There was a brushfire in the hills on Sunday, and as we sat listening to the roar of the fire planes passing overhead, Max told me all about an unfortunate (and apocryphal) scuba diver who got sucked up into the belly of one of those planes and dropped directly into a blaze.

“W. told us about it,” he told me. “They found him in a tree.” Mia, sitting next to him, nodded solemnly.

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds like a lousy surprise when you’re scuba diving, doesn’t it?” They both concurred, and we observed a brief, respectful moment in honor of the not-really-fallen aquatourist.

And then Mia looked up and said this:

“Daddy, W. told us that once, there was someone scuba diving and there was this fire, and when one of those planes came to the water to get water to put out the fire, the scuba diver got sucked up into the plane—”

The fact that I was laughing must have distracted her from her story, because she stopped mid-sentence.

“Wait,” she said. “Have you heard this story before?”

“Daddy?” she said.

“Yes Mia?”

“I just noticed that I have a booger in my mouth and I don’t know why.”

Awesome, I know. I’ve told Sarah that if I’d known just how funny these people were going to be I’d have made them way sooner, and it’s true. And this exchange, delivered with such a guileless, How about that? expression of discovery, was just perfect, so much so that I wanted to – had to – wipe it on my sleeve, and save it for later.

She’s still a little kid, of course. I need to remind myself of that sometimes. Not that there’s any real confusion, not with her still-missing front teeth (fourteen months and counting), or the way she seems utterly incapable of grasping the notion that I can’t follow a phone conversation when she’s standing in front of me asking for permission to wear feet pajamas. Some things just jump out.

But we’ve had her for so long now, and she’s changed so much, that it’s hard to imagine that we’re still at the beginning of the arc. She’s four years from middle school, ten years from college. She’s halfway to high school. Soon she’ll develop a life entirely independent of us. She’ll push away, as she should. Boys will happen.

I squint and grimace and turn away at the thought. It will all happen eventually, and it should all happen. But I’m not always great at letting go. I’m not always great at marching forward. There’s a lot I’d like to put off. So the unexpected discovery of wayward boogers is a relief. She’s growing, but she’s far from grown. We’re not there yet.

There are other comforts. We were at the park back in August. We were early for camp drop-off, and she asked if we could go to the playground to wait. We had 10 minutes to play, maybe 15. She explored the play structure while I hid in the half-shade of the latticework above the picnic tables.

She called out to me. “Come play with me.”

I demurred. The heat, Mia. The heat. It had been mid-’90s and sticky all week, and the last thing I wanted to do was chase Mia around a Habitrail.

“But why are you wearing long sleeves?” she asked, and she had a point. I have to go to work, Sweetie. I’m going after I drop you off.

“Oh,” she said. “Is it dress-up day at work?” In a manner of speaking, I suppose it was.

She clung to me that day at drop-off. That week, actually – all week, she held on when it was time to let go. Nothing heartbreaking – she just squeezed my hand and pulled me close and asked me not to leave her just yet. Not yet. And I didn’t.

She still leaves the house in mismatched outfits with her hair a bird’s nest, completely oblivious to convention. She still asks me to close the guest room door because the green light blinking on the wi-fi router scares her. She still sleeps with Pig and Other Pig clutched close, and she still needs a night song and a butterfly massage before she’ll do it. She still asks me to stay a minute, just a minute, to snuggle.

There will come a time when I’ll deliver her to school, or send her off to bed, and she’ll dart away. I know it’ll happen, I know it has to happen. I just hope I’ll know enough not to hold on when it’s time to let go.

Because there are already days when I miss her childhood, and it’s still here.

I made spaghetti hot dog monsters for the family last night, but only Max had them for dinner. Sarah tasted one – it was a favor to me, since I needed someone to verify that the pasta was cooked through – and she probably loved it, though she didn’t say so explicitly.

Mia also tasted one. Shortly before dinner was served, she announced that she didn’t like hot dogs anymore, and anyway Mommy served hot dogs the night before, so she wanted something else, and she got it. But she did ask for one of them, late in the meal, and then she smothered it in catsup and turned it into a bloody spaghetti hot dog monster.

Max, though, he ate them and enjoyed them, as you can see. I too enjoyed them, far more than I expected to, though I didn’t eat them. Next time they’ll have eyes, if I can figure out what to use and where to put them. Capers on the side of the dog? Peppercorns? Penne? Perhaps.

As entertaining as Max’s meal was, it wasn’t sufficient to keep him glued to his seat. That’s a thing – neither kid seems willing to sit down in a chair, in front of their plate, during a meal. Mia is the worst at this – I have seen her stand on one foot, bent sideways at the waist with one elbow on the table, stretching her body a good three feet in order to eat a plate of macaroni and cheese. With her bare hands.

I thought it was just our kids – perhaps Sarah visited a barn while they were in utero? – but I’m told by good friends that they’ve seen the same thing play out with their children. It’s not easy to understand, this insistence on raising the degree of dinner difficulty. The pile of macaroni on the floor after every meal, on the other hand, is.

We’ve long known that Max leans vegetarian, spaghetti hot dog monsters notwithstanding. He regularly skips the chicken fingers or hamburger patties or meatballs on his plate, opting to stick with the pasta. Now from Sarah comes news that he made her shoo a spider outside rather than swat it, pointing out that spiders are, after all, living creature.

Just a data point. Maybe it’ll mean something in hindsight.

Max: When will I die?

8 Ball: Ask again later.

Mia: Will I have a good dream tonight?

8 Ball: Very doubtful.

Max: Is a meteor going to hit the earth?

8 Ball: Without a doubt.

Max: Will I ever lose a tooth?

8 Ball: You can count on it.

Mia: Will Mommy and Daddy ever have another baby?

8 Ball: Yes, definitely.

Max: Is that true?

8 Ball: It is decidedly so.

Mia: Will Daddy grow back his beard?

8 Ball: It is certain.

Max: Why are you a ball that talks?

8 Ball: Ask again later.

They like to walk along the cinderblock walls on the way to and from school.

Max especially, but Mia too, and this morning, as she navigated the balance beam in front of the neighbor’s house, last night’s dream came back to her. “I was walking on a bridge” – a bridge just like the wall – “and I got to a house on stilts, and I went inside, and the roof had holes in it. And a bunch of birds landed on the house, and they started pooping in the holes. So I hid under the table.”

I think it’s the first coherent dream she’s told me about after the fact. She’s like me, she doesn’t remember her dreams, or if she does, she keeps them to herself. Maybe the only other dream she’s ever really told me about was the one just after Max was born – he couldn’t have been more than a week old, and Mia woke up screaming. “I dreamt that Mommy put me in a basket,” she told me, still shivering and barely awake “—and pushed me up to the sky.” Sarah’s still getting over that one.

But this dream, the pooping bird dream, had Mia laughing, just like it had me laughing and it definitely had Max laughing. I mean, birds! Pooping! Through holes in the ceiling!

“Isn’t that funny?” she said, and it was more a statement than a question. “Isn’t it?”

***

It was good to see Max laughing.

All morning he’d been complaining. His bottom itched, and though we checked it and it was clean, he kept tugging at it, pulling his pants clear down and twisting his body around to inspect his bum.

We never did figure it out, but he kept it up. At school, after the pledge, I ran into Mia’s kindergarten teacher. While we chatted, I felt something on the back of my leg. It was Max, facing away, furiously rubbing his butt up and down against my leg. Like a bear scratching an itch on a tree.

He complained a little more, all the way home, but he settled down. Don’t know what it was. I’m telling you, the boy was clean.

I asked Max to tell me what happens after class starts, but it took a while for him to warm up to it. He was bored of walking to school, because walking to school is so boring, and besides his legs hurt, or so he said. (I’ve noticed that they only start hurting when he’s bored.)

But he did warm up, and I learned that after I leave him, they all sit in a circle and sing songs, and then someone rolls the dice, and someone else gets to put that many hearts onto the big heart on the wall. Not long after, they pick the jobs for going to the park.

“Oh yeah?” I say. “What kind of jobs?”

“Well, there’s the water bottle.”

“The water bottle?”

“Yeah, there’s the water bottle, where you bring the water bottle. And there’s flag. And there’s bicycles.”

“So you get to push the bicycles to the park?”

“No, you get to ride on the bicycle, and then you get to ride it around the basketball court, and then it’s someone else’s turn, but you get to ride it back to class at the end.”

I told Max that sounded like a pretty good job. Way better than water bottle, anyway. Is that the best job?

“No, leader is the best job, because you get to lead everyone to the park. But I like bicycles best.”

“Yeah, I bet – it’s fun to ride the bike, huh?”

“No, it’s because you get to sit down the whole way.”

***

Three days ago there was a football game on our TV, which doesn’t happen often, not after the Golden Bears are done playing anyway. Mia asked who we were rooting for, and since we weren’t, I let them choose.

“Well, I think we should vote for the Cardinals,” Max said, and his mom smiled because she went to college with Kurt Warner, or something like that.

Mia piped in. “Yeah, we should vote for the Cardinals because the Steelers sound like they steal things and that’s not good.”

Then Max: “Yeah, and Cardinals are a kind of bird, and birds are animals, and I love animals.”

So we voted for the Cardinals, because they’re animals, and you all know how that worked out for us. Not that Max minded. During the game he got busy drawing a double-sided bird of some sort, using a red Sharpie to color in the breast because the ink bleeds through.

“Hey that’s cool,” I told him. “Is that a Cardinal?”

“No, Daddy. It’s a scarlet macaw.”

***

On Inauguration Day they taped a page from the L.A. Times to the window at Max’s school. It was an illustration, an artist’s rendering of Barack Obama speaking with all 42 previous presidents seated behind him. I pointed to it and said to Max, “Do you know who that is?”

He didn’t, which surprised me, because every time he hears the radio say the president’s name he says “Hey Daddy, they said Bracko Bomma!” Instead, he took me by the hand and led me over to another window, where he pointed inside at the poster of Martin Luther King, which they had taped to the wall for the lesson on that week’s holiday.

“Who’s that?”

Martin Luther King, I told him. Did you learn about Martin Luther King?

“Yeah,” he said, and then he led me back to the picture of Obama. “That’s who that is.”

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.” 

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.

Max and Whitney met me at Mia’s school at ten after two and we all walked down to the multipurpose room, where Mia told them my name, and Max told me to vote for the high-speed trains, and both of them placed their hands on mine and helped me push the inker down to vote for the very first Hawaiian president of the United States. And I have never been more excited to vote, and I have never been more eager to watch the results roll in, and I have never been more optimistic about the leader of the free world, and I have never been prouder to be an American. Yeah, I said it. If you don’t like that, you can stick it.

And Mia got stickers, and Max got stickers, and I gave a sticker to Whitney, who doesn’t vote, and I got a sticker of my own. I voted. America won. And that’s pretty much all you’re going to hear from me on that.

Look what Sarah done.

I’m taking the kids to vote later, after school. Max has already told us he’s voting for Barackobama. Mia tells Sarah she may vote for McCain because a few of her (apparently influential) friends are voting for McCain, but she’s also made some campaign signs for the house, including an American flag with “VOTE FOR: BARACK OBAMA” written where the field of stars might otherwise be. I can’t wait to see how they come down on the high-speed trains prop.

And tonight, we order Chinese and watch results. I think I’ll keep the kids up late.