children home.”Hope everybody’s dancing to their own drum this fine morning —
the beat of distant Africa or a Polish factory town.
Old man, he’s calling for his supper.
He’s calling for his whisky.
Calling for his sons and daughters, yeah —
Calling, calling all his children round.Sharp ears are tuned in to the drones and chanters warming.
Mist blowing round some headland, somewhere in your memory.
Everyone is from somewhere —
even if you’ve never been there.
So take a minute to remember the part of you
that might be the old man calling me.How many wars you’re fighting out there, this Winter’s morning?
Maybe it’s always time for another Christmas song.
Old man he’s asleep now.
He’s got appointments to keep now.
Dreaming of his sons and daughters, and proving —
proving that the blood is strong.
It’s really, really hard, to know that true reconciliation isn’t an option any more. By the end, the Bear hadn’t softened at all. He was still full of hate, unyielding, unsentimental. Part of that was certainly the dementia that his illness is famous for. But not all of it. Within the last few days, he did acknowledge that he wanted to live a little longer, so that he could see “his legacy” in Rowan and Kestrel. He’d forgotten entirely that Aurora even existed, and several times over the hallucinations of his final days, he asked me who she was. I held it together and just reintroduced her every time, biting back my own hurt that even to the end, girls did not matter to him at all.
The thing about a death, is that it is the place where the buck stops, not only for the dying, but for everyone around them. You can’t be there for someone’s ending, without reevaluating your world and how you move through it. It’s motivation and impetus to live the way you want to be remembered. I don’t have any wars I’m fighting any more; I’m pretty sure that there isn’t anyone expecting something from me that I haven’t yet given (and if I’m wrong, please talk to me me…).
But if you’ve got one going… think about ending it, before someone’s remembering you as someone who never heard another Christmas song.
Dec 08 2009
We eat a lot of sprouts, on this boat. Not only are they little nutritional powerhouses, but they’re yummy finger food, they lend themselves to recipes well, they’re easy to store in the tiny storage space available on a boat, and, well, they’re fun. Just recently, the Sproutpeople, my favorite supplier, ran a sale on sprouters for children, so with my last order, I bought a few. The results were marvellous.
First, assembly.
Then, selection of seeds to sprout. You’re supposed to soak them first, but the boys played with them like sand for a while.
At that point, Aurora lobbied heavily for her favorite kind.
Seriously, wouldn’t that make you want to eat sprouts?
Dec 07 2009
I was recently told that I haven’t been posting enough pics of the kids. D’oh! I also realized I haven’t cleaned out the camera in, oh, a stupid long time. So, here’s a pic from earlier in the year, when the weather was warmer.
Dec 06 2009
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Dec 05 2009
My sister Ellen is a paper mosaic artist. She just posted a blog about my stepdad, the Bear, and some great points about art, and children. Check it out here.
