{my topography}

Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.

I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.

Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.

Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.

This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.

The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.

The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.

Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.

And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam.  Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.

How was your day?

PS–I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!

Five years ago tonight I’d just given birth, and I had no idea, no idea at all, how my life would be changed by the tiny baby with his big eyes looking up at me from a nest of warm cotton cloths on my chest.

All day I kept thinking about it his birth: how I labored for 2 hours; how I was walking through hard contractions on the back deck when the sun rose; how I remember seeing the way the buds on the lilac tree were fat, and how the air smelled like the beginning of spring; how I transferred to the hospital after about 18 hours leaving behind all expectations about home birth or what his birth would be like at all. When I recall either of my son’s births, my memory slips into this place that exists somehow out of body; beyond the periphery of pain or thought; to where things are blurred and thundering with the pulse of the moment, but somehow are dislocated, out of time. And so I blinked, and here he is. Five.

This boy with his sandy blond hair and huge green eyes and his thousand questions every single moment of every single day is 5. It’s such a heady, stupefying, astounding thing to have a kid and watch him grow up–and writing that I can see how it comes across as the most pathetic of cliches. But really: to watch your child grow up marks time’s passing in this utterly absolute way. Five years looks like this.

He’s intense, this boy I have. He didn’t sleep through the night for the first three years of his life. He’s allergic to dust and pollen and grass, and tugs on his shirts and pokes his brother. He is a knower. A thinker. A goofball. (Poop jokes are suddenly hysterical. WHY do boys find bathroom humor so funny? Why?)

He draws pictures of houses and vehicles and robots with wiring intact for doorbells and forklifts and motors. He plans how he’ll build things in his head. He talks about math without knowing abstractly that he is. The way numbers relate makes sense intuitively to him. He’s non-stop and funny and annoying. He is particular and bright and determined. He doesn’t like the spotlight, the center of attention, but he loves to shine and be the best.

A birthday questionnaire:
Favorite color: green, pink, blue
Food: pizza pasta and roll-ups (burritos) from school. I also like granola. Write that please.
Favorite fruits: mangoes, and only on occasion I like ants on a log.
Dessert: ice cream, peanut butter cookies, chocolate cake, pie and all good stuff.
Toy: my Plasma car, my desk, my scissors
What you want to be when you grow up: I want to be an astronaut and an airplane driver and I want to build robots that actually work and I want to tell people how to get the titanic up from the bottom of the ocean and I want to be a computer maker. That’s it. Sprout will be the same as me.
Favorite thing about Daddy is: that he does stuff with me on my circuit board
Favorite thing about Mommy: that we can snuggle and you let me draw on your phone sometimes
Favorite thing about your brother: he’s a jelly tub.
Favorite animal: seal and octopus; NOT dogs. I also like fish and sharks.
Favorite time of day: Morning, afternoon, and night. Night is my not good time.
Favorite candy: licorice and chocolate. Ice cream bars. Popsicles.
Favorite clothing: I don’t know. I really like my red shirt with a pocket up top and my overalls and my goose tag (lapel pin of a loon.)
Favorite games: Circuit board. Sledding. Soccer outside.
Favorite music: violin and guitar.
Stuff you don’t like: The bottoms of asparagus. Taking naps. Tomato. I like broccoli now.
What do you wonder about: I wonder about being in college
What makes you sad: I’m only sad when I’m hurt.

Today on the way home from school we stopped for a raspberry danish and when he took his first bite the yummy raspberry jelly was a surprise and he said, “Oh mommy, when I bit into this I was just so delighted!”

My boy, through and through. I love him so.

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He’s also one of the reasons I’m going for this.

I did it. Days of mapping out details and collecting information and editing video clips (whoa, no small thing!) and finally, here it is. A Field Guide To Now.

It kind of feels like giving birth. A lot like it in fact: the risk, the unknown, the realization that it’s all beyond my control even though I’m going to give it every single thing I’ve got.

It’s the first time I’ve ever taken a leap like this. Plunged with a fluttering heart towards a dream.

Please support this.*

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And also: I have two birthday boys this week! Bean’s birthday is the 16th and Sprouts four days after. This is the week that has changed my life, twice, momentously. It felt so utterly right to launch this project today. (Still. I’m nervous.)

xoxo!

*Things are tenuous financially, and this would make a huge difference. Please Share this project with everyone you know.

Doing: Whoa, it’s been one heck of a couple of weeks with both kiddos underfoot. Lots of sledding and cookie baking and general revelry. Not enough writing though. Or painting. Or time without the ruckus, giddy, non-stop noise making of two small boys.

Speaking of: Sprout is standing and almost walking. He’s thisclose. He’s hilarious. He plays hide and seek. He initiates chase games around the house and crawls pell-mell at top speed, then bursts into adorable peels of laughter. I tried to teach him to paint a few days ago–because I did with Bean at around this age, and it was an utter disaster. He ATE the brushes and got so frustrated when I’d take them out of his hand and try to turn them around so the bristles went on the paper. So not his thing.

Bean on the other hand is totally into drawing. He makes airplanes and houses with doorbells wired in to the walls. Tonight he drew a picture of our cat stalking mice. Each mouse had a lovely, loopy, curly tail. I can’t really believe that he is almost five and suddenly all cool and adorable: a big+little mashup. Yesterday he said, “When I’m big I’m gonna build robots. I’m going to design one to be a remote control that I control–and then another robot that the first robot controls.” He’s like that. Totally coming up with the coolest things ever. An engineer in the making.

Reading: it’s been haphazard at best this week. Mostly about the end of the world as we know it. Which really is rather unsettling . Though not entirely hopeless. I’m already thinking of what my garden will look like this spring.

Wishing for: a few solid hunks of time I can call MY OWN to get things crossed off the to-do list and sink back into writing and creating and feeling like myself again.

Eating: I’ve perfected pizza dough and a really great bread recipe. I’ll share both, but not tonight. Somehow it’s bedtime already. Where did the day go?

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Wondering tonight: what do you worry about? What are your greatest fears–the big, worst-case-scenario ones…and the little ones that nag and gnaw?

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”–Annie Dillard

Maple sugar on the first snow of the season…
TEETH!
Our advent wreath with a little twirly mobile from Germany (a childhood tradition.)
Our first gingerbread house attempt this year. Bean cut out the templates and the dough. And mixed everything.
Bean was hilarious to watch decorating these. He was so careful with the icing… then DUMPED the sprinkles on.
Lots of snowflakes have been cut this year…Bean made this one entirely himself.
Bundled up. Getting ready to do our annual holiday photo…

PS: I’m sort of sick and am hating the general anxiety of Sunday night. There is always a to-do list bigger than my brain waiting for Monday. What’s on your to-do list this week?

I always pictured this, and yet I could never have imagined how it really is: life with boys. My house is always a ruckus. Things are always flung, spun, twirled, jabbed. Sticks are essential. So are rocks. Forts are made everywhere. The couch is a launch pad. Trees are dangled from. Boxes are magic. They become boats and cars and rocket ships; they are played in and fought over and sawed into with serrated knives.

Each morning I wake up to the full catastrophe delight of little boy energy. Inevitably I get a finger in an eyeball, or an elbow to the ribcage. “Mommy! MOMMY LOOOK!” But by the time I do, Bean has already dragged a giggling Sprout out of my room, down the hall and into his bedroom, where I can hear thumping and banging and more laughter.

Bean is growing tall. He grew 3/4ths of an inch in the past month! Sprout is standing on his own, cruising everywhere, cutting teeth. He is hilarious. He does things purposefully just to make us laugh. He loves to bang on things: pots, cupboards, boxes. He loves music. He loves his big brother, and he beams whenever Bean enters the room. But he’s also a tattle tale—already. He makes this particular fussy sound whenever Bean takes something from him, or even just gets close enough that he might take something from him. He is absolutely, one-hundred-percent a Mama’s boy.

My sweet second son. We’re so smitten for each other, and truthfully, every single day I still kind of wish he’d stay small for a lot longer. I love to snuggle with him. I love the sleepy moments just before I tuck him into his bed at night. I love when he first sees me after I’ve been gone for the morning. I love how he gets such a kick out of everything: standing, eating, sticking his hands in the dirt.

That said, I’m much less of a wimp with him. I want him to sleep through the night now. He’s huge (really: as in, 18-24 month clothing is snug on him. SNUG.) and he has no reason to wake up four times just to tap into a boob for five minutes, although I can’t blame him for trying. It must be nice, little man. Sorry to cut you off.

So last night there was more fussing and less sleep as he adjusts to going back to sleep himself. He was indignant at first, but a trooper, and figured out how to find his pacifier & snuggle in and go back to sleep after a couple minutes of fussing. And already it was easier than the night before. By the end of the week I think we’ll be where I want us to be (as in, one or both of us will be getting five or six hours of sleep at a go!)

Aside from the whole sleep deprivation bit, which gets old, I admit, I’ve been having so much fun this month with my boys. All three of them. And even though money is tighter than it’s ever been, it is quite possible that I’m enjoying the holiday season more than I have in years past because it’s been all us, as a unit. Without the pressure to buy things—the holidays become all about shared activity, small rituals, adventures, crafts, and food.

We’ve already made a batch of gingerbread cookie dough; strung oodles of lights; and cut more than our share of snowflakes. Bean loves to do paper crafts. He memorizes the folds easily and delights with cutting each snowflake and then opening it up—each one a glorious surprise of symmetry and pattern. Sprout watches, delighted, trying to eat every paper scrap that falls to the floor.

Each morning we all look forward to the excitement of Bean scurrying out to see what the advent fairy has tucked into a little box for him: a tiny slinky, some balloons, a golden chocolate coin, a small crystal, silly putty, umbrella straws. It’s a lesson for all of us to remember: how much delight comes not from the actual gift, but from the suspense and mystery of each small box. It’s all about the ritual, the gesture of fun, and the small delightful moment of surprise.

What are some things you do as a family together this time of year?

Bean’s Robot costume, in progress:

Two words: foil tape. Love it.

We make paper airplanes. A fleet of them tossed into space after dinner, twirling, looping, landing on the hardwood, on the couch cushions, on the edges of ledges and windowsills. Our hearts on our sleeves, laughter filling the living room, as the cold autumn night crowds in around at the windows and Sprout chases after each one, newly crawling, hands going fwap, fwap, fwap across the floor. This is my life, I think. These boys, these moments. What does it matter that I’ve missed a deadline I wanted to meet, or that tiredness makes me stupid some mornings? Everything that really matters is in this room tonight.

“Here, I’ll show you how fold one,” I say to Bean, not really believing that he’ll be able to follow my lead, and remembering second graders I’ve taught who have burst into tears with frustration, not able to follow the same sequence of folds.

“Really?” he grins. Then he sits on the floor with a stack of paper, his legs folded behind him on the floor like a little frog.

He watches intently, copying every fold.

First a rectangle, then the nose folded in to make opposing triangles, then the whole thing in half, then the wings folded down. Symmetry and sequence matter now. He breath is shallow, intent.

“Let me try it again,” he says after we toss our new planes high and watch them land. Sprout squeals in delight. A candle still flickers on the dinner table. Night is here, making the window glass into mirrors that catch our grins.

I watch him as he makes another, all himself. The entire sequence of steps folded from memory, after only being shown twice. And his plane flies beautifully. It lifts improbably, air pushing up under the flimsy paper and carrying it up to the ceiling before it swoops down, twirling in arbitrary circles before landing at his feet.

His grin is bigger than the room.

My grin is bigger than the room.

This boy, this beautiful boy of mine, teaches me so much. He challenges me at every turn to grow, to become more organized, more intentional, more prepared. He is my mirror, revealing the fragile and haphazard parts of my being that dangle and drag like dropped stitches. Where I am weakest, this is where parenting him forces me to grow the most.

I can’t coast, parenting him. He never gives me the chance to sit back on my laurels and get comfy. He questions everything. He is always pushing me to the edge of my comfort zone. He’s a kid who seems porous to me: the entire environment saturates his little being. He soaks everything up. Watches everything. Asks about everything.

He sees a thing once, and remembers it, classifying it with other similar things: the makes of cars, the inner workings of tractors, street signs, logos, maps. He has a particular obsession with learning new words and he insists on using them again and again until they blend into his daily vocabulary. Words like scenery and astounding, and investigate.

He is never content with the simple answer. He is always full force, full throttle, determined. He is fragile. He is allergic (to dust, grass, pollen, pets.) He is picky. He is persistent. He is easily overwhelmed by sensory stimulation. He exhausts me.

And I’m starting to get it: this boy of mine might be one of the most profound teacher’s I’ll ever know.

It seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago that I was clipping Bean into his ski boot bindings for the first time and sending him down the driveway. Now the first leaves are already golden and orange. Where has the summer gone?

The crickets know that snow is on its way. In the garden, fat pumpkins with girths rounder than Bean’s hugs. My Bean, who has started a mixed-aged (Waldorf) kindergarten program, and comes home singing. My Bean who tells us about the enormous imaginary kangaroo that lives upstairs. My Bean, suddenly a big-little kid. Four and a half. Mischief around every turn. He is my favorite forever.

And then my baby boy, my little Sprout, coming up on 7 months old, impossibly. He is a chunk. Pure love. Grins always. He’s been surfing the floor the past week or so, trying to crawl. In between attempts he’s pleased as peas to sit in the center of a circle of pots and spoons, banging things and grinning. He’s always cracking himself up. There are so many times throughout the day where I’ll look over at him and feel my heart catch and then expand. He’ll be smiling at me, watching me from across the room as I do things in the kitchen or fold laundry or type. He is my little Buddha. My reminder to be right here, now, in this precious, precious moment. He is my favorite always.

Also, some weekly blog crushes to share:

2 or 3 Things, Bliss, Le Love (can’t help going here and smiling), listing quirks over at Cupcakes & Cashmere…(a quirk DH pointed out tonight while we rocked it in the basement gym—3 miles in 24:15 minutes—is that I love to watch bull riding. Really.)

Also, these houses (still brooding over treehouse plans, as you can tell.) This gorgeous little party. This amazing installation. It’s how my heart feels, sometimes, lately. Overflowing, made of feathers, of air, of fragile things.

What are some of your crushes right now? Share please.
Also~ what are you looking forward to this week?

1. Treehouse, 2. Treehouse, 3. MAJ_The Ultimate Tree Fort II *, 4. 2nd February 2007, 5. Tree House, 6. DSC00145

We’re building Bean a tree house and we’re discovering that it’s uncharted territory. DH never had a tree house. I grew up climbing trees with my sisters, and there were certainly a few make-shift tree forts that are scattered throughout my memory, but never a real honest tree house with a ladder and a roof.

Because neither of us have real experience we seem to get sucked into substituting nostalgia in its place, with dire consequences. Having spent most of my childhood with scraped knees and in trees, I picture a helter-skelter little tree nest tucked up in some branches with a few log stairs nailed into a tree trunk. DH’s childhood was all about suburb sidewalks and and swimming pools and green lawns, so his image of the perfect tree house includes functional windows and an shingled roof.

Thus far we’ve settled on a platform built between three trees within eyesight of the kitchen window. Bean wants two stories, and a secret tunnel. I want to use logs from our property. DH wants everything to be built with two-by-sixes and six inch screws. We’re a mess.

Really, I’m a mess. I am outnumbered, and this is becoming more and more apparent every day. I have no idea what to do with little boys, I am discovering. They are not like little girls (though apparently this might be my fault.) They like to be LOUD. They like to smash things, and run really fast, and make skid marks with dirt bikes and dangle from tree limbs. They like to make plastic alligators eat the heads off of Lego people, and they like to make sharks attack. They like to have their pancakes in the shape of monster faces, and if you make beets and polenta into a similar design (with the beets for bloody teeth) they will acquiesce and devour them.

Other than that, I have no idea what to do with little boys. Or specifically my little boy. My frog-catching, fearless, stubborn, shy, determined, goofy little boy who loves to use every ‘big’ word he hears, and who has an opinion about every single thing under the sun.

Take naps for example. What do you do with a little boy who is determined that he is beyond naps, but still desperately needs them? He becomes the monster when he’s overtired–which is almost every afternoon. And what about refusing to wear certain articles of clothing? Or arguing about brushing teeth? Or? Basically, help. Mamas of boys, I need a primer, STAT. What are the top five most important things I should know/learn about parenting little boys? Because clearly, I’m in for it.

And also, about that tree house… What’s your idea of a perfect tree house? What’s essential? What’s overkill?