One of the (many) reasons we renovated our house last year was because our little Edwardian, with all its chair rails and moldings, didn’t have much open wall space for Tony’s late father’s enormous paintings. Now, we’ve been able to hang several of the fabulous, gorgeous canvases… but as it turns out, Ben needs plenty of display space, too. He’s taken to taping his pictures (right now it’s all trains, all the time) to the half-wall over his art table, to doors, and now to the front window.
On the far right, you see an Amtrak train (“toot!!” it says,) its pantograph carefully connecting it to the electric wires above. The sign on the bottom says simply, “Ben Love Tony.” And this morning’s addition, after we’d baked banana coconut muffins, welcomed friends for a playdate: “Muffins Waiting.”

I’m so happy to live in this house!

(a note about the muffins: you can replace half the butter with 3/4 c ground flax seed and feel virtuous about eating two or three…)

The first time I was pregnant and poring over name books, I quickly realized that naming a child is the one decision a couple makes that allows no room for compromise. If your favorite name happens to be the same as your partner’s 3rd grade playground nemesis, that’s it; you have to find another option. An old Saturday Night Live skit shows a couple arguing so fiercely about naming their baby — each of them turning the other’s suggestion into a playground taunt — that they wind up divorcing.

The second time around, we had to at least pretend to consider our son Ben’s suggestions, like “Telephone” and “Benna.” Eventually we agreed on two girl’s names and crossed our fingers that these would be enough. But I packed the name books in my hospital bag, just in case. In the pictures of us in the hospital after our second son’s birth, a whiteboard listing various possibilities is visible in the background: Daniel; Josiah; Leo; Elijah. We left the hospital with our red-haired beauty still unnamed, and the hospital staff distressed. “What’s really the problem with filing this paperwork later?” I asked. “Well,” someone finally admitted, “If the baby doesn’t have a name, it makes it harder for us to bill you.”

Well then, I thought, I’ll be rushing right back.

It took us three days to settle on Elijah, three days during which our friends and family — all of whom had seen that whiteboard — kindly kept their opinions to themselves.

This all came back to me when I went to see The Namesake (Mira Nair, 2006) with a friend who is expecting the birth of her second daughter any day. She and her husband haven’t yet settled on a name (although their four year old lobbies hard for her choice by making elaborate drawings of the letter C) and as we waited for the lights to dim I thought of how often lately she and I have sat through to the very end of a film, reading the credits carefully in search of potential names.

Read the rest of the column here at Literary Mama.

The Easter Bunny brings books to our house along with chocolate, and this year I got a sweet Margaret Wise Brown story, Home for a Bunny, for Eli and then finally remembered to get one of my childhood favorites for Ben, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.

When I was little, I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes Easter egg logistics that this book details: the “fact” that there are five Easter bunnies; how bunnies are chosen to become Easter bunnies; the palace stacked with Easter eggs, carefully sorted by color, style, and flavor.

As an adult, and as a parent, I appreciate the feminist message in this seventy year-old story. The Country Bunny is told that she’ll never be an Easter bunny because her 21 children take up so much her time. And it’s true, she says, that as babies they do keep her completely occupied. But then they grow, and she teaches them to run the house, assigning pairs to cook and clean and garden and even to dance and paint, to entertain the bunnies doing more “necessary” chores. We’re shown, in fact, that mothering gives her skills that make her more qualified to become an Easter bunny than she might have been otherwise.

All of this is very gently conveyed, not at all beating the reader over the head with its message, for which I am grateful. But the thing that gets me is, why does the Country Bunny need to teach her kids to do all this work? She has a husband, we read (he’s never shown), which is how she comes to have 21 baby bunnies, but then he falls out of the story and the Country Bunny is effectively a single mother. And so good for her for managing as competently as she does. But of course I wish for a story that shows the daddy bunny staying home with the kids while mother bunny follows her career dreams.

It’s been over a year since we moved back home after a year-long renovation, over a year since we brought back all the furniture (ours and lots of my late mother-in-law’s), all the boxes of clothing and books.

But I wouldn’t say we are quite unpacked, yet. The clothes come out of boxes on an as-needed basis (and so I missed a whole slew of 18-24 month clothes for Eli, which I unearthed only after he was too big), and the books are mostly still packed up, awaiting new homes in to-be-built bookshelves.

Meanwhile, new things come into the house and gradually the garage has filled with boxes.

Last night, having spent the day working at my desk, but with a lot of energy still, I ventured into the garage to knock back the piles. We’d planned to use some of them for Ben’s birthday party, by letting the kids build cardboard rockets and trains, but the building project became an art project at the last minute, and we wound up only using one or two boxes.

In an hour last night, I broke down over 50, and I’m still not done. Anyone need some boxes?

School assignment letters went out from the SFUSD last week, as did letters to private school applicants. We’d listed our seven public schools, applied to five privates (fewer than the seven recommended by some preschool directors), and were curious (ok, ok, anxious) to see what the mail would bring.

The SFUSD assigned us our third choice school (not, I should correct, the plastic-fish-beating school, which on review was actually our 5th choice). We should feel lucky; the SFUSD proudly claims that 90% of families are assigned to a school on their list, but in my informal survey of preschool families, it’s more like 45% get their first choice, 45% are assigned a school that’s not on their list (let alone in their neighborhood) and the rest of us wind up in the murky middle, assigned to a school we’re not thrilled about, that’s far from home, but which we put on the list to fill out our required seven.

As for the private schools, we received one acceptance, at our last choice, Tony’s alma mater, an all-boys school about which we have mixed feelings, and four offers to be placed in the “waiting pool,” the deliberately phrased non-waiting list from which random children are happily plucked to take the spots of families who have rejected acceptance offers. So if the straight white parents of a boy from an average middle class family turn down admission to our first choice school, maybe Ben will get that spot. Or maybe some other white boy will. We have no idea.

In the meantime, here we are in the waiting pool. I am absolutely not complaining, because we have options that some families would be thrilled about, but we are not at thrilled quite yet. We’re still at uncertain and pensive. The water isn’t too clear here in the wading pool, it’s crowded, and there’s an unpleasant vinegar scent in the air. We need to climb out and dive in to another pool — but where?

Tune in next week!

Ben went on his first field trip today, with a small group of kids from his preschool: a walk to a mailbox (not even the post office!) less than ten minutes away, to mail letters to their parents. He’s been plenty of places without us, of course, but this was his first organized school outing. I’m just a little verklempt.

And Eli, at almost twenty-two months, uttered his first sentences! Leaving the duckpond today, he waved and said, “Buh-bye duhk. Buh-bye coot. Buh-bye guhl.” And he continued on, saying goodbye to the rest of the birds, the flowers, the grass, the dirt… It’s a whole new world of communication.

It’s March in San Francisco. The skies are clear, the sun is shining, and Eli has rediscovered his Halloween costume (with the extra, and quite fetching, addition of his UConn Huskies hat).

He alternated between the tiger suit and, when he got too warm, just a diaper, all day long.

I’m not used to having a boy who expresses an opinion about his clothes, let alone likes changing them occasionally . Ben would keep the same clothes on for a week if I’d let him..

OK, technically only my parents were on vacation, but what with Ben’s birthday and all, it began to feel like we were all on break. Which is really not so bad (except that I need to be writing my next column right now…)

So this is what we did:

Read many different books, including The Gypsy Madonna; Special Topics in Calamity Physics; What is the What; Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq; slave narratives; and Cold Mountain (all of us, though mostly my parents);

Read one book, The Bunnies Are Not in Their Beds, over and over (Eli, with his patient granddad);

Read one other book, The Daylight Limited, over and over (Ben, with Tony and me);

Bake (me! Cooks Illustrated’s Best Chocolate Layer Cake, which is more complicated and less delicious than Chocolate Carrot Cake and therefore won’t be made around here again; the fabulous and easy Apricot Crumbles; my new favorite lemon dessert, Meyer Lemon Cake; and brownies);

Add words to our vocabulary (Eli: “cake” and “dessert”);

Add lines to our epic poem, even at the playground (Dad, who is working on a paraquel to Beyond Beowulf);

Learn to play catch (Eli, with his granddad);

Build with his new lego sets (Ben);

Look at old family photos;

Take more family photos;

Make plans for the next visit.

“Ben, what do you think Eli will learn when he’s two?”

“I think Eli will learn how to say ‘placemat.'”

“Oh. And what do you think you’ll learn, now that you’re five?”

“I think I’ll learn how to drink wine!”

Alright then.

Five Things Ben Likes To Do
Read
Draw
Build with Lincoln logs, tinker toys, and blocks
Play with his friends
Pretend to be Dan Zanes and play a concert

Five Favorite Things
Trains
Musical instruments
Books
Tinker Toys
His brother

Five Favorite Foods
Pasta puttanesca
Chard with lemon and garlic
Penne pesto
Dried mango
Chocolate anything

Five Foods He Doesn’t Much Care For
A glass of milk
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Beans
Butter (acceptable only as an invisible ingredient)

Five Reasons I Love Ben
He says “actually”
He’s (mostly) kind to his brother
He always asks to be excused from the table (even when he happens to be the only one sitting there)
At bedtime, he wants me to cuddle and tell him the story of the day he was born

And extra bonus reason: this morning, he said to me, “At night, I decided I should sneak into your room and gently put this picture on your pillow!” The picture, of a house with some flowers growing in front of it, and a bright sun in the corner, is captioned “Picture of the World, for Mama, from Ben!”

Happy birthday, sweet Ben!!