chicken, dog bite, spider family

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.

secret garden

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.

little city things

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.