giving thanks

At Thursday’s dinner we were going around the table listing the things that made us grateful when Max blurted, “I’m thankful for pets and Uncle Dave.” I’m sure Uncle Dave was thankful for that. 

Me? I’m thankful for “leg pits,” which is what Max calls the backs of his knees. Last week he begged Sarah to tickle them.

This morning, Sarah and the kids dug through two bedroom closets and collected half a room’s worth of old toys (and some fairly new ones) to give to other kids, kids who have no toys. Mia gave up her princess stuff, including the tiaras, including the princess castle, including the dresses, including the Barbies. The Barbies! Because other kids have none.

And maybe, just a little, because she knows she needs to clear out room for Hannukah. Doesn’t matter. I’m proud.

And leg pits. That still kills me.

 

the book of joob

She keeps a journal. It’s in one of those old composition notebooks, the ones with the black and white mottled covers. Sometimes she lets me read it, sometimes she doesn’t, and I always respect her feelings on that. Kills me to do it, because all I want to know in this world is what’s going on in that little head of hers, but I do it all the same. I have to.

Sometimes it’s about what she did over the weekend. More often, it’s about what stickers or books or toys her grandparents bought her. And then there’s this one:

I love my dad.

I love my dad

becus he has no

joob and wen he

has no joob then

he sumtimes can

pic me up from

scool urly.

***

Sunday is Father’s Day – my sixth, incredibly. Each is better than the last, because each day the kids get more magnificent. Couple weeks ago they held a debate on the question of robot poop – Max says they poop cannonballs, but Mia says it’s more like screws and bolts. I think it depends on the robot’s diet. The jury’s out. And Saturday, Max drew a frog and named it Snort, and this is how he explained the name to his sister:

“My frog’s name is snort because he snorted one of his boogers into the ocean. He had a booger that was really good, and he snorted it, and it fell into the water.”

And in fact, there’s a really good booger in the water. See for yourself.

***

Mia learned to tie her shoes this week.

Max ate a 64-ounce clamshell of blueberries watching Caillou.

Max still comes into our bed at night, but not every night.

Max is uncommonly polite. He uses please and thank you like they were Skittles. He also farts a lot, and this makes him laugh. A lot.

Mia’s favorite food is Skittles. I have never given her Skittles.

Max doesn’t like pizza. It has sauce, and he doesn’t like sauce. He also doesn’t like ketchup, or white sauce, or spaghetti with red sauce. The only sauce Max likes is syrup.

And Fig Newtons. Which he described to me as “the thing with the sauce with the bread around it.” He likes Fig Newtons.

Mia and Max only eat the heads off broccoli.

Mia read a whole book in bed tonight. She called me in to tell me about it. Her smile kept the room lit even after I made her turn out the light.

Max is coming around on shorts.

Every night before bath, Max chooses a plastic animal or dinosaur to bring into the tub. And every night, he asks me if that particular animal or dinosaur swims, and if it swims underwater too. Every night, I say yes to both questions.

Max draws dogs. He draws cats. He draws bunnies. He draws mice. Yesterday, he drew a dog chasing a cat. Chasing a bunny. Chasing…no, not a mouse. A ball of yarn. The ball of yarn was chasing the mouse. The mouse was chasing an ant.

Mia refuses to tell me about her day. It’s because it’s her day, not my day. That’s what she told me.

Max still gets tired of walking. I get tired of carrying him.

***

And then there’s this: I got a joob. I’ve been working at it for five months, and right now I’m thrilled, but I’m not.

I’ve not gone to work for five years. I’ve worked, but I’ve not gone to work. I’ve written. And though this job is insanely close to home – close enough that I’ll commute on foot – it’s not at home, which means I can’t watch kids and still work. Which brings with it all sorts of complications involving daycare and after-school care and babysitters and juggling and I don’t know what else. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out soon, though. We’ll have to. I start next month.

It’s good. I’m happy. This is what I’ve been working toward. And it’s as close to a perfect situation as I could have imagined. It’s just.

Well. I like picking her up urly.

 

here’s something.

So Danny sent some of his people this way to help us with our fundraising, which is beautiful, because I mean, Danny has a lot of people to send. If you’re reading this and didn’t know, Sarah and I are training for a marathon, and we’re raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Want to help? Go here.

Meantime, I offer you a little something in return. It’s a recipe for a cool summer soup, sort of like a gazpacho, but with a melony twist. Mia invented it on a lazy Saturday a couple weeks ago – we’d spent the morning in the pool, and Max was napping, so Sarah made sandwiches and Mia made…

Watermelon Water Bisque

3 cups water
one string cheese
2 slices of watermelon
A handful of toasted soy nuts

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Let it soup sit for 20 minutes to allow the nuts and cheese to begin to soften and decompose. Enjoy!

Or not. Truth be told, it didn’t taste quite as good as it sounds (and I know how good it sounds), but good for Mia for trying – she’s a creator, that one. Still, she really wanted us to love it, so I had a spoonful and made a big deal over it, and a while later, after some very effective badgering, Sarah pretended to take a taste as well. She made an even bigger deal over it, then wolfed down the rest of the batch while Mia was in the other room. She stood over the sink while she ate, lest some of the soup spill. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it spilled. A lot of it.

Sometimes you love your kids so much you lie to them.

 

portrait of a five-year-old

Mia has started to whistle.

I don’t mean inadvertently, like the way you’d report a fan belt gone awry. “I don’t know what the deal is. She just whistles, usually when it’s cold or when we get up above 60 miles per hour.” Not that way. I mean really whistling. Or really trying, anyway – she’s not quite there yet. Truth be told, it’s a thin whistle – reedy, even – like a bad fan belt on a cold morning. But the fundamentals are there. She just needs to practice.

It’s just the latest leap forward in a summer of leaps. She’s five now, and she’s finally stopped asking which shoe is for which foot. She can get herself into and out of the car seat with no help whatsoever, even if it does take her hours to do it. At the pool, she holds her breath and dunks herself underwater.

It’s amazing to me. It just doesn’t seem like that long ago that she was an infant, small enough to fit in my shirt pocket. Now she dresses herself and throws a ball overhand and puts together jigsaw puzzles. And she reads chapter books – well, we read, but she follows along, sometimes three chapters a night, and she can pick out words if you nudge her to do so.

And she’s thinking, too.

Not that long ago, we were barbecuing, and Mia was laying with her head on Sarah’s lap, looking up at the clouds. I don’t know where their conversation started, but as I passed them with a plate full of corn in my hand, this is what I picked up:

“Did god make the earth?” That’s Mia asking, not Sarah.

“Yep,” says Sarah, because really, what else do you say to a 5-year-old?

“Then I think he’s a giant.”

Which, I mean. It’s good deductive reasoning, right?

And now we’re in mid-July, and in a few weeks Mia will say goodbye to daycare and hello to kindergarten. She gets so excited about it she can’t stand still – she literally dances in place, jumping up and wiggling her bottom with pride at what she’s about to accomplish.

In June, we walked over to the school (it’s about 300 feet from the house) to register her, and they did a pre-screening. She sat at a very short table with one of the kindergarten teachers and identified numbers and letters and colors and shapes while Max and I sat at another very short table around a corner and fought over crayons. They gave her a certificate, as you can see, and she was thrilled, as you can see, and soon my girl will be in elementary school.

Which just makes me shake my head and raise my eyebrows and let out a low, reedy whistle.

 

i am the greatest

Four days ago, Mia asked me to help her spell “Happy Father’s Day.” That’s how I remembered it was coming.

I was reading Sports and eating Raisin Bran (which I’ve recently rediscovered), and she padded down the hallway with a piece of paper folded in half, and I dictated my own Father’s Day card.

Which wasn’t bad.

Then, on Friday, both kids brought home gifts from school, and both of them had named me “World’s Greatest Dad.” Both of them. Two for two.

Which ain’t bad either. I mean, I was joking about that in the last post. But for real. World’s Greatest! Can’t beat that with a bat.

And then? Today? Sarah and the kids took me to my first Dodger game of the year. And, okay. It was 135 degrees. And sticky, what with the ketchup and the sunscreen and the snowcones and Mia eating her “frozen” lemonade over my right leg. And Max, who passed the third inning playing “crush the peanut shells one by one,” spent the fourth inning playing “wipe my feet on Daddy’s shorts.” And the Dodgers got pasted, 10-4, and their First Baseman of the Future nearly lost his right kneecap in a collision with the right field wall. And we had to leave in the sixth because Max was starting to melt in about three different ways, which means that we missed “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which has been putting Reines children to sleep for five years.

Fine. But you know what? Mia sat on my lap and asked me about the baseball diamond, and we spent the game trying to catch a foul ball, on every play, even the intentional walk. And as I carried him away from the stadium, his legs straddling my belly, Max rested his head on my shoulder and pressed his nose against my neck and pulled me closer.

I love Father’s Day.

 

forgive me father, for i have slacked

There’s just so much I haven’t written. I want to, but I haven’t, and I probably won’t, so this will have to suffice.

I never wrote about Lausanne. I never wrote about the cross-country drive we took in our last week in Switzerland, a drive prompted by Mia’s need to see – and Sarah’s need to show Mia – one last real live castle. So we drove to Lausanne, and then down through Montreaux to Vevey and beyond, to Chateau de Chillon, the 800-year-old castle set hard on Lake Geneva. The castle is gorgeous, as were Sarah’s stories, complete and fabricated memories of where the princesses stood, where they danced, where they slept, where they greeted their people.

The kids loved it, especially Mia, but neither of them loved Chillion as much as they loved Broc, which is where the chocolate is made. That’s why we went there, to see the chocolate get made, and to smell the city, and we did both, and then they left us alone in a room with bad lighting and about 50 pounds of fresh chocolate, with and without cream, and with and without nougat, and with and without milk.

When we left, Mia jumped up and down in the parking lot and told us, “This is the best day of my whole life!” and at five, she may be right.

***

I never wrote about the trip to the wild animal park, a couple weeks earlier, with JY and the kids. It’s a zoo with no walls, and the deer and whatnot roam the same pathways you do without pause, as if they were expecting you. Which of course they were, because you’re the people with the food, and you’re there every day. Max fed a ram, and the ram looked Max in the eye, and I watched the ram. Very closely.

On the way to the park, JY noticed the kids’ shorts and sandals and stared at me, agog, wondering aloud at my foolhardiness. That’s when it occurred to me: we were on our way to a wild animal park. In the rolling, wooded hills. On a hot day. In the spring. Which is high tick season. In maybe the tickiest region on the planet.

I turned and looked at Auxane and Andrielle. Long pants. Closed shoes. And socks…socks pulled over the pant legs.

We didn’t bring home any ticks that day fortunately. But I did get a World’s Greatest Dad trophy.

***

I never wrote about the Monday before we left, after the packers came and took everything, when we walked down to the lake and rented a paddleboat. I’d been waiting all winter for that, and I’ll miss it all summer. Not the paddleboat, per se, but the lake – the chance to do something with it besides fattening its duck population. Sarah sat in the back to make sure Max didn’t take up swimming, and Mia and I sat in front and paddled, and from our lazy vantage point, we watched the paragliders spin in endless circles above our house.

***

Did I write…? No, I never did. I never wrote about Mia’s birthday party. We invited everyone in her class, about a dozen 5-year-olds, maybe more. We invited siblings, too. We even invited the parents to drop off their 5-year-olds and their 5-year-olds’ siblings and just go shopping. And then we gave the kids sweets. And we went to the schoolyard across the street for a treasure hunt, and to slide the slide and spin on the giant rope spinner. There’s a reason I didn’t write about that party. I’m still too tired to write about that party.

***

I didn’t write yet about the marathon we’re running. We’re doing it to honor Leanne, and we’re doing it to raise money for the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society, and if you want to help us out, we’d be thrilled.

***

I never wrote about the morning of our flight home, when Max walked up the stairs with a huge smile, his eyes wide and his eyebrows high. “Daddy!” he shouted. “Daddy, Mommy said we can go on the airplane!”

“For real?” I asked. “Today?”

“Yeah!” he said, still shouting. “And it’s so big!”

***

I know I didn’t write about Noel. He’s our neighbor, and he may be the Greatest Neighbor Ever. I know he’s mine.

While we were gone, the couple next door cared for our plants, watched over the house, and took out our trash, and they were wonderful.

While we were gone, Noel came over every day and
• opened the sliders to get some air circulating
• flushed all the toilets
• opened all the faucets
• flipped lights on and off at different hours
• checked the sprinklers to make sure they weren’t geysers
• occasionally opened the doors to the cars to air them out
• opened and shut the refrigerator doors a couple times to air out the empty fridge.

Oh, and on Sundays? He raced the next-door neighbors over to our house for the privilege of taking out the trash.

I know you wish you had a Noel.

***

I never wrote about the 24-hour milk barn.

***

I never wrote about two days at Disneyland for Mia’s 5th birthday, about the singles line that lets me run through the roller coaster twice while Sarah takes the kids on a single spin around the Ferris Wheel. I never wrote about the lunch with the Disney Princesses at Ariel’s Grotto, about the fact that we were chosen from tens of families to be the royal family, and to announce the presence of the princesses to the whole restaurant. I think we were chosen because we were more sophisticated than all those other rubes, but it could also have been random.

I didn’t write about the button Mia got for being a birthday girl, or about the utter elation that followed throughout the day as stranger after stranger wished her a wonderful birthday and asked how old she was. Honest to a fault, she explained carefully that she was four, but that her birthday was on Monday, and that she would be five years old then. Stranger after stranger nodded, and moved on.

***

And I never wrote about Memorial Day weekend, when we walked to the Vons with the kids in a little red wagon. We removed the kids and filled the wagon with groceries – probably 40 pounds of groceries, maybe more – and started walking home in the heat, but Max insisted that the wagon was his to pull. Never mind that the whole contraption surely weighed more than him. He grabbed the handle behind him, put his head down, and leaned into the thing, starting slowly and getting a head of steam and pulling the wagon, all told, at least 70 percent of the way home. At least – I tried to help speed things along, but he threw a fit. The Max wants what the Max wants.

Stubborn kid, right?

That night, we cooked S’mores in the microwave and made brats on the barbecue and slept in the backyard. Sarah and I had a proper tent. Mia had her Barbie castle. And Max slept in the giant ladybug. The dew made us wet, and the air made us cold. And the ground made us sore.

Well, it made me sore, anyway.

***

Wow. That was a long time coming.

 

trois, deux, un…

There are three weeks left in Sarah’s assignment here, which means there are four weeks left before we get back to LA, and about five before I get back to school, and the kids get back to daycare, and Sarah gets back to American Idol. That’s a lot to get back to, and we’re beginning to get excited – Sarah and Mia have been ex-ing out days on the calendar for a month now, and we’re down around 25 days at this point.

That’s not to say that we’re sitting by the door with our plane tickets in hand or anything. Since I last wrote, we’ve been to Paris, we entertained some handsome visitors from the Pacific Northwest, and we even managed to shoehorn in a trip to the slopes (finally). And through it all we kept up with the coffee-drinking and the bread-buying, so we’ve been busy, and we’ll continue to be busy, clear through to the 26th, when we strap the kids back into fancy-class and fly back home. Which is why I need to pause now, and record.

So let’s see. Paris.

It may have been our last big trip from Switzerland, so it was all a little bittersweet. Everything felt like the last to me. And everything was extraordinary. So here’s Paris, beginning and ending with two insanely long paragraphs, specially designed to commemorate the train rides there and back. Speaking of which, they were fine.

The train rides, I mean. Fine there, fine back. I was worried, but on the way there, with just me and the kids and Sarah awaiting us, the kids slept, and they watched movies, and they ate sandwiches, and they were fantastic, the whole five hours. Just wonderful, total troopers, and I could have boxed them up right then and sold them as-is to anyone on the train, and gotten a really good price, I know it. I didn’t, because Sarah would have been irritated, but I could have, and that knowledge alone made me smile, just a little, to myself. The ride home was also easy, but not quite as easy, despite Sarah’s presence – the Sunday train was packed, and we shared our six-seat compartment with a pair of stragglers, neither of whom seemed terribly thrilled to be in the car with the kids. The six-minute transfer in Strassbourg was trying, to put it lightly, because Sarah didn’t realize until we reached Train B that she’d left her purse on Train A, which resulted in me executing a 1,000-meter dash, down and up a flight of stairs and down and up another, with only a minute left before Train B was scheduled to leave for Basel. I made it back in time, because I’m blindingly fast, but I was empty-handed because, as Sarah had by then realized, she had the purse with her after all. Meanwhile, the train was late leaving, which is probably the real reason I made it back in time. Okay, it was the reason. So…hooray for French inefficiency!

Told you that graf was a long one. Here’s the rest of our trip, broken into smaller grafs for your convenience:

We stayed in the Opera section of Paris, just north of the Jardin des Tuileries, just east of Champs Elysees. The location was great – close to everything we wanted it to be close to – and we walked all over town. We stayed at the Opera Richepanse, which is pronounced “Oprah Rich-Pants,” or at least it is when we say it.

The Rich-Pants is lovely and quaint, though it’s built above a metro line, a fact that became clear to us within about ten minutes. Didn’t bother us, but then, we had Max in the room, so it may have bothered the metro passengers. If it did, we didn’t hear anything about it.

I spent Friday morning in a neighborhood park with the kids while Sarah tied up some loose business ends, and I learned two things: Nanny culture is just as big in Paris as it is anywhere else, and all the nannies in Paris are African.

In our family, crepes are now called Paris pancakes. Man, I love Paris pancakes.

I asked every cab driver about the upcoming elections. It wasn’t easy, because only one of our cabbies spoke English, and he wasn’t terribly chatty. Another guy broke it down for me, though, and his take is my take until I do a little more research, which I probably won’t. To wit: Bayrou is good. Royal, the socialist, is crazy (as he indicated by twirling both index fingers next to his ears). And Sarkozy is bad for black people. Or people with forearms, I’m not sure. All I know is that he said “Sarkozy bad for…” – and then he pinched the skin on his forearm.

He also said Sarkozy was going to win. So, you know. Bummer, dude.

The city was blanketed by men in blankets. Actually, men in kilts. Scottish men in kilts. Apparently, the Scots were in town for a big rugby match for the Six Nations Chalice, or whatever it is, and the fans were out in force. The Scots lost, but not by enough to give the French the championship. The Irish won that. In case you were wondering.

No, I didn’t think you were wondering.

We spent Saturday afternoon in the Jardin des Tuileres. Sarah rode the carousel with the kids five or ten times (I didn’t count, but it took a while). And then the kids bounced on the trampolines for about two hours (I didn’t count, but it took awhile). And the sun shone. And we ate sandwiches. And it was lovely.

We lost Max’s Neigh-Neigh. Six weeks earlier, in Amsterdam, we lost Neigh-Neigh’s predecessor, also called Neigh-Neigh. We now have Neigh-Neigh III, and as long as we don’t visit any more world capitals, we should be fine.

Mia had one goal for Paris, to see the Eiffel Tower. She knows it from the Dora DVD she watches every couple of days, including on the train to Paris. I don’t know if she thought she’d see Dora there, or if she just wanted to share Dora’s air, but either way, she was positively giddy when we got there Thursday night. We waited in line for an hour to board the elevator to the top, and while we did, Mia literally hopped up and down, punctuating her landings with cries of “EIFFel! TOWer! EIFFel! TOWer!”

While we waited, the lights on the Tower sparkled, as they do at the top of every hour. Mia’s eyes sparkled right back. She may remember that moment forever. I think I will.

And then there were the Parisians. The unbelievably friendly Parisians.

No, really.

Last time I was in Paris, I walked into a visitor’s welcome center and politely – even timidly – asked the woman there if she spoke English. I asked in French, and I apologized for not knowing French. I may as well have genuflected, but it did nothing for me – she spat out non, and turned back to her paperwork. Mind you, this was in the welcome center! It was far from the only such experience I had. I left town that day.

Things have changed. Maybe the French have realized that they need tourists more than the tourists need them. Maybe we just caught them on a good weekend. Or maybe it just helps to have a little more money, a little less scruff, and a couple of really cute, really well-behaved kids. Whatever the reason, things were different this time out. The guy who made my Paris pancakes handed them to me with a smile and a bow. The woman who sold me two roses for my wife and daughter chatted happily with me – in English. The aforementioned cabbies were, as aforementioned, very gregarious. And the hotel staff was tremendous, loading the kids up with candy every time we passed. The manager even went a step further, stopping us one afternoon on our way to the elevator to give them presents – a yo-yo for Mia, a toy phone for Max. She later brought Mia behind the counter and loaded up her bag of treasures with soaps and lotions from the supply cabinet. None of it felt like business; all of it felt like kindness. What a treat it was. What a treat it all was.

So that was almost certainly our last big trip in Europe, which is too bad. But at least it was a good one. A great one, even.

One more thing. I mentioned the good-looking out-of-towners who came to Switzerland all the way from Portland, Oregon, and that was another treat. Dave and Karmin spent a couple days on an airplane last Sunday, and when they made it to Zug, we gave them some raclette and some Spanish wine, because nothing peps up a weary traveler like bread and cheese and wine. They were asleep within minutes.

The next morning, I made some rösti. Then we got sandwiches on baguettes. Then fondue. Then meusli with yoghurt. And älpermagronen, Switzerland’s answer to mac-and-cheese, with potatoes and onions added. Oh, and a knockwurst. And a lot of coffee and chocolate. They left Wednesday morning, and as I type this they’re in Paris, presumably eating anything but bread and cheese.

Want some more pictures?

 

this is a recording

I haven’t written much lately. The reasons are far from profound. Sarah’s been working some difficult hours at work, and so I’ve spent more time than usual parenting, and Max is napping less, so I’ve had less time during the day to write, and it rained all week, so we spent less time on the playground and more time at home looking for what to do, which inevitably means drawing pictures with Mia and (for) Max. At night, I’ve been making other words, words that pay, or I’ve been talking (and listening) to Sarah, who had a hell of a week, or I’ve been watching old movies borrowed from the library and new TV shows bought from the video store then sold back at a discount the next day. (Since I’m an auslander, every movie costs me 30 francs, but they buy it back for 22 francs when I return it.) (By the way, my five-word review of the first eight episodes of “Lost,” which we plowed through this weekend? “Not awesome, but way, way better than the travel show with the toothy guy on CNN International.”) (I think that’s five words.)

Point being, it was a tiring week.

It wasn’t a bad week, though – Sarah’s hours notwithstanding. We’ve only got about eight weeks left before we put a stamp on the kids and follow them back to California, and I guess I’ve been a bit wistful about the time. In two months I start back with school, and Sarah’s back into a routine, and the kids are back in daycare, and I may not get another chance like this for a long time, maybe ever. I know that. I’m savoring it.

I’m also trying to remember it, even as it happens. That was the point of this blog in the first place – to communicate with you all, but also to keep a record of this trip so that I wouldn’t forget it in a year, or five years, or 20. Or at least so that I wouldn’t forget all of it.

So that’s what I’m thinking about today. Recording. And though I have other things to write about, other things that I will write about, and soon, it’s a good time, right now, while I’m thinking about it, and thinking about them, to take a bit of a verbal snapshot of these kids, even if it’s a blurry shot, and it only captures a small part of them. Because if I don’t, I’ll surely forget, just like I’ve forgotten Max’s first words, or how old Mia was when she first crawled. (I do remember her first step, though – the television was on, and she was drawn to it. So little has changed.)

So anyway. For the record – for my record – this is (a little bit of) how the short people who live with me look and sound and act and are in early March, 2007:

Max speaks with some kind of New York accent. Could be Brooklyn, could be the Bronx, I don’t know, but when he says “Crocodile,” it rhymes with “Popeye Doyle.”

Mia sings on the pot. Loud. And she uses the sink and her knees and the metal toilet paper holder as drums. Sometimes she’s in there for an hour, and she comes out with deep red creases on the back of her legs. This is a problem in the morning when we’re late for school.

The hour. Not the creases.

Mia is slow. Extraordinarily slow. Actually, a better description would be “easily distracted,” but the net effect is the same. I ask her to get her shoes on, and a half hour later she’s sitting near the shoes with a collection of dolls. This, too, is a problem in the morning.

Mia has a bad habit of ignoring me when she doesn’t want to hear what I’m telling her. I have a bad habit of letting this drive me crazy. We’re working on that. Well, I am, anyway.

Mia loves to draw. Could do it all day. She just drew a – well, I’ll let her describe it: “Daddy? This blue stuff here is the ocean, and those orange things are the fishies, and the green stuff is the seaweed, and the yellow thing is the sun, this brown and orange thing is the mountain, and that’s the palm tree, and that purple thing is the seal sunning himself on the rock.”

Mia makes up songs to go with her drawings. Like, “I am a seal and I’m going in the ocean, blub blub blub!” I’d transcribe the music here, but I can’t transcribe music.

Max likes to draw, but he likes it even more when you draw for him: “Daddy, can you make a blue car? Daddy, can you make a blue car? Daddy, can you make a blue car?”

Except it’s more like this: “Daddy, gan you make a ba-lue toar?”

Somebody – I won’t say who – came home from school with bugs in her hair last week, and now I spend the bath hour picking her nits like a Rhesus monkey.

The kids fight over who gets the kitty-cat towel and who gets the butterfly towel.

Max has a tendency to melt down. He doesn’t quite trust his words just yet, so when he gets frustrated, he doesn’t talk, he just gets upset. We’re working on that.

Max has started sleeping without the gate on his bed. We’re a family of big-time bed-sleepers now.

Usually.

Mia and Max have pretty good internal clocks. Most days they sleep from half-past-eight to seven in the morning. Some days, though – like today, for instance – Mia starts singing – loud – at six, and since her bed is just three and a half feet above his bed, they both end up awake and somewhat hyper. That’s when I take them upstairs to draw while I write and Sarah sleeps.

Occasionally, my writing is interrupted by drawings of seals and cars.

At the supermarket, Max pushes a miniature cart whenever I’ll let him. He likes to put the groceries into the cart himself, and the way he does this by raising the items over his head with both hands, then slamming them into the basket like a professional wrestler might.

I do not let Max handle the eggs.

The kids fight over the elevator buttons.

Max’s favorite song is “Wheels on the Bus.” If you ask him for music, he will give you this. On my father’s birthday, three of us sang him “Happy Birthday” in front of the computer. But the really loud one, he was singing “Wheels.”

Mia’s friends are all girls. She’s four. I thought that happened later. I guess not.

Mia loves books. Max loves the library. This is because they have a kids section at the library, and in the kids section, there’s a toy truck.

Max insists on putting on his own pants. He has trouble pulling them over his bum.

Max insists on climbing into his car seat all by himself. No matter how long it takes.

Max insists on climbing stairs and ladders by himself. No matter how precarious.

Max insists on walking everywhere.

Except when he doesn’t. When we get out of the car at Mia’s school, Max immediately announces that we walk too fast, and that he needs to be carried. “You’re too bast for me.” I promise to walk slow, and to hold his hand. He sits down, rolls onto his back, and looks up at me. “You’re too bast for me.”

Max never wants to leave Mia’s classroom. He wants to stay and play with the cars. The only way I can coax him out is by mentioning the fish in the hallway.

Max never wants to leave the fish tank in the hallway. I have to lure him with talk of the library.

Max never wants to leave the library. The only way I can get him to leave is by promising lunch and a nap.

Even the nap is a hard-sell. Some days, the only way I can get him down is to promise him that we’ll pick up Mia as soon as he wakes up. Those days, his last words before closing his eyes are “Go pick up Mia.”

Invariably, he smiles when he says that.

 

so much depends on the white balcony

It’s been a strange week for us. For starters, Max has for some reason been dreaming angry of late. He wakes up two, three, sometimes five times a night, screaming and indignant, rejecting his mom in favor of me, then rejecting me for Mommy. He’s been, frankly, a pain in the Alps, and none of us slept well for about five days running, until last night. Last night, something inside him realigned, and he slept peacefully – which is to say, without screaming at anyone – staying in his bed until the sun came up to reveal a balcony full of snow.

These are not minor details, the balcony and the snow. We’ve been waiting for months for that balcony to fill up with snow, but it never did. Snow fell on the Alps, and we went to the Alps to see it, but didn’t fall on us at home. And it fell in our neighborhood, right near us – minutes from us, even. Minutes on foot. But it never fell on us. Not on our balcony.

That’s not to say we haven’t had weather. Just last week, the skies went weird and the rain went all sideways, and an honest-to-god hurricane, Hurricane Kyrill, blew through Northern Europe, with winds up around 125 miles per hour. I never knew Europe had storms like that, but this thing was no joke, knocking out rail service and knocking over trucks and knocking down trees, though it did no damage here. All it did for us was howl and strut like a rooster, leaving our streets peppered with tree branches and disfiguring one shutter that we had foolishly left unmoored. The next morning, though, the balcony was still clear.

Not anymore.

The snow is good news for a lot of reasons. It’s good news because Mia’s been begging for “snow candy” – basically, snow with maple syrup on it – ever since Sarah told her she used to make it as a kid. It’s also good because I’ve only got another three months left in Switzerland, and I was beginning to wonder if I was going to be able to ski the Alps before we go home. And it’s especially good because 35 degrees and rainy is only charming for so long – eventually, you want Mother Nature to just commit already.

Well, she done committed, at least six inches worth, which is how I found out that our company car doesn’t have snow tires. I drove Mia to school this morning at a robust 15 miles per hour, stretching what ought to be a 10-minute drive into close to a half-hour, but everyone survived. That includes, by the way, the oblivious pedestrian who stepped into a crosswalk in Baar just as I was gliding slowly to a halt. She looked up in time to jump back onto the curb as I eased up right next to her, which is good, because even after three months I don’t know how to say “I’m sorry for breaking your hip” in Swiss German.

The snow today is good for one other reason: its impeccable timing. Yesterday morning, Max and I took Susan, visiting from Chicago, to the peak of Rigi, our local 6,000-foot pre-Alp. There was but a dusting of white stuff up there, but that was a fair trade-off for us, since today’s storm would have obscured one of the most spectacular vistas I’ve ever seen: a 360-degree expanse of mountains shooting through a totally still cloud layer. In other words, it would have been Jungfrau, revisited.

Mark Twain climbed Rigi once and wrote about it in “A Tramp Abroad” – of the view from the summit, he said, “We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze in drunken ecstasy and drink it in.” He also described “a limitless expanse of tossing white-caps,” and “peaks draped in imperishable snow,” and “radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith” through a cloudbank, and I’m not about to try to out-write Mark Twain, so I’ll just say, um, “Yeah, what he said.”

I do, however, have a better digital camera than Mark Twain ever had, so I’ll add this bit of information, which is somehow missing from my copy of “A Tramp Abroad”:

(Note: this is just the close-up. Click here to see the whole panorama.)

There’s more to tell, but I’ll tell it later. Right now I’ve got pack, and then I’ve got to sleep. Tomorrow we go to Amsterdam so that Max can try hash.

We’re hoping it’ll chill him out.

 

yes it’s still hanukkah, part VI

There are days when it’s exhausting. I love them. I love them more than anything, I really do. But there are days when I get whipped by it all, and by the end of these kinds of days, I’m bent over, like a fighter who’s been taking body blows for 10 rounds. Maybe I’m a wuss, I don’t know, but I am, to put it plainly, completely worn out.

Today was such a day. For most of ten hours, I spent my time coaxing and arguing, prodding, promising, wheedling, reassuring, arbitrating. I pushed, I got pushed, I scolded, I warned, I implored, I refused. I coddled. I begged to no avail, and I fended off begging with some success. I deflected. I distracted. I directed. I ignored whining. I tried, anyway.

I filled cups, I wiped noses, I mopped floors, I got juice, I got milk, I made meals, I washed hair, I calmed nerves, I kissed tears, I bundled children, I installed shoes, I lifted 35 pounds into a car seat, I lifted 35 pounds out of a car seat, then I repeated it with 40 pounds. And then I did it again. I walked very…very…slowly, and then I ran to deflect danger. I was ridden like a pony, I was sat upon like a log, and was walked on like a doormat – literally. Maybe figuratively.

I had no personal space. At all.

Of course, there’s plenty more. I also laughed and sang and wrestled and tickled. I played Connect Four. When’s the last time you played Connect Four? I held the boy while he fell asleep, then I held him when he woke up, upset, needing a long, warm hug from his father. I sat on a big, comfortable chair and read a pretty good story about hippopotamuses and elephants while the two of them nuzzled my neck and chest. So I am not complaining. I’m just saying. When the whole thing was over – before it was over – I was beat.

Then Sarah got home. Then we lit candles. It’s day six. Then I went for a long walk. From here to the Kolinplatz, over to the Postplatz and then the bahnhof by way of the Bundesplatz. I platz-hopped. At the bahnhof I browsed magazines and bought a newspaper and a Mars Bar. I ate the Mars Bar slowly. Nobody asked for a bite. Then I started up Baarerstrasse, right on Lüssiweg, up past the 24-hour milk barn, past the Kantonschule, across Aegeristrasse, and home. It took an hour in the bitter cold, but it seemed like ten minutes. My hands never left my coat pockets.

I walked fast. Sometimes very fast.

Tonight, that was all I wanted.