Category: Family

Stars at 3AM

November 21st, 2015

Photo credit: The Purple Milky Way by Donncha Ó Caoimh

It has been far too long since I’ve watched stars in the deepest part of the night. It has been too long since I’ve watched stars at all.

Before our childrens’ athletic schedules consumed every weekend of spring and fall, we camped regularly as a family. Here in the Appalachians, we pitched tents near Old Rag, Mount Rogers, and in West Virginia.

In the mountains, the sky is filtered by trees. Our tent is usually sheltered under a dense canopy, and we do not see stars at night. In Minnesota, though, we camped in the open. Our children were small, and we backpacked to an isolated hillside. That night, in a sea of prairie grass, there was no glow of city lights. Nothing masked the vastness of the dark night sky dusted with stars. The absense of interference was absolute, and humbling: it was just us and the deepness of space.

We were small under that big black sky splashed with starlight. Our son, who was six at the time, wanted to sleep outside the tent, without shelter, under the dome of the universe. His dad slept out with him, and they woke to daddy longlegs and dew.

That’s the last time I remember stopping and paying attention to stars. That was six years ago. Maybe it’s time to stop again and look up.

Thank you to Fabulousness Unleashed for the prompt “Stars at 3AM.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Giggles

November 11th, 2015

When our daughter was eight, she’d have one friend over at a time. On a Saturday, a little friend would come over for the afternoon, and for four hours, they would giggle.

They’d eat a snack, look at each other, and burst into the tinkling sound of little girl laughter. They did not need a reason to laugh, the joy and silliness just bubbled out.

As the girls age, they still giggle. Our daughter is almost 10 now, and when she has a friend over, there are frequent bursts of laughter for no apparent reason. The laughs are deeper now — not as high pitched and airy as an eight-year-old giggle. The giggle fits are often inspired by a boy somewhere in the vicinity: our son, or his friend if he has one over.

I remember the days of giggle fits, where I’d start laughing and couldn’t stop. And then my mom would say, “Some one turned Andrea’s giggle box over,” and I’d laugh even harder, until tears streamed down my face and my abs felt like I’d crunched 100 sit-ups.

A laugh that goes so deep you forget what you’re laughing at, and that lasts so long it hurts, is one of the best feelings in the world. I hope our daughter has thousands of them.

Photo credit: Bubbles by pandajenn1234.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
August soccer

August 18th, 2015

The SUV stinks of sour shin guards and sweaty soccer jerseys. The boys are splayed on the seats and the floor in the back, napping between games at the tournament while we sit in the parking spot, trying to cool off. I look over at the mom my son and I are carpooling with, and she smiles slyly. She she digs around in the console, then pulls a new air freshener out of a package. Spent fresheners litter the cup holder area. She pulls the old one out and clips a fresh one on the air conditioner vent, and we aim them at our noses to try to clear the stench. It doesn’t work.

I expected stinky diapers. But when planning for children, I didn’t really think beyond the small years, when of course there would be spit-up and pee and vomit and poop. I didn’t think about foul feet and smelly soccer socks. When I glance back at the boys in the back, I expect to see stink waves coming off of them like in the cartoons.

All day sweat has dripped in rivulets between my shoulder blades and down my chest. My bra has gained 2 lbs from the perspiration, and it’s smeared with suntan lotion to boot. This thing, and our son’s shin guards, are going straight into bins of soapy water when we get home. When he pulled his uniform over head this morning, after wearing it in two games yesterday in sweltering August heat, our son squenched up his nose and said, “This doesn’t smell very good.” I guess we could have looked for laundry facilities in the hotel. Oh well. Maybe next time. But probably not.

I don’t know how the boys play in sun and in this heat. Back out on the sidelines I sit with my arms and legs out, making sure no part is touching any other part. Even in the shade, sitting still, I feel vulnerable to heat stroke. And there our sons run in the sun and sweltering heat without even hats or sunglasses. Their red faces give the strain away. The beads of wet on their upper lips give the strain away.

The sour stench of boys in the back seat gives the strain away. And they are only 11. How will August soccer weekends smell when they are almost men?
Muzak

April 24th, 2015

Our daughter’s music — Katy Perry, Run-D.M.C. — and our music, especially when we play hard hip hop, make our son cringe. He has specific and limited music tastes. He will tolerate classical, and jazz without singing, but rarely has he said he likes a type of music, and never would he seek any music out.

One day we went to the mall, and as I power walked to whatever store we were destined for, in my hurry to get the shopping over with, our son strolled behind me and said, “I like this music.”

I stopped to listen. It was some horrible generic Muzak whose blandness offended me. I scrunched up my face, one nostril raised, and said, “You do?”

“Yeah,” he said, with his contented Buddha smile. “It’s quiet. And sad.”

He was 10 at the time. And he liked quiet and sad music.

He didn’t seek out or buy Muzak after that, thankfully, but the moment was enlightening to me. A little window into our son’s sensibilities: he did not care about music, as evidenced by his appreciation for Muzak. It just wasn’t his thing.

So when he started requesting a song in the car recently – “Can you play the whale song, Mom? – I was happy to play it for him. Over. And over. Again.

“What is it you like about this song, buddy?” I asked him after the fifth or sixth request.

“I like that it tells a story,” he said. And he shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like it.”

“Oh, well maybe you’ll like the rest of this band’s songs then. Most of their songs tell stories.”

“What’s the name of the band?”

“The Decemberists,” I said. “You want to listen to another of their songs?”

Since then, we have put 39 Decemberists songs on his tablet for him. I’ll be folding laundry in the living room and hear, drifting down the stairs,

We are two mariners
Our ship’s sole survivors
In this belly of a whale*

He listens while he does his homework. He listens while he curls up and reads. He listens while he lays in bed and stares at the ceiling, doing nothing at all besides absorbing the stories, and the music.

*From “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists.

Artwork from University of Toronto Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection.

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page.
Favorite Easter Memory

April 4th, 2015

We spent a winter in Maine when we were still a family of three: my husband, myself, and our 13-month old son. We spent a winter in Maine when our home was in Florida. I don’t think we saw the earth the entire four months we lived there: it was hiding beneath a thickening batting of snow.

The place we rented was across the street from the beach, and the finger of land we occupied was empty of people. The houses were dark night and day for this was a summer community. While we lived there the snow piled high enough that it reached the icicles dripping down from the vacant houses’ eaves.

We didn’t have a washer and drier in our “cottage,” which is more accurately described as a mobile-home. On laundry day I would pack our baby and our giant mounds of laundry — giant because it was winter and winter clothes are bulky — and I would take us to the laundromat. I struggled every time: what do I do with our baby while I carry the laundry in and out? How do I get around this five-foot snowbank between the car and the sidewalk? I walked many trips, baby in one arm, giant bag of laundry in the the other, to the end of the block where there was a passage in the snow bank, then back up the block to the laundromat where the car and laundromat were side by side with a ridge of snow between them. Each trip that would have taken four steps in summer took at least two minutes in winter.

Which is why Easter was so wonderful. Easter morning, a fresh snow sparkled under an April sun, and after so many weeks indoors, we could not wait to go out and feel sunlight on our faces. We bundled our son till he looked like a red starfish pillow with a face, and we took our brightly dyed Easter eggs out into the pristine, glittering landscape. We “hid” colored eggs in the snow, and they popped like flower buds in the crystal powder, promises of a coming spring.

Photo credit: My mom, Beth Smith. Interestingly, the photos prove my memories wrong (what our son wore, how much snow was on the ground).

For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Trying to get back into the writing habit.
Snow Day Fatigue

February 20th, 2015

Today is the fifth consecutive day the kids have been home from school due to snow and bitter cold.

Spring will be here soon, right?

Category: Family

Stars at 3AM

Giggles

August soccer

Muzak

Favorite Easter Memory

Snow Day Fatigue