should we flee the city?

hanging out with a bottle of wine, foraging, chocolate-making

2012-01-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

it was a nice three-day weekend except for the occasional tantrum blowing through. i am trying to learn how to parent my passionate children better, but it can be hard.

a neighbor friend came over one day with wine and our kids wrote comic books and worked on projects while we talked and had time to drink the whole bottle in little cups. it felt spur of the moment and nice to drink wine during the day.

an old friend visited town for a chocolate conference. he makes fantastic chocolate and lives near a volcano in hawaii. we got a little group together and spent a few hours foraging for native edibles in glen park in the mist and rain. the dog got muddy, kids got muddier. we picked lots of miner's lettuce and chickweed, wild mustard and radish. then we brought back the greens and made a big salad to nibble on during an extremely impromptu six-hour chocolate-making party with new friends and old.

so, there is school stuff and scary budget stuff and work stuff and tantrumming kid stuff. but there is also chocolate, the not-appreciated-by-all pleasure of foraging for food, and friends getting together to drink wine and make things. it was a nice weekend. i need more of this.

xo in the sky, wierd post

2012-01-15T17:13:00.001-08:00

my iphone camera did not quite capture it, but we saw this full moon and "x" made of jet plane exhaust. maya called it a hug and kiss in the sky.

maya is almost six now, and we celebrated her birthday with an old fashioned party full of candy, cake, games, streamers, and horrible but much appreciated kidz bop music. maya received a pricey american girl doll named mckenna, who has been renamed thorn hunt, and who is currently being held and styled by her new mother. she came right from the american girl orphanage, but maya also gave birth to her, and i am the grandma.

lately things have seemed stuck in ruts, both in the personal and public worlds, which can be depressing and overwhelming. seeing negative cycles repeat and expand can be scary. this morning, however, i was so happily surprised (shocked, really), to see miles playing with his sister and her new doll. miles agreed to be the dad, and made a blanket for thorn's cardboard bed. i think he was entranced by her long thick hair--miles has been into hair for a while. he used to comb mine when he was just a toddler, and combs his sister's before school in the morning.

it was a nice reminder not to put my kid in a box--he may be obsessed with sports and video games, and buying more video games, but he also tends to dolls, loves his dog, and watched martin luther king's "i have a dream" speech on youtube 3 times this morning.

there is a key to unlock the part of every person which is capable of being caring and nurturing towards others. for miles, it may be hair. whatever it is, it seems like finding and taking care of this part of all of us is important for our future. i hope that nurturing this part of the next generation will be up there on the government's list of educational priorities. how to make this happen??

the horse boy

2012-01-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

i just watched a documentary about a couple seeking help for their son with autism, the horse boy. they end up taking him on a journey to what must be one of the most beautiful places on earth, mongolia, and riding horses for days on end as they met with shamans and are accompanied by the guide and his six-year-old son. at the end of the trip the boy had changed, with less tantrums, more social connectedness with peers, and was using the toilet. the father considered it the work of the shamans, the mother was not so convinced, but they both seemed strong in their belief that the trip had drastically changed their lives. they now run a center for children with autism that specializes in equine therapy, out in the country in texas.

i couldn't help but feel as i watched this quite beautiful film, that just about any kid in the world would come out stronger after a journey like this, knowing that it was all for him, to help him, that his parents were 100% there for him, and that each day he could do his most preferred activity for hours, ride horses, through an amazing wide open landscape of water, green, and blue sky. AND there was a little boy there with him, all day, a funny little friendly typically-developing kid who just jumped right in to playing with him. chase, animals, pretend fighting and wrestling, silly sounds. wonderful.

of course my mind went to two of my current obsessions--that all kids need the kind of time this kid lucked out to have--time engaging with the natural, not man-made world, of plants, animals, rocks, water, mud. and that kids with autism need time, lots of time, to play with friendly, typically-developing kids.

i am in a city where these things are not happening for many kids, and the inequities are hard to take, especially when the kids are just entering the world of school. why do some preschool kids with autism in our public schools end up in places with lots of nature and great opportunities to become friends with peers both with and without disabilities? why are others assigned to schools with mostly asphalt, and ONLY kids with disabilities to interact with? i know things are changing, and "we're working on it" but how is that going to help the kids who are missing out on opportunities right now? it is driving me a little crazy. i am becoming more of an inclusion advocate, especially for preschool. kind of wandering all over the place here, but that is where this film took me. check it out if you have a chance.

i have probably written this sentence too many times on this blog but ALL kids need more time in nature. we are working on it at my kids' school, but it is slow work.

2012 is the year i am going to be louder and squeakier calling out what i think could be much better in my little world of special education. i will just have to be patient, thoughtful, and see if i can use some of that drummer's timing i used to have when i call it out.

winter staycation 2011

2011-12-30T20:52:00.000-08:00

some photos. it has been a beautiful two weeks off with sun, fog, presents, treats, video games, tennis camp, golden gate park, zoo, cliff house, beach. one of my kids is going through some kind of emotional change, and there have been a lot of tears and angst most evenings, but that is a story for another time. another year has rolled by, another opportunity for resolutions-- which are kind of ridiculous in many ways, but i still have a little hope i can change for the better.

micro bake sale for the food bank

2011-12-20T09:46:00.000-08:00

maya and i just finished our micro bake sale. we made peanut butter cookies with hershey's kisses a few days ago, and we managed not to eat them all. this morning we set up a little table and sign right outside our front door. i put the beck radio station on pandora. we cozied up on the cold stoop in our jackets and started waiting. there was something very zen-like about this activity. we looked across the street at the blue sky above the houses and let the traffic flow before out eyes. then the random giving and not giving and getting began. our first customer was a woman who worked at ucsf and gave us $5.00 for one cookie. then many people walked by with just smiles or averted gazes. a happy woman bought two cookies for $1 and ran off laughing on high heeled boots. a confused looking man carrying lots of paper and plastic bags walked by and we gave him two cookies for free. a man walked by and said he would like to buy one but didn't have money so we gave him a cookie. then he ran back with a dollar, he had bumped into his friend down the block, and shouted a huge "merry christmas". our grim-faced neighbor came out of the house and biked away. another neighbor came out and gave us $5.00 for a few cookies for a kind co-worker. a woman from around the corner gave us a dollar for a cookie, then returned in her car, jumped out and gave us $5. more people walked by without looking. a woman tried to communicate with us in spanish, was unsuccessful, then filled a bag with about 10 cookies and walked away, leaving maya with her jaw hanging open. a neighbor from across the street came over and gave us $5 for "la nina" and told us in spanish about how he only had boys and some other things i could not understand at all. bob marley came on the radio. more people went by without stopping. bikers in the bike lane checked us out. we said "yes!" if we got a smile. miles made a half-hearted attempt to join us for a few minutes, but then went back to his video game upstairs. a ups man came by with two boxes for us from delaware grandparents. it was warming up. then one more woman came by with $5 and we told her to take the rest of our goods.

now we are going to take the money to the food bank. i have no idea if this will help the kids understand anything. money, giving, getting, it is all pretty random in our world. our bake sale felt nice, though.

wreaths, bogeyman

2011-12-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

photos are wreaths made by me, miles, and maya.

we had a potluck wreath party and it was a success. friends brought evergreen, bay, and olive branches, dried poppies, berries, artichokes, tiny oranges, clippers, dried flowers. a bunch of ladies and kids sat close together on the back porch in the cool sun and attached plants to wire, and plants to each other, while sipping on hot mulled cider with rum. it was very nice.

just now i was cleaning the greens off the back deck, leaving the back door open as i went in and out, when i felt a stab of fear. there have been two very violent assaults on women in my neighborhood recently. i thought about the door being open and unattended and closed and locked it, then went around the house checking in closets and behind doors to make sure this predator had not snuck into my home. i don't know what i thought i would do if i found him, and this feeling of being scared of a bogeyman coming into my house is awful.

there was also a homicide not far from here not too long ago. is it paranoid to be hyper-vigilant, or is it denial to not be?

i am missing chicken, my big strong barking dog who made me feel safe for many years. i hate that there is fear in the air on my beautiful sunny day off.

hour wait

2011-12-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

i've spent the last hour on the playground and in the cafeteria at my kid's school, waiting for a 10:00 meeting with the director of the green schoolyard alliance. there is a lot going on around here. the food pantry volunteers laid out pasta, potatoes, pears, garbanzo beans and sushi wraps on a long cafeteria table and families lined up to fill their bags and boxes(i scored some nice pears and brown rice). this happens every tuesday. kids played holiday songs on trumpets in a circle on the stage. fourth and fifth graders did some kind of project decorating t-shirts with the inclusion teacher. first graders ran excitedly across the playground with their lunch bags, on their way to see the sf symphony. a crew of gardeners whacked weeds and shrubs. "hi jamie" random kids called as they walked by. a car drove around the corner too fast blasting heavy duty hip hop. pre-school kids are riding tricycles around on the little playground and whooping, one crying. i spot my son's best friend loitering as he walks across the playground in the sun, doing a little dance on the four-square court before he spots me and calls out "can miles come over to play at my house?" now the clarinet players are rushing to the cafeteria with their instruments. a seagull flies overhead. the playworks coach helps a kid in a wheelchair hand over hand to shoot a basketball into the net. parents lead other parents on school tours, anxious questions rising into the air.

we are meeting to talk about making green changes at starr king school, and that is exciting. but this has been a sweet wait, reassuring me that even on the huge expanse of asphalt there is plenty of life here already.

why not?

2011-12-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

i had a pile of miles' old clothes to give away lying in the hall and maya found this size 6 suit. silly me, not thinking of my daughter! here she is the "office lady" with what looks like her first paycheck (actually a birthday card).

maya wore this to friend's party but then chickened out on the front stoop and wouldn't go inside wearing her suit because she thought everyone would laugh. she hid behind me and shuffled into the bathroom where she changed into a pair of pants the hostess graciously provided. so sad.

we are once again in the throes of christmas greed and entitlement but i think maybe even my materialistic son is starting to think about all the ideas floating in the air about sustainability, sharing the wealth, etc. he did not have a huge fit when i said no way to a toy all his friends seem to be getting, and that is a step in the right direction. we are going to have a little bake sale outside our house and donate the money to kids who don't have toys.

speaking of donations, our kids' school needs them bad. here comes my shameless plea. if you are reading this and have the urge, please go donate at the starr king website. supporting the schools really is an investment in the future. it feels good, too. pass it on.

more creeping normalcy

2011-11-19T17:44:00.000-08:00

(maya's photo of trees at potrero rec center)

i was at my kids' school this morning. we seem to spend quite a few weekend hours up there. it is a beautiful spot, and walking distance away. the school is perched on top of a hill with views all the way across the bay on one side, and across the city to twin peaks on the other. some days we go up there to water trees, or weed the garden. there are monthly work days where parents clean, scrape, paint, and build shelves. this morning a bunch of dads were working on a project with ladders and tools and extension cords and a few of us moms were up there to talk to the principal. the moms were there to brainstorm with the principal about the best way to find and hire a new kindergarten teacher because it is VERY hard to find teachers for the mandarin program. miles and the other kids rode bikes around the playground and hit balls against the wall in the fresh november air.

after the meeting i went to office depot. i am being moved from the school site and program i have loved and helped develop for five years. i am being moved due to the bottom line. the district needs the same number of speech and language pathologists to serve an increasing number of kids for the same amount of money. i just threw down quite a bit of cash at amazon for materials for my new site. at office depot i paid for color copies of all the picture communication boards and visual supports i have made for my classes over the years. i have to leave the materials i have made behind and my last day is tuesday. i am going to have to buy a laminator for my house as i don't feel comfortable going to a new site and asking them for funds for copying and laminating when i will be serving walk-in preschool kids from the community who don't even attend the school. basically i am being placed at a site and asked to provide therapy and materials for students with a budget of $0 to do so.

so, this is the new deal for me. less money to work with more students. kids at a school which is increasingly dependent on parent resources and support. everything is trickling down and interrelated in my little microcosm. i am identifying more and more with the talk about aftershocks and the 99%.

i really do believe there is enough to go around, and i have no problem having a little less money and spending time and cash nurturing my kids' school and my students. it just won't work unless we can all do the same, though.

cuddled in the bed in the dark with my two kids. we are watching movies with the excuse that one of them is sick. it's quite nice. i love these little people and will do everything i can for them.

insider's visual representation of mandarin immersion kindergarten math

2011-11-14T21:48:00.000-08:00

it has something to do with the number concept "10". not sure what else to say about this one!

3 birthday parties

2011-11-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

life here is almost too full and varied. just popping at the seams with interactions with all kinds of nouns.

saturday after dance class the kids and and i went to a birthday celebration and memorial for the brother of one of miles' classmates. he was shot and killed five years ago, and part of the idea behind the celebration was that we need to heal and love ourselves first in order to become a more peaceful community. the other big part was about creating unity. we arrived at the park in the bayview and people were milling around the rec center, but soon there was a call for everyone to hold hands in a circle. brother clint poured libations and said the word "ashay" each time he poured the water and mentioned brave people who had died. he asked us all to think of people who had died. then a young boy poured the water into some earth under big trees. a healer came and led us all in an exercise where we repeated her words about loving and taking care of ourselves. then the family released balloons and shouted happy birthday to their child who had been killed. much food was cooked and there was a storyteller as well, telling african folktales. it was a pretty amazing display of positivity. later maya joined in painting a mural with miles' classmate. this event has been held every year since the murder.

this morning miles went to a birthday party in the marina and maya and i waited while he celebrated his friend's birthday by bouncing on trampolines and playing dodgeball. as we watched all the tourists and kids riding expensive bikes and adults walking briskly with purebred dogs i felt a million miles away from where we had been the day before. we sat in the sand and watched a blimp move surprisingly quickly across the sky as we made a little sand and stone village. later we went to yet another birthday party in brisbane for an old friend's little boy, just a normal kind of park and a mix of brisbanians hitting pinatas and jumping in jumpy castles.

living here is sometimes not very grounding. time seems to pass so quickly when we can move worlds away by driving across the city.

i guess i should mention that adding the this feeling of being in many worlds last night was the monthly mom's night and we were out pretty late at el rio, watching bands rock hard until way after bedtime. the bands felt close to my age, one all ladies with a stripper who was almost bare, one a mexican punk rock band with close to a cult following shouting along, and another a devo-type band, the phenomenauts, super silly and awesome. at the end of the night i found myself talking to a young guy who had just come back from the military, where he had been for five years since he turned 17. he seemed pretty lost.

tonight at story time maya picked a book about two friends who are separated into different classes when they go to first grade, and a book about martin luther king. after we read both she got the first grade book and found a picture of the two friends holding hands and said "it's like in this book, she is white, and she is black, and they are like BEST FRIENDS!" which may sound trite as you read it but which seemed perfect coming out of my five-year-old's mouth tonight.

more feathered friends, please excuse the rant

2011-11-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

it really must mean something, how many of these posts end up related to birds. hmm, any ideas?

this has been a hard week as the reality has sunk in that i am being moved from a school site i have actually looked forward to most mornings for the last five years to a big unknown. not only will i miss specific kids, parents, and staff, i will miss the lovely location of the EES where i have been working, and i will REALLY miss the service delivery model, which was pretty much just playing with kids, singing and reading to kids, and helping them communicate along the way. waah, i will miss it. i will be going into a more clinical model, but i will wait to write more about that when i have more of an idea of what it will be like.

i do know this is an excuse to spend money i absolutely do not have on fun new preschool games and activities. hello, credit card.

i guess what is unsettling is the fact that i have worked in a field in one school district for eleven years and no one who is in charge of my fate (assigning me to kids and schools) has any idea what, if anything, i am good at. i admit, i have started to feel like i know what i am doing with a pretty specific population and service delivery model, but poof, i am being placed elsewhere, a little tiny part of a big machine which is basically just responsible for shifting people around so that there are enough therapists at enough schools to cover enough minutes of time and enough assessments with enough kids. so, i might have felt pleased with my work as i watched good things happen with my students, but the district does not look at my experience as meaningful, in the sense that it should be added to the district's supposed goal of improving outcomes for kids. no one is evaluating the work that is being done. sure, i have had evaluations but they don't go anywhere or mean anything. since things have been going well for the kids at my site it seems i would be continuing on or developing/helping improve upon the model within which i have been working (i had some fantasies about doing this kind of "bigger picture" work), but this does not even get considered. by anyone. except me.

teachers out there, you know what i am talking about, right? i will see how the new assignment goes, but deep down i am becoming more disassociated and less caring about the big picture. i still care about my students, and always will. but what can all my ideas about best practice come to when there is a bottom line so much more powerful that any person's experience or expertise? i think maybe hearing so much news about moving backward in so many ways in the bigger world due to money woes (republicans, i am talking about you) is making this seem harder. can't we be moving forward and enlightened anywhere?

sorry about that rant. i am sure it will be all right. at least i have a job, and maybe change will keep me on my toes. the world will be fine and occupy sf will rise up and we will all become happy socialists and there will be peace. the kids will start behaving themselves and brush their teeth vigorously twice a day without reminders. little caterpillars will stop eating all my backyard vegetables.

we visited a new friend of maya's from kindergarten today. they live high on a hill overlooking the green swoops of mclaren park, with a backyard that included "the back 40"--trees for climbing, two swings, a chicken coop with a little chimney, and honey bee boxes. ok, i am incredibly jealous, but we do have lots of wonderful culture and food around here, which you can check out while you scrape the garbage off your shoe. it was a sweet visit and miles and i even got in exactly 40 minutes of mommy vs. son soccer time on a big drizzly field.

here are the kids with the adorable chicks, and maya's lovely rendition of a girl turkey.

my saturday, i mean sunday

2011-11-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

hi,my name is miles millman and i am guest blogging on my mom's email for my first time ever ! i had just gotten into a cool comic called ''the prince of tennis'' because i had just started playing tennis again because i had found my old tennis racket in an old box in my mom and dad's room . for some reason i thought that i should start playing tennis.

and for the whole day i was basically playing tennis. at first i went to a birthday party and i thought it was so boring that i was going to die because the only reason i came there was to eat pizza and cake. it turned out there was only cupcakes and we also had to wait an hour to get the pizza.

and then later on i had to wait at home and do nothing except read the prince of tennis while waiting for my dad to come and take me to the park to play tennis with my friend named jed who also played tennis like me. then it turned out that we played my dad and jed's dad instead of me playing my friend jed. the rest of the day i have been typing this email for half an hour and right now i am saying the words you are reading right now and my sister and mother are laying in the bed and are trying to go to sleep but they cannot because i am talking to them right now for them to give me ideas. that is the end of my day so far, so bye i will talk to you on my mother's blog some other day. bye.

p.s. i am not spoiled rotton i just sound like i am

inclusion drama group

2011-11-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

i was asked for permission to have my son participate in a inclusion drama group run by a mental health specialist at his school. my first question was--is miles having problems at school that i don't know about? less than a year ago he was having anxiety problems and near panic attacks about not getting picked up on time from his after school program. remember that? i sure do. no, he was chosen as an open-minded peer model for a group that will have a few kids from general education/mandarin immersion and a few kids from the special day class.

yes! interesting that my son and i will be doing some of the same work/play--getting kids with and without autism or related disabilities together at school to play. i asked him about it and he just said he got picked to be a "good role model". if only he could be one of those for his sister at home...

i am all for a curriculum of creativity, peace,tolerance and inclusion at school--if this generation of school-kids doesn't start to get it right then we really are in big trouble, all too-many-billion of us...

2011 day of the dead

2011-11-02T21:45:00.001-07:00

my camera battery died for day of the dead (right?!), so i only have these two to offer from halloween.

halloween was halloween. i felt proud of my son because he wanted to be a "big fat chicken" and was comfortable in his very homemade costume. the yellow rubber gloves pulled over his shoes for chicken feet were my favorite, but he was most pleased with the fat aspect of his costume, a pillow stuffed in front and back which got a lot of friendly punches and attention. maya had the brilliant idea to be a toilet with a remote control skunk popping out, but we just couldn't put it together over the weekend, so she was a witch. we met our friends on potrero hill, saw some great decorations, and scored lots of candy. the kids were ready to go home after an hour--it has been a busy few weeks.

tonight i went out alone to garfield park to check out the day of the dead celebration and altars. once again i fell into a peaceful and somewhat awed state. every year the altars are more beautiful and elaborate. some are pure family, with grandmas and cousins, missed fathers and mothers. some are for the community, with various places to write messages to and thoughts about dead friends and family. people with beautifully painted skeleton faces walk throughout the crowd. there was a heavy metal altar. a skateboard altar. probably my favorite was an altar with information about the tribes of what is now called california--how most are gone, but some members live on. there was a tree in the middle of four converging paths. each path (north, south, east, west) represented something different, such as illumination of the mind, facing the darkness. you took a handful of cornmeal and walked to the center from the direction you chose, placed the cornmeal under the tree. incense is in the air. most people are talking and some are laughing, a few look sad. lots of marigolds and the smell of weed too. many little candles. all kinds of san francisco people are here, definitely many folks younger than me. a sorrowful sounding brass band walks by. a man is breaking the rules and selling ice cold beer from his cooler on wheels but that's ok.

halloween was a little unsettling because i can't help but notice every year how my kids are getting bigger and bigger. each halloween reminds me that this holiday will be limited--that all too soon my babies will not want me with them on halloween night. day of the dead feels more calming and grounding to me. somehow knowing that there will be people out celebrating us when we are gone, with a photo, a scrawled message on a piece of paper hanging in the air, or an elaborate altar with candles and art and sculpture is comforting. i can hear the sounds right now from my house, a bunch of drums playing together, over the waves of traffic noise, people pounding on their drums. i know there is a throng of people still out there, one man playing kool and the gang through a speaker, others holding hands and missing someone, most just enjoying being alive.

life story

2011-10-26T21:28:00.000-07:00

"when i am in first grade then n. will be in 2nd grade. when i am in 2nd grade n. will be in third grade. when i am in third grade n. will be in fourth grade. when i am in fourth grade n. will be in fifth grade. when i am in fifth grade n. will be in college. when i am in college n. will be a mommy. when i am a mommy n. will be an old lady. when i am an old lady n. will die."

maya's breathless account of the lives of her and her cousin, with sad ending.

local local, love

2011-10-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

this week we attended two evening school events. free, fun.

one was a visit from local author and illustrator ashley wolff, who came and illustrated a book that the kids "wrote" by yelling out crazy comments from the floor in front of the stage where she stood with a big pad of paper and super speedy drawing powers.

another was a visit from aiko cuneo, in conjunction with scrap (the scroungers center for reusable art parts). the kids went crazy and made unique and very wearable hats. they got to use glue guns and some kids got very creative.

thanks to the parents who organized these great events. we are lucky to have our kids' elementary school as a resource in the neighborhood long after the school day has ended.

and parent conferences were not too awful. after just a few months maya's teacher amazingly sees all the talents and subtle challenges i see in my kid. it feels nice to have your kid understood.

today maya said we were lucky that we can walk to a bookstore (there is a new branch of the dogeared books empire opening on 24th street). we started to make a list of things we could walk to:

dance class

school

st francis ice cream parlor

the bookstore

the library

the water park

the donut store

a's house

g's house

the skate park

the bakery

m's house

the garage sale

walgreen's

million fishes art gallery

the rice and beans restaurant (aka casa sanchez)

and in an emergency...the hospital

i just have to say that i had such a nice day with my two children i started to feel sad thinking about them growing up and leaving me. just walking around the neighborhood, and then attending an ice cream social birthday party at st. francis (no wonder they were so nice,they were fully sugared up), watching them play with their friends. then holding hands walking home in the dark past some very far gone men, hipsters smiling at us on their dates, passing toddlers reaching for our party balloon, an ambulance speeding by, the horrible window displays at walgreens and then home-- i felt so in love with my offspring. sorry if that sounds strange, and they both returned the feeling, maya with her many mommy i love yous, and miles with a request for cozy time. he read his book smushed next to me in maya's bunk, then climbed into his own, and said a now rarer "love you", too.

enjoy it while you can.

hiiiii

2011-10-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

mask made in art program at sf parks and rec afterschool enrichment program

in a very excited voice maya told me about this girl who had said hi to her near the jump rope area. she demonstrated how the girl had said "hiiiiiiiii!" with a huge exaggerated smile, standing on her tiptoes, with her arms up over her head kind of in a diving pose. she showed me this several times, cracking up when she said the big "hiiiiiii". i said the girl must like her a lot, kind of picturing a patronizing and slightly older kid. then maya told me that the girl was in the class "where a lot of the kids are hurt. one is even in a WHEELCHAIR!" and i realized she was talking about the primary special day class.

interesting that maya thought of this as the class where "a lot of the kids are hurt". i explained a little bit about wheelchairs, but really, only one kid is in a wheelchair, there are just a lot of kids in the class who move a little differently. and kind of awesome that maya was so amused and thrilled at the way this girl greeted her. maya thought this girl was just "SO FUNNY!"

somehow this anecdote was an antidote to the description i heard this weekend about the wondrous acres of land, knitting, high teacher student ratio, wood shop, and focus on social emotional development and creativity to be found at the private school where my friend's kid just started. i am not in denial, and know my kids will have an education constrained by budget issues, and ridiculous testing, and many other obstacles. but at least they are in a place that is open and welcoming to all.

hiiiiiiiii to all of you, too.

scary witch

2011-10-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

howdy

sorry about this very generic photo of pastorino's pumpkin patch. but look at the pumpkins! the hills, the mist? the cute children! and what about this creepy creepy witch? maya listened to her gravely and then bravely posed for this photo.

this is the time of year when we are confronted with lots of images of death--graves and bones and ghosts and leaves that have fallen off the trees. the whole cycle of seasons feels a little strange here, because there is no winter. no cold dead time followed by spring. instead there are days of gloom and days of sun with holidays that evolved over thousands of years in very different climates attached to the calendar on the fridge.

sometimes i think not having the progression of cold to colder to coldest to warm to warmer to hot to cool, with accompanying holidays and natural events to celebrate (light returning ,winter solstice, various religious holidays with candles etc. , harvest festivals and feasts when there really was a crop t0 harvest, egg focused holidays in the spring when birds build their nests)--really throws us all off here in san francisco. seems like food is always growing, and it is pretty much never the dead of winter, and birds seem to have babies any old month. maybe there are more rhythms but i am not feeling them. maybe this is a problem with city living.

there were many memorable thoughts and quotes and vignettes since i last wrote, but none so memorable that i actually remember them. too busy with work and work and kids and driving all over the city and picking up kids and work and dishes, and walking dogs and putting kids to bed, making lunches, iep meetings, driving, work, picking up kids, dropping off kids, work, meetings, making dinner, you get the picture.

last night we saw a huge yellow moon in the sky and talked about how big the earth is compared to the moon and the sun. miles stated that "we learned about the solar system today" and then proceeded to share some vague information and some false information. they are not learning much science at school, and although miles is definitely able to read to learn at this point he mainly reads to learn more about the world of manga soccer players. we googled image comparisons and the kids were impressed with the size of the earth and the sun. it got a little cosmic. maya found out that we are in just the right position from the sun to be alive. miles said something about the earth moving two inches around the sun each day which was a little frightening to hear. i guess that will have to do for now and i will have to relax about my 5 and 8 year old not being able to find good jobs when they grow up.

i am tired of seeing worksheets. i am ready to throw all the worksheets in the recycling bin and teach my kids something about the world,but then i would have to be a non-working homeschooling mom. which is something that does cross my mind occasionally.

i read in the paper today about rick perry making a big deal about expanding offshore drilling, repealing environmental protection laws, etc. a nice republican lady i know mentioned those crazy environmentalists and i just held my tongue. i had heard obama talk about his jobs bill the week before on the radio and had stupidly thought it might go through. it made sense to me.

andtoday a kid was being mean to other kids at soccer practice, again, and we graduate school trained adults just didn't know how to deal with the problem, again. because it is a hard problem to deal with.

how smart are we peoples?

anyway, tomorrow i am going to sonoma for a ladies overnight getaway. can you believe that? at bedtime i got many extra hugs and i love yous from my wonderful children, which i enjoyed. i will miss them too.

walk to school day

2011-10-03T22:22:00.000-07:00

here are some happy folks walking up the rocky way to school for walk to school day. i had some work at home time today and found myself listening to some experts on what the lack of nature in our lives is doing to us. interesting stuff about how urban planners 100 years ago prioritized proximity to nature and the whole fascinating subject of how many of us are no longer interacting much with the world people evolved in, but with the world people created (they stated 53 hours a week average screen time for american teens). anyway, i better get off this laptop and go out in the back deck in the rain, or at least pet my dog, or water a houseplant. just five minutes a day of being in a natural environment (and the definition of THAT is up to you) will improve your mental and physical health.

iiiahh

2011-10-02T20:54:00.001-07:00

walking slowly home from dance class yesterday maya and i came upon a little table by the house of color run by iiiahh. three ladies wo-manned the the table which was covered with photos of objects and curious objects such as a george washington era wig made from a diaper, a box which when opened contained a tiny theater with a tinier mouse in a mousetrap watching a show, and a felt puppet whose teeth were made from a hair clip. People kept stopping by, mostly asking if the things were for sale (they weren't) and many staying for a little while to check out the objects and ask questions. maya was pretty delighted. there was a tunnel with a flashlight inside that you could switch on, a sequined black jellyfish made from an old purse, and more.

this could have been an art show to encourage recycling but there was more to it. i looked at the web site and it turned out that in previous weeks these ladies had held swap meets where people were encouraged to stop by the tables to look at a mouse house made of bread and little wooden puzzle pieces, and to trade something they had with them or at home for one of the wooden pieces. the artists then took home the swapped objects they had obtained, photographed them, and then made them into something new. look at the website--it explains things much more clearly than i just did.

this process appealed to me quite a bit, as a way to increase the circles of communication, encourage reuse, and inspire people to do something different with their time. i am sure there is a more scholarly way to put it, but it was just kind of fun.

nothing heavy duty in this post, nosiree! if you click on the iiiahh link please take a few minutes to check out the awesome clip of a man advocating for sensible spelling.

brushes

2011-09-25T21:02:00.001-07:00

report from the mission

busy busy. here is a photo of chloe's grave. 2 weeks ago maya tossed a ping pong ball into an empty glass bowl and won a little fish named chloe. she was a good little fish who swam swiftly to the surface to eat her food each day, and seemed to enjoy the music she often heard living near the stereo. on friday, however, chloe was found floating, her soul gone, slightly curved. maya cried a little but then got right to the business of mourning. we wrapped chloe's body in a scrap of black flowered fabric, and buried her under the fuschia. maya topped her grave with orange and red flowers, and ran inside to draw a picture of chloe (seen here, wet from the rain). she found that the cement block near the fence was a good place to sit and look at the grave and think about chloe.

all level-headed and calm and purposeful. i remember when miles' frog died he was so inconsolable and angry. i recall hysterics at a similar age when i learned my dutch bunny had died without me. my mom told me that when she was seven she had a year where she was so disturbed by a relative's death that she threw up every night. i hope i can preserve this peacefulness about death in my daughter.

my mom came to town to witness the starr king fireballs' game with ace defender grandson miles-- a good and close soccer game with the powerful sunnyside eagles. we hit a birthday party and my mom and miles and i hiked the glen park canyon loop while maya put on a show with her old buddies. that night we went out for a special dinner at lolo, owned by the parents of another awesome starr king fireball. miles was treated like gold with mini-tacos and sliders while we ate delicious artichokes, tuna tacon, crab tostadas, and felt very special as were comped three glasses of wine. afterwards we wandered to valencia street and ate organic ice cream and bought vanilla beans. spoiled rotten.

today maya and i went to a new friend's for tea. i have walked by the store front pictured above on 24th for over a decade and wondered at the little cut out newspaper faces in the window. this turned out to be our new friend's house, which tourists were examining as we arrived. the pictures are stipple portraits from the wall street journal and to me seem to mark the passage of time somehow. inside was a not so san francisco like space--a storefront, carport, warehouse-y kind of place with little twisty staircases and leaky roof and extra small doors for the kids' rooms and skylights and both high and low ceilings and friendly interesting things to look at everywhere. there was a little monkey bar set up the dad had nailed right into the carport roof. the tea party lasted about 6 minutes but we stayed for five hours as the afternoon evolved into a grill party with the neighbors on the other side of the shared outdoor space, kids running back and forth between houses. we met the neighboring musician and artist couple who put out oysters and fancy cheese while maya and her new friend danced around to the ultra lounge music in tutus shouting "no you can't" in mandarin and shaking their fingers in the air. our friend's parents live right in the warehouse with them half the year and we talked in the space between the houses as the kids played hide and seek and neighborhood kids came out of nowhere to play soccer on the new and enviably wide treat street sidewalk. we ate grilled salmon and mushrooms and cauliflower and talked about fish extinction and architecture and of course our children.

last week someone we know with three little kids was seriously injured by a car--in the ICU paralyzed with a traumatic brain injury. it brought up lots of feelings and i remembered working in the sf general ICU during my internship, people astonished at what had happened to them--shot, strokes, car accidents. i worked side by side with an amazing speech therapist who could jump right in to help people understand what happened and how they were now going to figure out together how to communicate, to eat and drink. once a young woman came in, 21, who had been hit by a car outside a nightclub. she was paralyzed from the head down, tears pouring noiselessly down her cheeks, staring at us, and i almost blacked out but my mentor SLP just stayed calming by her side. she ended up six months later with only a limp, a kind of miracle. the person we know has started to move her hands and feet volitionally, and smiled at her children in the hospital.

incredible that you could smile in a situation like that, but people do. i am thinking about her a lot and hope her recovery will be a good one.

what does this all mean? i wish i knew but i don't.

RIP chloe,

get better, parent friend,

be careful around cars,

and love to you, readers

chapters of randomness! crystal cave!

2011-09-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

1. my kids' school: yippee, test scores went waaay up across all the grades and classes, which makes people feel good. i will try to look at this as a very positive thing, rather than think cynically about what these standardized tests and requirements of adequate yearly progress yada yada yada really mean. like, possibly, the destruction of good public education. i do feel proud of the hard-working kids and teachers. let their learning continue to be high-scoring AND joyful.

2. on that note miles' teacher left without a single day's notice. she seemed kinda' unhappy, and we will never know why she quit except that there were "personal reasons". of course. miles has let me know that it doesn't matter if they do homework this year, and that they are not learning anything this year. it is shocking how quickly apathy has set in! the sub seems like a nice man, but is not really teaching. miles has been saying things like " i flew a paper airplane because i wanted to see if mr. X would mind, and he didn't mind tooooo much." hopefully there will be a new teacher soon but in the long run it is all just fine. i had a completely senile teacher in 5th grade who assigned the same homework every day for weeks before parents started to notice something was up-then he disappeared and left in his wake a trail of subs who could not pronounce anyone's name. i remember this year as the first year i was around pot, which was being smoked AT RECESS in a stone pagoda right outside the school.

3. we had an expanded group for mom's first friday out and i love my mom friends! woo hoo. you know it is a good night when you are singing the chorus from that song about canada at the bar (take off, to the great white north,etc.). these same great moms showed up for the soccer practice at potrero del sol on monday and one of them brought her mini-rex bunny with a portable pen for all the kids to pet and commune with--very cool and unexpected.

4. maya got together with her old old old pre-k friends from 3 weeks ago and they played pretty hard for a few hours, rampaging through about 20 changes of clothing. it was REALLY FUN according to maya who informed her friends that kindergarten had a lot of rules including: 1. you have to sit IN your square! 2. you have to sit criss-cross! and 3. you have to LOOK AT YOUR TEACHER THE WHOLE TIME YOU ARE LEARNING!!! (maya was pretty incredulous about this one). she told them that you get to play to learn in english class but in chinese time you just have to learn. there was one upsetting incident involving a lower case "a" that got my mama hackles up but she is sleeping in her uniform right now and seems to be going along with the program.

5. today we met up with our brisbane friends and ended up picking blackberries which were growing dangerously intertwined with poison oak at san bruno state park. this was my first time here (thanks corinne) and we got a good haul of blackberries and saw lots of butterflies and thistles and thistle down seeds and eucalyptus trees and ferns and a little bog and even bumped into an old painter friend from the philly days who now lives in noe valley. there were also four little kids running around with their shirts off making obnoxious jokes and laughing raucously.

6. after that we parked in a mysterious warehouse's parking lot and followed our 7-year-old friend (and graduate of the brisbane hiking camp) up a completely insane trail to the crystal cave. there were several spots which were so steep and narrow that the only way was to hold onto a rope and pull yourself up hand over hand. more poison oak and nettles everywhere. it was so dense and the trail so narrow we really felt we were walking through the brush, and then there it was--crystal cave! high enough to walk in and about, hmm, 15 yards deep. i almost expected to see cave paintings from 10,000 years ago. we were very lucky to have friends who knew had to get to this cave. the kids got out their headlamps and chisels and hammers and we found a whole bunch of beautiful crystals, growing like little teeth or cities out of cracks in rocks. i found the best one, a crystal that was perfectly clear with a perfect point, about as big as a jellybean, but better.

writing day, co-housing

2011-08-29T20:54:00.001-07:00

friday morning i met with a friend of a friend who is a writing coach. what i should really be doing is going to bootcamp and running 3 miles each morning, but instead i talked to this nice lady about finding some direction and focus for writing fiction. we will see!

that afternoon the kids and i went to a fundraiser write-a-thon at 826 valencia, aka the pirate store. maya ran to hug and hold on to her ex-pre-k teacher who had been there writing for four hours, and dictated a story to her which included jet packs and hot lava suits. miles sat down and went to work for an hour with a writing prompt to describe an alternative origin of the universe (he included a nice sensory description of a god's sandal). when maya and i went to look for a bathroom there was a little wait and a nice man told us there was a bathroom out in the back if we were desperate. i'm desperate! yelled maya. the nice man took us out back and chit chatted about 826 valencia and maya starting kindergarten and his own little girl starting kindergarten and we made some jokes and i was totally star struck because it was dave eggers! a real live famous writer!

last night we went to my brother's for a bbq with an old high school friend who now lives in a co-housing community in oregon with her husband and little girl. the focus of their co-housing community is sustainability and it sounded really interesting and good. along with sustainability and sharing resources there is also being able to walk out and visit a friend across the way while your kid is asleep, and to walk home safely after a few drinks. the kids go out and play in a pack kind of like the old days, but different. it brought up a lot of feelings about the people i love who have scattered and how i still wish i had this kind of community in my life, with these people i love. i guess it is not meant to be so i have to make the best of what i have...which is a lot.

haven't said this in a while, but i miss and love you, far away friends. wish you were a short walk away across a safe and quiet field of kids playing, waiting to have a drink and a laugh in the dark. maybe watching some fireflies on an end of august night.

report from the first week of 2011-2012 school year, snacks

2011-08-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

well, we made it through the first week of school and are into the second. this is a wierd post, i feel it coming...

my daughter has sailed smoothly into kindergarten and says she loves it. maya has not questioned the fact that her teacher speaks chinese 90% of the day. today she was chanting "hong suh, lee suh" and when i asked her what it was she said that it was a pattern (of colors, in mandarin). her class is the SFUSD dream of diversity. she has two very good teachers. i helped a little at lunch today and saw maya just chilling out in the huge loud room, eating her lunch slowly, pretty smiley. outside in the sun during the too short recess she got to play an exciting game of cookie monster with her cousin and the fabulous coach d.j. of playworks. a few stumbles and trips but she is keeping up with the crowd.

miles' entry into third grade has been a bit bumpier. this is a public blog, so i won't say too much, but there have been some clashes between his new teacher and the kids and parents. i am trying not to get too sucked into the negative thoughts and worry, and be supportive instead. the principal asked if i would help make posters from the caring school curriculum for all the classrooms with some basic norms and rules and expectations. for kids AND teachers. how we all need to treat each other. we are all learning this stuff, but to get along in the same building, and really in any public space, there have to be some ground rules. poor kid also hurt his legs at soccer camp and i can tell he is deep down worrying about a possible damper on his professional soccer career. i am waiting to hear back from his doctor. we are all missing the very long and lazy days of summer.

this was an especially good and lazy summer and i need to hold onto those sunny memories as we move into the high gear of the school year.

(and let me say or the record that i am personally against benching kids unless it is a last resort, and even then it should be an opportunity for teaching and relationship building, not punishment. as in, let's sit down together and make sure you know why you are sitting on this bench and let's figure out a way it won't happen again. kids need to run around!!!)

as for me, i have a full caseload already, and there is a lot up in the air as to what will unfold at my sites this year. i guess i can't divulge any details as this is a public blog, but the special education redesign in this district really does seem to be happening. i think it is a step in the right direction, but hope that there is more systematic implementation of the next steps. one teacher was bawling on me at the end of the day, her class so full of needy kids, she loves them all and wants to teach them well but on the 4th day back was feeling it was "a cluster f**$#".

there is a lot being asked of people without many resources to support them.

today i cruised the bulk aisle at safeway and walked out with bags of whole wheat goldfish crackers, pretzels, cranberries, graham crackers. i made three big packages of snacks, one for my daughter's teacher, one for my son's, one for the after school program. i gave money to the teacher i work with to buy snacks for our preschool class. the food bank can't supply snacks anymore.

we are all in this together, this creation of every new day here, the kid raising, the kid feeding, the votes for parks and schools and clean environment. ask someone who takes care of other people what he or she needs tomorrow. don't eat any meat if you can. do what you can to spread the wealth.

sorry to be preachy and rambly. i promise my next post will not be so.

p.s. here are a couple of photos from the annual folsom street food festival. beautiful, fun, tasty. among the gourmet delights miles managed to find a cheeseburger (a REALLY GOOD cheeseburger)

first day

2011-08-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

here is my little girl on her first day of kindergarten. she walked right into school with the line of cute little strangers. i came home and called my mama who recommended i watch the beautiful and cathartic documentary "the cats of mirikitani". i have cleaned and shopped like a good homemaker on my childless day off and i am itching to go pick up my babies.

end of an era

2011-08-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

today was maya's last day of preschool. yes, i cried. partly it was sadness at the relentless march of time that has made my babies grow so big so fast. there was a party where the teacher read stories written by the big kids in literacy group ( all five of them) and the kids acted it out. it was an amazing creative collaborative, with kids just jumping in to take parts and no one fighting over who got to play who and how they should do it. they worked it out with just a tiny bit of help. and you could see the end result of two years of preschool--little kids who can cooperate, create their own narratives (with some elements lifted from movies, video games, and pop music--all gamely accepted by the staff which refused to let kids wear commercial characters on clothes), sing, dance, have fun, and express their feelings.

and now it is on to the world of public school, where i have been overwhelmed the past few days with the reality of the need to raise test scores, the need to be in compliance with special education law,and the grim budget scenario. mandates to do lots and lots of things with very little money.

but somehow the kids still seem pretty happy.

politics these days are so scary and the problems seem related to some real basics. not to sound like that person who wrote about all she needed to know she learned in kindergarten, but can't we have a little more creativity and cooperation in congress? if the preschoolers can do it, can't you guys?

at the end of the preschool graduation a beloved teacher (who will now forever be even more beloved) handed out candy necklaces she had made for all the big kids. we had advance notice, and had prepped our 8-year-old with some ice cream before the party. i expected the little kids and siblings to start dropping like flies on the floor crying and yelling as their big friends walked around with shiny candy draped around their necks. but nothing at all. and the big kids started opening their necklaces up to share. miles scored two pieces.

we will miss you very very much room to grow preschool.

wildflowers, wood line

2011-08-07T21:06:00.000-07:00

we managed to spend a lot of time outside this weekend, which is a very good thing.

saturday we all went to starr king to help water trees and weed the garden. even with a mild hangover it felt sweet to be in a garden with seven kids who were excited about pulling the most weeds, finding big radishes, and washing carrots to eat. walking through the starr king open space we saw all kinds of wildflowers. later maya and i went to the nursery and came back with a shovel, aphid eating ladybugs, and some geraniums to cheer up the deck. the compost pile was chock full of big roly polys and we spread them around. the garden has been a little forlorn lately, and needs some tlc.

today we met our friends at the presidio, and walked (on top of, only fell once) andy goldsworthy's wood line. very worth checking out, maybe it will become a birthday tradition. continuing on we saw a very big bird of prey we could not identify in the grass near the path. then we hit presidio bowl for a few hours of '70s rock, strong drinks, bowling (i was awful, boo hoo), turkey burgers and shooting and driving arcade games. we walked back up the wood line and i was pleased to see miles with his friend talking about different birds they had sighted, and dragon books they are reading. she is one of his few girl friends...i like that he has at least one!

tomorrow my summer ends, with professional development that starts at 8 am. i will really miss these wide open days and weeks.

ok it has been a while

2011-08-05T23:17:00.000-07:00

hello friends

we are back in the city, and i have just returned from a night out with my starr king moms for our first friday night home in the mission. whiskey, wine, talk talk, and oysters and pate at a pop up restaurant in sugar lump cafe.

it was a fantastic few weeks out of the city. we were at camp mather for a week, where miles learned ping pong and we all got a healthy dose of RELAX. no cleaning, no cooking,no driving. we spent our days under tall redwoods, swimming and eating (and playing ping pong). maya rocked the talent show with it's a hard knock life. we swam (and played ping pong) and met friends and it was mell0w and beautiful out under the redwoods, climbing rocks and no traffic or crazy people. after that we spent two weeks in sonoma, just me and my two beautiful kids. ice cream, the bookstore, pizza, swimming,the chocolate cow. sun, trees, sun, blackberries,wine, reading, playing on the stage, grandma, wine, soccer. our dog ran free, the kids and i a happy threesome. i watched disfunctional tv all night. we looked at real estate ads before we bought lattes and baked goods on the square in the morning. we saw the stars every night. we caught crawdads and a tiny trout in a creek and swam and it was quiet.

now we are back. and i am thinking, why live in the city if you are not devoted to social justice, or improving urban ecology, or the arts. am i to be inspired by the city, or depressed by it?is it time to write my novel? today we went to the park and miles played soccer with a little boy who just moved from nicaragua. swam in martin luther king pool. and tonight i met my starr king mom friends for an awesome 24th st night of wine, whiskey, pate and talk, talk talk. we all flirted with the curly haired 43 year old waitress with braces. school will start soon.

my baby starting kindergarten.

so had some serious where should we live thoughts this weekend. should we live where it is calm and peaceful? quiet with no garbage on the ground, wine at the park and friendly faces? inverness and point reyes were so natural with trees and sky and beach all around. today we saw a woman lying on her side outside walgreens in handcuffs. was she an escaped murderer? miles wanted to know. i had no answer, only a clear image of her vulnerable back, lying on the sidewalk, a man slipping a hand into her back pocket, hopefully to find her identity and help her. a fire truck, police car and ambulance were soon on the scene, so i could tell the kids she was taken care of.

anyway, we are back. thanks to my starr king mom friends for this buzzed night. back in the city for now, with lots of plans for getaways to places where we are closer to the land, the plants, the animals, where the population is not so dense and intense. i need it, i want it, this time with nature.

love you guys,

4th parade photos

2011-07-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

lots has been happening. night out on 24th street with my new girl gang. kids in camps singing songs on stage about greasy grimy gopher guts. fireworks. peaches. much summertime behavior regression.

we spent a good weekend with my family in sonoma. took the ferry up and back, and spent our three hot days there swimming in various pools, chasing bullfrogs again, eating much delicious BBQ, playing with cousins, having city friends up for a visit, and cramming 11 people into the two bedroom condo. on july 4th we watched the sonoma parade. it was a lot of fun but i had many non-patriotic feelings ( these feelings are not pretty, they are somewhat superior and not very open-minded--"hah! you think our country is so great? you know nothing!" and so i should keep them to myself) and identified most with the super freaky "mutants for molecular energy" contingent. at one point an old grey war plane flew slowly over and as people yelled "awesome" i felt queasy inside. turns out it was a transport plane but it looked like a bomber. at another point a little girl from starr king moved past us in a boat on wheels--starr king is everywhere!!

we just left the front door open and the kids kicked a soccer ball around outside the condo and miles tried to teach his little cousin lacrosse. rocket could just bound right out the door to run around on the lawn. we watched fireworks with a bunch of my mom's friends who all sounded very stoney to me as they commented on the display. i bumped into an old colleague from sfusd who lives in my mom's condo complex now and hangs out with a bunch of speech therapists in sonoma, one of whom retired last year and now works as a wine hostess. i will knock on her door next time we visit.

maya said she wants to move to sonoma. her reason: the tv is bigger.

photos:

amazing amazing amazing lucky shopping cart!!

"the gathering" christian rock band float

more of the amazing lucky cart, is it conceptual art commenting on the greed and luck of the american, guzzling gas as we fill up our carts, or just someone's idea of a good time? i love this thing!

random friendly panda

captain america

emergency chocolate delivery, yum

good eye at potero del sol

2011-06-30T22:34:00.000-07:00

i don't think of myself as a bird person, exactly, but there are a surprising number of posts on here involving birds. nests, eggs, baby birds,library chickens, empty lot roosters, hawks, and of course that little dead pigeon maya had to pick up off the sidewalk. at the park for the second time today, miles and friend being loud and obnoxious, pit bulls frolicking on the field, the smell of weed drifting over pleasantly from a group of teenage dudes maya whisper screamed "come here!" with an excitement that seemed too much to be real. "it's a bird in a nest!!!" and there it was. a little nest tucked into a straggly honeysuckle vine about four feet off the ground, with a small mama bird and her loud peeping featherless baby with beak open wide. i hope we did not scare her too much, but i had to lift the kids up to take a peek and i just had to take a picture. the mama stayed in the nest and just kinda looked at us. if you look closely it appears that this urban bird has used some of the abundant local materials--garbage--to construct her home.

maya remarked that usually birds build their nests in trees, but now we know that that is not always the case. buena suerte, pajaros.

let's pretend we are poor

2011-06-30T13:26:00.001-07:00

this morning at the park maya wanted to pretend we were poor and lived there. "see this table? that's where i sleep." she told me, lying on the picnic table bench. "let's go play in my bedroom," she said, running up the grassy hill to the playground. kind of wierd, but she is trying to work things out. there has been a lot of conversation lately about the homeless and half-naked man who is living under a dirty sleeping bag on the sidewalk by the walgreen's parking lot for the past few weeks.

today i bumped into an old friend, who looked great, and was happy, but who is really living on the edge income-wise, and who has faced eviction recently and lives on food stamps. she is very tied to the neighborhood because they don't have money to take trips out of the city. she wasn't complaining. she showed me some photos of her beautiful daughter, and told me about some of the social justice activities she has been up to with her band, the brass liberation orchestra. when she spoke about her daughter it was in the most glowing terms--she is the most amazing girl, so not-entitled, so appreciative. my friend really does not have money for indulgences, and her daughter really does appreciate what she has, and is living a pretty different life than most kids. they actually wake up every morning and meditate for a few moments.

i have to say, i fantasized i would raise non-entitled, non-materialistic kids, but between my own weakness for buying them stuff and peer pressure on them to have what their friends have i have not done a great job. these kids want a lot, and are not afraid to ask. they have a strong sense of justice about when they think they are being treated unfairly. translation: a lot of whining, begging, arguing. i wish it was a little more peaceful around here.

i want to figure out a way to channel that energy and sense of justice into caring about the larger world, not just who gets what when why around here. can we do this without being dirt poor? does seeing the man living under the sleeping bag create appreciation for our apartment, or just insecurity about ending up on the sidewalk with him? we have tried modeling a life where we don't buy too many things we don't need, and give some of our money away to help kids and schools and hungry folks. but reality is, they have a pile of toys sky-high.

their little hearts and brains are still so soft and malleable. it is just impossible for another generation to grow up and want as much stuff as the last american generations have. any ideas?

solstice-ish 2011

2011-06-27T23:02:00.000-07:00

look at some of the crazy energy i photographed on and around the summer solstice and pride week in sf. i think miles was influenced by all the outfits he has seen recently and he looks pretty awesome in this wig he found in maya's dress-up. according to the zoo artists maya is a bug about to be devoured by a tarantula but she is obviously not going to go down without a fight. and i just liked this art on a plywood wall by bi-rite ice cream ( i finally went--yes, delicious). the days will start to get shorter now, which will hopefully lead to a little more sleep for us all.

today maya wanted to find her old sling for her arm and it is no longer here. i splurged and we went to walgreen's and bought two ace bandages and she hugged me and whispered that i was the best mommy in the world. i will try to remember to help my kids and myself be happy in tiny ridiculous ways like this. tomorrow she has firm plans for me to wrap up her arm like it is broken and hanging in a sling and wrap up her knee from calf to thigh. she has packed a little purse with gauze and bandaids and will be showing off her injuries and tending to others at preschool.

took rocket to fort funston today and met an old friend. the sky was gray and we found a sculpted dune with a black line running through it looking perfect against the sky. we climbed up and sat and talked looking from high up over the pacific ocean, rocket charging up and down the dunes, rolling in plants, digging, and coming up to us every few minutes overjoyed, looking crazy with his scruffy hair and wet nose covered with sand. our dune sloped down to create a valley of sand between us and the next dune. i considered log-rolling down like a kid but was a little too lazy for the hike up. not lazy, tired. maybe next time.

tadpoles

2011-06-18T00:37:00.001-07:00

up in sonoma where as usual all seemed suspiciously idyllic. happy kids of all ages frolicking on the green grass in the square, fountains trickling, bargains at the church mouse, a quiet pool to swim in, ice cream at the chocolate cow, maxwell's miniature golf course, no litter to be seen. fragrant flowers at every turn. my mom drove us less than a mile out of town to this tiny pond near ravenswood winery where there were bullfrogs croaking loudly through the sunny afternoon and it was just fine for miles to strip down to his underwear and capture many tadpoles in a frisbee.

this morning the kids and i ventured into the lisa kristine gallery i have walked by many times and i was surprised to find a lot of powerful images of people in slavery at the back. i had to pull miles away from the slavery photo book and was surprised by a little tear in my eye. there was a pleasant but obviously mentally ill man hanging out with us by the miniature golf course, who the manager mentioned was someone she had to keep an eye on so he didn't scare away guests. and a funeral. so all is not perfect, even in sonoma.

here is maya, taking a photo of herself with gum hanging out of her mouth. lately she is all over the place, sweet and funny, incredibly silly and loud, and even a little mean and sneaky. sometimes i am overwhelmed by her, she is changing faster than i can keep up with, but i am trying. testing, testing, "can i do it?" "what will happen if i do?" "will i still be loved if i do bad things?" i get mad a lot, and wish i was more patient. she took this photo of herself with gum hanging out of her mouth, and i can hear her saying, in a contrite but almost hopeful voice "i know you're going to be really mad at me." she sometimes cries "you don't love me" in a pretty anguished little voice. of course i do, more than you can know.

worries, peaceful

2011-06-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

working with my hands, listening to music, these things can take my mind off the ever present worries. yes, this blog is partly about devising ways to fully experience life without being miserable. not denial or escape, but let those worried thoughts come and go right through me. yes, the anxious brain is trying to problem solve in the face of a perceived threat, but there is a point where it is not problem solving, but pointless worrying that is going on. let those thoughts flow right through!

one kid at preschool, another lying in my bed reading shonen jump comics from the library for the last few HOURS. i have been in my sunny garden, where i get lost pulling young weeds from the vegetable beds, adding compost and working it in, making tiny furrows for seeds and planting them. i have become much better at rolling my fingers in a way to drop one seed at a time. i took a break for a big green lunch of sauteed collards, lacinato kale, and arugula from the garden. there are a few artichokes back there, lots of cut and come again greens. the wild blackberries are all along the back fence, full of white flowers. the wierd pimento bush is thriving with some small fruit. i picked one plum, but the fruit trees are fairly devoid of fruit this season. little roses are blooming, nasturtiums. the chayote squash has climbed up the bougainvilla--two stories high. some small green tomatoes and strawberries are doing ok but wishing for more sun. lots of plants growing and birds all around. i am lucky to have this space and time.

very much liking the itunes radio station afriki djigui theatri these days. i have no idea what the words mean. check it out, it will make you feel good.

this morning we were out of milk and i had the idea that i could send miles around the corner, just right around the corner to buy some. do people in the suburbs and small towns send their eight-year-olds out to buy milk? i didn't, because of some sibling issues this morning. but maybe tomorrow. i will just have to trust that the one big building in the way, the lack of my eyes on my boy, will not cause anything bad to happen to him.

i think i will go lie down next to my little boy and rest. better get it while i can.

another new person

2011-06-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

maya took this picture. if you look closely you will see several roosters walking aimlessly around this weedy lot on alabama and 19th. hmm.
this morning i took miles away from a playground full of his buddies, chasing each other around aggressively under a blue sky--to attend a writer's workshop. so proud of my once so anxious boy. he sat with a bunch of 8-10 year-old writers of all shapes and sizes around a big wooden table and said "no way" when i asked if it was ok to leave--but said it smiling. so for two hours i sat in the cozy corner at 826 valencia with a big coffee and read a collection of memoirs written by incarcerated women in writer's workshops taught by wally lamb.

the workshop is called "diary of a young whale" and i tuned in now and then to hear the kids asking and answering questions about predators, decomposers, prey, producers. two hours of brainstorming and writing, to be repeated next sunday with a finished product of some sort that will be typed up and published in a chapbook. anyone remember those? i had to drag miles out of there and he took his paper home to work on. he asked me to read it aloud in the car several times as we drove to carl and ellie's house and then counted the little blue lines. it is about a lump of dirt named bumper who lives in hawaii. now he wants to be a writer and an athlete.

826 valencia is the brainchild of dave eggers, and full of pirate gear, tourists, a beautiful aquarium with a blowfish that can be viewed in a tiny tiny dark theater with two theater chairs, and eager earnest writers who want to help kids find their voices. there are lots of anthologies written by local kids, and by local adults. being there made me want to go home and write--i used to want to be a writer, too.

we went to carl and ellie's and met india for the first time. her big eyes are an almost metal grey, amazing curly hair and tiny doll hands. she feel asleep in my arms, all peace and trust.

another carless day

2011-06-10T21:03:00.000-07:00

another carless day. i love this kind of existence, reminds me of those post-college days in newark delaware which in some ways were the best times of my life. just let it flow. we roll out the door with rocket and a vague plan to hike bernal hill and find some more secret slides but only make it one block before we stop for the kids to get their hair cut at stephany's. everyone speaks spanish and miles gestures to make his hair plan clear. we walk a little farther to casa sanchez where we are lucky enough to eavesdrop on a big group of traveling cool skateboard ladies from portland oregon discuss skate parks and the skate business while we eat rice and beans. we make it another block to the water park where miles entertains some kids running through the fountains. a little farther south to garfield playground, home of the purple dinosaur and the wierd moving balance beam. we watch a very professional looking soccer game and start to laugh hysterically as we avoid stepping in doo doo and hockers. we give up on the healthy hike up the big hill and head back for ice cream, stopping at the bookstore on the way where i read maya a book called king and king about a gay prince and buy virginia burton's book "life story". waiting for our cones i spot this cool woman and her twin girls we met at rancho cicada last year. we take our cones to the water park and soon the kids are soaked and sugared, chasing each other around topless and happy in the sun.

i topped off this day at our wonderful neighbor nancy's house, drinking a bottle of nice red wine and eating a delicious sandwich made with her home-preserved strawberry jam while miles and her son got awfully goofy. i put miles to bed with a nice wine buzz.

a day without the car is often a better day, i need to remember this. for so many reasons.

educational

2011-06-06T21:55:00.000-07:00

today i took maya to preschool and what did we beehold? a bunch of kids swarming around the back window. sorry about that. anyway, a swarm of bees was resting on a wooden railing in the school's outside area. they had just appeared there. exciting. i guess this is not unheard of in these parts.

it was parent appreciation morning so i stayed a little while for the treats that had been provided for us bumbling parent folk. maya's teacher quickly dig through her bookcase and came up with a book about keeping bees and read it to the kids at morning circle. when i picked maya up after lunch the kids were all clustered at the back window again, watching the bee rescuer and learning how to capture a swarm of bees.

i love preschool because so much of it is incidental, wonderful teaching. how could you come up with a more interesting science lesson than a swarm of bees in the playground and a guest bee keeper removing them?

i wish this kind of teaching and learning could go on for many more years but reggio emilio is undervalued and (supposedly) harder to implement as the kids get bigger.

anyway, i was feeling a little sad about preschool coming to an end for my youngest. miles saved some allowance to pitch in to see kung fu panda 2, and it was raining, and i am a sucker, so we headed over to the 4 star theater on clement street after picking up maya. miles scored two free bags of popcorn from the concession stand after asking for it in mandarin, and we were the only people in our tiny movie theater. after the movie maya talked about china, and kung fu, and then dressed up like a kung fu lady when we got home and set up little kicking stations around the living room and then got a plastic stick and waved it around like a kung fu lady would and twirled around in circles and crashed into the couch a few times and made lots of hilarious kung fu sounds until she whacked her brother in the arm with the stick and then it was bedtime.

so, there is incidental learning going on all the time, whatever setting you are in. it is just so fabulous when things that are real and meaningful and interesting fall into your child's lap and there is a teacher waiting near her with the time and skills to go deep with it.

locals

2011-06-05T21:56:00.000-07:00

another full day. potrero hill rec center for a pick-up soccer game, lots of little boys running in the green. rocket sprinted around the field like a maniac and maya and her friend lucy made bead rings and shared a bottle of orangina on the playground. i took miles for his first violin lesson with one of the teachers from his school. on her block were several extremely friendly cats who greeted us with purring and rubbing. miles really liked the big grey guy, who a neighbor informed us was named chewie.

later we visited with an old friend and my brother and kids in parque ninos. miles and edison looked pretty huge on that big seesaw. i remember the first time he walked the 7 blocks to this park without being carried or strolled and what a big deal that was. the free farm stand was there, giving out free organic produce and acme bread, surplus from the ferry building farmer's market. the acme bread is a little too good with our fake butter right on the crust. on the way home we stopped to buy ice cream cones and have some cheap thrills on the water park swing. we ended our full day by having dinner with our friends and their three boys, the boys wild, temperamental, sweet, maya taking the three-year-old as her special little friend.

feeling sad that my fear of flying is keeping me from spending time with my friends and family on the east coast this summer. it has been a long time since we were in delaware, and this august my best friend will be there too. i tell myself we can't afford a big trip but of course we have a credit card. it's just still too scary. julia suggests hypnosis, but what if it worked? then i would be in a plane, which is just not at all safe. back to my old mantra, why can't we all be together, why are we so far apart? documenting the pleasures of our very local existence makes this pain a little less.

seward slides

2011-06-03T16:19:00.000-07:00

day 5 summer vacation 2011

we found and rode the seward street slides. i had heard about these for years and finally checked them out. two old concrete slides dug into a hillside by a community garden, with a couple nice curves and drops. there was a community garden above and an old playground below. the one on the right is fastest, and riding on cardboard adds a little speed. of course i met someone there i vaguely knew--a fellow public school mom (sunset, an awesome school) and teacher (at alvarado). it made me wince inside to see her reaction about miles being at starr king--"the mandarin immersion program, i hope." i guess it will be a while before people consider starr king as a good school for kids in all programs. kind of sad.

we park-hopped to walter haas where we hooked up with two of miles' classmates and ate hard-boiled eggs and cherries and olives. the girls rollerbladed, miles played soccer and got loud, and...maya did several monkey bars on her own!!! something just clicked for her. very exciting.

grey sky, summer cold, miles at a friend's house, rocket sleeping on a pillow.

maya's the best

2011-06-02T08:25:00.000-07:00

maya just woke up and wants to contribute to the blog:

maya: i love my mommy when she takes me to go get donuts. now it's your turn.

me: i love maya all the time.

maya: one time my mommy told me how to write it down, a poem, umm, and then my dad read the poem to me and it was great. and then i'll tell you the poem too. it said...

some fish are blue

some fish are red

some fish are sleeping in a beautiful bed

and then this is the next thing i wrote

some fish are red

some fish are blue

some fish are sleeping in a beautiful pool

me: i can't believe you remember that!

maya: and now say, "you're the best"

me: you're the best

chicken, dog bite, spider family

2011-06-01T22:41:00.000-07:00

will you look at this? our city friends own this land and home in the wilds of mendocino and we were lucky enough to go spend time with them over the weekend again. we walked through redwoods and sequoias to the fairy corral, the kids gathered kindling and played many ball sports. we drank a lot of wine and ate delicious meals. it is so beautiful up there. the kids can just move around and make a lot of noise and throw things and we are not all on top of each other. i was sad to leave.

what was not so fantastic was that our little foster dog was attacked pretty badly. our friend's dog picked him up in his teeth and shook him like he was a rabbit. he is healing ok but had to get antibiotics for the big puncture wound. he was already fearful. it is hard being responsible for a tiny dog. maya was right there and i think it was traumatizing for her, too as we all screamed at the big dog and finally his owner had to kick him hard in the head to make him open his jaws..

we hit two libraries today. the first was the portola branch where i went down memory lane remembering my days working at e.r. taylor elementary. this is a sunny working class neighborhood with way less garbage than our hood. i see e.r. taylor has several school gardens going now. the portola library was full of people, kids lined up to play on the computers and lots of garandparents. we went to a separate room so the kids could participate in a storytelling theater type thing. i am always surprised that my son especially is so open to these unknown quantities, but in minutes they were in costumes and part of a spider family, miles as cushion and maya as see trouble, acting out a story from africa "why the moon is up in the sky" with the very talented storyteller sally davis.

later maya and i ventured out to the bernal library. she really really wanted to go because she had heard about this event and that there would be cookies and chickens at the library. she imagined the chickens roaming free, just as she imagined this morning that all the kids in china were sitting in the backseats of their cars listening to the same terrible katy perry song as we were "in their land". a wonderful author-illustrator and 20 year bernal chicken and duck farmer, jane wattenberg, showed us lots of different eggs, let us pet her chickens, read a book, took a wide variety of questions from the audience, and gave away postcards. maya was very impressed with the way the author's clothes matched the cutest chicken's feathers, and i was impressed by her life, making children's books and raising animals right up there at the most beautiful part of bernal hill north.

my kids are getting a good start to learning over the summer. i hope that other kids are too.

last day

2011-05-26T21:05:00.001-07:00

another last day of the year. at times the year seemed interminable, but overall my little students made amazing progress and i am proud of them and will miss them. one little boy said goodbye and then, as his dad tried to drag him out of the room, launched into a detailed explanation of all the different kinds of explosions that will take place at his backyard explosion party that i will be invited to. mentos and diet coke. baking soda and vinegar. some chemical i have never heard of. the explosions will go THIS HIGH. like mount saint helens up to the SKY. this little guy entered school having daily 45 minute tantrums if he did not get the BLUE THING and is now able to say, "it's ok, i like blue a lot but sometimes i have to have other colored (fill in the blanks)." he used to avoid other kids but will now sit next to his little buddy making playdough volcanos together and say "awesome" and mean it if his friend shows him a playdough island with a tunnel through it. if i get the invitation to the explosion party for sure i will be there.

reality is hitting about my daughter going to mandarin immersion kindergarten in the near future and i am in obsessive worry overload, especially as she is going through an especially "out of her body" phase and seems pretty out of whack and disregulated. hey, maybe she is having a hard time because her mom is overly worried...could it be? i just read her brother's report card and instead of feeling proud of his second grade achievements, which include speaking, reading, and writing in mandarin, i worry about my daughter not being able to hack it.

sometimes i feel like a terrible mom.

anyway, maya has been asking me lots of questions about what is important lately:

what is more important, a house or food?

what is more important, your house or a big building?

what is more important, your kids or your car?

what is more important, how a bandaid looks or if it covers your boo-boo?

what is more important, your kids or watching tv?

what is more important, going to work or your kids?

what is more important, your pet or someone crying?

what is more important, love or eating bednight snack?

my son asks different questions: (this is yu-gi-oh talk)

who would win, explosive magician or battle fader?

who would win, volcanic doomfire or cyberdark dragon?

who would win, voltanis the adjudicator or mystic swordsman?

who would win, guardian sphinx or injection fairy lily?

there are people on the radio talking about ascending and declining civilizations. republicans fighting democrats. here in our city there is a battle going on over what kids should go to school where and why.

it takes all kinds to try and figure out this world. what is most important? how do we decide? is it getting the color blue all the time? winning the yu-gi-oh game? i like how maya is thinking and i want her in a school which encourages the search for this kind of wisdom. it feels like too much to ask lately but i want to know we are moving forward towards determining what is important for all of on our big blue marble. otherwise, what??

secret garden

2011-05-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

friday night we went and saw bossy dudes and rainbow moods, short plays by short people, performed at the DeYoung museum, which was once again wonderful and heartwarming and amazing. i laughed, i cried. there are people out there, and they come to MY KID'S SCHOOL who are teaching narrative skills through playmaking and we are all lucky to have them. go stagewrite.

saturday we hiked up potrero hill for our tree-watering team orientation. friends of the urban forest planted nine trees along the sidewalk on coral road by starr king and they will need lots of tlc this summer to survive. so we learned about the bucket and plastic bag method of irrigation, found out where the water could be turned on, and were teamed with a partner family who will join us once every five weeks or so in our quest to keep these slender guys alive. yet another commitment but how can you say no to watering baby trees?

the kids got a peek at the learning garden which is only accessed by 3rd grade at starr king for some mysterious reason. maya and a few kindergarteners were very busy pumping water from the rainwater catchment barrel and pouring it on the plants while miles and his buddies hunched over a table in the bungalow playing yu-gi-oh. it was a beautiful day with blue sky and wind. on the way up maya picked up a dead baby bird she found on the sidewalk by the parking garage. it was very sad, but she decided that if we took care of the trees the birds could make nests in them and the babies would be safer. we are seeing desperate nests all over the place lately, eggs on stone ledges, nests on parking garages. many little birds are flying in and out of the overgrown jasmine in our backyard. one nest of eggs was savaged by a big old raccoon.

then a preschool alumni reunion in glen park followed by the fireballs' last soccer game of the season which...they won. woo hoo.

summer is almost here and i am feeling the call of rivers and big trees and even a faint call for a child-free getaway to a hot springs somewhere up north. i have been obsessively worrying about how my daughter will fare in kindergarten, and trying not to. i think she is feeling it, or feeling the end of preschool,because it has been a time of much yelling and crying and "you don't love me anymore." she is a mess and i assume it is my fault. we need some quality time in nature, or at least i do, getting away from all the arbitrariness of weekdays and weekends and school years.

heard a guy on NPR today talking about how kids who grew up in the 80s were taught that government was incompetent and or bad by watching shows such as the a-team, dukes of hazzard, and even ghostbusters. it was scary how much sense his argument made.

and today in my garden i harvested a bunch of greens, carrots, onions. i planted some tomato plants just as a big wind kicked into the afternoon. whoosh whoosh. miles was picked up and taken to the house of air. maya acted out a story where a sculpey horse and a sculpey snail were cruel to a sculpey sheep. he was perfect and they were either broken or overcooked and they would not be kind to the sheep unless he broke off his ear. which he did not. i put her to bed early and then miles returned from his party. he lay in bed next to me, this often rude little dude, and rocket cuddled between us as i read him two chapters from his surprising new book of interest, the secret garden. i have held on to this copy since childhood. miles may be growing up, and may not want to water trees, or even come play in our own backyard garden often, but i can see that this book holds him in the same way it held me a long long time ago. and that is nice.

nonsense post

2011-05-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

c'mon, people, can't we do better than this? seeing this litter and weed infested tree pit makes me think of how there is so much potential in humans. we can all throw our trash in the street, or we can walk one more block and throw it in a trash can.

see what these nice elderly people on 23rd street have done with their house? they keep up their garden and plant pretty flowers and staple and glue tacky little plastic toys all over everything to create an effect that is actually quite lovely and entrancing for the little ones.

sorry, i am a little off tonight. my car got hit during the night a few days ago and it is getting appraised tomorrow. who knows if we will be carless soon, i do not trust the insurance folks to do the right thing, whatever the commercials say. the person who hit me left a note with their number and my insurance has taken over. i am counting down the days until summer vacation starts as work has been very meeting-heavy with some administrative shenanigans i have been unwillingly dragged into.

summer! i will emabark upon a serious exercise routine. write my speculative fiction novel. enrich all the soil in my backyard garden. find an awesome planter to put on our sidewalk to combat the trash and general blightiness of our block. spend quality time with my wonderful children, enjoying each other and not yelling "i'm going to kill you!" (yes, i actually said this the other day. maya: "kill me?..." (breaks into sobs). overcome or accept my phobias. develp myself professionally as i have no time to do this during the school year. make plans to be super-volunteer at my kids' school and try not to panic about maya entering mandarin immersion kindergarten with all of its demands and who knows who for a kindergarten teacher. catch up with my far away friends, some of whom are only 30 minutes away.

take some deep breaths. stop watching netflix. figure out some s*(^%.

nighty night. mom, enjoy the on-deck hot tub for me.

slightly apocalyptic

2011-05-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

a year ago i wrote about the day of action march to the civic center to protest budget cuts to education. it was a very high energy hopeful kind of day.

perhaps it is just my mood but the day of action today felt a little more apocalyptic. i dragged miles and maya down to the civic center. exiting bart we heard drums--there was some kind of crazy sculpture made of a bunch of huge plastic drums attached to each other in a blob shape big enough for about ten people to walk around hitting the drums. which they were doing. nearby was a super intense looking young man with no shirt, sitting on a backpack in the windy sun with his eyes squeezed shut, all his muscles clenched. i was feeling a little like i was at a grateful dead show (yes, i mistakenly did that a long time ago). as we got closer to the civic center i felt a falling sensation, a swift decrease in optimism as i realized it was a very small, quiet crowd, not the energetic swarm of thousands and thousands who seemed to represent a sure route to raising awareness of the school budget crisis last year. this was a few hundred teachers and a few kids and parents. we made our way to the front and heard some loud and impassioned speeches which i had to explain to miles. basically, can't we just keep what we have in place with the tax extensions? "tax the rich" chanted a teacher organizer from berkeley. the chief firefighter in san francisco got up and spoke about republicans who were making our world less safe, empty firehouses and slow response times to crime. as he spoke a fire blazed away in the mission district. an angry sounding older woman asked repeatedly "if not us, who? if not now, when?" it all sounded true but felt more desperate than last year. are people going to give up and let it be this way? there does not seem to be any easy way to solve the financial problems, but i guess i just don't buy that keeping taxes low to keep businesses happy and in our state is going to make things better. what is the next level of protest and rally? do we rally the teachers to strike? do we storm the state legislators? are we going to have a revolution? or do we just make do and think about fleeing to finland. i really don't know but today seemed sad.

the kids had an awful soccer practice with lots of anger and out of control boy-ness. rock throwing and sand throwing and pushing and fighting and not listening. it felt very edge of the world up there at the potrero rec center. kind of crumbling and crazy. and on the bus ride home from the civic center on the 9 little miles squeezed into the middle back seat, maya and i a few rows up. it was crowded and then some aggressive sfmta guys got on asking for transfers and passes. soon the man next to me, with a big pizza box and two kids in strollers was furious, mf, mf, what the f you asking me for, on and on and he finally flashed two fast passes at the guys. a woman near him had passed him the fast passes, miles saw it all and was confused. so the guy had snuck on with his wife and babies, outraged as he seemed that he would be asked for proof. some dudes in the front of the bus started commenting about how he should have shown them the passes in the first place and soon there was arguing and ugliness and i really had the impulse to grab my kids and get the h.e. double toothpick out of there.

anyway, i did not, and we made it home just fine. miles is at his friend's house, staying up too late watching a kung fu movie. rich is playing apocalyptic space rock in the other room. maya is dreaming about...what? in the other room. fashion. mommy and baby creatures. things that all makes sense and have patterns and logic. she tries hard to find order and meaning in her world. i need to try and do more of that. right now it seems like a lot of messed up chaos that i can't do much about.

sunday streets again

2011-05-08T21:12:00.000-07:00

mother's day. we were lucky to catch sunday streets and were out for almost the entire day, walking from our house to 18th and valencia with rocket dog. i saw a student i had when he was four who is now a junior in high school. his mom recognized me and i felt old. he told me about some mech droids they were building in japan and was very into rock the bike (music powered by pedaling bicyclists). later another student sped by on her scooter. when she left our pre-k program at 4 she was barely speaking, today she politely introduced my to her brother and looked like a beautiful about to be 2nd grader. of course we saw many friends from the neighborhood. there were a bunch of kids from miles and maya's preschool checking out these amazing dancers (imagine video of amazing dancers here, i can't seem to post the video right now) but my favorite was a little boy who was just learning how to walk when he was in preschool, and usually used crutches to get around--breakdancing!! he was inspiring.

painting part of a mural outside the brava theater.
we saw this before sunday streets really got going. it is conceptual art? did someone just throw their recycling bin through a glass door in a rage? did someone break a glass door and someone else push the bin through to make a statement of some sort? hmm...trippy...confusing. watch out for the broken glass.
also at the beginning of sunday streets miles and maya enjoyed lying on the asphalt in the sun, until a cranky cop suggested they get up because it might scare other people to think they had been hurt. c'mon.

been a while

2011-05-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

i got out of the blogging habit there for a while, sorry. lots going on for you and me.

here are my kids and two others we picked up walking to school yesterday. you can almost feel the cool wind and smell that dry starr king openspace grass, can't you? not bad.

i went to walgreen's today to pick up some allergy medicine, allergies are killing me lately. as soon as i walked in the door i saw this woman whose name i can never remember but who i have known for years. we worked together at cadillac head start in the tenderloin almost ten years ago, and now i see her around my son's school, where she picks up kids from the preschool and brings them to her daycare. she is an african-american woman, about 65, very nice. at cadillac there was a boy with autism who was very smart but just learning to communicate, and he would only listen to her and had to hold her hand on all the field trips. she was shaking and her eyes were bugging out and told me that the security guard had stopped her and searched her bags because he thought she stole something. her daughter was there with her and calling some head honchos at walgreen's to complain. she told me the security guard didn't like black people and she was the only black person in the store. trying to make her feel better i went up and told the guard i had known this woman for years, she took care of kids, and she was very upset. he said he had apologized ten times, but she was still mad. happy day before mother's day at 24th and potrero. at least they were making sure he would be more careful with accusations in the future.

last night my friend with the beautiful mansion hosted a teacher appreciation party for all the starr king staff. i was on the wait staff and helped bring out and clean up the amazing donated food and drink parents made. sangria, ceviche, paella, lemon squares, grilled chicken, donuts. a dad and his two friends played music and the teachers seemed pretty happy and mellow sipping sangria in the dusk looking over the city. i bonded a little with the special education teachers and once again offered up my offspring for integrated playgroups and any reverse mainstreaming which might happen. i stayed late drinking manhattans and laughing with the funny parents after the teachers had gone home and we had cleaned up. there was not much talk about the drastic budget cuts and crazy state of education funding. more about that later.

i got to talk to my best friend far away today. she called while maya and i walked home from dance class on 24th street. it was some kind of communion day with girl after girl walking by in beautiful white dresses, juxtaposed with the hipsters and tourists checking out murals. while we chatted maya took at least four pieces of gum from my pocket, removed her shoes, and tortured the dog on some concrete steps.

we are all hanging in there together in this random world.

Dog Fest and school funding

2011-04-16T21:05:00.000-07:00

my mom was in town and i wanted to do something fun with her that was very san franciscan, so we went to the mckinley elementary school fundraiser in duboce park, dog fest.

this is the best school fundraiser on earth, with tons of fun booths to win prizes (maya especially got a big old pile of booty while miles chose mostly perishable sugar prizes), jumpy houses, art activities good food, so many old friends and acquaintances i felt i was looking through some kind of time machine telescope, and lots and lots of dogs. the emcee was hilarious, and talked his hilarious way through various dog contests such as owner matches dog contest, best lap dog contest, and best ears contest.

you hear a lot about buying local, keeping money in our country, etc., but this is the REAL new local economy. we spent about 25 bucks and had a very fun, tasty, and entertaining afternoon--and all that money went right back into funding a very nice public elementary school. this was one step up from the usual school fundraiser, which is a fun event that has either entertainment or an auction--you get something for your money, but it is mostly within one school community. this was people from lots of different communities, different schools, dog lovers, neighbors. this should just be going on every weekend somewhere in the city. i guess it kind of is.

this is the way it is going to be until some kind of miracle happens and there is more money for kids and education. i will not get started on the equity issue because sooner or later all schools will have ptas putting on dog fests, right? right?

anyway, i am procrastinating getting to the main point of this post. at the end of the day, after being surrounded by dogs for four hours, and with a LOT OF ENCOURAGEMENT FROM MY MOM, i was pulled, sleepwalker-like to the northern california family dog rescue booth, where, all kinda' dreamy-like i found myself holding a very small white dog, and then taking him on a walk, and then signing some foster papers, and then walking out of the park with the little dog, and bringing him home.

he was rescued from a shelter one day ago, and passed some kind of test proving he is kid-friendly, is neutered and has his shots. that is all i know. so there was a little furry stranger who needed a home, and now he is sleeping in the bunkbed with miles and maya.

did i mention my husband is in europe, touring with his band, and will be returning to this situation whether he likes it or not?

i explained to the kids that daddy and i may decide it is not a good idea to keep him, and that we are fostering him, and have not taken him home to keep, just to think about. uh-huh.

there is not rational way to decide to get a dog,at least if you are a busy, working, urban parent whose backyard is solid vegetable garden and whose kids are a bit loud and bonkers. but he is here, at least for now. and where to draw the line? who do we help and how do we decide? it is all mysterious. i hugged the rescue lady with tears in my eyes as i rushed off to the starr king fireballs soccer game (we won again--play bad news bear theme song in your head).

what do you think?

photos for daddy

2011-04-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

this is pretty much photos for rich, who is touring europe with his band carlton melton for almost a month. he is living the high life in europe, staying in castles, being fed gourmet dinners and fine wine, not doing dishes or laundry or homework help. but look what he is missing!

we survived out first trip to disneyland. it was a fine road trip with our friends nancy and angus. nancy and i blasted satellite radio rock and roll on the rented mini-van stereo and reminisced about our long-ago childhoods. disneyland was hot with long lines but not horrendous, and chock full of glorious people watching opportunities. lots of 'mericans and many tantrumming children in the happiest place on earth.

here are the kids with some pirate bling on huck finn's island.

and here is maya, who had a very crummy cold but who rode big thunder rollercoaster twice anyway, as minnie the bride.

back to the city we were lucky enough to stumble upon the caesar chavez day celebration on 24th street this weekend as we walked back from dance class. some kids in miles' class marched by in the parade as well as many upbeat labor union members.

cowboys who were actually carpenters rode these lovely horses through the mission. i love this picture, taken through some flowers which are part of the extensive sidewalk-scaping around 23rd and harrison streets.

and yesterday we were treated to a fantastic bike ride at sunday streets on the great highway. we arrived early and scored free rentals on bikes, one for miles and a bike with a kid's extension bike on the back for maya and i.

things are a little scary lately with earthquakes and the horrible california budget situation. hard not to think in terms of apocalypse, and disappearing to farm some land and become a survivalist in alaska. but look at this place! the great highway closed down, we rode our bikes south for a while and then turned around. we stopped at this activity area run by a group of teenagers in a group whose name i sadly can't recall. they were smart and nice and gave the kids books and brownies for participating in bean bag tosses and twister games. they all went to sf high schools, public i think, and their group raises funds and travels to other countries to build schools for kids who need them. some of the kids had just returned from a trip to help build a school in bali and they were now collecting funds to build a school in haiti. i made sure miles noticed how cool and awesome they all were.

there were remains of a ship sunk long ago poking out of the sand where ortega meets the beach. we pedaled right by it, maya saying "this is great, i love this day."

look at that blue sky. things are bad but could be worse. ride a bike, grab a hula hoop. build a school.

bus politics, youth poets, my first (political) house party

2011-03-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

today was one of those days that links together random events somehow. or maybe it's just me.

we took the 9 bus downtown to the library, and of course there was a weird little incident. we sat in the front and it was crowded. a man in front of us started complaining about people not moving back. another man told him "you just have to say excuse me, man", and the complaining man was disturbed enough by this comment that he started saying "i don't want to have to touch anyone's ass when i walk by", "don't give me that fucking shit," etc. miles was deep in his yu-gi-oh comic book but maya was trying hard to follow the situation. often these types of comments are returned by people staring at the floor, but on our bus today several folks spoke up. "watch it, there are kids on here", "yeah, the kids on the bus, watch your mouth", and "just don't get on the bus in the first place." maya whispered to me "they said there are children on the bus" and i explained that the people were trying to make the rude man be more polite. she looked around, pleased.

at the main library we checked out the youth speaks poetry slam for a few minutes, during 90% of which i had to wipe my wet eyes. there were teen poetry teams from different high schools. the first one we saw was three girls and their poem was funny but so sharp and intense, with a repeated chorus of "why are americans so distracted" when there were things like the oscar grant shooting and our president ( one girl said "george bush in blackface") sending more troops to fight wars overseas. the second was even heavier, with an amazing teenage boy shouting about how hard it is to be gay in our society while three other teens acted as the haters behind him. the poem ended with him hanging. lots and lots of bad words and passion, miles' eyes bugging out of his head. i think we may have stumbled into two of the best poems as both got very high ratings from the judges. amazing. when we walked out the kids were quiet and then miles said "but c's parents are gays and no one hates them, right?"

we got out of there and on to two playdates. after miles' playdate his friend's dad cajoled us into walking over to a political house party thing for their friend who is running for sf district attorney. i am so unaware of politics, but am slowly learning more as we stay here longer and longer. turns out the candidate is someone we know from another context. i knew a bunch of these people--from friends with kids, the school district, our neighborhood. the candidate is david onek. here is my summary:

*he approaches the job thinking: we need to bring people from different spheres (community, employers, law enforcement) together to collaborate; we need to ask if policies are fair and equitable; we need to do what works and look to other places for best practice

*he thinks san francisco is a place where it is possible to incubate some ideas such as increasing opportunities for youth, convicts, and ex-cons in order to reduce crime

* he is a person who has spent 20 years working with law enforcement as well as youth and community organizations and will be able to build on this background to bring people together

*as far as my own dangerous neighborhood he thinks that people need to feel comfortable with law enforcement so that when there are crimes people will inform on killers and they can be sent to prison (not happening now). the roots of gang warfare run pretty deep, but it could also help if there were more positive things happening for youth.

so anyway, i will vote for him for sure but it is a little hard to hear all these ideas which sound great, coming from a person who is loved and trusted by people i love and trust-- but still know that there are so many roots to crime (from unemployment to old gang rivalries to kids not getting good educations, to kids with many adverse childhood events ,etc etc etc etc) that for anyone it will be an uphill battle trying to make things safer and better.

it did feel good being in a room with all these smart, caring people and to feel connected to them. lawyers, teachers, stanford education researchers, therapists, people who work with youth and family organizations, all their adorable offspring, and...me. and i guess this is how grassroots politics is supposed to work. you go and meet an actual candidate and talk to him and people who want to support him and start thinking about the issues involved. and know there are other good people who have a little hope that things might get better.

quite different from pressing a key to send an email to a senator somewhere.

while we drove home, late, from this meeting, maya asked what a poem was. i gave her some lame definition and she said she wanted to hear some poetry again. i told her we could read a poetry book tomorrow and she was excited. she also made up two poems:

"some fish are red

some fish are blue

some fish sleep in a beautiful pool"

"some fish are blue

some fish are red

some fish sleep in a lovely bed"

oh, my little girl, she is so deep!

nighty night

china basin

2011-03-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

rich was playing music all day while i struggled somewhat with the kids to listen, be nice, do homework and chores. we went to check out the southern end of sunday streets, which the map indicated was mariposa. we parked in some weeds and were treated to a beautiful and somewhat end of the world scene. no cars allowed, but very few people straying to walk on this piece of concrete by the bay. music provided by a small band of brass and string musicians, camped out happily on a broken concrete picnic table. one man played an instrument that was part trumpet, part violin, from transylvania. strange hulks of mission bay architecture to the west, wierd pilings in the water, fantastic clouds stretching to oaktown. a man fished fruitlessly from a short dock and a homeless man sat on a piece of concrete behind barbed wire and danger signs, contemplating the water. we saw a long-necked bird dive under the water for seconds on end, and pigeons having a party. puddles everywhere filled with strange shapes and weeds and garbage. a few kids biked through the puddles and sped away. a few folks walked their dogs. it was a good sunny hour, even with the kids whining and falling down. things are perfect and then they get ruined and then they start to get perfect again, right? this landscape will survive us, i am sure. miles put his toes in the bay and maya made plans to go home and pretend we were a family of deer with a bluebird friend.

probably the best (legal) way to watch a disney movie with your kids

2011-03-06T20:06:00.000-08:00

birthday party cancelled, rainy day, so i looked online for something to do. miles and maya and i ended up heading to the castro to see the singalong little mermaid at the castro theater. i was surprised to see a line around the block and many folks in costume, but was assured we would get in. we did! taking our goodie bags to our seats we walked through a sea of happy people wearing golden paper crowns, waving light sticks, laughing. the pipe organist was playing "under the sea" and soon the hilarious emcees sebastian and ariel took the stage. there were some subtle sex jokes that the kids did not have a chance of understanding. there was a children's parade across the stage of little girls in mermaid and princess costumes. the very large and beautiful ariel introduced each one with great appreciation in her voice, even maya who was wearing jeans and a red shirt, and was introduced as "a beautiful princess from a far away land" and given her bag of fruity snack to great applause. then a brief adult costume contest and the movie began.

why ever go see a kid's movie the regular AMC kinda' way when you can see it this way? we were given props and instructions. "tell ariel to look out when the sharks come", "hiss when you see the eels", "make kissy noises when eric and ariel have a kissy moment", "blow your bubbles when she takes the bubble bath", "wave your glow sticks to warn ariel not to listen to ursula". everyone obeyed and added their own cheers and boos and gasps. oh yes, and it was a sing along with words for all the songs provided on screen and a majority of attendees singing out loud.

afterwards we stopped in at cliff's variety and i impulse bought a snoopy snow cone machine.

super camp. super fun. on the 33 bus on the way home a rough looking twenty-something-year-old overheard us talking about the movie and asked if we had been at the castro theater. she said she had been to the sing along sound of music. she thought they should have the rocky horror picture show, which brought me back. i used to love seeing that,everyone throwing toast when a toast was proposed, and squirting squirt guns in the rain, watching ridiculous meatloaf and sexy tim curry. and before the kids were born i used to go to the castro way more, for serious movies, silent movies, and to throw pills at the screen during mommy dearest.

there used to be more silly adult behavior in my life and i miss it.

the campiness today made me feel so much more connected to my fellow audience. and paying a little bit more was worth it, especially knowing that the theater can then afford to show non-commercial important films. i think we will be back next month for the sing along wizard of oz. wanna come?

cassie, missed you today...

the only rock video you will ever see posted on this blog

2011-02-21T22:04:00.000-08:00

rich posted the first rock and roll video i ever made on youtube. the internet is amateur heaven! anyway, here it is, made on my ever so wonderful iphone.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnaklvuCX0U

that's rich's band carlton melton with music legend j mascis sitting in for a song at cafe du nord.

the usual

2011-02-21T21:50:00.001-08:00

maya's quote for the day, looking at another brown item on the sidewalk as we walked down utah street to a friend's house under a beautiful blue sky.

"you know, mommy, most every day we see a poop."

so true, so true.

pathetic parenting moment

2011-02-20T20:52:00.001-08:00

last night i trailed behind a fast-moving and funny dragon composed of a bunch of fast-moving and funny 2nd-4th graders in the chinese new year parade. in front of the dragon were the bunny dancers and fan dancers. it was a cold and drizzly night and i felt very alive in the bright lights and music, sipping a delicious manhattan a fellow parent handed me mid-parade as we wound our way through the downtown streets.

maybe this is wierd narcissism, immaturity, obsessive thinking, getting older, who knows, but lately more and more when i am feeling the most alive, joyful, amazed, or loved i also think about dying. it happens more and more. i felt it last night as part of a spectacle, this fierce love of being alive and the thought of being dead. i know this is a subject i need to come to grips with a little better. maybe it is time to get some religion unless anyone has a better suggestion.

tonight, my seven-year-old dragon dancer surprised me by echoing my thoughts. in a happy family moment, drawing together at the table he looked right at me and said "i hate thinking that i'm going to die." my pathetically inadequate response was to hug him and say "then don't think about that."

it's an art, not a science

2011-02-17T07:18:00.001-08:00

i work in a preschool special education classroom, and dealing with undesirable behaviors is pretty constant. kids not following directions, not staying with the group, not being safe, difficulty sharing, yelling, grabbing, knocking over towers, and some hitting--all in a day's work. of course most of the time our students are just wonderful and adorable. during the past two months, however, one of our students developed some pretty severe aggression toward the other kids. hitting, throwing hard and heavy objects, poking, kicking, pinching, making scary faces and sounds--up to 30 times an hour. his primary teachers and i came together as a team and devised a plan for what we decided were attention seeking behaviors: completely ignore all the negative behaviors, heavily praise the good ones. this did not fly with some of the assistant teachers, who thought it would be impossible to ignore the bad behaviors,and did not feel comfortable refraining from saying no and telling our student he was doing things wrong. but the plan was if he hit someone we would attend to the hittee. if he was about to hurl a block at someone we would just take the block from his hand with a neutral expression and move right on. this involved a lot of creative defense and comforting of the students while simultaneously trying to create lots of opportunities for our little aggressor to get positive attention. we had tried giving him positive attention before but not ignoring the negative stuff.

as these things go, the bad behaviors escalated for a while as our little guy tried more and more desperately to get attention. for the past two weeks there were a lot of crying kids, ice paks, and some serious skeptics on staff saying that this would not work, things were getting worse, we should not keep ignoring bad behaviors, this was bad teaching. it is hard to work with people who don't have patience. it is also hard to hear these doubting voices when you are trying hard to implement a plan that may or may not work.

however, the past two weeks things have been much better. some of the kids that our aggressive little guy was targeting the most have, as he probably wanted them to be all along, become his friends. instead of screaming and crying in fear a few of our more passive and scared kids have become noticeably more confident and assertive as they have had so much practice defending themselves. it is kind of amazing and heartwarming to see ( as i did today) a tiny four-year-old who would burst into tears at the mention of the aggressive kid's name actively seek him out on the playground, and take his hand, and lead him away saying firmly "you are my friend."

gustav klimt's rocker sister

2011-02-12T21:22:00.000-08:00

there has been a lot of outside time lately. the garden is growing in the backyard, lots of little seeds sprouting up, pink and white blossoms on the fruit trees, and crazy tall greens that just keep going and going.

work has been rough lately, feeling overextended, but i am trying my best. i find myself involved in miles' school through meetings and email conversations. the teasing and bullying task force. the middle school committee. the garden coordinator political fiasco. miles is doing fine, but there is so much pressure to get test scores up that there doesn't seem to be much time to look at how to engage the kids. they keep assessing the kids to find out what skills they don't have yet that they should. i know this is important but assessment should look at not just what they know and don't know, but how they learn best.

have i mentioned these things before? i think so. project based learning. cooperative learning groups.

anway, we have been learning by getting out and about.

yesterday maya and i walked up and over potrero hill to an art class where she learned about gustav klimt and painted a huge gold background. on the way back we saw this amazing kidserve mural on daniel webster elementary. this is just a section, this thing is huge.

maya experimented with making shadows in the window of this closed down hair studio. she said she was gustav klimt's sister, who was in a rock band.
today we went with friends to the mission science workshop, a big room in mission high with a free for all of musical instruments, projectors, bones, woodworking tools, glue guns, rocks, slices of 540 year old redwood trees, live animals, dead animals, computer parts, you name it. i love this place.
maya made this cool magnet pendulum which showed how magnets can repel each other. the little hanging magnet dances around on its string.
layers of people i knew were at the workshop, and are everywhere we go, really, from the neighborhood, baby class, preschool, even pre-kid life. and outside there was an old friend, alec, looking like the cool sailor engineer that he is, with his dyke march t shirt on, headed to sunny delores park. the park was packed, a green sea of people and dogs, throwing footballs, grilling sausage, giving free capoeira lessons, playing accordion, walking on tightropes. blasting bad rock music from a fender amp, selling ice cream, drinking and smoking weed. i told the kids about how we used to go to this park a lot, and sit on blankets and sometimes play instruments, and how cassie lived nearby.

we watched as a group of people prepared to release a balloon creation into the sky, tethered by fishing line so as not to pollute. it was the size of a small room, red balloons attached to each other in the shape of a heart. the kids were patient as a very sf crowd of older women with some young tattooed women and some men, well, hey, all kinds of people talked about going around the circle and departed love ones and meditation. "the ice cream!!!!!!!!!" screamed maya and the kids ran off hand in hand to buy crappy mexican ice cream from a cart. they returned in time for the release of the heart, which floated higher and higher until it was just a small red shape above delores park, with no destination but, as miles said, "as high as the moon."

happy chinese new year

2011-02-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

ok, i admit i was a proud bragging mama today. maya's pre-k teacher asked me a few days ago if alumnus miles would come and talk to the pre-k kids about chinese new year today. he agreed, but at 9 this morning, just after SPONGE BOB SQUARE PANTS, i looked at my very runny-nosed and goofy missing tooth child and wondered how it would go down. he packed up a lantern made in kindergarten with the fabulous ms. chang, a lion dancer costume we splurged for a few years back, a picture book about a girl in china and her pet dragon, two pop tarts for breakfast and a tennis racket for a park date later, and we were off.

at the preschool miles sat calmly on a little blue chair in front of the gang, and then proceeded to tell (in detail, for 20 minutes) about the origin of the red lanterns and lion dancers, and the story of the chinese zodiac. some of the things he said didn't really sound like him ("the elephant was approaching at a very tiny speed") and i realized he had learned this all in mandarin and this was how it translated to english. the 3-5 year olds were pretty rapt listening to these crazy stories of racing animals, crop destroying dragons, and evil spirits scared of their reflection in the lion's mirror.

maya was the lovely assistant who held the lion's tail. one of my favorite parts of the presentation was when little slade started playing some quiet harmonica to accompany miles' quite lengthy narratives.

awww. maybe miles will be a preschool teacher some day, if not a super spy, comic book artist, famous soccer player or singer as good as michael jackson. the fact that he learned this stuff in another language seemed pretty cool.

doom and gloom cycles and wanting it all

2011-01-31T20:30:00.001-08:00

these things come in cycles, right? we have pretty much accepted that maya will follow in her brother's footsteps and attend the starr king mandarin immersion program. we will support her as much as we can and see how it goes. maybe it will be hunky dory. if not, a learning experience.

but now middle school changes are now on the horizon again. never a dull moment around here! in a draft proposal of changes we read about in the fall miles' entire school was slated to feed into a mission middle school but there was a lot of mandarin immersion parent uproar. many vocal people did not like the low test scores and spooky scary crowd of mission kids. i was not thrilled at first but the more i looked into and thought about it this school grew on me. the kids miles is getting to know, slowly but surely, would be together for another few years. it was a nice sized school, not a gargantuan one with 1500+ kids. small class sizes. and walkable, walkable, walkable. but then a few weeks ago another district plan emerged, a plan in which the mandarin immersion program was to be placed at a higher scoring school, but a huge one, with bigger class sizes, and across town.

maybe i am nuts to lean toward my kid attending a low-scoring school in a part of town with more violence and less open green space, but to me community is huge. i can clearly recall that horrible self-conscious feeling of being in a new school, surrounded by strangers. it took a long time to be myself when i switched schools in 6th grade. and then another long time when i switched in tenth. i never got to know kids outside of my classes and everyone was in a little group alienated from everyone else. i also remember that long long bus ride i took for years, and how my parents never set foot in my schools. and i don't think a tiny school is the best but yes, size matters. i know i am projecting onto my kid but i really believe that it makes more sense to not have to make all new friends every few years in a huge sea of people just because, well, because we live in a big city. i am hanging on to my commitment of having a stable community for my kids despite the erratic urban planning around here. i like walking my kids to school and being green and all of us getting to know the people and places on the way. our city here is the mission, bernal, and potrero hill.

so maybe it will be a waste of time, but i guess i am going to jump into this middle school assignment redesign process by attending the meetings and thinking and talking. who knows what the district will come up with? i would love to see starr king stay together. or at least have my kids attend middle school in our neighborhood. learning new languages is supposed to bridge cultures, not separate people, right? after posting this i will organize the soccer registration forms i have been trying to collect from miles' second grade team, kids in ALL the classes who our tireless coach has been working hard to recruit and register.

anyway, it will all work out somehow, but i do think this school district, like a lot of government, is good at coming up with plans and goals, but not so successful at implementation. suppose the implementation would be easier if there were not so many voices clamoring for what they want and think is right. it would be nice if we could all just be good citizens and not be so entitled and think about the bigger picture in a thoughtful way. the good, the bad, and the ugly are all out in the open when you talk about educating everyone's kids. and of course we are all in for another shock when the new state budget is revealed.

get yourself an egg and beat it

2011-01-30T21:00:00.001-08:00

walking down 24th st this morning to buy some garlic and eggs i was suddenly aware of the very gentrified crowd flowing up and down the street. sure there were two men having a loud drunk conversation sprawled out on the ground next to a shopping cart full of wet blankets. and the dressed up sunday latino families going into church. well, actually, there are all kinds of people, and garbage, on 24th street but today it seemed like the majority were semi-scruffy 20-30 year old hipsters, coffee cups in hand, dark framed glasses, cool bikes. many of them smiled at me as if they knew me. one man was wearing birkenstocks and a tie dye t-shirt, my lord!! and papa potrero's, that crime magnet eyesore we have lived with for 13 years, has been painted a golden kind of yellow and there is a piece of paper tacked on the door saying "coming soon, wok and go". a terrible name for a chinese restaurant, i guess.

i am free associating back to a middle school teacher who had a crazy handlebar mustache and would yell "heads will roll" when we were acting up. throughout 7th grade he had us draw map after map of africa, europe, and asia over the centuries, as different empires came and went.

little city things

2011-01-29T20:20:00.000-08:00

i keep writing serious posts and deleting them. all my worries and interests are being written about so well by many others. i will just keep documenting the little details of our lives in order to try and better understand why we stay here in this expensive earthquake land.

i grew my first batch of sprouts, broccoli sprouts. pretty tasty. just soak, drain, rinse and drain for a few days and here they are, a bowlful of hippie food.

this is a view of the hamilton rec center from the south side of geary. it's a huge sparkling rec center in the western addition, with a playground, soccer fields, batting cage, tennis and basketball courts aaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnd.................

check it out! the pool (and indoor basketball courts and tot area) is in the building glowing in the distance in the previous photo. here is one of two water slides at the very large pool. tough love lifeguards all around, water which was warm enough for all but the smallest of our group (maya is supposed to look cold in this picture), sunny warm air, huge windows. i rode the pictured water slide about ten times, ahhh, eyes closed made it seem even faster. there is another water slide i rode once, which is super fast and high and dumps you out about eight feet above the water. fun but a little painful. afterwards we walked over to the japantown mall and splurged on sushi. miles even ate some avocado. we sat in the peace tower and thought a little about war and peace. miles mentioned that the atom bomb turned the beach to glass, and we bought a book called hello, maggie, about life in a japanese internment camp.

and at starr king last week there was a guest author, maya cristina gonzalez for the books for dinner event. our maya stayed home which was a shame because she would have loved the author's hair. she showed the kids all kinds of secrets she paints into her work--they were entranced.
that's all for now.

23rd street river, funny faces

2011-01-24T20:46:00.001-08:00

maya and i found this awesome little river running fast and hard down 23rd street. very exciting. a pipe must have burst somewhere on the hill.

23rd street river

2011-01-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

maya and i found this awesome little river running fast and hard down 23rd street. very exciting.

child home not sick

2011-01-24T20:24:00.000-08:00

after a hectic fun (that's hectic, not hecka') weekend miles said his stomach hurt this morning so i let him stay home. it was another sunny perfect day. i gardened, cooked homegrown kale and green onions, made carrot muffins, and defeated the entire pile of bills. i even completed maya's kinder application with, gulp, starr king mandarin immersion in the top spot.

maybe i am just lazy, but i don't want to work these days. i am imagining my day tomorrow. 8:30, two little boys with very different issues, me trying to plan therapeutic activities. then 9:00 two brand-new three-year-old students, again me trying to hold a little clinician-directed session to engage them both. then the part i like best, three hours of co-teaching our little class. then meetings with parents about transitioning to kindergarten. thursday is little 30-minute pull-out sessions all day. i am feeling burnt-out. it has been eleven years, and that is quite a while.

i would love to be a gardening housewife. i could walk leisurely to and from school with my kids. get a bike and start doing all my errands on it. hem the pathetic bottoms of my son's pants which are all stepped on and torn to shreds. make healthy muffins and recipes with brown rice and many vegetables. write my novel, of course. tutor at my son's school. but i know i have a good gig with the school district, and i should hold on tight...unless i can find something else rewarding and part time and secure.

any speech and language pathologists out there have any ideas? anyone else?

love letter

2011-01-15T20:29:00.000-08:00

i went and saw rich's band carlton melton play at cafe du nord last night. j mascis played a song with them and it was pretty exciting, especially for rich and andy. a loooonnngg jam.

afterwards i went out to a nice gay bar with a few friends for a quieter drink. we discovered everyone in our group was jewish, at least in theory, and i enjoyed a few hours of talk talk talk. i discovered a good number of jews don't believe in god, but are in it for the community. my brother gave me a ride home and we stopped at el farolito for an unnecessary taco. jam packed at 1:00 a.m. with drunken people scarily walking around ignoring traffic. i gave a skinny homeless woman a buck and felt bad about not giving her my warm plastic bag full of a grilled chicken super taco.

at home i read a little bit of the new yorker at 2 a.m. and skimmed an article about how social connections and interactions create the most happiness for people.

and this morning sipped coffee in a big sunny room with huge windows and watched maya smile her way through her creative movement class at dance mission theater. she "loved it", "it was SO FUN because three girls i know were there."

the mother beside me, hugely pregnant, noted that the girls looked like a lot of little pretty birds.

the thought comes and goes sporadically that this blog is just a long letter to those people i love who don't share much time with me. those folks i fantasized about having an intentional community with at one time. those who have slipped away to places that are hard to travel to.

and check out the carrots! i had been waiting for some spindly carrot tops to grow big and strong in the garden but pulled a few today and discovered these short, thick, very tasty little guys. the potatoes were a surprise, some growing in the dark below the compost. the green onions are amazing roasted with olive oil and salt.

night night

love,

a house or a place to live and food

2011-01-14T18:10:00.000-08:00

the sun makes it all so much better. aahh. after a rainy stretch life is beautiful and full and warm again. in the starr king open space all is green and flowers are starting to bloom.

feeling spoiled rotten i bussed it to noe valley with maya where i got some fancy clothes with christmas gift certificates. for her birthday maya picked out "the most beautiful paper plates and napkins, ever" (i think they were left over from hanuhkah). we also cashed in a noe valley bakery gift certificate for a shi-shi cake. we lounged at home, had a picnic of bunny pasta in the sun on the deck, and then borrowed a huge pile of library books. i know it is a parenting no-no, but days like this i feel like my kids are my best friends. especially my little girl, lately.

we went to pick miles up from school and he was practicing for the chinese new year parade with his buddies. in between carrying the dragon they played a wicked game of handball while maya climbed around on the playground and me. my starr king girl gang and i hung out and talked about, well, school stuff, but also our upcoming party for a friend at a new mexican restaurant in the mission, gracias madre.

i am going out tonight to see rich's band play. supposedly j mascis will be jamming with them for a song. this brings me way back to that heady elation and angst of being 21 and blasting dinosaur jr. in my cheap little boom box. probably mishearing and mis-singing the lyrics, "don't let me fuck up will you, 'cause when i need a friend it's still you."

miles told me that he was the kid selected from his class to speak at the martin luther king peace celebration today. don't ask me how he was selected, i doubt it was for good behavior. we have been reading an amazing book, martin's big words, which makes me tear up every time i read it. miles said his dream in chinese first. then he said "i have a dream everyone will have a house or a place to live and food." which could be something he heard someone else say and didn't put much thought into, but i prefer to think he is learning something good from living in this crazy neighborhood in the big bad city.

24th street window shopping

2011-01-09T21:44:00.000-08:00

i am lucky my brother lives in town. and that his daughter is my daughter's best friend. this morning we walked with the cousins from our house up 24th street to the dance mission theater family dance class open house. it turned into a good hour long walk, with the kids checking out all the sights, smells, and sounds. a new record store with crazy comic books for grown ups! a head shop called purple haze with some (according to miles) extremely ancient egyptian statues in the window. a storefront filled with grim reapers. many pastries with little colored balls on top. skull art. casa de canario with the african gray parrot who looks so wisely into your eyes. posters of creepy adult movies (inception), adorable owl movies (legends of the guardians). a crazy smashed in muni bus shelter. a dog with an army jacket on. smells of donuts and grilled chicken. cacti for sale. hipsters. people speaking spanish. hipsters and their dogs waiting for pop's to open.

we went to the dance studio and miles astounded me by joining in the demo creative movement class for 3-5 year-olds. i said he could be an assistant. skipping, twisting, jumping and shaking his booty he looked so happy and so...huge. especially in his size 10 puffy down jacket.

and a little escape to the backyard this afternoon. i pushed over the compost bin and was amazed to find black, rich, soil. a lot. and a bunch of sweet little potatoes growing at the bottom. i dug, scattered, weeded, pruned, and harvested mint, borage, potatoes, and some green onions while maya played evil gardener with her calico critters and the bright afternoon faded into dusk.

freaking earthquake

2011-01-07T22:24:00.000-08:00

lying on the bottom bunk in the kids' room this sunny day, watching maya play dolls we felt the earthquake roll under us a little. maya said "i'm ok with little earthquakes but not with big ones." you said it sister.

i spent my vacation with mushrooms and weeds

2011-01-07T09:22:00.000-08:00

ha ha, little joke there.

the winter break is over and we are back in the thick of it with work, school, pta meetings, worries about budget cuts to education, rich squeezing in his music career, doctor appointments, etc. etc. i even had the opportunity this week to write up and report a substitute teacher at work who showed up with no teaching skills and some incredibly racist comments.
over new year's we visited friends on their rural property in point arena. our little friend ella was really interested in picking mushrooms, specifically candy caps, which we picked off a trail near her house. they have a maple syrup flavor and we cooked them in buckwheat pancakes, yum. i had a strong memory of picking hedgehog mushrooms on our other friend's property down the road ten years ago and wanted to try again. i ventured into the wet woods, pushing under and climbing over wild rhododendron branches, and there, amidst the dark earth and dead leaves and branches, were hedgehogs, yellow tops poking up in random little clumps. i could hear my kids calling "mommy where are you?" but i was in a pretty dense area and had a little quality time with myself picking wild mushrooms with trees and ferns for company before they found me. we ate the hedgehogs in an omelet and funnel chanterelles in new year's eve risotto.

i also became addicted to watching weeds on netflix. so easy to push "watch next episode" on the laptop. i don't usually do this, but i fell right into a serious addiction, and am pretty sleep-deprived from watching 2-4 hours a night for the last two weeks.

weeds, weeds, weeds. i would love to sink into it right now, curled up in bed watching a dysfunctional family and their underground adventures. escape escape. but maya is here, and laundry, and dishes, and the rest of the real live world.

the caption for maya's picture is "this is a clown who has a broken leg and he has crutches. he is smiling because he can't wait to get back to the clown show."

i am assuming the clown got hurt on the job. he must really love his work.

2010-12-29T21:25:00.000-08:00

barbie and her pets

2010-12-25T21:13:00.000-08:00

here are barbie and her pets.

christmas has come and gone, leaving behind several bags of garbage and many new battery operated toys.

looking at the mound of wrapped gifts for the kids last night i had a minor panic attack. how can we raise a generation of responsible people when we keep buying them so. much. stuff. how can i teach my kids not to want so. much. stuff? waah, waah, the fate of the earth is in our hands. i actually felt nauseous looking at the piles.

this morning, however, the presents were ripped through by 6:56 and everyone seemed pretty happy. the unsustainable lifestyle panic over, we enjoyed a dungeness crab, fancy cheese from rainbow grocery, and endive salad feast with my mom and stepdad, topped off with a viewing of elf, many lifesavers, many beyblade battles, some sentimental emails and phone calls, and a little more of that endive salad.

a little sad feeling for loved ones far away but not too too bad.

there will be time to try and correct all our many many many many parenting mistakes (disasters might not be too far off, if you know us pretty well) , or at least try, right? there are worse things than getting too many presents from your mom and dad.

now i need to study my urban rebounder dvd- my christmas trampoline is waiting for me at the foot of the bed. good night.

peace and love

miles' idea

2010-12-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

"in the future the world will have a mechanical heart."

i think he meant it literally, but yikes either way!

dickens fair, fog of ennui, babbling

2010-12-19T20:34:00.001-08:00

i took natalie and maya to the dickens fair today at the cow palace. just a few years ago i would have been full of ridicule and unable to relate to the "actors"in their costumes and english accents. today i felt very little of this detachment because i was with a four and five year old. maya asked a lot of questions about "dickens world" and although the girls knew there was acting involved it seemed so easy for them to slip into being into a whole different reality, and i kind of slipped along with them. hard to explain, really, but i found myself having a long conversation about india with an indian lady from rudyard kipling's time about sacred cows and cobras and third eyes. ok, i am a super geek, but being there with my wide-eyed girl i really enjoyed the dickens fair.

later i went to the bottom of the hill to watch a film some friends had made called "fog of ennui", starring naughty ninja, jailface, and captain ennui, with other superheroes and villains including furry man, spanish icicle, and dr. exposition. i laughed quite a bit and enjoyed the soundtrack and effects and silliness, but did not relate to the theme, which, loosely, was about fighting captain ennui before he spread boredom to the entire country.

this is probably not making sense but i am feeling today that there is something about having kids later in life, as i did, that throws your mind into a wierd position. or at least my mind. when i should be thinking about getting older, and fighting boredom, and the usual midlife existential crisis stuff (i have the fear of dying pretty bad), i am simultaneously exposed, every day, to little people who are feeling the novelty, beauty, and wonder of life much of the time. maya often GASPS with excitement and does a whole body "ohhhhhhhhhh" in amazement. i feel it along with her. i am so lucky to have this time with her but it throws me off balance too. i feel like a little old kid who knows way too much sometimes. it is confusing.

does anyone out there have any idea what i am babbling on about?

this is ridiculous

2010-12-13T20:28:00.001-08:00

this weekend:

saturday:

1.go to randall museum to complete ceramics project with maya

2.after finishing project get sucked into storytelling hour with city college storytellers

3.attend maya's ballet performance, clap

4.attend 4 hour birthday extravaganza at gilman playground

5.collapse

sunday:

1.attend amazing gay and lesbian dance along nutcracker with friends and family

2.travel across town for emily's willy wonka tenth birthday party

3.go out with starr king moms to listen to a fellow mom's choir, sacred and profane, perform at mark's lutheran church

4. following performance head to bar for a few hours. drink hot toddies to fight off new cold germs.

5. following bar time head to SPARKY'S diner and eat curly fries (have not done this in ten years)

6. get home at 2 a.m. and complete meeting agenda for meeting with miles' principal regarding the environmental ed program

i want to hibernate for a few weeks. and then come out of my cave and do some things differently.

on a sadder note, i had ridiculously high expectations for a meeting with my son's principal regarding proposed improvements to the present environmental education program. i got a little too excited, because after the meeting i learned that even though X would be fantastic, and is very possible, Y is business as usual, and that is what we are stuck with for now. big bummer.

i keep writing these serious critiques of education and human nature but they are all in the draft section of this blog. lucky you get to read this fluff instead.

school talk

2010-12-11T22:36:00.000-08:00

another fabulous starr king bday party with our warm and diverse school crowd. soccer? check. miles in sports and friends heaven? check. families speaking different languages? check. families of all income levels and backgrounds getting along just swell? check. delicious spread of food? check. warm fuzzy feeling watching the kids together and knowing so many friendly faces? check.

but a few times at this party i had to walk away from conversations regarding school. the conversation where people discuss how they are supporting their kid in chinese, with websites, tutors, trips. we are not really doing that. and the conversation with one parent in particular which is inevitable--she is so aware of the things i don't like about public schools and i fall into this groove with her, about the test prep aspect of learning, lack of choices for kids, shallowness of learning, lack of intrinsically rewarding work, etc etc. go read alfie kohn. it is like talking to him.

so, pros and cons. it is a done deal for miles but i am still debating things for maya, and considering, possibly, applying to a reggio emilio charter school which is opening.

this decision, like so many others, is based on a choice between what may be flawed, but what is a part of our lives, and our community, and that which seems better (at least more progressive, and less focused on producing good little workers of the future), but which is not familiar. i tend to want to keep people together, but maybe this is not always the right thing to do.

i want to find balance in this area. maya and i were at the academy of sciences at the climate change exhibit and the lonely dad of a not yet talking toddler approached us and spoke of how all the suggestions to make changes towards sustainability might be useless at this point. it certainly does not seem like making decisions based on what is best for everyone is our species' strong point. i guess the problem with changing things like our unsustainable lifestyles, or the school where we might send our younger kid, is that *most" human beings, even when they can see the negatives, choose to go with what gives them community. this means sticking with what you know.

principal's chat

2010-12-06T21:13:00.001-08:00

at miles' school there are occasional scheduled principal's chats on monday mornings. these chats consist of the principal answering questions posed by parents who do not have to go to work, while younger siblings are silenced by a tray of mexican pastries or sticky buns and the eye candy of iphones.

so many involved parents at miles' school with questions about things like "how are teachers dealing with the subject of race via the caring schools curriculum?" and "how will low-income parents access the tutoring their child is entitled to?" and "can we get a working microphone for morning assembly?"

there are so many huge issues to deal with in this one public school. there are issues between parents with different sets of values and priorities. issues between teachers and students with different values and priorities. issues between parents and the school bureaucracy that forces teachers to teach so broadly, touching on a thousand standards rather than letting the kids get deep into a project, and do some critical thinking. issues between parents and our larger society which does not place much priority on providing a good education for our kids.

it can be overwhelming. i look at my kids and obsessively worry that they are not getting what they need in this stressed out system. that there is a scary vicious cycle going on in which people are not educated to think and do in a way that is fair, sustainable, creative, caring, peaceful. then they grow up and become the leaders in a society where good education is not a priority. and it gets worse and worse, and stupider and stupider.

i don't just worry about my kids, i worry about the generations to come. so corny, but to me educating kids should be the absolute top priority for our society if we think beyond the next year or two.

fantastic cookie party

2010-12-05T20:52:00.000-08:00

i made the mistake of peeking at facebook again. aaaahhhhh. seems so easy for most folks, but for me it is a fascinating yet creepy excursion into what my life could be, or isn't, and how other people seem so good at condensing their wonderful lives into easy to digest and respond to sentences and phrases. i really don't know what the heck it is, but it makes me feel kind of agro, and a little depressed. like a nice whiskey might help.
anyway, the holidays are upon us. miles had a greedy tantrum today about how this xmas would be stupid, and all presents are boring except for the nintendo DS i don't want to get him. poor brainwashed little consumer victim. luckily, right after his tirade against my cruelty we went to rebecca's cookie party, and got a glimpse of some fun that does not come in the shape of a handheld electronic device or a ball. rebecca's 4 downstairs neighbor kids were there, and they all kind of congealed and made cookies and got very silly, and then we were down in the basement and these 4 cool kids (7, almost 9, almost 12, and 14) were playing ramones, sex pistols and rolling stones covers on their very own instruments in the most awesome way possible. maya fell in love with the almost 9 year old girl and invited her to her birthday party. later emily played crazy beats and samples on her yamaha keyboard and everyone was dancing around like a freak. i guess eating lots of cookies added to the hysteria. but who needs a DS to have fun?

i will try to hang on and make it through this season of giving--and wanting to get lots of stuff--and painful old memories, and comparisons with oh so rosy facebook existences. at the end of it all i think there will be a reward--new year's in a wood stove heated hot tub up in the damp green green woods of point arena. clear skies and cold air and stars above.

oh the possibilities.

a little vent about work

2010-11-29T20:44:00.000-08:00

i know i am lucky to have a job. and extra lucky to have work which i actually care about and sometimes enjoy. but lately i am not feeling that positivity. i am feeling pulled in a million directions and stretched out so thin that i don't feel like i am doing much good at all. a torrent of needy children coming my way, with needy teachers and parents lined up behind them. help.

i did get away for thanksgiving. we had a delicious dinner at grandma's in sonoma, and the kids were very good and quiet thanks to satellite tv. miles did manage to be obnoxious in the few minutes he was not staring at a screen and when it was his turn to say what he was thankful for stated "i am thankful there are toilets in this house because i really have to go!" ha ha, thanks little boy.

we played in crunchy leaves at the square and we visited a mossy old cemetery on the hill above sonoma on a wet saturday morning. then julia and her two boys picked us up and we went to the calistoga village inn. there we alternated between being furious with our spoiled and bratty children and feeling heavenly as our little sweethearts frolicked in the sunny warm pools for hours. on the way home we hit the calistoga petrified forest, and saw 3 million year old trees that had been knocked down by volcanic blasts and replaced cell by cell with silica, turned into stone. they looked exactly like redwoods, even the bark was intact. kitchy wooden statues stood along the path through the petrified forest, and we were all wary of the rattlesnakes and mountain lions which never seem to appear.

terrible housekeeping--or ultra cool indoor gardening?

2010-11-29T20:38:00.001-08:00

i was feeling very back to the land as i gathered some arugula seed pods and let the seeds dry in a little cup on the windowsill by the sink. then i characteristically lost track of my seed project. a few weeks later i found this little arugula sprout growing in the grout by the faucet.

not again

2010-11-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

not again. i went through this agony of indecision a few years ago trying to figure out what school was right for miles. he ended up in mandarin immersion at starr king, a school visible from my window. and now that is his school, for better or worse, and he will "NEVER" go to another school and leave his friends. the school is working out pretty well for my rule-following, sporty boy with such a great memory and eye/hand for drawing and characters.

my maya is now coming up on birthday number 5, and another kindergarten application is due. if miles was not at starr king it is not the school i would choose for maya. i picture her somewhere artsy, creative, full of easels and child-led discussions. ok, i think i can picture her at creative arts charter school. i have a much harder time visualizing her in the starr king uniform, eagerly practicing characters using the correct stroke order, entering the sporty, competitive fray of the playground. maya has some mild delays in balance, fine motor, and proprioception. this throws her a little off. it is part of the wonderful person that she is. i am scared that her tendency to knock things over, to fall down, to be a silly puppy crawling on hands and knees will not be embraced at her brother's school. i am scared that the characters will be too hard for her to write and imagine her hurling her homework across the room in frustration.

i am scared of too many things, i know, and it will probably work out fine for maya at starr king. it is difficult to trust my judgment on this one, as it is on most things involving possible pain for my kiddos. do i just do as i did for miles--sign her up and see what happens? it would be strange to have kids at two different schools, one learning chinese and one not. and maya's beloved cousin is at starr king now too.

i went through this process of figuring things out with miles and came to one conclusion--that i most easily envisioned him in a place that was more like our home and his preschool, but that a place very different from our home was not necessarily the wrong place for him. and in the case of his school this has pretty much held true. but i am still not convinced this is not just rationalization of the decision to throw him into a situation where most of what he learns is in mandarin.

preschool is so safe and nurturing and full of freedom, the demands are all ones that maya handles with ease. her voice there is heard and respected. i want her to thrive and her unique little spirit to remain intact. what would you do?

a few things we saw on the way to jed's house this morning

2010-11-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

wind turbine on the roof of the sunset magazine house near garfield parkpainting on someone's garage
new mural with rocks with eyes (hard to see). miles and maya are sitting on the rocks, get it?

i was talking to my friend about how it is hard to write blogs that are about your daily existence without worrying about boring readers. i am taking a little break from journaling my oh so profound thoughts and am instead sharing some sensory details from our lives. yes, taking a break from thinking.

this walk today from our house down 24th st, and up the north side of bernal hill. in perfect sunny weather with a little wind. the smell of pot smoke here and there, donuts cooking, roasting chicken. we heard some kids yelling at each other and screaming with laughter as they chased each other around a block. the blimp overhead, a family of three children coming around the corner in their pajamas, preceded by a remote control race car. many dogs to pet. in the water park on the way home we saw a bird of prey with pale wings, very high, bigger than a hawk. a little boy named rueben who spoke mostly spanish played a long long game of hide and seek with maya. after a while there were about 10 kids playing, miles and his buddy and maya running fast and shirtless and yelling under the blue sky.

the feast for the senses around here, even if it is on top of noisy cars and garbage, is most definitely part of what keeps us from leaving. maybe it would be as full in the middle of nature some where, but i would not trade all this for the regularity of suburbia in which i spent much of my childhood. all this stuff to see and hear and smell, it makes me feel more joyful, in the moment, alive.

2010-11-12T22:11:00.000-08:00

another lovely friday almost gone. we visited a friend in his ceramics studio (don't. touch. anything. maya.), played in delores park with kids from maya's school, watched the hawks and gophers while miles played soccer on top of potrero hill.

thinking today about how much closer i am with my kids than my parents were with me. as in actual proximity. by miles' age i was walking to school in a pack of kids, and after school was about running around in the woods, or being in the backyard or in my room with a friend. when my kids visit with friends i am right there with them, being friends with their parents, all of us within the confines of small to medium living spaces. we are seeing the same

floating and sinking

2010-11-08T20:33:00.000-08:00

after a few years of hemming and hawing i signed the papers today at luminalt, two blocks away on potrero avenue, across from the skate park. we are getting a tiny array of solar panels , and more than 80% of it will be paid for through credits and incentives. our little array will reduce carbon emissions, will pay for itself within four years, and hopefully in a year or two we will be able to get thermal to heat our hot water. we use a lot of hot water here, with dirty kids, dirty dishes, and dirty clothes. our electric bill is tiny, as we don't use a heater or air conditioning. oh, i feel so good and green. the elections were disheartening on several fronts but california still came through and made it clear we care about our environment. i was pretty amazed to find that renewable energy incentives and credits still exist in these times of economic apocalypse.

now we just have to make sure our kids learn about it in school. miles told me he had science today. when i asked him what he learned he said that they combined water and sand, and the water turned yellow. i asked him what this meant and he was not sure. he also said they noticed the sand sunk to the bottom, because it is heavier. i think he noticed this when he was about 30 months old. but not in mandarin, of course.

anyhow, i will keep you posted on the state of our solar-powered lives.

beautiful day in the neighborhood

2010-11-05T20:09:00.000-07:00

i love days like these, all in the neighborhood. a fuss-less walk up potrero hill, through the newly green open space. miles said goodbye with a hug and barely a backwards glance. a slow walk down with lots of dogs to pet. we sang michael jackson as we walked over the highway and didn't care who listened. at home maya and i got very domestic for a few hours. we picked flowers and vegetables, and then made sun prints. for lunch, pasta with the garden veggies (arugula, tomatoes, parsley). we drew some trees and made collages. then a stroll down 24th to get a coconut donut from the friendly donut shop, where spaceman 3 was blasting. we met a nice mom and three year old rock and roll boy and hung out with them. then back up the hill. soccer, all kinds of crazy kids running in the grass, balls flying, miles in his element. the red-tailed hawk sat in his tree above us gossiping parents while maya and some big girls made mud soup in the ground. the kids and i walked down through the open space singing a song i wrote about not swallowing your gum and a woman getting out of her car told us "the family that sings together stays together."

sometimes i feel like i am a wierdo, that all this mundane stuff can make me feel such ineffable happiness. and little flashes of sadness thinking about the kids growing up and this all going away. i try and try to live in the moment, because when i do it can be so good.
stuff we made
book miles started writing before anyone woke up today. terrible spelling, heavy captain underpants influence.
leftover from someone's alice in wonderland costume, i think

sigh, sorry

2010-11-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

i should be feeling good but am not. in the last few days i went to a fun grown-up halloween party (with grown-ups that don't have kids), a kid birthday party where many of the separate parts of my city life collided (among the guests were my brother and family, families from miles' school, families from miles and maya's preschool, the couple that runs the video store on 24th street, and some of our neighbors i have known since the kids were born) and where i painted many people's faces including the birthday boy's 80 year old haitian grandma. last night i trick-or-treated with a pack of joyful kids and no tantrums or major injuries. today i took the kids to the academy of sciences with rebecca, and we met up with more of miles' school buddies. it was a beautiful sunny day and my kids were good.

yet it has been a huge effort to keep calm and help my anxious son and needy daughter feel that all is okay in the world when i am so unsettled.

outside there are doppler shifts of car horns honking, fireworks whistling and banging, shouting. i think i just heard a trumpet the giants have just won the world series and i feel alone on my little planet here. i don't care a bit about the giants. now i hear a helicopter overhead. it is my mom's birthday and she is driving south on highway 101 right now. i just received an email from my best friend far far far away. i am hoping for some sweet dreams tonight and a cease in the noise of ecstatic drunken giants fanatics.

miles the werewolf at school halloween parade

2010-10-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

isn't this a cute werewolf? don't you just want to take off that mask and hug him?

pre halloween

2010-10-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

halloween is days away yet some things around here are taking on that element of..."what are we?"this is a house we walk by on the way to school. for a long time it has been the house that needs some love. suddenly it is the witch's house. look closely...creepy, eh?

and this, is it harmless entertainment for kids or an expensive subliminal message filled commercial for those too young to know better?
1974 looney tunes folder propped up on nasty garbage container by sf general. conceptual art? why does the tasmanian devil look so evil? i never before noticed what a carnivore he is. and what is bugs looking at?

wha,ah,ah

little spiral, beasts

2010-10-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

well, things have been pretty exhausting lately. my son is experiencing separation anxiety, which i have recently learned can rear its ugly head between the ages of 6-8 and then again for the tweens, as the kids reach new stages of understanding how they are separate from their parents and also what the world may have in store for them. so life has been full of reassurance, logic, worry time, talking back to worry bullies, back up plan after back up plan,making things calm and good and happy, talking to the school counselor. yesterday was one of the worst mornings, and rich had to peel a wailing miles off me as i left for work. he then put scared and miserable miles in the car and just happened to turn on stairway to heaven on the radio which, he said, snapped miles out of his fear and into a normal state. who knew? soon he was playing handball on the schoolyard and things were all hunky dory today. led zeppelin therapy. we are trying our best.

some of this means i am spending quite a bit of extra time making sure i am there to pick up miles exactly right on time every day, which can be tricky with a job and a four year old. today maya and i arrived at starr king too early because she practically sprinted up potrero hill, being ozma of oz with a brown puppy. we had 30 minutes to kill in the starr king open space, and made a baby rock spiral and several maximum volume short movies, mostly about protecting puppies from: the tree monster!! the rock monster!! the earth monster!!! protect your puppies, hold onto them and don't let go!!!!!

shout it from the hilltop maya! protect your puppies from these beasts!! and end your crazy movie with a big long loud laugh.

same clouds

2010-10-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

my friend and former bandmate who lives across the city posted a picture of these very same clouds from the same sunrise last week. amazing. the rain has come and everything is wet and gray. suddenly the city seems emptier.

rich is listening to some eery atmospheric guitar down the hall and i hear maya's cough from her bedroom. it won't be long before she gets up and gets into the bed with me to snuggle and go back to sleep. there is some persistently being mailed to us disney family magazine (did you, dear reader, send it to us?) in the bathroom, full of cheery ideas for thanksgiving activities and christmas gifts for kids to make themselves. winter has pretty much arrived. every year i forget about this season, and after only two days of gray i am missing the clarity of the blue sky and the sight of my kids playing outside.

pandora radio music and fancy plant store

2010-10-21T20:09:00.000-07:00

i have music in the car now. i forgot how music affects your thoughts as you drive through the world. listening to palace brothers and bon iver as i drove up past glen park canyon in the fog felt very different than driving up with just my own worried little petty thoughts.

it's thursday, my friday. a big sigh of relief as i said goodbye to my last little language-delayed student (who told me a long story i understood pretty much none of, about egg-man, a big ship, and robots) and headed off to pick up my own kids. since i am not allowed to pick up miles before the predetermined pick up time maya and i stopped to browse around flora grubb nursery. i know it is shi shi, and some might hate this place but i love it. all the expensive little glass terrariums full of air plants, and rusty bikes hanging in the air serving as planters, and rocks with holes carved in them growing succulents. what could be more perfect than a plant? we got two pumpkins, one green and one orange. miles is going to make his into calvin's head (from calvin and hobbes that is).

singing, dancing, eating, riding ponies, stuck buses, big fears

2010-10-17T21:41:00.000-07:00

the potrero hill festival is my favorite of the year.

maya (and her brother and cousin) found herself on stage again with the mobile arts platform, singing and dancing with the amazing Asheba. less than two weeks ago she was dancing with MAP at the galeria de la raza. i'm liking the MAP.

the kids made their own cotton candy at the potrero hill neighborhood house booth. there were pony rides supplied by an exceptionally crotchety pony lady. politicians and michelin men handing out bags of candy. a joyous dance performance with much audience participation by students from the international studies academy. here is a video of the cupid shuffle, something i was unaware of until saturday. i still can't do the electric slide. we also got to see a muni bus stuck on the crest of the hill at 2oth street and carolina. later on we went to a giants game on tv party and today was a mellow one with miles' sweet friend over for a playdate.

despite all the fun, my little partier son could not go to bed tonight because of his persistent new fear, the terrifying possibility that i will be late to pick him up at school and he will have to go in the dreaded cafeteria after 5;30 and wait for me. it is heartbreaking to see my son crying about this day after day, so i am going to try and take more action to make things better for him. it is not the kids, or the teachers, it is miles' feeling that he would be "in a big empty room, all alone." to be somewhere surrounded by people, but no one he really loves, not a close friend or his family is miles' current fear, and it is a big one. i do understand. it is hard to be patient about this, but i do understand. i do.

i guess the cure will be to somehow show him not that i will always get him from school before the remaining kids in the after school program are herded into the cafeteria, but that if i don't he will be able to go in there, and be ok waiting in that big empty room, and maybe even find that it is not as empty as he thinks.

this is a challenge. let me know if you have any ideas.

put down that book!

2010-10-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

stop reading and get ready for school! i found myself saying this about ten times this morning as my two kids sat at the table eating oatmeal as if they were inside a black hole, and reading (in maya's case looking at) comic books. here is miles attempting to brush his teeth while reading

eric shanower's adventure in oz.

so yes, we have an avid reader here, despite the mandarin immersion, and part of me is pleased to see miles stumbling around our halls reading, and lounging on the couch reading, and sloppily eating oatmeal reading, and sneaking a flashlight into bed. much of me is pleased. but part of me sees myself in this reading fiend, the self that does not like to be left with my thoughts too much, and is too lazy to write a book even though i love to read them. so, my little reader, do beware that reading can be the enemy of writing.

now i am off to read my own book, the only thing i can do to get to sleep. i'm reading louise erdrich's the red convertible, selected and new stories. ahh the sleepy lullaby of heartbreak and humor. the benadryl helps too.

glen ellen parade

2010-10-12T21:48:00.001-07:00

here is a purple cheetah with a flower lady, representing the nonprofit my mom volunteers with, the bouverie nature preserve. we joined a tiny parade in tiny glen ellen. everyone knew each other. lots of dogs, lots of happy kids,a very small town surrounded by woods. we ate a pumpkin cookie from a booth raising money for kids with cancer. miles stared at their bald photos a long time. the kids played a bunch of games and won candy and plastic crap. it turned out later my poor son had strep throat while he was marching in a parade in the 90 degree heat.

kind of like a street fair in sf, except a longer drive to get there, i didn't know anyone, pretty much only english being spoken, no buses, and hotter. did i mention i didn't know anyone? my mom says she can see me here in this little town. miles rolling down the streets on his heely's, maya a star in the dunbar school musical. what would i be doing here? writing a novel in my room that trees peeked into? feeling new and unknown? missing the gourmet donuts, garbage and traffic on my street, and the familiar faces?

so many people i know have fled the city for little towns like this. everyone seems equally happy no matter where they are.

this afternoon

2010-10-08T21:13:00.000-07:00

here is a little plug for project-based learning. a few girls from maya's pre-k went to hawaii, and taught some other girls hula dancing. they started bringing in and reading books about hawaii, making grass skirts, painting a mural with hawaii themes, and the culminating event was tonight's hawaii christmas party, where we witnessed a dance these four-year-olds choreographed themselves, and opened presents they had made for and addressed to their parents. very impressive. and very cute. aloha. of course the night ended with everyone running around in circles very fast and banging into each other.

and walking home from soccer the kids and i were lucky enough to see this painting being created:
definitely the most amazing oil painting ever of the stop sign and party store at wisconsin and 23rd.

million fishes

2010-10-08T20:46:00.000-07:00

very halloween-y art exhibit at million fishes art gallery at 23rd/bryant

hardly strictly afternoon

2010-10-04T00:00:00.001-07:00

after a morning at the skate park i fled the home scene and took a cab to hardly strictly bluegrass. my cabbie was from morocco and philosophized to me saying loudly "just live your life!" several times while telling stories about an ex-girlfriend. the festival was a huge mob scene, but fairly orderly, with a few youngsters attempting some sort of rebellion by smoking clove cigarettes and limbo-dancing with their friends' digeridoo (as it was being played, really!). i spent a lovely reflective 45 minutes or so sitting on a little hill near the stage listening to patti smith play. heroin was the first song, and gloria the last, with lots of songs going out to poets in between. i found my friends and their irish bachelor party in the meadow during her last song, and things rapidly devolved. i joined them and their whiskey for a ride in a stretch hummer down to broadway and made my exit while i still could.

ducked into house of nan king and sat cozily between two older than i am couples, one from new yawk and one from munich. when i came home i was a bad mom and gave the kids, lying one on each side of me in the dark, a chocolate and caramel treat to eat with their freshly brushed teeth.

more happens without the car

2010-10-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

this evening, after an afternoon watching my boy play a soccer game and then an impromptu tennis match with a sporty friend in the richmond fog, i got the urge to go to the library. maya and i hopped on the 48, not realizing the route had changed, and it no longer went near the potrero branch. we had a ride up and over potrero hill, down to 3rd st., then back over the hill again and into the flat mission and 24th st. we got our goods at the library and headed home in the dusk, neon lights starting to come on, kids in soccer uniforms seemingly everywhere. we shared a delicious plate of rice, beans, and fried chicken at usutalan. we stopped to check out a window display with chuckie and two live dogs in pink dresses.

then we continued on, starting to get a little tired. across the street i saw lights were on at la galeria de la raza and thought we would stop in for a minute to check it out. we ended up staying for about 45 minutes enjoying the singer songwriter theresa perez. maya was amazing, she got up and danced right up in the front, all by herself. not completely unselfconscious, the opposite really, because she was very pleased to have everyone watching her and smiling. the musician thanked her for dancing and at one point even stopped singing and said "dance solo" for maya. i was proud.

my daughter is a very good dancer. now there are some big plans to dance in a show, a band, wearing a floor length red ball gown with a diamond necklace and a crown. and white gloved that go up to her shoulders. luckily there is the upcoming hawaiian christmas party at her school, planned by the kids and supported by the teachers.

i got off track a little there. anyway, all this would have been missed if we had hopped in the car. thank you, 48 bus, and thank you foot for not hurting today so i could feel happy walking home through my neighborhood.