rIGHT hERE, rIGHT nOW

Back in college (2020) we used all caps for the text on engineering drawings and when programming with equations and variables. I still use it when I type out addresses. One of the funny things that happens when you’re working in all caps is that when you switch programs – like I just did now when it came to me what I want to say to you – you often type out your first few words in all caps without looking.

I had a friend over for dinner. He got divorced recently and had some real emotional struggles. We have that experience in common. He said, “I finally got to the point where I said “I’m deciding the grass is greener right here, right now” and that’s that.” He made it sound so easy.

He had been pushing back all evening on my insistence that this time in my life was a “downtime”, that my life had been 35 years of adventurous peaks but had now gone to “flatline” like a lifeless EKG. Something inside me broke when that phrase came out of his mouth. I stopped pushing back. Dell’s voice faded away. And that hair-raising Fatboy Slim banger that this post’s title borrows from started playing in my head. It played the rest of the night, getting louder when Dell left, and the next morning even louder.

It played on into Wednesday, and I wrote this, and then I wondered: “Wait, why did this song start in the middle? Why didn’t it play from the beginning?” And that’s when I realized: it wasn’t on pause. I had turned the volume down. I’m not sure why I did that, life got really boring when Right Here, Right Now was turned down.

It’s been playing on repeat since I found that KTCL Rave on the Rocks Fatboy Slim ticket in an old CD case back in high school. Now, it’s going to keep playing loud. For you, Phoenix.

This week in the life of Phoenix…

Cake: Ordered.

Venue: Booked.

Cupcakes: Check.

Guests invited? Oh yeah.

Ice cream? Phoebe’s bringing it.

Musician? Yeah, that’s booked too.

Gifts? Bought.

Wrapping paper and tags: still outstanding. I’m psyched for this party. Hope “12-15” really means 20 kids and 20 parents…

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All 32 pounds of you was in my left arm as I scanned us into the YMCA. Instantly, there was John waving to us from the pool. I waved back through the glass behind the front desk, and you exclaimed “Olive! I want to go swimming.” I smiled as Olive waved too, and walked us right back out the front door. I explained that I hadn’t brought our swimsuits and I hoped we had some in the car. “I’ll just go naked,” was your response. It made sense. You go naked in the bath, even naked in the shower at the Y, maybe you can even remember swimming in Superior naked when you were younger. I smiled. “You could do that…” I trailed off. Luckily, there were in fact old suits stashed in the car. As I inspected mine, my main concern was how long ago I had forgotten it on the floor and whether the smell would be bearable. They both smelled fine, but yours fit when I ordered it on December 19, 2021. I knew it had stretched but I was still amazed when it fit fine, albeit as a shorty instead of full-coverage as intended for a 1-year-old!

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You insisted on bringing the ice cream home. I didn’t even know they served ice cream at daycare. So, there we were, going 65 MPH down the highway, you balancing a Styrofoam plate in your lap containing a puddle of white liquid with one pink lump barely still discernible in the middle. As I expected, you were mostly over it by the time we got home. It was a sunny day out and we agreed to bike ride. We walked toward the shed to get our bikes, and I asked what you would do with the plate you were holding out in front of you as you walked:

“I want save it in the the the… the bike house.” Watching you think through things you don’t know has been the highlight of this week. After biking, we made a game of me picking you up and you trying to drop the floaty plate into the dumpster as it spilled all over the parking lot in the wind.

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Today we went to the movies (after the kids gym, and swimming, and the ice rink.) You dropped our La Croix and cried. A storm came and made the family of ducks in Migration scared, and you wanted to leave. Then you dropped our tub of popcorn and every last kernel dumped onto the floor, and again you cried. But each time, we patched things up. After the movie, you tried to bargain with me in the lobby: “Let’s play 1 game,” you suggested. I reminded you that you had had a choice of games OR popcorn and that you’d chosen popcorn. You cried. We patched it up again and headed out into the blizzard. We shopped the clearance aisle at “the blue store” (Walmart) and bought things we didn’t need like a Paw Patrol bike helmet. You already have two bike helmets plus a snowboarding helmet with a headset, but $10 is pretty cheap if it makes you happy.

On the way home, you promptly fell asleep eating an apple. I thought back to the movie theater bathroom with pee on every toilet seat. With two faucets working out of four. With soap smeared no the mirror and water pooled on the counter. The movie theater that only sells cold popcorn because the front of their machine is always wide open. That clearly has some kind of shiny residue on the screen in Theater 3. That didn’t return my message about having a birthday there. I think about the Walmart where you have to look at the whole batch of spinach clamshells to see if they’ve been left unrefrigerated and are starting to rot on the day they came in – again. Where the soy milk was bad last week – all three cartons – for the same reason. I think about the way everyone drives around with their brights on and doesn’t think to turn them off until you turn yours on. Each of these things I’ve seen time and again and for three years now I’ve been dismissing them as one-offs. But they’re not. They are life here. I’ve never met a less competent nor more self-centered populace, sadly.

Anyway, rants aside, I slid you onto my bed and you climbed in and fell asleep while I folded laundry on the other half in the light from the hallway. You’re a great kid. I look forward to a future somewhere else.

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Emotions & Time

First, Time.

These days when I tell you it’s time to go to daycare, you’ll usually tell me, “Those guys are sleeping.” It means we should wait until after nap time. Truth be told, you’d stay home given the choice.

Last week you treated me to an elaborate explanation of naptime: “I just go in the other room and Kathy rubs guys backs and … I play and TV and those guys just sleep cause I eat lunch and then just, just I can’t sleep. I go in the room and play …” It’s amazing to watch not only your powers of speech expand, but also your desire to convey your ideas. You get that I don’t understand sometimes, but there’s less focus on that outcome than on spontaneous expression, which I like. I’ve never put much pressure on you to tell me whether or not you understand what I’m saying, so that’s what you do back to me.

You don’t really know what time it is. We finish breakfast, play a little if there’s time, and I take you to daycare a few hours before nap time. Something similar happens now when I mention going to your mom’s: “Moms here?” You light up and head for the window regardless of what time it is. I got a little sad the first time it happened, but then I saw you directing a similar emotion toward me: the biggest sustained smile I’ve ever seen outside of a Disneyland commercial.

It started when you were in Montana. We did video calls in between you visiting “Brittany and Jesse and a dinosaur zoo.” When I would call, your smile would be so big! And you were silly. Really silly. You did somersaults on the couch, pulled your lips open wide with your index fingers while you were eating a sandwich, and even stuck your socked foot in your mouth. You were being so silly that it made your mom mad and she started telling you things not to do. But if we weren’t being silly, you were done. You need that higher energy level to override the tension that is still thick between your mother and me.

That selfsame smile came again when you got back from Montana. You were sick with diarrhea and your mom had just hit a deer. It was dark of night and Grandma Buzz brought you out to my car. I was nervously waiting in front of your mom’s house still, having just been cussed out by Grandpa Bruce, but that is a story for the family court, not you. Even in the dim light of one distant streetlamp I could see your massive smile beaming at me, and it didn’t let up as Grandma Buzz brought you closer. Relief washed over me, as we read each other’s faces. I had Bev set you down, and I strapped you in. Each of our emotions shifted toward homeostasis as we drove. We landed somewhere around Happy anxiety, and couldn’t really shake the anxiety piece over the next 2 days. We made the best of it, but it had been a really rough day.

Your emotions go the other way, too.

A few weeks ago, I was doing the dishes when I heard you crying. I take a pause before I run to your rescue these days. Crying is far and away your default reaction to anything negative, and I don’t want to reinforce that. But this wasn’t a petty “you used the wrong color Lego block” crying. This was legitimate “I’m in pain” crying so, within a second, I was hurrying to the living room (it’s all of six feet away from the kitchen.) You were facing away from me, so I saw Paw Patrol before I saw your face. It was the scene that flashes back to Skye being lost in the snow when she was younger.

I was puzzled; we’d watched this movie together before, and you hadn’t cried. It’s a powerful scene though – honestly, tears are welling up even now! But it was equally possible that you’d bit your tongue. I looked at your face. You were glued to my 32″ articulating computer monitor that, combined with 6 channel surround sound, turned our living room into a tiny theater. I understood: this wasn’t a pain that could be attributed to any one point on the body. I wrapped my arms around you just said “I know.”

Before all of this, something little happened, but I look back now and realize it was a sign of your nascent new expression of deep sadness. “Lexa!” You were yelling at our virtual assistant, but she wasn’t responding. She doesn’t understand you yet. “Hey, we don’t yell at her” I told you as I continued my Lego building. There was silence followed by a sharp cry of pain. This might have been the first time I thought you bit your tongue.

You hadn’t. My sternness had gone over like a lead balloon. I knew you’d been feeling sadness a little more strongly these days, mostly by the way you had started throwing yourself down the hallway and sobbing facedown into your hands over forts built wrong and having to wear boots in the snow. But so far it hadn’t ever been in response to a rebuke of your specific actions. You’d always just argued “Why?” and made frowny faces.

I was able to confirm what had really happened: “Did it make you sad that I told you not to yell at Alexa?” Alexa perked right up, of course, but your wet, red-faced nod kept me from saying anything. I wrapped my arms around you. “Ok, I’m sorry.”

Something I’ll try to carry with me: Mud

The look of dismay on your face was already fully formed. “What’s that?” You asked.

“Dunno.” I tried to brush it off figuratively so I wouldn’t have to touch it. You’d probably just wipe it on your pants, and they were black anyway.

Instead, your countenance sank further. It went right past dread and into horror. “No what is it!” You feigned sadness but this was clearly going to be the time you made that look without actually crying because there was no way you were going to cry about a 2mm spec of dirt on your hand.

Ignoring every sign and doubling down on my It’s No Big Deal Approach would be the way to go. “It’s just dirt. Wipe it on your pants.”

Aaaand you turned bright red. Horror was replaced by despair. Big, wet tears began to stream over your cheeks. “No, it’s mud.” Mud. MUD. MUD. The way you said it revealed that you’d been trying not to say the word at all.

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Mud is a big deal this week. We point at it, we step over it, we watch kids with poor judgement or lack of awareness step in it. But not us. We are aware of every mud. The watery snowmelt mud in the bowling alley parking lot. The thick piled dirty-snow mud against the curb in the apartment parking lot. Mud is dirty and we treat it with the appropriate reverence.

This was the aged grass clippings stuck to your hand type of mud. Yes, I looked close enough to determine its composition. Honestly, I smelled it too. Smell is useful in determining your next steps as a parent. Not poop, that’s what the sniff told me. Did I wipe it off? Can’t remember, but what happened later was pretty entertaining.

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Phoenix was back in her car seat, but this time we were unloading instead of loading. We’d been snowboarding and spirits were high. I noticed the half-eaten tuna packet and fork I had lodged in her door at lunch, and I offered her a bite.

“That’s not tuna, it’s MUD!” She exclaimed. She was improvising and I caught the smile still spreading across her broad cheeks. I don’t know if it was her intonation or my heart or both, but when I realized she’d turned mud from and abhorrence to a joke, something shot up into the sky.

“Yep. Here’s a big mite of MUD,” I smiled and brought the fork closer. Dads can improv too.

She took a bite with such a big smile that I could see her lips struggle to stay abutted. “Now a bite of mud for dad!” And on we went: “This is the type of mud with rocks in it,” I said.

“No, it’s MUD!” Which, apparently, was worse than eating anything with rocks in it, since that would, of course, dilute the mud.

“Yum yum yum mud, I love to eat mud.”

“Me too,” with mouth full.

“Can I have the last bite of mud?”

“No, for me.”

“Ok.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll save it.”

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In an instant, simple make-believe had turned the everyday into something we could laugh together about. It brought us together as peers in play, and it kept me laughing hours later to boot. The peers part is key. I used to only recognize this as some kind of “slowing down”, me shifting into baby time and hopefully finding that beginner-mind wavelength so I could ride along for a while. But during this visit, which is only long-block #2 since the permanent schedule change earlier this month, I realized there’s an alignment happening. She is actively probing to figure out what engages me, just like I am doing for her. Now, with more time and two of us trying, we’re finding that alignment more easily.

Internal Shift

I started waking up at the crack of dawn. I began announcing myself when I arrived to see friends, and again when departing. I smiled at strangers and said hello. And for once, I saw that look of swallowed sadness on someone else’s face. I knew it too well. That’s the mask you quickly put on when you don’t want to stall the conversation. It’s not even about bringing people down, because when you’re depressed you go through it enough to know that your despair doesn’t depress people, it just leaves them groping for what to do next. It leaves them wondering how long to stare at you, while you stare at the floor. It stalls those conversations that you so desperately need to keep you going, even if to the outside world they sound like an endless string of poor-me complaints about your life.

If they don’t know you well, the person you are talking to will pretend not to notice you staring at the floor. Some may even pretend not to know you well, so then they don’t have to notice. That was the case yesterday: despite that I’d known her for 2 years, this mom looked over my head as I told her what a long road it had been and described the uncertainty that lie ahead. She surely thought I was headed for the floor now, just as she’d seen me do before.

Chances are better than not that this will turn out fine now, so I smiled at her and finished my share. But that wasn’t the case before. I’d said the wrong things and was paying for it. The odds became stacked against me. The legal profession isn’t purposely opaque, it’s negligent by design. I’d received the representation I paid for, but that was only the Bronze Package. What I had needed was the Platinum Package. “Tell me what to say when I’m on the witness stand,” is not a mandate most lawyers will follow, and also isn’t the most effective way to arrive at your desired end state. This is: “Tell me what factors this judge will likely consider and then describe to me the type of testimony that would get us to my goal. But first, spend several extra hours studying my case and what I have to say so that this isn’t just hypothetical. At my expense of course.”

Lawyers fly by the seat of their pants. That’s a good thing. That’s what you’re paying them for. Good lawyers get familiar with your case, and then listen very carefully to what’s happening in the courtroom. Or during negotiations. Or “in chambers” as mine likes to say, a broad reference to the closed-door discussions between the judge and the lawyers that you never hear. Then they respond in ways that you don’t have the skills to. My first lawyer could do that latter part, boy could he ever, but the former was a problem. He just didn’t know me or my case well enough to guide me to the proper testimony. The decision that was handed down severely limited my parenting time, but I was the only one that knew it. Nobody had even asked. The odds of me being a big part of your life were low and things were looking bleak.

That would slowly change over the course of the next 16 months. I kept “fighting” and decision after decision was handed down in my favor. It wasn’t luck. I bought the books and studied the case law. I hired a lawyer that would listen to me, and that would spend my retainer down explaining the mundane if that’s what I wanted. I never found the “smoking gun” or the “silver bullet” that would get me to joint custody. I did read the laws and the guidelines the court uses until I had them memorized. I wrote outlines about how I expected the court to reason, and when my lawyer told me that certain elements wouldn’t matter, I went and redid them. In short, I learned how to think about custody.

Maybe I’d be happier if I didn’t try to track the odds of life’s possibilities in my head. Will I study law after this? Most likely, because as far as I can tell, the legal system poses one’s single biggest risk to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Vacuum Debacle

“Oh no!! Just a minute, I gotta get something..”

Your grasp on temporal relationships got a huge leg-up last week: daycare seems to have taught you several expressions for talking about when something happens. “I come over next week,” you told me, for instance, or “let’s go to the kid’s gym tomorrow.” But you’re favorite? Plain old later. Are you done with your food, Phoenix? “No, I’m saving it for later.” Well, can we pickup these Legos? “Let’s do it later, Dad.” And you know what? For now, because I’m so enamored with your development, that flies 😊

Speaking of Legos…

We’ve had seven vagabonds boondocking in our living room with their truck and their motorcycles for days now. They’re doing stunts and making a mess of Christmas tree needles, but we let them hang around because they’re a lot of fun when we need a little R & R on the floor together. We take the motorcycles out, and with the slightest little kick they shoot across the vast expanse of pocked plastic that has turned our living room into a private playa for jumping through flaming hoops and riding wheelies vis a vis a chair mat.

“You’d best vacuum,” is what I think you actually said as we played in the accumulating debris beneath the tree. “That came from the Christmas tree,” you continued. Actually, it hadn’t, I explained – it came from the wreath on the front door. I must have bumped it on my way out earlier; I had been more than a little pre-occupied. “I need to check.” You opened the door, took a good look at the wreath, then solidly closed the door.

You asked me to let you get on the couch first, and I did, then I vacuumed as one usually does: I started with the big pile and then worked my way out, but standing bent over and moving with curious purposefulness and slowness; my focus was in searching your face. I wanted to know if the relationship between the movement of the needles and the local pressure difference this machine created was registering with you, or maybe the idea that although no visible contact was occurring something was acting on those pine needles. No dice. Now you were preoccupied.

Foomp: The sound of any object going up the vacuum when it’s not supposed to.

In reality, they* made little crackle sounds as they dragged along the corrugated tubing and banged through the vacuums extensive ducting that we would end up getting an equally extensive look at. I glanced at you sidelong and then continued vacuuming. This you also had not registered, though you continued to watch earnestly from your elevated perch. I finished up and realized that wasn’t actually your guy that had been vacuum vaporized from his Lego life – what had actually happened is that through sheer and utter willful negligence on my part, that supernaturally extendible hose had been allowed to suck cash directly from my wallet. And $5 worth if you want to get into what the gift shop charges for those at Legoland.

We called grandma. You were still hiding on couch island. Grandma answered and her grainy video began to jump to life. Phoenix, we have an emergency, I said. “What?” You understood by unmistakable seriousness in my countenance. A Lego man has been sucked into the vacuum. He’s trapped inside. “We need tools. Just a minute.” You ran off.

You were gone a curiously long time and I could hear you playing in your bed room. Meanwhile, Grandma and I removed the vacuum bag and began to fish around. A thick bat of LA smog slowly backed up in the valley below Christmas Tree Forest as my face diffused grey belches from the soggy bag. I might have shouted a reminder, or maybe it was a plea for mask and googles, but you did eventually come back on your own – and with pliers.

Before you could even plop down on your healthy haunches I was inspired and headed to the kitchen: in your world, pliers and scissors are the same thing. This was a job for scissors. Since you don’t know the difference between the two, why stress you out – so you cut from one corner, and I cut from the other, and we met on your corner. Lego man was somewhere in this dusty convertible, he’d had enough wind in his hair, and he was begging to be bathed in southern California sun. The jaws of life had done their part, now it was up to me to extract him.

You have taught me how to come hair in the gentlest way possible through a picture-perfect expression of firm boundaries: comb it gently, or you don’t come it, that is your rule. I’ve adhered ever since a light bulb moment brought tears to my eyes: I force-brushed your hair, probably it was for church and we were tight on time, you cried your eyes out and banished any idea of trusting me for that moment, and I realized you looked just as cute with bedhead. So why was a forcing it? Alas, I digress.

I now combed with the same gentleness, though your trust was not my concern. I was trying to minimize the exposure time that our poor lungs would endure following this escapade. When they didn’t turn up, I began to consider calling off the search. I fingered the various ports I could access inside the vacuum in hopes they’d become lodged, and soon discovered that the vacuum was a building toy in itself. The up-pipe for the hose released with a thumbscrew, then the hose released from that with a press-fit feature that rotated. The larger, clear up-pipe from the impeller pulled free of the hose/impeller selector valve after a large latch guised as a pipe support was lifted. Ingeniously, the larger up-pipe also functioned as the hinge pin for said latch. The impeller housing was disconnected by a similar rotational press-fit feature as I’d found on the hose, and with all that removed I was able to examine each bend from each end, a well thought out design for a machine that might see the inadvertent ingestion of Lego men.

They were not there. “Hang on.” You said, another not-so-subtle expression of your newfound knowledge of time, and you ran off to your room. This time it was quick and you’d come back with something larger.

You plopped on your stomach and began “typing.” I could tell by the way you used the side of your fingers, I bad habit xeroxed from dozens of emails we’d written together over the years. The ‘puter you’d run to grab had only 5 buttons, a flappy door, and a rattly wheel, but you deftly searched for a Mashable or WikiHow article nonetheless. “Ok, fixed!” You exclaimed as the staccato snap of the baby laptop closing echoed your satisfaction. Then we continued peering, prodding, and combing. Grandma stared blankly all the while (don’t worry, her and everyone else is used to it by now – 90% of what they watch only makes sense to you and I. It’s like if you lived inside an inside joke but everyone around you had had their ability to be annoyed simply removed from their brains.)

Anyway, I went back to digging and there at the bottom, among birthday candles that I don’t remember sucking up and pieces of the lower heating element that we watched melt inside the oven last week – there was lanky guy in a pink shirt and eyeliner. They badly needed a bath, and you obliged, learning in the process that if you can’t reach the bath towels you don’t need to fall on the floor and cry until someone hears you – you can just use the hand towel instead. Oh thank God. I love you.

*Lego Friends have a markedly androgenous feel to them. Gone are the hula skirts and breasts, the eye patches and goatees of the ’90s minifigures, supplanted by tight pants, 3/4-length sleeves, platform shoes, and eyeliner in these sets.

Grammar and Swimming

You corrected my grammar this week! It touches my heart to see your confidence and your willingness to share what you’re learning. Hats off to your daycare, they must be doing a phenomenal job. You seem to enjoy learning, and that makes me really happy. Anyway, we were painting at the kitchen table, and I had brought a lamp from the closet so that we could see better. “What’s this light?” you asked in typical Phoenix fashion.

“That’s an extra lamp,” I said.

“2 lights?” You questioned.

“I like lots of light,” I answered.

And then you corrected me: “Not lots of light silly, lots of LIGHTS.” Hahahaha

“You can also say “lots of light”, you know,” I added a short time later. You just smiled and painted away. When you were done and everything was dry, we wrapped it and sent it to Grandma Ann and Grandpa Gary – a big clay handprint and a clay heart ornament.

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“I wanna do it again,” you said with water dripping down your face. Even now, I get deja vu – you must have said it 50 times this week. It’s finally cold and wet outside (though not really “snowy” per se) so we’re back to visiting the Y. Our MO is to build forts in the kids’ gym for an hour or two, then swim for the same. We met a shorter girl named Lilly in the pool at the start of the week, and Lilly was psyched on the waterslide (because she was actually almost 4.) You followed her as far as lofting one leg over the rim and into the slide’s takeoff before you got scared.

Lilly’s mom had the genius idea of putting you in just at the end of the slide so you could get a feel for it. I would lift and release, she would catch, and it went swimmingly. After two times you wanted more, but I told you no and that you could go down from the top. You assented and gave me instructions from the top of the stairs, which were all but drowned out by the roar of water pouring out at me from the slide’s exit.

I nodded and you shoved off. The water’s din became a useless silence and for a moment I feared the worst – an unintentional spin-around and horrified Phoenix now descending head-first. That can happen when you tip back and get scared – your legs shoot out stiff and wide but fail you in that they are only wide enough to catch one wall or the other, never able to press against both like the brake shoes they’re intended to mimic. And catch that one foot does – flinging you into a spin that stops halfway at the more aerodynamic head-first-and-backwards descent position. I watched this happen first hand, once, when it happened in the final turn. You were alarmed by then, but not scared, you’d had a dozen good descents by then. Actually, you soon began to enter that way, head first and backwards. Or head-first on your stomach. Or feet first on your stomach. Feet first on your back. Feet first sitting up. Or any of the above augmented by the raucous repeated thumps of your hand extolling a joyous baby adrenaline rush through rapid slaps to passing blue fiberglass.

Thanksgiving

I love you, you know that?

We had a great day yesterday. We went to bed fairly early and spent a while re-reading your favorites books: My Favorite Color, which you’ve told me you read at daycare and with your mom; and The Great ABC Treasure Hunt, which we’ve been perusing for years now.

It was my first time reading My Favorite Color, so I was caught off guard when you seemed to be able to predict the author’s favorite color before I read the words. “Maybe she’s just commenting based on the colors she sees,” I thought. But now that we’re able to have simple conversation, I decided to ask if you had read it before. You confirmed you had, and so I asked where. “At my mom’s house and at daycare,” you answered quite literally. Where. You understand that where is asking about a place. What’s more, you also understand that Who refers to a person; “At my mom’s house” and “With my mom” are responses I get often now. Equally as common but a bit more confusing is when I get answers such as who you saw whales with (yes, you told me you saw whales) and where you went on a plane: “With my dad” and “at my dad’s house.” Well, we diiid go to an aquarium that had shark rays. And we do pretend quite regularly, sometimes about flying so… You’re right on both counts, kid. I love you.

We woke up at the usual time, but you were less excited to climb out of bed than usual. You’re not always motivated to eat, but you like to go straight to playing without fail. I can probably count the times you’ve slept in on one finger.

You went to open the curtains and we hit a snag – I had taught you to come in my room and open the curtains first thing in the morning. Dad’s not a morning person, so we always made light of dad’s “suffering.” But today I asked you to leave them closed because I could see it was very bright out and I wasn’t ready. I overlooked the import of my perceived caprice on your faultless routine. Immediately, your world flipped upside down. I felt your sadness and confusion with a hollow tightness in my loins. Tears fell to the floor, and then so did you. You had woken up feeling very close and safe with dad, and I had, in a toddler sense, rebuked you. We reached out for one another’s hands, and I pulled you up on to the bed that I had yet to leave. There, wrapped in my arms, we dozed off for another two hours until John and Josie and Pearson were out front. Then we all played with clay and went to lunch.

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It’s nighttime on Thanksgiving Day now. I talked to my family this morning and went on a bike ride. Then I did homework and cleaned the common areas of the building. Two friends stopped by to say hello, and I gave them a dish to cook together since they had been sick. Two friends from Colorado reached out to me, Isaac and Allan, but nobody local. I’m good focusing on my to-do list, but saddened by the lack of connection here in Marquette. I’ve been here 2+ years and spent countless hours with parents in the local community, why don’t even the dad’s reach out to offer a Thanksgiving hello? Again, that hollow sadness. It’s hard being away from home. A week will pass until I see you again, I pray that gets fixed soon.

Grandma’s House

What an adventure! We chased each other on the beach, dug in the yard with a mini excavator, rode a 3D ride that you made me cover your eyes for, slept in a bunk bed, noticed which parts of the airport were already in Christmas time, put our suitcases through the x-ray machine together, and ran to catch short connections multiple times, to which you begin to remark with a stoic giggle, “Doing it again!”

Your favorite part was the “scary movie ride” and I don’t blame you – it was only Lego guys throwing bricks at our slow-moving vehicle, but between the heat lamps and the wind and the 3D glasses it felt very real. Welcome to 32″ Phoenix 🙂

That’s a Phoenix!

I was a little thrown off when you first said it. You pointed to a word in the book we were reading – it was The Book With No Pictures, actually – and you said, simply, “Phoenix.” Eternally wishing to encourage you, I responded in a warm, round voice where the tone meant more than my word choice: “Yeaaahh,” and then I kept reading. In my head I thought, that’s a word, your name is a word, end of story. Right?

We made it only another page, or maybe two, before you were back with a vengeance: clearly from your point of view I had missed the memo. “That’s a phoenix and that’s a phoenix and that’s a phoenix and…”

There were four in one word, and 10 on the two pages we could see. This emphatic indication that you needed to express your newfound realization continued through the rest of that book, and every book in the two days since. I am starting to see a pattern: they were mostly e’s and p’s, but also a few n’s. b’s make it in there too, because if you flip them up they’re also p’s.

But then there’s the moons. As we lay on the couch reading before church yesterday you pointed to the big letter at the top of each page. “That’s a moon,” you said about the capital B, the C, and the D. Actually, for Cc you said there were two moons. F was not a moon, nor was E, and slowly my understanding coalesced: It’s either a letter of your name, or if it’s curved it’s just a drawing of the moon. There are also other letters that we just sort of ignore for now.

This is a blast. I love how much you are learning in the morning pre-school classes they’re giving you at daycare. I had no idea you could learn so fast, but maybe it’s just that I’m seeing you less. It’s hard not seeing you for a week at a time, but it’s what we must go through until the court fixes it. We have a hearing today actually, so I have to keep this brief and get reading – we’ve had about 15 hours of hearings over the last 20 months, and I need to be familiar with all of that. I want to be an equal part of your life. Your mom doesn’t want that. So, I’m still asking the court to order a schedule that gives us equal time with you.

Currently I am at the part of the transcript where your mom is testifying that I should not be part of your future. She is saying that my presence is damaging, and that I should stop asking for more time with you. Yeesh. But let’s end on a happy note today:

I moved Fritz’s wedding invitation from the fridge to the dryer. But I outsmarted myself. Since it’s up high it was there so long that when you finally asked, “What’s this thing?” I ceased to see it. I said, “That’s the laundry basket,” and wondered how you hadn’t seen our old pink miniature laundry basket before. Duh Dad!

I’ve taken to purposefully changing little things so that you’ll ask about them. It started with “What’s this thing?” – As soon as you learned the word thing you started asking about anything new. Then as you learned more words, you substituted thing for the actual word: “What’s this paper?” “What’s this car?” “What’s this coffee?” Now, as of Friday when I picked you up from daycare (I’m writing this on a Monday morning) you were excited to express your vocabulary. My heart welled up when I heard your confidence: “I see a ‘ighthouse, I see a ore dock, I see crane, I see big rock, I see ‘tenna!”

Which brings me to my final gush about your linguistic development: you’re so bent on emphasizing the vowel sounds that you often leave off the first consonant. Acorn is acorn, but antenna is ‘tenna. Light is light, but mom’s partner is ‘ukey. It makes me sad when I haven’t seen you in a week and then you ask for him.

By the way, you took your first steps on April 29 of last year, and last week you told me you were skipping, and you’ve thought it pretty funny that you can walk backwards. Oh, and whistling – you made the slightest whistle, on accident I think, and hen you exclaimed, “I whistled!” Now you just blow one of those paper party favors that rolls itself back up and laugh.

Oh my god I almost forgot – Finley! You and Finley had the most fun I’ve ever seen you have. We were at a concert in the park and Finley and her mom and dad were there. You guys are about the same age and height. You chased each other, and you called me in, and then Finley’s dad jumped in and we made such a ruckus for all those old people! I had given you two glow stick necklaces, so I helped you take one off, and you gave it to Finley, and then later I hooked them together around you guys and you danced. Then it turned into a game of you hiding it from Finley and her climbing under tables to get it. Then you fell asleep. It was wondrous. Now I really have to go hahahha.