We don’t seem to track milestones in Ben’s development so much these days. Some time recently we noticed that he can read silently now (which means Eli doesn’t get so many bedtime stories read by his big brother any more), but the days of noting — and recording– the first step, the first jump. . . those days are long past. (He’s playing basketball now, but we’re not holding our breaths for the first slam dunk.)

But today we had a good one to note: he lost his first tooth! Exactly 5 years, 5 months, and 2 days (thank goodness for baby books) after we noticed his first baby tooth, it fell out of his mouth, the casualty of a big bite of dried mango. It’d been hanging on for a couple weeks now, the adult tooth coming up behind, rather than pushing up from below, so he doesn’t even have much of a gap. This strikes us as quite true to form: our Ben doesn’t do anything without being well and truly prepared.

Above: the first tooth, with a Joe’s O for scale

No, it’s not a meme, it’s how we got through 5 1/2 hours on the way to Yosemite. It’s more like 75 questions, but still, it amused me.

Is it alive? (yes)
Is it green? (no)
Is it a plant? (no)
Is it yellow? (no)
Is it an animal? (no)
Is it a person? (yes!)
Is it an insect? (no)

I had to stop writing this Q&A; down to deal with Eli and now I forget what the eventual answer was. But the pause gave us a chance to chat about general questions and specific questions, categories and the like, and then we tried again with a new answer.

Is it made of vinyl? (no)
Is it made of glass? (no)
Is it made of plastic? (no)
Is it made of metal? (no)
Is it made of elastic? (no)
Is it made of wood? (no)
Is it made of rubber? (no)

A pause here to suggest that Ben could ask a basic dead or alive question. He considers, then resumes:

Is it made of paper? (yes!)

And so having proven his method is effective, he moves on:

Is it an origami bird? (no)
Is it an origami frog? (no)
Is it an origami balloon? (no)
Is it an origami airplane? (no)
Is it a songbook? (we’re stunned by the rapid shift in questioning, and sadly answer no)
Does it have to do with music? (no)
Is it a book? (no)

I give him a clue: it has to do with a recent holiday. We review what he knows: it is made of paper. He continues:

Does it have to do with Chinese New Year? (no)
Does it have to do with President’s Day? (still in the future we remind him, and no)
Does it have to do with Valentine’s Day? (yes! we see the light at the end of the tunnel! and then…)
Is it a candy wrapper? (no; and when did Valentine’s Day start to rival Halloween in the kid candy haul department?)
Is it a Valentine?

Ding! ding! ding! hurray! and now a break while we bang our heads against the steering wheel, take a deep breath, and begin again.

Is it a … ?

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California is big.

Now I’ve always known this, even before I lived here and started driving around. I’ve driven from north to south and deep into the middle, too. And I’m not afraid of road trips; I’ve driven across country once (spending the better part of a day crossing Pennsylvania, before I knew people I would like to visit) and once, when a friend and I were 100 miles into a trip before realizing we’d forgotten something, we happily turned around to get it and set off again. Good company, good songs on the radio, some snacks along the way — what’s not to like about a road trip?

Road trips with the kids, of course, are another story. Our first big (over 2 hour) drive with Ben was when he was just a bit over two. We flew the red eye from San Francisco to Washington, DC (no sleep), drove from DC to Richmond, Virginia (no sleep) and then, after breakfast, drove from Richmond to the Outer Banks. For the last leg, I was in the back seat, crammed next to Ben, my sister driving and niece in the passenger seat. They might as well have been in another country, doing the snack-music-conversation thing happily while I read George and Martha Tons of Fun over and over again. Tons of fun it may be for George and Martha, but not for me, not for seven hours. (Thank goodness, it was a great vacation, and as I recall, Tony did Ben duty on the drive back).

A road trip doesn’t have to be long to be rough. When Eli was a little bit, we’d drive into the city most days from our temporary house in Marin, to take Ben to preschool and check the progress of our renovation. Often we’d have dinner with friends in the city before driving the twelve miles back to Marin, and I would spend the drive with my arm stretched back, straining out of its socket, trying to give squalling Eli a finger to suck, until I gave up, unbuckled my seat belt and climbed into the back to comfort him (or, more accurately, myself).

Luckily the kids are pretty good travelers these days — luckily because there’s a lot of California to see! Over the last weekend, we drove 9 1/2 hours to Yosemite and back, put about 500 miles on the car, ate one box of Trader Joe’s mini peanut butter crackers, half a dozen Z Bars, a bag of dried mango, a bag of roasted almonds, some carrot sticks and a lot of dry cereal. We listened to Dan Zanes, Chris Molla, The Beatles, Maroon 5, and Diablo’s Dust. We played 20 Questions (more on that later). Although we timed our drives to coincide with Eli’s naps, he napped a total of 2 out of the 9 1/2 hours. And yet, we did it all without any tears or many raised voices.

I think we’ll do this again.

We’ve got one duffel bag packed with four pairs of (borrowed) snow pants, four sets of long johns, four pairs of boots, four warm hats, and four pairs of mittens. The suitcase is still yawning open, with pjs and underwear, pants and shirts spilling out, the book lights, my journal, and an optimistic pile of books stacked on and around it. My “don’t forget” list of things I’ll gather after we’ve finished with them this morning, is on the floor: the boys’ bed buddies, toothbrushes.

We are heading into the snow!

And although I will bring my laptop, I am kind of hoping that we don’t have internet access and I can get some writing done.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

I know, most of you will not read this till the day after the fact, but the day itself proved too busy for blogging. Still, I was just so delighted with Ben’s card, I had to share.

Most days we have to rouse him at 7, and if we’re doing well he’s out of bed by about twenty after. This morning, I heard him get up and head downstairs on his own before I even had my slippers on, and when I finally got downstairs, this is what greeted me on the kitchen island.

Love is the best. Literate children are pretty great, too.

Edited to add: Sometimes I feel sorry for Answer Boy (and the rest of us) for the barrage of questions we endure. But Question Boy has his work cut out for him, too. This morning, he tried valiantly to insist that he’s older than his older brother. Answer Boy, exasperated, finally said, “Did you notice when you were a tiny tiny baby that I was already alive? That’s another point.”
———————————–
I don’t know how it works in families with children very close in age, but here we have Question Boy and Answer Boy. Their questions and answers don’t always sync up, of course, but they do try.

Question: How does the light work?
Answer: There’s a switch in the wall, connected to wires. And when you press the switch, it makes the wires connect, and that makes a circuit which makes energy which goes to the light and it turns on!

Question: How does the house work?
Answer: What do you mean, how does the house work?! It has walls and a roof!

Question: How does the garden work?
Answer: You need dirt, and sun and rain. And seeds. Or you can start with plants. But seeds will grow into plants, and that makes a garden.

Question: How does a duck work?
Answer: It starts with an egg, and an egg has a little baby duck inside. Or maybe you start with the mama duck?

And with that, stumped by the question that has stumped great thinkers through the ages, Answer Boy gave up and just ate his breakfast.

Go check out the exhibit at the de Saisset Museum, Eye on the Sixties. Tony and I went to the opening Friday night, and rather than having to hunt for his dad’s sculpture, as we thought we might, were happy to meet up with it right in the front lobby, glowing in the light.

We’d never seen this one in person, and it was fun to see it in context with some other beautiful and unfamiliar acrylic and resin pieces, as well as some more famous pieces, like Claes Oldenburg’s creepy moving Ice Bag, and some great paintings and drawings as well. We introduced ourselves to a couple of Tony’s dad’s old friends, including Bruce Beasley (who pointed out how ill-suited most museums are to exhibiting sculpture: not much natural light, no cranes to lift heavy pieces…) and we chatted with the Andersons, who are quite charming and unassuming guardians of a multi-million dollar collection. But my favorite quote of the night was from Ronald Davis (that’s his piece, Spoke, at the top of the de Saisset Web site) who chimes in on the whole tangled question of abstract art vs. realism quite simply:

“The painting’s just gotta look better than the wallpaper.”

Indeed.

image copyright The Estate of James Grant.

One day this weekend, as a favor to me, Tony kept Eli going all afternoon without a nap. Tony was going out that night, which is no big deal (even when sick, I manage, of course, and plum the experience for a story) and he figured rather than leave me with a well-rested jack-in-the-box who would pop out of bed every 5 minutes, interrupting my work and disturbing his older brother to the point of tears (everybody’s) before finally crashing around 9pm, he’d leave me with a sweet and docile child who’d tuck in to bed happily at 7, leaving Ben to his rest and me to my work.

Well, that was the idea. Except this always backfires. Sometimes, whether due to intent or accident or a simple willful refusal, Eli doesn’t nap (he’s approaching the age when Ben dropped his nap), and it’s never good. Sometimes he winds up a cranky ball of tears by 6pm, sometimes he carries on like the Energizer bunny, fueled by adrenaline, until late. We should know better by now. And yet.

The other night was a variation on the theme that I hadn’t encountered before. Tony left around 4:30, the boys and I sat down on the couch to read a book, and by 4:45, Eli was nodding off to sleep. That wouldn’t do at all. Sure, it’s ok — even welcome–for a little baby to take a late afternoon nap, but a rest so late in the day would only give my toddler fuel to carry on into the wee hours; or if it was more than a nap, he was likely to wake up “for the day” at 4:30 or 5am. I had to take measures.

“Ben!” I said, enlisting the help of an expert. “We need to keep Eli awake or the night will be a disaster! What should we do?”

“Balloons,” said Ben.

(OK, his first suggestion was “Read Tintin to me!” but I didn’t even have to say a word for him to understand how wrong that was.)

And so we got out the balloons. And lo and behold, within 3 minutes, Eli was running around the house, merrily tossing his balloon around. He played, he ate dinner, by 7pm he was appropriately tired, it was all good.

And over the last few nights, the balloon game (or “baboon game,” as Eli calls it) has developed to the point that it is in fact the perfect game, one in a series of games that Tony and I (mostly Tony, to be honest) have perfected over the years, which require little to no energy nor imagination from the parent and lots of energy and imagination on the part of the child.

One of Tony’s classics is Napping, wherein he lies on any comfortable surface and submits quietly to tucking in, kisses, and storytelling. Another is “Hat On, Hat Off,” which involves him sitting in the living room arm chair wearing a hat while the child runs from the room. When the child returns, the hat is off. Child runs out of the room, Tony moves hat, child returns, etc. Somehow, this was wildly amusing to toddler Ben, and continues to produce shrieks of laughter from both kids.

So what started the other night as batting filled balloons around the house and then moved to letting untied balloons shoot around the living room has now, by some mysterious kid alchemy, developed to this: I sit in the armchair and blow up a balloon while the boys run out of the living room, run a circuit down the hall, through the kitchen and dining room, back to me, where they take the balloon, let it shoot into the air, retrieve it, hand it back to me, and so on. Lots of shrieking and running from them, nothing but breathing from me.

I’m not saying every day is a walk in the park, and of course now that I’ve written about it, the game may never be as much fun again, but for one night, baboons were all we needed.

This has not been a good winter for San Francisco. We have not, for example, been to the zoo to ride Eli’s beloved Puffer train since the Christmas Day tiger escape, and I’m not sure I’ll ever feel safe enough there to return. I have mixed feelings about zoos, but there’s something about the SF zoo, the sight of the giraffes’ heads bobbing along above the eucalyptus trees, the waves from Ocean Beach crashing in the background, that always appealed to me.

Meanwhile, in other local news, the governor has slashed the public school budget (how are our teachers, already stretched to the limit, going to continue under these conditions?), and our street car line recently struck another pedestrian.

My kids don’t know about any of this, of course, but it’s all been wearing on me and I badly needed a good city day. And we had one last Friday. We started at Ben’s school, where his kindergarten class, their fourth grade buddies, and assorted teachers, staff, and families gathered for a peace march in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. The kids paraded across the park to a shopping district, chanting slogans (“2! 4! 6! 8! We think Dr. King is great!”) and singing Happy Birthday to the bemused smiles of shoppers and shopkeepers. We walked along beside them, Eli asking the whole way, “This the ha-pade? Where the ha-pade?”

After some time in the playground’s train structure and lunch, I collected Ben from school (Tony and Eli having driven home for a nap), and we rode the bus downtown. A few stops along our journey, an older man boarded the bus and sat down next to Ben and me. He listened to us chatting about the parade and MLK for awhile, then pulled a piece of paper out of his bag and started to fold. Ben watched intently as the bird (pictured above) took shape. When he was done, the man handed it to Ben, who was delighted with his gift. “For me? Really?” and then checking with me, “Caroline, can I keep this?” The man and I both smiled our yeses to Ben, and the man then got out two more pieces of origami paper; handing one to me, he indicated (I only realized later that he never spoke to us) that I should fold along with him and learn. Two more birds emerged from the papers, just as we got to our stop. Ben bounced off the bus, holding his bird, delighted with this interaction with a stranger.

Next stop, the Museum of Modern Art for the Olafur Eliasson show. If this comes anywhere near you, go see it! Take the kids! It’s a gorgeous, light-filled, fascinating exhibit, with many of the installations exposed so that you can see how they were created. Ben and I had a ball poking in and around the various pieces, and I think a Friday afternoon bus ride to MoMA might become a regular part of our monthly routine.

Ben then remembered the MLK memorial across the street, so off we went. It’s a Maya Lin-inspired fountain/waterfall, with lines from King’s speeches engraved on the walls next to huge photographs from various moments in the Civil Rights movement. Streams of water pour down (“let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream”), and the whole thing always makes me cry. Luckily Ben was there, threatening to topple headlong into the water, hollering at the pigeons, lightening up the mood.

And then last stop, reunited with Tony and Eli, who took the street car (without incident) downtown to meet us for dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Out the Door. We filled up on lemongrass tofu and chard with carmelized shallots, picked up some chocolate gelato for dessert, and then loaded two tired boys back on to the street car for the ride home. It was a fine day in San Francisco.

I’m not at all a proselytizer, generally, but apparently my efforts to eat a bit more seasonally have not gone unnoticed.

Exhibit A: A blueberry-pear tart a friend bought at a local shop and brought to share for lunch.
Ben’s reaction: “Blueberry tart?! What?! Blueberries aren’t in season!”

Exhibit B: Dinner at a friend’s house (the same friend, in fact), with pesto pizza.
Ben’s reaction: “Pesto?! Impossible! Basil doesn’t grow in the cold winter!”

Meanwhile, the cafe that Ben and Eli have set up outside our kitchen now sports a spiffy “USDA Organic” sign, which Ben found on the computer and printed out himself, and the boys now grow imaginary crops for the cafe in our living room. As of last night, their garden included carrots, potatoes, an olive tree, a caper bush, and a maple tree, for syrup. They also harvest their own cocoa beans. Of course.