Posts tagged ‘family life’

One Perfect Day

Our friends’ son slept over the night before our trip to Giverny, and I wake to the sound of the three boys, still in their beds, chatting about their stuffies’ eating habits. It’s a pleasant way to start the day. Eventually we rise and eat and make our way to the train station, meet up with our friends, and set off for Giverny.

This stop has been on Ben’s to-do list since last fall, when he first started to learn about Monet and the Impressionists. He painted many pictures of the Japanese footbridge in Monet’s garden:

Meanwhile, we’d been visiting Monet paintings wherever we could find them in San Francisco.

Giverny is fabulous. The gardens are in full flower — roses, sweet peas, cornflower, daisies, and a whole red field of poppies. The boys can run in the big field or amble along the paths; we give Eli the camera and he shoots and shoots like he’s on a photo safari. “Do you like this flower, Mama?” he asks; “I’ll picture it for you!”

The house is rambling and beautiful, every room painted a different bright Easter egg color. I wish I could have photographed the kitchen, which has walls of robin’s egg blue, blue and white tile, and is hung with a series of copper pots.

We head home and meet up with another family — friends from San Francisco — and linger in the courtyard of our rental apartment with glasses of wine and salty snacks while the boys toss a frisbee. A boy who lives in the building comes into the courtyard with a ball, and after kicking it toward us a few times, we get the hint and start up a bit of a soccer game with him. Eventually, people need dinner and we go to the bistro next door, filling it. There’s not much on the menu that Ben and Eli are interested in eating, but they sit and color and nibble on some sweet potato fries (of all things) before ordering big bowls of chocolate ice cream for dessert and then heading back home to bed.

I’m sure there was some whining somewhere along the line, there was some stress about the train tickets and the boys didn’t much like the picnic lunch we brought to Giverny (ignore the guidebooks that say you cannot picnic there; you are only forbidden from picnicking within the garden, but that leaves an entire field plus paths dotted with plenty of benches), but that all fades pretty quickly and what remains are the remembered scent of all the flowers and the image of one happy boy, grinning on the Japanese footbridge.

Middle Days: Up and Down

Nobody is sleeping well, the adrenaline excitement which had powered us through the early jetlag days now having worn off. Ben and I both have sore throats, and he also complains of a stomach ache. He’s draggy, not his usual self. But we’re in Paris! We want to see things! So these are days of old and new, up and down.

First, we aim to return to places we enjoyed last year. We start here:


The appeal for the boys is the funicular train ride up the hill. Last year, we didn’t even go inside, but this year I want them to understand it’s a church. We walk a lap around the nave; there’s a service in progress, and we pause to listen a moment before heading, blinking, back out into the sun.

We make sure not to miss a ride here:

Then we take the metro to the Luxembourg Gardens, where we’d had so much fun last year. But this year, the carousel is closed and the man renting sailboats is nowhere to be seen. The zipline, which wasn’t even so easy last year, is crowded with kids jostling roughly for their turns. We go to the playground together:

Before getting back on the metro to meet our friends at a park, by which point the boys are ready to just hang out like this:

And like this:


It’s a lovely park, with a fun-looking playground, and we’ll explore it more another time, I hope. Soon enough, we head back to the apartment, cook a little pasta, toss together a salad, and call it a day.

The next day we head off to La Villette, which sounds amazing: a hands-on science museum, a music museum, a submarine, and a variety of different, themed playgrounds, including one with a giant dragon slide. We don’t have reservations for the science museum, though, so we can’t go in; we have a good time at the submarine, but when we are about to leave, a guard shouts at me for trying to take Eli to the bathroom via the exit door, rather than the entry. The dragon slide is closed as are all the playgrounds; we walk past them, past what feels like miles of chain link fencing. It’s like a museum of playgrounds, all carefully guarded by security. Maybe if the playgrounds were open and full of children, the whole place would warm up for me, but it feels cold; every angle is too sharp, the precise green lawn too strangled by the miles of concrete. Later, I read that the park is on the site of the former Paris slaughterhouses, and was designed in consultation with Jacques Derrida. Maybe that’s why I don’t like it. The whole place makes me cranky about Paris and all its arbitrary rules. We don’t take any pictures.

So it doesn’t make any sense, after that, to sign up for a metro ride clear across town to stand on line for the Eiffel Tower, but we do, and it is perfect. Last year, we spent a long time planning our ascent; this time we just go for it and this works, too.


We ride up, we snap pictures (especially Eli, whose interest in a place can always be rekindled by looking at it through a camera), we eat ice cream, and at the bottom, for good measure, ride the carousel.

Paris Day Two: Father’s Day

It’s the last day of the Paris Air Show, so although it seems a little wrong to go shopping with a friend while your husbands take the kids to look at airplanes (including Ben and Eli’s Favorite Airplane Ever, the Airbus A380), the plan makes everybody happy. Plus, in the Marais neighborhood, my friend leads me to falafel so good I am still (two weeks later) thinking about mine.

Later, we meet up outside the Pompidou, which has so much going on outside, I feel no need to take the kids inside to see the art. We stay in the plaza and watch the fountains squirt.

Finally, we explore the (hip, arty) Canal District — lots of young people hanging out on the banks, drinking and smoking, but also lots of families pushing strollers. The kids are delighted to see a barge come through the lock, the roadway spinning on a turntable to accommodate it. At 6 PM the cafe we choose for a drink and snack is not yet serving food; so we have a drink, then head back to our friends’ apartment for dinner before taking the boys home to bed.

How to visit Paris with kids (not a guide)

Day one.

Plan to meet friends at the playground, an enormous one familiar from last year’s visit. Hope to recreate the fun of the zip line, the train play structure, the bouncing bridge. Know that you’re borrowing trouble; you shouldn’t expect to recreate anything. Eye the clouds as you leave your apartment and wish for an umbrella. Get on the metro.

Exit the train twenty minutes later and stand in the station watching the rain pour down the gutter next to the stairs while your kids say, “Come on! Let’s go to the playground!” Spend twenty minutes trying to come up with Plan B with your husband, texting friends about the change in plans, and managing the kids’ disappointment. Watch them sit on the grimy station floor, rummaging through the backpack and eating a days’ worth of snacks.

Go to a museum instead, the nearby Musee d’Orsay (purchasing a cheap umbrella on the way) and join a long line. Close up the umbrella; the rain has stopped. Leave line-standing to husband and chase kids around the open plaza. Find short posts for them to climb on. Enjoy twenty minutes of happiness.

Rejoin line – and patient husband – at the museum entrance. Enter. Nearly trip over 4 year-old son who has sat directly on the floor and announced, “This doesn’t interest me at ALL.”

Pull him along after enthusiastic seven year-old (whose first grade curriculum included the Impressionists) and enter the galleries. Challenge him to a scavenger hunt: bowls of fruit. Thank heaven for Cezanne, and all his lovely apples and pears. Next, hold son up to look closely at the Degas ballerinas. Ignore his insistence that he doesn’t like ballet and ballerinas. Point out the shadowy figures in the background and challenge him to count them up. Twenty minutes pass. Watch 7 year-old at the opposite end of the gallery, grinning and bouncy at seeing so many familiar paintings.

Leave the museum after an hour, eye the grey sky, notice the Batobus stop across the street. Board the boat, which is partially covered (and not at all crowded). Challenge the boys to be the first to spot the Eiffel Tower. They spot a playground first; exit the boat. Weave your way down a path studded with colorful sculptures.


Begin to wonder if the kids were optimistically hallucinating a playground. They weren’t. It’s little (one slide, two teeter-totters) but it has enough. Play.

Watch the skies clear, the sun come out, and make a dinner plan with friends.

The Stuffies’ Birthday Party

Bedtime was not going well.

I’d already marched down the hall three times to put an (albeit temporary) end to the boys’ conversations and waited through Eli’s long explanation for why he was still up: it was the stuffies. Moosie goes to bed at 8:30, he explained, but Bunny stays up till 9 and Ringo the lemur is a night owl with an 11:00 bedtime. Eli wanted to keep Ringo company, but his chatting was bothering his brother and driving me to distraction. I was at the end of my rope when Eli held up Moosie.

“Mama?” said Eli-as-Moosie.

“Moosie, I can’t hear it!” I snapped. “You’ve been talking way too much tonight! It’s bedtime!” (You know it’s bad when you’re shouting at stuffed animals.)

Eli crumpled and started to cry.

“Oh, Eli,” I said, instantly chastened. “Please don’t cry. Tell me what Moosie wanted to say, just this one more thing, and then we all need to stop talking and go to bed, ok?”

Well. I should have known that given an opening, Eli would jump right in.

Through his tears, Eli told me it was Moosie’s birthday, and we had forgotten. We hadn’t done any of the special things we’ve done during the recent run of birthdays: Ben’s in March, Tony’s in April, and Eli’s just last week. We hadn’t hung the birthday letters, nor baked a cake and served it on the family-heirloom musical cake plate. There had been no special breakfast, no gifts, no singing. As Eli spoke, Ben sat up, his annoyance gone, and started to chime in along with me, trying to comfort Eli.

We would celebrate Moosie’s belated birthday (Ben helpfully explained to his little brother what “belated” means). We sang Happy Birthday right then, to make Moosie feel better, but we would sing it again in the morning. We would hang the birthday letters and set out some treats. And we would celebrate Bunny’s birthday, too. Bit by bit, Eli’s tears stopped and his sniffling slowed. Both boys were excited (but not too excited) about our celebratory plans. They snuggled back down in their beds. They stopped talking.

When Tony got home from his meeting, he set to work making cut-outs of Moosie and Bunny. I got out the cake plate, a relic of Tony’s childhood, and set it with small bowls of peanuts and carrots. We felt silly and indulgent, but why not? It doesn’t take much to provoke a smile, to send a kid to bed with happy dreams, and this was one of those times it felt pretty easy to say yes to a happy, silly plan.

The next morning, Eli announced it was Ringo the lemur’s birthday, too, and that Ringo likes to snack on eucalyptus leaves. With some quick work, we expanded the celebration to include Ringo (Eli need never know those were bay leaves in the lemur’s bowl). When Eli saw it, he grinned broadly, and then sat the stuffies right down to enjoy their birthday snacks. Luckily, nobody asked for any presents.

Mama at the Movies: The Iron Giant

I always imagined that my kids and I would watch loads of movies together. We would start at home with sweet animated features like Toy Story or movies I loved as a kid, like The Red Balloon. Then as they got older, we would go out regularly, settling in with our salty buckets of popcorn to watch the latest family flick. It hasn’t worked out like that, though. Ben, at seven, has only seen one movie in a theater, a special screening of The Polar Express for a friend’s birthday. He lasted about ten minutes before he came out to the lobby, overwhelmed; the loud soundtrack and the huge projected images were just too much for him. Meanwhile, although I managed a few mom and baby movies when Eli was still a tiny nursling, I had to quit those screenings before he was nine months old; instead of sleeping quietly while I caught up on the latest releases, he wanted to watch and chat with the figures on screen. At four, he’s happy to watch the same movies at home that Ben has been watching for years: Curious George; Toy Story; The Little Prince. But I’m getting bored, and wanted to find something new that might suit their very different temperaments.

Read the rest of the column over at Literary Mama!

Can You Hear Me Now?

As reported by Tony:

Ben and Eli were digging around in the closet and found an old craft project they’d made probably a year ago — a couple plastic cups connected with a string — the old classic “phone.”

So they stretched it out in the living room, and Ben reminded Eli to put his mouth into it for speaking and put use his ear for listening. And then the following transpired:

Ben: Eli? Can you hear me?
Eli: What?!
Ben: Can you hear me?
Eli: Yes.
Ben: Hi Eli.
Eli: Hi Ben.
Ben: What are you doing?
Eli: Um…. sitting on the couch.
Ben : Oh. OK, bye.
Eli: Bye.

Who needs a cell phone when cups and string will do?!

Image source.

Milestone

Look Ma, no training wheels!

And Eli the blur has graduated from three wheels to four, but looks to be leaving training wheels behind soon himself:

The Double Daring Book Shower!

Some people have baby showers, and some people have book parties, but for The Double-Daring Book for Girls, a special kind of book shower has been organized, during which bloggers will write about activities they tried from The Double-Daring Book for Girls and challenge you (yes, you!) to best their results.

Well, we spent a lot of time trying to decide what to do. We’ve been reading The Double-Daring Book closely since it arrived in our house, because even though no young girls live here, the book offers a lot of material and activities that interest all of us. We have been studying up on notable women (particularly the astronomers (p7), mathematicians, and scientists (p109)), amazing our friends with the math tricks (p198) and memorizing the list of Words to Impress (they do; p199). We have considered dyeing our hair with Kool-Aid (p48; a pink-haired cousin is inspirational in this regard, though she didn’t use fruit juice mix), read the section on swimming (p250) , and practiced the steps of the Cotton-Eyed Joe (p192).

It was hard to choose a challenge, however. At first, Ben wanted to challenge someone to become President of the United States (p153), but then remembered that he actually likes our current president and didn’t want to risk any change in the White House. He wanted to make a lava lamp (p57) — and we will — but that doesn’t seem like a competitive activity. We could summon you all to a Private Eye Challenge (p177) and see if you can figure out our secrets, but that is actually kind of creepy.

Then we found it. Page 120. Pogo Sticks. If you recall, Santa brought Ben a pogo stick two years ago, and to say we have not really mastered it yet is an understatement. So we turned to page 120 and read:

An old story has it that a man traveled to Burma (which is now called Myanmar), where he met a farmer’s daughter named Pogo. Pogo’s family was poor, and she had no shoes. She liked to visit the local Buddhist temple each day, but the road was muddy. So her father built her a bouncing stick, and called it a “Pogo” after his shoeless daughter. Considering the fact that pogo sticks work terribly on mud and much better on hard asphalt and concrete, the story seems unlikely. What is true is that, in 1919, George Hansburg patented the pogo stick in the United States. In the 1920s, pogo sticks became a huge craze, with chorus-line girls in New York performing pogo stick shows on stage.

I would love to see a chorus line of pogo stickers someday. But in the meantime, we read the careful directions and set out in the rain. Ben managed three hops, Eli two, and both are eager to keep trying until they can pogo up and down the block. Can you beat that?!

Book Review: enLIGHTened by Jessica Berger Gross


I don’t remember when I first walked into a prenatal yoga class. I was teaching at Stanford at the time, a two-hour daily commute, and maybe the fact that I was so darned uncomfortable –pacing around the conference table during class, fidgeting in my seat during office hours, using cruise control so that I could stretch my legs on the long drive — sent me to that cool, pine-floored studio once a week. There I gathered with the other round-bellied mamas and we stretched and balanced and relaxed through our ninety minutes.

After Ben was born, I returned to mom and baby yoga for a bit but, unsurprisingly, didn’t find the peace and relaxation I’d enjoyed during prenatal yoga. Ben was a noisy, needy, perfectly typical baby and although I aspired to be the kind of balanced yogini that could nurse while standing on one leg in vrksasana (tree pose), I could barely relax lying on the floor with him in corpse pose.

I returned to yoga during my second pregnancy; this time I wasn’t working outside the home, but renovating our house and caring for a three year-old kept me even busier. The once-a-week session seemed like the only time to spend thinking about this coming baby, and I wound up asking my yoga teacher to serve as my doula during my eventual 17-hour labor. I can’t say I consciously practiced yoga during the labor, exactly, but the training I’d absorbed, the thoughtfulness about breathing and stretching and opening, all helped me ride my labor peacefully almost toward the end. I say “almost” to account for the brief interval between feeling the urge to push and getting the doctor’s green light to push, when I recall shouting to my doula, “There is not enough yoga in the world to get me through this!” She laughed, which made me laugh, which distracted me enough to survive that last minute until I could push Eli out.

But again, mom and baby yoga wasn’t for me (especially since I never could find a mom + baby + preschooler yoga class), and yoga has fallen by the wayside as I find my best exercise time is a quick run before the boys wake up. My yoga mat is rolled up in the garage, gathering dust, and I look at it sometimes, thinking I should bring it upstairs, lay it out next to my bed, and try to get in a quick pose or two before bed. All of which explains why I jumped at the chance to read Jessica Berger Gross’s new book, enLIGHTened: How I lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle-Pointer. I thought it might help me get back on the mat.

I know Jessica’s writing from Literary Mama, of course, but also from her work editing the gorgeous anthology, About What Was Lost. EnLIGHTened is part memoir – a journal of her struggles with weight and the emotionally unhealthy family dynamic that contributed to her eating issues —part gentle how-to. She is so honest in her writing about her past (starting with the confession that her childhood nickname was the mean “Bubble Berger” because of the extra layer of fat she carried), that a reader is immediately sympathetic and open to her advice. The book is practical and pragmatic, full of diagrams of yoga poses, recipes, and sutras (both in Sanskrit and in English); she is so convinced of the benefits of her path that she offers a reader lots of ways to join her, and the result is friendly, charming, and accessible. I may not go as far as she does in her low-fat diet (I’m lucky not to have weight issues), but she makes me think twice about the ice cream in my freezer, or at least consider serving myself a much smaller scoop.

I figured I would read her book the way I do books by Michael Pollan or Barbara Kingsolver (books with which enLIGHTened shares some thinking): I am a member of her choir – I am a vegetarian, organic food-buying, yoga-aspiring writer – but as such, I try to be extra-sensitive to preaching, proselytizing and didacticism. So I’m happy to report that whenever she strays into potential eye-rolling territory, she pokes a little fun at herself. For instance, in the chapter on purity and cleanliness, she describes attending a retreat in which she was led through a thirty-minute exercise in “conscious sipping:”

“It was unnerving to drink so slowly. After all, I was used to downing a juice while talking on the phone or blow-drying my hair or driving my car or checking my e-mail. Plus, I was already hungry and it was only the first morning. “What do you want out of the next sip?” Alison asked. I wanted to be comforted, I wanted to be filled. (To be honest, I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.)”

Later in the same chapter, she writes, “If you eat healthy and low-fat most of the time, you can splurge on the occasional more-indulgent foods.” I perked up, wondering what would count as indulgent for someone who bemoans her previously unenlightened nightly snack of Cheerios and chocolate chips (please! My indulgent snack is a bowl of melted peanut butter, topped with vanilla ice cream, granola, and chocolate syrup.) So she continues, “On a weekend—not every weekend, but on the occasional Sunday—Neil and I will go out for whole wheat organic pizza made with hormone-free cheese (I know, I live on the edge).” If she’s living on the edge, even my decent diet puts me over the cliff, but that’s fine. The point here is not that you slavishly follow every tenet she outlines here –I agree with her that we’d probably be healthier if we did, but I certainly can’t – but she offers a great menu from which you can choose.

Yesterday I finished reading enLIGHTened and then washed off my old yoga mat and rolled it out next to the bed. This morning I was already awake when the alarm clock went off, having been woken at 5 by my 7 year-old climbing into bed next to me. At the sound of the alarm, my almost-4 year old thundered down the hall and climbed in, too. I extricated myself from the warm pile and stood on the mat a moment, groggily collecting myself in tadasana (mountain pose) before stretching my arms up over my head and bending one leg at the knee in vrksasana. The boys giggled from their cozy nest, but tomorrow I’ll encourage them to come join me. Now I know this is the perfect way to start the day, and I’m grateful to enLIGHTend for reminding me.