mandarin immersion thanksgiving

hi

i was busy working and could not attend my son's thanksgiving celebration and presentation. he was bummed out enough about it that i asked a fellow parent to take some pictures and she sent me
this video.

pretty cute. i am proud that my once super shy kid could get up and do this.

better go look up some thanksgiving recipes, i am behind the cooking curve.

i love you mummyshots

what a weekend. the mandarin immersion mom's night thing was a blast, i discovered a new happy juice, pear and rosemary martinis and mmm are they good. i also felt the beautiful diversity of the public schools...sure these are all middle class mamas who might look like me on some paper record of socioeconomic status or parental education (probably many more educated and wealthy than our own little family, actually) but i found myself almost in "i love you guys territory" talking to some folks i never would have come to know at all if it was not for the witchcraft of the sfusd diversity lottery. a shout out to our fantastic hostess, who not only made the pear martinis but cooked and served homeade bread pudding with caramel sauce and extra special chocolate chip cookies.

then there was a lot of kid time for two days. we had an extremely long-play visit with friends today and at one point maya walked out of a bedroom where she had supposedly been quietly reading books while the boys went beserk with war games in the back yard. she was a nudie and had decorated certain body parts with the one pink thing she could find in this house of three boys-- a strawberry shortcake pink magic marker. go girl.

rich dropped me off on valencia street, maya wailing at me through the window as he drove away. i browsed in a bookstore and felt a little touristy checking out the young folks with their unique attire--handlebar moustaches and pippi longstocking outfits. everyone seemed so sophisticated and freaky at the same time, and i saw a surprising number of babies peeping out of slings and bjorns. a cool and misty night, and i was fortunate enough to see and hear the fabulous mummyshots again, at amnesia. i'm no music reviewer, but they are a pure delight, deep and silly and talented and laughing, i really can't describe, just come over and i will play you a cd and make sure you go to the next show. lots of old friendly faces there and an amazing list song about the dome.

speaking of the dome, a song rich recorded there with carlton melton is now being played on the bbc radio playlist in the uk and scotland. check it out.

tonight, going to bed, maya told me that next time i went to a meeting (this is our reason for all nightly outings for parents) she would go with me because we were "stuck together with tape, butter, and jelly."

that's all folks
love, jamie

rocky way to the starr king open space

i wish i could walk the kids to school every day. darn that pesky job. twice a week we hike up the hill. today we found a giant's leaf, some green pigeon poo, a flower to pick, and counted 102 steps on the step sidewalk block. then the best part, miles rock climbs and maya and i take the super steep path up the rock. a small hike, to be sure, but it is a very good feeling reaching the top. a hawk circled around and we noticed the rocks were a light green color. someone broke up some concrete from an old sidewalk going through the open space and someone else has used it to build little tower sculptures. i am an old broken record about it, but i love this place, this little bit of nature that is part of the weekly routine.

and in other fantastic news my friend from way way back (5th grade) has adopted a brand-new baby boy.

i am drinking coffee to prepare myself for the second annual mandarin immersion mom's night out on potrero hill. worn out from a day muni-ing a class of kids across the city on a field trip about Plastiki-Mission Control. with maya. it was an exhausting pleasure on my day off.

it is raining and dark and it would be easy to stay home and curl up in bed, but i will get up and go soon. little tiny traditions and rituals are forming around here, i need them.

parks and rec and vitamin d

today after a long time at work and driving all over the place maya and i went to get miles at potrero rec center. it was dusk when we got there, the indoor court full of big teenagers from the neighborhood playing basketball, nicely-dressed folks on the field bringing their dogs for their nightly outing. miles was not there, he was outside somewhere with the director, and under the flourescent lights some girls were drawing on easels and one boy played mancala with another staff member. the kids returned from outside, looking cold. they had been looking for the anaconda, a wierd little fiction the director had them fascinated with, and which i did not want to dispute. today miles said they found a can of blood, so there must really be an anaconda. but he also asked me "did mike just wink?", feeling a little confused. is there really an anaconda roaming potrero hill? like a ghost story from summer camp. not educational, not "enrichment", just a strange story to get the kids thinking and looking around the trees and bushes in the twilight.

miles and maya started whining about being hungry and the rec director went into the kitchen to get them a snack. he came out with one piece of homeade fried chicken and a piece of bread in a little plastic container, which he said his friend made for him. i didn't want to take his dinner but he insisted he didn't like fried chicken. miles and maya certainly do and gnawed on the bones in the dark car on the way home.

so things are working out in the after school department. odd, but good.

our lead blood test results for the kids came back fine, which is a relief, although i can no longer say it is the lead dust causing my dear daughter to be a frequent tyrant. we did find out they are both severely deficient in vitamin d, and need to take special supplements. vitamin d, it's not just for rickets anymore--deficiencies now linked to high blood pressure and cholesterol later in life. most people, not just kids should be supplementing vitamin d in their diet.

another wierd sign of the times--if we were outside all day like the animals we are, then the sun would keep us well in this department.

rambling as usual. take your vitamin d. thank your low paid goofy hat wearing chicken dinner donating parks and rec director who says your kid is "the best" and smile to yourself as you wearily drive home, the lights of downtown san francisco sparkling in the darkness below you.

pretty much content-less post

okay, so the days are getting shorter but that is no excuse for my lame blogging behavior.

it is easier to think about writing than write. maybe i need a secretary to sit next to me bed and take dictation.

and i have been reading a lot, snuggle in bed rereading old books reading. right now the feast of love, which is a very good reread. the kids are getting well-behaved enough that i even have time to snatch a few books for myself on our library trips.

soccer season has come and gone. the kids at my school made paint turkeys today, and we have to start thinking about xmas. little calvin just turned three. we haven't found time to prune the fruit trees yet. i have been overdue to get a root canal done for OVER A YEAR. what the heck is going on?

this is one of those short, i need to get my groove going again posts.

tonight when i picked maya up from preschool, after a little struggle, as she climbed into her crumb-covered carseat: "mommy you smell like hearts and flowers and roses." not true, but go ahead and say it, girl.

and at bedtime as miles climbed into his bunk: "you are the best mommy in the world. you are exquisite. you are double exquisite. if you were a finger i would still love you. if you were a piece of sand i wouldn't let the broom sweep you. if you were an ant and an anteater tried to eat you i would kick him in the face."

awww. just what i needed to hear.

nighty night

i should be in bed

another fast entry due to computer power problems.

saturday rich's cover band browntown west played a benefit for miles' school at the bottom of the hill. i drank three jameson and cokes pretty fast and had an excellent time watching my worlds collide. my visiting dad, stepmother and their two friends from delaware were there, along with our rock and roll friends, some with babies now, and a crew of starr king families. even the principal showed up for a little bit. they started the set with the star wars theme which created an instant mosh pit of little boys with imaginary light sabers. they covered hot for teacher of course. there is jed, grabbing the mic and yelling rock and roll. three little girls lined up next to christa shaking and yelling, like mini motown back up singers. about 10 kids sitting on the stage in a huddle, just staring intently. by the end of the show kids were banging on drums and cymbals and doing some stage diving.

it was a blast, especially as we have been dealing with some annoying and anxiety provoking problems with lead paint--i had to take the kids to be tested and we are spending a lot of money to get our house tested and cleaned--and the painter who we think contributed to the lead exposure does not seem to want to help pay. he did not do a terrible awful job, but was not careful, and we are careful with our kids around here.

and my dad has come and gone. seeing him for two and a half days,being my dad and being a poppop was just enough for me to miss him more. delaware is very far away from me. miles was pretty obnoxious for much of the visit, or seemed so to me since i so wanted him to show his good side to the poppop he never sees. every toilet talk joke or random throw of a toy made me furious. as they left tonight, though, he yelled down the stairs, "i'm going to paint i love you on all the walls in this house and send it to you in the mail!!!" so some love shone through.

better go before this screen goes blank.

halloween 2009

i have to type quickly because our f$&&^ computer is acting up. halloween has come and gone. we spent friday waiting in line for the H1N1 vaccine for 2.5 hours at a public health clinic. a bunch of neighborhood kids and acquaintances were there and it turned into a little block party with candy, chalk drawings, inevitable wrestling and at one point miles and his buddy lying on the parking lot faces up to the sky, surrounded by folks waiting for their flu shots, making synchronized knee-pit fart noises.

last night we trick or treated on potrero hill, star wars style. we went with friends and saw lots of cool spooky stuff and got a TON of candy. people were handing out full size chocolate bars and maya was amazing, i will never have to worry about her finding food if she is lost in the woods somewhere, she could spot a house with candy from a block away and was cute enough to get away with taking more, more, more. my favorite stop was this (see crummy photo above) house we hit on the way home. they had set up a popcorn maker and tv sets with monster house playing and the kids sat and munched and watched, totally spent, while rich and i people watched for a little while.

up on potrero hill it feels a lot like a neighborhood. the guy handing out popcorn had grown up there and seemed to know everybody, young and old.

after the kids passed out i felt a little sad thinking about my boy growing up. how many more halloweens will we have where he will hold my hand and be with his mommy and daddy? he still believes wholeheartedly in mother pumpkin, and there is no way that will be happening when he is ten. i got very sappy (maybe the kamikaze shot at the bar with my trick-or-treating mom friends contributed---and the little whiskey flask) and told the kids how much i loved them and how wonderful they were, etc etc etc. i think is it good for them to hear this.

anyway, i have made it this far without losing power so i should end while i can. good night.

jamie

well, i had to post a picture of some kids in hay, because that's what we city slickers have been doing for the month long holiday of halloween. the pumpkin patch behind ucsf with the hay ride around a parking lot to see some old stuffed animals in trees (the kids loved it). scary grove night at stern grove, a new parks and rec event involving many many many children in star wars garb, no food, rides, magicians, light sabers flashing in the trees, and a major blood sugar let it all out double kid cry all the way home. and this weekend the mother of all pumpkin patches. we were there for.....four hours!! jumpy house. corn maze (maya took off and got lost in it and had to sit next to me on a bale of hay while everyone else ran wild and free and itchy). face painting. expensive hot dogs. we saw a cow being milked which probably turned my kids off milk forever as the cow had her neck in a creepy metal holder thing and she pooped during the demonstration. snow cones. haunted house, haunted barn.


so, we get our country time in.

i know i did not blog for a while. sometimes it is easier just to lie in bed rereading books for the 40th or 50th time than it is to write online about my existance. sometimes it is hard to write about my existance without sharing certain thoughts and feelings that are better left inside my head, or at least not outside a bar or private phone conversation.

what did you miss hearing about blog readers?

one event stands out. we went to a night time outside movie screening put on by the family of a girl miles went to preschool. i know they are community oriented because a few years ago they got a grant and organized community members and rebuilt a decrepit old park into an amazing and lovely playground and garden. we walked over with miles' school friends, and the kids just zoomed along on scooters and bikes. no crazy traffic. the house turns out to be big and magical, with a secret hideout for kids under the house, a huge electric train set hidden in the basement, and an in law apartment out back with guinea pigs and a sweet dog checking out the guinea pigs and hundreds and hundreds of cds. through the back door of the in law and we are in the alley, an overgrown alley with a sandbox and door leading out from all the fences on both sides. people are coming down the alley with their kids, it is getting dark as parents try and set up the outside screen. there is a couch in the alley and food and people coming in and out of their backyards and kids running wild, toddling wild. the little girl miles went to preschool with had invited her first grade teacher and she appeared in the crowd, and then went to check out r's bedroom. there is a big cooler of beer and funny malt liquor drinks and juice boxes and i am just in love with this alley full of people, a big tree leaning over it, a swivelling seesaw in it.
finally the movie starts, and the kids are all crowded onto blankets and the couch, the adults in chairs or around the little fire pit. it is totoro, totoro which i first saw with my best friend long before kids came along. after the movie we go outside and there are little signs of halloween everywhere, glowing pumpkins and lights.

this was in mission terrace, which is in the city about 10 minutea away, but which in my little slice encounter seems to be the coolest suburb i have been to. no cool factor of huckleberry donuts and murals and theaters, but what could be better than totoro on a big screen at night, outside in an alley, your boy and girl cuddled together watching, a mike's hard lemonade and some reminscing about old times, strangely but nicely, with people you have not known for all that long.

tired now, goodnight, love you
jamie

why am i doing this?

why am i writing this blog anyway? there is no clear subject which might be of interest to people--say, education or food or knitting or raising chickens. there is no point, as in trying to make people laugh, or convert to my religion, or give me money.

i suspect this blog is a primitive version of why most writers write--to decrease the feeling of isolation. i'm not sure about this, though.

why feel isolated? look at today. kids wake me up at 7 am rolling on me and shrieking about star wars. soon we are at the park with very nice newish friends and kids, eating salami and dried apples, kicking a soccer ball, listening to the cars, admiring our children and planning a night out to drink some wine. then we drive through this beautiful city to check out the amazing mission science workshop with the kids, where we see more friends and their kids along with dead bats and live reptiles and batteries and clay and little boys making things out of glue guns and band saws and cardboard and putting bones together. all this started by one man who wanted to bring more science to kids in the neighborhood. after this we go with suling and natalie to valencia st and visit the pirate store 826 valencia, where the kids looked at all the wierd stuff in the drawers. and then miles and maya and natalie spent some time in the dark little tiny three seat theater watching the very clean aquarium with the puffer fish. they spy what seem to be some old fish bodies on the floor of the tank and speculate about them. poor little adorable fish says maya, really meaning it.

we get sandwiches and walk right by cassie's old old house to dolores park. it is a huge party. drunk 30 year old ish people everywhere, some younger, some older, drinking, eating birthday cake. playing with hula hoops, even walking on a low tightrope that has been set up. we get to see a man and a woman about my age strip down a little and full-on wrestle, an activity that ends when they roll in dog poop. there is a man with a long red ponytail and droopy handlebar moustache just hanging out in a tiny bikini bottom. someone has set up a small mobile art museum. i swing with the kids and we are all befriended by a wasted young guy with dreadlocks and pants below his baggy underwear. he makes funny sounds as he swings and then jumps off to almost smash his head on the sidewalk several times and maya sure loves that. the view is fantastic. i remember coming here 13 years ago and playing acoustic token white boy songs. it is a scene like a good city park should be, full of people having a good time.

so what is it? some middle-aged dread? after all this warmth and display of humans (maybe too much today for my tired mind to handle), after my kids go to bed and rich is in listening to music land i just need to read, and read, and this is often good. but some nights it is not enough, and it is too late to call my most far-away loved ones, or just not the right time for a call, so i babble and ramble on in this blog about the details of my day.

are you out there? do you want to read about something else? i will do it for you, if you ask.

goodnight.

cursed block?

MOMMY, SOME PEOPLE EAT ANIMALS!!! SOME PEOPLE EAT, DEAD,ANIMAAAALLLLS!!!
maya came running into the bedroom this morning to tell me this, which she learned from some cartoon character on PBS kids.

i am beginning to think our block is cursed. two nights ago i heard a commotion outside and looked out the window. about 25 very excited police officers and a car completely turned around and on the sidewalk right in front of my house. then a flurry of confused looking cops grabbed a woman and shoved her into the backseat of a cop car. this didn't go over well with me, even though i found out later that no one was hurt. the cops had chased the woman, driving a stolen unmarked police car, all the way from daly city to end at 1107 potrero avenue. boom, into a spot where we often park.

more upsetting to the kids, the top portion of a nice tree on our block, you know, the part with branches and leaves and sometime fluffy pink flowers, disappeared. poof. maya has been talking about it for days.

and for the second time someone stole the nice bright green succulent we planted in the cinder block outside. miles noted with disgust that someone had thrown a dirty tissue in it.

even so, today was a beautiful day off work. maya and i made a dollhouse, muffins, and did a little gardening. we split our weekly dynamo donut (meyer lemon with huckleberry icing) and after school walked miles and friends to soccer practice under a blue sky. on the walk home my kids both held my hands with no major meltdowns and we found a secret little block between 22nd and 23rd and wisconsin and carolina, funky old and new houses, one with a shady front garden with a stone lion head.

we watched looney tunes and then at bedtime miles asked lots of questions about what we were going to do with his body when he died.

it was a kinda strange, good day. my friend suggested that all the bad things that happened on our block make the chance of more bad things happening unlikely.

i know this is not how it works, but i will try to believe it.

bye

do you have an extra 600,000 dollars?

sonoma weekend. we called the clydesdales and they came right over to say hello. met kids in the park and miles and rich played football for a lonnnnngggg time. we drank red and white wine and ate salami and cheese and tomatoes from The Patch and even made it through a grandparent brunch without driving grandpa david nuts. my mom fed us tidbits from her training as a sonoma county naturalist--vultures are the only bird that can smell. yellow jackets are wasps. she tells us about a dog chasing a deer through nathanson's creek behind their house.

the way home was pretty for a while, with rolling hills of grapes on vines, and a stop at the beautiful stanly farm to pick pumpkins and run between tall sunflowers and corn stalks and pretend to drive rusty old tractors.

then we hit the traffic on 80 and the world started to seem not so nice. sitting in a mass of barely moving cars for two hours gives you time to think about all things wrong: from too many people to collapsing economies to oil wars to unsustainability to people just being jerks as they honked and shoved their ways from lane to lane. and the bridge, the bridge, well if you know me you know how i feel about that. suspended so high in traffic i bit my lip and felt my hands go numb as rich drove and i silently begged my children to be quiet and happy and patient. miles put his new yoda mask on to make our neighbors in the traffic jam smile as we eased our way down into our tall city.

i want to take the ferry next time.

back in sf we dropped rich off and went to the friends of potrero hill at i.m. scott raise a roof benefit. maya and i rode on a bike to provide pedal power for blenders and spin art, and we all pedal powered the bluegrass musicians amps. as kids ate treats, poked at weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt, played with hula hoops and rode things with wheels we heard educators plead for money. friends of potrero hill has found a home in the i.m. scott building owned by sfusd. sfusd will lease to to foph for $1 a year, and in return friends of potrero hill will build a new little sustainable beautiful place in which to teach preschoolers. all the preschool needs is 600,000.

it is time, time, time, time, time, time, time for some big changes. is it crazy to think that in these very scary economic times there is hope for donations of $600,000 to build a little neighborhood preschool that wants to teach kids about peace and sustainability? just hearing the plea, amongst the rock the bike people and joyful kids, was in a strange way inspirational. like, it's insane, but it is gonna' happen anyway.

i hope so.

night night

gifts before noon today

ahh, friday, i love you.

we climbed up the rocky way to starr king this morning, scrambling up like rock climbers and being snow leopards. maya cut her wrist but did not cry. on the playground a parent gave her a pink rubber bracelet for her suffering.

miles got involved with a pack of kids and did not seek me out to say goodbye when the bell rang, a first.

maya and i walked down 24th st and watched ants crawling out of cracks with white food in their mouths. a stooped and smiling old lady threw rice for the pigeons. we ate a hipster donut listening to old soul music and then a stranger gave maya two metal bicycle-shaped keychains she made for her business.

we saw lobsters in tank with rubber bands around their claws. disney princess on ice posters, religious statues that look like queens, a cute little doggie, aww, some broken glass to step over. a bus stop poster with a man and a woman wearing gas masks.

at maya's dance class a little bit of her tinkerbell dress ripped and she let another girl have it for a bracelet. then she shocked me by giving away the pink rubber bracelet to a little girl named frankie.

on the way home i got maya rice and beans and the waitress gave maya a floating green balloon with a pink string. we walked by two memorials, candles and flowers and photos huddled around trees.

then maya's balloon got away. she started to get upset and then decided against it.

home now in our dirty apartment, maya watching a little bit of little bear, quiet green trees blowing around in the back yards.

happy weekend
xo,
j

a little better

hi

sorry for those miserable last posts, but a shooting on top of general stress will do that top ya'.

this is the kids watching a very cute performance by ballet folklorico at miles' after school program (which i think he is turning his back on).
rich has been in delaware and i have been super mom this weekend, carting the kids to star wars playdates (i did get a good red wine buzz out of this event) martial arts, soccer (hey, we have a nice view of the golden gate bridge and alcatraz from the soccer field), and two bday parties.

the party today was right down the street and we dragged poor grandma j along and ended up staying all day. it was a good party because there were lots of adults there, and adult food that kids liked too, and it was not 100% about the kids, but they were certainly there. there were lots of tatoos and people talking about the beauty bar, and homework, and a hello kitty jumpy house, and another bday party for another friend right under the next group of trees. homeade tamales and tabouli salad and pulled pork and fancy meatballs and fruit salad and speakeasy beer and the new and improved riunite wine. maya made a crazy mud hole with some water and a fork which splattered all over her face, and then took a little snooze on a slab of concrete next to the jumpy house generator while miles participated in a quiet but very complex and endless boys stalking unaware girls kinda game. there was a friend face painter who made maya into a sparkly blue dragon with lips, and a pinata chock full of sugar.

grandma josy kept her word and we took miles to st francis after the party for his grandson hamburger and ice cream. i had a little tiny bit of trouble breathing as we walked past the shooting site from last week, got a tiny bit teary eyed but it is hard to feel too bad when maya is dancing in the restaurant and miles is laughing so hard he slides under the table. the hipsters were coming in and out, and some dressed up latino couples, and a group of cute people doing the wave at the counter top. out the door i could see strollers, homeless folks, skateboarders zipping by, a pink balloon. it was okay. i took a deep breath and took my babies home and they went right to sleep, pinata candy, ice cream, cake and all.

xo

still feeling sourish

oh, ho, it is wednesday and i am a single mom for a week. trying not to think about gunshots. once a month i see an old friend at our department meetings (which we use as 2 hours to catch up, whispering in the back row like the bad and disrespectful people we are) and she makes me think about another mythical suburb, albany, where she is friends with all her neighbors and half the neighbors are old friends. someone recently moved there called it mayberry. tra la la all the kids walk together to the great school down the street where hardly any kids are bombing out due to poverty or experimental immersion programs. birdies chirping rather than sirens and truck engines on the highway. little green gardens and sidewalks devoid of trash heaps and feces.

yes, i am in a down mode. what the heck are we doing here? mode. and doubting our choice of schools for our kid. sure it is a place with a good feeling and lots of people to like, and miles is happy to go there and he can speak chinese now but the more i think about it (in this negative frame of mind) are we NUTS? not only is he only getting one hour of crappy houghton mifflin english time per day, taught teachers who great but undeniably ESL, but there are many many kids in the school who are dealing with great poverty and difficulties. seems like we picked a very cool place with huge challenges.

kind of like the city. can we do anything to make things better? are we being bad parents? am i just very very grumpy?

on a lighter note--maya was moving cinderella's paper arm in the pop-up book up and down during story time in the bed tonight and told us cinderella was making a fart sound in her armpit. we all lost it and i laughed for about ten minutes as miles went armpit and kneepit noise bonkers and maya joined right in.

one more day of work and then my fabulous four day weekend begins, full of creative movement class(not for me), wushu class (not for me), soccer game(i get to watch), two birthday parties (not for me), library benefit. i can hardly stand it, i love it all but i can hardly stand it.

anyone want to come over for cocktails one night soon? i miss you, people.

xo
jamie

nice weekend sour end

here are some weekend photos. we went to the roadworks street fair in potrero hill sponsored by the center for the book. many artists had made linoleum block stamps, and they rolled on the ink, laid the linoleum blocks down on the road, covered them with paper and a rug and then a guy rode a two-ton steamroller over them to make prints. cool to watch and then there was a table for people to make their own prints which miles took full advantage of. today we met mike and suling at the beautiful walter haas park. perfect weather, good monkey bars and pretend castles, kids sharing scooters and bikes and tricycles. later julia met us at the skate park and we got to see some kind of crazy voodoo ceremony with women singing and dancing, an older man spraying liquor from his mouth, an altar, some ritual looking sword fight, drums. there were tons of kids of all shapes and sizes playing together on the playground.

on our way home, however, we saw some police cars on 24th street and i went home to read online about a shooting one block away. and miles has decided he wants to return to his latch key program which i feel a little nervous about.

the urge to flee is somewhat strong tonight.

poor poor pitiful me

well, this was a tough week for me. i know, i know, i've got it good but we all have different levels of tolerance and this week brought me pretty close to quitting it all and going on welfare. does welfare still exist?

work was chock full of kids not getting what they need and me feeling very bad about it. i will leave it at that. maya started her new waldorf-y pre-k. i had convinced myself the drive would not be too bad and then managed to get panicky on the highway so it kind of is bad since i am meandering a long long way on city streets and then at night thinking about all that driving and thinking of comforting quotes i have heard/read recently like "why worry about flying or earthquakes, when driving is the most danger you can put your kid in?" so is the cool pre-k worth it or should we out her in the nice cheap co-op walking distance from our house? the deed is not quite done because we have not paid the waldorf-y pre-k yet. miles also started his first week at the starr king asp and kind of liked it, but i think the asphalt is getting to him. monday: "can we go camping soon?" wednesday: "can we visit brian soon?" yesterday: "i just want to go somewhere....green soon." so we have to make that decision still, too, about after school programs.

i found myself emailing private speech and language therapy clinics late last night after, i admit it, yet another bout of loud crying and just feeling too pathetic to drive all over and feel guilty about kids at work and worrying about kids in cars and afterschool programs and too much asphalt.

today was my day off. maya and i took miles to school and then very slowly meandered down the hill,taking a full 30 minutes to let maya sit on the steep sidewalk and sing songs and then through the mission with a stop for a dynamo donut (chocolate rose) to her first creative movement class at dance mission theater. it is a huge high ceilinged place with lots of studios and light and mirrors. a hot hot day and no fans turned on. maya jumped right in, as she did at pre-k this week. at one point they played some beautiful floaty music which i think was bjork, or sugarcubes, and watching maya twirl around and hold hands with a new little girl friend and feel the music was amazing. we made it home in the heat with a lucky ride from one of miles' schoolmates moms, driving around the mission unemployed.


after school miles made the brave leap to join the starr king soccer team. i watched him skipping around the soccer field, yes skipping, i'm not sure why, this is his latest thing. maya messed around in the shade with me and some cool moms and dads and the little siblings. afterwards was smoothie day and miles had a nice mandarin conversation with the lady at the deli.

so, deep breath, in writing this all looks fine. sometimes it just feels like way too much for me, though. i can barely handle my own life--when the needs and worries the parents i work with come in to play i really want to flee. for a nice life of being a mom and taking care of our house and maybe taking care of me a little.

darn you, facebook

dave milsom just sent this to me, and i felt like sharing. twenty years ago! i was thin! token white boy.

scroll down to wednesday, march 18th on the link. thank you ilhan.

wish i could go bang on something or yell into something right now. maybe tomorrow.

everybody everywhere

waahh. my baby, pictured here in a stunning ensemble, started preschool today. she barely said goodbye and walked off toward the group of kids, then shot back across the room and squeezed my legs ferociously, then joined the group.

i missed her during my three hours of food shopping and cleaning the kitchen. and i felt disconnected from the well-heeled group of moms waiting outside to get their kids, all tall ladies with smooth hair and nice shoes and cars. second guessing my decision about this preschool, of course.

miles started his after school program today, which we are trying out 5 days a week. i was itching to go get him at our usual pick up time but had to wait.

walking down the rock hill from school i told him how maya had been brave but was a little teary and mad this afternoon. he told me when he started preschool he cried for six weeks but then he had a good time, which is pretty accurate.

why did you cry so much, anyway? i asked. this was when he was three. because i wanted you, he answered.

this is the answer i wanted to hear, i suppose, but it hurts a little too. we want to be together but have to go into the world.

of course at home the kids were fighting over markers and bickering as they counted each other's stirs taking turns making sweet potato pancakes (wink wink, deceptively delicious), and then miles drove me nuts at bedtime making fart noises under his armpit while i tried to sing baby beluga to maya. i yelled at him and he went into the closet for about ten minutes but finally emerged to say sorry. he had to make just one more fart noise, though. then we called each other exquisite and he went to sleep.

big meeting tomorrow, the thing i never mention here, work.

and i just reread one of my favorite autobiographies, nobody nowhere by donna williams. you can borrow it from me if you would like.

night night

6:45 a.m.

rocking out to patti smith, horses, at 6:45 this morning.

note new and thrillingly realistic lightsaber. life is good.

idealistic hippie post

here is a link to a photo that made me wish i had been at burning man this year. maya would have loved loved loved this sculpture. if i could get a few humane leashes and hire a full-time babysitter i would love to attend burning man with the kids next year. who knows! my two trips there were two of my best trips anywhere.

thinking a little more about the myfarm business difficulties is really motivating me to study sustainable gardening more seriously and get to work . maybe i will be out there with a flashlight (listening to rem) because that is the only time i will have, but i am very interested. making a small, semi-shady, windy space into a productive vegetable garden on a limited money and time budget is definitely a challenge.

i'm extrapolating my thoughts to lots of the things about living in the city that made many of my friends leave, such as wanting a bigger house, bigger yard, safer places outside for kids to play, less conflicts/crimes, the complications of public school assignments, the noise and crowds. these things can be considered challenges if you are in the right mood. all these issues are issues facing the entire world right now--overcrowding, not enough food for everyone, dealing with pollution, tolerating different folks as we are crammed closer together, making sure people have enough education and resources so that they can be happy citizens and not criminals.

so, on a good day, i look at these issues that our entire city living family faces daily as challenges to learn from. if we can deal with them here our kids will be better equipped to deal with these problems wherever they go. maybe they will learn to grow food in small spaces if their mama does. miles fought saying goodbye to the grass in our yard but now likes the little garden even more. maybe they will learn that people don't need huge places to live in since we are making them share a room. maybe they will understand how hard most people have to work to survive when they see those muscled shirtless older men dodging traffic on potrero ave as they push their piled-high bottle and can filled safeway carts to the bayshore recycling center. we will make sure the kids are just fine by spoiling them rotten in our own way.

i can hear some 60's music playing in the background, is it simon and garfunkel? call me idealistic, or an early childhood educator, these are just thoughts, that's all.
goodnight

david i. was right

well, there is trouble in urban farm paradise.

if you don't remember this important fact, we are members of a "decentralized urban farm" in sf. we received a very sad email this morning from one of the farmers in this group saying that they had not been paid in two months and that things were not going well. which we had kind of noticed since our little backyard farm has been a little neglected.

on my way home from a trip over potrero hill i stopped at the eat-in at the awesome 18th and rhode island permaculture garden. they were eating all kinds of gourmet vegetable creations but i was mostly mesmerized by a tour with the main gardener, who is all about permaculture, which invloves cool stuff like building up soil, everything being a perennial, climbing perennial squash vines, low maintenance, training out of control fruit trees to behave and fruit within reach, lovely pineapple guavas (hi nat),sharing food, sharing systems, and not constantly going to floorcraft for more bags of soil amendment and little plastic six packs of baby vegetables. he said to come back on friday during their weekly workday and i could pick his brain some more. so maybe there is hope for our backyard farm yet.

the eat-in is an awareness-raising event, i guess they were all over california, to raise awareness of the need for healthy local food in kids' lunches. right now at miles' school the achievement gap even follows the kids into the cafeteria--more educated and affluent parents pack whole grain breads and nut butters and organic apples and yogurt and sugar snap peas in their kid's cute little lunch bag while most of the kids from lower income families get the fake juice, processed food pizza, extra sugary corn muffin, you get the picture. click on the permaculture link above to get more info about the eat-in.

tonight after dinner i took the big kid to the skate park. we rang his buddy's bell on the way over and they accompanied us with a.'s DOUBLE-BLADED LIGHTSABER. his mom had a nice little buzz from an afternoon bbq and i remembered why i like having so many cool neighbors as we gossiped about the school and the boys twirled their plastic sticks around in the cool and sunny almost bed-time evening.

i have to do some work for real work now. the kids are asleep, visions of star wars in their heads. it is kind of quiet and last night's huge moon has vanished.

more sunday streets

we drove out to sunday streets at ocean beach today, a somewhat miserable trip with miles very dejected in the back seat and assuming the worst, that there would be no bike for him to ride. this culminated in a full-blown temper tantrum, which we have not seen in a while, miles refusing to get out of the car and even saying he hated us. we could have been tough and cruel but instead babied him through it, and thank god there was ONE miles' size bike left at the free bike rental out at the great highway. i decided to get one too. i guess riding the bike feels so good to him it was worth freaking out in advance against the possibility that his desire would not be realized.

we met my mom and brother and family and bumped into lots of folks we know, which always reassures me. it was a perfect temperature greyish day and rich and i took turns biking with miles south and north from gg park to (almost) the zoo and back, while the other parent supervised maya flinging hula hoops around her neck, begging to ride the crazy cyclecide carousel, making origami penguins, and rolling in the sand with her cousins.

it feels very good to bike by the pacific ocean pretty much ignoring traffic lights and riding right on top of that painted dotted line. some kids on training wheels, people blasting music, a few dog walkers, mostly bikes bikes , a salty smell in the air, nothing for sale and no cars, no cars, no cars.

it felt a little bit like riding into the future, when cars will be less and less and then just fizzle away to nothingness. maybe. i will be an old lady and miles and maya can pull me in an old lady bike trailer cuz they love their old mama so much.

night night

vegetables, decisions

tonight i hear a bunch of kids yelling and playing out back their little voices louder and clearer than the car beeps, motorcycle vrooms, and trucks rumbling down the off ramp. go kids go. rich says the little girl sounds like maya, i think she is yelling and singing in spanish.

in our neighborhood at this time of night the sky turns a very cool shade of purplish blue.

today we got our first big bag of vegetables from myfarm. sadly our yard has not turned out to be incredibly productive so we are sharing vegetables with other myfarm members in our neighborhood while we work on boosting our soil, deciding on which plants can thrive back there, etc. the kids got very excited about the bag left in our backyard with apples, lemons, parsley, lemon cucumbers, greens, zucchini, lettuce, big beets, leeks, a turnip, some yellow squash, beans, and two orange squash flowers which i guess i should go online to find out how to cook.

this fits in with my new obsession, the deceptively delicious cookbook by jerry seinfeld's wife (sorry, that doesn't sound very feminist does it). i have been cooking vegetables and pureeing them night and day so i can sneak them into all our food. sweet potatoes in the pancakes, avocado chocolate pudding, choco chip cookies with chickpeas, butternut squash and broccoli in the red sauce for pasta, cauliflower puree in the mac and cheese, you get the picture.

wow, a half page of words and the loud happy kids seem to have quieted down and gone inside. the sky is very dark now with what appears to be a very bright star visible out our center window. laundry is tumbling in the dryer. the zucchini is calling me--put down that laptop, chop me up and make me into a cookie...

i have avoided what i am really thinking about, the decision between after school programs which i must make by tomorrow. it is kind of the whereshouldwelive decision, stick with what we have, which miles enjoys, and work on the kinks, which include safety and security and equity. or switch to a program that is safe and secure and takes us away from each other a little more. that probably only makes sense if i have talked to you about this already.

whoa, if i lean a little to the right now i can see a bright almost full moon shining down on me.

i am 41 and still confused about why the stars and moon seem to move so fast in the night sky. guess i have a lot to learn.

peace out

if you lived here you'd be home right now

i just talked to one of my good friends far away for 74 minutes, which was nice.

today was sweltering at 9 a.m. i took miles to his first class at pacific wushu where he learned, among many other things, how to do horse stance, salute, and do two kinds of splits. this is a goofy kid who i motherlyly envision participating in a creative drama group, or learning piano, but here he is running and jumping and kicking and punching and waving his legs in the air counting to ten in mandarin. and looking very proud of himself, indeed.

after getting one day closer to the fabled day you get to use a sword in wushu class we packed up and headed through the neighborhood to garfield pool. where the heck did all these hip looking people come from? i surely am not one of them. maya was looking pretty swell in her mermaid bathing suit, alternative ponytails and twinkle toes sketchers. we had unfancy food at casa sanchez and fancy ice cream at humphrey slocum (maya got pink lemonade, i got vietnamese coffee, miles had secret breakfast which had bourbon and cornflakes), then sat overfull and dazed under a big tree in garfield park waiting for the pool to open. i liked that miles knew one of the "poor kids from the projects" at the playground who is his age but runs around with a group of kids and not her mommy and daddy. i liked that they are school mates and played around a little bit and that he does not only know kids in his mandarin immersion world.

the pool was cold and loud and crazy with every hot kid for blocks around, spider man and sponge bob balls flying, shouts and laughter echoing off the old concrete walls. so joyous to cool down, the water, the noise, the taste of chlorine.

the cousins came over later and how cute is it to overhear two little cousin girls painting side by side at the table saying "i'll make mine for you, ok?" and "i'll make mine for you."

when i listen hard i hear a truck come thundering off the highway, maybe some country-ish music, miles sighing in his bunk bed, now some fast shrieky rock and a bus air-brake.

the sounds of morning are so much clearer and sweeter, mostly birds and more birds, a fresh bus going by, maya reading my anne lamott book to herself out loud.

goodnight

hmmm

okay, is anyone reading this or should i just keep these thoughts in my head? or give up on blogging and become a facebooker. or a hermit. or take up knitting, or start writing poetry, or just get some more sleep?

anyway, has anyone out there been reading about the repair california movement? i am intrigued but not so knowledgeable. this does fit in with the where should we live theme.

let me know what you think. wish we could all chat about this at the argus or the 500 club or someplace like that, but that is not going to happen anytime soon.

and why is it so ^*$##$^ hot?

sappy post

after a brief goodby hug and kiss my big kid only looked over his shoulder for me once as he shuffled into the first day of first grade in a mass of uniformed kids.

my heart is breaking, said maya burrowing into my shoulder.
why?
because my brother is so far away.

i feel it too. tomorrow is back to our fixed schedules of schools and work and being so far away from each other. hopefully there is enough summer in our hearts to get us through.

sorry for this sappy post. but my kids are growing up at too many miles per hour.

back to starr king mandarin tomorrow

awww. look how adorable these little rocker girls are. maya, sorry i mean princess leia, and i went down to the rock and make festival on treat street where we heard about three hours of bands, many of whom, i figured out, were closer in age to my kids than to me. oh well. i may be old but not freakishly old, and there was a 60+year old shirtless homeless guy breakdancing up front who seemed embraced by all the cute young-uns so i have a ways to go. there were lots and lots of parents jumping on the opportunity to go hear music they would not regret the next morning.

the kids were conditioned to like the music with free tootsie pops placed by a few singers' feet.

i still love live indie rock especially the lineup today who did not seem to take themselves at all seriously and who rocked out without their you know-whats out. free and during the day are especially sweet. take a few minutes out of your busy schedule and listen to some links. the drummer from the ferocious few had one of the best drumming styles i've ever seen. kim if you are reading this check out "the shes". lots of vendors more my age selling their jewelry and clothes and handbags and homeade soap and art and big ol' glam belt buckles.

am i just being optimistic or are people actually moving towards something a little more creative now that the last remnants of the dot com tsunami seem to have washed away?

back to school tomorrow. yes, we have signed our kid up for another year of mandarin immersion. our friend asked "what did miles do wrong to deserve that?" last year and sometimes i think we are torturing crazy parents but for now it is o.....k....ohhhhh....kaaaaaay.

random summer pictures of offspring

i love the siblings in this one. we are up in mendocino in lisa's car and by the look of brotherly love and appreciation in miles' eyes i think maya may have been talking about butt cheeks in a funny voice, a real crowd pleaser. maya was actually bossing me around from the seat of her little revolving whale at santa cruz. the backwards shirt trick thing is thanks to peter up in anchor bay.

nice sticker

thank you, kind person who out this sticker on the window of the 33 bus!

just killed about 2 hours reading lenore skenazy's free range children website and comments. verrryy interesting.

i'll post some pictures of the kids in case you forgot them,hahaha.

i can hear our young new neighbors partying downstairs

well, they are starting to make some noise down there. happy loud youngsters. i guess we used to be like them except we were ten times louder and stayed up blasting rock music until 2 in the morning. and let our dog poop in the backyard way too often. i really can't complain, except that i do miss our old downstairs neighbors and how our kids would run up and down the back steps visiting and giving us both little half hours of peace.

the school year starts back up tomorrow and i have my customary end of august nausea. blaaach.

miles will be in a new classroom, away from his best buddy and is very worried about it. when this best buddy was not at his camp last week miles suddenly felt like he was going to throw up, was bawling in my lap, and then his eye started hurting and he couldn't see. i had to hand him over to his counselor, all snotty and red-eyed, knowing the counselor thought i was just a weak mama.

maybe i am, and maybe it will be funny someday but right now (thanks a lot dr. sears) i am feeling his pain, his worry, fear about the unknown. he asked why the kids from his class last year can't be together and i don't know. why DO they split up these little elementary kids each year?

reality is, there are only a certain number of kids in a class, friends in your neighborhood, people in the world, and you are lucky to deeply connect with any of them.

at miles' school they sing make new friends and keep the old and it is so sweet but it is hard, hard to do. i guess we just have to do it.

on a totally different subject, or maybe not really, i saw the pbs documentary playing for change about this guy who travelled the world recording musicians playing and singing the same songs and then put all the tracks together and the result was pretty amazing. all covers of inspirational songs, musicians in israel, south africa, ireland, louisiana, santa monica, all over the place.

so now i want to try and start some kind of all ages music group. good covers only. rich plays guitar, i play drums, we have some interested friends, but who will organize the children?? any volunteers? shake, bang, sing and dance. on a regular basis. sing about love and peace and some funny stuff too.

they are settling down a bit now below. windy greyish purplish evening. listen, above the neighbors voices are car and truck rumblings, guinea pigs sipping on water bottles, a motorcycle, a wierd beep, a bus' air brakes, a distant car alarm, a wind chime. a man laughs loudly, heh heh heh heh.

goodnight dear ones

retreat

well, nobody really wants to hear a summary of our trip, do they?

sorry.

after a week in mendocino county swimming in rivers, playing on beaches, sipping on cider and bloody marys, cooking on fires, making shrinky dinks, being carless and chauffered, i felt a little bit, um, calm and relaxed. ahhh. we then headed to russian river for a stay with my mom and spent a day way back in time at johnson's beach taking turns kayaking, canoeing and paddle boating up the lazy green river with miles, checking out the swallows darting and swooping around. then 2 cheesy days in santa cruz, stuffing ourselves with crappy boardwalk food and then going on rides that swished or jerked the crappy food around. on our way home we stopped in at costanoa and ended up staying one extra day there, in a little cabin, soaking in a hot tub with a view of nothing but hills and sky and trees. i did end up sleeping outside on the floor of the deck because rich's snoring was so loud but it was actually pretty cool listening to the wind and ocean and random animal sounds. yesterday we celebrated my bday with julia and family as well as andy d, and julia and i snuck off for a trip to kabuki hot springs, with massage. i could spend all day in that room....wet sauna, cold plunge, hot pool, sit down showers, lotions and cucumber water everywhere, the gong of silence occasionally being rung.

now things are back to stress and worry--choosing maya's preschool, being audited (randomly, lucky me) by the state speech and language pathology board, looking at unrepaired and painted objects, piles of bills, a still unpacked duffel bag of dirty laundry.

but this getaway time was good, very good. i was kind of shocked to find myself not thinking and worrying about much at all. was it being in the country? possibly. or maybe just stepping out of the usual patterns that are so easy to fall into.

the kids were well-behaved!

i am trying to hold onto the peaceful country nature vibe. and also to appreciate those people and places around me, while not denying the part of me that longs to be with people far away.


i still love point arena. who wants to buy some land up there with me? we can build some tent cabins and a hot tub in the woods and hide out from the small town politics and enjoy the retreat.

up north

hi

today in anchor bay/gualala/point arena

the kids are up by themselves in the morning and i hear them being fed breakfast and then playing outside in the huge huge fenced in yard--maya, miles and toddler kevin. there are tall pointy redwoods, and blue sky and sun by 10. sam the black and white terrier is in love with us, especially miles. we load up and visit the anchor bay beach right down the hill. a small curved bay with rocks to climb on jutting out of the sand and surf, a few blond and red-haired kids digging a booby trap, a tidal pond to splash in. houses on the cliffs above with long skinny staircases down to the beach. a fisherman shows off his pile of orange rockfish. hawks are circling overhead and i bury the kids and cover them with sand: maya a mermaid with little sand boobies, miles a torso being swallowed by a shark. lisa tells the story of a tourist up here for a meditation retreat sitting on a rock in the sea, being swept away forever by a rogue wave.

in the afternoon we go to the gualala river and swim in the cold clear swimming holes. miles jumps off a rock, i even take a dip. kevin throws rock ofter rock to hear the plop, maya is miserable about the lack of a toilet as i help her crouch on rocks under flowers which turn out to be covered by buzzing bees, and we capture a tadpole in a cup with tiny tiny legs.

afterwards i treat us all to dinner in a child-friendly restaurant. the kids are perfect with two huge tvs to watch, and we bump into our one friend up here with a kid miles' age. they play tag on the outside deck looking over the huge pacific and no one cares.

it is huge and clean and beautiful up here. much as i dread and don't enjoy the journey from sf, it is worth it. it is midnight and dead silent and dark. if i stop typing i can hear the quiet ringing in my ears--do you know what i mean?

sweet dreams

keeping busy not taking the yearly trek back east and trying not to be sad about it

the peach tree is dropping about 25 ripe peaches onto the ground every day. on saturday maya and i took two bags out on a walk. we gave the first one to a speed freak guy who is almost constantly in motion around the neighborhood. we went into the little take out deli place to see if they had mason jars to seal up the peaches and they didn't, but the counter guy offered to trade us, which we did, a bag of peaches for a big delicious chicken tarragon sandwich and curried cauliflower salad.

we spent saturday night in brisbane celebrating julia's 40th with naked children dancing, margaritas, water balloons, maya and natalie disappearing for hours to play complicated pretend games while miles and edison happily beat on each other and the grownups got nostalgic. little russell did some head-banging to a thin lizzy song rich played on guitar. where should we live decision of the moment: if we flee the city it will be for brisbane. we can trade in what we've got for a terraced view of the bay and beyond, safety, quiet, christmas light stars and sports and sports and more sports.

sunday i took miles for some culture downtown, the sf free theater festival. we watched lots of adults entertaining kids--psychotic clowns, storytellers, physical comedy, pirates, jugglers. but what i loved where the kid entertainers. we saw our acquaintance isabel singing excerpts from the sound of music, an amazing grease with long-haired drummer and teenagers from the mission singing and dancing, but my favorite was a group called the habit project from petaluma. they were from about 10-17, all beautiful kids in white shirts and black pants, full of joy but somber, singing and playing guitar, very adult songs about being fucked up, being in love, making stupid decisions. while listening i didn't know what the theme was but knew it was deep and the kids were special. i was ready to sign miles up, even if he would be learning about drinking and bad relationships and adult stuff. somehow it all worked, it was beautiful.

we crawled home on two buses. my little big guy has taken to wanting to hold my hand again lately. he does a little skip thing most of the time instead of walking.

today he wore his school uniform to the park. the kids climbed, were friendly enough with strangers to play soccer with them, maya scored a little baby and stroller she took care of for a long time. maya and miles were on the seesaw for a long time, moving the weights back and forth, going up and down, up and down, some bumps but mostly laughing.

tomorrow we head up north to point arena. miss you
love, jamie

freedom from training wheels

man i love this stuff. ever since i was a child, going to newark community days and checking out all the arts and crafts booths and live music and hula hoops in the grass and even having a picture hung on a tree in the kids art show. i loved sunday streets in the mission today, with bicyclists blasting michael jackson off their bikes on the closed off streets, my kids walking and biking down what is usually a traffic-filled danger zone, so many happy people, bumping into friends, the freedom from training wheels workshop (miles is training wheel free now!). merchants outside their stores, jumpy castles governed by teenagers from the bernal dwellings, a duo playing songs about coffee and cigarettes, a man offering free massage in spanish and english on a massage table outside his house, and yes hula hoops on the grass.

only once every few weeks, but maybe these sunday streets events really will get some things rolling, maybe someday we will close off the streets once a week, or even more! more and more people will want bikes and want to spend time walking and talking on the wide neighborhood streets. who thought to make this happen? i want to thank them.

we had friends over later and ate burnt grilled chicken and drank just enough beer and the kids played star wars and went to bed happy and quickly.

the wind is blowing hard now, over and out, goodnight.

movie night

well, we survived the giant's county fair today with david and emily. the 48 bus and the fancy new t line took us to borders, we ate burgers and then went to a sleazy kind of carnival by the ballpark, full of vendors desperate for us to throw balls and rings at bottles and squirt water for prizes. miles and emily teamed up for the rides up to 48" and maya and i spent some peaceful moments on the baby rides together. no baby animals or giant vegetables around. afterwards we went to chill out in the grass by the waterfront. a dude was down there having a great time playing electric guitar all by himself and miles and emily and maya played along on their inflatable guitars won at the fair (maya actually played a giant inflatable hammer with pretty pink pirate skulls). we made the journey back up and over potrero hill and met up with a little girl from miles' school.

now it is movie night and the kids and rich are watching star wars for fifth consecutive friday.

i guess it is okay to say this--i have been very anxious lately. i am finally starting to do something about it. everyone tells me it is normal to be worried about things, but all this worry is really getting to be too much, and my world is shrinking. i won't go into the details. but, for those who know me, it does help to share.

does living in the city contribute to the anxiety? if there was no scary traffic outside would i worry about people breaking into the house and kidnapping the kids in a sleepy suburb instead? or about mountain lions carrying them away in the countryside?

this weekend is chock full of things to do. mandarin classes, friends' bbqs, visits with new friends. flipper playing, sunday streets in the mission with all kinds of cool stuff, freedom from training wheels workshop for miles. it's not boring to be here. maybe all this activity keeps some of the worry at bay. maybe it is all a wash. who knows.

maya wants me to watch star wars with her because she is worried about luke. so there you go. i'm going to go and hold her on my lap and watch the good guys prevail.

4th of july

here is the gang that stayed in sonoma for fourth of july, and the two cinder blocks miles and i found and tucked some mexican feather grass into to beautify (?) our sidewalk.

sonoma was all about warm weather and cannonballs in the condo pool, fireworks and the big parade, walks to the square, ducks and ducklings, wine, pizza, and kids getting to wander in and out of front doors without me having a panic attack. miles made a buddy at the pool through an elaborate squirt gun war that ended up with the little boys holding hands while jumping in the pool. maya discovered the joy of floating with water wings and channeled her inner mermaid for a long long time. this was the first time i left sonoma thinking "maybe we could live there, someday, maybe..."

there was one sexy odd float in the parade that got everyone excited, a huge step van with pole dancers on the outside, something butthole surferish playing, a man with a microphone intoning wierd prose about liberty and an amazing vibe that brought me back to me experimental youth--past burning man and parties in philly to the distant past of newark and DAMON KHAN. something about the sight and music of this float actually got me teary eyed, i miss this feeling so much, i want to be on a float like this that gets the sonomans laughing and a little confused, i need my creative partners to be with me and my kids as i slip into my 40s.

rich suggested our own float for next year, "relatives of josy". anyone want to join?

and let's keep fighting for freedom--why do we have less freedom on an institutional level than much of the "first world"???

july 1

maya loving herself some pinata and miles in an abandoned fort on epic angel island, on our hike to quarry beach.

the apartment below us is empty. i had some hopes for a friendly family to move in, maybe even friends, but it will be taken by four women, strangers, though as i keep telling maya, not all strangers are bad.

an acquaintance at a birthday party on beautiful sunday in a lovely potrero home told me she had left sf and moved across the street from her best friend in albany and how she was loving it, and i felt a hard pang of jealousy. the kids ended up buck naked, we drank margaritas and chatted, they climbed in boxes and maya sang about butt cheeks and miles watched entranced as his little naked girl buddy did an interpretive dance standing on a cardboard box, about a flower growing up, on a stormy night.

today we went to the samurai exhibit at the asian art museum and it was all very amazing and old but i did not feel connected to the art or the artists. on the way home miles and i found a new seafood store on 24th street, with live crabs and lobsters, eel, huge shrimp. he said to the owner in mandarin "i like to eat fish."

birds are going crazy outside. we made a plum pie with plums from the yard yesterday and it was delicious.

love you, miss you

sidewalk again

category: sidewalk/kid quote/city living/where should we live/tiny ambitions

if you read this blog regularly (and the two of you know who i mean) you will notice that there are a lot of sidewalk and park posts. i think this reflects the urban nature of what i am pathetically trying to write about here, how we intersect and live in the public spaces of the
city.

i wish there were more positive sidewalk posts.


this morning walking past some stinky fluid on the sidewalk miles said "i wish we lived on garbage block (the other side of our block, which has some kind of wind tunnel of paper litter but is much much less travelled than potrero ave) so there would only be regular garbage and not so much poo and pee."

sigh

there are a lot of sick and homeless folks around lately. faces are becoming so familiar. the drunks at the walgreen's bus stop have moved somewhere else. sometimes the down and out people around here remind me of friends from my past in newark and philly. i had two different friends camping on my couch for a combined period of over two years way back when. rich just saw our homeless friend with the shopping cart downtown looking not so great. i know we are lucky. i try hard not to use the poor around here as lecture subjects for the kids "if you smoke cigarettes too much you can get too sick to have a job and end up not being able to pay for a place to live" but every now and then this kind of bs comes out of my mouth.

i guess the upside of all the nastiness on the sidewalk and crazy looking folks pushing shopping carts in traffic and tiny elderly chinese ladies carrying huge bags of scavenged recycling on a stick across her shoulders is that right outside our door the kids are learning about how varied everyone's living situations are. i guess it is my job to make that part of their education positive somehow. i will try my best...

mission pie, mission apple tree, mission plums

hi little journal

evan forced me to go to mission pie
with him yesterday. strawberry rhubarb and peach, with a big blob of thick whipped cream, i reminisced about the 1996 fruit pie and iced coffee national tour i went on. cassie you need to go there next visit.

last night miles and i went out at bedtime, walked down 24th st, through about eight doors into the inner sanctum of precita eyes mural gallery and painted 4 ceramic leaves on the branch of a gigantic apple tree for a big tile mural/mosaic going up at the 24th st snake water park over the next few weeks. i was supposed to go see shellac but passed out at 9 pm instead, with allergies and parent fatigue.

today i picked three ripe plums from the backyard plum tree. firm and sweet. and ate the first big red backyard radish and radish greens. the wind chimes are going crazy right now , louder than the ambulance siren and motorcyle engines gunning. our old windows are rattling in the wind. the kids so cute and so asleep and daddy rich is out with the band.

summer is here

since i am overwhelmed lately by the numerous subjects to write about i will kickstart my writing by analyzing miles' flag he made for the bear flag festival up in sonoma this weekend.

first, the obvious. this is a variation on the california state flag. the pictured variations are fireworks, which usually represent celebration and excitement. they can also be seen in this image as representing massive problems in the california state economy and government. boom, bam, krash.

we can also analyze my son's kindergarten education, which was in mandarin for 90% of his day all year. he learned what the state flag looks like, from the red stripe and star to the bear which happens on this flag to look like a prehistoric sloth. he learned to use pictures and words to represent ideas, and how to tape a piece of paper on a long stick and make his little sister envious of his flag. he learned how to write simple words like boom, bam, and krash, but has not picked up many sight words, which makes this overly worried mama nervous. he learned how to make thought bubbles and fancy exclamation points. note the absence of chinese characters. i would guess that this means miles has not yet learned the characters for boom, bam, or krash. i'm pretty sure he hasn't. this brings up a whole host of concerns about mandarin immersion and what it entails as far as comprehension and expression of content. i am going to give it another year, and see how it goes.

summer is here and i had my first partially kid-free day in a long time. i went to dmv and waited in several lines, shopped at rainbow grocery, indulged myself at a bookstore, cleaned the guinea pig cage, did laundry, emptied and filled the dishwasher.

oops, i did not have time to do exercises, call phobia therapists, or start making my massive to do list. i also seem to have run out of time to call several of my loved ones who i am procrastinating calling until i have some good news, like i have found several million dollars and will be buying houses and plane tickets so my loved ones can come visit or live here and we can spend some quality time bbqing and gardening and drinking and listening to music and digging in the sand with our toes and watching kids swim in blue pools and all that summer stuff.

face painting at home

weekend notes

friday night review scribbled on parking ticket envelope:

king of coffee
for years this was a scary meat market, and then for the last 2 it was a plant shop full of homeless plants leftover from hotels and closed down companies staffed by a friendly older man who sat on a plastic chair on the sidewalk surrounded by his potted trees and plants, smiling. orchids, palm trees, japanese maples, cacti, tiny fruit trees, spider plants. walking by tonight out by myself before the mandarin immersion mom's night out i notice some new art in the window, a dragon, an abstract metal sculpture. the plant shop is now king of coffee, with the plant guy's friendly son josue serving coffee and telling me about the incredible paint job--you just have to see it. bush and bob marley and james brown singing out from behind a mass of plants. it is a one cup at a time place, like philz, and i get the magic joe, which is quite special. a young punk looking bruce springsteen is making silver rings for chain mail, his mellow pit bull at his feet and his hip friend discussing her fashion show for the maker faire. then a guy pulls up in an electric golf cart with a kid in the front in a car seat, the kid wearing a mexican wrestling mask. he checks to see if the tiny cupcakes he makes have been selling. through the window where i sit i see pink and white and purple petunias dancing around in the wind, growing in a big homeade planter on wheels. a vaguely familiar guy with his daughter walks in and the guy smiles at me and asks where my little ones are. i don't know exactly why but i am feeling good about my neighborhood. if all my loved ones are far away i'll just have to love these strangers around here.

circus review:
miles got tickets from school to see the maker faire (incredible, we went last year) and the circus (i went last year but had forgotten it somehow). turns out the maker faire tickets were gone so saturday we checked out carson and barnes circus at cow palace.

now this is one seedy circus. miles ate a scary hotdog served by a man with major fingernail fungus. inflatable spongebobs and doras, cotton candy and snow cones came by us every 2-3 minutes held in boxes by desperate looking men. a lot of the performers had a lot of ace bandages on various joints. there was a six year old performing. the ponies were biting at themselves obsessively. the animal guy didn't look very nice.

of course maya was in heaven, literally screaming with delight each time a teenage girl dressed in a sparkly bathing suit with feathers on her head hauled herself up a rope or ladder, swung from something or clung to an animal's back. "mommy look at the LAYYYYYDEEEEES!!!!!!!" the clowns appealed to miles, and i was laughing pretty hard myself at ajax's physical comedy. but there was an edge there, the kids getting a little frantic for a toy, a light up sword, more sugar. we had snow cones but they were not satisfying.

on the way out were about 15 very serious looking men and women holding signs, video screens, handing out flyers with photos of elephants being poked and hurt and an elephant foot in chains looking infected as well as some quotes right out of a horror film. "these poor animals" they were muttering, shaking their head sadly, and "carson barnes tortures animals", etc etc. maya started crying about how the people didn't like the elephants and miles wanted to know what the hell was going on. we got into a little discussion and then the whole thing felt awful and i never want to go to a circus with animals again.

sunday notes:
sunday morning we went to the skate park and there was a starr king family. and a family from maya's day care. and it was fun and nice. then miles and i cut out for his bud's bday in beautiful koret playground in gg park and we spent more time with starr king families and it was fun and nice. then since we were right there and i felt so free and light with only one child miles and i walked over to the academy of science joined by two little girl friends from his class and their accompanying parents and it was fun and nice and actually an adorable time with the three kids running around so excited about the rainforest and the fish and the alligator and the cool rocking bench and holding hands etc.
it was not QUITE so nice walking back to the cars when miles and his little friend got a little too happy and started stripping and running into the trees and wouldn't listen but what can you do. to top off this day miles and i went to a vietnamese restaurant to eat and he actually chewed and swallowed an egg roll with all kinds of unidentified things inside, a baby bok choy, a gnomish looking mushroom and some bean sprouts. incredible.


this was my weekend. i'm sure you are all fascinated. how to take all these bits and pieces and write them into something whole is beyond me. school will be out in a week and i will have a little time to...myself. whatever will i do? suggestions are welcomed.

memorial day

carnaval! it was a cloudy grey day, good for the performers. we headed down to our usual watching point, outside of boa on 24th. maya wore her faux fur cape and glass slipper flats for the occasion. miles was on the prowl for candy.

i walked the unicef parade as a preschooler, then was a band geek for years. in college i organized the first and last pagan ritual. a somewhat tamed and child-friendly version of mardi gras, carnaval makes me feel good. brazilian drumming, sexy dancers, little kids dancing with their schools, more sexy dancers, a scary african procession with skulls and machetes and crazy long-haired costumes, more drums. salsa bands on floats, followed by tiny bolivian women dancers with flutes and surprisingly loud voices. goofy middle school kids dancing to tonto jump on it. you gotta love this stuff.

later miles and rich went to play basketball and came upon a man lying in the street with a bloody mouth. rich said he couldn't talk and looked scared--maybe a seizure. he made a big impression on miles, who asked many questions about him at his favorite discussion time, after he was supposed to be going to sleep.

it is memorial day and i am thinking about my poppop. he was a combat photographer who in his grandpa days became a combat photographer for peace, veteran for peace, fought against landmines and helped protect voters in elections in central america. he grew up in a city like my kids are doing, in a poor neighborhood with a garden out back. he told some good stories about pea shooters and horse poo pranks. he built houses, made tiles, was a studio photographer. he made delicious oatmeal, built a house for my grandmother and himself next to a gorgeous green river in massachusetts, raised goats for a while, then ended up living his last years with a wonderful retired schoolteacher in staten island, ny. he led a full long life and was very much against war.

xo

ilhan first told me about this place

last night we bickered with each other about various issues (mostly miles and rich--miles has been pretty grouchy lately) and almost didn't go, but finally packed our stuff in the car and drove down to the dreamy butano state park campground. the ground was moist, the redwoods tall, huge logs everywhere for kids and banana slugs to climb on. the smell of fire and evergreen leaves. dogs barked and kids yelled, an occasional clank of pan or loud crack of fire, and our breath made clouds. the kids went bezerk for marshmallows, but it seems like lately the kids just ARE bezerk. how did we end up with these crazy little folks? hmmm...

we survived a night of heavy snoring and awoke to the sound of stellar jays and little waking noises. after breakfast we hiked down the trail where ten years ago cassie and i trailed kaveh to his friend's wedding and drank some danish liquer (that word must be spelled wrong) while elf like wedding guests cavorted around. today we were highly entertained by a park ranger named mountain who led a junior park ranger presentation about birds. we sang a song about quail, miles got to wear a sign around his neck that said BEAK: you got a beak, you got a eat, and finally there was an insane game with camoflauged nests full of checkers and 30 kids running around flapping their wings and trying to protect their checkers from the predatory adults. as we drove out we saw bunnies and quail and talked about native americans and how modern society was quickly changing the entire planet.

we balanced out all this nature nicely with a stop at burger king and a "name that cartoon theme song" game in the car. upon arriving home rich and i collapsed and miles and maya watched 2 hours of rocky and bullwinkle.

carnaval tomorrow. i'm in a i miss my friends mode. i miss you, friends.

i want to go back to bed and daydream

procrastinating before work

summer is almost here

stopped to get money from the little liquor/party store on 24th street. they have made an effort to reach new customers and now have "organic food". i expected some healthy cereal, soymilk and annie's mac and cheese. instead two cute stoner/skateboard dudes sit behind a deli counter with sandwiches and salads they have made themselves. they have home jarred fruit and vegetables in big mason jars. the salads are 2 bucks and things like corn, mint and baby bok choy. acme bread in huge bags. rasta music playing. good for them.

across the street i see a man peeing sneakily in someone's doorway.

our little garden out back is growing but slowly--the morning sun takes a little while to hit the ground. i just want to go lie in bed and daydream.


kids are waiting at school, better go.

"let us cultivate our garden"

just returned from seeing:
my friend sheila starring as candide in the theatre of yugen's version of candide, or optimism.
in case you didn't noh, which i didn't, this is a highly stylized form of theater from japan. after getting over my astonishment at seeing sheila on stage as a man in crazy japanese costume courting a baroness in west failure i settled in and enjoyed it thoroughly for 2 hours.

and on the optimism tip, we took the kids this weekend to the life is good festival
in gg park where for almost six hours a bunch of people played music, did some top-notch juggling and ventriloquism, kids cavorted on parachutes and threw balls through openings, the face painting and ice tea were free, bubbles were blown, and all donations went to charities. as we sat and made arts and crafts out of old clothing catalogs i got the story that life is good is a clothing company that decided to give back after 9/11.

ahh, what a nice place our earth is, the best of all possible worlds.

and maya's quote, unrelated:
"here are some books i got for you. i got them all in china."

me: "okay, can you read me one?"

"no, they are all in spanish."

nighty night

bee babysitter

we went to point arena last weekend. i was singing the hazy hit where should we live so much that maya started crying "stop it, stop it." so beautiful up there i just want to stare around me for hours but the kids made certain i didn't do that. every rock and plant and tree and cloud seems perfectly formed and positioned. i ended up staying up until almost 3 with brian and his friend listening to recordings he has made in the dome. it's amazing the creative projects our (mostly childless) friends have produced!!

back in sf things are way too busy. i was kind of half-hearted about the starr king open space board and didn't invite anyone to vote for me. so, phew, i am not on the new board of directors, but feel my slight involvement and vote helped create the new school friendly board. soon there will be kids out there with clipboards sketching bugs and writing in their journals. if there is still any money left for schools to function...

maya and i sat on the path in that open space today for a while. she came up with a game about us being birds that were babysat by bees. it was nice to not be a mean stepsister for once. some nice folks with dogs wandered by. we picked some teeny flowers. after coming back down the hill i was cornered by our star trek loving cross-dressing older neighbor walking his inherited dog peanut. i heard him rant about how he couldn't stand the city much longer and how when his wife retires in 18 months they are moving to a country house 20 miles from any town up in northern california. he is very pissed off because more parking will be removed for bike lanes. he also informed me that peanut has diarrhea.

maya started to pick someone's geranium's but before i could stop her the man stepped off his front stairs and said she was welcome to pick a big one. she said that was nice of you to let me pick this wery big flower.

and rich and miles are at a giant's game, tickets purchased through a fundraiser for miles' school. a weekend ahead of kid events, cleaning the bathroom, maybe a little cousin time.

life is whooshing by lately. i have been up a lot at night, thinking about present and future.

love you

me a board member?

not so long ago i was making jokes about bored members. haha. thought of that just now, actually. anyway, i was asked to submit my candidacy for the board of directors of starr king open space and i did! there is debate about how democratic the current board is, and there are plans for new blood to come in and make things more inclusive, democratic, etc. i have said yes because it might lead to kids at miles' school having access to this great natural space, but i am no politico. when i think of a board meeting i just feel bad about going out in the evening after work when i should be home squabbling with my family.

after almost a year my son is finally loving his lord of the flies type after school program, and now it is in danger of being shut down by parks and rec budget cuts. today i got there to see a the kindergarten tennis gang arriving at the court at the same time as a dad and his two sons with their racquets. at any other program the adults would have stepped in and told the kids to wait their turn, etc etc. the staff here is, um, very loose, and barely registered the possible conflict ("oh, are there kids around here somewhere doing something?"). then miles and his little buddies suggested to this very large stranger and his big boys that they share the court, and they did, for about an hour, while maya and i played bluto and olive oyl (feminist olive oyl) and squashed some unripe passionfruit.

maya is finally ready for bed, so night night to ya'

quick while the kiddos are working on a secret project

well, in a nutshell i am worried about swine flu. call me paranoid and a media believing loser but we are lying low this weekend. i think we will skip the my gym birthday party with 30 kids sneezing and coughing into plastic balls, and also the pump it up party with 30 kids wiping germs all over inflatable fun.

oh no, conflict already. i like this little dude a lot--cute and evil with swords on his forehead.

gotta go

at the car wash

this morning i hid in the garden so i could talk on the phone with my dad and not be interrupted by little crazy people. he had just put his boat in the water for the first time, in lewes thousands of miles away. my sister is living at home now with her toddler who is getting lots of grandparent time. i miss my dad more than i can write here. miles found me and talked to his poppop a little about fishing.

sometimes it seems very wrong that i am so far from my father.

around 11 we hiked the hill with some brownies for the starr king carwash and bake sale. woo hoo. the kids ended up washing and detailing, rich vacuumed many many cars and i hung out and fed kids and tried to help make sure no one got run over. it was a sunny perfect day. sf recycling donated a huge grill and two griller guys, and double rainbow donated a big ice cream truck with cups of ice cream for all. kids playing in the streams of dr bronner smelling soapy water, shooting hoops, chasing each other, actually staying still and lounging in the sun. an excellent dj, watermelon, scooters, meeting new neighborhood folks. it was nice. the starr king friends were there but what made things seem a little more whole in this disjointed people all over the place life of ours was that a bunch of our rock and roll friends came. baby suzette and john and danielle, and eric and his girlfriend from the warehouse, shannon from philly and her buddy. they were psyched to come to this school event near their houses. then they got to go and drink mimosas and we got to take the kids down the hill.

on the way back down i heard my name called and it was a content specialist from work sitting in a camp chair outside sf general, on a vigil with a good friend whose good friend was very sick inside. i finally get to see your real life! cried this co-worker with some real pleasure in her irish accent, a goofy basball cap shading her eyes. for some reason miles laid down on the sidewalk and then maya laid down with her head on his tummy and said he was her pillow. it made everyone laugh for a minute.

i'm tired now and rich is down the hall in music land again.

love you

mummy shots

sunday night i took off at 4:30, hopped a quick 48 bus to valencia street and walked through the dazing yet soft heat to amnesia to hear the mummy shots. four of my lovely lady friends were all in ghostly white with red eyeliner. they are the back up singers, xylophone and tambourine players. the band played a show with a deathly theme, with a little funny sex stuff thrown in. accordion, guitar, a wierd stylus instrument david bowie used in the 80s, piano, drums, sounding almost a little like daniel johnston at times. i had a few pint glasses of sangria on ice under the shimmering pink fabric hanging from the ceiling. my band played here a few times in a different lifetime when the bar was the chameleon. the basement thren was full of kind of dirty looking happy punk rockers and cigarette smoke and furry dogs. that was almost a decade ago. afterwards there was more drinking and talking and a little cool breeze coming in a window off the street.

looking at all the death-referenced song titles on the free cd yet feeling so light and happy i remembered out loud that most people who think a lot about death are very in love with life. then i had one last slurp of my vodka and grapefruit juice.

not a profound thought but it pleased me at the time. it is still very very hot here. time for a wet washcloth and some short stories in front of the fan to wind down. i should be doing work, oops.

so, my husband went out and played with his rock band last night, and will do so again tomorrow, yet i can't go because we don't have a babysitter. no babysitter. is this a function of living in a city, or of the somewhat unusual situation of having a 41 year old husband who still plays shows until 2 in the morning? i would like to go out, but will have to be content with going to bed at 10 instead.

today was beautiful, right now the sky is light pink and purple, and thank god the kids conked out early. maya and i hung out in the starr king open space after dropping miles off at school. sitting up high looking at the hills and valleys covered with lines of buildings, different colors and rooftops, wisps of fog around the sutro tower, green peaks around us. right where we sat we found pineapple weed, a wierd sticky velcro plant, california poppies, tiny pink fairy flowers, purple thumbelina flowers, rocks that maya stuffed in a small hole, a pale spider, lots of wavy hay-like grass, shiny black obsidian, and a rectangular piece of glass. somehow the places where buildings, roads, and nature converge make me feel slightly hopeful about the future.

a blog telegram

cassie came and went, in a 3 day blur of being sick, laughing really hard like i do with no one else, getting teary about old friends, and finding myself toughened up a little and not bawling when we took her back to the airport. cassie, wish you were still here. we could go see browntown west at the eagle together thursday and think about tedd and laugh hysterically at my husband's band.

ajax the guinea pig was very ill, almost dying from seizures on easter sunday but the vet saved him. he is nibbling on a carrot right now. maybe it took a near death to make me love the little guy.

now the blog telegram, or maybe a bad poem...

big wheel race down vermont st last night, streams of 2o somethings racing down the hill on plastic tricycles, barbie cars outfitted with cheetah print pillows, the same small asian lady ninja turtle we saw last year, they reach the final stretch and jump up and out of the way so the big wheels following don't hit them. miles on my lap, checking out the outfits, the helmets, the sexy easter bunnies, the man slurping vodka from one of those hikers water tubes, the bikes. these riders are whooping with exhilaration, the ride down is so good. my sciatica hurts just from walking up the hill.

in sonoma my mom drove us around, bought us expensive pre-cooked food, played pick-up sticks with miles. we went to a trout farm and i threaded hooks through fat squirming worms and pulled in 2 10 inch and 1 11 inch trout. miles cried and yelled in the car going back to the city when he realized we left his fish skeleton in the refrigerator. he wanted it for science.

easter sunday ajax is in the animal hospital with rich and i am in gg park with my kids and brother and friends and miles is so hyped up about the upcoming sugar that he gets wacky and just smacks a big open bag of bagels right out of his uncle's hand onto the ground and barely notices. i am becoming a bad mother at times, and yank him up by his arm and tell him to go sit across the field for a minute and calm down. he does. i need to be aware that i am big and strong and i shouldn't yank anyone no matter how annoying they are being.

maya is being a baby, again and again. me want up she says. she falls apart crying, down on hands and knees in angst, several times a day. she screams and folds her arms in fury. she is going through a phase. she wants to be little again. littler. even when having an angst-filled tantrum she is adorable. miles says "i like the age i am, i don't want to get any older." miles asks "after i die will it still be monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday saturday sunday?" miles says "love isn't always a good thing because if you love someone and they have an accident or something then you can't love them anymore and that's when love is bad." a friend emails after his 40th bday and says he is getting old. we all want time to stop. i remember crying about growing up, around age 15.

i have a moment of pure pleasure holding my friend's tiny wide-eyed smiling baby boy.

and after school today i took the kids to check out warm water cove. people trying hard to make natural a place devastated by people. a patch of wildness with cement paths through it and lots of broken glass. butterflies and birds singing sweet songs on that scary curly sharp barbed wire. we eat bananas and tortilla chips on a table looking out over the bay. two large cement stones turn out to be parts of baby head statues our artist friend dave from the warehouse on third discarded years and years ago. they are still here. miles and maya stop to sketch on a bench and when i look down they are sitting on top of some graphic cartoon porn someone has sharpied on there. a beautiful young man and woman walk by and it turns out they are going to be trying to build a beach here. as an art project for california college or arts. they get my email and we talk about community building. there is glass everywhere and maya has another tantrum when her brother draws ariel's hair scribbly black.

i tied together some cool hard dried seaweed in a circle and hung more curvy pieces on it. black and white, odd shapes, this wierd mobile is hanging from our beautiful old light fixture. i like it.

maya told me this was a bee-YOU-tiful day.

this is not a telegram at all. i don't know what it is. we flee the city and return and do it again. i'll be more organized next time. how many times have i said that in my life?
love you, jamie

long weekend

rich away this weekend making music in mendocino county, and i've got one borderline sick kid and one quite sick coughing mucous-filled kid but we worked it out. saturday we met our good friends at the library downtown, where we checked out no books but played sorry and the strawberry shortcake game, then ran around at the park in front of city hall, walking past the most joyful loud laughing totally crazy person ever on the way. her head thrown back and huge huge laughing mouth with shining white teeth in the sun. said friends came over afterwards and the kids puttered around together so well, miles and jonah drawing skeletons and monsters, z and maya dressed like tinkerbells and parallel playing in parallel small worlds. these friends are moving to the east bay, but i won't get too sad about it because, well, i guess i am becoming hardened and tough about losing friends to distance.

yesterday evan came over and we took the kids to hipster st francis for a fabulous brunch and returned to find i had locked us and evan's bag with his keys out of my house. upstairs neighbor in sacramento, rich 4 hours away. evan kept cool and we walked to my neighbor's bday party one block away. i left the kids there and cabbed it to my brother's, got his spare key from the hiding spot, found the set of keys to our house in his basket of mail, bought a bottle of bushmills whiskey and some ice at the corner store, and went back to the party. soon the kids were watching pokemon, evan was facilitating shots for all, there were ribs and chicken and cookies and the day flew by until bedtime.

and today our backyard became part of a decentralized urban farm, myfarm. we hired a bunch of young eco-warriors to crush all our grass, haul in tons of dirt, build beds with drip irrigation, put up a huge trellis and a potato tower. for the next nine months our farmer will come each week to weed and harvest and leave us a box of veggies, taking another box to a member of myfarm not as lucky as us with our sunny mission yard. yes, i wish i could do all this gardening myself, but times are wierdly busy, my back and leg have been killing me, and this is all good, right? allll gooood. the farmers ride their bikes around the city and the food is only transported from yard to kitchen. it is supposed to taste better too. we will see!!!

miles asked tonight if i was going to die first since i am a grownup. i said i didn't really want to talk about it (bad answer), and that we should enjoy our time together. he replied that we spent a lot of time not together, and that made him sad because i am his best friend. lord, he is a pain in the you know what, but i love that crazy little dude SO MUCH. maya then spent an hour driving me nuts not going to sleep and then threw up from coughing ten minutes after she passed out. i washed her gross milky vomit hair in the sink and she smiled up at me with her red cheeks and exhausted eyes.

i know i am lucky right now, even if i often forget. my life has terrible and wonderful parts. the terrible are not on this blog. it is possible to turn towards the wonderful, and writing, growing things, kids and friends help.

you know what i mean, right?
love, j

more themeless details, this is headed somewhere, right?

thursday morning i discovered that when rich test drove our car the night before to check out the sticky clutch it had become completely stuck and was squatting at our mechanic's across the street. aaaahh. i had to get miles to school up the hill, maya to bernal heights daycare, me to work in the western addition in an hour. a seemingly impossible feat, but it was done. after some phone calls ana from ana's daycare came racing over in her humongous suv and took maya and her car seat away to ana land in bernal. miles and i ran up the hill and two classmates stopped to offer us rides. after drop-off i hitched a ride down the hill. grabbed my bags from the house. ran down the steps. snuck in a tasty two-shot rocket coffee from 24th street for moral support. the 33 miraculously appeared. a cute baby stuffed in some kind of snow suit on a 70 degree day made googly eyes at me. i got off at 16th and mission. wham! the 22 appeared. i got off in the heart of the fillmore, walked two blocks and made it to work on time to see my first little friend. after work i got the 22 to jackson park, enjoying my seat as the man next to me snoozed and then dropped a huge plastic to go box of chow mein noodles of the floor. scooped up miles just in time to hitch another ride to our house with a departing schoolmate. he was in heaven (silent, shy heaven) but heaven anyway to be in the backseat with a second grader he idolizes. we were dropped off at home just in time for maya's little daycare mate's mom to drop her off with her carseat. adventures of carless urban mom. i don't know how people do it. i depended on a lot of kindness and favors. and a freakishly good day on muni.

this morning, walking to school, maya was jumping over pieces of glass, cigarettes, pigeon doo and other lovely stuff. she said she was garbage girl and made a superhero pose. yikes!! she is into the tiny titans. and being strong, fast, and powerful.

rich is down the hall making crazy guitar sounds. kids in dreamland. school event tomorrow night, cousin dinner the next, friday is walk to school day, this weekend a new friend's bday party i can stumble home from with my kids, monday is our farm installation, soon my best friend will be here.

is anyone reading this? and why, may i ask?

i promise something interesting soon. there are a lot of interesting things going on, but i'm not ready to share them here yet. don't get too excited, but that will bring you back again, eh?

wierd fun

there are many things i could be doing. instead i am spending my tuesday night alone time...
watching american idol and obsessively checking the sfkfiles blog (about school admissions in san francisco) EVEN THOUGH MY KID IS ALREADY IN KINDERGARTEN!

any analysis of what is wrong with me is appreciated. well, you know, almost any analysis.

i guess both obsessions are loosely connected to justice and fate. those are interesting, right?

maya's quote: there was a plate of noodles on the floor near her at miles' party. i asked her who dropped the noodles. "my butt!" peals of hysterical laughter. ai yi yi.

xo

joint birthday party

well, we made it through another birthday party. my baby boy is six. years. old.

we planned this one with another family from miles' school. we don't know them that well but the kids had birthdays in the same 2 weeks, it would be greener to have one whole class party for both, and less parties for parents to bring their kids to.

this morning was rainy, gray skies and maya up at 5:18 whispering in my ear about "remember when the hawk picked up tinkerbell?". a blurry few hours of princess music and some punk rock dancing and nerf basketball. i took miles up 24th street to return 2 videos, him riding fast and smooth on his new scooter, me limping along in the drizzle. we stopped at st francis and shared a sausage patty and a hot chocolate under the awning, surrounded by hipsters discussing their friends, watching dogs and drunks and families go by.

at glen park there was a glimpse of sun but then rain fell. the kids came in, many, many kids, the whole kindergarten class plus edison, calvin, emily, natalie, and more i don't know. they hummed and buzzed around in the big rec center room we had rented, making goofy faces, creating paper masks, eating potato chips, playing floor hockey, running spastically making animal noises, pulling each other in a wagon. maya was in heaven with her big friend lucy to follow around. my mom, my cousin, my niece, julia, todd, rebecca, suling. miles not yet overwhelmed with this marking of the passage of time, sugary food or bags of gifts (the angst hit later, around bedtime. he is definitely my son). the other birthday parents had hired a magician and our kids grouped up and watched him smack himself in the head with flying objects, make booger jokes, and at one point balance my son on his shoulders while standing on a board which rolled on a barrel. maya's laugh hit the ceiling every dumb joke he made.

i moved around the room checking in on my kids, my family, all the moms and dads talking about their kids, school politics, and started to feel a wierd feeling. kind of a feeling of joy. was this relief, having pulled off another party in the midst of work chaos? hormones? hmm. as the kids gathered around the birthday cakes (grandma-bought flourescent green ninja turtle for miles, homeade with a top hot on white icing for the birthday girl),and then sang twice, first in english and then chinese, and as many little fingers darted impulsively towards the cake i was trying to cut fast with a sharp knife i felt oddly calm and good.

i still lament the breakup of my urban tribe, my wonderful time and friends who played music together and camped together and had kids together and went to burning man and on and on. we had HISTORY, and intimacy that comes with it, and love. and that goes a long way and always will. but tonight after the party, lying in bed with maya waiting for the kids to drift off it hit me that, random as it is, my son's school is a new tribe we have joined. no history yet, but a wierd intimacy because those funny little people we are all more than intimate with, and so in love with, will be together for years. this tribe has a future, and i am happy to create it with them.

it's time to dive in. splash.

happy birthday miles love you SO MUCH.

xo
xo
xo

power nap

sleep struggles. maya has been waking us all up at night, and then getting up for the day between 4 and 5. in the morning. this morning rich was so annoyed and talking about her slamming doors and not sleeping enough that she started bawling listening to him, "you said i wasn't a good girl." and nap time was ugly. i tried to lay down peacefully with my yawning earlybird, eager to close my eyes and drift for a bit but her legs kept kicking around, she kept talking, joking to herself, playfully patting my head, inching away as i lay there becoming so so so grumpy wanting a break, wanting a little nap myself. i started threats, made her take off her princess dress because princesses go right to sleep at nap time, even helped her stay still by holding her tight next to me on the bed. i will go to sleep, i am, i am she would protest, and then after a few minutes of clenched eyes the twitching and whispering and squirming resumed. this repeated for an hour.

i am embarrassed to say at one point i cried and let her know how miserable she was making me by keeping me up. she cried too, after staring into my eyes hard for a minute, and we bawled together exhausted. pathetic tired guilt-tripping mother.

this is bad power stuff. i know better. i don't like threats and guilt tactics and using my power over people. i only do this stuff when i am very very tired.

just thinking about positions of power and how we act in them. the benevolence and caring and patience can go away so quickly. this is part of what is wrong with humans, even the kindest of us. it has become better among some people, some groups, but how will it ever go away when we teach it to our kids in so many ways? however you look at parenting there is no doubt that parents use their power in ways that are not just for the child's good. or our own, really. and so it goes.

maya woke up and smiled at me with red cheeks and crazy hair and said "remember when you were mean to me?"

i did.

i'm sorry.

xo

little things

hmm. the last weeks have been a busy rainy blur. i'm sure i have had some profound and interesting thoughts but they seem to have fled my head. discovery museums, tapas birthday brunches, very sick students, party playhouses, rich's music projects, preschool interviews, rediscovering The Cars with my children, a trip to round table pizza, the culture and excitement just don't stop around here.

the rain has made everything brilliant green. there are pink blossoms on our peach tree and white on the plum. maya is sleeping with a smile on her face under my blue and white quilt in a room filled with the scent of lemon geraniums. i had the day off to take it slow. stop and chat with my owner friend of the 23rd st cafe and her girls after dropping off miles. stop to pick many small flowers on the way home. stop to investigate streams of water in the gutter and painters on scaffolds and say hi to lily the dry cleaner and our neighbor dog little chicken. play cinderella on the back deck in the sun. lie down with my baby girl and listen to the traffic and the fan. ginger flowers in a vase on the table, left over from valentine's day. a tiny plastic bag of dark chocolate chips for lunch.

there is a lot going on that is heavy and complicated, but these little sweet things are what i am concentrating on today.

soon i will wake maya and we will hike up that hill again. i promised miles we would walk the circle maze up on the green top of potrero hill open space. there are wild flowers blooming everywhere there, and little rocks to be pocketed.

xo

year of the ox

lately i have been unable to keep in touch with people. there are a lot of important folks on my to call list. i haven't spoken with my sister in months. and you all know i love to talk.

i love to listen too. but the way things are, communication with far away loved ones becomes very one-sided. blog posts. a little facebook here and there. emails with photos of the kids. it seems like there is so much communication going on, but, and this is painfully obvious i know, reading and writing are not talking. not close. i know email and blogs and facebook are creative modern ways to communicate in our brave new world but sometimes i wonder what these developments are replacing, and how, and why. and if it's okay with me.

here is a photo of miles preparing to march in the chinese new year parade. he did it, he made it, he is a trooper. he had a breakdown before they left the school, and pretty much wouldn't take his eyes off me during the 2-mile march, but he made it!! i was quite proud.

and now miles' teacher is leaving to have her baby. he is sad. and i don't know if it is coincidence, but all the death questions are resurfacing. questions about who will die first in our family. if my grandmother is dead. if his great great grandfather is dead. what it is like to be dead. i'm so bad with this. i'm 40 and haven't figured out much about death yet except i'm painfully afraid of it. i can't lie anymore, like when this topic was approached last year, and say that we just aren't going to die. so my kid is feeling a great loss already, that the teacher he loves is going away, and i guess to him it is something like death. loss is loss, right? we can try to picture her happy with her baby, and know she will visit, but loss is loss.

i have been shedding some tears with him.

but we all know it will all work out all right.

hey people, if you are out there, say hello. let me know how you are. miss you.

xoxoxo

blog from the past

my former bandmate, accordion and guitar player extraordinaire,tall handsome tatar maker of elvis heart pillows and owner of many a cake pan mold created a blog of our old band.

i love the past, and love to revisit it. you are welcome to stop by too.

yusakuta.blogspot.com

more sunny weather

this is maya being cinderella.

went to our friends tiny bungalow yesterday to eat pancakes and bacon and meet their 11/11 newborn. i got to hold her the whole time, her big big eyes staring at me from under her hat. her dad took a tiny space, about as big as our bathroom, and customized it into the sweetest little bedroom, with a window looking out into a bamboo and stone backyard. we look forward to her growing up in our neighborhood.

sunny sunny sunny, wierdly hot and sunny really. the kids collected flowers and sticks in mckinley park and then miles and i made a weapon out of sticks and silver duct tape to match the one donatello has (is that the right ninja turtle?) maya and i made a six-inch sword for her made with sticks and pink duct tape, it's definitely cute. we saw the sun set yesterday at taco bell beach. today we played at the skate park and then went to the bottom of the hill bar for a nordic heavy metal themed chili cook-off/super bowl party. i don't even know who won. there were a lot of old friends and the kids hung in there, eating meatballs, jello and red velvet cake, and running around on the stage behind the huge tv screen, the stage where their daddy has played his guitar.

my mom and dad are both out of the country, and i am feeling it. the unknowns seem piled high right now--miles' new teacher starting tomorrow as his fabulous one is going on maternity leave, my credential and maybe my job in danger as the legislature considers a cheaper "language credential". sick students in the hospital, crazy headlines about droughts and recessions and the next big earthquake and california budgets blaring at me from newspaper dispensers even when i try not to look. other friends waiting for adoptee babies to arrive. my dad down some tiny dirt roads and across bridges i have never heard of in costa rica. i'm feeling the need to hunker down with some people i love and feel grounded.

i guess i can try and do that with my little family here. sometimes a lot of people i love seem so spread out and far away. if you were all closer i think i would enjoy this endless sun and heat more instead of wondering if it is a sign of unknown things to come. we could have a picnic at the beach and watch the ocean slowly slowly rise. things feel peaceful at the ocean's edge.

hope for rain soon.

posted at 4:00 am. xoxo

boom

well, it is the eve of the due date for miles' paperwork to participate in the san francisco chinese new year's parade. yikes. he's been attending the weekly practices, where they march around the schoolyard for an hour holding hands, and after these practices miles is (extra) teary/sensitive/angry/tired, but insists he likes it. insists he wants to be in the parade next weekend. i don't think he has any clue what he is getting into. here is the scoop: drop your five-year-old off at the school at 2 in the afternoon, where they get to dress up in cool little costumes. then they ride on a bus to chinatown and get ready for the 2 mile parade in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of people. fireworks, dragons, stops and starts. rain? then they get back on a bus and we pick them up at 9 at the school. two hours past bedtime.

i've been in a lot of parades. dressed as a orange paper painted pumpkin skipping down main st newark on a sunny halloween weekend, scooping candy off the street. marching in lines down a slippery boardwalk playing flute badly on a slippery boardwalk in atlantic city for the miss america parade. overheating playing trumpet badly in disneyworld. so, will it be fun?? i am feeling like such a mama. if i could march too and check in with my little dude, to see if he is overwhelmed by it all, and ready to blow up, his little face screwing up. because he really is still a little guy. but i can't march, and there will be huge crowds so i won't be able to keep up with his group. and his beloved teacher won't be there because 2 miles is too long for a nine-month preggers lady. there will be other nice moms and teachers and kids. it will be intense and beautiful and loud.

should i sign the forms? or should i play loser mommy who forgot to turn them in, sorry, my fault, you can't be in the parade...

i wish it was a tiny main street parade, a soft, gentle little parade with good access to my baby, but that's not what we've got going on here, is it?

sigh.

hot tub!

this photo was taken moments before i left my children and, poor pitiful me, had to go to an, ahem, conference for the weekend.

so the kids got to get spoiled by daddy and i spent my weekend in calistoga, under a perfect blue sky with a few clouds and breeze...(in chronological order)

going to two fantastic wineries where my girlfriends and i sipped lots of expensive varietals from big glasses in front of statues and fireplaces. eating raw oysters and drinking irish coffee at the main street bar. soaking in the hot spring pools for three hours, floating on my back and looking at palm trees and clouds. fancy farm to table dinner with more wine.
more hot springs and very buzzed talk. sleep. eggs benedict with crispy little potatoes. lots of good coffee. slow drive home past vineyards, hawks, bitterns, hills, the bay. survived trip over bridge with no earthquake. kids overjoyed to see me and everyone is fine.

why did i wait almost 6 years to take 30 hours for myself?

***********

for those of you who want kid quotes miles said this morning:

"mommy, sometimes i like homeless people because they can't GET stuff so they MAKE stuff."
(makes pained smile i'm-trying-to-understand-how-things-work face) "I know it's not good for THEM."

i like that he feels admiration rather than pity.

my best friend is coming to visit soon! hurray! get ready.
xo

kids with runny noses and dragon

a post in the format of the classic children's book "fortunately"

fortunately we got out of the house on time this morning
unfortunately it started raining halfway up the hill
fortunately the 48 bus came promptly right along
unfortunately the beeatch driver did not honor my request to get on the bus and see if someone had change for a 10
fortunately a man in a tree care van pulled up and offered us a ride
unfortunately i used terrible judgment and hopped in with the kids
fortunately it turned out he was the husband/dad of the our nice neighbor mom and maya's little friend
unfortunately after a sweet hour back home making banana bread and playing princess and ninja turtles with maya we went outside to find someone had shattered the car window and ripped out the car stereo
fortunately my daughter is a champ who told her crying mother that it was okay, she would read me a story and that would make me feel better


this could go on and on. what is really bad right now is that one of the little students i know is very very sick, so send your positive wishes to him. makes you hug your own kids tighter, feel lucky, etc etc, but it is true. all these little ups and downs are just fine. i don't even have bad feelings toward the window smasher. i know nothing about him (but i guess it's a him).

last night i speed read the rest of last child in the woods by richard louv. not a work of hard science, and the ideas are mostly familar, but it packs a wallop. a parenting book spliced with worldchanging and ecotopia. it's all so true, about this generation of kids missing out on nature. makes me want to just start pickaxing all the roads around here, tearing down the fences of our little sectioned backyards, quitting my job and going into the nature/adventure park business in san francisco, or, and i haven't thought this for a while, fleeing the city. to where? some little green village somewhere? again, i want to live by a river. how can i get this river time to my children? can i help dig up mission creek?

but fortunately i like that we have kind neighbors
and fortunately we have many beautiful green spaces we can bring our kids to if we get off ourlazy you know whats
and fortunately a car window is not bank-breaking

here is a picture of a dragon miles' kinder class made. i know this is not a great post but it has not been a great week, so excuse me.

happy chinese new year

sugar and potty picture

today was a swirl of old disney princess music, pink icing, pink balloons, little girls in princess dresses, tiaras, magic wands, little stickers and buttons and glue, flowers, pretend glass slippers, pink punch ladled out into little fake crystal cups, strawberries, and for a clean up break, mary poppins.

and of course maya, the star of the day, three-years-old. i know every mom is a proud one, but i just gotta say it, this kid is so freakin adorable, i just want to tell her i love her all day long, she's even great when she is acting up, she's just awesome. so cute and sweet and funny and nice and her imagination blows me away. and part of me is sad she is growing up so fast, but that's the way it goes, right?

to balance out this sappy post i will attach a picture from the other child i adore. i know the spelling is not so hot, but c'mon, he's still five, and in mandarin immersion to boot. if you can't read the caption it says rock poop guitars.

love and goodnight.

options

it was a busy day, my mom visited. the weather perfect, warm, sunny, a little wind. we took the kids to a hilarious magic show at the randall museum, then hiked up to the top of the peak there. we drove across the city and met mike and family at the legion of honor, where we checked out some art, heard a guitarist playing princess dance music outside, climbed the king statue and soaked in the the ocean and trees.

quotes of day:
maya (very loudly, a few times, looking at big bronze sculptures in the museum): i want to touch his penis!
miles (eating a tasty dessert, after hearing my mom rave about the museum lunch): it's not about the art, it's all about the food.

when we were at the magic show we bumped into an old acquaintance i met through a kid channel a few years ago. i asked how things were going with her child and was told things were finally going better, thanks to me. i had been concerned about this child after first meeting her, and had struggled with the decision to push this child's diagnosis and treatment forward by stepping in, or to let the parents and teachers figure things out on their own time. i decided to be brave and say what i thought, that this child was not just having behavior problems, or odd, moody, etc etc. but was on the autism spectrum. and he is. it is hard to combine your professional and personal lives, and risk alienating people. but it is a good thing to get this diagnosis when people think you are just behaving badly all the time.

sometimes i feel like my work is kind of worthless. but this made me feel good, that i have acquired some knowledge that can actually impact a family, can make things move in the right direction for them. not sure how to relate this topic to "should we flee the city". but maybe part of staying here is that i shouldn't stagnate and stop enjoying my job, but dig deep and see what it is i do love about it, and then take advantage of these big city resources and move in that direction. specialize. grad school? private practice? be a part-time consultant and spend the rest of the time doing greening projects, writing a book, who knows??

there are a lot of options in this big city full of beautiful children.

counting

maya is really into counting lately. counting not quite accurately, but for a long time. after 29 comes a mumbled 21 again, i think. sometimes she tries it in mandarin to be like her brother.
yesterday walking down 23rd street she wanted to "count the garbage" in each tree pit. she counted a lot of garbage.

all this garbage seems to represent something. draw your own conclusions, i don't want to rant like some middle-aged conservative about the people who just don't care, raised wrong, people not connected to their community, etc. it is deeper and sadder than that, really. a neighborhood full of people tossing their trash on the ground, and a little girl counting it on a foggy morning.

here is maya flying in the pink sky and channeling a mermaid at gg park.

i have insomnia again lately.

buh bye

listy post

i just wrote a lot and deleted it. what it said was---i don't want to work the job i have and raise little kids at the same time.

anyway, tomorrow things start up again, just after we finally found a little groove around here. modern life, sigh. yesterday i got inspired and finally made use of the aquarium i found on the street 6 months ago. the kids and i went to the garden store and paxton gate, where we saw many amazing things. stuffed (taxidermied??) creatures--stoat, raccoon, antelope, lion, mice in crazy costumes, bat and butterfly bodies, strange rocks and crystals (from outer space says miles authoritatively), raccoon and fox claws, orchids, electroplated devil's claws, bugs in amber, porcupine quills, old nature books, walking sticks, special knives, beach glass, the list goes on and on. somehow this place is comforting, not creepy, although i can't put maya down for a second without her fingers latching onto a delicate bird skeleton, a fragile glass bell, a 50$ orchid (pink flowers). at home we layer the rocks, charcoal, dirt, and then make a little tiny world for our new and old plants. miles completes the scene with plastic wolf and baby rhino which i can tolerate. good luck little plants. we will try to take care of you. maya please put down the spray bottle.

today we all went to the beach and built a giant sandcastle kingdom, complete with sandy wet roses from the tideline, stick bridges, a rock that said love which i found and miles told rich he had found but then admitted the truth, a fort for the bad guy (tigger), and rocks for cars to bring bad guys and good guys back and forth from various locations. of course it ended in someone crying with a face full of sand but for a while it was just me lying on a blanket with my hat pulled down low, feeling the sun and sand, listening to far away voices and waves and watching tiny clouds drift over the marin headlands.

and i used one of my xmas gift certificates tonight, at christopher's books. lately i am overwhelmed by bookstores and don't know what to go for. i found myself in the psychology section for a long time, holding books with titles like "happiness" and knowing i wouldn't buy. i ended up with the road (cormac mcarthy), the lorax (dr you know who), a small journal to carry around and write fascinating insights in, a book of short stories by lorrie moore, and last child in the woods.

time to go read now. nighty night.
xo

new year's day

on the 30th the kids and i rode bart to albany to visit laura lee and gang. we whooshed under the bay with only a little nervousness, and then travelled elevated rails over the soundless vistas of west oakland backyards, poverty looking pretty from up above. we ended up sleeping over at her house, completely exhausted by our kids who were pretty much holding back nothing, their aggressions, needs, every desire. at one point i was almost jogging through safeway searching for maraschino cherries to top the ice cream one child had been promised in return for cooperation, thinking, this can't be right, we must be out of our minds. i got my parenting book in the mail, how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk.

on the return trip new year's eve day we walked out of the bart station and encountered the guy who plays johnny cash. big, tall, young, black leather jacket covered with semi-punk stickers, sunglasses of course, the kids gave him fifty cents each and wanted to stay and listen. his voice and guitar almost exactly like johnny cash. he asked for requests and maya said twinkle twinkle, which he tried and failed johnny cash style. he then played a song about a young skate pro and a princess which made everyone pretty happy. miles skateboarded the 10 blocks down 24th street.

and i ended up buying a ticket online to see the butthole surfers for new year's eve, rich's suggestion. of course miles cried when i left. i walked over to shannon's slowly, stopping for wonton soup at punjab where a woman waiting for take out told me her daughter's school woes and ended up telling me it was great to meet you as i filled her in about some good schools she probably wouldn't like anyway. she had chosen her daughter's school beccause it was clean and had a security camera. a cold night, christmas lights still on, disco blaring from one decorated window. ended up taking the bus and having a great time with a bunch of friends at the fillmore.

of course i felt a little ill at seven a.m., and told miles so. he came back to my bed with a plate containing a red apple with the sticker, a piece of bread with a tiny smudge of butter,and a big glass of water. i got healthy things for you, he said, because you said you were ill. i'm trying to care about you.

aww. happy new year.

p.s. the picture is a miles and jamie collaboration. i drew the tree trunk in foreground, tree with white leaves, red mushroom, fern, words "deer crossing", and the last bit of road going up the mountain. maya is the brave girl in the orange dress ascending the stairs to the crazy concrete slide in golden gate park.

gimme a break

ex band members, you will hear the title of this post in a loud and screechy cover song version of the hit show theme song.

so, here i am on my break but it just doesn't feel like a break. and i think i need one. i am planning a mom's night away (hot tub? expensive nice dinner? shopping? some happy juice?), but before i send the email invite to my buddies i hear my son's voice cracking into a sob as he hears the news that,alas, he will have to spend one night without me, spending time with daddy who will spoil him with hours of screen time and bowls of ice cream. this is why i really need a break--these kids need me awfully bad. miles had a realization tonight--"daddy can read me a story, he's the same as you," but it didn't last long. i guess i should be honored to be so loved, but honestly IT IS DRIVING ME NUTS.

so, this is my break from work. we are letting the kids watch lots and lots of high quality animation, especially looney toons and maya's favorite, mr. magoo's christmas special. lots of sugar cookies and candy from the stash kim and kimm gave us. rich is predictably sick with a bad cold on his days off. i browse the cultural offerings in the morning, but it is daunting trying to find something that makes everyone happy. miles would like to check out the museum of the african diaspora, but maya isn't there yet. maya would like to see some animals at the zoo but miles only wants to ice skate there and my back hurts. so, we can play some playdough for 5 minutes, let the kids wrestle. watch the kids fight about something, visit with some other kids and their parents who also seem to need breaks, and then it is time for some more looney toons.

anyway, more rambling. after everyone was asleep tonight i took a steaming hot bath with some tired old ass soak (a gift from my california parents), and read a book, drank some wine and ate a piece of apple pie while bathing. now there's a break.

i'm not complaining, exactly. today was nice. sunny and clear and cool. peter and lisa came over to visit with baby kevin. we ate whole grain pancakes and peter let miles and maya wrestle him and lisa and i chit-chatted. we went to the park and rich and peter and miles played net-less tennis and miles skateboarded and julia joined us with her little boys. back to the house for chicken soup and more wrestling and fairyland play, and then maya took her nap while miles and rich watched daffy and bugs and porky pig. i took care of sheila's cat. took miles for some grocery shopping and then back home for smoothies and turkey burgers, 5 readings of pop up cinderella, some fighting about mommy reading stories, and then the tired old ass soak with pie.

time to start planning the getaway!! i can do it, i will, i will. kids, you will survive without me for one night and i promise i will miss you, and return.

gifts

well dear readers it has been a while. so, since it is so vitally important that the minutiae of my life be chronicled, here is a list.

1. i saw a former co-worker who has been gravely ill with cancer for years. she showed up at a social gathering looking radiant and beautiful. i thought i would never see her again. she is better now. it was a gift.

2.miles had a peace assembly at his school on the last day before the break. kids singing and dancing and banging drums, very cute. i saw a commotion outside and slipped out the back door while my mom watched maya. two big kids were fighting, bigger than the kids at miles' school. another dad came out and handed me his baby. he grabbed the bigger kid and said "c'mere player"in a tough voice i had only heard on tv. he took the kid out of the playground and i handed him his little boy back. just a fight, i guess. some older siblings? i dunno. i dunno. i dunno. it really bothered me. the teachers who saw the fight looked so sad. of course i imagined a worse fight, miles being there. of course it scared me, my baby maybe not being safe.

3. i have been using some parenting techniques that make me seriously doubt my abilities--either the kids are becoming more challenging or i am in dire need of a break. just now i went on amazon and ordered siblings without rivalry, 1-2-3 magic, and how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. we will see

3.we had a christmas eve party last night. a wild band of 4 to 6-year-old boys quickly formed, running wild, flashing each other, chasing tough tinkerbell and belle in their costumes. at one point my son was lying under 4 kids all kissing him. when they let him free i could see trouble coming and when one of his friends approached him he shoved the friend full force back against the dresser. awful. but the rest of the party was good with new and old friends (30 plus), babies, live music, food, creamy drinks. a present of a wonderful family photo our friend took days before. ellie playing small world stuff with maya for hours. rye dancing to ccr.

4. my brother made me a dvd out of 29 old super 8 films my dad made, from around 68-74. he added music. my mom looking so young and beautiful, my dad so young and cool. on the beach, fishing off a rock at my grandparents in massachusetts. my grandparents sitting and watching the opening of christmas gifts, my grandma holding hands with a group of little girls in dresses playing games in our backyard. my tiny self, a baby coming home from the hospital, riding a pony my mom guides, opening bunny slippers, my tutu, beaming, beautiful. baby mike with his big cheeks and eyes, ripping paper off a shiny metal firetruck, full of baby joy.

5. and today christmas with the kids. the pile of gifts and the hopes the gifts will make them happy. they don't of course. by mid-day maya was saying "i want something else" and harrumphing and crossing her arms to show her disgust when the answer was no. miles made it through without a huge meltdown. the wind blew cold and my mom and david came with dungeness crabs. we ate it with julia's leftover pumpkin soup and drank the larkmead wine. all the expectations, coming down through the years, one generation to the next. it's condensed and heightened this time of year. and the changes, the family i had at birth breaking and stretching and changing. watching my kids feel what i felt as a kid. watching films of us as innocents. and feeling like a little kid as i open my gifts now and watch people open mine. talking to my dad on the phone far away, hoping he likes the recording of us singing christmas songs.

6. and grandma rae called me today from staten island. my poppop ben's wife, sick and alone and very old in her apartment. she is jewish, and i don't think her call was connected to christmas. miles answered the phone and then passed it to rich, and by the time i spoke to rae she was a little confused about who was who. she told me my mom had been sending her (paper version) of this blog, and had some very kind things to say about what i wrote, how i would feel differently years from now reading what i had written, and how in writing i could be more sensitive than in person. she talked a little about letters she had written with her husband, reading them later in life. i think she sensed the need of two little people inside for mommy to help--assemble, play, referee, because she got off the phone quickly.

she made me feel a little confused, too. but good.
here's to peace, as much as we can get and give.

what maya told me

i'll try to get this straight: when it tomorrow i be the mommy and you be the baby. and i wear your clothes. and next you be a big girl. (will you drive my car?) tomorrow i drive your car. (will you take care of me?) yes. i think that a great idea. tomorrow, not yet.

this is maya in her small world (as the british say), and miles at the skate park.

living with kids sometimes seems all about the moment but when i step back a lot of what goes on in our lives seems about the past or the future.

definitely not getting enough sleep lately.
xo

wotta weekend

julia came over friday with her little boys. as they were trashing our house and eating frozen pizza rich offered to put all four kids to bed if we wanted to go out for a while. ummm....yes. bye! miles had a little meltdown about not wanting to let me go but we worked it out and then julia and i were out on the town. we walked up 24th st sipping some espresso from sugarlump and checked in to virginia howell, peeked in to the studio de la raza. we made it to argus where shannon was celebrating her birthday and then somehow were drinking lots of horribly named drinks (mostly jon benet ramseys--vanilla stoli, ginger ale,crushed cherry). at first i wondered what we were going to talk about and imagined an early night but soon the talk was flowing with our friends who showed up, ethical treatment of pets, tips on cool world music artists, the lowdown on relationships, bad jokes. when we returned many hours later edison and miles were in the top bunk and maya, calvin, and rich in the bottom. in the morning i was sick as a dog while the four kids puttered around playing hot wheels and eating cereal. success!

the rest of the weekend was the usual bday parties. it's out of control. but the balance felt a little better. mommy got a night out. it was kind of fun to be the mom with a hangover at douglas playground as the kids climbed steep rocks, maya planted the orchid party favors in the sand, and the air was clean and fresh and green, sunny. we drove home through the mission and saw some aztec indian dancers on 24th street. today another party, at the exploratorium, and then tonight we recorded the kids singing some christmas songs while they were captive in the bathtub. now it is sunday night and i have a lot of work to do. booo.

does anyone really care about this? probably not. guess i got the gene from my mom's side, where my great-grandfather chronicled every day in his life, the weather, the events. it's okay to be writing this boring stuff sometimes because what i am really doing, in this wierd world where sometimes facebook is the only communication i have with a friend, is saying hello to you.

hello. wish you were here telling me about your weekend. or better yet you had shared it with me.

human stimuli

i try not to worry about my son when i pick him up each day from his afterschool program and he is just watching the other kids. it seems impossible that he doesn't want to be one of the busy humming little people, digging sand, chasing, moving plastic furniture around, pretending to set up stores and jails and castles. he likes them, he says, he just doesn't want to play with them. it has been 4 months and i guess this is something i should accept for now. he doesn't want to join a soccer team and be one of a crowd of ball-kickers on a field, doesn't want to join the group of kids at school reading "books for breakfast."

no, my kid is hopelessly chatty and social at home, demanding our attention every moment, but in the big world he is, for now, a careful observer, doing his own thing on the monkey bars, watching, watching. there are so many reasons why this might be, but if i can stop worrying then it is very cool. to be a person who loves people, but who can be happy just watching them. a writer, maybe a scientist? and it seems like the city is a good place to be this way, a place where there are thousands of amazing people everywhere we look. the yelling man around the corner, the skateboarders, little lily in her shop, the big kids around him riding bikes in the street, people speaking chinese, french, spanish, the musicians we know playing songs they wrote, our friends the bartenders and van drivers, the salsa musicians in union square, the glass blower at the gallery, the people playing basketball and tennis at the park, the kids with two mommies, the big kids playing kickball. even the homeless folks surviving on the street. kids who are tiny yet walk themselves to school. lots to see. lots of time to choose who to join up with. no hurry.
no hurry at all.

this one goes out to the ancient tribe of yusakuta

we slogged through the last week or so of fevers, stomach flus, and missed turkey opportunities. nothing like a 104 fever to make you appreciate your child. now all seem to be well, although i sense bugs still lurking about our home.

i joined facebook and it has been whipping me around through a swamp of thoughts and emotions. first there is the revisiting of many out-of-sight out-of -mind relationships, ith all the accompanying memories and what-ifs. but more disturbing i think is that every time i see the "what are you doing right now?" i am doing nothing of interest, have just completed nothing of interest, and am about to do nothing of interest. i am playing with the kids. i have just returned with the kids. the kids and i are off to another birthday party. all these OTHER people seem to be doing fascinating things, like creating thanksgiving walls or rendering lard, or being excited about sports teams or, umm, just stuff i don't do.

rich's band played on wednesday night and i really really wanted to go but couldn't scrape upp a babysitter. it was probably a good thing because the stomach bug bit me hard at about 5 a.m. but at around 11, when the kids were asleep, and i knew many of my friends were having drinks at the eagle, making jokes and sitting elbow to elbow at the bar, listening to some cool opening band, i felt pretty crappy. not only do i not play music or create anything fun on my own anymore, i don't even go see others do this. it was a low enough moment, feeling true very immature jealousy, that made me realize i absolutely positively need a creative project.

so i can seem cool on facebook. so i can not be envious of rich. so my kids will be able to see that moms don't just stay home and take care of kids.
because i miss it.

cute, eh?

here is a picture miles drew when he had a 104 fever last night. he is feeling better now, thank you. i know i am his mom, but that is pretty darn cute, isn't it? fish with pink fins and big lips? symmetrical rainbow hills topped by happy crabs?

maya is a princess painting with her fingers in princess world. i have to say i have been getting in touch with my inner pink princess lately, maya's influence is powerful, and i am noticing pink and cute everywhere. i am trying hard to ensure she doesn't buy the disney princess is hurt by unattractive jealous older woman, falls asleep, and is rescued by prince with his kiss story as the only story out there. today she made her princess, riding a pink unicorn, attack a violent sting ray, so i think she will be abrave princess,not a wimpy one.

anyway, reality here is that everyone is sick with what looks like the flu. i am okay...for now. we have hunkered down all day while i tried not to look out the window at the beautiful sunny day. we have had some rough city days with the stuff on the sidewalk left by homeless people and my conflicted feelings as i called the police twice to ask sleeping people to move. i don't want my princess tripping and falling on any scary garbage, but at least one of these homeless campers is a friendly and nice guy who always has a big smile for the kids, and who i hear singing to himself in a sweet voice sometimes early in the morning. however, last night was nice. the waitress at punjab who has known miles since babyhood, and who always said he was a handsome boy, was so excited about his writing 1-10 in chinese characters that she kissed him a bunch and told him she loved him. we also stopped at virginia howell across the street and little one-year-old miles and big miles played for a while in the store. my apologies if little miles caught the bug that gave miles a crazy fever an hour later.

anyway, sickness makes things a little wierd, so this post is especially rambly. i have also joined facebook and have been swept back, back, back into the past. faces from high schoola nd even before. are we still the same people now that we were then? are relationships carried through two line emails for over thousands of miles after 20 years so qualitatively different from face to face friendships that they are something altogether different? anyone from long ago reading this...come visit. we will make you something good to eat and drink some wine and talk about the past, if the loud kids will let us.

3 parties one day

today was a tough day. lots of crying and misery and neighbors all around to hear it. hopefully we will all get some restorative sleep.

maybe today was somehow related to yesterday...three birthday parties in one day--with no tears or tantrums at all. we spent the morning at the skate park celebrating jonah's 6th. friends and friendly friends of friends, lots of talk about work and kids and all the little dudes skating around on the sidewalk--and then abandoning this work to play pirates. and eat cake. then miles and i headed to the new world of his school buddy's high-density condo complex downtown. i was kind of amazed at the indoor courtyard and the mixed use neighborhood. it would be so easy here--a gym, a food store, a library, a bus, all on the block. and no poor elderly man walking around in his hospital shirt, pants down around his knees, wearing NO UNDERWEAR (we saw this guy yesterday between birthday soirees and he made such a big impact on miles that he had a dream about it). the kids i picture miles being shy around were within minutes speaking googoo with him, wrestling, chasing in circles, and one little girl was even riding on his back. then it was off to the quiet peace of brisbane, where most of the homes are festooned with giant lighted pentagrams and we celebrated the second bday of calvin, who may be the number one slugger in the tiny blonde baby league. the kids tried to catch the neighbor's cat with various evil traps until it was too dark

so, maybe the kids with their cake hangovers weren't the only ones miserable today. too much stimulus for me. our neighborhood, with some cool folks but some yucchy piles of stuff and nudity too, and the ever-present knowledge that more good friends will be fleeing this city for a home of their own to own soon? downtown clean and glassy and removed from the dirt on our ground? or a little town close by, where no one locks the door and all was quiet as we drove home at 7:00? and all the couples--watching them manage being couples, and all the parents-- watching them manage their kids, and all the kids growing up with supersonic speed and my two babies navigating it all as best they can.

sometimes i really don't feel wise enough to help them grow up.

too many options, too much sugar. a preview of the holiday season. time to focus on where we are, who our family is, and of course christmas presents. can we make them this year? can we not fly into the tornado of greed and letdowns? the kids have been studying toy catalogues and even maya is starting to say what she wants "for halloween"

will we help out at a shelter somehow with our kid?

again there is no focus with this post and i am sorry, but somehow all these thoughts will compost someday, and become something fresh and new.

other people's projects

here are a few images of other people's projects. the first is miles tromping through the drizzle at cayuga park.
i included a link to a little local video someone made of the park because it fits in with the post topic, but really, you have to go there! there are hundreds of cool wood sculptures but also, for the kids, little trails and tree forts to climb on and in. high above on a rail swooshes the bart train. ONE person, demetrio braceros has made this little park his life's work (or maybe he has other work too, i don't know, but just these carvings alone look like they must have taken, in miles estimation, sixty one thousand years.

also are photos of children made from broken glass we saw at galleria de la raza on day of the dead night, also more amazing in real life. and a picture miles made to put on the altar for his teacher who mysteriously died last year.

right now i (don't worry mom, i won't) really want to quit my job and sink myself into a huge PROJECT. i've been dreaming about playing music again, writing a book (about ferns, dreams are wierd), even transforming our backyard. right now this little blog is about all the project time i get, and i'm only getting that because the kids are staring at the boobtube down the hall. maybe all the election elation about change has sunk into me, i want a change for me, and to work for some big changes for others. i love my students at work, but doing what i do through the frustrating restraints created by the huge school district administration is making me want to get out and make some of my own big changes in the world, get into my own big and little projects.

did that make any sense? not much sleep last night.

love ya

here's what i have been listening to on repeat for 2 hours solid:
sleep, sleep, sleep sleepyhead
sleep, sleep, snuggle in your bed
i will keep you safe and warm,
so sleep, sleep, sleep sleepyhead
from the music together summer songs cd. pretty classical guitar and a woman singing in a sweet high voice. maya has been napping for more than 2 hours, and i have spent this time in my underwater nest, rain falling, listening to this peaceful music, making lentil soup, talking to my dad on the phone. we needed this rain, the geranium out on the deck has a bright red bloom now. rich was away all weekend partying and playing music in seattle while the kids and i did trick-or-treating, birthday parties, and the day of the dead procession. a highlight of the weekend was pretending to be a monster in twlilight at the water park, sitting on the darkening ground as miles and maya ran just past me, shrieking with laughter, and i reached out to grab them. over and over and over until their cheeks glowed red under the streetlight. in studio 24 there were amazing life-size sculptures of children made out of tiny frito-size pieces of sharp broken glass. miles made a picture for his teacher who passed away last year to put on an altar at garfield park. i just found out my sister and family are moving to delaware.

i have this nagging feeling lately that time is going by too quickly, and that there is too much of my life in the past. i think this feeling wouldn't be so bad if so many people i've loved in the past weren't so far away. then they would seem like the present, not the past or even a visit in the future. same old song.

maybe just some evolutionay thing. the days are getting shorter and darker and i just want to hunker down and listen to sleepy music with my kids, eat homeade soup and watch the raindrops hit the glass.

photos are at the boo at the zoo, and then the parade at starr king. maya was very brave and joined the group of big fairies and princesses. miles was wolverine.

xo

c'mon!

there was a long string of weddings for a while there. sorry of i missed anyone's wedding gift, it really did become hard to keep track! then things slowed down for a while.

today two of my favorite people i have met since moving out here got married. they are a solid enough couple that they rebuilt their entire house together, while living in it, with many pets. amazing. and now they are legally wed. maya and miles and i went across town for a little reception to congratulate them (one of us was mainly focused on the cake).

some $&^$%)( folks want to ban marriages between two people of the same sex. oh no, the institution of marriage is threatened! hasn't the institution of marriage had multiple flaws since the beginning of time? why shouldn't people who love people of their own sex have the same civil rights as others? even the same rights as other not so nice and smart and cool people who think they know better than anyone else how we should all live our lives.

i'm sure i am missing something and hope my stepdad never reads this as he will roll his eyes at my simplistic thinking. but there is just no argument here, people!!!!!! let anyone who is old enough to make their own choices marry whoever they want!!!!!

yay kim and kimm.

we love you,
all of us over here even the ones who didn't make it out to your sweet little reception tonight. i hope you drank a lot of tequila for me and rich.

music in the hood

this morning we went up potrero hill to the annual fair. we started with a pancake breakfast at the neighborhood house. i kept thinking how much my dad would love this as we ate homeade pancakes and eggs while an incredible jazz band of what looked like 75 or more year old musicians (stand up bass, trombone, drums, keyboard, trumpet, sax, woman singer in big floppy hat) played jazz. all was free, with jumpy castles, sugar skulls to decorate, pumpkins to paint, an obstacle course to run wild on, cookies to top with icing and sprinkles.

later we walked, pushed/sat in the stroller or rode a batman bike through the mission to see some friends play in a new version of an old band at the homestead. they are called the mummyshots, and awesome. maya drank a shirley temple and miles cavorted on the sidewalk outside with edison and emily while his dad watched him and drank PBR. i heard someone say that having kids in the bar made it seem more wholesome. we even got blessed by a visit from the tamale lady herself.

right now there is a crazy LOUD noisecore (i'm guessing at this description) band playing in a house party nearby, unless someone is blasting a concert album i've never heard. feedback and bass and angry unintelligible screamed/shouted lyrics and drunken cries of joy and all are floating into my window. i can imagine the crowd and keg and sweaty smells and moshing in a little space because i've been there before.

rock on, my neighborhood!

love, me

big buddy

miles told me excitedly today that he had a new friend. his class is teamed up with a 3rd grade class and they met for the first time today and drew pictures of each other. i think this made miles happier than any school activity so far. he recreated the picture of his buddy, and then drew about 250 happy hearts to show how he felt. procratinating bedtime, sure (new and baaaaad trend around here), but so sweet.

"is this your favorite picture i ever drew?"

"i like it because my favorite art is art that shows how you feel."

sorry if this post is nonsensical and/or agrammatical, i am on vicodin for my painful mouth.

at least some folks still have their sense of humor

part of halloween decoration on glen park home.

there was a george bush bat also, but i didn't get the photo.

trick or treat!

i don't wanna work

I am a terrible procrastinator. i have tons of work to do--work there is no time to do anymore while i am at work, and even though the kids have gone to bed beautifully early (7:40, haven't had one of those in a while), i just don't want to do work work at home.

instead i will mention the inspiring conference i attended part of this weekend, coordinated by the green schoolyard alliance. on friday night i took the bus to gough and geary and met many people whose mission in life is kids and nature, and heard a talk by richard louv, who wrote last child in the woods. i won't say he is an amazing speaker, but by the end of the talk my mind was zinging with ideas and inspiration. he talked about how there are different rings when it comes to giving kids more time in nature (where they really need to be). the first ring is programs, the second the volunteers and low-paid workers who run the programs. the third ring was more interesting, more about a big cultural change, and that is what would really make a difference. things really seem primed for this cultural change--mass awareness of environmental problems, consumer economy bombing out, and kids who need to feel that the future is not a big hopeless mess. so i left and dragged rebecca walking with me all the way down to the mission and we had an eco-warrior talk and i was definitely feeling fired up!

we met an old friend nat visiting with his new phD homeade autumnberry chocolate, and a big plastic boot on his leg, and sylvia who i last saw playing walkie-talkie games at burning man and who now has her MFT. my friend at zeitgeist gave me a double jameson and coke for free and then we went to delirium where my other old old friend was djing. i felt so popular, how delightful.

yesterday miles and i walked the alien and brand-new but actually beautiful new neighborhood of mission bay, high-density condos along the channel full of funky old houseboats. we went to a benefit for friends of the urban forest and listened to the sippy cups rock out some covers including a kid version of i wanna be sedated, handled some giant bugs, snakes, lizards, played some old-fashioned games like tug-of-war and, inevitably, miles got his face painted.

enough of this.

did i mention i went to the dentist for the first time in 13 years? i have to get two root canals.

buh bye

anxiety, greening

yesterday my son's teacher mentioned that he seemed anxious, which is what i have been noting for a while, and which makes me very sad. so, we will try harder to make him feel secure and confident. time to amp up the calm and happiness around here, and keep adult concerns hidden away from little people.

walking down the very steep hill from miles' school today we heard a crazy loud noise. it was two middle schoolers zooming down the middle of 23rd street sitting down on skateboards. and then one more came by, i dunno, maybe at 40 mph? is that possible? really fast, with huge serious smiles on theire faces and i had to laugh out loud in amazement. they were flying. sledding. rocketing.

this morning i and 2 others from the starr king greening committee put up a display of photos from other schools around the city showing various ways to green the schoolyard. composting, butterfly gardens, synthetic grass, vegetables, dry creek beds, goldfish ponds, outdoor classrooms. we pasted up a background of green and blue construction paper while maya roamed the school cafeteria finding books and spilling milk, and eventually drawing what looked exactly like a fish skeleton on the asphalt with chalk. we put a sign up saying "schoolyard greening, what do YOU want to see?" along with a flyer for a community meeting next week. i found myself feeling inordinately proud of this little effort. i will be a small part of moving things forward towards health, fun, nature, sustainability for this group of kids and it is a good feeling.

i keep reminding myself that miles was shy when he started preschool. they said he was a quiet observer there, as is right now at school and at his after school program. i see so many kids playing happy and relaxed and i want him to feel that way too. he was the wacky loud and happy king of preschool by june of last year. but it might not be so easy. his daddy was a very shy kid. my dad says he was too. and i remember that excruciating feeling of switching schools and wondering what everyone was thinking about me, the new girl. yuchhhh.

maybe the green schoolyard will help a little. and time, of course.

bye

potrero del sol again

sorry dear readers, i mean mom, shannon, and cassie, for my absence

there is plenty to write about but i have been thinking instead. lying at night, awake, awake, thinking of huge amounts of stressful b.s. at work (tied to school budget problems, mostly) and fantasizing heavily about quitting. still awake, visions of economic and ecological collapse, simultaneous solutions (growing plants to eat in our yard) and doom (someone stealing the plants from the yard, kids starving). still awake, wandering to thoughts of rearranging our furniture to make our nest better so that home will be a happier place (think what you will of this one).

so anyway, i will write what i tend to write about on this blog, another day at the park.

potrero del sol has become our second backyard, 2,3,4,5 times a week i find myself there. today we met cousin natalie and she and maya rolled down the hills, picked and blew dandelion wishes, ran shrieking from miles on his batman bike, and attempted to climb the climbing tree. another perfect sunny day. the two tiny puppies from down the street show up and the kids play with them. someone lets miles borrow his skateboard for a long time and he rides it down a steep hill sitting down, over and over. we hear the wheels of the skateboards constantly now, going by the house, down the sidewalks, bump bump, bump bump, over the cracks. when it is time to leave we pause near the exit. maya, exhausted says my want to listen to the drums, just a tiny bit. they are playing congas, three men sitting down, and one playing another percussion instrument, i don't think i've ever known its name, like a gourd you scratch with a stick. my smell fire says maya. and it is a bbq near the drummers, full of charcoal black chicken. the man with the bbq asks us if we want some, and although my first thought is no thanks i think of how much my little boy loves dark meat, and bbq, and say yes. the man gives us a drumstick on a paper plate, sizzling, but then makes several more trips, another leg for maya, a napkin, two more pieces for me and rich, 2 corn tortillas.

maybe someday when we have a bbq we can offer him some chicken says miles.

and this is good and important, right? this is not an endless meaningless cataloguing of what my kids do and say at the park, right? because they are the future, and we are here in a city, and cities are the future, and won't it be good if we could all share backyards in that future? and listen to drums on the wind? and eat food from a stranger and hope to see him again to pay back the favor? so for all the scary stuff happening in the world right now, all these fine little moments in our lives are working to negate some of that scary bad future. not ignoring it. not really. not hiding or running.

i don't know if any of that makes sense. the benadryl is really kicking in.

gotta go lie down and think some more.
miss you dear readers. wish you could come to our lovely park and we could feed you some chicken and brazilian drumming. we could come up with a plan to make things even better. make our own music in the park.

nautilus

here is miles' version of the chambered nautilus we saw today at the new california academy of arts and sciences. today felt kind of cosmic. maybe that word is in my head as miles has a new buddy named cosmo. but we walk up a huge hill in the sunny morning, listen to bootsy collins on a playground looking over huge dilapidated projects full of poor people, beyond them the bay, the shoreline jagged with docks and warehouses and pointy rusting metal boats. maya and i stop at the cafe on the hill so she can play with the owner's daughter and i can talk neighborhood politics with the owners. we keep walking back down and meet up with our old neighbor molly. at the park i exchange numbers with a mom i meet. skaters whiz around us, young, old, fat, thin, speedy looking, healthy looking, staying on or falling off. maya conquers the hanging net and makes a little boy friend.

and after school i take the kids to this fabulous new museum in golden gate park , full of light and glass and water and plants with fish, alligators, seahorses, penguins, turtles. huge photos and paintings show the earth and inhabitants for the last 4 billion years. whale bones float overhead. sharks and skates bicker for shrimp and squid a museum worker tosses them. i know that many of these exhibits touch on the crisis going on in the earth's environment but we don't read them today.

on the way home miles is asking about how long creatures live, and i lie again and tell him that i won't die before him, although at this point i think he suspects i am lying. the kids spend a whole peaceful 30 minutes drawing together in the late afternoon light on the back deck. we spot a family of mourning doves. before bed i start sorting through a box of old journals and memories my parents have been storing and find a book i wrote and a teacher typed in first grade. not so different from this blog. there is a story titled the country in which i declare i like country things better than city things.

buenos noches

dreams and rock spirals

i have been having a lot of dreams about partying. wild parties with all kinds of people, even a dream starring many old friends and new ones--including a young teen mom with a baby with craniofacial anomalies and an actor from hill street blues--having a big party in my parent's house and OOPS--drinking all their fine sonoma county wine. (sorry mom). what do these dreams mean? i miss my wild side? i need to write about my past? my subconscious is in need of a good professional overhaul?

i sure don't know.

mondays and fridays i walk miles up the big hill to school, pushing maya up a, what, 90 degree slant in the stroller. lately we have been joined by one or more of miles' schoolmates on the way, which is cool. we walk over the river of cars on the freeway. past the ambulances whoop whooping to the hospital and cars with kids going to starr king honk at us sometimes. at the top of the hill across from the school is a big open space with a panoramic view of the city and little criscrossing paths to run on. one day we saw a black and white cat stalking a group of innocent pigeons. another day miles and a friend found broken pieces of a thick white plate he gave to me to take home for a mosaic. if i see broken glass (and i do) i pick it up and throw it away.

yesterday we found this, the spiral rock maze, otherwise known as a labyrinth. it was unexpected and beautiful and here are my kids running around it finding the center.

i tried it too.

jimi rocks the school yard

school update, mostly for grandparents:

well, the kids are in new schools and so am i. i still feel queasy inside that we have out our son in a school program where 90% of the instruction is in mandarin, but (repeat to self many times) i think it is going to be okay. he is going. no tears yet, just a few evening meltdowns. looking isolated in the after school program, but he looked like that at the start of pre-school, too. miles can count in mandarin now!! and he did his first homework packet quickly at the kitchen table, while maya painted her hokey fisher price coloring book.

they play different music each morning at starr king while the kids show up on the playground. salsa one day, funk the next.

yesterday they were playing JIMI HENDRIX. how cool is that???

and maya came home with tortillas she made with her teacher at baby school. and kisses her teacher goodbye, and talks about her little boyfriends there. and gives me about 10 fierce hugs and kisses but doesn't cry when i drop her off.

so, it is all okay for now.

i walked up 24th street to guerrerro tonight and met 2 newish friends for drinks at an irish bar. they are sweet and smart. we talked politics while our husbands tended the children. sarah palin makes us all sick.

it was a cool clear night with a bright white moon and i got a ride home.

night night

maya's pink dream

upon awakening, looking very confused, maya tells me, "the octopus is fighting with the pink princess. in the pink sea. with the pink shirt. the pink pink birthday. the octopus happy now."

and another shot from fabulous fairyland.

no car day with sky parade

i didn't get in a car or bus today, which was nice. two park visits, time to check out the windows and art on 24th street, the flowers and trees and painted houses in our neighborhood. there didn't seem to be any fear in the air today, just a lot of energy with the end of the heat wave.

in the skate park we sat on the hill with our very pregnant friend and her visiting sister. maya wore her belle princess dress and miles pretended to be a bull or battering ram to get my attention. the park was brimming with life: skateboarders whizzing around curved walls, kids running and kicking balls, swinging, rolling down grassy hills, climbing trees, and pinatas and balloons and the delicious smell of grilled meat and charcoal lighter fluid.

as we were leaving we saw a group too intriguing to ignore. a dad, handsome as david bowie, and two 8 or 9 year olds, lugging and pushing dollies and bags with 2 motors, air tanks, a big bag of stuffed animals, and a huge u-shaped black pvc pipe, about 8 feet tall. we followed them onto the field and discovered it had been part of a burning man installation, the Penguin Blaster, and was now being utilized to salvage a play date gone sour. my kids helped stuff animals into the tube, and after a lot of false starts the motors were going, an air tube was hooked up, a valve was pulled and BOOM an anteater, teddy bears, madeline doll, little dogs and cats and a green fish sailed 100 feet into the air and fell gently back to earth. the kids screamed with happiness and went to retrieve them and after about 10 more explosions and the addition of some big kid skateboard physicist helper the first boy announced that it was a sky parade.

we left and watched some men playing congas by the park exit. i remembered for the moment why we live here, it is because i just love it here too much to leave.

plates

last night i heard gunshots. then sirens. i was going to the park today with maya and (probably unwisely) was drawn to the little gathering of people with candles and a bunch of black and red balloons. it was a couple of big latino teenage boys, swigging vodka from a paper bag and reeking of weed. what happened? i ask. i heard the shots last night. 2 people shot and killed, the biggest guy told me. were they your friends? i ask. yes. i'm sorry, i say about times, and it is a wierd feeling, my eyes lock on with the big gang kid and both of our eyes well up with tears.

sad but scary scary scary. gang warfare going on in my neighborhood. and reading my friend's blog in oaktown some scary crime there too.

all day in the neighborhood i felt a twinge of fear, and a suspicion of bad judgment. should all of us stroller pushers out in the sun be in our homes with the doors triple bolted?

we meet a friend at miles' school and soon the boys are running around the water park in their underwear and chocolate stained faces, maya joyous and speedy in a wet saggy diaper, while we hear neighborbood gossip and venting about the violence happening. later other friends come over and we get buzzed on white wine and pizza while the kids watch a movie and draw and hold guinea pigs.

and at bedtime there is a short strong earthquake. i am more buzzed then i thought and am lying eyes closed on the trundle bed while miles asks me about the plates in an earthquake. i realize he thinks we are resting on many many dinner-type plates which are moving back and forth.

is this about how safe we are? drinking our wine and raising our kids on top of a foundation of millions of loosely stacked white china dinner plates, ready to be shaken at any time?

mostly pictures

images:
mandarin kindergarten influenced art with some characters i can't read.
greetings from fairyland.
our new buddies ajax and prince mermaid.

i'm outside on the deck in the dark. a little girl i met at work today told me that sun plus rain equals rainbow. in the house 20 yeards behind ours some friends are listening to loud salsa music and trying to learn a dance together. their laughter falls right down on me and i imagine what they look like whirling around the room, making the funny faces people do as they try new dance steps. i barely know what these neighbors look like and wish this wasn't so. underneath our deck my neighbor is reading her book and smoking her cigarette. global warming was in full effect today, whatever the horrible republican vice-presidential candidate thinks, and the cool night feels good. the kids have just passed out and rich and i are shuffling around like the exhausted zombies we are. maybe someday i will have the energy to learn a new dance. for now, buenos noches amigos.

when will we live next to a river?

what grade will i be after kindergarten? how old will i be when i am done at my school? when will i be able to write hard chinese letters? could we cool down the sun if we put a million pools around it? what happens when you stay under water too long? do some people who don't have enough food to eat eat GRASS? if they don't have enough food to eat do they die?

i'm used to my daughter wiggling and squirming way past bedtime. now miles is doing it too, but squirming and wondering and processing verbally, so many big questions.

and my son wants to live next to a river. this is a consistent wish. which is how i grew up, in my early homes. one river basically a storm drain, but good for dams and frog eggs and finding treasures and mica and clay nonetheless. and the other in a huge woods, with The Big Rock to dive off, a hook sunk into it that once tied up big boats, minnows and catfish, a beach across the way, creepy swimming snakes, even an occasional family of nudists. the sun hitting the sandy other side that you could swim to if you fought hard against the current.

how are all these things related? i'm not sure. but in these hectic days of new teachers and schools and students and families and schedules and after school programs, for all of us, i am wondering myself, when will i ever live next to a river again?

life is feeling short now that i am 40.

news flash: city cleans sidewalk!!!

something crazy happened. a week or two ago i sent a late night email to the city of sf politely venting about the litter situation (you know--human and dog poo, dumped out fried rice, vomit, as well as the usual cups, papers, bottles, etc) on the sidewalk in front of our house.

i got a call the next day from someone named mario who told me all about who cleans up our block and when, gave me his cell phone number, and another number, 28 CLEAN and said to call him anytime there was garbage out front. amazing! but b.s.?

i introduced myself to the 2 guys cleaning up and told them about my call to mario and thanked them for their work. and since them i have seen scarcely a trace of poo or old food. not too much else either. this gives me some hope in my heart.


on another note we made it through week one of kindergarten and my week back to work with only 3 meltdowns (2 miles, 1 me). miles got an eraser and a new pencil for something, he's not sure what because he still doesn't understand anything his teacher is saying. but i'm assuming he's behaving passably well if he is getting gifts.

and today we passed a big family of african-american kids waiting in the bus stop, the kind of family we usually don't talk to, because we don't know them, and a little girl kicked her foot out at miles. he said his funny "HEY" and made a face, and i found out she is in his class at school. very cute in her little uniform and a million neat braids with colored beads. i think miles likes her.

the good old days 30 days ago

here is miles in training with poppop millman, and maya knowingly wrapping her poppop john around her little finger. in lewes this summer we ate crabs and were treated to pizza and my dad took us for boat rides in the ocean to fish and see dolphins. miles was taken to funland on the boardwalk three times, returning each time with an armload of stuffies. i wore my bathing suit almost all day every day. i didn't drive anywhere. ice cream for dessert, every night (look at me for proof of this). two months of no work, no school.

bam we are back in the thick of things and i was not prepared. maya to daycare by 7:45. too many kids to schedule at work. sweet new students with so many challenges--autism, cancer, hearing impairments, elective mutism. all their parents waiting to meet me and see what i can do to help. maya and miles waiting to be picked up by mommy. miles tells me that his new school is okay, but he doesn't know how to speak chinese yet. and they mostly just sit on the rug. and then abusing me on his third day of school, hitting me for the third time in a month, in front of his new afterschool program teacher and fellow parents. why? i disappointed him by not bringing a snack he thought i promised. and he apologizes but says he just can't remember not to hit me. old habit i guess. it shouldn't matter but i am very embarrassed. i am a working mom punching bag. and in the car maya says i no hit my mama, i no make my mama sad. and then has her own crying fit about wanting a pink mermaid, wanting pink, pink,pink,NOW.

and later i let myself have a little cry in the bathtub with maya. what hurt mommy? i tell her my head hurts and she looks very concerned. she carefully dabs my hair with water and asks "your tummy too? i fix it with this." she gently prods my tummy with a rubber killer whale and then kisses my arm. miles pokes his head in, rich looking concerned behind him, and tells me that when he is mad he stops thinking about it so he won't keep feeling that way anymore.

wish it was so simple. i wish i was not working now. too many new things, feeling too needed by too many people. before bedtime miles and i take apart the rotting half wine-barrel planter in the yard. we dig out carrot-like roots from parsley plants. pull the staves off and pile them. think of uses for the metal hoops. together we take the cake of dirt and shovel and move it into low parts of the yard. maya is crying for mommy up with rich on the deck, she won't take daddy for an answer, and for just a peaceful minute, before she steps on a bougainvilla thorn, we all silently spread the brown dirt, miles with his shovel, maya with a broom, and me with my hands, while it starts to get dark and rich leaves to go mix rock music in the studio.

this is a rambling post with no real direction, but how i am feeling now. it's quiet and time to lie down and sleep before tomorrow comes.

we haven't fled yet

we travelled across the country and back on amtrak and had a lovely time in small towns and suburbs. what can i say? green grass yards perfect for hide-and-seek, driveways in front of houses, lush summer trees, friends with big houses and guest rooms. quiet at night and clean sidewalks. swimming pools and more swimming pools.

thought-provoking, yes, but we are back in our crazy loud city, enjoying the new skate park, digging holes by the pacific ocean, playing with our new guinea pigs ajax and prince mermaid, checking out the renaissance fair, hanging out with new and old friends and neighbors, meeting our tiny nephew, returning to work.

and here is miles on his first day of kindergarten. looking at his little face in this photo makes me want to cry. my big boy. my baby. he drives me crazy sometimes but i will state that obvious, i LOVE this kid, so, so , much.

kids and camp fire

i heart p.a.

we fled the city for the fourth of july in point arena. up up and away. we camped at the caperton's with four families, the kids joining and separating organically in the big field, checking out each other's tents, hiking with john, kiccking balls, investigating bugs, and at night toasting s'mores on super long sticks. the kids conked out in seconds in our tent, the sound of wind in the trees and grass lulling us, their daddy a few miles away in town rocking out all night at the oddfellows hall. we saw our delaware friends and kids, miles and edison running around nudies in the heat wave at lisa's. we moved our tent down the road to brian's for night number two. a lot of very late-night partiers showed up and mommy jamie stayed up with them until at least 3, sipping on cocktails and having fun making dumb jokes and appreciating the loud loud music with friends around the fire, as, incredibly, miles and maya and rich slumbered on in the tent which, to me sounded as loud inside as a busy bar. the next day we checked out the parade, and i got tears in my eyes watching some older maybe ex-hippies, march down the street joyfully promoting peace. the extra-action marching band did their funky thing, we saw our friend dressed up as a zebra seahorse, and there was much candy to be snatched up from the street.

it's so so clean up there. i lounged in a hammock at brian's listening to the clinking sound of horseshoes, maya lounging next to me as miles and edison made a pile of firewood under brian's deck that they called a lemur's nest. even the dirt seems clean. the sky so blue and clear, no noise pollution from honks and air brakes and ambulances and yelling crazy people. this happens every time i go up there. should my kids be growing up in a heaven like this??

miles begged to stay until the fire that night but we had to go. the begging turned to threats. he even threatened to hit me if i made him go, and i tried to ignore that one. i tried to be understanding, and i guess i was. i will stay here forever, like a statue, i won't move, if i can't stay for the fire tonight. that's the only thing that will make me happy. that's the only thing so i don't have a fit. so he did end up having a fit. our grown-up friends who were camping another night said it was the saddest thing ever, hearing miles (and his sister who joined in) just wailing and wailing as we strapped them in their carseats and drove up the long driveway. of course the crying stopped when we got some ice cream in town. that makes it all better.

i want to go back soon.

another day

i just finished reading what is the what
by dave eggers. i don't need to write anything about it because the reviews pretty much say it all, but go get it and read it, even if a heartbreaking work of staggering genius didn't do much for you.

in a lame parenting move i let miles whine his way out of going to his day camp today and then ended up reinforcing his lies about not feeling well by taking the kids swimming at the bakar fitness center.
we walked by the huge wooden statues of people and past the men and women working their bodies while watching daytime tv. we got in the pool and joined a few other familes for the parent toddler swim. maya and miles made 10 times more noise than the other kids. look mommy, look brother, i swimming, i swimming! shrieks maya excitedly. the huge windows in this expansive room let us see the panorama of downtown, and cranes building more huge modern buildings in mission bay. miles dives for rings. maya orders us around, and then for a few minutes holds onto her brother in the water as i try to float on my back, just for a moment in this clean room of water.

afterwards we eat our bunny crackers and pineapple on the big green field. the kids walk a hundred yards to the top of a hill and roll down, in uneven lines and circles. when they get back i am told of the 2 cool things they saw, a bird with a bug in its mouth and a dragonfly.

amazing dinner and meltdowns

last night i took miles to an amazing birthday dinner while maya stayed home with her daddy. it was for our friend jessie who lives in a big warehouse on 3rd street. the theme was hearts, unicorns, and italian food, and miles was the only kid who made it to the party of 30+ people. we used to come here and hear bands, or check out small art shows, or sing karaoke, but no matter what the food is really really good. the warehouse has a huge room with a kitchen and loft, and then a burrow of separate bedrooms to the side. there are beautiful much larger than life woodland creatures all over, left over from a previous resident who painted them for a party at the sundancce film festival. two huge tables with booth/couch seating. miles' eyes bug out at a huge bowl of lollipops, a tray of cupcakes, and a tiramisu walking by in sheila's arms. there are many more familiar faces here than i had imagined and i get to catch up with some people while lynn and birgit make monster faces and chase miles around the room.

for dinner: two kinds of clams, crab risotto, 3 different lasagnas, grilled asparagus, zucchini and sausages, lots of salads, homeade red sauce, bottles of wine galore. jessie makes a toast which ends with "to my family who are friends and my friends who are family." there is an epic silly string battle, starring my son, who is looking quite confident and is hysterical with screaming giggles. eric winds things down a bit by projecting a care bears film, about 50' by 50', onto the wall. on the way home, topping off his tiramisu with a lollipop, miles mentions that he would like to go out to more night-time parties.

but today was just awful. miles slept in and then didn't want to got to his camp. we went to the randall museum, which was ok, but after that the whining, arguing, fighting, and not listening from both kids went through the roof. i finally dragged them to the park at 4, but then dragged them right home after miles started jumping up and down yelling that we wanted ice cream which set his sister off wanting ice cream. the evening culminated in miles having a huge crying meltdown because rich wouldn't let him play with the window screen. he explained in great outraged detail that it was the only thing that would keep him " a little bit warm" because to had holes in it. like a nice blanket with holes, just perfectly ventilated and nothing else would do. waaahhhhhhhhhhhh.

of course i am projecting into the fall. did i mention that my ^*(*&*& %^& boss (cassie, you know who i mean) pretty much doubled my caseload??? i am imagining early morning freakouts of miles not wanting to go to kindergarten, me having to go to work, maya not wanting to go to her new day care, both of them wanting me not daddy after work, having to struggle through homework. sounds awful. guess i need to just live in the present and try to take the kids to as many parties as possible while summer is still going.

commander finger does fine

miles went to his first day of superhero day camp today. we entered live oak school and the a teenager showed us the room. kids were milling around playing with superhero dolls and blocks. i hadn't realized when we signed miles up for this camp that most of the kids knew each other. the teacher wasn't overly friendly. miles' friend from preschool was not there as we thought he would be. miles held on to me and asked me to stay. we sat for the circle but then maya started disrupting things (getting up and shaking her booty in the middle of the circle, actually, just as the teacher was going over the rules of the room). miles whispered urgently that i should stay until the end of circle. i took maya to the back of the room but she started yelling about sittin gon her brother's lap. i sensed disaster. so i went back to the circle of kids and whispered in miles ear that we were going. i kissed his big soft cheek. he grabbed me and kissed me back, then let me go...and that was all!

when i returned he was sitting and drawing with a bunch of kids. they each had a superhero they had created through some sort of card game. miles was commander finger. "he points his finger at you and electricity comes out of it." he tells me darby never showed up and they buried a big boy all the way up to his head in sand at the park. he showss maya the bird and we go. i was SO PROUD!!!!!

potrero del sol

this weekend was the grand and long-awaited opening of the potrero del sol park 2.5 blocks away. this is the park where in another lifetime, i would take chicken dog every night. we dog owners would sit and stand around, some sipping an after-work beer, and watch our babies chase each other around the field. in this other lifetime i also had a garden plot at the potrero del sol community garden, where i grew some artichokes, mustard greens, bulb fennel donated by the cool old italian gardener, and flowers.

now the park has a big green fence around it, locked at night. there is a huge concrete skateboard park and it is humming with all sorts of skateboarders, from serious looking 35 year-olds to serious looking 5-year-olds whizzing up and down the tall sides of the bowl. there is also a nice new playground and glorious brand new clean grass (not for long). maya and miles do one of their first sibling team-ups ever when confronted with a funny growling 3-year-old and then some hugging and rolling in the grass.

i had a crush on another dog-walker here. i had long hair and was kind of thin. i came sometimes and sat on the concrete bench and wrote in my journal until it got dark. time is passing and things are changing. if one of my kids doesn't turn into a skateboarder i'll be surprised.

and i can't help but fantasize about the on ramps and over passes and highways surrounding this park and our neighborhood being torn down, potrero becomes a quiet street with houses, bikes, trees, and of course skateboarders.

sidewalk envy

i found myself saying to my son today "i wish this was our sidewalk." it wasn't a really fabulous sidewalk, but he got my point. "but it only has three," he said. "no, ours has three, this one has five." we counted them, five, (he seemed to know how to refer to the number of sidewalk squares from door to curb), as opposed to our measly three. if we had five i would put out some big planters and maybe dig out some of the sidewalk for a garden. i would put a little bench, although i really couldn't do that because it would instantly become an additional room for the crowd that hangs out and drinks in the walgreen's bus stop.

timing is off. preschool is ending thursday and miles said today when i asked how school was that he tried to have as much fun as he could since school is ending soon. this ended up being the week we transitioned maya into sleeping in the same room as her brother. it started while rich was away over the weekend and all seemed peaceful. tonight it hit miles that rich was home and maya was still there, in his trundle bed. there were a lot of big real tears and anguished wails about her being there, invading his space and his mommy time. big awful cries which were finally stopped by a pathetic mommy move of digging up a star wars plastic lightsabre and giving it to him as a way of saying thank you for sharing your room with your sister (translation, stop crying and expressing your feelings kid, or you don't get this cheap toy). the ploy worked, kind of.

wish there was more--more squares in the narrow sidewalk outside our house, more years for play in preschool, more space and mommies to go around. it's hard not to feel greedy sometimes.

miles and nina, artsy photo miles took of friend on preschool camping trip

well, you get behind with the blog and then there is too much to write about. the soofis have come and gone, a whirlwind of kid-watching, friend-visiting, and reminiscing. it is good to still feel close to people who are far away but a little bittersweet when you want them in your everyday, or at least every week or two life.

we spent the heat wave mostly at the 24th and york st water park. maya hogged the baby fountain, the only one that doesn't spray 10 feet up in the air, and miles screamed and ran in his underwear for hours. we keep meeting more cool families whose kids miles will be going to school with, which helps to reassure me that going with a neighborhood school was the right thing to do.

my old friend nat sent a video of himself talking about foraging in n.y.c. and it reminded me how much i enjoy foraging. i have a great book about foraging in the bay area, the flavors of home, but it is really best to learn in nature, with a human guide. tonight while trying to keep maya safe from miles' increasingly powerful soccer ball kicks i took a little inventory of what could be foraged in our back yard--some blackberries, borage, nasturtiums, oaxalis, a dandelion or two--pretty good for plants that have just made their way into our little green space.

it is very quiet here. i think i will go take a long bath. goodnight.

rock on

went to 12 galaxies last night to see rich's band play a birthday party show. i drank several whiskey drinks very quickly and was hurting this morning when maya woke up at 5:20, but it felt good to dance with old friends and watch my husband playing guitar lying on his back on the floor. music was a big part of my connection with my spouse and others in the early days of being an adult and sometimes i forget the power being in and around live music has to bring people together. i mean, you have to pretty much have your mouth in someone'e ear to talk to them at a rock show, and that promotes closeness. there was an awesome emo-core band, touched by a janitor, that took me back to about 1993, and phil crumar was playing with a big happy band including a trombone. it is kind of wierd, many of our friends from the rock and roll days are the ones who are still in the city, and one by one they are buying houses and/or talking about or having babies. maybe the friends in this crowd are ok with smaller spaces or not being home-owners. the rock and rollers have turned out to be the least transient in our community of friends. i'm glad they are still around. rock on. love you guys.

mandarin immersion

there was an article about the starr king mandarin immersion program in sfgate today. kinda' cool...maybe miles will like his school because it is famous (a new interest).


this week i said goodbye to many of the little cuties and their families i've worked with for the past two years. i will miss them.

my best friend and family arrive in town today. i can't believe they have been gone 2 years. we will have to pack in the fun for the next 2 weeks.

bye

critters

last week we saw a baby rat in mckinley park. maya fed it some bunny crackers. camping we saw a wild turkey and some deer. in sonoma there was an immobile hurt fledgling by the duck pond that we spent about an hour trying to track down a ranger for. today we met one of miles' future classmates up at the potrero hill rec center. the visit started a little badly, as the boys scrabbled up a hillside and found lots of broken glass, which i climbed up to help them over as maya whined for me from below. then a couple of kids appeared with a toy gun that shot plastic balls and gave me the creeps. but the kids relaxed and ended up playing a little and hugging goodbye. on our way out we saw a garter snake wriggle through the fence. and from the deck at home i saw 3 yellow lorrakeets (i think?) swooping and flying around our backyards, at one point just a few feet from my head.


last night i spent about an hour reading websites and blogs about urban chickens.

i think i want to make this blog more interesting to more readers. any suggestions, my devoted and beloved audience of three...maybe four...??

my fault?

i took miles on his preschool camping trip friday night. over 70 people, about half preschoolers, at china camp state park. rich stayed home with maya and i didn't know what to do with myself. i wandered around chit-chatting while miles ran free lord of the flies style with a pack of kids. they climbed in and out of trees, tied ropes to things, ran up and down hills in the dark with flashlights, threw rocks, found giant beetles, battled with sticks, pushed and pulled each other perilously close to the edge of a rocky creekbed in a red wagon, and burned marshmallows on sticks to hold up like torches in the night. as i sipped lots of red wine from my cup and watched miles having such a blast, and started to slip into my sentimental sadness about how here was this great community that was going to end soon (miles' last day of preschool is the end of june) and how great it would be if the kids could all stay together, it dawned on me that it was MY FAULT. if we lived in a small town he WOULD be going to kindergarten with most of the kids. they wouldn't be ripped apart to go to 30 different schools and could continue to wrestle and refine their poop jokes for years to come.

so, my tiny devil's advocate says, would that be so great? you grew up in a smallish town and really didn't want to stick around there.

isn't there some happy medium? perhaps i am an idealist but i am going to try so hard to hang on to the people we have made connections with through miles' school. maybe not deep deep level connections, but enough that you know what i'm talking about, friend. with some layers of show and defense pulled back. maybe we really can nurture our little boys' blooming friendships. as we roasted hotdogs with one of miles' buddies and they got giddy giggly making private jokes about the stars and then the next morning as one of his friends gave him an unexpected and strangely hilarious hickey on his back i felt strongly that i was going to help miles keep these friends, even if i had to annoy their parents to do so. and as i sipped my wine throughout the evening and looked into some of the mamas' eyes i thought maybe i will make the time to nurture these seedling friendships too, before they are thinned out by the demands of feeding, driving, and surviving these young kid years in the big city.

soft walls

this weekend we fled the city and went to costanoa with some friends. we met two boys making a crazy trap in a tree for mean girls, heard some native american storytelling, played in an inlet at pomponio beach, spent a lot of time making sure the kids weren't running on the road. miles and emily were given a chance to take a very short ride on horses who had just returned from guiding other horses and people on trails up in the hills. their eyes are so big and intelligent, and so different from ours. a groundhog shared our site. there was a lot of tree climbing.

we didn't get much sleep, though. miles had a little trouble once it was time to crawl into the sleeping bags and stated tearily that he wanted to go sleep somewhere with hard walls. maya couldn't get into a deep sleep THE WHOLE NIGHT which was a real killer. all she could state in her defense was that "the baby lights wake my up."

i was thinking about the ohlone indians and their sustainable lifestyles as we cruised back up the coast. about how we wrecked their civilization and how ours is on the brink of collapse. it makes me glad some people have been working to protect native american indian knowledge from disappearing completely.

my mom and stepfather are travelling cross country right now with their cat molly to begin the next chapter of their lives as retirees in sonoma. they narrowly missed some tornadoes. wish them safe travels.

guest blogger rebecca goes to the prom

here is a guest post from my friend rebecca. she is a very fun and energetic person with that midwesterner's sense of hospitality. she has kind of stumbled in to being a teacher in a high school special day class for "severely impaired" (the district's lovely term) students. last week she helped out with the special olympics AND volunteered to chaperone two of her students whose prom was the first date for both of them. sorry i am posting it a bit late.

thanks rebecca!!!!

p.s. she also sent a link to some cool photos

Happy Memorial Day to you all. Thanks Jamie for giving me a chance to post on her amazing blog. Here’s SF Weekend Wrap-Up – take #1.

Things were hoppin’ in San Francisco this weekend among the under 21 crowd.

Friday was the inaugural SFUSD Special Olympics Track and Field Day at Kezar Stadium. The stadium was filled with over 350 elementary, middle and high school special-ed students from 26 schools plus parents, teachers, paras and therapists of all sorts- speech, physical, occupational, and more. The students competed in a variety of running/rolling events, turbo-jav, ball toss, and long jump.

Emily’s school, FS Key, brought 5 general-ed classrooms of kids along to cheer on the inclusion kids from their rooms. They cheered their own cheers at top volume. Totally adorable.

And my own group of rambunctious high schoolers gave it their all. One threw a softball 92 feet – about the distance from 2^nd base to the catchers box. Way to get SF’s special-ed population on the map!

The weather was glum on Saturday, so Em and I tidied the house, or at least I did, while Emily danced her own version of the entire Nutcracker.

Then, it was off to the next big event of the weekend: Balboa High School’s PROM.

Two of my students had wanted to go with each other. So, I met N. (chaperoned by his mom) and K. (chaperoned by her 19 year old sis) at the In-N-Out Burger joint on Jefferson for some viddles and to shake off everyone’s nerves. They were dressed to the nines – N in a black tux with white tie and K with a lovely cantaloupe colored floor length knit frock and a pretty black jacket zipped and tied modestly to the tippy-top. When we finally made our way into the ballroom’s entrance the mom, sis, and I kept our distance of about 20 feet or so while the young coupled made their way to a table right in front of the dance floor. It was a memorable night for them I think – awkward at first but then eventually doing all the prom things dancing, nibbling appetizers, mingling with other students and teachers, dancing some more. But when the first whiff of smoke from the soon to be smoldering dance-floor hit the consciousness of the family chaperones our young pair was quickly escorted OUT OF THERE and back to their pumpkin, I mean car and sent back home around 9:40.

I had to stay a bit longer just to soak in the ambience. The students looked great. All of them! The young men now dress to match the colors of their dates’ dresses – with some combo of shirt, vest, tie, armband, and boutonniere the same color. So I was seeing guys with the de rigueur black pants with shocking pink or lime green or lemon yellow on top. Really looking sharp. As for the young ladies: strappy floor length dresses of every possible design were all the rage. Along with up-do’s of every possible creation. Sexy and elegant. A fun evening and my first prom in over 20 years. Next year I’ll have to bring a date!

Sunday in San Francisco’s hippest event had to be the annual Capsule Design Fair in Hayes Valley. The rare sunny weather beat down on shoppers, vendors, and French Bulldogs.

Tomorrow’s back to work but here’s hoping you all had an unbelievably lazy Monday.

whole mess of photos

here are some random photos from the last week or so. match the photo to caption:
A."stop attacking your baby sister my big crazy boy cousin, that is too dangerous. somebody might get hurt. what is wrong with you?"
B."mmm, poisonous treat on a stick from mexico, thanks for being weak mommy." C."hmm, is someone going to call the pants police soon?" D. "look, look, daddy, special ladies, pink, music, pink, pink,look!" E. beautiful colombian dancers
F. "my friend and i here don't know each other well and we are males, so we will take turns beating at each other with a hatchet to the drum beats at carnaval. it's fun. now we are closer buddies and want a playdate so we can beat each other some more." G. "see, sometimes we like to be near each other. sometimes." H. "brother, let's smack each other with swords. iyou are teaching me to be tough. don't listen to our smart little pacifist cousin urging us to lay down our arms."

very silly, i know. things have felt a little too serious lately. what the heck.

bye

cloudy

this
makes me feel very frustrated.

backyarding

either the world is changing fast or my view of my place in it is. about 7 years ago i started working on the yard, and went crazy digging things up and planting flowering trees and flowers, flowers, flowers. i still love flowering trees and flowers. but new people have just bought the bottom apartment and in preparation for a meeting with them i made a list of what i envision for the back yard.

(in no particular order)
--a place for kids to play, mess around, dig, make rivers, make stick structures, explore and discover
--a bird, bee, and butterfly haven
--a place to grow fruit, herbs, and vegetables, maybe with a little portable greenhouse
--a place for some environmental education, about plants, soil, compost, sustainability
--a place with sensory pleasures
--pet chickens that lay eggs for us??
--a pet turtle to roam around?
--and if it was possible a play structure of some sort for climbing, swinging, pretending

this is quite a list but wouldn't it be cool?

when i was little we lived in a suburb with a big park behind us and a tiny stream ( a storm sewer, actually) next to us. i remember hours of making dams in the stream, finding forts in the woods, picking tiny watery tasting strawberries and juicy mulberries, finding strings of frog eggs and then hundreds of tiny frogs. we moved from this house when i was about 8, so all these adventures took place before then, without my parents. were they just innocent about the wierdos and creeps in the world or were there less wierdos and creeps then? was it safer there because there are less people per square mile than in the city? i remember once finding porno photos stabbed onto tree branches in the woods. if i lived in newark delaware with miles and maya would i let them wander around alone now? right now, it is hard for me to imagine them being out of my sight. yet i want them to have some time to explore and build in nature, on their own.

so far i see that city kids spend more time with their parents. i like this. maybe we will just have to find ways to do the exploring and building in nature together. i just hope the kids don't rebel against the lack of freedom, from their parents, in their lives...maybe this is all part of the nature of our rapidly shrinking world. we need to be able to have freedom and experience nature, but also to live close to and in harmony with others.

rambling on, again. like an old hippie this time. but i'm not an old hippie, really.

goodnight,
love,
me

no title, really

we crossed the golden gate bridge two times this weekend, to sonoma through the golden hills and back. sonoma always the same, sun, trees, a pool, the horses at the farm down the road. on our early morning park trip i overhear several people discussing money and real estate. there are new ducklings in the pond.

can't help feeling a little overwhelmed by bad news. there was an article in the paper about miles' teacher. her body was found in the water and there are questions about her death, a suicide or foul play. i don't want miles to ever find out about this, so i suppose when he gets old enough to read my blog i will erase this post. while looking for the article i found a link to a photo book this teacher's friend posted. it was so surreal and awful to see pictures of her being a happy silly young person, and reading about the mystery of her death, when not long ago she had just been the friendly new teacher at miles' school making sure he and his friends were good to each other while they played basketball.

the news is just too much. the earthquake in china has me eyeing our own old walls. we drove by a house burning down. there was a six year old with a gun in his backpack in sf. oh yeah, and the world is running out of food.

driving home over the bridge i shut down a little, even after our nice weekend of swimming and playing in the sun. maya was whining and crying and the fog was all around and i gave up for a bit on cheering her up and stared out into the fog thinking about loneliness. feeling sorry for myself in a crossing the bridge mood, and it popped out, in a not good mom way, that i felt lonely. and miles said right away, "but we're here. you have us."

the people i have to keep me from being lonely are all sleeping now. it is too late to call my best friend whose call i missed again, whose son and daughter's little voices are on my answering machine. the heat wave is over. i am going to stop listening to the news for a while.

water park

it is freaking hot today. like, walk around the house in your underwear hot, compulsively buy bottles of gatorade hot, little old ladies carrying around umbrellas hot, let the kids have all the ice cream and popsicles they beg for hot. i picked the kids up and was driving home thinking i wished i lived in the suburbs right now, feeling desperate for a pool to jump in, or a river to wade into. we parked on hellish sunny potrero and went straight to the water park, where we ended up staying for over three hours. there were all kinds of folks there, naked little brown boys sticking their hands into the fountain, girls running and shrieking through the water in their bathing suits. the ice cream pusher sold out of spongebob squarepants ice cream. four preschool friends showed up and miles was in heaven making insane noises and moves in the fountains with them, pushing the giant swing, riding the giant swing, and staring at a boy with an awful plastic gun toy for a full 15 minutes. maya was a little less content,and tired from waking up at 5:30 and launching into 12 hours of whining for the last few days, but she finally relaxed and chilled out on my lap, feeding me bits of dry cereal and watching and listening as the spanish, english, and spray from the fountains washed over us. i pushed them back together almost naked in the stroller and was happy to hear a bling bling covered woman at the bus stop tell me that i had two beautiful babies.

it's so so so so hot.

just stuff

i'm writing this in the trundle bed while miles cuddles for "one more minute" by my side. he has been all over the map recently, cuddly, mature, polite, rude, aggressive, gentle. he has been asking so many questions about what happened to his teacher, and i feel so lost trying to answer them. trying to explain death and its possible causes to a young five-year-old can make an atheist wish she was a born-again christian. listening to him speak his thoughts aloud, rambling on "maybe she cut her finger and her blood all came out. maybe when you die it's like your body stops working and your bones stop working so you can't move and then you can't eat anything for a long time and then you are dead. maybe she ate a poisonous mushroom. let's stop talking about this." i feel helpless. if i say the right thing will i help my child live his life with a less crippling fear of death. what exactly is the right thing to say? we will never know what happened to his teacher, only that she died...so the questions will keep coming and i will have to try and answer them.

today a haze of travel and spending cash up and down the 24th street corridor.
first--miles and i walk to st francis where he eats an evil face pancake and we listen to sun ra and cat power
second--all of us drive up potrero hill to check out the new park at the potrero rec center. this used to be a scary sketchy place, rusty playground equipment and cat poo in the sand, overgrown trees and weeds everywhere. today we play on a beautiful new playground with views of potrero hill backyards with terraced gardens and the bay through eucalyptus trees. a little boy is holding his first birthday party there. the smell of smoky bbq. well-dressed families speaking spanish and english. we see a little friend from miles' school and he follows her around being obnoxious but she loves it.
third-the kids scream out to stop when he drive by miles' school-to-be on the way home. there is a health fair with booths promoting healthy things,a bookmobile, volunteer clown who painted a perfect ninja turtle on miles' face, a dj blasting kmel jams, boys riding bikes around an obstacle course, lots of people from the huge potrero hill projects. miles scores a man's xl t-shirt he is presently sleeping in.
fourth--we cruise up to noe valley to check out a garden on the garden tour that our friend john created. he and andy made the garden for a man they befriended who is blind. john called it a sensory garden. he is a rock sculptor and landscaper. our party crowd friends are there mixed in with the noe valley garden tour people. there is a groundcover that smells like mint when you walk on it. an amazing little stream with rocks in it to move and change currents falling onto a pond. a bridge that rocks slightly when you cross it. one of our rocker friends is due to have a baby in october...
fifth--we eat lunch at barney's and are disappointed with the hyped-up burgers and curly fries
sixth--this marathon goes on. we walk up the block to the little noe valley 24th street park. maya talks about the terrible easter bunny we saw there. miles climbs a tree and impresses a little german boy. maya shoves miles in the back and he shoves her back. time to go
seventh--rich is craving mitchell's ice cream. we get there and there are about 40 people waiting but the kids are ready to freak out so we wait. there are rainbow sprinkles all over the car.
eighth--we go home and watch our first mandarin video, with bao bei the panda. i feel like my ears are clogged. yikes.

and now the kids and rich are asleep. i'm writing all this down, why? i'm not sure. maybe this day to day minutiae will somehow counteract this heaviness that won't leave us alone lately--teachers being mysteriously dead, scary headlines about environment, politics, economics.

maybe if i write this down and someone reads it it will make me feel closer to them. knowing all these dumb little details. i don't know. too tired to make sense.

buenos noches

more experts

(read post while pinching nose shut to get true effect)

i have been dealing with over a month now of very bad sinus congestion. it's really hard to sleep, say my "m", "n" and "ng" sounds, and i am exhausted. it's hard not breathing through your nose. i've been taking claritin and sudafed which have worked in the past, but things are not getting better.

i finally went to the doctor today. she talked to me for about one minute and then said i needed to try a different allergy medicine, like zyrtec. i should stop taking sudafed, as i have been taking it for too long. then see if things improve in a few weeks. she starts to bolt out the door but i get teary eyed and say i don't think it is just allergies, and i really am having trouble functioning, so she quickly prescribes antibiotics and suggests claritin-d instead of the zyrtec. rich just went out and got the medicine--it's claritin and sudafed combined. so what the heck is this dr thinking????? help!!

on another note i am home with 2 sleeping kiddos and my stuffy sinuses. rich is at band practice and i am missing the meeting at miles' preschool with a child psychologist who is there to talk about the effects of the teacher's death. miles is asking about her a lot. as soon as we left school today he said "no one knows what happened to teacher b yet." i asked if he talked ot someone about it but he said no, no one did. he is back to wanting to fall asleep with me next to him, and i am saying sure and hoping it is okay.

the maker faire

well, we passed up a birthday party (gasp!) and went to the maker faire in san mateo. rich was wise and drove down 280 so we missed the traffic jam and breezed through the gates with our free tickets. wow! a huge giraffe robot, make your own marshmallow gun, isolate strawberry dna, see the tesla coils make lightning inside, make your own pet robot, watch battling big robots, see the devilettes and burst into tears thinking about tedd, ride a carousel or bus powered by bicyclists. listen to a musical saw. see a beautiful fountain display created by mentos and diet coke. get inspired by engineers without borders or grey water exhibits. watch your kids get confused by the steam punks. there was much to do, make, see, and hear. unfortunately we could only stay a few hours but we will be going next year. a little taste of burning man without the dust and the distance.

on another note, through park, word of mouth, and the sfkfiles blog, about 10 families of kindergarteners going to starr king mandarin have already connected and are starting to talk about playdates before schools starts and even pta meetings. i can see there is going to be some real community there if we want it. i'm also feeling intimidated by what i perceive as a group of very intelligent parents. i hope miles can keep up there and is not intimidated like his mama.

this photo of a dinosaur stomping on pretty flowers is for those of you who love cute and evil. you know who you are.

adios amigos

lady bugs and worms

it was a garden and party day. this am miles and i cruised down to flowercraft and deliberated for a while but came home with a lemon tree, a blueberry bush, some basil, strawberries, some alyssum miles picked out,a container of worms and a container of ladybugs. then off to cousin natalie's fabulous 3rd birthday, complete with a deluxe spread of food, a multi-colored ice cream cake, a real live princess who put on a show (believe it or not the boys couldn't take their eyes off her, yikes, it is starting), balloon animals and weapons, face painting with sparkles, a craft activity that engrossed the adults for hours, and a chaotic degeneration into mike hurling chocolate into the yard and kids growling and throwing balls and other objects at the adult males at the party. when we came home it was nearing dusk and time to do some planting, as well as release our critters. miles banged on our neighbor's back door and she finally came out to help us place the hundreds of ladybugs around the yard, one by one. i hope they like it here and stick around for a while

gone and gon

so sad and tragic. a young teacher at miles' school has died. how she died is a mystery, the kids were just told that she had died and that the teachers didn't know how yet, they would have to find out from the family. i don't want to speculate on what happened but miles certainly is. maybe octopus crime killed her. maybe she got burned in a fire. was she with her family when she died? where is her family? do you know how she died yet? and then, "let's stop talking about this, it's making ME feel dead."

when i talk to someone on the phone he is whispering in my ear to tell the person at the other end that his teacher died. this type of mystery is not good for anyone, especially my son. all day he just seemed wild, laughing too hard, running too fast.

we also discovered gon at the library. a wordless japanese graphic chapter book for kids. about a tiny dinosaur who lives in the present, in nature, and is in different chapters a member of an eagle family protecting the baby eagles from a bobcat, a member of a tundra wolf family happily nursing and playing with his fellow cubs until a terrible tiger comes along, at which time he must avenge the death of his mama wolf. then he is chomping down trees trying to build a mansion of wood in a stream next to an irritated beaver. amazing art, lots of biting and tail-swacking and anger and oh so therapeutic for a little boy overwhelmed by the world of humans.

what this all has to do with shall we flee the city i don't know.

goodbye

iron will

well, maya finally started walking today, about 10 minutes after she got to the babysitter's. we spent about 3 hours at the doctor's office yesterday as three doctors tried various strategies to get maya to walk or open/use her hands. she fell for NOTHING. it looked very behavioral to them, as to me, but they all said that this was level of persistence was highly unusual in a cchild her age. they thought it might be something medical since she absolutely wouldn't stand up or open her hands. after brainstorming at some type of secret pediatrician round table yesterday it was decided that she is stressed about something and that's why she is doing this type of regression. it was also decided she must be pretty smart, which makes me feel a little better. because overall, i'm pretty sad that maya is stressed/worried enough to act like this. when i got her this afternoon i felt like i was mommying on eggshells, trying to be kind but not baby her, love her and encourage he but not reinforce her whining. luckily, except for a moment when we got up the steps and she said "maya no walk at home" she has been walking, dancing, running, making a mess, and being her pretty much usual happy self. as the dr said, it's hard to tell what kind of spin their little brains put on the information they get at this age. i know maya may have heard us stressing about schools, day care, will she be potty trained in time for preschool, and god knows what else. things have been fast and hectic and stressful. so for now, even if we don't feel it, rich and i need to put on our calmest, happiest, most supportive faces for our little ones. maya told me today that she came from mommy's tummy, maya sleeping in there, it dark in mommy tummy, and it made me think maybe she shouldn't know these strange things yet, maybe it is too much, because she made it pretty clear she would like to be in there sleeping in the dark again, and had a strange little smile on her face when i told her she wouldn't fit anymore...