Our Bold Adventure Continues

The Move, day 1

2011-11-18T21:44:00.000-08:00

Funnydad and I are sitting and reading on the floor of the bathroom of a Hampton Inn in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. It's not a big bathroom, and the floor is cold. But this room has the only light we can safely turn on while our kids fall asleep.

Today is the first day of our cross-country move. We're driving from Boulder, Colorado to our new home in Laguna Beach, California. The time between that last post about staging and this moment has been a roller coaster. Actually, lately it's felt more like being sucked into a downward spiral. Too much to recount in a single blog post, so if you haven't spent time with me in person or on the phone in the last few months, I'll just have to mete out the story to you in pieces as I post about our relocation experience. Again. That's "relo" (RE-low) to those of us who have done this so many times that we know the lingo.

Quick summary: We're going for Funnydad's new job, which he landed after being laid off last June. Which happened six months to the day after I was laid off in December. We sold our Boulder home, and we're both heartbroken to leave, but we both agree that it was the least bad of the bad options staring at us. We're wary of the expense and traffic waiting for us in Orange County. Southern California is going to have a few upsides, for sure. But, no matter how lovely the weather is, it's not going to be Boulder. It's not going to be that town where we fit in and thrived so completely. We're leaving good friends behind. It took years to build those relationships, and I'm not excited about the work and time it will take to recreate that in California — if it's even possible.

So. Holding back tears, we're headed west. We'll stop in a couple of National Parks and (I'm sure) several unplanned places. We just have to be at Funnydad's father's house in LA by Thanksgiving. Along the way, the four of us will spend the next ten days sleeping in the same room. Good thing I don't mind reading on a bathroom floor.

Living on Stage

2011-09-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

The towels in our bathroom belong to someone else. The stager we hired put them there. After we de-cluttered our house, the stager swooped in and made it look fancy, the way a house has to look these days to sell. We put our mis-matched dressers and garage-sale book shelves in storage. We got rid of our half-broken Ikea stuff. We packed away our photographs and books. The stager, Heidi, came with loads of comfy chairs and large vases of artificial flowers, lots of lamps and throw pillows. There are now 26 throw pillows in our house; two weeks ago there were three. She put nice towels in our bathrooms, gave us an acceptable credenza for our TV, and put red martini glasses in our living room. Because, if you buy our house, you'll just loll around drinking cosmos in that living room every night.

So, the towels in our bathroom belong to the stager, and I can't use them. MY towel is stuffed under the sink, which means whenever I need it I have to scoop it out of the vanity. The toaster oven now lives in the garage, and our kitchen radio spends most of its time in a cabinet. The only books left here are the ones I am actively using for work and a selection for the girls (which are tucked in a drawer in their dresser). There's also a coffee table book of Andrew Wyeth landscapes, but that belongs to the stager.

Every night before bed I pick up and put away absolutely everything, and every morning after breakfast I clean. I wipe and sweep and dust and even mop if necessary (note: Mop n' Glo may be the most magical substance on Earth). My house has never been this consistently clean and uncluttered, and it's so much no fun work to keep it this way. But, the reports from Realtors tell us that the house is "showing well," and if that means we have a better chance of selling it quickly and for a decent price, it'll be worth it. Here are some photos of what the place looks like all sparkly clean decorated with Heidi's stager's touch.

Testing

2011-09-01T19:01:00.001-07:00

This is a test. This is a test of the blog, but this phase of my life is also a test of my sanity. More to come.

Have a Magical Day!

2010-01-15T20:33:00.000-08:00

We just returned from Disney World. I will admit that I went (somewhat) reluctantly. Grandma was persistent, and I knew the kids would adore it; we agreed to a short trip. And so, with fond memories of a childhood visit tucked in my back pocket and decades of snobby backlash against the evil mouse on my sleeve, we arrived in Orlando.

I have been converted. Disney is all about having fun, kids, imagination, and happy endings -- what's wrong with that? They aren't pretending to be real, in fact they make a show of being magical. They entertain, and they do it well. They keep grandmas smiling as easily as five-year-olds. It's quite an impressive accomplishment, really.

We spent two nights and one day in Disney World, and that was enough. We stayed on the grounds of the resort, which is so expansive it may be bigger than Boulder. Disney has four levels of accommodations: economy, moderate, luxury, and super-mega-expensive. We stayed at a moderate place, and it was perfect. We had a regular hotel room-type place in a garden apartment-type complex with a small refrigerator. Our room opened to a courtyard, though the 40 degree temperatures kept us from enjoying it much. Our complex (Caribbean Beach) had several small outdoor, heated pools and one large one with a zero-entry area, tube slides, waterfalls, and towers. There was a white-sand beach on a lake and a great playground. There was a mile-long running loop and a workout room. There was an on-site sit-down restaurant, a food court, and a (of course) a gift shop. The next level of accommodations down didn't have fridges in the room and lacked an on-site sit-down restaurant. I imagine that the next level up would have had more amenities: better shower soap, and maybe room service. All I know about the tippy-top level is that rooms start at $410 per night.

Disney World is more than just one place. There are four parks: The Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom. We spent our day at The Magic Kingdom, and that was perfect for a pair of five-year-olds. We rode a lot of rides including It's a Small World, a Peter Pan ride, Dumbo's elephants, and their very first roller coaster. We watched three parades, one show with Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, and then later that night we had dinner with Cinderella. The girls were happy all day, even when exhausted. The cold temperatures and mid-day rain were a a bit of a drag, but they also kept the crowds away and the lines short.

Grandma and grandpa were with us too, in fact, grandma arranged the whole trip using as much intel as she could gather from her south Florida friends and office mates to make it a success. Grandpa (in his wheelchair) was a wonderful sport about it all, watching his granddaughters run circles of glee.

I'd long ago made my peace with the Disney products that touch kids' lives: the videos, the plastic, the merchandise. I figure that moderation, counter-balance, and a hefty dose of parental example keeps the mega-marketing influence to a minimum. But, I had a professional snobbery against Disney. They seemed to be the opposite of what I work to do, and without spending time thinking about why, I long-ago jumped into the Anti-Disney camp.

In the historical, interpretive museum industry we spend a lot of time fretting about authenticity and the visitor experience. How can we be engaging, but still real? How to make sure the visitor has a great time and yet discerns that the museum is different from, say, looking at the walls of a theme restaurant. In a museum, those cattle brands aren't props -- they're the real deal. And here's their story. And here's the cool thing about the person who used them.

Disney seemed to be the antithesis of this: they're unabashedly fake. They make stuff up, they embellish, they go for flash over substance. And yet, that fake-ness is what won me over: they aren't fooling anyone. No one thinks that's a real castle. Nobody thinks this is a real Main Street. And it's okay. Go on in. Suspend belief. Have fun. Shake Cinderella's hand. Watch the fireworks. Look at the walkers on stilts and wave at the dancers with identical haircuts. Walk through an enormous facility where there is absolutely no chipped paint and never a speck of litter or graffiti. Go to the bathroom through the door marked "princess" and hear every employee end every conversation with "have a magical day!" Disney is a complement to what I do, not a threat. They aren't a cop-out, they're a whole different experience. And there's room for both. In some ways, they may make the authenticity I peddle even more valuable.

They up the ante though. Everything these days does -- restaurants, TV shows, computer games, Wii -- it all ups the ante. Visitor expect to be entertained, really entertained. But that's another blog post.

Laugh and the Blog Laughs With You

2009-12-18T20:22:00.000-08:00

I have been keeping all kinds of humor to myself. Hoarding it. Laughing here at my computer, and you've known nothing about it. Now, my friends, it is time to share. Below are some silly websites and blogs I sometimes visit. Laugh with me. And if you know any similar sites, please share.

This is the first of this "people watching" genre I discovered. It's hard to know which photo is my favorite, though "the closeness of you" is probably a good choice. Would you want to be in that relationship? If so, which person? Really, it's the collection as a whole that makes me chuckle so much.

There's not much one can say about this that the site's title doesn't. It is called "People of Walmart." Be sure you go back a few pages to get the true flavor of the people of Walmart.

This is not a site to visit just before lunch. Which, for some reason, is when I tend to check it out. Every single sandwich looks so freakin' good. The funny is in the oddness. I mean, who scans their sandwich every day? And who makes sandwiches like this, or who seeks out such variety from take-out joints?

This type of thing is a favorite of travelers and wanna-be travelers everywhere.

So, it's a site with things that all look like ducks. Big deal. What's funny about that? Volume, people. Sheer volume.

This isn't a true humor site, though a lot here is funny. Some is just plain interesting. A lot is poignant. My current favorite (funny) post is about Walt Disney. http://www.dump.com/?x=0&y=0&s=disney

This site makes me happy I'm no longer a college student. These texts are largely from young people who are inebriated, and while looking in on that life doesn't sound as if it'll be amusing, I bet you laugh by the end of the first page. Best read on the weekends or Monday morning.

seven eight nine

2009-11-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

This is a painful time at our house: our kids THINK they know how to tell jokes. Tonight, Jon got them going with an old standby, and then, well, you judge:

Dad: Why was six afraid of seven?
kids: I dunno
Dad: Because seven eight nine!
M: Why was 10 afraid of two?
Mom: why?
M: Because of six and seven.
Mom: That doesn't make sense.
M: Yes it does, and it's funny. Like this one: why did eight nine ten?
Mom: why?
M: Because of three.
Mom: Sweetie, the reason dad's joke is funny is because of eating, like the number seven actually ate...
M: Why did the napkin cross the road and jump over the fence?
Mom: why?
M: to get to the other side.

And it went on like this for at least ten minutes.

Hot Lava Girl

2009-10-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

So what do you do when your daughter tells you she wants to be an exploding volcano for Halloween? First you give her some time to change her mind. When she doesn't, you get creative.

First, I made a newsprint pattern and then tried it on the kid, cutting and adjusting as necessary. (She's being scary in the photo, like a volcano.)

Then I cut out a huge piece of brown fleece. It's worth noting here that I don't sew. I cut, I glue, and I make liberal use of that fusing material that allows you to iron fabric together.

Then I made shiny lava floes.

Then I made a crown of flames.

When she put it on she looked a lot like the Pope -- pointy red hat and all.

She loved it, so I loved it. I don't know that she looked like a volcano, but I also don't know how else I could have done this without resorting to paper mache. I made the space between her arm holes too wide, so the fabric bunched in front. She didn't notice, and I wasn't about to try to fix it. I kept telling myself, she's FIVE. If she thinks it's an excellent costume, then it is. This holiday is all about making the kids happy.

O alternated between wanting to be a ladybug and wanting to be a fairy. Since we had both costumes already, there was no problem with her indecision. I think she really wanted to be a fairy, but early on she'd told so many people she was going to be a ladybug that she felt she had to be a ladybug. (People who have been following our family for a while may remember that the girls were ladybugs when they were two. The ladybug costume was recycled from then, but they don't remember Halloween when they were two.) This was one of her first experiences with expectations and social obligations, beyond the rule-obeying type of instances. I let her figure it out, telling her she should do what she wanted. In the end, she went to school as a fairy, but wore the ladybug costume for trick-or-treating.

O tries out her fairy costume.

Just before trick-or-treating. The night was beautiful and mild, but three days earlier we'd had 18 inches of snow. Notice how little is on the ground now -- this is typical of the front range of the Rockies. It snows, but it melts fast.

Their pumpkins. As in years past, we let them draw on the design and then we carved it best we could.

Storytelling at its Finest

2009-10-07T19:29:00.000-07:00

I went to hear Ira Glass speak last weekend. Do you listen to This American Life? You may, because it’s an insanely popular show. Every week it’s NPR’s most popular podcast download by a longshot. If Ira comes to your town, you should go hear him too -- it's a 90-minute NPR love-fest hosted by a funny guy with a keen eye on America and an unparalleled talent for putting together a compelling story. What more could you want?

He opened his talk in the dark. Unexpected and funny right off the bat. Who sits in a dark theater and listens to someone talk? It’s radio, he said, you can’t see people. Voices become more powerful and expressive when you’re not caught up in the way someone looks. Radio allows people to listen to those whom they might not otherwise pay attention to – as an example, he cited some high school girl gang members with colored hair, baggy clothes, and black lipstick whose stories he once told on the air.

His point made, the stage lights came up. Ira Glass is of course, a storyteller, and for an hour and a half that night he spun his storytelling magic. He led us from place to place seamlessly. He kept us entranced explaining his theory of most journalism today (fake, segmented, reliant on hyperbole, falsely grave) and what his show is trying to do (entertain, but still be objective, serious journalists). Serious stories that shoot to the root of the matter – you can laugh AND you can report on the larger meaning of an issue at the same time. Some have called This American Life, under Ira’s leadership, “the vanguard of a journalistic revolution.”

Ira went into some detail about how the show finds stories, and the music in each story. He recounted some recent spots that never aired; he played clips, and then explained why they fell apart. A This American Life blooper reel. As an aside, he mentioned that he is the composer Phillip Glass' cousin. A talent for pushing the envelope must be genetic.

Not familiar with This American Life? Here are two episodes to try (click on the icon that says “full episode.”) This one is about the financial crisis, and though it sounds boring, it's accessible and so well done that I kind of think everyone should listen to it. Or, go to this link and listen to a this episode that re-aired this summer. The bit by Mike Birbiglia (the first piece, it begins at about 7:53) had me buckled over in laughter. A friend from work and I look at each other whenever a crisis hits that we don't want to deal with and say, "Or, I could have dinner. Because that seems more convenient." Listen to it and be on the inside of the joke.

Two Years

2009-09-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

We've been out of Brooklyn for more than four years now. That's the way I think of it. How long has it been since we left New York? Not how long has Boulder, or Minneapolis, been our home. We closed on this house almost exactly two years ago exactly. And so, I'm a bit introspective.

In the circles of introspection I realized that my life in New York is completely inseparable from my pre-kids life. We moved when the girls were 9 months old. At the time they felt SO old to us. They weren't newborns. We'd survived the hardest part. Now, when I see a nine-month kid they look so tiny.

So there were 13 years without kids in New York, and then a measly less-than-a-year with infants? My NYC memories are full of the things I did before kids, luxurious things like yoga classes, and harder things like working until 9:00 many nights. I never had to jostle for a spot in a preschool, I didn't have to learn which sidewalks were okay for trikes and which were too crowded. I just had babies in the city. In Minneapolis I had toddlers. And now, in Boulder I have preschoolers.

So, with all this Thinking, I've realized how much my life has changed. It turns out I know a lot more than I did four years ago.

I know about ice dams and roof rakes and that I never want to deal with either again.

I know water is a touchy subject in the west, as well as a common source of recreation in Minnesota. I miss the lake house culture. Not that we took full advantage of it, but wow, it's almost worth putting up with a Minnesota winter to spend a week at one of those lovely lakes listening to loons at night. But you can't move 10,000 lakes to the high arid plains, and water is a Big Deal out here. Until two months ago you couldn't even have a rainwater collection barrel in Colorado.

I know about open space and uff-da. I know that the Chautauqua Auditorium is the equivalent of the Lake Harriet Bandshell is the equivalent of the Prospect Park Bandshell. And they're all delightful places to be in the summer for an evening concert.

I know about "Minnesota Nice" (which isn't) and the bond that forms between transplants to a new part of the country. Neither can replace old friends with whom you have shared experiences.

I know about old friends with whom I have shared experiences, and that as time marches on the distance makes even those shared experiences no longer enough to hold us together the way I'd hoped. We visit, and it feels distant. The time/distance combo sucks away some relationships, and it's sad. But for others, time makes no difference. You can't always predict which friends you'll stay close to when you move away. (If you're reading this blog, you're probably one who's sticking, and I'm grateful.)

I know that having lived in New York is not the same thing as having lived in Brooklyn. But once you cross the east river that nuance is lost on everyone but me and funnydad.

I know that "back east" is good enough to explain where I came from because no one really cares. Unless they're from back east, too.

I know what xeric landscaping is, and I know how to install and run a drip irrigation system. I know that leafy greens like nitrogen and tomatoes like fish emulsion, and that the second season of a community garden plot is far more rewarding than the first.

I know that Boulder is pretty awesome. It's becoming a home, and it feels right when we come back from a vacation. But I still don't have those good friends you call when you have a really bad day, or a really good day, and until I do, it won't really be home.

Maybe it'll take another two years, or four. Hope not. But we're here, regardless. Moving sucks, and I don't plan to do it again.

Part 2: It's not just for Petsmart Anymore

2009-09-08T18:50:00.000-07:00

It's hot in the Big Horn Basin. And the sun is relentless. There is no shade. These conditions are, in large part, what makes this a good place to find fossils. They’re also why Dr. Scott Wing wears huge wrap-around sunglasses fit for someone leaving cataract surgery. One summer a few years ago, a couple of his post-doc students secretly decorated them with crazy glue and gold glitter. This might be a you-have-to-see-it-thing to understand, but they’re pretty sweet sunglasses.

Scott Wing is a paleobotanist. He goes to Wyoming every summer to crack rocks and look for evidence of past plant life. He's spent 37 summers doing this, and says he'll stop only when he can't do it anymore. Dr. Wing isn't just a paleontologist, he's a rock star. Literally. Not only is he a premium scientist for the Smithsonian who has contributed greatly to the study of paleontological flora, he's a talented communicator. He has a gift for explaining the complex in accessible terms. He's one of our go-to people for the scientific nitty gritty. Any exhibition is a balancing act between, on one hand, really detailed, interesting things that people have written books about, and on the other, the visitor's attention span, available time, and interest level. So, someone who can sum up like Dr. Wing is very helpful.

These days, one of Dr. Wing's primary areas of study is a global warming event that happened 55.8 million years ago. Dinosaurs were gone, mammals were just getting started and suddenly a huge amount of carbon dioxide was released into the earth's atmosphere causing the earth's temperature to rise about 5 degrees Celsius. This event took place at the end of the beginning of the Eocene Epoch just after the Paleocene had ended. It is called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum. It lasted for about 100,000 years.

Scientists debate what caused the release of CO2, with most theories settling on a combination of volcanic activity, a comet impact, a ginormous fire that burned a lot of peat.

There are obvious parallels between the PETM (as it is known) and what's going on today with Global Climate Change. The PETM was a much slower event than the rise in temperatures we're experiencing now, yet the change to the earth's flora was dramatic. Plants that are now found on the Atlantic coast of South Carolina thrived in the Big Horn Basin. Dr. Wing and his work will be highlighted in our exhibition, including a video of him explaining the PETM. Which brings us back to the Big Horn Basin, and me, downing gatorade.

On this particular day, we met at the small tent city Dr. Wing and his cohorts call home and drove (four wheel drive required) to Dr. Wing's dig site for the day. He then began excavating a pit they’d dug into a hillside, and students started cracking rocks with pick-hammers. The spot where a leaf once fell creates a weak plane in the rock, even 55.8 million years later. So a trained eye and a swift tap on the right fissure can reveal a leaf fossil – usually two fossils, one from each side of the leaf.

During a slow few moments, I started playing around with the discard pile. It wasn’t long before I found a small leaf impression. Really! Me, all by myself, with rocks from the discard pile! I showed it to Dr. Wing, just in case it was important, and wouldn’t you know it, it was! He said it was the best fossil found all day so far, whatever that’s worth. Here’s a photo of my leaf fossil, now in a box somewhere in the Smithsonian’s collection.

He did let me take home a couple other less impressive leaf impressions, though. Apparently, this is common. Paleontologists call them “party fossils.”

If you’d like to learn more about the PETM, you can wait until May of 2010 and come to the Washakie Museum in Worland, WY. Or you can watch this American Museum of Natural History video featuring Dr. Wing (and several other of our Guest Curators). Or you can just google it – it’s pretty interesting and fairly depressing.

Oh, and if you ever forget the initials PETM – just think about Petsmart. PETM is that store’s NYSE ticker abbreviation.

Part 1: Introduction to the Big Horn Basin

2009-07-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

The Big Horn Basin lies in north central Wyoming, a northwest to southeast oval tipping its hat into southern Montana. It’s a moonscape. Funky-looking, desolate, stunning. Hot and dry in summer, bitter in winter. It’s isolated and easy to get lost in. It is distinctive enough to be readily visible on satellite images from space.

The badlands of the Big Horn Basin. Some geologists write it Bighorn Basin, but our client prefers the three-word version, so that's how I write it.

A few towns ring its circumference. You've probably heard of Cody, Wyoming, a tourist magnet just an hour from Yellowstone. It's the Basin's biggest town with 9,000 souls. The populations of other towns around its perimeter hover between hundreds and low thousands. Not much goes on in the heart of the Big Horn Basin, at least not now. But at different times in the earth’s history this area was immersed in tropical flora, an inland sea, and a lush forest.

The earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old, but it took until 600 million years ago for non-microscopic life to evolve. Trees didn’t show up until about 280 million years ago. Dinosaurs came on the scene about 200 million years ago and they stuck around until about 65 million years ago. Their extinction opened the way for surviving animals to diversify and evolve. Mammals flourished after the dinosaurs, and many of the species surviving today have ancestors from this time period. The first primates, tiny lemur-like creatures, date from about 55 million years ago.

Evidence of much of this is visible in the Big Horn Basin. The earliest primate found to date has been found in the Big Horn Basin, and here is a very cool PBS video you can watch about it. (It runs 13 minutes, and it's well worth your time. Fascinating.)

The Big Horn Basin is truly a perfect place for paleontological study. The earth has buckled and uplifted in such ways that layers from nearly every part of the earth’s history are exposed. Its dry climate has preserved what’s there, kept plants from covering it up, and has discouraged humans from building on top of it. Plus, much of Wyoming, including the Big Horn Basin, is federal land run by the Bureau of Land Management. It belongs to all of us, and the BLM is gracious about civilian use of the land for scientific study.

The Wyoming DOT has posted signs like this indicating which highway-side rocks are exposed and how old they are. If you think about the layers of rock like an onion, geologists call each onion layer a "formation."

There are fossils in countless places in the United States, but not all are this easy to access. Also, the Basin holds a nearly continuous record of time, practically an un-interrupted record of life on earth. The Big Horn Basin is a paleontological gem, a true treasure in the world of science unlike any other single place on earth. This idea is central to the museum I’m working on in Worland, Wyoming, a town of 5,000 in the Big Horn Basin.

So, my firm went up to interview and film some scientists in the field. Which is how I found myself standing with paleontology students in blinding sun and 100 degree heat, downing Gatorade, swinging a pick at rocks shards.

To be posted very soon: Part 2: My Paleontology Field Trip and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

A different part of the Big Horn Basin

What I Learned on The Great Colorado Road Trip

2009-07-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

No matter how well you plan, it's not possible to get five people into a car at the appointed time on departure day.

The speed with which a minivan with a roof carrier can go up a mountain pass and the speed with which it can go down the other side average about 50 m.p.h.

O on day 2, after doing some kind of coloring project in her seat: Does anyone have a stapler?

A roof box can open while going around a corner down a hill, spilling much of its contents, if you have not properly closed it.

Colorado is a big state.

There are a lot of hot springs in Colorado.

There are also a lot of mountains.

Funnydad could spend all day wandering in sand dunes. Dude likes moonscapes.

O on day 3, frustrated, Does anyone have a stapler NOW?

Four-year olds are not terrified by 32-foot ladders and small tunnels on cliff dwellings. They are, however, worried that the man with the hat [park ranger] will talk too long.

The most exciting thing about breakfast at the hotel for the girls and funnydad (!) was the waffle maker.

The most exciting thing about the car for the girls was the Magic Treehouse books on CD we had with us.

The most exciting thing about the car for mom and dad was grandma who was always at the ready to hand the girls dropped crayons, snack, or stuffed animal.

1055 miles in five days. Mom, dad, funnybunnies, and Grandma Mimi (funnydad's mom). Cool trip, loved what we saw, learned a lot about our "new" state. Have no desire to get in a car again for a long time.

There are more than 600 cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, a National Park in southwest Colorado. This is the largest. Known as the Cliff Palace it was once home to approximately 125 people. Each cliff dwelling was built into a natural overhang and near a water source.

Jon heads out to climb the dunes at the Great Sand Dunes National Park. These sand dunes are 750' tall, the largest in the country. There are several other sand dunes in the U.S., including others in Colorado.

There is a creek that runs near the base of the dunes. The bottom is sandy and the water is ankle deep. Perfect for kids.

M loves to pick bouquets of dandelions, and this field was a perfect spot. This roadside break was also one of our highest elevation stops of the trip, 9,500 feet (Boulder is at 4,500 feet, and tundra begins at 11,000 feet.)

O at one of our roadside jaunts.

The girls have started telling one another secrets. Here they're on the sidewalk of a mountain town called Ouray. It's in a stunning, steep valley, and attracts ice climbers in the winter and tourists like us in the summer.

Just in case we forget where the wall is

2009-06-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

The girls love to spell things these days. They're on the cusp of reading -- they can read short words and special books made for very, very early readers ("Mat sat. Sam sat. Mat sat on Sam." That kind of thing.) They like to read the newspaper with us pointing out every "the," "and," "in," and other words they see that they know. This is all age-appropriate. I know kids their age who are more advanced, and kids older than them who aren't quite here yet. I feel strongly that this kind of interest in words should be organic, borne from their interest, not in a parental desire to have early readers.

Sometimes they ask us how to spell words as they write them out. Usually this involves silly, four-year-old sentences to caption a drawing. For instance, "This is a baby fairy and she likes her pet dolphin." It also involves a lot of mermaids and ladybugs.

But, last weekend the girls decided they wanted to label things in our house. It was completely their idea and a true joint O+M effort. We helped them spell the words, and they taped them up. Here's what our house looks like now (there are others not shown here, too):

Self-explanatory.

The scribbles on the bottom and side are the crank to open the window and the levers to lock it in place.

Sometimes M gets a little carried away making the letter capital E.

Once they'd labeled the obvious things, they moved on to other items.

They taped this one by the doorbell. It reads "May and Ophelia house."

M's Rules for Hiking

2009-05-29T20:35:00.000-07:00

Verbatim, as made up by M during a recent hike. (We're not sure what "including" means here, but this is the way she said it.)

1) Be careful, including.

2) Don't fall down the mountain.

3) This rule tells the other rules what to do: Be careful, including, and don't fall down the mountain or you could die.*

4) Be kind to animals you meet on the mountain.

5) Trees give us oxygen, thank you.

* the origin of this rule may lie in that at school they are learning that silent letters tell other letters to say their names. As in, the silent "e" in home tells the "o" to say its name.

Cut-off day

2009-05-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

Our girls were born on THE cut-off day for kindergarten in Boulder. They will either be the oldest or the youngest in their class – anyone born a day later in 2004 will have to wait another year to begin kindergarten. At first, back when they were small lumps crawling around our apartment, I advocated waiting. People said it was better. People said they knew kids who grew up timid as the youngest in their class and kids who grew up strong as the eldest. “If you want leaders hold them back. If you want followers put them in early.” My mother-in-law teaches seventh grade and said she can tell who is older and younger in her class without looking at her pupil’s birthdates. It matters, and we wanted our kids to be their best, so we’d wait. Funnydad agreed. I was so sure that’s what we’d do.

Now I put that decision in the same category as when, as a childless woman in my 20s, I saw preschoolers in mis-matched clothes and swore my children would not look like that. You just don’t know how you’ll really handle most kid things until they’re staring you in the face; then you search for advice, close your eyes and let instinct carry you.

Their teachers say they’re ready for the big K. Socially and academically. We agree from what we see at home (as if we know what a kindergartener should be doing). A few months back, after much agony, we agreed to start them in kindergarten and let them be the youngest in their grade. I was okay with this decision, but I worry. Kindergarten is okay, but what happens in seventh grade when they – petite compared to their peers – develop late and think boys are gross when others don't? A friend reminds me that seventh grade sucks no matter what age you are. But, what about them not being confident because they’ve always been youngest? A friend tells me of how she was held back and was so bored with the academic work that she tended to daydream, get in trouble, and not try hard.

For every turn of this decision there is someone with an anecdote. Being youngest helps build social skills because they have to work to be included. Being oldest helps build social skills because others look up to you. One friend tells me that she was youngest and loved it, and her husband was oldest and loved that. I conclude that you make the best of whatever your situation.

Oh why, oh why couldn’t my daughters have been born in any other month? Why can’t Boulder have a different cut-off day?

In fact, it turns out that Minneapolis, where we lived for two years before Boulder, has a kindergarten cut-off day of September 1. Bam, decision made: wait. And New York City where they were born has a cutoff of December 31. Bam, decision made: enroll. What this tells me is that it’s not about the age in terms of academic success – these kids all blend in the same academic environment at college – it’s your peer group.

But anyway, we’d decided, and kindergarten it is. In addition to their academic readiness, most of their friends would be going to kindergarten. How odd would it be that kids they play with all the time are suddenly a year older than they are? And if we did that to them, what would be our reason for holding them back? To possibly set them up to be stronger leaders? Aren’t there other ways to foster that?

So, as a way of hedging, Funnydad and I thought we would continue them at their Montessori school for the kindergarten year and put them in public first grade. Give them another year of maturity before they faced the big school with a cafeteria and changing classes for art and music.

I must have subconsciously questioned the decision. At each playdate or moms' parking lot discussion, I’d explain our reasons to M+O’s friend’s parents. Protesting too much… Everyone else's kids are going to our local elementary school, Foothills. It’s an excellent school, why would you pay for private school when Boulder’s public schools are top-notch?

Doubt crept in. Just who would be left at their Montessori school next year? There are 15 in this year’s kindergarten class, but the school says they know next year is a smaller class. How small? Would we want them to be just two kindergarteners of five? (No.) We've requested the enrollment numbers for next year for their current school, but don't have them yet. In this economy Funnydad and I doubt many will choose private kindergarten if they don’t have a compelling reason. And, anyway, aren’t I being a tad over protective? If they’re ready for kindergarten, then frickin' put them in kindergarten.

You might think this blog post ends with our decision, but it doesn’t. I’m still in agony over what is right: keeping them at their Montessori school or putting them in our within-walking-distance public elementary school; however, I feel the tide turning toward the public school option. I am coming to realize that if the decision is this hard to make, both answers must be okay.

The girls started telling people they’re going to Foothills next year, I think because they keep hearing their friends saying they’re going. M+O don’t understand they may not be in the same classroom as their friends, they just want to go where everyone else is going.

Funnydad and I are still trying to find out how many kindergarteners their Montessori school will have next year, and we still have a Big Discussion ahead of us to decide. And whichever way we go, I have years of worry ahead of me.

School, especially middle school, was hard on me. I wasn’t popular. I dreaded that feeling of walking off the cafeteria line, tray in hand, scanning the lunch room for someone I could sit with. It was hard, tearful at times, and I would do almost anything to shelter my girls from that experience. But, my mother tells sad stories of eating her middle school lunches in a ladies room stall because she couldn’t find anyone to eat with in the cafeteria either. Maybe it’s genetic. Or maybe there’s nothing to help adolescence not suck. Or maybe, because they’re twins, they will always be able to eat lunch with each other.

Margin

2009-05-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

Another post about being insanely busy. Feel free to skip, since you’ve heard it before. I swear I don’t like living this way, despite the fact that I can’t seem to change.

(This is another post of 50-word-or-fewer paragraphs. Seems appropriate for the subject matter. Plus, you all seemed to enjoy it last time.)

When I was younger, before kids, being busy meant that maybe I skipped going to the gym. Or I worked late instead of meeting a friend for dinner. Now, it’s an entirely different game.

Been spinning in circles trying to stay balanced. During a recent trip to Virginia my sister-in-law, a mom whom I respect greatly, talked about the ways she works to build “margin” into her and her family’s schedule. That’s the word for what I’m missing: margin.

Every minute is accounted for, busy, and if it’s not, there’s something slipping. I forget forms for school, I handwash undies the night before lest I go commando to work because I haven’t done laundry.

People actually call to ask if I’m still blogging. I am grateful for recent rain because I haven’t had time to water my garden. I blow off necessary, but “optional,” things like returning library books. Funnydad does lots, this isn’t a matter of marital workload balance. It’s much harder to fix.

So I clean out the garage. It looks awesome, and (bonus) the pile for our neighborhood yard sale is larger than I expected. It feels good to have something clutter-free. I go upstairs and tackle my sock drawer.

At Quaker Meeting a friend and I talk about this very thing: what does simplicity mean these days, and how does a working mom achieve it? For her elminating clutter is not part if it. I don’t tell her about the garage. Instead I tell her about my sister-in-law’s margin.

Is the route to simplicity with a margin? It’s appealing, though easy to say and hard to do. Margin becomes a goal. It’s more concrete than saying a blanket “I have to stop doing so much.” But I’m not even sure I know what margin feels like. I don’t think I’ve ever lived that way.

I'm always doing something. Pasta's boiling, so I empty the dishwasher. Kids are getting in their car seats, so I take out the compost. Is this at odds with margin? I'm not sure. Feels productive to me, but maybe that's because I'm desensitized.

I drop the kids at school, go to work, then go straight from work to pick them up. This doesn't seem abnormal. Is this where I'm lacking margin? There is no obvious answer -- there's no "Oh, if only I stopped trying to learn Italian, things would be more sane."

A call for comments: Anyone know? How do you build margin into your life?

Some truths about gardening

2009-03-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

• Half a plot is less than half the work of a full plot
• The second year really IS easier
• Four-year-olds are better at playing by themselves while you garden than three-year-olds
• There is no good way to work compost in around a drip irrigation system
• It's not worth the fight against bugs to get beans to grow here
• Everyone who has rhubarb has too much of it, so don't plant any yourself
• Weeds are intimidating, even five months after I last fought the good fight against them

Did anyone notice that after a rousing start to last year's gardening season there were NO posts about my community garden plot? This was not coincidence. This was me sparing you from my sinking depression over how Not Fun my Gardening Burden became. Turns out that 528 square feet of weed-infested garden with poor soil in an arid climate is too much to take on while working half time and raising three-year old twins.

Weeds in my community garden plot last year.

There were several problems, and together they just piled on the frustration. First (and throughout) the weeds almost did me in. I took them away by the wheelbarrow full. Not kidding, wheelbarrows, many, many times. My plot had been abandoned the year before and loads of weeds had gone to seed right there in the soil I was tilling. Plus, I didn't understand the stratigies for dealing with weeds properly -- I've learned a few lessons. But it was (still is?) a harsh learning curve.

Then the wacky Colorado weather meant that during parts of March I needed to be watering every day -- WTF? It's March, there's occasional snow! -- but there's also intense sun. Since I didn't realize this some of my seeds didn't germinate well.

Then, the poor soil (that I thought I'd amended well enough but clearly hadn't) meant that the things that did grow didn't grow well. Tiny peppers. Superball-sized tomatillos. Baby melons. No peas. Blossom-end tomato rot. I got okay lettuce. I got lots of zucchini (who doesn't?). I got a lot of cucumbers, but that's about it.

Overall, what pushed my gardening pleasure down so low was the ratio of weeding-per-satisfying-harvest. By September, knee deep in weeds I almost walked away from the whole thing. Seriously, I'd sit out there for hours, weeding and crying, thinking why am I doing this, where's the fun? I tried to hire people to help, even. The weeds were insane. I'd had such a successful square foot garden in Minnestoa, but this was a whole different game. I was beaten down and began to resent my community garden plot. Dozens of people linger on the wait list for these plots each year, so I should feel lucky to have one. But there I stood in tears resenting the never-ending work and the weeds.

I thought about it, but I didn't quit. Instead, I decided to split my plot this year. A neighbor was all too happy to take half my section. But my passion was gone. The renewal notices came out and I waited weeks to send mine in. I almost missed a mandatory meeting for all gardeners because I just wasn't focused on Things I Had To Do For the Garden. I didn't start seeds on time. I needed a plan, a way to get back into it. I decided on being a lazy gardener.

Things have started okay -- it's easier to get going when you're not starting from scratch. My goal this year is to take the path of least resistance at every turn. I'd like to rearrange or enlarge my rows, get more out of my limited space. Nope, not this year, too much work. I'd like to install a proper gate. Nope, not this year, use what I have. I'd like to cover my not-yet-sprouted arugula so the flea beetles don't get it. I should do it now, but I'm waiting until next weekend when I have time. If the flea beetles get a hold before then, oh well. I just can't knock myself out this year. I have to have the best year I can, get that feeling back.

Thing is, I don't feel it yet. I'm doing what I need to do, but it's still kind of an obligation, not a labor of love. I'm not excited yet. Right now, I'm going on faith that it will come. I'll keep you posted.

What to do with all those single socks in your laundry room

2009-03-12T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sock puppets! Take a stray sock, some extra buttons, a bit of scrap yard, a dab of Elmer's, and you're good to go.

The girls' sock puppets talk to each other. M's is named "Sparkle" and O's is named "Diamond."

A close up of Diamond. Diamond had facial arrangement issues until her eyes fell off and O glued them back in a different place, this time below the hair. The cool thing about making sock puppets when you're four is that there aren't any rules.

Little monkeys

2009-03-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

My kids are growing up in Boulder, which means it's practically a right for them to learn to rock climb. (It's pretty much a right to learn to ski here, too, but we're delaying that for reasons that could fill a whole other blog post.)

In this small, one-movie theater town there are two rock climbing gyms -- I mean gyms with nothin' but rock walls -- and apparently that's not enough because they're building an Olympic training facility here, too. When we go hiking on a nice weekend, most anywhere we go will be lousy with folks and ropes and people on a high climb. Rock climbing is big here. Way big.

Parks and playgrounds have fake boulders to climb and rock walls on the sides of playground equipment. Our children scramble up those like they're nothing, so we thought it was time to take them climbing for real. They loved it.

We met a friend from their school and their mom at a rock climbing gym. The mom just happens to have spent 16 years on the U.S. Women's National Rock Climbing Team. (I know, you're thinking, "that's a thing?" I felt the same way.) She was the best in the country for a while, and even now, buff doesn't begin to describe this woman's body. Anyway, we met at The Spot for a weekend morning of fun with M+O and their friend, and up they went.

Funnydad helps M figure out her next move

O way up high. Both girls felt safe with the harnesses instantly.

Funnydad tries a bit of "bouldering," a type of rock climbing that doesn't use harnesses, doesn't go far off the ground, and tends to move across rather than up.

We're now going to seek out kid-sized harnesses of our own so we can take the girls without champion support. We all enjoy it, and who can resist an outlet for monkey children to safely be monkeys?

50 words or fewer

2009-03-04T18:52:00.000-08:00

At work these days I’m spending a lot of time writing exhibit text. The research phase ended a while ago, the outlines and concepts have all been approved. Now it’s the nitty gritty work of finding ways to make the text make sense, connect with the artifacts and images, flow through the story line, and be lively. And, each text block is generally between 35 and 50 words. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s impossible. Somehow it all gets done.

Since I’m thinking in short paragraphs and I’m feeling behind in my blogging, here are some short catch-ups about our lives. All in 50 words or fewer.

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Our trip to the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua simply rocked. Eleven family members and we all got along. The 400-acre organic farm we stayed on kept surprising us, and we swam every day. There were cool wild (and some tame) monkeys, but there were also big bugs.

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It’s been in the 70s all week, which has brought on spring fever. Daylight savings time is almost here, which means kiddos will meet outside to play after dinner while their parents chat. Everyone wins.

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Peas go in the ground on St. Patrick’s Day, so I must get going with my garden. This year I’m taking a smaller plot. Last year’s garden required more than I could give. The weeds! The weeds were insane. I’ve scaled back my expectations in hopes of a better year.

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Our home landscaping, however, was a dream last year. This year I’m full of ideas for improvement, thinning this and adding that. We’ll see. I’m trying to be realistic on the homefront, too.

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I’ve forgotten each girls’ lunch box at least once, left my purse at home, misplaced my car keys, and arrived at work in my house shoes – all so far this week. And, I backed into a mailbox smashing the car’s rear windshield on Monday. Bad week.

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I’ve decided to train for the Bolder Boulder, though the event feels daunting. I know if I can’t run the whole10k, I can run 5k and walk the rest. Oddly, this compromise doesn’t help. I still ask myself: Am I in or out?

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My hiking group starts again on Monday. I’m excited, though also a bit worried. I’m pretty busy – do I want an activity every Monday night until September? On this one, a partial commitment feels okay, so that's what I'm going with. For now.

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The girls’ school will hold a silent auction in May. I claim to hate soliciting donations, but so far I’ve effortlessly scored some good stuff. Including five cases of chai. A little strange, but crazy popular here.

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Today we listened to the lullaby “Hush little baby don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking bird...” M said, “Mom, if those things the lady is singing about don’t work for the baby, she should give her a nukkie [pacifier] because nukkies always work for babies.”

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See that word below this that says "comments"? You can click on it! Really! It would be a great encouragement to me if you all would leave more comments. Might even motivate me to post more often. Thanks!

Gung Hay Fat Choy

2009-01-30T19:23:00.000-08:00

Tonight we sought out a traditional "Lion Dance" to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The girls have been learning about it at school and were very excited. They kept explaining that red was the color of good luck in China and they had to put lots of red things in our house for the new year (this didn't happen, though I offered red construction paper for crafts). They also said the house had to be clean for the new year and took it upon themselves to use the wet wipes we use to help make four-year-old hygiene easier (AKA Butt Wipes) to wipe down every bathroom in this house. It may have used a lot of wipes, but who am I to stop my children from voluntarily cleaning bathrooms?

The girls' school told us about a Chinese restaurant in town that offers a "Lion Dance" to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We heard it gets crowded, so we got there at 5:30 for a 6:45 dance (both girls sporting red shoes). But despite our early arrival (they don't take reservations) the restaurant was full, no chance of being seated. So, following a tip from another parent from their school who was also turned away, we went to a nearby Vietnamese/pan-Asian restaurant that also had the Lion Dance, this time at 6:30. With luck and little tenacity we scored a table and a prime seat for the main event. A round of Shirley temples to celebrate!

The story goes that the lion comes to the village each new year to scare away the bad luck. The lion is loud and powerful, and the villagers don't know what to do. So, after the dragon has chased out all the bad luck, the villagers take a head of lettuce and lace it with sleeping pills. The lion eats the lettuce and falls asleep.

Our lion was actually a team of four lions, each worn by two students at one of Boulder's Kung Fu academies. There was a loud drummer and many cymbal players, too. The lion danced and leaped up and down, shimmying around the restaurant, having a blast. Near the end he reaches to the ceiling where the crew has placed a head of lettuce -- like an overgrown bunch of mistletoe. He grabbed the lettuce, and tore it to shreds as he "ate" it, which sent pieces to all corners of the restaurant. Then he fell asleep, kind of. The whole event lasted for ten minutes or more, and the girls were great sports about the noise. They liked the lions, loved their noodle dinner, and pretty much fell into bed by the time we got home.

The video is shaky -- it's hard to have a steady hand in chaos -- and it doesn't do the event justice, but it'll give you an idea. Fun. Loud. In this video you'll see the lion eat the lettuce and you'll notice that the other lions all have lettuce bunches to eat, too. And, it will become clear that at this point -- ten minutes into the commotion -- May was more hungry than interested in watching bad luck be chased away. She had fun, but you have to appreciate that she has priorities.

Lion Dance from jennifer chapman on Vimeo.
All those years in New York and I never once went to Chinatown for Chinese New Year's, never saw a thing like this. It was fun and I bet we'll do it again next year.

Music media

2009-01-13T20:29:00.000-08:00

The other day a mom of older kids gave M+O each an old cassette tapes of kids' music, so now we have some vintage Raffi and WeeSing going on at our house. Woo hoo! The most amusing part is that the girls are fascinated with the cassette tapes. They want to hold them constantly. They try to take the cases apart. They put the little folded covers out and put them in again incessantly. Once one of them pulled the brown magnetic tape out a bit, looked up at me and said, "oops mama." They can't seem to remember the word "tape" so they call them "those small CD thingys."

This weekend when we set out for an errand both girls protested taking the minivan. NOOOO! SUBARUUUU! They never ask to take the Subaru, it's harder to crawl into and the carseats there don't accomodate winter coats well. But, I quickly figured out, the Subaru has a tape deck. No, I promised, opting for driver ease and preschooler comfort, we'll listen to them on the totally ancient boom box when we get home.

So, after days of carrying the tapes around like treasures they gathered in our room around the boom box , and listened. (the boom box's normal function is to channel NPR to me while I get dressed in the morning -- it's old, ugly, and clunky, but Martha Stewart hasn't gotten to our bedroom yet, and we're frugal, so it's just fine for its NPR purpose). To them, it was just another way to hear "Baby Beluga." I thought perhaps they'd make connections about CDs and tapes and realize that there is an older way of hearing music, but no. I thought they'd remark about how we don't have any tapes other than these, but no. I thought they'd at least ask why they only see CDs and the ipod when we play music, but no. They're not old enough to get that there's technology they haven't encountered, it's all current in their reality. These are children who already know how to use a computer mouse, and who will someday think we're square because we like to email -- let alone that we barely text -- or because we don't know how to (fill in the blank). CDs will someday be to these kids what 8-track tapes are to me -- used during my life, but a relic of the past by the time I started paying attention. For now, a cassette is just another way to hear and sing (off key) Baby Beluga, a song that's been part of our lives for years. Here's a video from our Minneapolis days -- they were two and a half when I took this (it's likely that we were just weeks away from our first conversation about moving to Boulder when this was taken). And for those of you not familiar with Raffi or his iconic song, here's Raffi singing on yet another ancient medium to get up to speed.

The List

2009-01-08T18:56:00.001-08:00

We had an exciting day here in Boulder yesterday. Just a two miles from our house a wildfire burned 1400 acres and seven "structures." It started when 80 mph winds blew down power lines. You could see the smoke for miles, smell it too. An entire side of a mountain appeared to glow orange -- we could see it from the end of our street. It's a mountain very close to our house, one we drive on regularly, and one we hiked on just the weekend before with a visiting grandma.

More than 11,000 homes were evacuated along with a lot of livestock. Mostly horses, but I saw a photo of a llama. They brought all the four-legged evacuees to the Boulder County Fairgrounds, which struck me as brilliant, but of course must have been part of the county's standing emergency plan. The Red Cross set up a shelter at a local high school, but in a statistic that illustrates Boulder's wealth, most found friends or hotels: of those 11,000 households, only 75 people spent the night at the shelter.

The news spread quickly, the way it does in disaster situations. People repeated what they knew, what they heard, where it started, how many acres had burned, that no one had been hurt, that a barn had burned down. Because it was clear the fire wasn't close to the more populated part of town where we live, there was a thrill to it all. We were safe, so we could be voyeuristic. I've never seen a wildfire in person, and it was, I have to admit, amazing. All that orange. Humbling. A little bit scary because at the time it wasn't yet contained.

When I was perhaps ten years old we spent a Christmas in Pacific Palasades outside Los Angeles with my father's cousin Steve and his family. My second cousin, Betsy, walked on water. Five years older than me, she was the epitome of teenage perfection. I remember everything about her room, including the fact that she had a list on the back of her door of what she would bring with her in the event that they had to evacuate because of a fire. I'd never heard of such a list. Why would you have to leave your house and bring important things with you? For real? I also remember that a guy who liked her had written a love poem in caligraphy and she had it framed on the wall. Cameron's poem was on the list even though she and Cameron were no longer dating. The existence and beauty of the poem (guys do stuff like that when they like you??), as well the fact that it meant so much even though she and Cameron were over, baffled me. I remember the evacuation list perhaps because Cameron's poem was on it.

Last night I began to think, what would be on my list? Should I make a list? My mind went all other the place: do I want to think about what I'd need for a night away, or what I'd want if my house were gone? Do I want to think about what I could grab and run with, or what I could pack in our car? I thought of only a few things at first, and then put my ideas into categories. There are the papers of a household -- passports, mortgage stuff, tax prep papers, bank records. But, much of that is computerized and can be accessed remotely. There's our computers, they were essential. I didn't think much about clothing, or items in the kitchen. I wondered if it could be handy to have some practical things with us -- how long would we be evacuated for? -- like screwdrivers. My list for M+O was long: dolly and duckling (their lovies), baby books, that file of preschool artwork I've been saving, their favorite dresses and pink sparkle shoes. Things to keep them entertained while we're away from home: art supplies, favorite books, the portable DVD player, Zingo. In the end the personal item list for me was small: our Quaker wedding certificate, photos, some things from my childhood, a few work-related things that would be hard to reproduce, my master's thesis. Could I find a copy of the love poem funnydad wrote for me while we were engaged? And the chargers -- don't forget to grab the chargers for all the electronic stuff I'm grabbing. My thoughts began to be practical, and as I thought and thought, and I couldn't imagine finding enough things I couldn't live without to fill our minivan.

This, of course, is ridiculous. We can fill that minivan for a weekend trip. But it didn't feel like there was that much I couldn't live without. I am absoultely certain it would be different if we were really evacuating and there was a real chance we'd never see this house and our possessions again, but what did it mean that my silver didn't make the list until I decided that was silly, of course I could grab it. Nothing from our garage made the list and very little from our basement.

Does this mean I can donate everything in our garage to charity? Of course not. There's a difference between examining the essentials of life and the comforts that make living easier and enjoyable. I've gotten used to the space and the storage of a quasi-suburban home, and rather like not having my extra sheets crammed into underbed storage boxes with funnydad's old LPs. There's room for improvement, but that doesn't mean I want to take on a life of austerity.

So I spent today thinking about what things are important to me. My girls, my husband, us as a family. Perhaps the presence of sentimental things on my list and absence of many material things means I'm living Quaker values more than I give myself credit for. Or maybe I'm living the values and that's what makes Quakerism attractive to me. Somehow the fire has shown me that it's tied together. And that I'm lucky.

This morning when the smell of smoke still hung in the air and the fire had been 30% contained, neighbors were blasé about it. "Fires are just a part of life here." Really? Well, this was my first brush with natural disaster, unless you count a handful of minor hurricanes. I'm not sure I will ever be blasé about natural disaster so close to home, but it's interesting to learn a few things about myself as I process it all.

What would be on your list?

Merry Little Christmas

2008-12-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

First, you have to resign yourself to being tired. As fun as Christmas is with kids, and it really is now that they're old enough to get it, there is an endurance aspect to it all. But, once you accept that there is a fatigue you cannot escape -- because Christmas Eve is never an early night and Christmas morning comes early -- it's wonderful. It's wonderful to listen to M explain that she REALLY heard reindeer on the roof last night, and watch O be more intrigued with the mechanics of her new Zingo game than the game itself (it's a bingo-like game with a little dispenser for the chips, and woah! is the dispenser fascinating). They're old enough now that they thought to distribute gifts as well as dive for the ones with their names on it, but they're young enough still that there was a steady chorus of "I want to open another one."

The opening was over, breakfast was yummy, and then we had the time-honored, chaotic tradition of Christmas phone calls to relatives spread across several time zones. Then -- a new Christmas Day tradition -- we took the girls ice skating for the first time. I cooked my first lamb dinner. It's been a lovely holiday, with a dear performance at their preschool, the "sheep show" (see quotes to the left) at Quaker meeting that included the entire meeting singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with hand/body motions, our first menorah at M+O's request, Christmas Eve church with Grandma Jo-Ann, their learning their first Christmas songs (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, and Jingle Bells), and back-to-back grandparent visits. There were a few setbacks, too, including the cowering in fear from the animated TV versions of both Rudolph and Frosty (our kids are very afraid of anything even slightly scary).

My parents have come and gone now, and Funnydad's mom is here now. My father's health is declining, and I don't think he'll be traveling much more. I'm not sure which is worse: the fact that he is no longer able to get his own gift for my mother, the fact that even coming to the store with me to choose it is too much for him, or the fact that we were all relieved that he accepted my offer of just going to buy it for him.

I hope you've had a Merry Little Christmas, and that your angels, however old they may be, are keeping your yuletide bright. I leave you with this video taken on Christmas Day.

Chapman Twins Ice Skating from jennifer chapman on Vimeo.

In Case You're Wondering

2008-12-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

When alloted one piece per night -- provided they a) finish their dinner and b) remember to ask -- it takes four-year olds from Halloween night until December 5th to consume all their trick or treating candy. Reeses Peanut Butter Cups were the hands-down favorite. Tootsie Rolls were also quite popular, but Three Musketeers bars were thrown-away half-eaten.

Balancing on a turkey

2008-11-26T19:12:00.000-08:00

Last year at this time I filled this blog with my somewhat arcane knowledge of Thanksgiving, thanks to the work I did on my master's thesis. Most everyone I know has heard this information now, so I won't rehash. I'll let a few years go by, and assuming I'm still in the blogosphere then, I'll let 'er rip again.

This year I'm focused on family, and how nice it is not to travel -- which in many ways is an oxymoron since we have no family here. I'm focused on what a nice place Boulder is to call home, and I'm not just saying that because it was 70 degrees and sunny today. I'm focused on my new hobby of running, and how I never thought I'd be one to plot when I could squeeze a run in. I'm focused on the fact that I was a moron for waiting until the last minute to go to the grocery store, but I'm enjoying the smell of baking sweet potatoes. So I'm focused on some good things.

But also, it seems I'm NOT focused in some important places. Like finding a good balance between work and the rest of my life, and within the rest of my life category between being a mom and being more than a mom. I'm continually out of balance, and this bothers me. Yet, I can't seem to set things right. A lot of people live this way, so either everyone else is also all out of whack and keeps quiet about it, or I have an unusually low tolerance for it. Either way, back on my home turf, I wish things were easier. I feel more at ease when the house is completely picked up, and knowing that gives me insight into some things I could do to bring about more balance. (Since the home of twin four-year olds isn't going to be picked up all the time, I need to apply that ease to other areas.) That pile on my desk? The closet I can't open without something falling out? Those little computer tasks that lurk? All that dross clogs me up. Gotta clear some of those bothersome things out of the way since I can't seem to will them not to bother me.

So, I plan to spend part of the holiday weekend taking care of loose ends. Wrapping up little things so I can focus on the big things. I'll let you know if it helps. Certainly can't hurt.

Meanwhile, M+O couldn't wait for Thanksgiving, mostly because kids love any special occasion. O's picked out which dress she's going to wear days in advance, and M is excited for the turkey. They made pumpkin pie at school, and now they're huge fans of pie. They also made hats, one made a pilgrim hat, and the other made a native american hat. There's something odd about seeing a pilgrim hat harking back to seventeenth-century Plymouth here in the west where things from Colorado's 1859 gold rush are as old as it gets. But even though I'm into the nitty gritty history of this holiday and the "first" Thanksgiving, I have to admit that a pilgrim hat looks pretty darnn cute on a four year old (even one uncooperative at photo time).

36:47

2008-11-17T17:36:00.000-08:00

Woo hoo! I ran my first road race this weekend, a 5k. That's about 3.1 miles, for those of you who don't speak metric. Not far by some standards, but considering that 12 weeks ago I hadn't run since I was 17, it's far enough.

Here I am, in the second row with the blue pants on. Not a great photo, but it's all I have. The woman with the short hair on the right is our coach, Pam.

It all started with the Avon Walk. After a spring and half a summer of long-distance walking I was completely over the idea of walking as serious exercise. It takes too long -- who has five hours to walk 20 miles each weekend? So running was the next logical thing to try. I trained through a local store, Fleet Feet, and a program called No Boundaries specifically for new runners. I had two coaches and a group of ten or so folks to run with each week. I enjoyed the training more than I thought I would: it turns out that running is fun. It took a coach to show me that I was trying to go too fast (that's why I got winded so quickly), and that when I slowed down I'd be able to go much further. The coach also explained that if I ran with a shorter stride and pumped my arms harder, hills were no problem (I used to have to walk up them). It took the pressure of an organized group each Thursday to get me out of the house on the days in between, and the knowledge that each week we'd bump up the distance to keep me from slacking off. Somehow it all worked, and I loved the process as much as the event. I came in 679th, and that's just fine with me.

Race day weather set the stage for success -- about 70 degrees and (surprise) sunny. (It's always sunny here.) We ran at the Boulder Reservoir with about 900 entrants. Along the way I got passed by a couple of kids 1/4 my age, and even the race walkers beat me. But, I finished in 36:47, and considering I'd been clocking 15-minute miles, I was pleased. Funnydad and the girls were there at the finish line, and nothing beats the cheering of four-year olds. It was a Thanksgiving-themed event, complete with people dressed as turkeys running alongside everyone else. Afterwards there was a kids' "fun run" for which they gave all children who wanted to participate a pin-on number (everybody was number 1). The kids ran around the parking lot and collected goodie bags at the end of the race -- M+O ran the whole way smiling and haven't let go of their souvenir water bottles since.

Now I've set my sights on running the 10k Boulder Boulder next May. At what point do I stop wondering whether I'm becoming an athlete and face the fact that I have a new hobby?

The presidential election, as seen through the eyes of four-year olds

2008-11-05T19:07:00.000-08:00

Election Day morning:

O: Daddy's getting on a boat.
Me: Oh, really? Okay. What kind of boat is daddy getting on?
O: He's going to a boat for Rock Obama.
Me: You mean daddy's going to VOTE for Barack Obama?
O: Yeah.

Election Day afternoon:

M: Where's the line?
Me: What line?
M: Rock Obama and John McCain are in a race, so where's the line?
Me: There is no line, sweetie.
M: But if they're racing and tonight we'll know who wins, there must be a line.
Me: It's not that kind of line. They're not really running like mommy goes running.
M: Then how are they running if they don't know where the line is?

The day after the election:

O: Now that Rock Obama won he gets to dress up and be president.
Me: Dress up?
O: That's what the president does, he dresses up.
Me: Oh. I see. What else does the president do?
O: He just dresses up and talks.
Me: I see.
O: Will John McCain get to be president next time?
Me: Oh, you want it to be fair. No, sweetie, he probably won't.
O: He won't get to dress up?
Me: He'll get to do other things.
O: Has George Bush gotten to be president yet?
Me: He's president now. How do you know his name?
O: NO! Rock Obama's president now. He won, remember?

Starts with "t"

2008-10-16T15:28:00.000-07:00

M+O's school just started a letter-based show and tell once a week. There's a letter of the week and kids bring in something that starts with that letter's sound. The letters are in random order and M+O's teachers gave us a handout and a list of each week's letters through the end of the calendar year.

The first week I nearly blew it with "m," but as we raced out the door I remembered and directed the kids to grab something. O found a stuffed mouse and M brought in a couple of magnets (noting, of course that SHE began with the "m" sound so she didn't actually have to bring anything).

This week I vowed to be better. The sound was "t" and the night before show and tell we went all over the house collecting "t" things. It was a game, and we all had fun with it -- their phonics skills are good enough that with most things they can tell you what letter a word starts with. We made a little line of our finds: truck, train, tambourine, two tape measures, tea cup, tea pot, and a stuffed turtle. M+O each wanted to bring in one of the tape measures, which I told them they could have. I got them free at a conference and they are the kind you pull out and push a button to automatically rewind. Very cool, especially if you're four. The other "t" items didn't stand a chance.

So off to school they went, tape measures in hand. They were proud of themselves and the cool thing they had to share, and I was pleased that I'd turned a task that'd been overlooked the week before into a teachable moment and an evening activity all in one.

When I picked them up from school that day I asked, "did you get to share your tape measures?" to which they squealed yes! Then, a nearby teacher came over and said softly, "were you aware that the letter of the week is 'r'"?

R. Not T. Best. Mom. Ever.

Turns out the teachers, creative as they are, were able to say that the tape measures have RED on them, and tied them into the letter of the day based on their color.

The "t" sound isn't even next week -- it's in two weeks. Maybe by then I will have gotten the hang of this whole show and tell business.

Election humor

2008-10-14T17:32:00.001-07:00

With the economy depressing us all, I thought I'd post something to make us laugh. This first one is my favorite of the three.

There's a buzz about this first piece, both with people I know and now on NPR. It's funny. But it's for real -- really trying to get Jewish people to get their relatives in Florida to vote for Obama. (Don't take the language seriously.)

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

This parody of the Vice Presidential debate will make you laugh. Or else, you're a McCain supporter and we probably shouldn't talk politics right now.

Elusive Simple Gifts

2008-10-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

There are days when I fantasize about having free time the way a person dying of dehydration must fantasize about water. Those days are frequent. But there are also days when I think I have it together pretty well, even though I know things below the surface, or in my laundry room, or desk, or bills pile are about to explode. Occasionally there are times like tonight when Jon is halfway around the world and the house is quiet, kitchen is clean, lunches are made for tomorrow and I look around content. While there are things to do, nothing seems urgent, but then I find something un-done that's been un-done for a long time, like the photos I still haven't finished pasting into my wedding album, and I realize it's all a ruse. Even when I feel I have everything all together, I don't. Having it together seems unattainable.

Many of my friends are moms who don't work. Conversely, few of my friends are working mothers. Most of my working mother friends have older children, children in school, children with different demands; in some ways I feel in a category all alone. We shouldn't -- I shouldn't -- compare myself with others, but who can't look at a friend's weed-free garden full of lovely and large tomatoes without envy, only to realize that the tomato plants are tended by a stay-at-home mom whose children are in preschool two full days a week. It's hard to talk to another gymnastics mom who regularly bakes with her daughter and not feel like I don't engage my kids with process activities enough. Either I need to adjust my outlook and expectations, quit my job, or get new friends. Instead I seem to push myself harder. Last week -- my girls' birthday week -- I was so jittery with everything I had going on that I had trouble sleeping. The feeling reminded me of grad school. Is that messed up or what?

An old friend from Minneapolis commented on my Facebook page the other day telling me I am an amazing mom. She is a pretty amazing mom herself, also a mother of twins, and back when we saw each other frequently she often told me she thought I was an amazing mom. I think I'm a pretty good mom, but whatever it was, my friend claimed to be impressed with the way I handled it -- potty training was a particular highlight, but there were other examples, too. Though I'm often dismissive in the face of a compliment, I grew to believe she was sincere, and found that her confidence in me was itself confidence-building. It still is a boost even though we live in different time zones now. I wish we were in closer contact, and not just for the compliments.

I'm looking for the way to be happy with what I can do, to really be at peace with the parameters I can maintain. It's letting go a little bit, accepting a certain level of [fill in the blank] that I would rather have another way. It's also about setting things up for success: good bones, like a well-organized closet or fewer magazine subscriptions to pile up. Some see it as a spiritual quest -- we Quakers, after all, sing about the Gift To Be Simple. It's about priorities (family, the girls) and it's about boundaries, saying no, knowing what's important. It's an age-old struggle, one many women and mothers face.

Tonight I'm feeling like finding this balance is of the utmost importance. I feel I've been out of whack lately and I don't like that. I'm trying to focus on the important things, but it's hard because I don't want to let go of anything.

3.2 in 12

2008-09-21T21:27:00.000-07:00

I've been a reluctant exerciser most of my life. I participated in track and cross country in high school because being on a sport got me out of gym class. Running didn't require a try out and it was way better than gym. William and Mary had a four-semester gym requirement which I met with one dance class, two ropes course classes called "Adventure Games," and bowling. In my post-college years I did no serious exercise at all, and stayed sedentary even as each of my parents suffered (and survived) heart attacks. Age caught up with metabolism around age 30 and I began to half-heartedly work out at a gym. Close to my wedding I worked out with a trainer and actually enjoyed it, though that spell was short-lived. Soon grad school, and then kids, sucked up my energy and time. Inertia set in.

But Boulder has a way of wearing off on a person, and it turns out that if I make it fun I don't mind exercising so much. Hiking. Rock climbing. Riding around on my bike, pulling the kids in the Chariot. Maybe I'm realizing that I need all those benefits exercise brings. Or maybe I'm becoming more conscious of the behaviors I pattern for my kids. Or maybe Boulder, and all the active people here, are influencing me. I walked nearly 40 miles in June, and it was fun, but it turned me off long-distance walking. It just takes too much time, and who has time? No mom of preschoolers I know.

So I decided to try running. Funnydad runs. I thought I didn't like running, but I decided to give it a try because it was an easy and obvious choice for someone who's done with long walks. I signed up for a training program through a local running store that trains people to run a 5k in 12 weeks. I figure: with professional coaches and 12 weeks I can certainly learn to run 3.2 miles. Some people have laughed at me (in the kindest way, really) when I tell them I'm training with a coach for this, but I like my little running group. We're all new at running and we all run a little, walk some, run some more, walk more. In this group my level of endurance is normal.

It seems I respond well to a moderate goal. At first it was discouraging when I couldn't run a third of a mile without stopping, but after a week or so I'm close to a half. I just keep thinking how reasonable it seems to be able to run three miles in twelve weeks and I keep going. (I am, technically, behind in my training. I'm supposed to be able to run 1.5 miles by now. The training plan has us bump up mileage by a quarter mile or so each week. I've talked to the coach and she says just to keep doing what I'm doing and if I work out consistently three or four times a week I will either catch up or be darn close in a month. We'll see about that, but I'm still encouraged that I have seen even this tiny bit of progress already.)

By default I train in intervals -- run walk run walk. That's actually a good way to build endurance! Twice a week I get up and run in the morning before breakfast, and I actually love that time alone to exercise, it's so beautiful that time of day and and so peaceful before the morning routine to come. On Thursday nights I get together with my little running group and we run (and walk). I think knowing I have the 5k goal is part of what keeps me going, helps me not make up my former-self's lame excuses for not exercising. My running group got caught in a rain storm the other day and I had to laugh because I never (NEVER) thought I'd be the kind of person who ran in the rain. I developed an ache in my foot and went to see a doctor immediately to make sure it was okay to keep running. What is happening to me? Am I becoming some kind of athlete?

I'm not sure I'm ready for that label, but I'm happy with my goal. I think I can do it, but there's no slacking off between now and then. The 5k race is on Novemeber 16th. I'll check in periodically and let you know how I'm doing.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart

2008-09-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

We've been married eight years today. Eight years of marriage, ten of conversation, and there are still occasionally things he says about himself that I didn't know — recently, a story about grade school, rotating seats in math class, and waiting for it to be his turn to move to the front row. There was a girl involved, and teasing, and I'd never heard a word of it. It's nice when after so many years there's still something new to share.

The old things are nice, too. It's nice to know how much cheese someone likes in their quesadillas AND which newspaper columnists they turn to first. It's comforting to know a routine so well that I can time my morning shower to come downstairs to be on kid duty just as his cereal bowl enters the sink. It's nice to know he's cheering for me when I have something big going on, and it feels good to support him in his endeavors. Mostly it's just nice to be together. And to be a family together. My love blossoms further each time I see him be playfully silly with our girls, hug them when they're sad or sleepy, and offer the boo boo bunny and a cuddle when they're hurt.

Eight years, yay for us. Let's keep discovering each other's stories stories. I love you.

What kicks my butt on Monday nights

2008-08-25T20:14:00.001-07:00

Or, "Don't worry about me, I'll just be here in the back."

I've joined a women's hiking group. By "joined" I mean I have been twice, and by "hiking" I mean walking up a very steep natural stair stepping machine. They meet every Monday evening from April until September and hike a different hike around Boulder. (For those of you not in Boulder, I'll let that sink in -- yes, there are that many different hikes in and around Boulder.) They hike throughout the season and then as fall approaches they hike a "14er," or a 14,000 foot mountain. Then, they hike "the three mountain challenge," which is hiking the three major mountains in Boulder in a single day. So, you can imagine my wonderful timing in joining this group when everyone else is in peak shape, all prepared for their two big events of the year. They're hiking their 14er on September 6th, so this was the last regular Monday hike. I'm sad to see it go even though I just started.

The Flatirons, Boulder's signature geologic feature, as seen from the base of Chautaqua park at the beginning of our hike. Moving from right to left, there are the creatively named First, Second, and Third Flatiron. We hiked just left of this picture, to near the top of the third Flatiron. I didn't know where we were going or I would have taken a different picture.

The thing is, I kinda thought I wasn't in bad shape. It wasn't so long ago I walked nearly 40 miles. I pull the kids around in the bike chariot, I bike to work whenever possible, I go to the gym at least weekly. I've lost a little weight, even. I thought, not bad for a working mom -- until I joined this group. Apparently I have some more work to do -- because both times I've gone I've been dead last in the train of women hiking to wherever we're going. And, I mean dead last by a fair distance. The caboose. There were seven women one week, and 12 tonight, so it's a good-sized crowd for a hike...Tonight, even the 60-year-old retiree was faster than me. Perhaps that means there's hope.

Today I thought my heart was pounding so hard on the way up that others could surely hear it, and to be honest I was not enjoying myself for a the second half of the up part. But, I made it, and I didn't complain (well, not that much). I kept saying, this is good exercise, keep going, this is so good for you, keep going. But it'll be FUN good exercise next year when I've been working up to these harder hikes since April and am more comfortable in both my pace and cardio-vascular level. I like the women and am looking forward to having a way to exercise and get to know a new crowd come spring.

There are rewards, of course. Tonight we hiked to "Royal Arch" which is up near the top of the Flatirons. It's a sandstone arch, and from it we had an incredible view of Boulder and its surrounding areas.

The Royal Arch, looking back through at the third Flatiron.

The view over Boulder, looking east at the NCAR Mesa. Trust me, the camera doesn't do it justice. (We live in the north part of town, to the left of this picture.)

Peachy Keen

2008-08-13T20:55:00.000-07:00

I canned peaches today, my inaugural canning experience. Loads of fun and not at all difficult, it's just that there are a few rules to pay attention to. The first thing to know is that Colorado peaches are divine. I'm not sure why people in Georgia are all ga ga over their peaches, because there is no way on god's green earth they're better than these mountain beauties. The line for them at the farmer's market is always 15 or 20 people deep, and every week I'm in it buying my fix.

A neighbor told me she cans a bunch each season and they make winter more bearable. I'd been wanting to learn to can; I asked if she'd show me how, and of course she said yes. So, a couple of neighbors, a couple of boxes of peaches, and a couple of hours later, I'm practically an expert. Well, close enough that I'll try it on my own next time.

First we sterilized the jars.

Then we washed, halved, and peeled the peaches (that order worked best).

Then we put them in jars and covered them with honey water.

Then we sealed them in their Ball jars after heating the rings and wiping the top of the glass to ensure a good seal. (Ball, by the way, is a Boulder company. Not sure if it's based here or just has an enormous campus here, but it's local.)

Then we put them in a water bath for 40 minutes. That's longer than we'd do at sea level; gotta account for altitude.

Then we labeled, and now they're cooling. Tomorrow we'll check the seals and place them in a cool spot until sometime this winter when we need a burst of sunshine and a peach melba.

Next, I think I'll try canning whole tomatoes and salsa (apparently you have to use specific recipes safe for canning so the pH is right). Also, I'm going to try pickling, and that's not truly canning, at least not at first (turns out you brine them and they hang around in the brine for a while, and if you want to can them you can do so after six weeks or so of the brine bath). Not that I had fun or thought it was cool or anything.

Anniversary

2008-08-06T17:03:00.000-07:00

One year ago today I was on an airplane moving to Boulder. Funnydad and daughters had come ahead, leaving me an un-populated house to prepare for sale. And leaving me plenty of time to brood about Change, the nature of Home, and just how the hell we were going to sell our house in a declining real estate market. The house sold lickity split for our full asking price, which I took as a good omen.

A year sounds like a lot when you say it out loud, but it's really short when you live it. Here I am a year later trying to make some sort of sense of it all, realizing I'm not sure there is sense to be made. Boulder is a great place to live, no doubt. About its only major drawback is that it's so far from family. Everything else agrees with us: the weather, the community, the culture, the politics, the geography, our quality of life, even the availability of ethnic food. So then why don't I feel all nestled in and not new anymore? And what does that even mean?

We've done a lot: learned our way around, learned about western issues like water rights, and learned Rocky Mountain facts (for instance, there are 54 mountains 14,000 feet in elevation or taller in Colorado -- "fourteeners." One of them is in Boulder County: Long's Peak. Another: the tree line -- above which trees don't grow -- is generally 11,000 feet.) We've sussed out the good playgrounds, a handful of good restaurants, hikes kids can take, and figured out what one actually has to go to Denver for (the airport, the zoo, Korean food, and The Container Store). We've both learned the basics of rock climbing, funnydad has a racquetball partner, I have a book group, we have a garden. Just today a friend asked if I wanted to join a women's hiking group. But you can't prove a place is home with a list, and that gut feeling is still not registering Boulder as "Home." It's where we live. It feels more like home than anywhere else right now -- Minneapolis has faded and a recent visit to New York showed us that The Big Apple will always be familiar, but it's not home anymore either. So.

We'd been in Minnesota for 20 months when funnydad started talking about conducting an out-of-state job search. I still felt new when those conversations began, though I remember thinking, "okay, so this is as 'at home' in Minnesota I'm going to get," because it was clear we were leaving the land of 10,000 lakes. Last weekend I ran into three people I knew in Boulder while I ran errands -- that's never happened before, and to me it's a sign we're becoming entrenched. So there are signs, and there's a growing feeling. But "new" takes a long time to wear off. "Home" takes a long time to settle in. "New" starts so abruptly; "Not New" doesn't. I'm not sure when I'll know Boulder is truly home, but like Jesse Helms and por*nography, I'll know it when I see it. ( And why is "not new" and "home" the goal anyway? Why can't I enjoy the journey?)

As for this blog, I'm going to keep going. When I began it I wasn't sure I'd like it which is why the top says "Our first year in Boulder, Colorado." Blogs felt crazy vain to me, totally narcissistic (and perhaps they are) -- hey, I'm so important, read about ME -- but it turns out they can be a lovely way to keep in touch with family and friends in far corners of the country. And, it turns out, I enjoy blogging. So keep reading, and I'll let you know when the balance tips to make Boulder truly Home.

Being Three

2008-07-31T18:27:00.000-07:00

M has an imaginary friend. In the car today she was telling me a story about her friend "Ima" (Eema?) and the things they did together today: swinging, pretending something was a ship, etc. I asked if Ima was a new friend at summer camp. M said, "no, mom, I made her up." "You mean she's not at school?" "No, I said I made her up."

Later, when M+O were talking about their birthday in September (which they know is "soon" and discuss almost daily) unprompted, M said Ima would not be able to come to their birthday party because she had a doctor's appointment that day. I wouldn't have expected a twin who has a constant playmate to have an imaginary friend, but she does. Wonder if Ima will stick around? (I found out later that funnydad knew all about Ima. She's been with us for a month or more he reports. Where have I been? Yeah, I'm the Best. Mom. Ever.)

* * *
O: At school at circle time sometimes the teachers say a boy has to sit next to a girl. (She makes a face.)
Mom: Boys and girls can be friends.
O: But they won't play with us.
M: Yeah, boys are good at trucks and bugs and we don't like trucks and bugs. But, we're good at climbing!

* * *

The girls outgrew their gymnastics leotards, which also double as their dress-up-like-a-ballerina leotards. So, O took M's old one -- a velour pink one she'd coveted for months -- and M needed a new one. Before we went to the store we talked about how only M was getting a new leotard, and when O outgrew hers we'd get her a new one, too. We discussed this many, many times over several days before setting out for the store. My goal was to get in and out quickly, but O's keen eye and obsession with anything purple foiled my best intentions. She spotted the sparkly purple dance leotard with a skirt! Complete breakdown. Tears. Wailing. Attempts at reasoning. Attempts to reason back. Threats of a time out. More tears. More wailing. The whole scene was so bad I almost broke down and bought it, but they didn't have one in her size. Embarassed, I quickly paid for M's new leotard and we left before someone called child services.

I promised she could have it for her birthday. I am happy to teach my girls the lesson that they don't always get what they want when they want it, but I wish we could have done it with a little less drama and public humiliation. I almost always get things in pairs, and it doesn't have to be that way. Grown twins say that the best thing I can do is treat them like individuals. Don't always get matching gifts, don't always give the same thing in different colors. Let their personalities and interests guide gift giving. And 'sides, doesn't every mom of more than one kid spend a great deal of time saying Fair is Not Always Equal? I'm starting early.

So now, O asks several times a day when her birthday is. They used to talk about their birthday (or anyone's birthday) a lot, but now we're going for some kind of record. How long will she have to wait for her birthday? September -- when is that? The last day of September? M says, "You're wrong mom, it's not the last day. You're telling a story." O doesn't always mention the leotard, but I know it's the motivator behind the question. I'll go back to the store and special order it if I have to, and I'm sure that in two months she'll still want it just as much. This whole experience has been so intense that as I recounted the event to funnydad I wondered aloud if this could be one of her first memories. She's nearly four, and that's when some people's first memories form. Probably not, but especially since this story will have a happy ending, it wouldn't be a bad one to start with.

Snork Snickeling

2008-07-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

When M grows up she wants to be "an excellent drawer." She also wants to be a "snork snickeler" which is their word for snorkel (a thing they'd never encountered before last week). O wants to be a snork snickeler, too, and an "art maker." I guess she's not limiting her medium just yet.

We learned these things while on our vacation back east. It was fantastic to spend 11 days with our kids as a family. Somehow, when separated from regular life, the same kids who can sometimes drive me up a tree became a near-constant delight. We watched them play in new spaces and make up wonderous games. We spent more time together just hanging out and learning their versions of songs ("it's one-two-three strikes and you'll be happy at the old ball game") and hearing about their newly-formed career plans. Until now the "when I grow up" conversations have been limited to things they can't have yet. Like gum. Or cockatoos. Or sparkly purple cars.

We divided our vacation between New York City and Martha's Vineyard. The whole journey took four airplanes, four buses, two ferries, countless subways, a handful of cars (including taxis), and a couple of recreational kayak excursions. Our vacation had two distinct halves. In New York we didn't rest -- we put our social skills and schedule-cramming talents to the test. It was fun, but not relaxing. We hung out with Grandma Mimi as much as possible and she graciously tagged along to help with kid wrangling in mass transit and stroller pushing. We visited with family (cousins!) and old, dear friends, some of whom we haven't seen in more than two years. Some of whom have entire children we had never met. The girls loved the subway, though until they experienced it they had a really tough time understanding how we were going to get underground, and once we got there how we would get back up. Would we have to dig? Juniper went back to her beloved Quaker Meeting and relished a couple hours wrapped in the familiar faces and feeling of a faith community that still sustains her. We ate great Chinese food. We walked the streets of our old neighborhood noting which restaurant have survived. What's different, what's not. We heard a lot about the insane real estate situation in New York. We asked our friends for a first-hand account of the controversial new Ikea and slightly less maligned Fairway in Brooklyn. We stayed in funnydad's mom's apartment, the one he grew up in. In his old room. On the twin beds he had as a kid. We ate a lot of bagels.

On The Vineyard chez adoring grandparents we just chilled, though the humidity made it anything but cool. After the dry heat of Boulder, the constant humidity of an island in July was a challenge. We went to the beach. Several beaches, actually -- some for walking, some for swimming, and some for serious play. We dug clams, kayaked, and buried our kids in the sand. The internet connection at funnydad's dad's house is slow, which suited us just fine because it gave us a chance to unplug. We ate blueberry pie and fresh pesto and as much clam chowder as we could. And, we used snork snickles to swim at Clam Point and look at all the scallops on the inlet's sandy floor.

We came back to Boulder the way one should from a vacation: refreshed, sad it's over, fearful of the work awaiting at the office, and happy to be back in our own space. We're skipping our regular Delaware beach excursion this year, so this is it for big summer getaways. We'll do a few small weekends as a foursome, but it's always a bit tough to return from a great trip unsure of when the next one will be.

The most poignant part for me was facing fading friendships. It's a fact of moving, it's not a surprise, but it's tough to realize that some people I used to spend so much time with have now turned to people I catch up with when I can. People with kids I don't know and life details I've forgotten. Sometimes, as we traveled between clusters of friends and asked and answered the same basic questions again and again, a silence would fall over the conversation. We'd hit the highlights and there wasn't much use in diving deeper during this disjointed, kid-chasing conversation because we all knew this was the level now. (For now?) People I'd once had endless walks with now became folks with limited common ground.

So, some people I used to spend so much time with have now turned to people I catch up with when I can. And, to be honest, some of the people I used to catch up with when I can have completely fallen away. Though we couldn't have managed anything more, there were still people we couldn't see while in the city. Our New York friendships grew -- for me -- over nearly a decade and a half in New York and for funnydad nearly 40 years, so it's silly to try to compare the whole feeling to the new relationships we have in Boulder. It's more helpful for me to keep sight of the fact that keeping friends takes work. It takes a crammed schedule and a not-relaxing-but-fun four days visiting with people. It takes effort to visit, it takes time to write, and it takes 15 minutes to pick up the phone every now and then. The street goes both ways. If you're reading this blog, chances are our friendship is important to you too. Let's keep it going together.

And I did it without a single blister!

2008-07-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Amy, me, Monica, and Elizabeth a few miles into our walk. Note that no one looks tired, sore, sick, or injured.

So I did it. I put one foot in front of the other and completed the Avon Walk. It was, quite honestly, a lot harder than I thought it would be, and every bit as rewarding. It was a lot of things, actually. Fun, inspiring, parts were easy, parts were miserable, some of it was boring, the scenery was beautiful. Mostly, I'm glad it's done.

Step by step it's not that hard, I mean it's walking not technical climbing or anything. But all those steps build up and after a dozen miles or so you feel it. By the end I was gimpy, having strained the top part of my calf muscles. Those muscles and general fatigue made getting up at 5:00 a.m. to walk again on Sunday super hard, but I did it.

The event was a lot of monotony because as I've explained, long-distance walking is more a mind and time game than an endurance contest. As I walked a seemingly endless path I thought all kinds of things. I thought of marathon runners -- heck, I can hardly walk this distance and people RUN it? I thought of the western emigrants of our country's mid-nineteenth century who walked from Iowa to San Francisco without the benefit of Avon-organized Gatorade stops, port-a-johns every two miles, and modern athletic shoes. I thought of how different my motivation is now from theirs then and wondered what it would be like to swap places for a few miles. I thought of professional athletes and the Olympic hopefuls who were (on that very day) vying for spots on our Olympic team. I thought of professional athletes and all the good pain medication and other drugs those folks get, but that was mostly toward the end when my calves began to hurt with each step.

There were very emotional moments -- the opening ceremony featured speeches from three walkers who were each fighting breast cancer, all valiantly, some with grim outlooks. For a while on Saturday I walked behind a woman who wore a sign reading "I'm walking for my mom. I miss her so much." Other people had tee shirts printed with the names of everyone whom they were walking in honor or in memory of -- some of those shirts had long, long lists of names, and I could only think that they knew so many people with breast cancer because they themselves were battling the disease.

In the end the three women I walked with hit their limit before I did. Two fell victim to altitude sickness, which can be a problem in Colorado (the event was 3,500 feet higher than our home in Boulder) and another's knee gave out. Walked 20 miles on Saturday (though I'd hoped to do the whole marathon), and when I stopped, I knew I just couldn't walk another step that day. I made it to between 20 and 21, and when I crawled into the "sweep" vans that shuttle people like me to the resting place for the night I wondered how I'd be able to recharge in time for the next day's effort. But Sunday's 13.1 miles flew by. I hardly felt them at all, buoyed by adrenaline I guess. I finished the race with a woman I'd trained with (briefly) here in Boulder whom I just happened to run into at a pit stop. She and I, and her walking friend Linda, raised our arms as we crossed the finish line. I was very proud, but also sad the women I'd begun the race with weren't able to cross the pink finish line with me.

With your help, I raised $2150! All together the women and men walking in the Rocky Mountains that weekend raised more than three million dollars for breast cancer research. That's amazing.

I'm glad I did it. I'm glad it's over. Since the event I have worked nearly every night in our garden, pulling out, so far, a total of ten wheelbarrows of weeds. I don't think I'll do another long-distance walking event because of the reasons I've explained in this blog. But I think I'll do other organized races and events. Small ones. I never thought I'd be the kind of person who looks for ways to squeeze more exercise into their life, but I am now, and I'm going to embrace it.

Me at the finish line with Pam and Linda. I'm pooped.

Pink Ribbon Blues

2008-06-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

It's now the week before my big Avon Walk. I walk next weekend, June 28-29. If you'd like to donate, there's still time. If you're tired of my groveling for dollars, you can ignore me guilt-free: I made my fundraising requirement. I'd love more support, but I am cleared to participate now that my many friends (and some strangers) have coughed up $2150. (Though, if I raise another $50 I get a baseball hat.)

I am sure I'll post more after the Big Event, but the truth, dear blog reader (both of you), is that I'm kind of over this whole Avon Walk thing. It's dragged on too long. The lead-up has been too slow. I signed up sometime last fall, jazzed and excited, so thrilled I literally jumped up and down when I decided to do it. My concerns at the time were about raising the money, not completing the walk. Turns out, fundraising was a challenge and I didn't enjoy it, but I got it done with only minor stress. It's the training that had me in tears. Not the pain of it, though I had to work up to longer distances. The time. It takes a lot of time to train for the Avon Walk -- time in mileage because walking is s-l-o-w, and time every weekend to just do it and walk those long distances. After a while it got old. The weeds in my garden threatened to strangle my vegetable plants. My children began to wonder if I lived at home on Saturdays. My husband wished for time to do the things he enjoyed on occasion. Though I was committed to the Avon Walk, I wasn't committed to it all costs, and the stress I felt as I tried to distribute what little "free" time I had among the things I wanted to do -- the stress was too much. Something had to give. The first thing that gave was my commitment to walking those 18 and 20-mile walks on the weekends in late May and early June. And sadly, the next thing that gave was my enthusiasm for the whole event. It became something to do, not something to look forward to. My commitment to the actual walk never waned a bit. My beef was with the toll training was taking.

Maybe it's that I signed up at the beginning winter in a town where I knew no one, and now winter has given way to early summer and I have a small collection of friends. Perhaps it's that I underestimated the demands of my gardens which take a LOT of care and feeding. Perhaps now that I've gotten out there and have built some regular exercise into my life I'm ready to have fun on the bike, on the rock wall, on a hike, at a strength-training class -- I want to do more than just walk.

I signed up for the Avon Walk for three reasons (other than it's a great cause), and it's done all three for me. One, I wanted an exercise goal, something to work toward. I'm not a runner, and this seemed like a lofty walking goal, and I thought I'd enjoy getting in shape with a goal in mind. As you've been reading, I've done that.

Two, I wanted to meet new people. This has happened, but not in the way I thought it would. I imagined walking the paths around Boulder talking to endlessly interesting women making fast friends in my new town. I imagined the supper clubs that would form, the sushi nights, the camaraderie among fellow trainees. None of that has happened, but my walking partner and I did pair up with a mom from the girls' preschool for training whom I've enjoyed getting to know. And today I walked with a woman who started a really cool women's sports apparel line called Born Fit. I learned a lot about launching a new business and got to see samples of her new line, which was fun.

Three, I wanted to get out there and learn more about Boulder, learn about places to walk, discover trails and paths. That's happened in spades. And there's still so much more to discover!

When my friend Allis earned her CPA, I hugged her and I shouted a hearty congratulations. She smiled, and said, yeah she was happy. But, it'd been a goal for so long that she wasn't even sure it was something she still really wanted.

I expect the feeling of the event, the scene of those 1500 people all there for the same purpose, the pink ribbons, the group synergy will carry me through. I expect once I'm there I'll get totally into the excitement and buzz of the event. And I'm sure once I've completed it I'll be proud. And once the pressure of having to fit in all the training is over, my distaste will melt away. I sure hope so. This has been a goal for a long time. But I know I still want it.

Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above

2008-06-05T19:03:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the wild west. Last week I traveled to Worland, WY for a short business trip. The trip went well, but the place is what merits mentioning here. Worland, WY is not just a small, rural town. It's a small, rural town more than an hour from the closest Target, Wal-Mart, or interstate. It's a place where the only national chains are a McDonald's and a Burger King. It's small, and not in a quaint way. It's got appeal -- mostly from outstandingly friendly people I met while there and the unique land that surrounds it, but this factory town with a wild west history is certainly dusty around the edges. The plane trip in shows you how remote Worland is -- nothing to see for miles around -- and the town feels very flat. Maybe there were a few two-story buildings, but apparently it's cheaper to build out than up. It all felt dwarfed by the space surrounding it. I came home humming Cole Porter's song, "Don't Fence Me In."

I flew in on a bumpy ride, a prop plane where every seat was a window and an aisle. The co-pilot (a woman!) doubled as the safety-speech person and airline greeter at the bottom of the jetway stairs -- we walked onto the tarmac to board and de-plane. Nearby thunderstorms kept the ride rocky and I spent most of the trip trying not to throw up. Not fun. The ride home was in a storm so severe we couldn't land at our intermediate stop in Laramie, WY. Not much better. I will now keep Bonine with me at all times when I travel.

Worland is on the edge of the Big Horn Basin, a remote area of north central Wyoming. It's tough to get to because it's hemmed in by mountains on almost all sides. For years those mountains made it difficult for (white) people to come to the region, but the thing that really kept them out was that those mountains were protected Native American hunting ground. When that treaty dissolved (in the aftermath of the Battle of Little Big Horn, which was fought nearby in Montana), whites, and their cattle came in -- in droves. Literally. Not long after things started to get messy.

And this isn't the only interesting thing about this little town you'd only stumble across if you were en route to Yellowstone by car. One of the largest excavation of mammoth bones on the planet was in the Big Horn Basin, and as a result anthropologists have spent decades studying the area and developing theories about how early humans interacted with these large animals. How would you go about killing a mammoth? And fossils. Plant fossils, dinosaur fossils, fossils of long-extinct mammals, and fossils of the marine creatures who once called the sea that covered Wyoming home. Remarkably, the Big Horn Basin is the best place on the entire planet to study the evolution of life on earth. Seriously.

So we're building 'em a museum. Big project, won't open until 2010, and we need every minute of that time to get things done. I'm looking forward to my next visit, which may later this summer. The people were great and the areas outside of town look like a moonscape. If you ever go, stay at the Days Inn. Dan will hook you up.

Street Wise

2008-05-26T15:43:00.000-07:00

Me and 54,250 of my closest friends were part of the biggest timed road race in the country today. I wasn't exactly racing, but there were those who were. I walked the 10k course along with thousands of other people -- the Bolder Boulder is open to everyone, and has a large contingent of walkers in addition to some serious runners. It's been going on for thirty years and attracts people from all over the country. And it's right here in Colorado (which I recently heard is considered the nation's healthiest state). It was fantastic, and I can't wait to do it next year. Who wants to come to Boulder and do it with me?

Ten kilometers (roughly six miles) isn't a tough walk, and for someone training for the Avon Walk it should be like a warm up. There were 85 start times to stagger the elite runners from the slow-poke walkers -- I left in a fast walker group at 9:10 a.m. (9:10:40 to be precise, and as they shuffled each starting group to the starting line, they actually had a starting gun for each wave). I walked the first part with a friend and her five-year old daughter, which was fun in a liesurely way. A lot of kids participate in the Bolder Boulder, and in fact it was begun partly as an event kids could participate in.

Me in our yard just before I left for the Bolder Boulder.

After a while this little girl slowed from brisk five-year-old pace to tired five-year-old pace, and I ended up moving ahead to meet the funnybunnies and the husband at the end. Later, I heard she walked half of it, which is very impressive for a five-year old, and while I was with her I didn't hear a single complaint! That's the thing about the Bolder Boulder, it's for everybody. There were grandmothers and little kids, dads with children in backpacks and moms with babies in slings. I saw a group of men my father's age wearing "silver sneaker" tee shirts and more than a few grown-daughter-and-mom pairs. There were people in costume -- from grass skirts and silly hats to all-out wacky outfits, and people playing games along the course. I saw a group of guys (early 20s?) who leapfrogged the race, a nine-year-old girl who pogo sticked five miles of it, a blind walker who was in way better shape than I'll ever be, and several groups of high school girls walking it backwards. There were many people wearing signs saying they were walking in honor of fallen vets -- this after all, a Memorial Day event. Along the course route, which wound through central Boulder, there was a band every half kilometer or so, spaced so when you stopped hearing the sounds from one band another came into earshot. Rock bands, amplified solo singers, way-too-loud bands, Elvis impersonators, a Blues Brothers band, and someone singing children's songs. There were two groups of women belly dancing along the sidelines, kids shooting silly string onto the walkers, and countless groups of people in lawn chairs with mimosas (or beer) cheering us along.

The event ended at the University of Colorado at Boulder football stadium with all the finishers walking onto the field and across the finish line in a stream. Finished runners and walkers and non-participants filled the stadium for an annual Memorial Day tribute, including a flyover of four air force jets in a broken formation (symbolizing fallen airmen and women). The weather (slightly rainy) kept away the star act of the ceremony: paragliders who land on the stadium field. The rainy weather and general pre-schooler-ness meant that once I found my family in the bleachers we needed to head out. Honestly, for the girls, I think the bus ride to and from the stadium may have been the highlight of the day.

When you're new to a place, you want to be Not New anymore. Today, I felt like I became a little more soaked in Boulderness. Because, what the Bolder Boulder brings to the streets is a sense of community: a wonderful, vibrant, healthy community, and I am becoming part of it. I recently heard a story on NPR say that smokers who are friends, or even friends of friends, of people who quit smoking are more likely to quit themselves. Extrapolate a little and it's easy to see how Boulder can be such an active place. If 54,000 of your friends participate in a 10k each year, perhaps you're more likely to hop on the treadmill instead of, well, not.

Regardless of larger implications, the Bolder Boulder is a part of the culture here. It's a Big Deal, and I had a blast. Alhough there are a few things I'd do differently next year (for instance, not suggest my family meet me in the stadium if it's drizzling out), I'm already stoked for my next shot at it. Seriously, who's coming to join in?

Like riding a bicycle

2008-05-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

Someone brought an archery bow for target shooting in to my office. Because that’s just the kind of outdoorsy place Boulder is. Or ECOS is. Or it’s what kids do. I’m not really sure what collection of reasons combine to make this seem like the sort of thing that happens here, but there she was with a bow in her hand, flat and unstrung. Her kid doesn’t use it anymore, and another colleague’s kid may use it for summer camp.

Like the proverbial person who gets on a bicycle after years of not riding only to pedal effortlessly, I knew what to do. I strung the bow in about two seconds, gently threading my leg through the loose string, placing the lower end over my left foot and the center of the bow on the outside of my right hip. A gentle push out with my hip and down with my right hand, and the job was done. I haven’t even thought about archery since the summer I was 17, and yet I remembered how to string a bow as if I’d just emptied a quiver. Isn’t it funny what a person keeps locked away in long-term memory? Isn’t funny when it surfaces on a Thursday morning 2000 miles and two decades from the last place you accessed it?

I took archery all through my eight summers at my Appalachian sleepover camp, and when I was a counselor I taught it. I’m not sure what I enjoyed about it, but I was good, and that’s often what kids enjoy — things they excel at. I even won a camp award — The Golden Archer — the kind of award that goes to only one camper each season. It’s the kind of thing that seems silly now, but it meant so much to me at the time. My name is painted on a wooden plaque in golden letters in the Assembly Hall. I’m sure it’s still hanging, a dusty witness to hundreds of girls singing camp songs each summer. When I was a camper there were Golden Archer plaques, and similar honors for other activities, on the walls listed year by year beginning in the 1920s when the camp was founded.

Being a parent is an opportunity to relive your own childhood -- to remember and to share things you once enjoyed. Right now, with my three-year-old girls, I’m reliving my preschool love of the book “Bread and Jam for Frances” and the first time I took tumbling lessons. My colleague’s archery bow catapulted me forward a bit in my memory march because her kids are older, doing the things older kids do. I’m sure I’ll revisit my fond days on an archery field again when my children are ready for the kind of summer camp where they teach archery. Maybe I could even volunteer and help.

Three cheers

2008-05-20T20:50:00.001-07:00

I hope every single person reading this has a friend this great. She's using her blog to help me raise money for my Avon Walk. Rock on. And thanks -- to all who have supported me, and to the ever-wonderful Lynsey.

Because you can't blog while walking

2008-05-13T18:08:00.000-07:00

Some people have pointed out that I've been a little lame in my blog posting of late. Sorry. I've been busy. Already I'm in over my head with my gardens (yard and vegetable) -- who knew you had to water every day here beginning in April? That is, on the days it doesn't snow. It's a lot of work and so far I'm doing okay, though only okay. Martha Stewart won't be giving me any gardening awards this year. My onion tops got a little scorched and my strawberries didn't transfer well. But I have pea sprouts and small spinach plants. There are tiny lettuce heads growing, my beets and radishes are coming up, and the broccoli looks great. My carrots are slow to send up shoots, but I have hope they'll get with the program soon. There are weeds between the rows, but I've been vigilant about the rest. This weekend I hope to install my drip irrigation watering system which will be on a timer and should help me not kill things as the heat sets in. There's still hours of weeding ahead; I had been warned that the abandoned plot I inherited contained a lot of weed seeds, and so for that's proving true. Our yard looks decent thanks to good landscaping and the in-ground sprinkler system. Funnydad's on a major dandelion eradication mission, which he seems to enjoy. Go for it, I say.

Gardening takes a lot of time, and while there is a certain bumbling quality as I learn how to garden in an arid climate, it's not what's keeping me away from the blog. The real time sink these days is that I'm training for a big 40-mile walk, the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Walking, as you may have noticed, takes time. Not a fast sport, and I have to work up to long distances. Last weekend when I walked 13 miles it took four hours. That takes a chunk out of your weekend and squishes other things into the rest. Something has to give. If it's any consolation, I am not keeping up with the laundry either, as my daughters remind me with, "Mommmmmm, there's no underwear in the drawer againnnnnnnn."

Sadly, 13 miles kicked my butt. I'm not sure how I'm going to be ready for this event in six weeks. When I'm inclined to be positive, I remind myself that a month ago I couldn't walk six miles without similar pain, so there's some progress happening. I walk shorter distances and do my best to cross train during the week, but the weekends are when I can carve out time for long walks. I'm training with two other women here, and like I said, the first week we trained together we walked six miles. Very tough -- not during the walk, but after. The next we did 9.5 and I felt fine. Next we hiked a mountain to build endurance, which hurt like hell, worked my butt and thighs, felt like a fantastic accomplishment, but I think it set me back a little in mileage. Fitness is definitely part of it -- my muscles, strength, and endurance have to be up to snuff -- but a large piece of the Avon Walk difficulty is the beating your feet take, and for that you need flat out miles. I mean, after these walks I have seriously sore feet, like they are when you have to stand on them all day. Sore feet that stay sore for a while after you take off the running shoes. Tender, too, like the kind of feeling you get just before blisters form -- which is probably what is happening. My legs and butt are sore the next day. Oh, I'm pooped when I get home. I feel proud, too. But my feet, man, they are not happy puppies. Next weekend we're going for 15-18 miles. Wish me luck. I'm enjoying all this -- the work, the challenge, the exercise, the getting to know new people, the getting to know walking paths around Boulder, and the helping a good cause. But it's a lot of work.

The thing is, six years ago, when I lived in Brooklyn, I walked a 12-mile walk to raise money for the MDA. I walked it with my friend Tricia, and we thought it was no sweat. We didn't train for it, we didn't prep in any way. And when it was over we both thought, oh, that was easy. And I distinctly remember the next day discussing with Tricia how we were not sore at all. Why does 13 miles incapacitate me for the rest of the weekend now? Was all that walking I did all the time in New York really what made it so easy? Was I that much younger then? Am I that out of shape now? And, could this general decline in daily walking have something do with the weight gain I've been fighting of late? But, seriously, six years ago 12 miles was no sweat and now it knocks me out for the rest of the weekend. It's contemplative.

I haven't written about my upcoming Avon Walk on this blog yet, but chances are you're aware I'm doing it. Recap: it's a fundraiser for breast cancer. It takes place in the Rockies, roughly between Keystone and Vail, and I'll be walking a marathon one day, sleeping in a tent, and walking a half marathon the next. And in order to do this I have to raise a minimum of $1800. The event is well-attended, with 1500 expected at the Rocky Mountain walk alone (there are seven others across the country), and the feeling of the crowd is, by all reports, amazing. There are survivors of this horrible disease, people in treatment, friends, family, strangers all banding together to help find a cure. And, all testing themselves with this walk of up to 40 miles. Some will walk less: the altitude affects a person up there (it's 3000 feet higher than Boulder), and some people are doing this while in chemo and radiation treatment. If you haven't supported me yet, please do. Click here to go straight to the Avon page and pay with a credit card -- you can even give anonymously if you want to. You can give whatever you're comfortable giving. I've received 37 donations ranging from $10 to $150.

Two of the women I've met while training for this are fundraising inspirations. One has raised more than $7000, the sixth largest amount of any walker in the Rocky Mountain walk. She did it just like I am raising mine -- by sending out emails to her friends. Her friends are a responsive group, and within 24 hours she had all her required $1800 raised! One high school friend of her husband's sent a check for $1000! Another woman I've met is organizing a benefit golf tournament to raise the money. She's walking with her aunt, and together they have rented a golf club at a tournament rate. They're charging people to participate, and have gotten sponsors for all the holes. They've had food donated and lots of prizes for raffles. They will each clear at least the required $1800, and then some, after they pay the green fees for their participants and cover their other expenses. It's a lot of work, but after months of clawing my way up to my fundraising goal, it sounds like a great idea. So there's hope for you, my guilty readers who haven't donated -- if I do this walk again, I won't have to plead for donations. Instead I'll entice you to attend a fundraiser.

So, there you have it. Why I haven't been posting. The walk isn't until the end of June, so posts may be a little thin until then. If you check this page and don't find anything new, think of me, out there toughing my feet and building my calf muscles.

House Finch Sorrow

2008-05-03T18:46:00.000-07:00

As a new backyard birdwatcher I marveled at the Very Busy House Finches building a nest under the eave of our porch. It's an old house finch haunt, apparently; they come back to the same nest year after year. The previous owner told us about the nest, and said it'd been there since they bought the house. They'd never had the heart to take it down -- even though over a sliding glass door doesn't seem like an ideal location. Someone put a little ledge up there to encourage nest building, and it works. Each spring the birds spruce it up with new, found materials and get busy. We have lots of house finches on our feeders, but two chose to call the nest home, and I was thrilled. All spring I've watched these busy birds swoop in and out, and I've just been waiting for the day I hear little peeps. It's been tough to wait, especially since I don't know a typical house finch schedule. When should I expect babies? Larger, heartier birds like eagles have had their young in Colorado, so I reasoned it would be when the weather warmed a little. Wait wait wait.

Today while on our deck I found two dead, newly hatched birds. Bare and featherless, just lying on our porch. From internet photographs I think they were a day old, maybe two. (I took a photo, but don't have the heart to post it. It's not gory, just so sad.) Thank goodness I scooped them away before the girls noticed -- O, especially, has been focused on death lately. For a few days it was just grandparents we talked about, because a friend's grandparents had died. But the conversation has now come around to me dying, and funnydad, and then to whether or not they were going to die. "Will I stay dead?" O asked, and wailed at the answer even though I delivered it with as much tenderness as I could. (I should mention that this all came to a head at an ice cream parlor of all places, a location not known to induce tears.) Promises that this would not happen for a long, long time didn't help, and who can blame them? Big Things are hard enough to comprehend when you're a grown-up, let alone three. After a tearful morning trying to get my usually bright-eyed daughters thinking of something else, I did not want them to be faced with baby bird death on our deck.

I don't how it happened, or why. The parents could have tossed them out of the nest, slave to an instinct I don't understand. Or, they could have been victim of a more aggressive species like a blue jay, but I don't see very many of those around here. I don't think the nest's location (above a sliding glass deck door) has anything to do with it, because the nest had been used successfully in the past. Disease? The near-frost we had the other night? I'm sure the possible reasons are many.

My internet searches tell me little, other than there are a lot of odd people with birding journals on the web. It's so sad, and I'm looking for answers, trying not to think of these as my house finches, and trying to remember that this kind of thing is common for birds. For lots of animals.

Some of the vague and specious sources I've read seem to indicate that the nesting season for house finches is months long. Perhaps there is a chance of another clutch of eggs above our deck. I hope so, and I hope they meet with a better fate.

Ladybug, ladybug fly away home

2008-04-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

In spite of the happy windbreaker story, it appears that our dear, sweet daughter, M, is still terrified of wind much of the time. If it's just breezy she's mostly okay. The windbreaker helps, and the other day we actually colored with chalk in the driveway while wind rustled the trees. I had to explain that wind doesn't come from the trees, but I'm not sure she got it.

Light breezes are okay, but if a gust comes sweeping by, heaven help her. It's so terribly sad to watch your child be tormented by something you have no power to stop.

The weather continues to be a tease here, but when it's nice, it's really really nice, and the other three of us are not keen on staying indoors. So, we're continuing our balance between compassion and reality, thinking that she'll outgrow this fear in time, and until then, small exposures will help desensitize her a bit.

So, last weekend we made a BIG DEAL of going to get a kite. The girls, especially M, have been asking for a kite since October. M promised she'd be okay in the wind to fly the kite. We explained that you can't fly a kite without wind, and she thought the whole idea sounded great.

The girls had to agree on which kite to buy, and they spent much time in advance of our trip discussing what they wanted. Purple on one side, pink on the other. With a kitty cat. All purple. An airplane kite. Yet, when we got to the kite store -- after carrying a terrified M down the Pearl Street Mall because it was windy -- they agreed on a kite with a ladybug on it. I'm simplifying of course, but off we went with our kite in hand to hit a local park.

Oh, the fun. Oh, the excitement. "Put it in the sky! Put it in the sky!" We got it up on the first try, and managed to keep it in the air most of the time, a feat for mom and dad who are rusty at best with kite flying skills. The girls took turns holding the string and running to be under the ladybug. The first ten minutes or so were delightful: M didn't mention the wind, we all laughed and ran around looking like a home movie or something. Slowly, M began to mention the wind, saying she didn't like it even though we need it for the kite. By the time we left she was a mess again, scared and running to the car. O, for her part, had found a deflated soccer ball and kicked it around two feet at a time, bored by the kite and oblivious to her sister.

Progress? Maybe. I think we just have to find a way to keep her functional outdoors until she grows out of this. How long will that take? Who knows? When we got home, M said, "We flew a ladybug kite. There has to be wind to make a kite go. I wasn't scared but then I was scared and wanted to go to the car." Pretty accurate recounting of the day. Perhaps we'll try again this weekend.

Bored

2008-03-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

Funnydad phones from work to say he's bored. It's Friday afternoon and he'd rather be home with us. Bored bored bored.
O ponders this for a moment and says, "I don't want daddy to be bored." I tell her not to worry, he'll be un-bored soon.
M asks, "How did he get bored?"
O explains, "Maybe a magic witch came and made him bored."
M says, "Yeah, a person with a wand waved and he was bored."
O adds, "Magic people can turn you into lots of things. They can make daddy bored."

I ask the girls if they know what bored means. They say, "Yeah! Yeah, yeah it's ... um, um. No." And go back to their play-doh.

Windy Girl

2008-03-21T19:35:00.000-07:00

M is deathly afraid of the wind. She'll throw herself on the ground in terror, huddle in a little ball, scream and cry until we carry her to shelter. And, if you've never been to Colorado, I'm here to tell you we have some wicked wind in this state, which doesn't help. Wind whips around along the entire Front Range -- something about being on the leeward side of the Rocky Mountains and cool air coming down from higher elevations. This time of year is the worst.

We've tried everything we can think of, stories about how the wind is our friend, discussions of nature and rain and sun and fluffy bunnies and how they all like wind. We've read books about wind, we've tried ignoring M and her fears, we've tried cowtowing to her. O, for her part, plays the good twin, never complaining, and occassionally proclaiming her love of wind.

After a couple months of this, we're tired. Our new approach is balance. Sympathy tempered with tough love, understanding mixed with practicality. I'm not sure it's working, though I've lost sight of the goal. Other parents tell us she'll grow out of it, which would be encouraging if I believed them.

But then (!) we got M a windbreaker. See, a windbreaker protects you from the wind. Keeps you safe. POOF. M's no longer afraid, or at least not really. As long as she's wrapped in her windbreaker, she'll walk down the sidewalk, play outside at school or skip into the grocery store without wailing. And that's close enough to a goal for me.

It's Go Time

2008-03-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

March may go in like a lion, but our lion has a split personality. It was in the 50s today, though there was a dusting of snow on the ground early this morning. After work Funnydad brought the girls to a playground in the bike chariot, taking immediate advantage of the extended daylight and our quixotic weather. Last week we built a snowman. Two weekends ago it was warm enough to wear short sleeves while doing yard work. The weather here, in the shoulder seasons at least, is wacky. My friends in Minnesota are still dealing with snow and temperatures below freezing, and this is the time of year I'm gleeful to have left the upper Midwest behind. We always want the best of everything, so I'm sure summer will have me wishing for one of those 10,000 lakes and a cabin. But for now give me my quirky Colorado March weather.

At any rate, it's time to get started on my garden. Go Time. No time to putz around, there's a lot to do. Time to get excited, dirty, eager, and almost certainly horticulturally over-committed. We inherited a stunning perennial garden complements of our house's previous owner's green thumb. In our yard this year, it's all about learning. We're not planting anything new, and we're not making any other landscaping changes. Gotta learn what we have and how it grows. It's a lot to take care of, but I'm excited because it's the kind of garden I always hoped I'd have someday, the kind that always has something in bloom. A gardener's rule of thumb is that the first year plants "sleep," the second they "creep," and the third they "leap." This means the new owner of our Minneapolis house should be enjoying some leaping this spring since I began my garden there three years ago. So, in terms of cosmic garden balance, it's fitting that I enjoy someone else's leaping -- but this garden is beyond what I could have planned. Remember, four summers ago I was still living in New York City with nary a speck of dirt to till. I'm relatively new to all this. We have to learn how to care for what we've inherited, and these are desert plants, not the azaleas and dogwoods of my mother's yard. But I'm up to the challenge. It's March, I have lots of energy for my garden.

All the new garden action this year is happening in my community garden plot. Community gardening is a serious thing here with people all over town participating. Boulder has seven different community gardens with a total of 350 plots available for lease each year, and some of those plots are subdivided into halves and thirds. I scored a plot in the community garden just yards from our house, a stroke of luck kind of. (Really, I just got myself on the waiting list early.) There aren't enough plots for new gardeners to go around; there's a waiting list.

My plot, number 507 if you're interested, is smack in a sea of others just like it in a mammoth community garden very close to our house.

Plot 507 on the day in late February when it was assigned to me. It looks pretty much the same now, only with a layer of compost on top.

As you can see, it's a big, flat piece of dirt. It measures 16 x 33, which works out to more square feet than the apartment I was living in when I met my husband. I'm psyched. I'm also pretty sure that in some way I'll get in over my head because that is a lot of garden to keep up with on top of our yard (see above), a job, and twins. Last year my plot belonged to someone who let it get too weedy and got kicked out for neglect (the community garden has Rules). I'm told there were forests of weeds, which means there are likely weed roots and seeds in there just waiting to cause trouble. I'll have to be vigilant, but I'm not daunted. (Talk to me in July.)

On a recent warm weekend day I enlisted some familial muscle and we weeded best we could and spread nine wheelbarrows of compost over the whole thing. There's a lot to do in these early days -- I have to prepare a bed for sugar snap peas and shelling peas which go in about St. Paddy's Day. I want to work in some of this compost so it won't blow away if the winds kick up before I have it all rototilled in April. I need to plan out my beds and get them ready for planting. I need to dig my carrot and beet beds extra deep so these root crops have the best chance to flourish. I need to put up a deer fence before tender seedlings show their precious leaves.

I've started seeds indoors, this year rigging up a florescent grow light in the unused space below our stairs in the basement. The last frost date here is in early May, and after that it's statistically safe to put out new plants. Tomatoes and peppers don't go out until Memorial Day weekend.

My seed starting contraption. I am mighty proud of myself for realizing that the space under the stairs was perfect for this project. We don't store stuff there, the girls don't play in it, and it's concrete, so dirt and water won't ruin anything.
I'll remove the lids when all seeds have sprouted. The light is on a timer and there is a special heating mat under the boxes. As the seedlings grow I can move the light up, and when they need it, I'll replant them into larger starter pots. I've never used artificial light to start seeds before, but it's supposed to yield sturdier seedlings because they get consistent full-spectrum light for the proper number of hours a day.

Future red leaf lettuce. I plan to keep lettuce growing as a continual crop until the heat kicks up. Then I'll start it again as a cool weather crop until the frost takes it.

A community garden is supposed to build a sense of community. Already I think it's working. I've met a couple of my garden neighbors, and a colorful, talkative guy named Curly who has had a plot in this garden for 32 years (the garden's been going for 34). I had a nice chat with the lady supervising the compost sale. It's interesting, a whole new subculture. For instance, I'm realizing there are many different opinions about how, and even whether, to discourage deer from parading through the garden (it seems deer are the primary garden enemy here, whereas I'm used to battling rabbits and squirrels). There's a debate about whether east-west rows or north-south rows are better. Some say because we're on the 40th parallel it doesn't matter. Me, I'm going east-west, but only because it feels more manageable in terms of row length; I don't have an opinion in this debate yet.

I realize that I garden the way I tackle other projects in my life. I'm all about research and a plan until it's Go Time. Since the new year I've read about gardening in Colorado -- websites, magazines, and books. I've thought about what I wanted to grow and have pored over seed catalogs. I've plotted my beds on graph paper. Now that I'm out there with dirt under my finger nails, I'm more about instinct and tapping into other gardeners' experience than what I'd planned out. I have a seed-starting excel spreadsheet calibrated to Boulder's last frost date that I created during precious spare time in January. Really. But I've already gone against it by planting my watermelon seeds and cucumbers ahead of their specified date. I've staked out my garden beds with little flag corners using a tape measure, but I left my graph paper map of exactly what they were to look like at home. I enjoy the planning and research, but only to a point. In the field I'd rather embrace the experience.

You only get one shot each summer. You can't stop in July and say, wait, I've learned so much from this season so far, I want to start again and do it all better. The best a gardener can do is keep a journal and learn from her mistakes and successes. That's why Go Time is so exciting. It's the beginning, and the possibility of reward -- for the eyes, the stomach, and the spirit -- is so great.

Croc Stars

2008-02-17T16:36:00.000-08:00

A friend here is a photographer trying to make inroads with the Boulder-based Crocs company. She planned to shoot some spring images for their internet department on spec and needed models. She was oh so flattering about M+O's cuteness, they'd be darling, would I let her shoot them? Though there was a very good chance the photos would amount to nothing, they could keep the shoes. I would have agreed even if she hadn't buttered me up and been so nice, but add her kindness to the mix and the whole thing was a no-brainer. We were off to promote Boulder's success story shoes, of which I might add we owned exactly zero pairs for the four of us.

She wanted them dressed twin-y. Alike or similar. Sounds good except as I examined their nearly-end-of-the-season wardrobe I found nothing unstained and coordinating, certainly nothing matching for them to wear. I could only conclude that I let my children wear rags and that I must be the laughingstock of their preschool for letting them wear, gasp, whatever they want. I fretted. I wondered if I should go shopping. And in the back of my mind I wondered if once I figured out a good combination of clothes, would I be able to get them to wear the selected outfit at the selected time. That last worry proved to be well-founded.

As we prepared to leave for the shoot M refused to put on the chosen shirt. She also refused, though eventually aquessed to, the second-choice shirt. She had no interest in the new, matching pink cable hoodie sweaters I'd gotten them (despite earlier squeals of glee) and I'll forever wonder if moving on to my third choice would have made the difference. There was a lot of "no pink no pink no pink," which is insane because the girl breathes pink. I thought I'd bribed her (lollipop) into not crying anymore, and on the way there she meekly uttered their phrase, "I'm a little bit happy now" which they say when they're cheering up after a fit of some sort. But when we got to the park where we were meeting the photographer it was all no no no and a new batch of tears. Of course, this whole time O was the model, pardon the pun, of cooperation. She sat down when asked, ran forward when asked, turned upside down and looked through her legs, and jumped in a (small) puddle on command.

Lynsey had been going for a "it takes two" tag line, so I really hoped M would get on the bandwagon. More bribes got her to cooperate just at tiny bit, but in truth if Lynsey gets anything good with both of them in it I'll be shocked. I'm certain there's something cute of O. The shoes, by the way, are adorable. Pearly pink Mary Janes. I pitched them as sparkle pink, but as it turns out, wearing the shoes wasn't one of M's issues that day. I guess I should be grateful for that.

The thing is, we get so wrapped up in our kids -- okay, I get so wrapped up in mine -- that I was a mess this whole time. Upset that it wasn't working, trying to cajole M into playing along. Which only makes things worse. If I thought they would have allowed it without producing more tears, I would have walked away and waited by the car just to remove my anxious presence from the scene. But, there I was, trying to help and possibly making it worse. I might add that Lynsey was great about the whole thing, making the most of her time with O and telling me not to worry, she deals with lots of uncooperative subjects. The kid's had a mind of her own since her lungs first gasped air, and yet there I was trying to get her to go along with what I'd planned for her. On the way home I was shaking, let down, near tears. Where does this come from, this, this what? Insecurity? Desperation to help out a friend? Need to be perfect? It sure doesn't reflect well on me, and is probably just a tidge unhealthy, but there it is.

Just as I was facing the enormity of these emotions, as if to offer some comic relief, we drove past the biggest pigs I've ever seen. Easily in the running with the ones from the Minnesota State Fair. They were so huge, and oddly out of place in this suburb of Boulder, that I turned the car around so the girls could get a good look. See for yourself, compare her to the door nearby. I see teats, so perhaps she's a new mama pig, keeping the local sausage industry alive and well, so to speak.

Back home, of course, M was all giggles and smiles and (!) wouldn't let me take the pink cable hoodie sweater off to protect it from dinner. I said, "you sure were a sourpuss today." She said, "yeah, I was a sourpuss, but I didn't want to hug sissy or go upside down or jump in the puddle." And that's the thing I couldn't accept. She didn't want to do it, and I couldn't change her mind. It's a crocs shoot today, but in a few years it's going to be piano lessons, or Girl Scouts, or something bigger. The parents I know -- parents my age and parents my parents' age -- whom I respect the most, let their kids do their own thing and support them no matter what, even if it's the opposite of what the parent envisioned. I think this is going to be more difficult for me than I anticipated. If I want to follow that model, it looks as if I have some growth ahead of me. Good thing time is on my side.

Eight days down, four to go

2008-02-16T19:32:00.000-08:00

I've been flying solo here for eight days now while Funnydad flies around Asia on business. After more than a week of single parenthood, I've hit a bit of a wall. The tag team of fatigue and loneliness visits every time he travels, and this time it tracked me down a little later than it has in the past -- a delay that lulled me into a false belief that perhaps I was getting better at managing this travel thing, or maybe having a job tempers the stress. Yeah, not so much.

While cooking dinner this evening, the laughter of baby cows and penguins (their game tonight, don't ask, I don't understand it either) turned to silence. Every parent knows silence is bad news, and after a couple of minutes when I peered out from the kitchen I found them playing with the paper towels I'd bought today (but had foolishly not yet put away). Instead of yelling which a) was my first instinct and b) would have made all three of us upset, I had them help me collect the un-rolled rolls and put them away, and told them they could play in the ones they'd already torn off. I tried to be clear that this isn't normally allowed, but I kind of blew it on consistency by letting them play with the mess they'd made -- but, I mean, come on, I wasn't going to use them at this point and they were having so much fun. At that moment the peace of being permitted to fix dinner undisturbed while they romped in and "ice skated" on paper towels was worth way more than a lesson in waste and proper behavior.

Funnydad returns on Wednesday and all four of us can't wait. He's got lots of stories to share about the unbelievable size of Tokyo and the unbelievable smog in China. He's off to Singapore next where he's going to be sure not to chew gum. Meanwhile, hats off to the single parents and military spouses out there. You're stronger than I am, though I bet you go through paper towels quickly.

Mending Wall

2008-02-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

The next day M wrote her name, too, perhaps motivated by the fanfare we made of O's efforts. She insists on starting in the middle of the page and then adding to the beginning when she runs out of room making the whole thing kind of incomprehensible, but it's there. She's low key about pretty much everything, including, apparently, the proper order of letters.

Anyway, we have a fence around our house. I think it was put up when the place was built twenty some-odd years ago. It's the same fence many of our neighbors have, a wooden picket fence about four or five feet tall, and it's in decent shape. Needs a little TLC and seriously needs a paint job, but it's a good fence (see the above picture taken at the end of last summer). I figure if I'm going to do anything I should do it before my garden goes gangbusters on it, which means as soon as the weather is consistently above 50 or so (I think). Also, that way, we get to enjoy the freshly-painted fence for the whole outdoor season. So I sent an e-mail to our little 20-family Home Owner's Association to say we wanted to have this done, could anyone recommend a good painter. Someone could, and I called them. They're coming out on Monday, and I have the name of a second painter whom I'll call for a competing estimate. From my perspective, things seem to be going fine. Easy, even. HA!

Today, our Very Thorough Neighbor next door caught me in the driveway playing with my kids. This is a friendly guy with whom I have had long conversations about garbage and recycling pick-up regulations, the nuances of snow removal in our neighborhood, and the city's refusal to remove a leaning tree. He's a nice neighbor, from New York even. But really a stickler for Policy. So this guy says, I saw your e-mail. Have I talked to my fence neighbors about whether they'll allow me to have the fence between our properties painted and if they want their side done at all? (Me: Uh, no, hadn't occurred to me. We've never had a fence painted before. You mean there's a chance they won't?) Have I talked to my shared-fence neighbors about splitting the cost of painting their half of common fences? (Me: Oh, I hadn't thought of that.) Have I talked to the HOA architectural committee? Even if I'm having it painted the same color, which I am, I have to have this work approved. (Me: we have an architectural committee?)

So, I happened to see the architectural guy (previously known as my neighbor) in his yard and went over to talk. Approval isn't an issue, nothing in writing needed, and I didn't even need to talk to him if it was going to stay the same color. Phew. But, as it happens we share a section of fence. He suggested "we" get an estimate to have all the linked sections of fence painted because they're all in similar shape. Suddenly there are five or six houses involved in this potential work. I'm seeing complicated math equations in my head, per-linear-foot prices, and divisions of cost where fences are shared. Somehow I'm afraid it'll come out the way it does at restaurants. Whenever you have people pitch in based on what they think they owe, it always comes up short and someone has to pitch in a little more than they expected. I'm going to do my best to keep it from becoming unwieldy or unfair, but I'm just amazed that this morning I thought the only thing to do was get estimates, make a choice, and set a date. Good fences really do make good neighbors, but why does mending the wall have to be so complicated?

Extraordinary Tuesday

2008-02-05T19:26:00.001-08:00

Of all the cool things that happened today, the coolest is that O WROTE HER NAME, in its entirety ALL BY HERSELF, twice! I don't know where this came from since we haven't been practicing it at home, though she could certainly spell it out loud when prompted. I thought the only letter in her name that she knew how to write was the O, but, no, there she goes spelling the whole thing in little preschooler block letters. It's unbelievable how proud an adult can be of their child, it's as if my heart wants to burst!

Another cool thing about today was that Funnydad and I attended the Colorado caucuses. I'm not sure where to begin -- it was a little like a cross between a high school class election and a Woody Allen movie. We'd never caucused before and weren't sure what to expect, but really it was the most inane system you've ever seen. I don't think there was anything improper going on, but everyone just kept whispering to their neighbor, "really? this is how this happens?"

There was no shouting, there were only a few impassioned speeches, and there was a lot of chaos. Way, way, way more people turned out for this caucus than the precinct coordinators were prepared for. The precinct leader said he'd never led a caucus that wouldn't fit in his living room, and here were more than 300 people crammed into an elementary school gymnasium. So many people they didn't actually check all of us in because they ran out of check-in forms and ran out of time before we had to start. (I worried that lack of official registration might mean our precinct wouldn't be counted later, but I was assured our caucus would count. I'm not entirely sure why that's true -- what's to have prevented a bunch of people who aren't eligible to vote from slipping in?) The event leader who made the call to scrap the registration process said, "We're Democrats! We're about participation, not bureaucracy." It sounded good through his faulty megaphone and made us all chuckle, but participation is only good if my vote still counts.

Anyway, once we got started, one person for each candidate was permitted a two-minute speech. The speeches for the two leading candidates could not have been more different. The Obama person stood up and spoke from her heart, throwing her soul into it. People want a sense of unity and a president who can move the country forward. Once in a generation are we given a political leader who can inspire and uplift like Barak... It was a good pep talk, and the room cheered. The Clinton person read a letter from Hillary Clinton sent to precinct leaders in caucus states for this purpose. It sounded like a letter from someone else, a flat and boring list of accomplishments and promises. Health care reform, energy policy, end the war, real change. When the letter was through the room clapped politely. A few others gave speeches on behalf of candidates for congressional races, and one guy got a laugh by saying, "I'd like to speak on behalf of Dick Cheney."

There was some business to attend to before we could get down to what we were all there to do. We had to appoint two precinct captains, people who commit to a two-year term helping to the Democratic Party in Boulder County by raising their hands in a crowded gym, as if we're choosing lunch room monitors at a school assembly. We had to choose a secretary for the evening. Someone nominated her husband, who was already running around with a clip board.

We split into two rooms, one for each of the two precincts present and there still weren't enough chairs. After the caucus leader (the guy with the inferior megaphone who reminded me and the people near me of a bumbling Woody Allen) dispensed with some necessary boring announcements, they took a "straw poll." The rules say that you can vote Clinton, Obama, or Undecided. But this is a preliminary vote, a vote to see who can be voted for -- a primary for the primary, if you will. In order to make it to the real vote, a group must get 15% of the eligible voters in the room. (There were indeed ineligible voters milling around the room, people from other countries who came with spouses, kids.) The Undecideds did not have 15% of the room. I'm not exactly sure what would have happened if they had, but luckily I can just gloss right over that since it didn't happen. Clinton and Obama did. But, just barely. There were 160 eligible voters in the room, which means 15% is 24 people. Clinton had 26. Just 26 people out of that packed room were there to support Hillary, and one of them was my husband. He had walked into the school unsure of whom he'd vote for (those of you who know him are probably not surprised to hear this). Accustomed to New York elections where supporters for candidates are not allowed to post banners and hand out stickers near polling places, he was turned off by all the Obama campaigning happening in the actual building, and on the spot decided to vote for Clinton. There were Clinton supporters handing out candy, but they weren't as obvious.

Then the "interesting" part happened. The Clinton people went to the front of the gym and stood near the stage, the Obama people stayed in their seats, and the undecideds took occupancy of the first two rows. Those undecided folks had five minutes to make up their minds. Was there a lot of vote wrangling? No. Were there convincing speeches? Were people standing on chairs enticing neighbors to join their camp? No. I think a few campaign organizers for each candidate worked the undecided crowd a little, but really, it was kind of a boring five minutes. I talked to the woman next to me who lives down the street. She runs a non-profit that encourages children's literacy in Guatemala, so it was an interesting conversation. When the five minutes were over they counted again. (By they I mean any number of people wandering around the room looking as if they had an official role -- there were no vests, hats, pins, or other indicators that these people were in any way in charge. Except the guy with the megaphone, and as I explained, he seemed a little lost sometimes.)

As they were counting someone said to the megaphone guy, "We have to do an official vote, this is still a straw poll." To which the guy responded, "Okay, this is an official vote. I think. I think this is the official vote." Seriously, folks. Your country at work, right here in Colorado. So, they told us all to stay still, asked the people who were just observing to leave the room, and three separate counters worked the room to be sure they all got the same number. The final vote? Clinton 27, Obama 125, undecideds 2. Isn't that incredible? As I type this and watch the returns on nytimes.com, it's clear Boulder isn't reflective of the rest of the country, but we already knew that (see previous post). Still, kind of amazing, such a sweep. And the feeling in the room was so positive, so pro Barak, so hopeful. I mean, there were so few Clinton supporters that in the straw poll she almost didn't qualify for the real vote -- she needed 24 and got 26, just three people shy of not counting at all.

What does this mean? It means that from our precinct we send one Clinton delegate and six Obama delegates to the Boulder County primary in March. We actually chose those delegates (and alternates) tonight, again through the grade-school process of people raising their hands and getting the attention of the guy with the clipboard.

I think caucusing could work if you had a lot of people who knew a lot about politics and political processes in the room. I think it could work well with smaller numbers of participants. I think it might be a good system for swaying people who might otherwise support a candidate who would get a small sliver of support. But there seemed to be a lot of room for error the way things went down tonight, I just kept wishing that Jon Stewart voted in a caucus state because the system is ripe for satire. Honestly, I've been to twins club meetings that were more organized and efficient. I'd like to go on trust, on faith that everyone in the room was legitimately able to vote and that all votes were counted, and for now I kind of have to because I don't have a choice. But as a system for the country, the way 14 states hold primaries, I don't think it'll stand up to scrutiny. Except it does because caucuses aren't going away. Oh, there were precautions; they supposedly locked the doors at 7:00, so the voting pool couldn't change once the process started. And the victory for Obama was so assured, what did it matter if the counters were off one or two people? You know how that counting goes -- people move around, counters lose track. It's just not precise. How can a country that goes to court over hanging chad allow something this imprecise to continue? I enjoyed the process because it was my first time, but I'm not sure I'll still love it years from now when the novelty of the chaos wears off, or when the whole room isn't supporting my candidate. But for now I can tell my children stories about the crazy day in February when O wrote her name for the first time and mom and dad participated in a loopy political event.

Oh, the other cool thing that happened today was the first day at my new job. It went well, but I'll have to write about that later because like Colorado caucus-goers you've been patient enough for one night.

Hippy Town

2008-02-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

Boulder has a reputation. Think of Boulder and you most likely picture of a big ol' box of granola. If you know people who live here you might expand that notion to include words like hippy, green, liberal, easy-going, and sporty. We've been here for almost six months now (really! I can't believe it either) and I can tell you that Boulder's reputation is well-deserved. Aside from loose-fitting, natural-fabric fashion, dreds for white folks, prayer flags in every neighborhood, and other visual cues that this is a non-conformist place (in a the way that non-conformists tend to look alike), here are a smattering of observations:

• The other day in a coffee shop I overheard some people talking about a "gypsy dance" party that was going to have live music, dancing, a feminine altar, and a masculine altar.

• Some of the busstops here have solar panels to fuel the lights that illuminate the shelters at night.

• When people bump into one another or have a problem, the standard "it's okay" phrase is "no worries."

• I have met people named Star, Rain, Peace, and Harmony. And, I have read about people named Rainbeau and Sunflower. You can meet people with unusual names anywhere. I just think there's a greater concentration here.

• Naropa University is a (big) deal here. Yeah, I'd never heard of it either. They call themselves "Buddhist Inspired Contemplative Education." If you want a degree in meditation, or an MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, or a bachelor's in Peace Studies, they're the university for you.

• There are two gyms here exclusively for rock climbing. Yes, not one, but two rather large indoor facilities floor-to-ceiling with nothing but rock-climbing walls. On any given day, even in winter, you can find people rock climbing outdoors if you venture even a little bit into the mountains.

• The city plows its bike paths before it plows our street. Even in the snow there are people who bike for transportation.

• There are three Whole Foods within the city limits for a town of 90,000. Minneapolis had one for a city four times that.

• In at least two lunch places the trash can is marked "landfill." Putting something in a bin marked "landfill" really makes you think. (These places, like many others, offer an array of recycling options.)

• At the lunch-food part of the farmer's market (when it is farmer's market season) there are two bins: compost and recycling. If you happen to have an item that falls into neither category you have to take it home with you. Seriously.

• People really let it mellow here -- in the bathroom. Are you familiar with the saying, "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down?" I've seen signs requesting this behavior (or lack thereof) in public restrooms, and frequently we'll go into a bathroom to find mellowing, um, already happening.

Of course, no place is defined by any one type of people. The granola/green vibe is strong here, no doubt, but the appeal of the area has attracted a large number of non-hippy people who like to live in places that have what Boulder offers. And companies have learned they can attract quality employees if they locate where quality employees like to live; there is a decidedly yuppy feel here now, too. There are suburbs with 7,000 square-foot homes and a Macy's. Those Whole Foods are not just for people who avoid refined sugar -- like everywhere else they're a kind of upscale grocery store. I don't doubt that Boulder will continue to change as more and more corporations (like my husband's) choose to relocate here. And, I am sure the mix of hippy and yuppy is part of Boulder's appeal for me, part of what makes it feel familiar. You could pick up Park Slope, Brooklyn and deposit it in the center of Boulder and, other than the mountains, no one would notice. Park Slope, our old Brooklyn neighborhood, is known equally for its food coop and multi-million-dollar brownstones.

But Minneapolis didn't have a hippy feel, not even a little bit. I hadn't realized that I missed it. At Christmastime we got on a plane to fly to Virginia and there was a gentleman in khakis and a blue blazer. He wore a belt and shined, lace-up shoes and looked as if he could get off the plane and walk onto Capitol Hill, which he very well may have been planning to do. I thought, that's what we don't have in Boulder, people who look like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm enjoying hanging out with the gore-tex, green tea latte crowd for now.

No means no

2008-01-29T10:09:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I laugh at the things I have to say to my children. I have been keeping a mental tally of the NOs I've issued over the past year or so since they started really testing things. It all started one winter in Minneapolis when I actually had to say, "no licking the car." I cracked up about that one for days, I mean, seriously -- who licks the outside of a car? It can't taste good, all that dirt and grime. Alas, that was just the beginning.

Since then, I've repeated the no licking the car line many times. And the list has grown to include: no sitting on your sister's head (sister, surprisingly, was not objecting), no sitting on the dinner table, no licking mommy, ketchup is not a finger food ... I'm sure there are more, and if you're a parent you may be able to add some of your own. Wish I'd written them all down. Most recently I said, "We don't put shoes in our mouth, and we don't lick the toilet." What about your kids? Got any no stories to share?

UPDATE: A friend from Minnesota went all out, using this as an excuse to post her own twins' NO list. Equally, if not more, hilarious.

Recipe for fun

2008-01-26T16:57:00.000-08:00

Start with one fledging parental friendship. Add a dozen or more kids of all ages between five months and seven years or so. Add one face painter, who turns into a balloon animal-maker when the painting is done. Add one inflatable bouncer. Mix together and let rise for a couple hours while grown-ups enjoy beer, and then add one safari-animal-themed birthday cake. It's a recipe for sure-fire Saturday afternoon fun -- who cares that M+O didn't know the newly-four-year-old birthday boy until we arrived at his house!

M with a dolphin.

O with a bat. Her other cheek is a butterfly.

Vicious Cycle

2008-01-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

Our girls play good cop bad cop. All. The. Time. This behavior is not unique to my kids, and I don't even think it's got a thing to do with being twins. It's just kid stuff, but it drives me bats. And, since I watch it so frequently I've spent some time deconstructing it.

When one is whiny and crying (often the result of a power struggle or demand for something she knows she can't have), and likely in some sort of removal or time out for that behavior, the other is all sweetness and light. Cheerful. Quiet. Self-entertaining. Then, the tide changes and the grumpy one will cheer up, and just at that moment the other will have a problem that requires crying or whining. Or perhaps an attempt to wrest a band-aid from mom (if there's no blood, they can't have a band-aid, but they do their best to get me to waive that rule). It's actually quite fascinating to watch from a social interaction perspective. Their priorities shift so silently and swiftly.

Here's how I figure their little brains work: At first it's better to try win the power struggle, and when that's a defeated cause it becomes better to behave. But the other sister, who got attention being good when her sister was upstairs crying on her bed, no longer has a lock on attention because there are now two good kids in the room. So, how to stand out? Suddenly have a reason to cry and whine. Which can become a power struggle when mom tells you whining is not allowed.

Fascinating, maybe, but maddening. What about you? Your kids do anything like this? Empathy appreciated.

Time to make the donuts

2008-01-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

I have managed to get myself a job. I applied for exactly one position and got it (this has happened to me before). Either I'm really as good at this museum thing as I say I am in interviews, or I'm really lucky. I could also have good timing, be in a small field, or be really good at fooling people. Actually, the part about good timing is true -- I sent the company a blind letter just a few weeks before they were going to advertise for an exhibit developer (that's what I do, in case you aren't keeping track).

The job seems pretty awesome, which is convenient since there aren't many exhibition firms in Boulder. The work, the firm's clients, and the general feeling in the office all seem to be are right up my alley. They agreed to a half-time schedule, which is all I feel I can do right now because I'm not ready to give up being with my children more than that -- they're only three, after all.

My job joy is tempered by the now-constant anxiety of finding childcare. Enough childcare. Quality childcare. Childcare that doesn't have me paying four different parties to care for my kids for the 20 hours a week I'll be working. They're at a great preschool, and I don't want to lose that element of their lives -- they've been through enough change in the past few months. Plus we all like the atomosphere and the teachers there. But, the school is mornings only; I can't leave them all day. So, trying to supplement this preschool with other options to equal enough coverage is a giant logic problem. If M+O are in school until noon, and sitter A is only available on Tuesdays, and the oncoming train is approaching at 70 miles an hour, what color are the girls' lunch boxes? There are way too many options on the table, yet none is good enough to embrace, and none is awful enough to reject. There is no easy answer, at least not until the new school year begins and I start them at a new preschool where they can stay all day...on second thought, maybe I don't have good timing.

M+O don't get it, of course. The last time they saw me go to work was early August, practically a decade ago in preschooler time. They say, "mommy is going to go to work like daddy" and cheer "yay!" Then later O said, "I think no. I don't like it when you go to work." M added, "if you go to work, can I have juice?"

By the way, in one of those "oh sh*t" moments, I realized the millisecond it was too late that I had sent my future boss an e-mail with this blog address in the signature. I am sure he has better things to do than read about the antics of our family. But just in case, you won't find any major complaining about The Job on this blog. For that, you'll have to pick up the phone.

Underwear is for wearing on your head

2008-01-14T17:03:00.001-08:00

Three-year-olds are full of never-ending imagination. I guess kids learn the phrase "I'm bored" when they're older, because it's not even a concept for preschoolers, at least not mine. This is when having a twin must rock, because they have a constant playmate, not just for chunks of the afternoon, but for those slivers of time between breakfast and getting out of the house in the morning, between lunch and nap, after dinner and before bed. The games they make up just amaze me in their cleverness, reassignment of available items, and variety.

Earlier today they were walking around the house, up and down the stairs wearing blankets on their shoulders ("capes"), crocheted hats, and tights (over their pants) (?), carrying a baby doll in a plastic bin meant to hold stringing beads, while singing a song they had made up about celery.

They negotiate with each other over what to play ("now we're baby otters," "okay, now we're kitties," "now let's go to the store") and oddly there does not seem to be one who dominates the descisions more than the other. They have their bossy moments, but not here. Yesterday their cotton blankets were spread from the back of one bed, over one small rocking chair, and anchored with books. There was a menagerie of stuffed animals laying on top all in a neat row. As I began to remove them to return the blankets to their beds for bedtime, M hollered, "NOOOOOOOO, they're sleeping in their hammock." Right.

As I type they're walking around singing a song about being a "tailor" ("it means you're getting on a pony with a tail") and they're wearing several layers of dress-up clothes, with, I'm not kidding, (clean) underwear on their heads. Earlier this evening they were playing house. The games run into one another like a three-dimensional, two-person stream of consciousness. Much of what they do involves nurturing, and some reenacts cartoons they like, such as when they rescue a stranded animal a la Diego. When I was a child in the 70s my liberal Free To Be You and Me parents tried to break gender sterotypes by giving me trucks and my brother dolls. We traded. I'm not sure where my girls learned to wrap their stuffed animals in blankets and put them to sleep next to their pillows, but they've been doing it for half their life now. This stuff is in their genes, and one day I hope it'll help them be compassionate in the grown-up world.

They're also at an age now where they like to have "playdates." (I dislike that word, but it's a mommy staple in this day and age, so I'm forced to use it. When I was a girl I went to friends' houses to play. What was wrong with the simplier terminology?) I digress. We have two friends who are girls M+O's age, and we've had a couple of playdates with each child over the past month or so. Preschoolers enjoy running in packs, and these playdates are a blur three-year-old motion.

While my girls are in heaven, and I'm delighted to have them entertained, playdates are not the same as the weekly playgroups I miss so much from Minneapolis. Don't get me wrong, I really like to have mom friends here with whom I can hang out and get to know over coffee while our kids tear around the house in fairy wings and tutus. But I guess I'm still mourning what I left behind, two groups of moms whose kids were pretty much the same age, groups where the friendships between mothers did nothing but deepen during our time together. One group had 20-odd moms in it, and the other had a core of seven or eight women I looked forward to seeing each week. The bummer is that I don't think I'm going to find a playgroup here because kids the same age as mine are in preschool -- they just don't go to playgroups much at age three. And if there is an existing group here I can glom onto I haven't found it. I bet that even my group in Minneapolis will start to dissolve as the kids enter preschool next year...

Two steps forward, stop and look back over my shoulder. At least I'm moving forward. Kids change so fast and we've moved so often that phases of my childrens' lives are identified by where we lived -- in Brooklyn, it was the baby lump phase. Getting out of the apartment was an event. I'd meet moms in the park and we'd set our kids on a blanket with some toys, and they'd stay on the blanket. We moved to Minneapolis weeks before one started walking, and just as they were mastering a handful of words (I remember O said "mama mama mama" during our first days there). We frequented playgrounds, toddler pools, and playgroups. Now, in Boulder, we're on to playdates, tricycles, and preschool. I can't wait to see what they do next.

No ants, either

2008-01-08T19:29:00.000-08:00

Parenting discovery of the day: Picky eaters will gobble their entire dinner if you serve it as a "picnic" on a blanket on the floor of the living room. They'll eat all their broccoli and ask for more even when the serving bowl is empty, all their red pepper slices, and their entire turkey burger. They won't be too keen on the steamed turkey wontons mom and dad are having, but that dipping sauce will be appealing. (The temptation, however, to put their fork on their foot, or their foot in their food will be almost too much to resist.)

It was wonderful. (Now let's move on.)

2008-01-01T18:35:00.001-08:00

I think I'll skip the "I'm recovering from a busy holiday" moaning and just go straight to a few highlights. Though I suspect, if you have kids you already know the stories -- they thought all the presents under the tree were for them, hopped all day from new wonder to new wonder, and looked adorable in their new pink tutus with magic wands. A few hours after the morning frenzy they couldn't list more than one gift. Children live so totally in the moment -- though they love a game or toy when they are in front of it, listing it when it's not in sight is tricky when you're three. M remembered the stocking, though. She told everyone about it. Not what was inside it, but that she got a stocking. We had a grandma in town, always a treat for Christmas, and days like this are just wonderful to share with family.

Holiday discovery no one saw coming: the girls are scared of Winnie-the-Pooh. They'd been talking about him, so Santa put a DVD in one of their stockings. Oh, they couldn't wait. Then they ran away in terror. M will explain that it's not Pooh they don't like, it's just they don't like when he falls down, or gets a honey pot stuck on his head, or chased by bees, or stuck in rabbit's hole. I think we'll put the DVD away for a year or so and try (gasp) reading the stories before we watch them next time.

Favorite gift: Was it the doll house Santa brought them with the lovingly selected twin girl dolls who sleep in bunk beds (they can't wait until they're old enough for bunk beds)? No. Was it the age-appropriate Chutes and Ladders game I remember loving as a girl? Nope. Was is the pile of play musical instruments dad selected and we gave them? Close. They got a drum, cymbals, and a plastic saxophone. Their favorite, however, is the *whistle* that came with the drum. Seriously, we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of trouble and just gotten them whistles.

Nature gave us a white Christmas -- snow all day on the 25th. While this looked lovely and made for a nice Christmas walk, it hampered our ability to do things with the girls, since as readers of this blog know, one of my daughters doesn't like to play in the snow. We had a lovely day, full of pot roast and family music parades and packing for our trip to see another grandma. Though the day didn't feel empty, I still feel I'm struggling to find that Christmas rhythm with our new home and family spread coast-to-coast. Some day, perhaps, we'll all go ice skating or skiing on Christmas Day, or maybe I'll throw a Christmas Day open house like my mother did when I was young. When I was older we always saw a movie -- since my kids are afraid of Pooh, that's a ways off. I've thought about finding a way to spend time with those less fortunate than us to balance the gift-giving and help M+O understand what the holiday season is really about. A soup kitchen, a shelter, something like that where they could actually see those they're helping. They're a little young, and anyway, this wasn't the year to start something else new. Maybe next year. Or the year after, because Christmas comes around every year. Right now, like most of us, I'm glad to be watching it trot off into the sunset.

Hope your new year looks like it'll be your best yet.

Good ideas that weren't

2007-12-17T21:41:00.000-08:00

Or, trying to fill time creatively while Daddy's on a business trip: (Mostly we've had fun. Been okay. Wrapped Christmas presents, seen friends, done our regular activities. But there were a few dark spots in the week. Notably, all coming in the afternoon or evening. Hm.)

• Dinner at the hibachi Japanese steak house. (I thought they'd think it was cool to watch food being cooked right in front of us. All they noticed was the loud exhaust fan over their heads. They watched, but while clinging to me with their hands over their ears and saying "go home.")

• Bagel for snack at 10:30 a.m. (They didn't eat much lunch and then were whiney and hungry by 4:30. I forgot they hadn't had much lunch and rebuffed their pleas for an extra snack, only fueling the deteriorating situation. Eventually I caught on and we had an early dinner, but it was rough for a while.)

• Going to the new coffee shop-with-a-play-area in town after kindergarten hours: "the big kids are going to attack us." Yes, my three-year-old not only used the word attack in reference to a kid who didn't even notice her presence and whose mom was 10 feet from him, but she wouldn't venture into a large room just because a five-year-old with a foam bat was playing at the far end (nowhere near the make-believe kitchen I knew she was eyeing). Nothing placated her. We sat at a table with chocolate milk until the big kid went home.

• My worst idea: (apparently, judging from the tears and tantrums that followed): not giving them a second cookie at snack today. They had apples and crackers, but NOOOOOOOO COOOOOKIEEEEEEEEEE. This led me to think we should get out of the house and try the new coffee shop that just opened...see entry above.

Funnydad comes home tomorrow with reinforcements (grandma) in tow.

********************************************************************************

Seriously, I wish I were better at this. Funnydad needs me to be strong when he's away. His job is demanding, and it just adds more stress for him if I'm a mess while he's gone. There are so many balls in the air -- finding a community here, having people I can lean on, finding professional work for me, establishing ourselves as a family in Boulder. Will it be easier when things are more settled? Flat out, J's job is hard. Good, way better than advertising, but super demanding. I want to be supportive, and a large part of that is keeping things running smoothly while he's gone (or here and just slammed with work). I have babysitters, I have a routine of activities. It's the edges -- the mornings and the evenings -- with no help that do me in. One day I'll post something about how we've had a great time while dad's gone, didn't even count the days. But for now, I don't know how to do this any better. Wish I did.

I have a friend in Boulder whose husband is a pilot for an airline based here. He's gone either four or five days a week, every week. She manages. She more than manages -- she's above-average cheerful every time we talk, and has largely been that way since we met in college. And they have three kids. (They're all in school now, but he's been a pilot for longer than they've had kids.) I hope she represents what I can be, both when funnydad's away and in general as a mom. Her kids are older. It could happen.

Or, maybe I just shouldn't write blog posts at night when I've had a long day.

Christmastime, Quakers, and a sense of place

2007-12-16T19:19:00.001-08:00

Sometimes I spend a great deal of time thinking about a person's sense of place. I mean, some days I think about this almost constantly. It's one of those topics that seems like common sense, like the armchair sociologist in all of us should be able to construct an answer, an explanation for how it works. Maybe there's a formula... But it's not that easy when you dive in deep. I'm not just talking about me finding my place here, though the ever-present work on that front is certainly fueling these thoughts. I'm talking about outward signs of connection versus inner feelings of grounding. I'm talking about why one person feels at ease in a place while another with a similar situation feels awkward.

Everyone in Boulder is from somewhere else. It's like Manhattan that way. No one is really from here, except just to prove me wrong, once in a while I meet a true native. Sometimes I'll meet a Colorado native who has been lured by Boulder's siren song, but most of the people I encounter on any given day are transplants from further afield. I met a fair number of transplants in Minneapolis, too, but the difference is that here people say, "oh, I'm originally from North Carolina, but we've been here 14 years." Or eight, or 20. In Minneapolis, many of the people I knew were from Minneapolis. The newcomers I knew had moved within a year or two of my family. And, by the time we moved our wagon train further west, a few had even returned to wherever they came from. Minneapolis, for a variety of reasons, isn't a place people "from away" stay indefinitely. But Boulder is, and every one of these transplants, like me, has managed to find his or her place here.

One of the things that helps build a sense of place are the mini-communities we're part of. And the mini-communities we're part of are sometimes defined, or at least influenced, by the mini-communities we've been part of in the past. When we lived in Brooklyn I belonged to a fantastic Quaker meeting. I felt connected to the group, I usually felt centered during silent worship, and I made friends there, friends of all ages. I participated in the meeting's work, activities and service projects, and felt like it was home. Because, of course, a faith community is more than a place to go on Sunday mornings. It's, well, a community. In Minneapolis I never felt at home at either of the two meetings I tried there. I wondered what I was doing wrong, was I not trying hard enough? I never admitted that I gave up, but after a while that's what I did: just stopped going.

So, I was a little afraid when I moved here and walked into Boulder's Quaker meeting house for the first time. Would it be a dud too? Was it the specific congregation in Brooklyn I loved, not the tenets of Quakerism? And if that were true, well, that would just turn a lot of things upside down. Luckily, I felt a comfort and ease that first Sunday that has continued. But, it hasn't been effortless. Like everything else about moving to a new town, finding my place at Quaker Meeting isn't easy. I go and I enjoy it, but I'm far from feeling at home.

This time of year it's particularly hard. As kid, Christmas Eve meant going to church, but Quakers don't have a special service for Christmas -- not on Christmas Day, not on Christmas Eve. Before my children and before moving so far from Virginia, I would go home for the holiday and just do what I did as a child, only with my husband in tow (who, I should add, was a real trouper about it). Since I was raised an Episcopalian, going back to church to sing Christmas hymns and going through the rote of the service was fine, in fact comfy, because I was with my parents and that's what we do on Christmas. But, when my parents are not with me on Christmas Eve, as they will not be this year, I don't go to church. I simply don't want to. But, then I feel adrift without a prescribed activity on Christmas Eve. As funnydad and I have moved to new cities and dealt with young children's schedules at Christmastime, we haven't had the roots or the flexibility to establish a nuclear family Christmas tradition. We're working on it, but more along the Santa Claus and Christmas tree front. Christmas Day and Christmas Eve are still defined by what I don't do, rather than what I do do: I don't go to a Quaker Meeting and I don't go to church. So.

This morning, after the Quaker "service," the children of the meeting filled the center of the worship space and each grade sang a song for Christmas -- Joy to the World, Little Drummer Boy, (the Quaker standard) Simple Gifts, etc. The congregation sang, too, and my daughters were on my lap. Something came over me, and I was suddenly bawling. In fact, I was crying before we got to the second line of the first song. Tears that wouldn't stop, no matter how embarrassed I was. I realized that the Christmas songs filling the meeting house were creating a bridge for me between what I enjoyed most about the Episcopal services of my childhood and the silence and Light of the Quaker worship of my adulthood. The morning of Christmas song didn't help me figure out what to do on Christmas Eve; we're still going to have to build our own tradition there. But, it was like a familiar, soft spot for me to nuzzle into this Christmas, and it drew me a little closer to finding my place the Meeting community.

Artistic license to the rescue

2007-12-10T17:06:00.001-08:00

So I signed us up to go see a children's theater production. It seemed like a good thing to do, a fun outing on a Saturday afternoon. The girls had never seen a live play before. Aren't we always looking for things to do with them on the weekends? The show was advertised as for children ages preschool through five. Bingo. I got four tickets. Plus, it was through the twins club here -- there were 80 tickets, potentially 20 sets of twins and their families there. Perhaps, I thought, I'd meet someone with twins my girls' age. I was all proud of myself for planning such a nice event for our family.

Except the show was Jack and the Beanstalk. Do you remember the story? It's scary. Really scary. I checked a book out of the library so M and O would know the story in advance. There's a giant who EATS LITTLE KIDS. He bellows Fee Fi Fo Fun and stomps around. Up until now the scariest thing my kids have been able to face is swiper from Dora, and even then they sometimes quiver and run.

Then there's the message of the story (a quick summary for those of you who may not remember the folktale): Jack and his mom are on their last penny, so they sell their cow. Jack manages to get hoodwinked into taking a bag of magic beans for the cow instead of cash, much to the ire of his mom. She throws the beans out the window where they sprout overnight into a giant beanstalk. Jack climbs up, finds a giant's house and the giant's wife feeds him (he was very hungry) and helps him hide from the giant because the giant likes little boys broiled on toast. When the giant falls asleep Jack runs, stealing a bag of gold (that's how you treat someone who just gave you a meal and saved your life?). In another visit, Jack steals a goose that lays golden eggs. Jack and his mom live quite nicely for a while, but then, the story says they are no longer content (we're promoting greed here, people) so he goes back up to steal from the giant again, taking a magic harp. On that visit Jack lures the giant to the beanstalk and causes him to tumble to his death. Then, the story goes, Jack and his mother live happily ever after on the loot they have stolen from the giant (who probably has a widow up in the clouds).

So there I am on the floor of the folklore section of the library trying to pick out the least scary version of this story, and I'm thinking: we're sunk. I say to myself, wow, you really didn't think this one through, did you? So much for my great idea. I choose a book and we read it several times before the big day, which causes my children to say, unprompted, things like, "I don't like stories with giants in them." The big day comes and as we drive over to the theater I figure we have a 50/50 chance of making it through the whole show.

Turns out the theater company took a lot of artistic license with the story and we needn't have worried. In fact, we might have been in better shape if we hadn't read the library book at all. In this version, the giant stole the gold, goose and harp from Jack and his mom in the first place, so stealing them back isn't as morally questionable. And, the giant isn't really mean, he is just lonely (the giant in the theater version apparently doesn't have a wife). In fact, in the end, Jack invites him to live with Jack and his mom. The giant does sing (not roar) Fee Fi Fo Fum, but you can't exactly cut the most famous line in a story, so it was okay.

We made it through the whole show, including a Q+A part at the end where they showed the kids how the set worked and how the giant got around on his stilts. Big relief. We didn't make any fellow twin-parent friends, but I was so relieved that we'd averted disaster that I didn't care. At a restaurant after the show O even reported that her favorite character was the giant! (M's was Jack.) Then today, a couple days after our theater experience, Funnydad took the girls to the library to return some books. Jack and the Beanstalk came back home again. Why? They didn't want to give it back yet.

a tale of two diets

2007-12-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

O's actual diet today:
a few bites of oatmeal
a slice of apple
water
a few pretzels
two bites of mac and cheese
a bite of celery
a banana
part of a sippy cup of milk
part of a sippy cup of juice
about 12 goldfish
a few udon noodles
chocolate milk (special treat at the restaurant)
a couple bites of her portion of a shared cookie

M's actual diet today:
a full bowl of grits (she asked for seconds)
a piece of raisin bread
multiple apple slices
water
milk
a dixie cup of pretzels
a full serving of mac and cheese
celery sticks
a banana
two sippy cups of milk
banana chips
dried pineapple
a sippy cup of juice
a bowl of udon noodles
chocolate milk (special treat at the restaurant)
a quarter of a large cookie

Recent research suggests that picky eating is genetic, or at least mostly so. Nature, not nurture. I have here a case study that proves the point -- in fact, the researchers used twins (though not ours). We've done nothing different with our girls. We model the same to both of them, for good or bad. We encourage them to try new things in the same ways. M says, butternut squash soup, sure I'll try it, O says, noodles of a different shape? no way. Curiously they both love broccoli, beets, and salad.

It should come as no surprise that M clocks in a good five pounds heavier than her sister.

No rest for the weary

2007-12-02T18:04:00.000-08:00

Funnydad's been away for a week, including the weekend this time. His new job requires a good bit of travel often for long stretches, so I'm trying to learn how to handle his trips gracefully rather than just, well, surviving them. Earlier in the week I had all kinds of witty thoughts about a post that would include the great things we did to make the time pass quickly. Activities, outings, projects. Days one through four weren't bad. Things started going downhill on Friday, day five, and now today, day seven, we're shot. All three of us. Forget grace, this is about endurance.

In addition to the stress you might expect, the girls picked this week to DROP THEIR NAP. I'm serious. We'd been in "rest time" mode for a while where they might or might not sleep, but this week they let the pretense of rest time go and started barreling through the day. Despite all my best parenting techniques, threats, and punishments, they were bouncing around their room, mocking rest time with dresser climbing, toothpaste eating, and laughter. No break for mom. But wait! They need to make up that sleep somewhere, at least part of it, so this lack of nap means the post-dinner time is so much fun now -- full of more sibling skirmishes, tears, and whining than usual. Nice. Just when I have the reserves to cope. And just to make things more challenging, it turns out they don't not nap every day. I have to guess based on behavior. Today we were at a Christmas thing, everyone all merry so I decided they were rested enough to skip today. WRONG. I'm sure we'll figure something out, but really, did this have to start this week, before a holiday while dad man is on a trip?

Here's to all the single parents out there. This is one tough line of work. They're worth it, of course, and maybe it'll get easier with practice. But if I had a nickel for every time this week I wished there were bourbon in the house, I'd have, well, a bottle of bourbon. Funnydad comes home tomorrow for shore leave (my term, because he leaves for another trip a day and a half later). Then he's home for a week, then off again just before Christmas. The good news is that the few friends I've made here are coming through in spades with play dates, dinner offers, and general support.

I remember being worried about what would happen when my girls went from two naps to one. That happened on schedule about 15 months, and the way I remember it now there were a few rough days, but it was fine. Soon I discovered silver linings, like we could take an outing for the whole morning to the zoo or the children's museum. They're making this new no-nap transition right on time, too, between three and three and a half. And I imagine after a rough patch I'll forget most of the hairy parts, and find some silver lining here. Hard to see now, but, as I mentioned, it's been a tough week.

Entwined

2007-11-28T08:23:00.000-08:00

O: Mama, do I have a cockatoo?
Me: No, sweetie, you don't.
O: Oh.
(pause)
O: Can I have a cockatoo when I grow up? And can we have a hanger outside for him to sit on?
Me: Sure, sweetie, if you want a cockatoo when you grow up, you can have one.
O (this time to M): When we grow up do you want to have a cockatoo?
M: Can I have a whale?

*****************************************************

As amusing as this exchange was, what I find most remarkable is that as she thought about that mysterious time when she would be "grown up" O turned to M to ask if she'd want a cockatoo as well. They've never been apart. They've always slept in the same room, eaten at the same time, played together. In their little three-year-old minds they're going to be together forever, sitting across the table from each other coloring even when they're grown up. Yet, somehow, O recognizes that M is a different person to whom she has to *ask* if M wants a cockatoo, too. It's completely fascinating to watch these little creatures.

The banter continued for a while longer with O talking at length about the mommy cockatoo and baby cockatoo they were going to have someday. Then, suddenly, they started pretending they were penguins.

Our first venture over the mountains

2007-11-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

So we forced her. (See previous post about getting O to be in the snow.) A friend (!) here in Boulder offered us her condo in Keystone and we jumped at the chance. Cute little one-bedroom where the bedroom is a loft accessed with a spiral staircase. The girls loved the spiral staircase and sleeping in their sleeping bags almost as much as we loved marveling at the unbelievable landscape.

O before the whining and crying and asking to be carried started.

O after the whining and crying and asking to be carried started. We rewarded them with hot cocoa when our flat 1/2 mile "hike" was done.

We don't know what M is doing here, but she's having fun.

Keystone is a little less than two hours from Boulder, and it's a pretty easy drive. It's essentially the first major ski place west of Denver, about a half hour east of Vail, and is just a few minutes from Copper Mountain. (Yeah, if you're not a skier, don't worry. It was all blah blah blah geography to me, too, until I went there, so don't worry. The places you may have heard of, Aspen, Steamboat, Winter Park, and Telluride are all in different parts of the state from this and are not close to one another at all. It's kind of like knowing that Ithaca and Buffalo are both in upstate New York, that's about all you need to know unless you are going to go to one of them.)

Anyway, Keystone was named by a gold prospector from Pennsylvania (the Keystone state) in the mid-nineteenth century. The ski resort opened in 1971 and was the first major Colorado resort to have a fancy lodge at the base of its mountain. This at a time when most ski lodgings were rustic cabin places, so it caught on. Today it is the only major Colorado resort to offer extensive night skiing. That and its proximity to Denver make it pretty popular.

For now, however, there's not much snow so the place wasn't very crowded. We enjoyed a couple of hikes around the area and took in some beautiful views. This also meant enduring a lot of whining. We poked around the town feeling like a mix of local and tourist, trying to figure out a little more about the ski business machine. We weren't really there for the skiing; we wanted to see more of Colorado and more of the Rockies. We wanted to explore. We're not big downhill skiers, though we both enjoy the sport and plan to introduce our kids to it at a young age -- goodness, if they're in Colorado, it's practically a right to learn to ski. We're just going to wait a few years. Oh, there are plenty of ski programs for three-year olds, and I'm told they are not only adorable, but they're fearless. We thought we'd try cross-country skiing since that seems more manageable, but there hasn't been enough snow yet. The slopes have snow-making machines, but not the Nordic ski areas.

One sad note is the damage the Mountain Pine Beetle is doing. We'd heard a bit about the damage this bug is doing to Colorado's forests, but it hasn't hit Boulder County very hard yet. Literally half the trees in some areas were dead, very sad.

After just 36 hours away we returned feeling like we'd not only had fun, but we'd made a kind of personal progress. See, we were lame about exploring outstate Minnesota. Though we told ourselves the toddler twins were a good excuse, it's still sad to think we spent two years in a part of the country with so many beautiful lakes and cabins and we didn't really take advantage of it. So we've vowed to do more and see more in Colorado. We're three months in and we've taken our first venture. Not bad.

Snow

2007-11-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

It's no small undertaking to get twins ready to play in the snow. And twice now we've gotten the girls all dressed to go outside only to have O announce she doesn't want to go. She's afraid of getting cold. She wants to make a snowman and Colorado's powder snow doesn't pack well. She's generally cautious about new things, and since they can't remember last year in Minnesota, this counts as new. The most heartbreaking thing in the world is to think you're going to get a few moments of peace while dad takes the kids to play outdoors only to have one freeze at the threshhold and say, "Noooooo. I want to stay insiiiiide." I guess we could have forced her, but there will be times when we have to go out and she'll have no choice, so we'll save the screaming and crying for then.

M kept saying, "The snow is everywhere! The snow is everywhere!" And then she'd list the places she saw snow: "it's on their roof, it's on the trees, it's in the street, (gasp) it's even on OUR house!"

Giving Thanks to Sarah

2007-11-21T13:19:00.000-08:00

Today as you sit down to enjoy your turkey dinner, give thanks to Sarah. Sarah Josepha Hale. She's the one who is largely responsible for Thanksgiving as you know it. (I'm showing my geek side here, but Thanksgiving has a kind of interesting history, so bear with me. Or come back to the blog next week when I'll surely have more cute things to say about your favorite twins.)

Like many traditions Thanksgiving has changed over time, but it began with the persistent efforts of a nineteenth-century magazine editor. Well, actually, it began as an occasional harvest festival. Long before the Mayflower set sail, harvest celebrations were commonplace, though not necessarily codified and annual, in England and among many Native American groups. In the New World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Thanksgiving was primarily a regional New England holiday celebrating family and community; it was largely unknown in the South. I'm sure the people in Colorado at that time weren't celebrating it either.

In the early nineteenth century when America was a generation past the revolution, struggling to establish a national identity, and tensions between the North and South were mounting, the only national holidays were Washington's Birthday and Independence Day. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of a women's magazine called Godey's Ladies Book and Magazine, thought her country needed a holiday centered on the family, a holiday women could enjoy, a holiday that wasn't all about men, guns, and war. Hale envisioned a day when far-flung relatives traveled home to be together, and wanted all the states and territories to celebrate this holiday on the same day to unite the nation.

Fortunately, Sarah had a forum: as editor of Godey's Ladies Book and Magazine she used the pages of her publication to lobby for a national day of thanksgiving. Hale published articles touting how nice it would be to have a family holiday, she published fiction stories featuring families reuniting for Thanksgiving bringing joy to all, and she even prescribed the menu with recipes in her magazine: turkey, oyster soup, vegetables in cream sauce, and pumpkin pie. Hale was practical in her approach: she suggested the holiday fall on a Thursday so women could prepare a Thanksgiving Feast without disrupting their responsibility to provide a Sunday dinner for the family. She wrote to senators, secretaries of state, and presidents to make her case. Other magazines picked up on her efforts and began including their own propaganda for a national Thanksgiving.

Ms. Hale was one tenacious lady. She joined Godey's Lady Book in 1827, and began her efforts around 1846. She kept it up until (finally) President Lincoln declared the first national Thanksgiving in 1863. She edited the magazine until 1877, and even after her victory in 1863 she continued to promote her Thanksgiving agenda.

For decades after Lincoln declared the first Thanksgiving, Presidents announced the holiday each year, always on the last Thursday of November; the holiday wasn't automatic, it had to be re-declared each year. 1939 was a month with five Thursdays, meaning the last Thursday fell late on the calendar. Fred Lazarus, who would eventually own Federated Department stores (which today owns Macy's and Bloomingdale's), realized that this would affect his Christmas revenue. So, Mr. Lazarus appealed to his friend President Roosevelt and convinced the President to declare Thanksgiving a week early. In 1941 Congress permanently set the official day of the legal holiday as the fourth Thursday in November, which is, of course, when we celebrate it today.

By the way, there was a first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts in October 1621. The pilgrims wanted to offer thanks because their successful harvest would mean the settlers could survive the coming winter (the previous winter had been a bit of a disaster). They invited the Wampanoag leader to join their celebration, and he in turn brought 90 Native Americans (and five deer) to the feast. The event lasted three days, and there were foot races and shooting games in addition to feasting. Revelers dined on a meal of venison, fowl, corn, cod, pumpkin, squash, lobster, mussels, and grapes. The only surviving written account of the event does not mention turkey; historians believe that the fowl was most likely geese or duck.

Here in Boulder we're sticking to tradition, not just with turkey, but with a couple of Juniper's father's recipes. I hope as you read this you're with close friends and family and are enjoying the day together. Just the way Sarah wanted it.

When you least expect it

2007-11-18T18:49:00.000-08:00

Maybe finding your way in a new community is like dating. It's common knowledge that when you're desperate to find that perfect someone you won't, but when you're not looking he shows up. (For instance, on the subway.)

This weekend funnydad and I were minding our own business, not actively trying to recruit friendships when a neighbor knocked on our door and asked if we wanted to bike over to meet "Ralphie" the live buffalo mascot for Colorado University at Boulder. Of course we did. So we piled our kids in the chariot, he piled his kids in his chariot and off we went in a little bicycle caravan. To get there Sebastian showed us bike routes through town that we hadn't figured out on our own yet. Suddenly Boulder blossomed in my mind -- things connected, the ease of getting around on a bike became even more clear, and instead of feeling "small" as I've often characterized this place, it felt "accessable." There are places I may never drive to again. Seriously. And since shared experiences are one of the fastest ways to build a friendship, this was a great way to get to know Sebastian and for our girls to play with his daughter in a setting beyond tricycles in our cul-de-sac. Ralphie herself was completely uninteresting to all four children, although I thought she was kind of cool. The temporary CU logo tatoos (applied by CU cheerleaders), bouncy castle, and big inflatable slide, were, however, huge hits. The big numbers on the indoor field were a lot of fun, too.

And then, on Sunday morning we took the girls to a playground under sunny 65 degree skies (the weather, I'm telling you, is amazing here. Off and on throughout the winter we're told to expect spells like this). I've spent many afternoons on this playground making small talk with other parents, and while I've had a few nice conversations, I haven't made any lasting connections. But on Sunday we met two couples there whom we both enjoyed talking with. They may become friends, and I hope they do, but what's more important is what they represent to me; I needed hope. And these simple events of the weekend represent hope, hope that we will figure out how to feel like we're part of the community here, make friends, feel comfortable. I guess when you're not looking for it that's when these things happen.

CousinFest

2007-11-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

I am here to tell you that a roll of scotch tape is all you need on an airplane if you're traveling alone with preschool-age twins. That and a portable DVD player. Since, as we all know, the airplane has rules, the DVD player can't come out until the fasten seat belt sign goes off. And three-year-olds will show unprecedented attention spans while watching for it to chime off. (They'll also ask if we're in the air yet while people are still boarding and announce they have to go to the bathroom during landing.) Until the magic of the DVD player can offer some distraction, there's the tape. It's sticky, it's tricky, it makes a mess, and most of the time they're not allowed to touch the stuff. So I give each girl her very own roll when we board and it keeps them occupied for the whole flight. They put it on the window, they put it on the seat. They try to cut off "little" pieces, and then stretch it the length of their arms. We play a game with it: they'll tear off a piece and I'll say "put it on your hand" and they will. Then the cheek, and the nose, the ankle, knee, wrist, forehead, and belly button. Then when they're covered in tape I'll have them hand it back to me one piece at a time. First the knee, next the hand, and so on. By the time you're tired of the tape game the plane will be in the air and you can break out the child-size earphones (bright red, of course) and the DVD of something they love, and suddenly you can read. Until the lady with the apple juice comes by.

The wonder twins and I just returned from a little jaunt back east to visit family. Funnydad had an extended business trip, and faced with eleven days as a single parent in a new town where I have at best a fledging support system, I decided it would be a good idea to visit my parents. And brother and grandmother and aunt and cousin. Old family friends, too. In hindsight I think I could have been okay in Boulder by myself, perhaps a little weary, but okay. However, I'm not at all sorry we went. A trip like this without the backdrop of a holiday was so much fun and so low stress – we’re staying put for Thanksgiving, so it’s like we had a holiday without a holiday. On Monday there were 17 people at my brother's house, eight of whom were children, all six or younger except one. Let that soak in for a second. It was chaotic. It was nuts. I wished I'd had experiences like that when I was a kid. All the children involved were cousins of some sort, so we called it CousinFest 2007, mostly as a joke since an event of this scale seemed to need a name. Not enough time to catch up with everyone, but there were a few good conversations as we rooted things out of the fridge, tried to make the guacamole, and applied temporary tatoos (to the young ones). Sometimes it's better when there's not quite enough time, you know? We didn't have a chance to get sick of each other.

My sister-in-law, Cate, gets some sort of Martha Stewart award. She had people sleeping all over her house, on floors, on couches. She fed us all so well and kept the coffee and wine flowing. But most of all she was unflustered by the whole event -- she claimed that the more kids there are the easier it is to watch them. (I began to believe her since I hardly saw mine unless I sought them out.) You should have seen the way Cate and my cousin Jess sat all eight kids at the table, said grace, passed out chicken nuggets, cleared it, and then ushered in the adults. When I have guests, even just a low-key small gathering, I'm a flittery mess, always worrying about something in the kitchen, or if the towels in the bathroom have fallen on the floor yet. I try, mind you, to channel calmness, but I rarely achieve it. I’m telling you Cate was amazing.

The next day when we flew back to our Rocky Mountain roost, glowing and worn out from the day before, I happily broke out new rolls of tape for the funny bunnies. Then when the time came for the DVD, they fell asleep almost instantly. Funnydad returns tomorrow. We'll all be happy to see him.

Busy being sick

2007-11-01T00:12:00.000-07:00

This week has been all about sickness. Dodging it, dealing with it, ignoring it. It began with O. They're in preschool, this is fall, sickness is to be expected. Though snuffly, O was fine. I'm the kind of person who just keeps going, so I expect that of my kids (with a few extra cuddles, hot cocoa, and longer naps). We all just keep going these days. I've read articles about how people don't call in sick anymore, the culture of the American workplace is such that we expect people to be having chemotherapy if they call in sick. It even has a name, "presenteeism," as in the opposite of "absenteeism." There's a backlash, even, people who advocate -- gasp -- staying home when you're sick. At any rate, especially with two, I tend to rely on our friend children's tylenol and push through a cold. But then, of course, funnydad and M got sick, too. I guess I had a low-grade version of late last weekend, but I dodged the bullet.

We had visiting grandparents for halloween, and I'm happy to say that the sickness only interfered at the end. Which may mean we were all together when the contagions were still flying around, but I hope not. Lots of fun, and they discovered a great little breakfasty brunchy place in what passes for downtown here. A gem called Lucille's.

But, this cold thing and the stress around it has gotten me thinking about how fully we cram our lives, and how when one thing, like a cold, interferes, we resent it. How another thing, like a car that needs new license plates, can throw things into a tailspin. Super busy doesn't seem like the smart way to go, so logic says trim the calendar, the art classes, the music, the commitments to laminate the play money from preschool in contact paper, the expectations of how the kitchen should look, or how quickly laundry gets done. Don't expect so much. But what really happens is the laundry still gets done, and the kitchen stays fairly neat, we make it to music class, but I never have time to read the New York Times. Or sit down to eat. Or call a friend back east.

Then, as if God wants to create a stark contrast to the days when I'm so busy I get kids in and out of car seats five times in two hours, I have a day like today. A day when I'm trapped alone with two sick three-year-olds all day with nothing to do and nowhere to go, and that's misery too. Our venture to the playground ended with all three of us in tears. I broke out all my mom tricks. We tried leaf rubbing, making banana bread, all whiney, feverish disasters. A full-time stay-at-home mom job is often jokingly referred to as the hardest job there is -- though we all know it's not a joke, it's just that there's nothing to do about it. And I only have two kids. There are moms out there with many more who do the same thing.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. My life was crammed to the hilt before I had kids. I can't for the life of me remember with what, though I do remember something about yoga classes. I must like living this way, so it's probably not going to change. Colds come, and luckily, colds go. I'm not the first one to wonder if they're nature's way of making us slow down, if only for a day or two.

In other news: Just when I'd kind of stopped looking for things in Boulder to be out-there weird, I came across an ad in the Boulder paper for a place to rent a llama. Seriously. Who needs to rent a llama? And if you need to rent one, would you rely on a random display ad in the newspaper to direct you to your source?

Halloween, and the day before Halloween, and the week before that...

2007-10-27T13:19:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that there is a decided absence of Halloween decorations in Boulder. Not a single illuminated, generator-pumped pumpkin in sight. No Halloween flags or banners. Only one yard I know of is covered in fake spider webs, and it's not that bad. I haven't seen any Halloween sweaters, either. (Maybe they don't know about Christmas sweaters here. One can only hope.)

O is very excited about her bunny costume. For the past couple weeks whenever she couldn't find me, I'd hear her say, "maybe mommy's making my bunny costume. I'll go check." Once when I said it was time for me to make dinner she added, hopefully, "and my bunny costume"? M thinks her elephant costume is fun and all, but she's a little less anticipatory about the whole thing. My mistake is that O's costume is a WHITE bunny. Bunnies in real life come in all kinds of colors, I couldn't have selected black, brown, or even spotted? No, I went with the stereotype, and the price is trying to clean food from pre-Halloween events off a costume that can't easily be laundered. It seems Halloween is no longer a single-day event; there are ample chances to get a costume dirty before the big night. Whether this multi-day Halloween is the result of experiencing Halloween through the eyes of my kids, or whether it's because of holiday creep, I don't know. But, whatever the cause, I'm going to plan better next year. You should have seen me, geek mom of the century, putting bibs on my kids at a Halloween pizza party last night.

This morning we went with another couple, also new to Boulder, to go pumpkin picking. They have a daughter a little older than M+O, and the three kids had fun running around choosing pumpkins, and later playing with the other obligatory (money-making) things pumpkin patches set up this time of year. There were jolly jumpers, a large inflated slide, a hay maze, a petting zoo, and pony rides. The girls had so much fun that they conked out in the car on the way home even though it's only a 20-minute drive. Later this evening we carved our pumpkins. Jack 'o Lanterns, they must have learned the term at school. They drew the faces on and we carved. (For kids who love to put their hands in paint any chance they get they were surprisingly un-interested in helping clean out the pumpkin guts.) They each did one, and they shared a third. (M's is on the left, O's is on the right, and joint pumpkin in the middle -- M did the eyes and O did the mouth.) The results are outstanding, the kind of ghoulish look those of us over three have to work quite hard to achieve. They were so proud when we put them outside, or was that us? The holiday may be expanding, but as far as M+O are concerned, that's just fine. They're enjoying every minute.

Missing Minnesota

2007-10-11T19:27:00.000-07:00

We've been here long enough that I don't really get lost anymore. The house is unpacked (though not organized. Don't look in our linen closet). We have a regular grocery store, a regular hardware store, an established rhythm to our week. Though I still feel new, the exciting part, the beginning, is over. And loneliness is creeping in.

Building new friendships is the hardest part of moving. I'm keeping in touch with people from our old life (lives) best I can given diverging circumstances, and there are specific people whose absence I feel acutely. That's the thing: I miss specific people, but I also miss just having friends. Heck, I miss having acquaintances. Our neighbors seem nice, and there is even a three-year-old girl two houses away. The people at Quaker Meeting are nice, too. My friend from college who lives here is quite welcoming, but she's busy with her own life and children. I haven't found a play group, or a book group, or a mom's outlet that is satisfying. I've got irons in the fire, mind you -- I've joined moms groups and the local twins groups, am taking classes with the girls where I chat with other parents, things like that. But nothing real is happening yet. I'm finding myself obsessed with absurd small projects: organizing all our screws, nails and hardware. Making halloween costumes without knowing how to sew (hello, glue gun) (elephant for M, bunny for O). Keeping squirrels off our bird feeder. Planning a new shelving system for the girls' closet. This is not to say I don't have larger, more complex projects looming, and of course I spend most of my day making forts in the living room, practicing lowercase letters, counting, reading books and pretending to rescue baby birds from tree limbs. My freelance museum work hasn't started again yet, though it will in a few weeks. While that's good, gives me focus, it's still not a way to have companionship beyond these four walls. So, I've finally decided to call a spade a spade and admit that I'm missing Minnesota.

A friend of my mother's once famously said, "only weeds grow quickly." I'm sure the friends will come, but after 13 years in New York it took me two years to build a handful of solid relationships in Minneapolis -- they're great friends, people I hope to be in touch with when our children are in college. But two years? Is it going to take that long again? If the answer is yes, can I lie to myself and say no? I'm not sure I can bear two years of this.

On a lighter note: We are jumping feet first into the culture. I have a Colorado driver's license and there are Colorado plates on our one of our cars. We're taking a rock climbing class and have a chariot bike trailer for the girls. I pick them up from preschool on my bike, and in a class of thirteen kids (including mine), there are two other parents who regularly do the same thing. I'm already planning my community garden plot for next spring. There are good things happening here, but it turns out that happiness is complex.

Living in a Postcard

2007-10-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend funnydad said, "It's like we live in a postcard." He's right. The mountains are omnipresent, and they never cease to be beautiful. I can be grumpy, turn west, and that vista just takes my breath away -- cheers me up, if only for a minute. When, on occasion, fog obscures the mountains the whole town feels flat, both figuratively and literally. Things are out of sorts until the sun burns off the fog and gives us back our mountains. In New York fog would sometimes cover the top of the Empire State Building, and when that happened it would be fun, an anomoly, a "hey look" catch-it-before-it's-gone kind of sight. Weird, but if you weren't within sight of the Empire State Building you might miss it. Here, when the mountains are missing there's no escaping it. I feel ungrounded. Boulder's specialness is gone. May as well be in a small town anywhere. Makes me realize how tied to the mountains this community, its identity, and my understanding of it is. Maybe that's why it happens -- don't know what you have until it's gone, mother nature style.

We went to the Rocky Mountain National Park on Sunday with the funny bunnies' visiting New York Grandma. The park entrance is about an hour's drive from our front door, short enough that I think we'll become regulars (we bought an annual pass). As we approached, the higher mountains in the background began to show their winter coat of snow and the aspen trees became more prominent -- up there they were turning sooner than at Boulder's lower altitude. I didn't know about aspen trees until moving here. They only turn golden yellow, no red or orange, and they grow in stands mingled into ponderosa pine and other mountain conifers. So, you look across a valley at a roadside overlook and see a sea of green pine trees with veins of yellowy-orange aspen trees. (In these photos, look in the background. You'll see areas that look like small wildfires -- those are stands of aspen.) It's quite striking, words hardly do it justice. Maybe next fall you can come visit and we'll take you on what our Colorado guide book calls, "one of the most spectacular drives in North America." I don't think the book is exaggerating -- and to think, we've only seen one small part of this park. It's a large National Park, taking up most of the northwest corner of Colorado.

Funny dad and his mother saw a large heard of elk (I was asleep in the car.) We saw several kinds of birds we'd never seen. I've been enjoying the birds here, mostly in our yard. We have a bird feeder now, and a small family of house finches (and their nest over our deck). This photo is of one of the male house finches, I think an immature male. Isn't he pretty? Most of our birds are fairly normal song/perching birds, but I'm happy to have them and nearly giddy about our house finches and our red-breasted nuthatches. We also have mountain chickadees, black-capped chickadees, and the regular assortment of sparrows. There are robins and blue jays around, but thankfully the blue jays stay away from our feeder. Blue Jays are not nice birds and would boss around the house finches I've become so fond of. They're like my first friends here in Boulder. They come by every day to say hi, and I enjoy their company.

we're three!

2007-10-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Your favorite twins celebrated their third birthday on Sunday. We made a big deal of the big day, and the first thing O said when she woke up that morning was, "are we three yet?" Then, when asked what she wanted for breakfast, M said, "cake."

Grandma and Grandpa Murphy were in Boulder for the occassion and we all treked a few miles up north for a day at a kids' farm. The Sunflower Farm in Longmont was a delight -- a rope bridge and tree house, goats and chicken to feed (with gallons of hand sanitizer for when they were done), a baby miniature horse just four days old (and its mommy), old tractors to climb on, tire swings to ride, hay bales to climb on, a hay maze to play in, ride-on toys to ride on, a play house with pretend kitchen toys for making pretend birthday cake, a sand pit to get messy in, a fire pit and marshmallows to roast, and (the highlight) ponies to ride! I'm trying something new here, uploading video. If it works, it'll be a wonderful way for all you far-flung relatives and friends to watch the girls from a distance. Here's M on her pony ride talking to the pony ride guide (it was very sunny).

And here's a still photo of O on her pony ride. It's a little out of focus, but you see that she liked it.

Not Itchy

2007-09-16T21:28:00.000-07:00

Funnydad and I have been married seven years today. And, I counted. Since we started living together we've lived in seven places. (More if you count my apartment in grad school when we had a commuter marriage.) One a year, essentially. No wonder I'm anxious to put down roots. We've been in our new Boulder house for two nights now, and it feels very comfortable. It's a good layout, easy to live in, easy to live in with kids. The girls like it. There are, as expected, idiosyncrasies. The kitchen doesn't have as much storage space as we'd like. The box spring for the guest bed couldn't fit down the stairs to the guest room. The girls' room is quite warm for this time of year. Our bedroom door sticks and is loud to open. But there are unexpected cool things as well. Turns out I love our freezer-on-the-bottom fridge. Our dishwasher is super silent. Who knew two sinks in the master bath would be so wonderful? Our garden is beautiful, really lovely. Having a mud room is already great, and it's not even mud season. (Do they have mud season here?)

As I ease (jump?) into our new home, I've been thinking, what makes a community have a certain reputation? Do I expect Boulder to be out-there athletic and liberal, and so I see those things? Honestly, I knew tons of liberal folks in Minneapolis (and Brooklyn) and saw plenty of athletes in Minneapolis, including some who play truly "different" sports (anyone heard of dirt bike polo? -- like polo on horses, only on dirt bikes, on grass, right there at Lake Calhoun). But here I laugh when I see odd things, as if I can't believe what else this town has to offer in the way of a sporting life -- an outdoor racquetball game played on a tennis-like court with chicken wire over the chain link; balls seem to be allowed to hit the sides. We watched a juggler in a park juggle four juggling pins; funny dad even tried his hand at it. We've seen hot-air balloons in the morning and parachuters at sunset too many to count. We've seen single-engine planes, gliders, and a gyroscopter (like a hang-glider, only with a motor). People are really into cycling here -- to commute, for exercise, for fun, for transportation, but then two people from my office in the Twin Cities regularly biked more than an hour home from work for fun and a workout. So is there more here, or am I looking for it? Today I saw two twenty-something guys tight rope walking in a park. No joke. The line was just several feet off the ground and it looked to be the width of nylon tie-downs for pick-up trucks. It had a lot of give and wobbled a lot, but they WALKED on it. From a standing position in the grass they jumped up to the rope like it were a balance beam and walked on it. Stayed up longer than I had interest in watching. I'm not saying I couldn't have seen that in Prospect Park or along Lake Harriet, but I didn't.

Anyway, here we are, seven years after you danced at our wedding sitting in our seventh house doing our best to make it home. We're already more active, though neither of us plans to tightrope walk anytime soon. Let's hope you can write this address in your address book in ink. I think we're going to like it here. By the way, neither of us feels itchy.

Bumper stickers seen in Boulder

2007-09-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

"I'd rather be upside down in my kayak than sitting upright at my desk"
"Frodo failed. Bush got the ring"
"Republicans for Voldemort"
"My karma ran over your dogma"
and, though it was a sign in a coffee shop (not a bumper sticker)
"unattended children will be given an espresso and a free puppy" -- that one had me laughing for ten minutes.

El Dorado Canyon

2007-09-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

We go exploring a lot. On weekdays we sometimes try a new playground, stay close to home. But on weekends we try something bigger, like yesterday's hike through El Dorado Canyon just south of Boulder. El Dorado Canyon is the site of the first settlers in the area, a history explained on a battered wooden sign and park brochures, and a history completely overlooked by visitors who are almost exclusively there for one reason: rock climbing. Our hike was an on-foot affair, but it involved a lot of climbing on rocks, which the girls adore. Seriously, we chose a trail with a split personality. Half crushed rock suitable for wheelchairs, and half directly uphill on a "path" of large rocks with hardly any dirt between them. The girls were great, using their hands to climb and holding our hands when we insisted (grandparents: do not fear, your grandchildren are safe). We saw a small chipmunk and the funnybunnies spent the rest of the day calling themselves baby chipmunks and making baby chipmunk sounds (we had a colony of chipmunks under our deck in Minneapolis, but somehow this chipmunk had more impact). This photo was taken just after the rocky part began, and I promise we'll get our camera fixed soon. The highlight of the hike for me and funnydad was watching the rock climbers. Like everywhere outside of Boulder, this canyon is a rock climbing destination and the faces were littered with people and ropes. We must have seen a dozen of groups en route to climbs and at least 30 climbs in progress. The whole scene just further piqued our interest in learning the sport. Honestly, it looks fun. I'm not a daredevil -- I'm a green-trail skier, never-tried-roller blading kind of gal. But I think rock climbing is a sport that accommodates a wide range of abilities and tolerance for fear, and here in the land of outdoor sports I'm gearing up to do like the Romans do. I'm not sure how the safety features work, how you clip in and clip out and belay from above, but we'll learn. It'll be fun to begin something new with funnydad, something we're both interested in, and something we both begin after 40. At any rate the girls loved scrambling up and down the rocks yesterday; this morning we woke up and O asked, "Where are we going hiking today?"

No, it's not the zoo. It's Colorado.

2007-09-04T20:14:00.001-07:00

I was talking to a friend on the phone today when I interrupted the conversation to say to my daughter, "Look, a baby horse and a mommy horse." The friend on the phone said, "Where are you? at the zoo, or are you watching TV?" I laughed and said, "I'm driving and we're two blocks from our apartment." She laughed back and replied, "I really don't get where you're living now."

This is the west. I drive past horses, cows and sheep between this suburb and Boulder every day. There are mountains in sight pretty much every moment, and it never seems to rain. The clouds are out of control beautiful -- you can totally see what Albert Beirstadt saw in the landscape. No one wears cowboy hats or boots (perhaps that's for people further out) but this is the west, replete with mommy horses and their babies. Mommy cows, too. I'll try to post some pictures soon to explain what 1000 words can't. (Our camera has been on the fritz.)

a post from funnydad

2007-09-03T09:46:00.000-07:00

hey, i went to NIST the other day. ever heard of it? national institute for standards and technology. it's where the atomic clock is based. and it's here in boulder. (as is NOAA - national something of atmospheric research.) anyway, someone who works with me has a husband who's a scientist there. took us on a tour just for fun. pretty cool, the shit they're doing. didn't even understand most of it, even after he explained, but still cool. all these lasers and optics and measurement shit. stuff that hasn't been done before. (working on a new way of measuring laser light that might in the end be the new system for measuring time, replace the atomic clock). one machine - a scanner they were trying to develop that detects weapons made of ceramic, undetectable by conventional metal detectors, for use in airports, etc - was essentially a big camera that looked like a hub cab. that hub cap camera spun around on wheels. i noticed the wheels were "Rollerblade" wheels. when i asked the guy why, he said: well, a lot of this stuff doesn't exist yet, so we can't just order it from some manufacturer, we've got to build it from what's available.

showed us how the new atomic clock works. you've got lasers hitting an atom from six or so symmetrical directions. when that happens, the atom gets suspended in place. it basically stops moving. absolute zero (or the statistical equivalent, he called it something like marginal kelvin). then they measure how that atom floats up and down. and that's time.

actually, he said, it was that advancement - coming up with the idea of hitting all atom with lasers from all sides (he showed us the original, outdated atomic clock, was basically a metal tube, at least from the outside) that somehow lead to the development of GPS. i asked him how, but honestly, the explanation didn't make much sense to me. basically, the old atomic clock was super precise - something like one second was lost in thirty thousand years - but this one was so much more precise (one second in a million years, or something) that that advancement let them do something else that led to GPS. how? dunno, something about triangulation. shit was cool, though.

what was so interesting about it was that all this future techno advanced shit was in a completely antiquated setting - straight out of the 1950s. (it's the government. that's what you get.) the place had been built in Ike's day, and apart from the lasers and sensors themselves, hadn't been touched since then. the hallways, the equipment, everything - even the gas mask-type emergency equipment on the wall (a lot of kill-you-in-an-instant gases in use there) looked like something straight out of a 50s documentary. guy said they got 12 million in govt funding, and about 6 mill in private grants. that's it. my company, covidien, will spend that much on r&d for one project they're considering. that's insane.

but it's how much our government spends on developing our future as a nation. meantime, china and whatever other countries are pouring money into govt sponsored research.

and the important thing, of course, is that what NIST is doing isn't for private usage. whatever they do has to be about "standards" - the standards for measurement (of lasers, of whatever). so they basically come up with ideas that can't be patented. that will be the system for all industry moving forward. the reason the US is dominant in the fiber optics biz, for example, is that NIST developed the standard for measurement that all companies (across the globe) now use. If that had been developed by, say, Germany, there'd be a lot more dominant German phone companies (or course, by now, phone companies are out of date, because everything is wireless).

for instance, this guy was working on a way to make lasers essentially a lot more efficient. light bulbs are staggeringly inefficient. but so are lasers, it turns out. and lasers are used by nearly every manufacturer these days. so, i didn't really get the details - or, shit, let's face it, i didn't even get the overview - but he's working on some new way of converting energy into laser light. (was that it?) or rather, a lot of people are working on that - he's working on developing the measurement standard for it (whatever exactly that means). so, if they're able to do it, it could make industrial application of lasers a great deal more efficient. that's means serious money. and yet, they're working out of a building that looks like the basement of appalachia community college - with about as much resources. with some of the best minds in the game, down there with those 1950s gas masks on the walls.

nice moment: in one room we went into, cordoned off in a separate area, behind a door with large red warning light above it, filled mostly with a giant laser machine wrapped almost entirely in Target brand aluminum foil (the box was sitting on a counter, as if the application had been recent), the guy nonchalantly said to us - when you hear the alarms, that's when you run.

fun trip. wish i remembered more what he was talking about. one of those things where you thought you half understood what he was saying while he talked, then later realized how little really stuck.

that's my news. job's fine. busy. a little (perhaps more than little) stressed. but it'll be ok. i hope. think i'd like to take up rock climbing. what the hell - why not.

photos to pass the time

2007-08-31T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here in an almost empty house watching movers load our possessions onto the biggest moving truck you've ever seen. Eighteen wheels aren't good enough for this truck. No, it needs 22. Our stuff takes up a sliver of the truck, but still it's taking an age to load. The movers are being careful, and I don't think they're wasting time. But I'm a little bored, can't leave the house, and am out of productive things to do. So you win -- I'm passing time by putting a few photos on the blog. I'll put up photos of the new house when I have some, which should be soon. Until then, enjoy these of your favorite twins.

Juniper and the girls in front of Boulder's signature mountain range, the Flatirons. Note the scrubby vegetation. These are not Vermont's mountains -- we're on the high plains.

M examines cupcakes at a good-bye party for us at our playgroup in Minneapolis.

O loves the merry-go-round. This one is in Delaware, but we hope to discover one in Colorado before long.

moving at warp speed

2007-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

I was looking forward to a lull. Moving is a lot of stress, and we made this one happen pretty fast. I figured, just get out of Minnesota and I could catch my breath, begin learning about Boulder, find the grocery store, investigate preschools.

No lull for the lucky. We sold our house in three days for full asking price and found a lovely place in a great area of Boulder just as fast. The whole series of deals went down while Juniper and the bunnies were on the east coast at the annual Murphy Beach Vacation and funnydad was throwing himself into his new job back in Boulder. It made for a busy vacation and a lot of phone calls as everything was finalized, but suddenly it’s done. Or almost done. (Find some wood to knock on, please.)

We'll own the new place beginning September 11th. It is in a great neighborhood, a block away from the best public elementary school in Boulder. It's within walking distance of a little marketplace with a Wild Oats, a couple of restaurants, a couple of coffee shops and a few gifty stores. It's within a super short walk of a great recreation center where we're already signed up for swimming lessons this fall. It's also a block from a large community garden where juniper plans to continue the veggie farming skills she developed in Minneapolis. The house is landscaped with xeric plants, meaning it's eco-friendly – the vegetation will thrive on the amount of water that falls naturally in this region. Small turf area for the kids, nice deck for meals outdoors and gazing at our mountain view (okay, it’s only a view in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, but still, it’s a view). Floorplan is very liveable, about the same size as our Minneapolis home. Open main floor, finished basement (with a guest room and full guest bath for your visit). Lots of big windows and skylights. It’s a new relatively new home, built in 1986, and it surprised me that I fell for a newer construction; I thought I was an older house kind of girl. The upside of new is ample closet space. The downside is that the roof and furnace are original and will need replacing in the coming years. But overall, it’s a great house in a great location and we're very excited about it. We’re also excited about the coming lull once we’re all moved in and settled.

everyone isn't lying -- it really IS beautiful here

2007-08-21T12:08:00.001-07:00

We took our funnybunnies a short ride up the mountains yesterday to "hop on rocks." They loved it, though at every hop we worried they'd slip and break an ankle or arm or worse. Of course they didn't. The view, just minutes from our house, is stunning. As we live here longer I'm sure we'll learn the names of each mountain and to tell them apart, but for now the big picture is a enough. Don't need the details yet, can't focus on them anyway at this point. Look one side off the mountain and see Boulder, flatness, and eventually (if the curve of the earth weren't in the way), Kansas. Look off the other side and see mountains, mountains, and more mountains. Nestled in there somewhere are ski resorts like Vail, Aspen and Telluride. Countless other places less famous but equally worth the trip. It's hard to imagine people walking over this endless pile of hills during our country's westward migration because the terrain is steep and rough and, well, it seems endless. That doesn't deter cyclists, though. There were a dozen or more dedicated bicycles steadily climbing this mountain that we had to put our car into low gear to drive. These men and women with thighs of steel were tan and focused, but steadily moving uphill. It was way beyond the kind of sport I'd ever consider, but a true sign of the fitness diehards who call Boulder home. Maybe the bikers of today are descended from the western emigrants of 150 years ago. Maybe I'm just not used to mountains yet.

change is in the air

2007-08-06T09:04:00.000-07:00

So here I am on an airplane moving to Boulder. Could have been a smoother transition, but I’m here. (It’s a long story.) Already people look different. Fit. Tan. They carry books about hiking and have carabineers on their backpacks.

It’s hard to say good-bye to Minneapolis. In two years I’ve met neighbors, friends and fellow mothers who have become very important to me, and to my children. I found a job I adore and I built a garden that made me proud. We had neighbors who gathered many evenings in our front yard to hang out, have a beer and watch our kids ride trikes up and down the sidewalk. I’m not saying I can’t recreate these things in Boulder, in fact I’m sure I will, but it’s terribly sad to leave and say good-bye to what I knew there and what could have been there if I’d given it more chance to grow. I could have been happy in Minneapolis. The summers were way too short, but the winters were manageable. And the parks, lakes, and trails made a pretty nice environment. It was a good place for our twin funny bunnies. But it was not a good place for funnydad, and in the end we’re a unit, and so we move on together.

The night before I left my neighbor – former neighbor – Doda, told me she’d had a dream about me: When she was a little girl on a farm in outstate Minnesota her grandmother sometimes had friends visit to quilt. When the women would gather for these quilting sessions, a young Doda would look at the quilts and see that each woman’s squares had a distinct pattern and style. In her dream, Doda tells me that Minneapolis and Oliver Avenue were a square on the quilt of my life. This square would have a unique pattern, and stand alone in my memory, but now it’s time to move on to the next square. And, she said, the quilt would keep me warm in the winter and be pretty to look at in the summer. Doda has been a lovely neighbor, and this dream a warm parting gift.