sitting out

Max came home from school with a fever today. Sarah got the call at 11:20 and was at his side within 20 minutes, and she watched him bounce home ahead of her and wondered about the diagnosis.

His forehead felt fine, and he looked fine, so she gave him lunch and set him up for a nap and asked why, as Miss Lillian had reported, he laid down on the playground during playtime, then again on the carpet when the class went back inside. Miss Lillian’s right, after all. That’s not like Max.

Turns out the devil’s in the details. Turns out Max doesn’t have a fever after all. Turns out they had an exercise in democracy at the Enriching Hour today, a vote between Red Rover Red Rover and Teacher Teacher What Time Is It, and Red Rover won, which meant that Max lost. So did Isabella, but she apparently shrugged and got on with the business of Red Rover. Max, on the other hand, gave himself the rest of the morning off.

Sarah too, come to think of it.

Mia’s got another drawbridge tooth. It’s the front bottom left one, the only front tooth she’s got in her mouth, and it folds down like a movie theater seat, and Sarah can barely look without turning white. Not sure why that is, since we have that at one point or another, but Sarah says that teeth aren’t supposed to do that, and really, she’s right.

There’s another one shifting too — the right front…whatever the one next to the front teeth are is. And with the top two probably six months away from coming in, and with the bottom front two also looking sluggish, we’re starting to grapple with the possibility that Mia won’t have any more teeth by the time spring arrives. Which means she gets to eat all the candy she wants. Because. I mean.

Last week I took her and her brother to the dentist, and they did terrific — the promise of toys and stickers always puts them on their best behavior. Still, the reality of the dentist may finally be settling in. When the hygienist tried to move her tongue aside to look at the inside of her molars, Mia squealed and recoiled, and the woman reflexively pulled away. When the hygienist turned away to look for a new tool, Mia turned to her and, with all the stern authority of a cop, said very simply, “Don’t do that.” 

   

 

car talk

We were driving to school – first Max today, because we had to stop by and get grapes for Mia’s Kinderclub party. I was thanking the kids for my Father’s Day – it had been lunch in Malibu with my parents, then Kung Fu Panda, then Chinese food at Lakeview Gardens to stay with a theme. And there was a fabulous card, too, for which I was grateful – “Thank you guys,” I said. “Thank you for the beautiful card you gave me.”

To which Max snorted, “Car? We didn’t give you a car.”

“No no,” I said. “Not car. Card.”

Mia stepped in. “You said car. You said we gave you a car.”

“No, well, I didn’t say that, but anyway, if that’s what you heard, that’s not what I meant to say. I was thanking you for the card you gave me.”

By now, Max was incredulous. “Why would we give you a car? You already have a car.”

Then Mia: “Car-duh,” she spat. “Car-duh. Not car. Daddy, we didn’t give you a car, we gave you a card. Car-duh.”

I gave up. “Okay, sorry,” I said. “Card. You’re right. You didn’t give me a car, you gave me a card. I had that wrong. I don’t know what I was thinking. Sorry about that. But thank you for the card. Car-duh. Card.”

That seemed to settle things. The backseat got quiet for about a minute. And then, from Max’s seat, very quietly: “Why would we give you a car? Pssh.”

Well, I know what I’m not getting for my birthday.

 

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.

 

more than one way to show your love

Max and I watched two swans tango today. We were out at the shore, having just come from a lazy train-station snack, and the rain was pocking the still water as though each drop was a tiny pebble. Next to us was a class of kindergartners, with their reflective orange vests, heaving fistfuls of breadcrumbs at the gulls and ducks and pigeons. The bounty was causing a bit of a melee – an actual feeding frenzy, right next to the docks – and in the middle of it all, completely oblivious, were the two swans floating bill-to-bill, gently swaying their heads back and forth, dancing. They placed their cheeks together, then switched sides, then switched again.

It looked, strangely, like an extended air-kiss, two beautiful birds just loving one another, and it was mesmerizing.

And then the water changed, as the rain-gravel peppered the water’s surface and the ducks scattered, and the swans split apart and began to plunge their heads under the surface in search of food. I picked up Max and made a quick retreat to the car, snacking on my son’s neck and stomach as he giggled and shouted “No don’t gobble me!”

But I did, I did gobble him. I figured I had to, if only to reestablish my dominance after being badgered into stopping at the lake in the first place. We had been on our way home for lunch and a nap when Max shouted at me from the back seat. “No go home!” he ordered. “I want go see seagulls!”

It’s become something of a habit lately as he experiments with boundaries and all that. He’s been more insistent lately, and at times it’s pretty overbearing. Like today, after the lake, when Max tried to order me downstairs to find his puppy dog.

“Go get it!” he shouted, pointing downstairs and putting on the sternest face he knows.

I scoffed at him, naturally. “Why are you telling me to go get it?” I asked, then reminded him, “You don’t tell me what to do, I tell you. I’m the boss, applesauce.”

To which he scrunched up his brow solemnly and declared, “No! I’m not applesauce, and you’re not the boss.” Then he poked his chubby little finger into my chest and began to climb on me as I collapsed on the floor, laughing.

(Oh yes he is applesauce.)

(Today’s photos provided by Mia Grace.)

 

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.

 

five things i learned on our trip to barcelona

1. Driving a cab in Barcelona makes you crazy. Our cabbie from the airport shouted at us because we hadn’t told him the name of our hotel. Of course, we had told him the name of our hotel. In fact, the first thing I said to him, in Spanish, was “Do you know the Hotel Sant Joan Despí?” To which he responded, “Sí.” To which I responded, “Good. Take us there.” Later, on our ride, he asked for the address, and while we searched for it, he became more and more impatient, until I finally said, “Wait, you don’t know the Hotel Sant Joan Despí?”

“Oh, the Hotel Sant Joan Despí!” he said. And then he yelled at us. For not telling him the name of the hotel. You figure it out.

Our cabbie from Las Ramblas to Parc Guëll fussed over his upholstery, even swatting at Mia’s foot because her shoe was touching the seat. (She’s four. Her legs, really, are not all that terribly long. Her shoe, inevitably, touches the seat.) Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’ve got a car and I’m super-precious with my back-seat upholstery, you know what I don’t do with that car? I don’t turn it into a cab, that’s what.

But then, that’s just me. Mr. Pragmatic.

Both cabbies were crazy. Neither cabbie got a tip.

2. Barcelona is for walkers. The Metro is, anyway. We might never have noticed this had we not traveled with Max’s stroller, but we did (it came in awful handy around nap-time), and now I’m wondering how handicapped people get around.

It’s not that there aren’t elevators, because there are. It’s just that they’re not always where you want them to be, and they don’t always go where you want them to go. For example, they don’t always go out to the street. You’d want that, right? In a subway? If you couldn’t walk?

Instead, they may get you to a walkway that gets you to the other side of the tracks, but if you want out, you’re going to need to get out of the chair and climb some stairs. Or they may exist only on a sign – the picture of the elevator points to the stairwell, or to an escalator, or even to a dead-end, but not to an actual elevator. Even those elevators that do exist – and in fact lead up to the street – often sit at the top of a short flight of stairs. It’s as though the Barcelona Transit Authority thinks people only ride wheelchairs because they’re sick of walking.

Of course, that’s why Max rides his stroller half the time, but when he’s feeling that way he’s pretty ornery, so it’s best not to haggle with him. As a result, we spent most of the week lifting the stroller up and down stairs, sometimes with Max in it, sometimes without. It got a bit wearying, to tell the truth. At one point, after an entire day of this, we dragged the stroller down a flight of about ten steps only to discover, after about twenty feet, an identical flight up. I got the feeling the entire Metro system was intentionally set up as an obstacle course for rollers like us. All that was missing was a rope wall.

Finally one day, I found myself standing above an empty stroller, pressed into a far-from-empty train car next to a pair of subway cops. Max was ten feet away on the lap of his big sister, who was on the lap of her mother. It was rush hour, and I was cheek-to-cheek with the two cops, one of whom nodded to the stroller and asked, “Can’t you fold that thing up?” I smiled and shrugged. “Not here I can’t,” I said. Then I asked him why there were no elevators in the subways.

He shook his head. “No, that’s not true,” he said. “There are elevators in the subways.” I told him that I always had to carry Max and his stroller, and he nodded. “Oh, yeah. There aren’t really elevators for that.” So there you have it.

3. Spain is for meat lovers. But I already knew that. There are two kinds of food in Spain: food with beef, ham, chicken, and seafood, and food with just ham. I had the patatas bravas.

A lot.

4. Antoni Gaudí is way rad. I knew that too.

5. Barcelona is also way rad too. I’d been there before, but for some reason it hadn’t made as much of an impression on me as the rest of Spain. This time, though, it hit me, despite the fact that we were with the kids and, by definition, unable to see the city the way it really ought to be seen. That means no late nights stumbling from tapas bar to tapas bar, no lazy, sangria-addled afternoons on some beach terrace, and no lingering visits to the Picasso museum, or the Miró, or the Dalí. We did do some of that – Sarah let me visit the inside of Gaudí’s crazy aquatic Casa Batlló while she waited on the street with the kids, for instance, and we did settle everyone down enough for a (very early) round of tapas one evening. But Barcelona with kids – anywhere with kids, really – is just a different experience altogether.

Still, we managed to blanket the city pretty good in about five days. We craned our necks at Sagrada Familia and hopped from street tile to street tile along the Ruta del Modernisme, and we found a nice spot on the long, curvy bench at Parc Güell for some sweet pastries and chocolate milk. We navigated the crowds and the birds and the human statues on Las Ramblas, and we squeezed ourselves into the buzzing market just off to the west, where fruits and vegetables and flowers and so, so many dead fish and squids and cows and pigs form a gorgeous, brilliant walk-through collage.

We also let the kids take a break from all-Barcelona-all-the-time and visited the zoo and the beach and the aquarium, the very sight of which caused Mia to break into a dead run, shouting – I kid you not – “Come on! Let’s go experience the world of fish!”

And on Friday night, after a long, trying day of hauling Max’s stroller up and down the Metro steps, we hiked up to Montjuïc to watch the dance of the Magic Fountain that lies between the National Museum of Art and Plaza España. The sun set, the lights filled the sky, the music settled an otherwise itchy Max, and the spray damped our tired faces, and it was an altogether gorgeous way to end the week.

We caught a cab from there back to our hotel. As we rode off through throngs of locals shopping and drinking and strolling, I asked the driver if the part of town we were in had a name. “Sants,” he said. Then, after thinking for a moment, he laughed and told me, “Every part of Barcelona has a name.” We listened to the radio, and told me about Saddam, and about Mike Tyson, and he brought us straight home without once yelling or swatting or fussing.

That cabbie was not crazy. That cabbie got a tip.

 

rome, if we want to

It’s Thanksgiving today, though you’d really never know it. Sarah worked, and Mia went to school, and I went to the market and poked around the meat aisle for some turkey cutlets, and that was the most Thanksgivingy thing about what was otherwise a very ordinary Thursday here. Sometime around 3, I turned to one of the moms out front of Mia’s school, a woman from Philadelphia, and offered up some warm holiday wishes. She squinted and cocked her head, then half-whispered, “Oh yeah.” It’s exactly how I felt.

Then again, Max ate a huge lunch and took a long nap, so at least someone’s in the holiday spirit.

Anyway, we do in fact have heaps to be grateful for, not least of which is the fact that we’re together, and last weekend, we were together in Rome. Sarah was there for a conference, so the rest of us flew down Friday afternoon to join her. And though we were conspicuously not invited to the Wedding of the Future™, we did happen past the hotel where Tom Cruise and his young detaineebride were staying, just as the Fresh Prince and Jada Pinkett Prince were leaving for the reception. Since I was surrounded at the time by actual paparazzi, and I was holding a camera, I naturally shoved my hand in the air and fired off a couple blind shots myself – when in Rome, right? Among my yield is the photograph below – I’m pretty sure that’s Will in the passenger seat of the Benz (click on the image for a lifelike close-up). Anyone out there wants to buy a copy, you just let me know, hey?

Rome was nice – nicer than I remembered. I still think it feels weighted down by its past – it seems like there’s always a ruin around the corner, and a giant stone monument between you and the ruin, and a guy dressed as a Trojan warrior between the two, shilling for cheesy pictures. But I remember it being a crowded and dirty and indifferent city, and while I’m sure it’s got its problems, the rain and the chill and the time of year made it feel cleaner and less claustrophobic than I’d remembered, and the Italians were anything but indifferent.

From the minute we got off the plane – and I do mean that first minute – Italy just felt warmer than Switzerland. It’s not meant as a whine about Switzerland – the Swiss are nice enough. But they don’t smile, not like the Italians do, and they don’t much care for kids. That fact was illustrated quite nicely the day before our trip, when Max and I were enjoying croissants with some friends at a local café and Max spotted a man at the counter quietly reading a newspaper. Max immediately identified him as Someone Who Didn’t Want To Be Bothered, and being two, he immediately set out to bother him. I pulled him away from the man the first time he sidled up and sat near his feet, and the second time as well. The third time, as I took Max by the hand and started to lead him out of the café, the guy huffed and puffed and twisted himself up into a model of Swiss pique, then muttered something indignant at me in German before slapping his paper, folding it with a great flourish, and stomping out the front door.

Quite a show, actually.

Now, let me be clear: Max was being a pest. This man was reading his paper in a café, and he had a reasonable expectation of being left alone, and Max was defying that expectation. He wasn’t pushing or poking or even touching him, but he was playing well within the guy’s personal space, and I really felt embarrassed about it – at least, until the newspaper man got all huffy on me. Then I just felt embarrassed for him.

In any case, it was a minor event, but it cast a shadow, and disembarking in Rome the next day brought the same feeling of relief I get when I walk in my front door after taking the kids to a restaurant. It was a burden lifted, an exhalation, and it presented itself immediately. When we arrived at the hotel, Mia insisted on staying with the revolving door for two extra go-rounds, holding up foot traffic for about 20 seconds. I looked at the doorman to apologize, but he didn’t see me. He was looking at Mia, and he was laughing.

May your holiday be as lovely as ours was uneventful. Happy Thanksgiving!

(Pictures from Rome. Click to see full size.)