Family Pics

Spring 2023

Mar1: Just got my first plants in the ground — four varieties of strawberries. And it’s going to thunderstorm tomorrow. 

Godspeed, kiddos.

Fun to see a bunch of herbs come back from last year, including cilantro. Plus this one strange fern-like thing (swallowtail fennel, apparently a butterfly favorite) that barely grew last year. Looks like the second year may be more fun.

I scattered lots of milkweed seeds in the fall. We’ll see what happens there.

Can’t wait for tomato and cucumber season.

But pumpkins and squash can die forever. Or, at least, apparently will around here due to relentless squash vine borers. They won. I’m done.

I’m also gonna need to learn how to prune tomatoes, because my cages aren’t big enough for whole bushes of ’em, and I’m too lazy this year to make my own giant cages.

And hopefully my cucumber vines won’t get that aphid virus that killed it off last year. See if I can figure out how to prevent that.

Mar3: Ayla: “Are those cars going left?”

Me: “They’re going straight north.”

Ayla: “Norf? I love norf! Norf is pretty!”

Mar5: I could make a whole card game called “Pamela or Ayla?” if old school photos weren’t such a giveaway.

Mar6: I’m embarking on a Year of Growth after age 42 came and went and I realized how far I still have to go 

So far, the most powerful modality of healing — that has changed my life and internal landscape the fastest — is called Internal Family Systems. This wonderful little book, No Bad Parts, explains it and works gorgeously as an audiobook. It goes through a bit of actual therapy that you can follow along with and get to know your parts and become the kind and courageous leader they’ve been waiting for. After reading the book, I’ve been able to do powerful self-led therapy. My heart feels different. There’s a confidence and peace that was never there before.

I really believe it can change the world, starting with you

Mar7: I told Ayla I would lay down with her for one minute last night. Ali has been showing off constantly by counting to 100 lately, and she said she would count the minute, seemingly trying to match this feat. (I guess 100 is a minute?)

She got up to 11 all right, then to the usual, “Fourteen, nineteen, one-teen, eleven-teen…” That’s as far as she had ever gotten, but she knew she had to press on. Finally she came up with, “Chinny, chinny-one, chinny-two, uh… chinny-fordy…”

Not bad, kiddo.

Mar7: Sometimes I pretend like I’m a wildly famous person who deeply misses anonymity, the simple ability to go out and live a normal life without people staring and whispering and badgering me for autographs.

Then I feel grateful that I actually can do that 🙂

ETA: A celebrity came to a party I was at one time (Woody Harrelson), and all the absolute worst people swarmed around him and monopolized him, while the good folks stayed back, trying to allow him to enjoy the party on his own terms. Trying to treat him like a human. And thus didn’t get to interact with him at all. He was a good sport, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

What a warped vision of humanity celebrities must develop.

Mar8: “Orange is my favorite color and blue is my favorite color. But most of my favorite color is pink and purple.”

~ Ayla, sounding like her brother, whose favorite color is rainbow

Mar8: Ayla’s latest watercolor. She went for the negative space this time, too.

Mar8: Ayla and I are apparently playing “hide and go hide.” She said, “You hide and I hide.”

OK, kid. I’m hiding in the bedroom folding laundry.

Mar9: Well, that was not on my Bingo card for the century.

On the highway on the way to pick up Ayla, the wind somehow caught the stuff being hauled by the truck in front of me, and two giant utility ladders were hurled with great force forty feet into the air, arcing toward my car. It was such a spectacle, it took me a moment to fully realize sh*t was about to get very real.

I was far enough back that I was able to hit the brakes hard to slow down, quickly check my mirrors, and safely steer around them — with about 18 inches to spare — as they skidded to rest fully blocking my lane. If I’d been following any closer, I would have run smack into them (or rolled the car trying to avoid them). If I’d been following closer than that, one may have hit my windshield.

I’m a proud stick-in-the-mud when it comes to driving. Defensive driving (like keeping a safe distance from the car in front of you) can save you when you least expect it.

Mar9: The artist at work

Mar9: It’s been one year since I got my first smartphone.

I pretty much only use it for calling, texting, taking pictures, taking notes, listening to audiobooks, and reading Kindle books or articles saved on InstaPaper.

I have not become a full-time scroll-zombie. Helps that I don’t have internet on my phone unless there’s wifi. Also helps that I hate fiddling with little tiny fonts and buttons, haha.

Mar12: My kids are going through a phase of liking to be sat on *shrug*

Also, a nice pic with three generations.

Mar12: I don’t know if Ayla is really missing Ali (who went to his grandma’s for a few days) or if she’s just trying to leverage it to get us to let her stay up late(r) and paint

Mar12: Today Ayla asked, “Why isn’t Moana listening to her Baba?”

Ummm……..

It’s like, OK, you’re 3. When you’re 16 and the world is ending and your Baba is being stubborn about it, we’ll talk again, k?

For now… please… mostly… listen to your Baba.

Mar13: My girl

Mar14: A sweet thing: I’m a huge dork and like to do inept middle-aged grand jetés over the dividers at the trampoline park. (The platonic ideal is shown below. I have no idea what mine look like. Don’t care. They feel awesome.)

The sweet thing is that I caught Ayla following me and trying to do the same thing, with her arms sweeping up and around through fifth position (aka “sunshine”). So. Freaking. Sweet.

(I tried to film it, but bringing out a camera spoils everything, haha. She wouldn’t do it again.)

Mar14: Full day. Trampoline park with Ayla, then Discovery Lab, pizza lunch, Starbucks dessert, and did our dang taxes.

In your face, Space Coyote!

Mar16: Ayla is into Moana again, and she calls Maui “Meow-y.”

Mar16: Last spring, it became my obsession to get the Bermuda out of my beds and dig up any old roots or nuisance plants that were just taking up space (or worse). Don’t even get me started on the poison ivy. I spent hours and hours (in a hazmat suit) on that alone.

The previous owners apparently “set it and forgot it” twenty years ago.

Pretty much all of May was spent just digging and sifting. I listened to the entire run of Star Trek: Enterprise on my ear buds like a radio show. (I have no idea what any of the aliens looked like.)

Anyway, this year it’s like, “Oh man, a few surface weeds and a couple of nuisance roots? I don’t really have anything to do here but till a bit, throw in some compost, and plant seeds. What a deal!”

(Also, no container plants this year. I had to baby them so hard, sometimes watering them twice a day, and they still fell to hornworms and heat. And no squash or pumpkins! If I never see another squash vine borer egg or grub, it’ll be too soon.)

Mar17: I just love it when a kid randomly launches herself at you, smashes your nose with the top of her head, and then when you dare to say, “Ow!” she freaks out and scream-cries, which means you end up comforting her.

This job is not for the faint of heart…

Mar18: Ahmed and Ali are both sick, after Ali briefly rallied for some trampoline park fun. I’m madly editing. It’s freezing out. Thank God for screens.

Mar21: Ali was talking along with Maui while Ayla was watching Moana.

Maui: “End of discussion.”

Ali: “End of Pacific Ocean.”

Mar21: Trying hard.

Mar21: Ayla ate her whole meal with chopsticks. Sometimes pretty close to correctly. Ali ate well for the first time in days. Still not feeling great but much better. He’s drawing airplanes now.

Mar29: Flowers and cheese

Mar29: I love when my kids follow me like little ducklings

Mar29: My Grandma is the baddest mutha on the nursing home block. Watch ya back.

Mar30: Aww. The kids love it when they wake up and Grandma is here!

Apr2: Ali figure out how to go to outer space. Just build a little play fort with the Nugget, cover it with a blanket, and crowd in with a globe and a flashlight. We learned a lot of geology and astrology tonight

Apr4: Had a lovely time at the 3-day meditation / yoga retreat at St. Crispin’s. Spotted a snake on a hike. Water moccasin?

Apr4: Happy happy birthday to my favorite favorite brother!

Apr5: Please don’t tell my kids about this form of art.

Apr5: Got my garden 90% prepared and planted in one week instead of over a month.

Take that, (seemingly) acres of Bermuda grass and poison ivy that I painstakingly removed by hand last year!

This time, just a few weeds to pull, some compost, and boom, seeds in the ground. Several perennial flowers are poking up again — I’m most excited about the milkweed. My little redbud out the kitchen window is leafing. Can’t wait to plant zinnias again.

My arugula reseeded itself and is coming up all over. Same with my giant sunflowers.

I’m also scaling back ambitions — strawberries, peas, cucumbers, and tomatoes, plus the herbs I planted last year (all came back except for lavender and basil). No watermelons, pumpkins, squash, or peppers. They just weren’t quite worth the effort. My blackberry looks like it’s trying to resurrect. Our own Easter miracle.

Apr6: My style can be summed up as:

1. I deeply hate shopping.

2. I occasionally find something on sale online, buy it, and then never wear it. It usually ends up being a rayon nightmare.

3. Sometimes I win a free T-shirt.

4. Thrift stores have become rayon nightmares.

5. Department stores are rayon nightmares.

6. Seriously, I see people wearing reasonably cute clothes all the time. Where the heck do they find them?

7. Meanwhile I guess I’ll wear my free T-shirt again…

Apr6: I invited everyone in Ali’s class to a party on Saturday, which I know is the day before Easter (which happens to be on Ali’s birthday this year). I didn’t expect a huge turnout. But I got zero RSVPs. So I thought, OK, no big deal, we’re having a party with the grandparents anyway.

Now Ali came home saying a couple friends said they would come to his party. So. I guess I’m throwing a party after all? With zero idea how many or if anyone is gonna show up?

Apr6: I’m having the same problem millions of parents are having right now.

Me, listening to the radio: “Oh, the former president was just arrested.”

My four-year-old: “Why?”

Me: “Um….. Hey, let’s talk about lawnmowers!”

Apr7: I got treasure! (Cute spring kid pics)

Apr7: Ali would 100% do this if he were a billionaire right now.

Apr7: The only thing I bribe my kids about is clipping their nails because they have to sit really still to be safe (I can’t really just pin ’em down and do it) and because I care about their muddy Freddy Kreuger nails a whole lot more than they do.

Mostly I try to find collaborative solutions, but in this case I completely ran out of energy to figure out a way to do it. Lollipops it is.

Apr7: Why is Ayla already throwing gang signs?

Apr7: Yep. This hit me hard at age 42. Enough with the screwing around. This is it, and it won’t last forever.

“I think midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear: I’m not screwing around. It’s time.  All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go.”

~ Brené Brown

Apr8: Not as good as last year’s ice rink cake, but it’ll do!

(The grass around the runway was supposed to be green. I realized at the last moment I didn’t have green… anything. I thought my green jello mix would be green. It was white. (It probably turns green if you put water in it, but I didn’t want to spread watery crap on the frosting.) Oh well!

Apr8: Ali’s loving his party. Ayla is getting tired.

Apr8: Four kids showed up to the party, and it was a good number with my two. We had two rounds of egg hunting with candy and prizes in the eggs (or papers with words on them that could be exchanged for prizes), and the kids had little decorated paper bags to put all their loot in. We also scored a play date with another kid on Tuesday who couldn’t make it to the party. Ali loved the cake (who else gets a bonus tiny vacuum cleaner on their airport cake?), and it was wonderful to see our backyard and play room be used to the fullest.

I got almost no pictures, as usual, because I absolutely suck at that.

Hopefully next year his birthday won’t be on Easter weekend and we can have a real rager!

Apr8: I want to go to bed so bad I want to cry, but the birthday boy will not sleep…

Apr9: It’s funny that flush of pride and joy you get when you pull off a party (etc) for someone you love. No one’s going to write an article about it or give you a Nobel Prize for it. There’s no glory or recognition.* But it makes the world go ’round.

* If you’re seeking glory and recognition, you’re doing it wrong, haha. Instagram seems to make everyone competitive and miserable about these things. I don’t touch Instagram with a ten-foot pole.

Apr9: Tiny prancer. Only took two years to get her to try this dress on (gift from grandparents). You gotta strike when the iron’s hot.

Apr9: We were joking about hunting dinosaurs and Ali said, “All the dinosaurs died.”

Ahmed said, “How did they die?”

Ali said, “A big rock hit the earth… or you could call it an earthberg.”

LOL. This kid. He’s obsessed with the Titanic lately. I love how he puts things together!

Apr9: My sweet boy has completed his first half-decade on planet Earth. So grateful to be his parent

Apr9: Another funny thing Ali does is take stuffed animals to school and loan them out to his friends, sometimes for weeks, before getting them back. He’s his own little lovey lending library.

I think it started when one friend really liked one of his stuffed animals, and he wanted to give her the experience of having it for a while. So far they’ve always come back.

Apr10: Ali loves making airport runways out of anything these days.

Ayla decided to show him up by making a fancy runway with lots of tight 90-degree turns.

I appreciate her casual disregard for the laws of physics. Ali was a bit apoplectic, though

Apr10: I decorated the gift bags at Ali’s party with random hippie stickers. Ali saw this one and said, “Ooh, I want the one with the iceberg!”

Apr12: My main goal for planning Ali’s party was getting in touch with other mothers — mission accomplished!

Apr15: I’m in California for a brief whirlwind reunion of the Stanford Improvisers thanks to a travel voucher that was about to expire. So much fun and so beautiful after the rains!

I earned that voucher, by the way. It was for the early morning flight with two small kids that they strung us along for hours with and then finally canceled. While we waited in the airport with two very tired kids (and adults).

Apr16: Scenes around Stanford Improv weekend

Apr18: I love the little names Ayla comes up with for her ponies and unicorns. One sprightly little Shetland pony is Grasshopper. A sweet little plump Shetland is Saleesa. Her majestic pink unicorn is Mel (which, incidentally, is the root of my name, which means honey in Greek).

Apr19: Taking a break, logging off for 10 days. See you in May!

Apr30: I’m home! I missed these boogers so much!

Apr30: If anyone is curious about 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats, I just got done with one. (They are free — you are encouraged to donate according to your means and wishes afterwards.) Happy to answer any questions.

To start with:

1. No, I am not yet a fully-enlightened, liberated being. Apparently that usually takes more than ten days.

2. We averaged about 1.2 farts per hour in the meditation hall. I really wished I had brought Ali’s fart gun so that I could finally make people giggle on the last day. (But the whole thing was so self-serious, I honestly don’t know what would have happened. I think it might have ripped a hole in the spacetime continuum.)

3. I’m not convinced it’s the only path to enlightenment, or the best for everyone, and I didn’t always follow the many strict rules. (For example, I only averaged about 7 hours per day of meditation, not 10.5. And I brought a book and journal, which were wonderful for me but not technically permitted.) I think everyone has a different experience, and that may be why the first rule of Vipassana retreats is, “You don’t talk about Vipassana retreats.” So any answers I give may be cryptic. But the experience was incredibly beneficial to me. I’ll be processing it for a long time.

4. I’m really dang glad I’ll be allowed to eat dinner again. Sick of going to bed hungry.

May1: Ayla was playing Wordle for me and typed in a big W. She laughed and said, “That’s McDonald’s! I like McDonald’s.” Then she looked at me and said, “Except upside down, it’s not McDonald’s.”

May1: My friend’s daughter:

“I *know* you used to be thirteen, but that was LAST CENTURY!”

May1: Ali: “What happened to Elsa and Anna’s parents?”

Me: “They were on a ship that sank at sea.”

Ali: “Was it the Titanic?”

May2: Me: “Ali, give me a minute.”

Me: *does something for five minutes*

Ali: “Why are your minutes longer than our minutes?”

Me: Busted

May3: We literally have a candy cabinet dedicated to all the random candy that comes into our home. I just consolidated two whole shelves into one big bowl and one big bucket after throwing away quite a lot. (We don’t restrict it much. Our kids get a piece almost any time they ask. It just keeps coming much faster than anyone can reasonably eat it.)

I’m so freaking glad candy season is over for a while. We’ll probably be giving this stuff away at Halloween. Only for the cycle to start all over again!

May3: Yesterday making rose syrup. Today slime and pony hair cut day.

May3: More cute school pics. Sadly the prices are extortionate. Thankfully we have an endless supply of adorable Ayla pics already

May3: We all live on a water trampoline

May6: Our kitten dragged a baby snake under our bed. So that was fun. The snake seemed dazed but hopefully fine. We let it go in the garden.

Also, I have our zinnias planted for the year. Godspeed, front yard flowers.

May7: Stigler clown car fun!

May8: Ali was a mechanic even when he was two. Barely two.

Mom wrote: “I lowered the seat the last inch as he watched.  It’s all over for the riding now.  All he wants to do is MECHANIC WORK.  Oh, boys….”

May10: My Amazon review of my favorite book I’ve read in the past decade at least.

No Bad Parts

I’ve been undertaking a “Year of Growth” since I hit age 42 and realized I still have a ways to go to really grow up. Out of many, many things I’ve tried, this book made the biggest difference in my life in the shortest time. It’s not just a “therapy modality.” It’s a way of viewing human nature that is fundamentally kind and hopeful. And it’s a way of actually healing trauma breathtakingly quickly, not talking about it endlessly for months and years, and not just trying to keep a lid on it with top-down approaches.

You can make friends with even the most challenging parts of yourself. It’s literally all good. Some old programs just need a little love and a little updating. IFS provides a genius “hack” for doing exactly that.

You don’t need willpower to change your life when you’re actually healed. Life naturally and easily gets better. I barely recognize myself from three months ago when I first read this book. (I just listened to it a second time, and got a lot more out of it after doing many IFS sessions on myself for several weeks.)

I could go on and on, but I’ll just say this: If you’re human, read this book. I understand so much more about everything since reading it, and life has gotten much better.

It’s not an immediate cure-all, and it requires some tough inner work. There are other methods and modalities that have shed other kinds of light, and I’m grateful for all of it. But this helped me take a huge psychological and spiritual step forward. And it doesn’t require you to believe anything. When you access your Self, you know. And it feels like a homecoming to a strange new world.

With books like this showing new-old ways to find our best natures, it feels like a wonderful time to be alive. And I’ve seen some of the worst of what’s happening these days. I don’t come by my cautious and increasingly joyful optimism lightly or easily. Even if we destroy ourselves, it’s fascinating and wondrous having a chance to find ourselves and each other in whatever time we have.

P.S. This book works particularly well as an audiobook so you can do the exercises without having to refer to the text.

May14: Happy Mother’s Day to Pamela Olson !  We love you!

May14: Happy Mother’s Day from the sports woman and the cleaning man

May14: Happy Mother’s Day to my Grandma Pat who cooked approximately eleventeen million fried eggs and coconut cream pies for all us cousins through the years and set up acrylic paints for us, too. I’ll never forget gathering eggs with you or galloping around the okra patch. Lots of love!

May14: Little Mother’s Day hike at Turkey Mountain

May14: The kids recreated the Yule Bell from Olaf’s Frozen Adventure

May15: On the one hand, this is a point well taken, and people who point to Thoreau and say anything about libertarianism or capitalism or doomsday cult nonsense are missing the entire point.

On the other hand, he did follow his heart, have wondrous experiences, and write books that inspired countless people, including me, and it’s very sweet that his mother helped him do that.

It’s true that most people who’ve had that help have been men. But I’m glad Thoreau happened to be one of them. He made a big difference in my life just by being an existence theorem that prestige isn’t everything, and following your authentic impulses can ultimately benefit yourself and the world.

May16: You literally can’t take your eyes off Ayla for 30 seconds. In that time, when I turned around to start dinner, she climbed up on a chair, turned it over, and hit her eye socket on a table on the way down. She has an angry purple eyelid knot the size of a blackberry.

Even if she broke the orbital bone, there’s not much they can do. We just have to wait and see if she winds up with any vision problems. Hopefully not.

And now, after much ado and crying and sad anxious nausea (mine), back to putting on water for spaghetti… Sigh…

ETA: She’s in reasonably good spirits — she just freaked out when we freaked out — and the eye itself doesn’t seem to be damaged and isn’t bleeding. She could still identify Frozen characters when we closed her other eye.

The cat’s also feeling better with his urinary tract infection, for the record. Never a dull moment.

May16: Bless her heart. And her eye. At least she’s cheerful.

(When Ali saw this, he lost his mind crying, saying, “I don’t want to see that!” In real life, it looked worse than it does in the picture.)

May17: Ayla: You should see the other guy.

The other guy:

May17: The doctor said there’s no evidence of bone breakage, eye damage, or muscle or nerve entrapment. “Just” an epic shiner.

Definitely a three-donuts-for-lunch kind of day.

May17: A bit better today. Eye shadow.

May18: Ayla stood up on her chair this morning.

I said, “Honey, what did you just learn about standing up in chairs?”

She said, “Well, I’m not falling off right now.”

Karma is a toddler, man.

(Apparently I was a climber and a bruiser, too, plus I’d eat any pill I happened across…)

May18: I normally play defense on my soccer team, but I played midfield tonight and made some assists. At one point I beat my defender and got a perfect pass and was all lined up to make my first goal of the year, and my defender grabbed my wrist and pulled me off balance so that I shanked the shot. Should have been a red card.

When I told the ref, the lady who cheated said indignantly, “You ran into me!” Just a bald-faced lie. Not even a very good one. The ref didn’t really care, and she got away with her cheating and lying.

What is wrong with people? It’s a rec league game. Just play and have fun. Cheaters and liars are annoying.

Anyway, we won.

May19: Ayla’s teacher: “I love your eyeshadow!”

Ayla, delighted: “Purple is my favorite color!”

Me, muttering: “There are easier ways to put on eyeshadow…”

May20: Don’t mess with this one.

ETA: She keeps asking me to search for videos on Youtube like “Dead Twilight Sparkle.” She’s apparently into My Little Pony slasher fan fiction.

May21: Both kids are playing quietly upstairs without fighting or destroying anything, without adult supervision.

I don’t want to jinx it, but… This is a big development, haha.

Meanwhile Ali has finally started making airplanes of his own design from Legos instead of just doing kits with directions.

And we got this report from Ayla’s teacher, who asked her various questions:

1. If you could pick any way to get to school, what would you choose?

“Unicorns… yep.”

2. What do you want to dress up as for Halloween?”

“Unicorn.”

3. What is your favorite animal?

“Unicorn.”

4. What do you want for Christmas?

“A unicorn vacuum cleaner.”

5. What is your favorite thing to do during the holidays?

“I eat candy.”

6. If you could have any pet, what would you choose?

“A tiger.”

(Ahmed wonders if they said, but didn’t write, “Other than a unicorn!” on the last one…)

May22: Oops. I was planting my sweet basil and dug up a bunch of eggs. Googled them and found out they were lizard (skink) eggs. Put them back and planted my basil elsewhere.

Meanwhile our kitten kept trying to eat the mama. I think the lizard finally ran off 😦

May22: Ali is in his room crying. The problem?

“I want to be a cat! So I can stay up all night! And no one has to wipe my butt and I don’t have to wash my hands!”

The real problem: He’s tired. Neither kid sleeps enough in the summer. It’s freaking exhausting for everyone.

May26: Spunky monkey’s eye is much better

May26: Finally got my beds looking pretty good. Now to wait for the flowers and tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries to start rolling in.

May27: Ayla found a little dress I bought for her a long time ago that she picked out and then refused to wear. It’s back in fashion now I guess. She’s calling it her Elsa dress.

May27: She’s being awful cute today

May28: OMG. The kids are playing a card game. With each other. And being reasonable and listening to each other and not fighting. For more than ten minutes so far (!!!)

May28: Ali is learning cursive

May28: I took Ayla ice skating for the first time on Wednesday. She couldn’t keep her skates under her whatsoever. I had to hold her by the armpits to move anywhere. Her ankles caved in and I couldn’t get her to straighten them or get her skates pointing straight ahead instead of slightly left and right, which meant her feet splayed out any time I tried to move her forward. She certainly couldn’t move herself anywhere, since she couldn’t keep her feet under her. Completely exhausting and futile, haha.

I took Ali ice skating today and was amazed. He no longer needed the metal frame to hang onto. He could skate just holding my hand. He still can’t move himself forward other than by pulling himself forward using the wall, or using me as his steam engine. But I was much older than him when I started, and I pulled myself by the wall for quite a while.

Ali said at the end that he wants to learn to play “hoffee.” (Hockey.) I said, “Well, first you’ll have to learn to skate on your own.”

He huffed and said, “Whyyyyy?”

Honestly, pretty hilarious to imagine him playing hockey with me holding his hand and skating him everywhere…

(Meanwhile, while skating, at one point I thought to myself, “Why is that middle aged lady wearing a Green Day t-shirt?” A split second later, I was like, “Oh. Right.”)

May30: While watching Frozen for the 875th time, Ali asked, “Why was Prince Hans nice at first when he was really a bad guy?”

Er… how much should I tell my 5-year-old about gaslighting abusers…? (Just kidding)

May31: Ayla was crying, and Ali said, “I know how to cheer you guys up. You want to know the funniest thing in the world? I was trying to build shorts out of Magnatiles.”

It worked. Not the shorts. Cheering everyone up.

Winter 22-23

Dec1: There’s a concept in spiritual life that if you are aiming for an outcome, you are paying attention to something that doesn’t exist yet (by definition, if it is a goal), which detracts from your attention to the present moment. The true aim is not outcomes but acting with integrity in the present moment, because this is what we have control over, at least more than anything else in the universe. This is where we can make our most authentic difference.

Parenting underscores this like almost nothing else.

Children are great spiritual teachers.

Dec1: It’s “desperately try to hide any delivered boxes before the kids see them” season!

Dec1: Ali seemed to assume I knew how to put together his Hot Wheels track. I said, “I don’t know how it works. I didn’t have one when I was a kid.”

Ayla said, “Well, you should grow down. Then you will be like a kid and you will know.”

“Grow down” is apparently the opposite of “grow up,” and maybe Ayla will teach me how to do that

Dec2: Ali said the other day, “When I grow up, I don’t want to have kids, because I don’t want to have to be available all the time.”

Me: GIF: *I’m not saying a word*

Dec2: Doug McDaniel: I had this when we moved grandma and never did anything with it.  It was just a momento and figured I could use it for something one day.

However tonight Levi was asking me about the photo and I was telling him about Ol Red and then I realized I had never looked inside. 

So if anyone wants to remember who was at Thanksgiving 22 years ago it was written down for you.

Dec4: Gooberbread houses

Dec4: Took the kids out for a hike at the Keystone Ancient Forest with  Tulsa Area Forest School, and they mostly just dug in the path with sticks. Ali also spelled Ayla’s name. The Y is upside-down, and the whole thing is backwards (at least according to Western standards), but not bad!

Fresh air and cold fingers achieved. And we saw a ‘diller digging around. He was not afraid of us at all.

Dec5: Just flipped to a random page of Autobiography of a Yogi and found this quote by a guru of Yogananda, after Yogananda had apparently abandoned the guru and caused great inconvenience in doing so, and he was really afraid he would be mad:

“No, of course not! Wrath springs only from thwarted desires. I do not expect anything from others, so their actions cannot be in opposition to wishes of mine. I would not use you for my own ends; I am happy only in your own true happiness.”

Y’all. I know this is what I need to do with my kids. It does not always happen that way. There is always so much further to grow.

(I haven’t read much of this Autobiography, so I don’t have an overall review. But that hit hard.)

Dec6: My kids being really careless about leaving Play-Doh out so that it dries (which, I mean, it’s really our responsibility at this age, so I guess we’re the careless ones)… Anyway, it reminds me of when I was a kid, and Play-Doh was like squishy gold and we were so meticulous about keeping it fresh for weeks because as far as we knew, that was it.

Just a random childhood memory.

Dec7: “There has to be a unicorn in the Pogey Wogey. It’s all about.”

Ayla, shortly after being introduced to the Reindeer Hokey Pokey.

Dec9: It’s beginning to look a lot like a triceratops putting ornaments on a little tree

Dec9: Ayla was trying to get my attention the other day to play with her when I was being all mindlessly busy.

Finally she said in exasperation, “I want you to be a kid! I want you to be a kid, Mama.”

She was right. I could make a choice to be a kid in that moment. And I did.

Dec11: Ayla, still 2 for a couple months, is on her way as a watercolorist. Hard at work all day.

Dec11: Ali: “Guess where the people in my video are flying? It’s really close to Honduras!”

Me: “What? How do you know about Honduras?”

Ali: “We have maps at school that we learn from.”

Me: “OK. Ummm… Belize?”

Ali: “YES! Belize!”

He’s 4. I didn’t know about either of these countries until I was in my 20s.

Dec11: How Ayla counts to 10 for Hide and Seek:

“One two free four five, I’m gonna come!”

Dec12: As I feared and expected, Ayla has a scar on her lower lip from her fall at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It turns stark white when she smiles, laughs, or cries (anything that stretches the lip).

It’s so hard being a parent, knowing that any moment of lapsed vigilance can literally scar your child for life.

Dec14: Nothing like a visit from the grandparents!

Dec15: Sweet! I made salmon and orzo with caper lemon butter sauce and veggies and had zero hope either kid would eat it. Ayla ate it all and Ali ate the salmon and orzo with chopped capers.

Meanwhile Ayla has a little plastic horse, and I told her it was an Appaloosa (because I couldn’t think of Palomino), and now her Palomino is named Appaloosa.

Dec15: That was close. Ayla brought home a little Christmas tree (waffle cone with frosting and sprinkles) from preschool, and we gave it to her after dinner and hoped Ali would be appeased with ice cream.

No dice.

Thankfully I scrounged together all the ingredients for him to make one, too, with red frosting, Melania Trump-style. (Didn’t get a pic before he demolished it.)

Dec17: That feeling when you’re starting to get bored of Facebook, and you unconsciously click the Facebook bookmark on your browser, as if it’s going to be something different than more Facebook.

Dec18: Ayla’s first World Cup

Dec18: Might be my only ever World Cup Christmas picture

Dec18: Watching Elf. (They were hugging each other until Baba came in with gummy worms.)

Dec18: Ali wanted to play airport security at the park today. When he was X-raying my bags, he said, “Water guns are OK. Power guns or electric guns or fire guns are not OK.”

Thanks for clearing that up, Buddy!

Dec18: My kids are so glad the World Cup is over. We had to keep reassuring them, “It’s only once every 4 years.”

(Shows how much we get to control the TV, lol. We hardly every watch anything while the kids are up.)

Dec20: Have I mentioned I love this little gal? Her hands are poetry.

Dec22: I almost commented on here two days ago about how my kids have miraculously avoided being sick this year. Didn’t want to jinx it. Didn’t matter. Ali has been sick with fever for the past two days. Couldn’t have been better timing, honestly. Just hope he feels better before Christmas. (Last year he threw up on Christmas day. Let’s not go two for two!)

Dec23: The plan today: Make and decorate Christmas cookies, go shopping, clean the play room, vacuum, clean the downstairs wood floors, clean the counters, work out, wrap gifts.

The reality today: Rest as much as I can and hope I feel better by Christmas. Watch the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special. Help Ayla do art projects while Ali tries to sleep off whatever crud he has. And maybe wrap the gifts.

And it’s fine. I just hope everyone does feel better with, say, 24 hours?

Dec24: Hashtag mood. Half of us [Edit: All of us] are sick and Auntie Val’s flight was canceled. But we are safe and warm and have YouTube and presents to open. Happy holidays, you all!

Dec24: Still here. Haven’t moved much. All holiday baking (and 3 hour beef stew recipe) canceled. Oh well. Not stressing. Just chilling.

Dec24: Santa wuz here. Just gonna wait to see if the kids feel well enough to notice tomorrow

Dec24: No drama this holiday season, just viruses and ice.

Lucky to have back-ups available: McDonald’s for Christmas Eve dinner (instead of beef stew and cole slaw), Cinnamon rolls for Christmas breakfast (if the kids even eat — they have barely been eating for days), Indian food for Christmas lunch (this was the original plan anyway and I am salivating thinking about it), and out-of-the-freezer Chinese food for Christmas dinner (this is very popular with the kids and always good to have on hand).

Monday morning, shops will be open again, and we’ll see how everyone feels. Hopefully good enough to head to my home town of Stigler for some cousin time, if we’re no longer a pack of plague rats.

Dec25: Watching The Santa Clause over the Christmas detritus. Still have the big present to open… Ali already got an entry level robot vac I found on clearance

Dec25: Ayla loves her dinosaur volcano “flime” and young Pegasus. Ali refuses to pose with the train table but loves that it has an airport with string-powered elevator

Dec25: I want nothing more than an India Palace buffet, but it’s not worth the possibility of getting someone sick. Takeout (picked up by Ahmed) isn’t the same, but it’s better than guilt

Dec25: Ali’s new robot vac, dubbed Robo, is mapping our house now. (Um, yep. It’s for Ali. Just for Ali.)

Ayla is moony-eyed for her little $7 German pegasus. (Schleich brand — super cool stuff and you can play with it in the bath because it’s not hollow)

There was immediate drama in the morning when Ali’s grey cat in his stocking was smaller than Ayla’s, and she wanted his smaller one and freaked out. But she’s happy with her haul now.

The kids are dancing around and seem to be on the mend, although Ayla still won’t eat anything. (They’re both drinking OK.)

I’m still feeling pretty rotten / exhausted, but at least I have an appetite. And most of the holiday treats I was gonna make / bake will keep. Stretch the holiday out a little longer.

Hopefully my sister will visit in February.

I’m glad I don’t stress about the holidays or have super high expectations, and this is part of why, haha. You just can’t control for all variables, and there’s no point yelling at clouds. Life is very good.

Dec25: I have a special place in my heart for that Wham! song, Last Christmas.

I somehow managed to go my whole life (23+ years at the time) without hearing it until it happened to come on when I was in a cafe in Beirut, Lebanon, in 2003.

And I thought, “What a silly Christmas song these Lebanese people have.”

Whenever I hear it now, I think of Beirut and being young and being so un-cultured in my own culture

Dec26: It’s such a joy to feel the life force flowing back into you after days of feeling so sick and weak

Dec27: I really hope our new robot vac isn’t sentient, because if it is, I won’t be able to blame the machines for the Rise of the Machines.

This may be the most tortured robot vac in the history of robot vacs.

Dec28: Ali: “Why is everything so small and the Earth so big?”

Me: “Well, everything has to fit on the Earth, hon.”

Ali: “No, everything came with it, like from Amazon.”

Me: “You think the Earth came from Amazon?”

Ali: “Yeah.”

Me: “Who bought it?”

Ali: “Like, the richest guy.”

Me: “How much did he pay for it?”

Ali: “Like, forty dollars. Wait, what’s the biggest number?”

Me: “Infinity. It’s like if you start counting and then just keep counting forever.”

Ali: “How about a hundred dollars. He bought it for $100 on Amazon and his name was Bob.”

Me: “Where did Bob live?”

Ali: “A space station. He was an astronaut. He bought it on Amazon and there was a shrinking potion and they put it in a box and when it came they put air in it and it started growing.”

Later I asked Ali: “Where did Amazon come from? Did Amazon come from Amazon? It’s turtles all the way down!”

He said: “Amazon came from Amazon, Amazon came from Amazon, Amazon came from Amazon.”

I think we have the beginnings of a new theology, folks.

Also, I need to stop ordering things from Amazon.

Dec28: Finally made it to Stigler and cousins! Hopefully left most of the germs behind. Reindeer and elf, and mama still can’t keep her finger out of the dang frame

Dec28: Stigler Family Christmas 2022 (Finally). Look at Ayla standing there like a big girl! Kind of like she’s in a line-up, actually…

“It wasn’t me. I swear I didn’t smash the Lego house.”

Dec29: Cutie cousins

Dec31: What a sweet picture. Look at little Ayla! She was gifted a red sparkly dress for the occasion from Grandma. Wouldn’t take off her unicorn leggings or her Santa elves shirt (also a gift from Grandma). But the smile is golden

Dec31: Decorating Ayla’s room with her Christmas wall unicorns. Ten dollars worth of fun well spent. These are mostly Ayla’s compositions

Dec31: It’s been a year of cultivating my garden (literally and figuratively), traveling with kiddos (Cali and Alabama), and breaking through mental and emotional barriers. With thanks to Michael Singer, Dr. Gabor Mate, Hermann Hesse, and many other kind teachers.

The drive not only to learn but to share wisdom is an absolute gem of human nature. We are living in the good old days, folks. This is it. This is all there ever is. This here now. Cut ties with anything painful in the past. It’s not happening anymore. You are free. There is no prison. Today can (always) be Day One.

There may be grief in your present, and that is part of being human. There may be hardships ongoing, within and around you. There also exists a possibility to be still, breathe, and give thanks for the Creative force that birthed all of this, from the ocean to the stars, from giraffes to Andrew Tate. What a show, hey? What a privilege even to get a glimpse of it.

Next year I’ll continue my None 2 Run program (like Couch to 5k but gentler), try to start going to bed early and get up and meditate more regularly, plant some seeds on time that need early planting, and continue to work on joining my own timeline as well as I can (as opposed to zoning out of it in various ways).

Most of all, I hope to finally finish writing my novel, Sinai Moon. So much of the growth I did last year helped me figure out what the heck I actually meant with some of the stuff I wrote. (Writing can be like channelling, and sometimes what I write is wiser than my current level of understanding. It’s not always super easy to work with that.) I feel like writing the novel helped me grow, and then some growth was needed to help me finish the novel. And here I am, feeling ready.

Peace is possible, and I hope the world can find it. It’s nice to have found a bit more of it myself this year compared to last.

Onward and upward.

Jan1: What a joy! Mom and Bill came by to deliver Ali and brought all the fixins for black eyed peas, greens, and cornbread. I made little date spice cakes with miso brown sugar glaze and sprinkles and we feasted in the new year. If all year is as good as this, sign me up

Jan1: Ayla’s an aggressive colorist

Jan2: Did my first run since being sick for two weeks. Surprised I could pretty much pick up where I left off. On to Week 5!

Jan2: Mud baby goofball (see video)

Jan3: What are your top 3 favorite childhood memories?

Mine are (off the top of my head):

1. Holidays at my grandparents’ house tramping around the barn, pasture, woods, and creek with my cousins, waking up to the scent and sizzle of sausage

2. Playing around in creeks and gutters and drainage ditches in general

3. Mountain biking after school

Jan3: Oh you glorious weirdo

EDIT: I couldn’t let her sleep in the random baby strappy sunglasses she found — strangulation hazard — and when I went in and took them off, she looked around, confused, then stuck her little arm out for a hug. I gave her one and she made a kissing sound. Then she snuggled right back in and went back to sleep

Jan4: Ali: “When are we going to get a house with a bigger yard?”

Me: “Probably never. This is probably the biggest yard we’ll ever have… But there’s a park nearby with plenty of space, lots of grass.”

Ali: “Well, you should get a zero-turn mower and mow it sometimes.”

Me: “Ah, you want a bigger lawn so we can get a bigger lawnmower?”

Ali: “Yeah.”

Me: “Well, when you’re older and you have your own money, you can get whatever yard and lawnmower you want.”

Ali: “Well, I… When you get old, I want you to give me your money.”

Me: *smirk*

Ayla: “When I get older and older and older, I’m going to give my money away. My kids are bad.”

Jan7: Ali: “Didn’t horses pull cars a long time ago before there were steam engines?”

Me: “Uh, yes.”

Ali: “And then electric trains were invented?”

Me: “Sure.”

Ali: “So first they invented horses, then they invented steam engines, then they invented electric trains?”

Me: “No one invented horses, Buddy. They were here when we got here.”

* * *

Ali: “Baba, were you on that Titanic? The one that sunk? Were you even on there?”

* * *

Ali: “Baba, tell me something about airports that I don’t know.”

Ahmed: “I think you know everything already.”

Ali: “I don’t know how they build the security.”

Ahmed: “I don’t, either.”

Ali: “Well, you need to go back to school then. You’re still like a kid.”

Jan8: She’s a multimedia artist. All I did was draw the Unicorn and hold the ribbon where she told me to while she got pieces of tape herself

Jan9: Nothing makes me happier than my kids just having fun with dirts and sticks.

Until they both grab the same great stick at the same time, and a screaming fight ensues.

Everyone survived. It’s fine. The woods are a great place to scream, after all

Jan10: It was a lovely interview. One of my favorites.

Look, Maw, I’m owna TeeVee!

Jan11: Ali’s freehand rainbow and Ayla’s coloring skills coming along

Jan12: “Iss you like da bideo, sums up!”

~ Ayla, a member of the Youtube generation

Jan14: And this is why we’re in Oklahoma

Doug: Giving rides on the 4 wheeler.  My view fore and aft

Jan14: Love it when the whole cousin gang gets together! Especially when little Rylee joins. (Same age as Ayla, almost exactly, and same love of horses/unicorns. She’s my sister-in-law’s niece.)

Jan14: We were telling stories in the car on the way home. One of Ayla’s stories began, “Once a pot of time…”

Jan15: My kids playing hide and seek. Where oh where could they be?

Jan18: Unintentional pun and possible sign of incipient dementia while explaining my poor Scrabble (and point counting) performance:

“Man, I am not firing on all syllables.”

Jan18: Throwback — me and Grogu

Jan20: Got a pic of the grandparents babysitting but not of us decked out to go to Sisserou. Oh well! Fun time, anyway. Yummy lobster, hibiscus cocktail, and chocolate lava cake

Jan21: Last year (age 42) was the best year of my life, and I am so grateful every single year that, inshallah, another is coming.

And now on my 43rd birthday, I’m going to indulge in a little “back in my day” nostalgia, as I watch my kids grow up with infinite content on demand and portable super computers to keep them entertained on car trips.

I remember when primitive computers filled up entire rooms. I remember when I had to physically change the channel on the TV, analog-style, literally changing the broadcast frequency with a clunky spinning switch. (I remember when remote controls were exciting and new.) I remember watching VHS tapes over and over, and having to “be kind, rewind” when I was done. I remember worrying about wearing out the tape. And there was nothing to do on road trips but read pulp novels or play silly games or see what every word spelled backwards. (I still can’t see a SPEED LIMIT sign without thinking DEEPS TIMIL. Sounds like a minor Star Wars character.)

I typed parts of my college application on a typewriter in 1997. Over my 4 years at Stanford, I watched Silicon Valley ramp up into the behemoth it became, and I got one of the first Gmail accounts and Facebook profiles, back when it was just about keeping up with college buddies. (MySpace, too, but that didn’t last long.) I traveled the world with a guidebook (and its laughably tiny, un-detailed maps) but mostly just by asking people questions. I remember being totally out of touch with the world until I could find another internet cafe.

But, in another sense, being much more in touch with the world without all that strung-out “connectivity.” When we’re still and quiet and not striving too hard, whole other worlds of possibility open up.

Of course, those richer in years than I am have experienced much more profound changes. (My grandparents grew up without electricity or running water.) And our kids and grandkids will see even more changes, hopefully better ones, as we begin to develop wisdom along with our technology. As a species, we tend to swing wildly this way and that way. Hopefully we can develop balance with time.

Try not to be too hard on our species. We were monkeys yesterday, and we’ve only had electricity for the past few seconds. It’s remarkable what we’ve accomplished in such a short time, with single-minded focus. And most of us begin to realize that there is more to life than gadgets, even as gadgets (including spacecraft) open up worlds of possibilities.

I also see so many parents working incredibly hard to learn about child development and attachment and attunement, information no generation in history has had access to until now, and doing their best to foster authenticity and connection and banish shame, fundamentally changing generational patterns.

The richness of our inner world and outer world is more than anyone could possibly hope for, more than anyone could possibly deserve. There’s always, always that.

Here’s to 2023, better than ever.

Jan21: I didn’t realize I had managed to get Chapter 9 down to about 35,000 words (plus about that many outtakes that I’ll need to comb through later). It needs to get to 20,000, tops, in the next two weeks, then polished down to 15,000 (at most) when I meet it again after I edit Chapters 1-8 again.

It’s such a strange chapter. A bubble within the book that takes place in one night, a philosophical treatise disguised as a conversation that may be a hallucination.

Wish me luck, kids.

Jan22: “One, two, free, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven… uh… fourteen, nineteen, one-teen, eleventeen…”

~Ayla. Not bad for a two-year-old. (Almost 3.)

Jan22: A friend was talking about the protests in Peru, and I told him I’d been in two different countries when they’d had coup attempts: Ecuador and Turkey.

Then I did a facepalm and had to amend that number: I’ve actually been in three countries when they had coup attempts.

How could I forget?

USA! USA! USA!

Jan22: Overheard, my two-year-old:

“Hey, Baba? Can I fart in the potty?”

Jan22: Ali: “Hey, Mama, did you know Russia is tooking over Ukraine?”

Me: “Yeah. Where did you hear about it?”

Ali: “School.”

Me: “Hm… Your teacher’s already getting into geopolitics. That’s pretty advanced for pre-K.”

Ali: “Anyway, can you tell me a story about cargo ships?”

He’s been bugging me to tell him stories about cargo ships for days. After I told him about the Ever Given, I’m fresh out. Any ideas?

Jan26: Amaryllis is blooming and Ayla is singing

Jan26: WOOOOOHOOOOO!

Ten years after Fast Times in Palestine was published, I asked my publisher if I could have the North American rights back, for purposes of giving away more copies, selling cheaper eBooks, and so on. And they agreed!

My first baby is coming home to Mama!!!!

Watch this space for a Ten Year Anniversary Edition of Fast Times, eBook giveaways, and more 

And we’re back to the original cover (and beautiful interior design), which I liked much better anyway 

Plus I can un-delete the stories my publisher made me cut to save money on paper. So exciting to have my story back

Jan26: Quite the yogini

Jan26: Ayla is lying on her side with her hands in prayer position under her cheek, slightly pooching her little cheek out and pursing her little lips, and it’s so achingly perfect I want to ruin it with a flash photograph. I saw it in person. I always go in to make sure she’s warm and watch her sleep for a second

Jan26: Doesn’t quite capture the magic, but close. Without a flash. (And another version that a friend edited.)

Jan26: OK, I’ll stop being a mom creep now

Jan27: Ooh Lord. Some days with kids you really want to yeet yourself into the sun, LOL 

If I typed this afternoon into a story, it would not begin to touch on the tedium, the yelling and demanding, the whining and complaining, the refusing and dropping and wasting of food, the million good-natured offers from the parents who kept remarkably cool if I do say so, the utter irrational nonsense from two tired and hungry kids who won’t eat, the whole other dinner I broke down and made for them as a special thing because it just seemed they were really dysregulated for some reason and I wanted to get some food into them, and then the bitching and whining and dropping and wasting of the food THEY ASKED FOR, and when Ayla dropped one piece of food and demanded another, and I said kind of sharply, “You have three more on your plate, EAT THOSE,” now I’m definitely the bad guy who ruined everything and made Ayla cry.

Yeah. The interior of the sun looks pretty good right about now

Jan29: I’m so torn about whether to introduce Star Wars to my kids in chronological order within the story, or as they were released in theaters.

Part of me wants them to understand Vader’s entire arc as he meets his fate. Another part remembers starting Episode IV as a kid with virtually no context, gradually figuring out what the heck was going on, being shocked by the big reveals, and most of all, seeing Luke Skywalker watching that double sunset, knowing almost nothing about him, but totally feeling that small town Outer Rim boy longing for bigger and better things. Heck of an introduction to the franchise.

Jan29: I’m proud to not be raising mindlessly obedient children. I’m not permissive. I hold limits that need to be held. (That doesn’t require their obedience, just me taking responsibility for things happening that must happen.) But my aim is harmony and cooperation in the home. I’m not always going to get it when the kids are small, but it’s a long game. Still, it’s absolutely remarkable how cooperative my kids are, in general, mostly of their own accord. (I don’t punish them.)

As Dr. Gabor Mate says, the root of “discipline” is “to teach.” Our kids naturally love us and want to be pro-social. If we can tap into it, and resist our authoritarian impulses (I know, lack of total control is scary), if we can assume our kids are basically good and competent and work from there, wonderful things can happen.

Jan29: 5+5 is 10, 1+1 is 2, DOG 

(Ali asked me to write DELETED under the part he scratched out)

Jan30: It’s thunder sleeting. School is canceled. Probably for the next 3 days.

So much for Chapter 9. Oh well. Let’s keep coloring unicorns…

Jan30: My great-grandpa Dave Reavis. My grandparents on my mom’s side grew up without electricity or running water. Amazing how life can change in two generations.

Jan30: Lego fun with the cousins!

Feb1: We haven’t left the house in about 5 days due to our driveway being iced in. Couldn’t stay ahead of it even though we have a snow shovel this year. The sleet pellets piled up super fast and very heavy.

So I’m getting really creative with random freezer / pantry / clean out the fridge meals, haha. Tonight was homemade pizza rolls using crescent rolls, cheese, and pepperoni, Campbell’s chicken pot pie soup (kids wouldn’t touch it), a frozen corndog baked and split two ways (I would have liked some of it, too, dangit), crackers and hummus, and leftover Christmas Kinder Surprise eggs. They had loads of our rapidly dwindling fruit at breakfast and dinner, and we’re finally out of milk.

It’s supposed to thaw tomorrow, but alas, it may just make things slicker with a nasty little thaw-and-re-freeze of the top layers. Thursday has already been declared an ice day. Friday probably will, too. This is the longest week ever. At least it should be nice-ish for Ayla’s birthday on Saturday, if I can get out and get stuff to make cake and so on. This is like the worst time of the year to have a birthday in Oklahoma, LOL. I was induced three years ago because I didn’t want to give birth in a wrecked car during an ice storm. Last year I remember wondering if there would be a cake because the roads were so treacherous. Oh well. Not like I planned it that way!

Feb1: It’s official: No school Thursday, either. Friday’s also not looking great.

Did I mention this was the week I totally blocked off to finish Chapter 9? Damn you, thunder sleet!

Oh well. I got to play with unicorns a lot, so there’s that.

Feb2: Our driveway is solid ice. (Compacted sleet.) Slick as snot and hard as a rock. Wish we had a sled!

Feb2: Ayla to Ahmed: “Are you hungry or busy or watchy?”

Ahmed: “What’s watchy?”

Ayla: “Like you want to watch videos.”

Feb2: Ayla, on the way to a restaurant (yay, we escaped the house!), apropos of absolutely nothing: “I think Rainbow Dash is a good awesome pony.”

After we got back home (only slip sliding on the neighborhood roads and driveway a few times), I said, “Hey, there’s Venus.”

Ayla: “There’s Benus?”

Ali: “There’s Penis? Poopiter and Penis?”

Feb4: Birthday princess

Feb4: Funny thing happened today. Ayla got a large, sparkly horse figurine from Grandma that said “Cupcake” on the box. Ayla loved it, and Ahmed said, “What is its name?” I guess giving her a chance to name it herself.

Ali said, “Cupcake!”

Ahmed and I stared at him, slack-jawed. I didn’t think he had seen the box. I certainly didn’t think he could read a word like that.

He looked at us like, “What?”

“How did you know that?” Ahmed asked.

Ali shrugged. “Because my cat is named Cupcake.”

If it was a coincidence — that he already had a stuffed cat that he named Cupcake AND he wanted his sister’s horse to share the same name for some reason — it was certainly a strange and funny one!

Feb5: Most of Ayla’s figurines are unicorns, alicorns, and horses, and a few other random animals, but one is the garbage man that came with one of Ali’s garbage trucks.

Usually when we play pretend, it’s all animals all the time. But every now and then she’ll say to me, “You play the human this time.”

At her birthday, she started using the word “gorgeous” for the first time and used it liberally — about the cake, her new horses and unicorns, etc. It was super cute. Big word for a girl who was technically still 2 for most of the day (until 5:59pm).

Ayla was also first to spot the big full moon at sunset just above the horizon when we were coming home from getting barbecue. She said in surprise and awe, “It’s a golden moon.” It did have a golden hue. She’s our little moonspotter.

Feb6: Celebrating her birthday at school today

Feb6: Me: “These are baked Cheetos. They’re a little different.”

Ali: “You mean they’re not just raw Cheetos?”

Feb7: Ali tonight wanted to play the tornado game before bed.

We were at the park, and suddenly the tornado siren sounded. “Oh no!” Ali said. “We need to get to the house!” So we all cowered in our safe area of the house (all make-believe up in the play room), then Ali said, “I have to go be the tornado,” and he got up and said, “Oh no, there’s TWO tornadoes!” Both his index fingers pointed down and spun ’round and ’round, and he yelled, “TUNNNN DURRRRR!” and made indescribable lightning noises, and Ayla clung to me and said, “Oh no, it’s a… it’s a tomato tundur!”

It was very exciting. I just hope Ayla doesn’t have nightmares. She was really getting into it.

Feb9: Parenting without punishment is surprisingly easy once you get the hang of it. Pretty soon the idea of punishing kids for lagging skills (such as keeping calm when they’re upset — a skill most of us are still working on, let’s be honest) seems downright bizarre. Learning is that much harder under stress.

We can teach kids the skills they need for the “real world” without shaming or manipulating them (and meanwhile take responsibility for holding limits that keep everyone safe). Control is an illusion — more and more as time goes on — and the last thing I want is for my kids to end up teenagers while I have only control-based tools in my toolbox.

A warm, respect-based relationship is more fun, too.

Feb10: The progression of Ayla’s pony painting skills (plus Ahmed’s Pegasus on the right)

Feb11: Ali’s favorite game now is “Driving to the Airport.” Packing up, getting in the car, driving to the airport, checking in, checking baggage, going through security, going to your gate, boarding, taking off — the whole thing.

Tonight he arranged a “game within a game.” Ayla and I watched a movie of “Driving to the Airport” acted out by Ali and Ahmed.

He just said to me, “There’s a lot of pompicated stuff in airplanes, right?”

I said, “A lot of what?”

“Pompicated stuff.”

I laughed in delight.

He said, “Or is it plompicated?”

I love this kid.

Feb11: So funny that I can play with Ayla’s hair while she’s sleeping and rearrange her blanket and even take pictures. If I so much as look at Ali while he’s sleeping, his eyes pop open.

Feb12: Mud time!

Feb12: No one:

Absolutely no one:

Ayla: Baba, do dinosaurs giddy-up?

Feb13: It’s 9pm. I need to stop scrolling and go to sleep, but I’m too tired to get up and take a shower and do all the other steps necessary to go to bed…

(I’m really behind on sleep. I love my book, but it’s 300+ pages that I suddenly need to edit — self-imposed project though it is — and it’s really putting a crimp in all my other plans. But it is nice to have a chance, after 10 years, to trim some split ends and pretty it up all ready for a new life!)

Feb14: Ayla was asked in class how she said “I love you.” She said, “I give toys to my mama.”

This morning, I told her in the car that she was my little red valentine. (She’s wearing a red heart shirt and red sweat pants.) She thought for a minute and said, “Mama, does valentines have legs?”

Feb14: Dang, Ali’s school got political fast

Feb14: Dinner can’t compete with valentines

Feb14: Ayla: “What are these?”

Me: “That [piece of pizza] has cheddar cheese and that one has goat cheese.”

Ayla: “Goats eat this?”

Later, when I served chocolate mousse…

Ayla: “Do moose eat this?”

I promise, I explained. But I guess it’s more fun to think she’s eating goat food and moose food.

Feb14: Ali: “Why didn’t anyone else come and give me valentines?”

Me: “Who else did you want valentines from?”

Ali: “The whole world!”

Me: “You wanted 8 billion valentines?”

Ali: “Yes!”

Maybe next year, kid.

Feb15: Ayla, watching a Youtube video: “I love that white unicorn because it’s so silly.”

Me: “I love you. You’re silly sometimes, too, you know. And sweet and funny and graceful and awesome.”

Ayla (quietly): “I’m as awesome as Rainbow Dash.”

You sure are, sweetie

Feb17: Ali: “Mama, who’s the principal of the whole entire United States?”

Ali (later): “Mama, a diaper is not a clo, right?”

(Apparently, “clo” is the singular of “clothes.”)

Feb18: Baby not feeling so good. Hopefully just a 24 hour bug

Feb19: I always thought I’d have life at least somewhat figured out by age 42 — a nice round number that happens to be the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, according to Douglas Adams.

When 42 came and went, and I had some breakthroughs but realized how far I still had to go, I decided to go all in at age 43. From a ten-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat to books I’ve always wanted to read to talks on Youtube that set off a lot of lightbulbs (and a weekend Hoffman process seminar over Zoom, and perhaps some judicious use of plants), I hope it’ll help me spend the second half of my life more open and generous and present and brave and joyful. (I can put on a good front, but it’s all too easy for me to get dragged down low or retreat from things I should embrace or lash out about things I should be generous and understanding about.)

It’s terrifying sometimes, but at the end of the day, most of our “demons” are scared or wounded children (protected by angry or critical “guardians” who themselves will often melt if given some time and attention), and if we can get over our unreasonable terrors (stuck in a past that no longer exists), a lot of wonderful stuff might be waiting. The universe is a miraculous gift, and none of us were owed a single molecule of it. I’d like to spend more time in the space of remembering that.

Feb19: Ayla is up and at ‘em and making waffles

Feb19: Someone got a new swing set!

Feb19: Scattergories. Fun to find answers from 20 years ago!

Feb20: Four generations of ❤

Feb20: Ali’s cousin Mason: “Do you have any updog?”

Ali (politely): “Updog? What is that?

Feb21: I found a way to entertain Ali for 15 seconds at a time: I’m timing his laps around the house on his balance bike.

Feb21: I love how Ayla adds an extra vowel between awkward double consonants. Like neck-o-lace or tab-uh-let.

I keep waiting for her to tell Boo Boo about a great pic-a-nic basket.

Feb21: It’s a red letter day. Little Ali, not yet 5, finished a whole Big Mac by himself today!

(If you didn’t live through his years-long eating-like-a-picky-bird phase, you can’t quite know what it means, but it’s a great day!)

Meanwhile Ahmed was supposed to eat what was left over after the kids ate on two Big Macs. What was left over was not much

Feb21: More Ayla art

Feb22: My 4-year-old is helping me get over my disdain for “cheesy” things.

After all, what is “cheesy”? Earnest, unself-conscious, silly, joyful, unpretentious. What’s not to like?

Who trained me to see those things as negative?

Feb25: Whew! Not easy to pull off a surprise 40th axe throwing birthday party, haha. I was having too much fun to take many photos (someone else took big group photos), but here’s what I have, including a cake wearing a seatbelt. More to come. We love you, Ahmed!

And now I can stop lying and sneaking around and being weird, haha. (Or, well, at least go back to normal weird)

Feb26: Ayla loves mixing ketchup and honey mustard, like her brother before her. Tonight as she did it, she remarked on how it was sunset colors.

Feb26: Hi!

Feb28: Happy happy actual birthday and so much love ❤️ to such a wonderful husband and father.
Thanks, Mom and Bill, for entertaining the kids while we had a lovely Bird & Bottle dinner to celebrate.

Fall 2022, California and Alabama

Sep1: Ayla’s Twilight Sparkle bandage. Unfortunate incident with the hinge end of a bathroom door

The finger was flattened like taffy but somehow not broken. It re-inflated by the time we got to the doctor. I didn’t know kids were literally made of rubber.

Sep1: Ali was watching a Youtube video, and at the end the guy said, “Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t yet, and give us a thumbs up.”

Ali cheerfully and dutifully gave a literal thumbs up to the video with his actual hand.

Sep3: The sum total of my pumpkin harvest this year. I finally euthanized my last vine (and murdered 4 last big fat squash vine borer larvae). I killed off my squash a while ago. Just got tired of messing with it.

Sep3: Ayla this evening is a roaring, stomping unicorn who is going to eat someone.

Aylacorn Rex.

Sep4: Ali found a new cousin! (My cousin’s daughter Alex.)

Sep4: Sweet smiles. Grandma’s only granddaughter (out of 8 grandkids)

Sep5: Fun trip to Grandma’s house with The Cheesemaster and Princess Goofball

Guess who got a new rainbow unicorn? (My old toy.)

Sep5: I found a song both kids like me to sing before bed: Colors of the Wind.

Ali once asked me if all parents sing the same song to their kids. I said, “No, people sing all kinds of songs. Some people don’t sing a song to their kids before bed at all.”

He said, surprised, “Well, they’re doing it wrong.”

Sep7: That feeling when you have all kinds of resolutions and things to do and think about now that the kids are finally back in school, and your HVAC unit goes out, it’s all hands on deck, and you’re literally sweating a multi-thousand-dollar problem that needs to be fixed like NOW

I wish I knew diddly squat about this subject (3 different companies have given 3 wildly different answers about various things), and I wish I had more time to learn.

At least this didn’t happen during the 103 degree heat wave!

Sep7: Ever since Ayla’s car seat turned front-facing, she has started commentating on the traffic lights.

“Uh oh, wed wight.”

“Iss geen, Mama! Go! Fasser!”

This leads to much consternation when I try to turn right on red, or I can’t turn left on green (not a green arrow) because it’s not safe. Or she sees the red light over the next lane while I have a green arrow. Poor kiddos learning all these arbitrary rules!

She has started trying to learn the proper L sound, but she only uses it when she really thinks about it, and she sticks her tongue all the way out to make the sound. She sounds kind of drunk when she does it.

She also calls her injured finger “my Broken Arrow”

Sep9: Ayla’s version of “because” is currently “Puhkuzz,” emphasis on first syllable. It’s vewy cute.

Sep9: We’ll be the proud owners of a new Trane HVAC system on Monday. Just gotta sweat a bit through Saturday (high of 90). Sunday and Monday have highs of only about 80. Whew!

Gonna go get my COVID booster and flu shot tonight, now that all that fun is behind us. #adulting2022

Sep10: We are earth, we are stars.

“You are comprised of 84 minerals, 23 Elements, and 8 gallons of water spread across 38 trillion cells.

You have been built up from nothing by the spare parts of the Earth you have consumed, according to a set of instructions hidden in a double helix and small enough to be carried by a sperm. You are recycled butterflies, plants, rocks, streams, firewood, wolf fur, and shark teeth, broken down to their smallest parts and rebuilt into our planet’s most complex living thing.
You are not living on Earth. You are Earth.”

~ Aubrey Marcus

Sep11: Pilot Ali ready to fly.

He asked me where I wanted to fly. I said, “Namibia.”

He said, “That’s really far away. This isn’t a RV plane.”

He asked for my phone number in case he needed to call me while we were in the air.

I started to give him my 10-digit real number.

He stopped me and said, “You need to get a different number. I can’t remember all that.”

“Oh, uh, OK. My number is 512.”

Sep11: Ali: “Where were you married?”

Me: “Stigler.”

Ali: “Were Grandma and Grandpa born then?”

Me: “Yes. They were there.”

Ali: “And you just thought, Hmm, this will be a good Grandma and Grandpa for Ali?”

Sep11: LASIK update: It’s been almost 6 months since I got LASIK.

So far it’s been a great success. My eyes are a bit dry sometimes, but not enough for me to ever remember to put drops in them. There’s still a slight halo around the moon, but I don’t know if it’s my eyes or just Oklahoma haze. (The moon is much clearer in the Middle East.) Lights at night seem a little fuzzier than before maybe? But not distressingly so, and since I don’t remember exactly how it was before, it’s hard to say much about it.

Sometimes the moisture in my eyes is just right and things have an almost jewel-like clarity. (It’s always very clear, but this is like super HD.) Hopefully as the months go on and healing continues, the jewel-like times will be more frequent as the moisture balances out.

Sep11: Today I accidentally broke Ali’s little MagnaTile house when I was moving things to vacuum. He started crying, and Ayla came to him and patted his back and said, “Iss OK, Ali.”

Ali wasn’t really having it — he wasn’t ready to be consoled — but it was super sweet.

Later Ayla fell and scraped her shin. Ali went over to her, patted her back, and said, “It’s OK, Ayla.”

❤ ❤ ❤

Sep12: Solemn little Ayla. Who knew what a goofball dinosaur unicorn she would be?

And oh yeah, it’s 12 years since Ahmed and I met on a soccer pitch in NYC

Sep12: When Ayla talks about volcanoes (boltanos), she pronounces “Lava” as “Waba.” And it’s also the cutest thing ever. (She does a lot of cutest things ever. IMHO.)

She has a best friend named Malachi who has as big a personality as she does (and huge blond curls), and I catch them sitting really close together and patting each other or holding hands at the end of the day.

The other day, after disengaging from Malachi, she patted other kids as she left, like she was giving them a little affectionate good-bye.

Today she was looking away when I came in, and Malachi nudged her and said, “Your mama’s here.” It was so cute. These little tiny kids that are so big!

Sep12: Whoah. We are no longer Sauna Force One. The new HVAC cooled us down so fast it took our breath away, and Ahmed’s office and the master bedroom are no longer the warmest rooms in the house. It actually cools the house evenly!

Sep13: Lots of glory in our mornings

Sep13: Morning glory with flowers in the background

Sep14: There’s a little kid joke where you make a cylinder with one hand and cover it with the other and tell someone:

“Open the lid…
Put your finger in [the middle of the cylinder]…
Wiggle it around…
Take it out…
Close the lid…
THANK YOU FOR CLEANING MY TOILET BOWL!”

Ali put his hands in the proper position and walked up to Ahmed and said, “Open the toilet… I mean, open the lid!” And he went on delightedly as if nothing went amiss

And now Ayla loves putting her hands together flat and coming up to you with the most mischievous grin and saying:

“Open my wid… Wiggle awound… TANK YOU FOR KEENING MY TOILET!”

Sep14: Ali named a bunch of people he loved, all family, and said he didn’t know anyone else he loved.

I said, “You know, love never runs out. You can love everyone in the whole world if you want to.”

He said matter-of-factly, “I know. It’s always there. Every time I sleep, I just get more and more and more love.”

Sep16: Purple tower = Ayla’s latest attempt at “paper towel”

She still keeps asking us to “Make me Siwight Farkle” [Twilight Sparkle], which means putting a bandage on her somewhere and drawing blue and pink and purple stripes and a cutie mark on it.

Sep16: Ali to our TV remote: “Search for Minecraft blimps on fire on Youtube.”

It’s just an example. He’s constantly asking for the impossible (or highly, highly improbable).

This boy’s tastes are so specific, he’s looking at a lifetime of either disappointment or prolific creativity

Sep16: I’ve always wanted a little tea and meditation corner

Sep17: Siblings from other mothers

Sep17: We’re playing zoo. Baby turtle wanted me to take a pic and send it to his grandma in Stigler.

Sep18: You have to appreciate those rare moments when kids are easy to please (for a few minutes). And I admit a blush of pride when she stopped after she had 10 stickers on the paper and correctly counted them.

Ali’s project (below) didn’t keep him busy quite as long…

Sep18: I was teaching Ali a little about clocks today as I changed the batteries. He pointed to each number and counted up to 12.

He said, “You know what my favorite number is?”

“What?”

“Ten. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because when you have ten dollars, you have a lot of dollars. It can buy, like ten sixteen things. Ten sixteen lawnmowers. Ten sixteen trailers. Ten sixteen of anything.”

Ali, at the starting line of a bike race in the house: “On your market set, go!”

Sep18: Cozy enough?

Sep18: Ali in the car just now: “Christmas is when you get candy canes, Halloween is when you get siiiiick.”

(Ali did not get sick on Halloween last year, even though I told him that this one day a year, he was allowed to keep eating candy until he got sick if he wanted. I did that a couple times as a kid, and I learned! But Ali stopped before that point, on his own. We’ll see how it goes this year.)

He also decided to give the cats full names. So now our older cat is Mateo Trees Fur and our younger cat is Isabela Sister Family.

Sep21: Ayla turned to Ali while they were having snacks at the table after school yesterday and said, “I miss[ed] you today, Ali.”

It was super sweet. He didn’t say it back. Which is fine. He loves school, and I love that.

(She also misses him at Tippi Toes class. Ali begged off for a while but said he misses it now and wants to start again after Christmas. For now, Ayla always begs me to join the class and dance with her.)

By coincidence, I park in the same spot in the neighborhood around the same time as Ali’s best friend’s dad, so we always bid each other good morning, or just share a smile of solidarity. They are a Lebanese family, and it’s so nice to hear Shami Arabic in the morning. (Shami = “from the Levant” — Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.) Especially cute affectionate Shami Arabic from parent to child. All of Ali’s friends seem to be girls.

Meanwhile we always catch Ayla being affectionate with her best friend Malachi when we pick her up. Playing with his arm or hair or whatever. It’s so wonderful to see how happy and confident these kids are. Who knows what the next generation will bring to the world?

Sep21: Life is beautiful

Sep23: It’s fascinating to me the extent to which we are basically cavemen of the psyche. We don’t even have the equivalent of a heliocentric model of the solar system. Everything orbits around the wrong place — shoring up and protecting the ego (our small and insecure selves).

Sep27: Ali: “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.”

Ayla: “I’m not Lucy!”

(He was pointing right and left and happened to be pointing at Ayla when he said “loosey.”)

Sep28: Spider fairy

Sep28: Fun Night and fish day

Sep28: Baby got a haircut, a pumpkin, and a sucker

Sep29: You cannot look around at the Gathering Place without seeing a monarch butterfly!

Sep29: I didn’t get a picture (my phone died), but we stumbled upon another monarch butterfly tagger at the Gathering Place, and she caught one and showed us how she tagged it and then placed it on Ayla’s hand. It flew away immediately, and Ayla laughed and wanted to do it again. We probably saw 100 monarchs in total.

The kids also found a dead painted lady butterfly, which has peacock-like markings on the underside of its wings.

Sep29: Ayla calls cantaloupe “cantawoop,” and I think we should all follow her lead.

Ali calls it Scooper Diving. He wants to do it in the pool. Now.

Ayla calls the elevator an “excavator.” She often feels a need to remind us, “I’m growing up.”

We know, Baby. We know.

Sep30: Parenthood is finding boogers on your shoulder and thinking, “Well, at least they’re out of my kid’s nose and in a place I’m not likely to touch before I put it in the laundry at the end of the day.”

Didn’t even occur to me to change shirts.

Sep30: Ali: “When is everyone gonna die and start over again?”

Me: “What? Who?”

Ali: “The world. Do people just die and then grow up again?”

Me: “I don’t know. Maybe? Some people think so. It’s called reincarnation.”

Ali: “I just think it happens over and over again.”

Oct1: Ali’s latest ask for a toy/gift: A grass baler that you can push behind a lawnmower that will gather the grass and poop out tiny grass bales.

These kids want the world, man. They want things no one has even thought to want before

Oct1: I took Ali along with me to get myself a haircut. He brought his Lego street sweeper to play with. Spent the whole time corralling hair with it.

He’s covered in hair and so is his toy. Oh well! Gotta keep ’em occupied somehow

Oct3: Ali: I want to play Christmas.

Ahmed: How do you play Christmas?

Ali: Just like real Christmas!

Oct3: This floor was perfectly clear three hours ago. I was gonna sweep when I had a minute #Sisyphus

Oct3: Ali made a mess or broke something, I don’t remember the exact scenario. I said, “Don’t worry, it’s not a big deal.”

He said with a mix of relief and confidence, “Yeah. It’s a little deal.”

Now Ayla has started saying it, too, when I say something is not a big deal

Oct4: Ali’s wee marigold sprouts from Bethany school turned into a whole flower bush entwined with my cherry tomatoes. (The other marigolds died long ago.)

(You can see the little wooden sign that says “Ali’s Marigold” in the center of the last photo)

Oct4: Ali’s favorite night time song these days:

Soft kitty, warm kitty,
little ball of fur.
Happy kitty, sleepy kitty,
purr purr purr!

He makes a loose lip horse sound when I say “Purr purr purr.” I have to quickly and discreetly move out of the splash zone.

Oct5: Ayla calls jack-o-lanterns “scary pumpkins”

Oct5: End of an era. Disaster of an old stumpy crepe cut down. Should grow back better than ever. But we also lost most of the morning glories climbing around in it. So it goes.

Oct5: “I just saw a RV boat with tons and tons and tons of apartments!”

~ Ali, on catching sight of a cruise ship on TV

Oct5: Parent teacher conferences were tonight, and my proudest moment was when the teacher said they put the kid who was having the hardest time at Ali’s table (“because Ali is so sweet”), hoping Ali would be kind to him, and they’ve become fast friends

He’s quite advanced in math. Average at letters. They asked if we talk to him or read to him a lot, because “He talks like a much older kid.”

That’s just Ali. Can’t take much credit. Youtube probably taught him as much as anything

Oct6: Little Miss Sassy with her Holly Golightly bangs having breakfast with Grandma.

Oct7: Ali reached all the way over his Baba to grab a silverware bundle at a Mexican restaurant tonight.

Ahmed said, “You know, instead of reaching over someone like that, you can just say, ‘Baba, can you please give me some silverware?'”

Ali said, “OK,” and reached all the way over his Baba to put the silverware back, then sat back down. “Baba, can you please give me some silverware?” he asked.

His Baba looked at me and we shared a smile. Then Ali got up again and reached over his Baba a third time to get the other two silverware bundles and lined them up in front of himself.

“Now you ask for them,” he said cheerfully.

Oct7: I love this little photo of Ayla kicking a ball around at preschool. And painting, playing, and Play-Doh

Oct8: Ayla had a 2.5-year-old check up on October 3, at 2 years 8 months. It was delayed for some reason I don’t remember.

She’s 37 inches tall (68th percentile), 29.8 pounds (56th percentile), with a head circumference of 49.7cm (82nd percentile). She was cooperative and talkative. Hated the flu shot, but I was honest that it was coming, and it would hurt a bit for a while, and I let her cry and sulk afterwards. It was only when we got to the car that she realized we’d forgotten to get her well-earned Dum Dum. She found her favorite flavor, bubble gum, and settled down in her car seat like a coal miner after a hard day’s work.

Oct9: Ayla said today, “I go to Tippi Toes. Will I go to Tippi Toes again after… Canifoniwa?”

Not a bad approximation of California for a two-year-old. It was from memory, too.

Oct10: When we got to the LA airport, Ali said matter-of-factly, but maybe a little sadly, “I don’t have any of my toys or videos here.”

I said, “Well, they have Youtube in California.”

“Hm,” he said. “Well, I won’t have any of my Youtube channels.”

“Buddy, Youtube was made in California.”

Oct10: It was supposed to be a lazy day to recover from a red-eye with two little kids, but we walked a mile along the beach to the Santa Monica Pier, Ali rode his first roller coaster, we drove through Topanga State Park and stopped at a gorgeous overlook, did some grocery and diaper shopping, and enjoyed a lovely sunset drive to our hotel in Thousand Oaks. (The kids alternately enjoyed themselves, tantrummed, and napped. As totally expected.)

Now we sleeeeeeeep.

Oct10: We already blew through LA, but I’m in search of good dim sum along the California coast. Recommendations welcome!

Oct10: Beach walk to Santa Monica Pier. Followed by an unglamorous but lovely dinner with improvised utensils.

Oct11: In Solvang, a little Danish-village-inspired tourist trap. Dang the food is pricy. But it’s cute.

Tomorrow: Pismo Beach and possibly San Luis Obispo. Recommendations welcome, as always!

Oct12: Visited Ventura and Nojuqui waterfall yesterday. So many chittering hummingbirds up by Serra Cross overlook. Ayla insisted on doing yoga next to a drop-off. (Only a few feet, but we still had to watch her like a hawk.) The waterfall was more like a trickle but still beautiful up in the woods.

The kids are being sleep terrorists, and Ali is super oppositional with all the changes and sleep deprivation. We are managing to have a pretty good time anyway.

The kids love watching videos and playing around in the hotel rooms as much as anything, and egging each other on in the car when they’re supposed to be napping.

It’s sweet how they’ve kind of ganged up against us, but also… yeah

Oct12: This is our view in Pismo Beach. Ali was just glad to find a patch of grass to mow

Oct13: Walking on Pismo Beach. Also, Ali found a tiny rubber fox at a boba tea place, and Ayla claimed it and has been playing with it non-stop ever since. They named it Runny because it likes to run and run and run. You may be able to see a rabbit in the background.

Oct14: Day 4, Thursday, San Luis Obispo Children’s museum and Morro Bay Beach. You never know what’s going to be a highlight. The beach was cold and windy, but an older couple gave the kids their last peanuts to feed to the world’s chunkiest squirrels, and it was a laugh riot. Then the kids found a miraculous box of beach toys behind a big rock. Treasure. They had so much fun and then put them back for the next kids.

Oct14: Ragged Point Thursday and Big Sur Friday. Our views have been foggy and decapitated but still pretty.

Oct15: Things have finally settled down a bit on this trip. The kids wake up around 7:30 and watch cartoons while we snooze and/or get ready. We have breakfast then head out and do some kind of morning thing — playground, hike, beach, children’s museum or attraction. We usually drive from one place to the next in the afternoon. The kids refuse to nap (or if one is tired, the other is bonkers) and are chronically underslept. We just have to understand they’re going to have moments of acting like sociopaths at some points during the day. (Eating in restaurants is super dicey. Sometimes videos are involved.)

Eat when we’re hungry — either a snack for lunch and then a bigger dinner, or a big afternoon dinner and maybe a snack before bed.

Some afternoon activity — a butterfly grove, a series of overlooks, a beach with corgi squirrels, walking around gorgeous hotel grounds, overlooks, and gardens at Ragged Point, watching hummingbirds feast on a flower bush.

Make it to the hotel later than expected (always), get the kids bathed, watch videos, play, and get to bed by around 8:30.

Wake up and do it all again.

The kids whine sometimes and say they just want to go home, or they just want to watch videos. All part of it. They’ll be talking about this trip for years.

Oct15: Ali ordered me to take this pic and send it to Grandma. Apparently he wants this sculpture for Christmas

Oct15: Monterey Bay Aquarium and Asilomar beach, day 6

(They were playing some kind of chasing game that always started with them squaring off with their hands on their hips. And giggling.)

Oct16: Day 7. Portola Redwoods. Little kids, big trees, banana slugs. Visiting a dear friend in El Granada now with gorgeous stairs and a beautiful view

Oct17: Ali and Ayla on vacation

Oct17: Day 8. Finally found a blue sky sunny day. Hit up the pumpkin patch and a lovely beach where a seal popped his head up every now and then. We also walked through a cypress grove

Oct18: Urgent care or just steri strip? Daredevil Ayla strikes again

Oct18: Day 9 was a humdinger. Started off saying good-bye to my dear friends Patricia and Ron, whom the kids bonded with so fast they barely looked at us the whole time we were there. Ayla fell in love with “Miss Tricia” as she called her, and Ali adored Ron (and his central vacuum system). Those kids wore my friends out, but a good time was had by all!
Then I girded my loins for a day on foot with two kids in the big city all on my own. I could have taken the car, but instead I took Ali on his first real passenger train ride — the Caltrain from South San Francisco to 4th St San Francisco. He loved all of it.

We took the light rail from there to the Exploratorium. But at the first light rail station, the kids started a chasing game the moment I looked at my phone to double check we were at the right place. They stayed close to the center (away from the tracks) and safe, and it was apparently a sneak-attack hug game. It took like one second for Ali to step behind a frosted glass divider thing and into a huge oozing puddle of barbecue sauce. WTF, right? It was like someone took the thickest BBQ sauce they could find, dumped it in a pile, and ran off with the bottle. I welcome theories as to how on earth this came about.

It took another half second for Ayla to scoot her little feet into the BBQ puddle and hug Ali. I frantically pulled them out and spent the rest of our public transit time trying not to let their feet touch their other feet, their legs, any chairs, or each other, with mixed success. (I had wipes, but there were no trash cans anywhere or any place to put used BBQ mess wipes in my backpack.) When we finally got to the Exploratorium, I spent about 25 minute cleaning up the kids and their socks and shoes, which had congealed BBQ sauce crammed into every crevice.

The museum was fun but not age-appropriate. The only way for Ayla to access any of the exhibits was for her to stand on the rickety wooden stools they had all over the place. After a while, at one exhibit, she reached too far, lost her footing, and smacked her mouth on the table as she went down. First aid medics were called, and they put on a steri strip that Ayla immediately drooled off. We went and got a snacky lunch, and everyone seemed to feel better, although Ayla’s lip opened up again every time she smiled.

Somehow the non-age-appropriate kid’s museum kept us entertained all day. And the gift shop had an Art-o-Mat, some of which feature art work by my mom! Not in this case, but I bought her a piece by another artist.

Ahmed picked us up a bit after 5 and we went to an Ethiopian restaurant at my request. The one I picked seemed to be a pizza joint when we arrived. And, well, it was. A pizza joint that also had Ethiopian food. And chicken nuggets and fries for the kids. And an NBA game on TV. It was perfect, actually. And excellent food.

We. Are. Worn. Plumb. Out.

Oct19: A couple of wins from this trip: the kids have really bonded, largely from ganging up on us. And today we tried to feed the kids at a pizza joint, and both said no thanks, they wanted sushi

Oct20: Day 10 — We rode the Caltrain from South SF to Palo Alto to visit some dear friends and got Boba tea and lunch on California Avenue along the way. (It’s the second time we’ve gotten boba tea while in California, and neither was as good as our Tulsa boba tea.) It was just me with the kids because Ahmed was working in his (super cool, Google-like) office again. Ayla started the day already over-tired. (We try to go to bed early every night, and we fail every night — the kids are just too excited and want to play and play in the hotel rooms.)

Ali took the first two portraits on the train (one of me, one of Ayla). My friends were savvy in the way of small kids and directed us to a local park and playground, where we caught up while the kids played and played. I forgot to take pics.

We then went back to my friends’ place to try to let Ayla nap while Ali played on his tablet, but Ayla stubbornly refused to play along and just got more and more alternately manic and zombie-like. Sigh.

Ali had been disappointed in how slow our local Caltrain was, so we caught an express Caltrain back up to SF to meet Ahmed (who had a fun work event until 6). Ali called the express train the “compressed train” and the local the “locomotive.” At the SF station, we watched the trains leave and the kids chased each other around until Ahmed could get there.

(Ali’s been asking insightful engineering questions lately, like how turning the wheels of an airplane makes it turn in the sky, and how bridges stay up. That’s fun.)

We tried to go to a Mediterranean restaurant for dinner but couldn’t find parking. Just went to the hotel and walked across the street to a pizza joint, but the kids weren’t interested. I said half-jokingly, “There’s sushi next door,” and the kids said, “Yeah, let’s get sushi.” So we dined on deep-fried California rolls, octopus balls, chicken gyoza, and Japanese-style chicken nuggets. The kids ate really well.

Then they wanted to play train games ad infinitum in the hotel. They have really bonded on this trip, banding together against us evil narcs who force them to leave fun places when they close and won’t let them destroy public property, run wild and free on train platforms and busy city streets, or shriek and yell and scream as much as they want on trains or in restaurants or hotels. How dare we. (Oh my god, give me a THOUSAND jobs before the job of constantly disappointing small sleep-deprived maniacs trying to run loose in these dangerous wonderlands.) And then we try to get them to SLEEP at night when a hotel room is RIGHT THERE begging to be played in all night long. What abject killjoys we are!

I am so relieved it’s the last day of just me with the kids during the day. (There were lots of meltdowns today. I’m usually OK with them, they aren’t emergencies, you use tried and true methods or, if necessary, improvise, and they pass. But all day long, sometimes in enclosed spaces, wore me down a bit. I had to deploy the ear plugs several times to help me regulate.) Should be downhill from here.

Oh, and Ali found a stuffed unicorn at the last hotel that looks like Rainbow Dash and suggested we get it for Ayla. So sweet we couldn’t refuse, and she hasn’t parted from it since. Ayla recently learned the word avenue and decided today to name her unicorn Avenue.

(Nap? No, Mama. Not today. Not ever.)

(A “short walk” with kids is never a short walk. Any insect or flowering bush could mean a ten-minute delay.)

(Post-bath stomp dance. Of course.)

(“I wanna see [the picture of] Ayla [that you just took].”)

Oct20: Day 11, San Francisco. Didn’t have a whole lot of time, but hit some highlights!

Oct23: Day 12-13. Friends, friends, friends! Friday morning we went to the Baylands Nature Reserve in the morning (it was a complete disaster — the kids were insanely wild) then met up for dim sum with two dear friends: Karen, my roommate at the Oklahoma School of Science and Math, and Amy, my roommate when I worked in China for a summer. They both went to MIT and had friends in common. Such a small world!

Then I met up with my Stanford roommate Liz and after catching up over a meal, we went to El Palo Alto Park, home of the original Tall (redwood) Tree that Palo Alto was named after. Liz played hide and seek with the kids, who were thrilled every time a Caltrain rolled by.

Next we had dinner with my friends at Magic, an intentional community near Stanford, including a neuroscientist who’s working on truly fascinating stuff. I told them it was fun to use my brain for something other than wiping yogurt off the floor.

Next morning was the informal reunion of my freshman dorm at the Coffee House. It was so awesome to see everyone. I don’t have pics on hand, but we got lots! Then I had a chance (finally) to wander the campus a bit, alone with my thoughts. I love walking around there.

Then we got Izzy’s bagels and headed toward Bakersfield. Long drive through a drought-stricken Central Valley. Fairly post-apocalyptic. The kids crashed.

Flying home today from LA. So excited to be home! But all in all a great trip. Not super easy by any means, but we made it through with good memories and without killing anyone!

(Notice the socks on her hands. She says she does it to “be a snake.”)

Oct23: Back in Tulsa. Pleasant flight. No children or unicorns lost

Oct23: Ayla still says “I wuz you” for “I love you.”

So if she says, “I was dat ‘pider,” it doesn’t necessarily mean she was a spider in a former life

Her totally random phrase that she says totally randomly these days is: “My birthday is going to be a cow.”

OK, kid. Um… OK.

Oct23: So, I think Ali wants to be a vacuum cleaner for Halloween. (It changes occasionally, but usually goes back to vacuum cleaner.) If you have any good DIY tips (or ideas) for that, please share!

Oct25: Someone wanted to try out being a butterfly unicorn pumpkin early

Oct25: OK. Turns out Ali wants to go as a REAL vacuum so he can suck candy up.

Man, this kid comes up with twenty impossible things before breakfast…

Oct25: Ali’s getting used to school again. The cats are getting used to us again. Meanwhile Ayla jumped right back in, “her Malachi” (of the giant blond curls and big personality) waiting at the door and reaching around the teacher and petting her hair as she greeted the teacher. They have the most adorable mutual affection.

Oct27: Children of the Corn. And pumpkins. And the dance. And my dead zinnias make pretty good Halloween decorations

Oct28: What is it with McDonald’s? What is their magic sauce? Some weeks my kids will refuse perfectly good food all week, then when we go to McDonald’s, they’ll eat like we’ve been starving them.

Oct28: When there was turbulence on the plane, Ayla would laugh and say, “This plane is silly!”

Ali was forever telling us on this trip, “Look at that plane! It’s liftoffing!”

Oct29: Shark shop vac in progress. (Say that five times fast.) Why couldn’t he just be a cat? Haha

Oct29: The principal of Ali’s school usually directs traffic at the crosswalk after school. He wasn’t there the other day, and Ali said, “Hey, where’s the prince?”

Oct29: Everything is magical

Oct30: Ali’s latest train contraption, staffed by two kitties and a red panda

Oct30: When my kids kept coming up to me and saying, “You are trash, Mama,” it took me a minute to realize they were playing a dumpster / garbage truck game.

Oct30: The kids had a great time making play doh and painting pumpkins with Tulsa Area Forest School

Oct31: “I has Siwight Sparkle hair”

Oct31: “I love it!”

Oct31: Halloween 2022. Ali was a trooper dragging that costume around for more than an hour and Ayla was a trooper dragging her two-year-old self around with barely a word. They were motivated, I guess!

ETA: Oh, by the way, Ali also drew a cat face on himself “so everyone can see that it’s a cat running the vacuum.”

Oct31: There was one house that gave out toys instead of candy in our neighborhood, and my two kids were VERY confused. They just kept hanging around waiting for the candy to appear. It simply did not register that they were trick-or-treating at this house on Halloween and not getting candy out of it

(I’m all for diverse Halloween treats. It was just fun watching my kids’ brains break the first time they encountered it.)

Oct31: Ali was so funny. At about half the houses, he said something like, “See if you can guess what my costume is.” Most got it immediately. Ali didn’t let others give up easily. It was amazing watching how easygoing and confident he was with all these strangers.

Ayla was more serious. She was on a mission. Cover the ground. Find the houses with lights on. Fill the bucket. Tirelessly, even as bed time approached, darkness fell, and little legs had been going for more than an hour.

But she wasn’t shy to gleefully shout, “I’m a unicorn!” at anyone who would listen.

One mom fail: I thought it would be a good idea to go to the scariest, most ostentatiously decorated house first when it was brightest out. Ali made it through the gauntlet of shaking spider bushes and jump scares. Ayla didn’t make it past a bloody skull jump scare. And she spent the rest of the night occasionally bringing up how “The first house was scary.”

Sorry, hon. I didn’t realize quite how scary it would be.

We technically didn’t limit their candy intake, but because it was past bath time by the time they got in, then quickly past bed time, they only got 5 or 6 pieces of candy each. Tomorrow will be “Eat ’til you’re sick if you want” day, I guess. (It’s how I learned how truly disgusting too much candy could make me feel.)

Nov1: Something about Palestine/Israel came on NPR, and Ali asked about it. I told him it was really complicated, but basically some people got kicked out of where they lived and then came and kicked someone else out from where they lived, and now they won’t let those people come back.

I said, “Like, imagine if someone came and stole your house and kicked you out. They’d probably think you were mad at them, so they probably wouldn’t invite you back in, right? They’d be too afraid that you’d do to them what they did to you.”

“I would just wait until the night and then throw them out.”

“Well, but imagine if they’ve been there for years and years, and they have kids and grandkids who live in the house. You’d think their kids and grandkids, plus the kids and grandkids of the people who were kicked out, could all share it. But the people there now don’t want to share it. They’re too scared. And a lot of them feel like if they do get kicked back out, they won’t have anywhere else to go.”

Ali said, “Huh. Well, let me tell you something. They should really go to those people [they kicked out] and say I’m sorry.”

I chuckled sadly. It’s really the least they can do. Alas.

Nov2: This little sprite right here

Nov7: Fist bump!

Nov7: Bless her heart. Ayla kept talking about “Ali’s cousins,” and I said, “Honey girl, they’re your cousins, too!”

I guess she just keeps hearing Ali talking about his cousins and didn’t realize she had the same claim…

Nov8: Tried to take a video of Ayla being a shark while swinging. Didn’t really work. Then Ali wanted me to record him swinging as well.

Nov10: All during the California road trip, Ayla had little figurines and plush toys to play with in her car seat, and she would make them talk, usually the child one saying “No!” to something, and the adult one saying, “Munna munna munna munna,” like the adults in the Peanut cartoons saying, “Wa wa wa wa wa.”

One of them frequently said, “Listen to me!” (I don’t know which one), and sometimes the adult one said, “No, I’m busy.”

It was funny and humbling.

Nov10: Ali asked some simple question, like why do tomato plants grow tomatoes while corn plants grow corn.

I started trying to explain DNA to him, and the more I tried to explain, the more I was like, “Whoah, holy hell, how have I forgotten the felt sense of how freaking unbelievable life is? All life, even a single cell is just… God damn. It can’t even really be possible, can it? It’s so unimaginably complex, so intricate, so colossal and so tiny at the same time. Yet here I am, thinking this thought, my hands doing the bidding of electrical signals from a brain magicked into being by chains of nucleotides (and cellular machinery billions of years in the making) that somehow know how to make a mind-blowing array of proteins and also know how to put the trillions of parts together to make a reasonably coherent whole, and then keep it in homeostasis for decades…”

So talking to a 4-year-old can be kind of like getting high, is what I’m saying.

Nov11: It’s incredible how much breathing space opens in the day when kids can finally:

• Ask for what they want instead of screaming until you guess
• Eat without making a huge mess every single meal, sometimes necessitating a wardrobe change or even a bath and wiping down half a dozen surfaces
• Put their own clothes on
• Get themselves in their car seats
• Buckle themselves in
• Get out of the car without you having to lift them out
• Find their own videos on Youtube instead of bugging me every 3 minutes to find a new one or skip an ad (and no, I don’t apologize for allowing Youtube to occupy my kids sometimes and give me a breather to do something fun like laundry)

Skills I’m looking forward to in the future:

• Eating healthy home-cooked food reliably
• Getting through the day without naps or (too many) meltdowns
• Both taking care of their own toileting needs
• Hiking more than a mile or so
• Sleepovers with friends
• Card games!

Nov11: Ali tonight:

“Hey, you know the animal called a chicken? They make the real chicken that we eat.”

Later:

“How do chickens make chicken?”

Ahmed tried to explain how chickens hatch out of eggs.

Ali said, “No, how do they make real chicken food? Chicken food for humans?”

He accepted my explanation that chicken meat is chicken muscle, and we have to kill chickens to eat them, like lions kill antelopes, with apparently equanimity. Then asked how they cut the meat off the bones. I told him I’d show him an example next time I got a rotisserie chicken.

Ayla tonight:

“If somebody has a Broken Arrow, they have to go to the doctor?”

(She called her injured finger her Broken Arrow for ages. We didn’t correct her. Now apparently it means injury.)

Nov12: Ali: “Santa must make a looooooot of money to buy all these presents and give away all these presents.”

Nov12: Why is Ali coughing non-stop at night for weeks? We’ve tried allergy pills, honey and lemon, honey and milk, etc. Doctors usually just say to try what we’ve already tried.

I wish I knew what caused it and how to fix it. It really destroys his sleep

Nov13: Ayla: “Ali has a peanut and Baba has a peanut and Mama has a boba and Ayla has a boba.”

(If you can decipher that, you get a PhD in toddler communication.)

Nov15: You can meditate and read and write in your journal and do yoga all day, trying to find your center, and it’s amazing how fast taking two little kids to Walmart after school will frazzle you right back up in no time flat. A not-nearly-exhaustive sampling:

Ayla cried for several minutes on the way begging for a “drayde”? I still don’t know what she wanted. She settled for a gummy bear.

It was cold and drizzly, and I suggested we go quickly into the store instead of dragging our feet. I meant “together,” but Ali took it as an invitation to go running into the parking lot by himself. I had to yell to get him to stop.

When looking at greeting cards, Ali grabbed every card that caught his eye and then couldn’t remember where he got them. When I asked him to stop taking cards out, he started rubbing his fingers hard over the surface of every card instead. (I put a stop to that, too.)

Ayla asked for a unicorn card for herself, and it was cheap, so I gave it to her. She bent it in half and then decided she’d rather have a tiger unicorn card instead.

Ali was always dancing around in the aisles, which was fine, but he would frequently pause his forward motion and continue dancing right in front of someone trying to get by, and I’d have to pull him out of the way, breaking his reverie and spoiling his fun.

Ali always wants the world and a half, and finding creative ways to disappoint him over and over and over again really taxes my heart and brain.

Ayla begged for an $8 Spiderman ornament, and we do need ornaments for the tree we’re eventually going to get. When I gave it to her, she ripped it out of the package. Two minutes later she handed it to me, saying, “I don’t want this one.” (Fool me once…)

When Ali was picking out an ornament (since Ayla got one), we both bent down to look at them, and after a while Ali stood up quickly and hit my cheekbone so hard with his dense little skull that my eyesight blacked out for a second. It’s not so easy to go cheerfully about your day after you’ve been punched in the face with a rock, however unintentional.

I know I shouldn’t even attempt it, but about once a month I forget and think, “Eh, I just have a couple things to pick up. How bad could it be?”

Oh well!

Nov15: My kids have the same curse I do: They hit their stride for the day right at bed time.

Nov20: Is anyone offended that in Tolkien movies, Elves always speak in a proper English accent, Dwarves speak in a Scottish accent, and Hobbits are basically Irish?

Or is it more like:

“Eh, fair play to ye.”

“Aye, pre”ay mooch.”

(Not my place to have feelings about it one way or another. Just curious.)

Nov21: With cousins and grandparents to play with, I’m officially chopped liver for the duration of the Thanksgiving holiday. And I’m OK with it!

Nov22: Legos are a huge hit around here. Ali built the Titanic. Ayla built a unicorn.

He also says “peach other” instead of “each other.” Totally straight-faced. Not as a joke. I can’t bear to “correct” him. His way is cuter.

Mom captioned this photo: Last night Ali spent a LOT of time building a lego Titanic. He turned around and said to Bill, “I’m building the Titanic but it keeps coming apart. IT’S A DISASTER!”

Nov24: Anyone know what this is? It stung the heck out of Ali unprovoked in south Alabama

Nov24: Fun doings in Mississippi and Alabama

Nov24: They didn’t grow up on a farm…

My mom wrote:

When we came up from the beach the kids were cold and sandy so I ran a tub of warm water and plopped them in to warm up. I’m always clowning around with them, so I started singing She’ll Be Coming Around The Mountain. They were delighted and so of course I went on with She’ll Be Driving Six White Horses, and they loved it and Ayla said, Is there more?

Without giving it a thought, I belted out WE WILL KILL THE OLD RED ROOSTER… The look on their faces was pure HORROR!

Ayla said OH NO!

Ali said.. YOU HAD TO KILL HIM?

And he was OLD!

I’m telling you I never know what they’ll say!

Nov24: In the whole day, Ali ate 4 rolls and 1 popsicle. Ayla ate some crackers. Oh well.

Nov25: Hotdoggin’

Nov27: Home after a 12+ hour rainy drive from Orange Beach, AL. Loads of fun with the extended family! (Nothing better than grandparents and cousins.)

A funny exchange today:

Ahmed: I’m just getting appetizers
Ali: What’s apple tizers?
Ayla: No, apple CIDER.
Ali [ignoring Ayla]: Is apple tizer a grown up drink?

Ayla’s favorite joke lately, which is really just a call-and-response re-enactment of a conversation we had the other day:

Ayla: What do unicorns make?
Me: Rainbows and sparkles.
Ayla: What do horses make?
Me: Horse poop.
Ayla: laughs maniacally sometimes adds: And horse pee pee!

Nov27: Oops. I missed all the Black Friday emails / deals. I was jumping my tail off at the trampoline park with my kids and their cousins

Definitely got my “run” in for the day! Super sore today, but my back held up, yay

Nov27: Just a friendly book recommendation, if you haven’t read it yet: The Untethered Soul. Michael Singer is not infallible guru or anything, but he packages timeless wisdom in a way that really clicked for me.

It took so many thing I’ve been learning, feeling like I was hacking my way through a dense jungle, and tied them together into a kind of Grand Unified Theory. It’s amazing how many things fit neatly into this basic framework.

It also offered a nice clearing in the woods ahead. It changed my life pretty quickly.

I’m sure it’ll hit everyone differently, but it hit me harder than any book in a long time. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you do read it (or have read it).
Nov27: It’s funny how, with your first kid, every new phase is like, “OMG, is this normal? Is going be this way forever???”

With the second kid, it’s like, “Oh yeah, this phase again.”

looks at watch

Nov27: Still sore from the trampoline park. Turns out I’m… 42 years old? Oh well! So much fun

Nov28: Welp. Ayla gave herself bangs this morning. Don’t blame her. She doesn’t like hair ties or hair in her eyes. It’s actually really cute. I’ll get it cleaned up at a hair salon after school and post a pic.

Nov28: What a frustrating day. One thing after another.

The kicker: Ayla’s hair looked much cuter after she cut it, before I took her to a salon to “clean it up a bit.” I should have let her keep her little style

Nov29: I had a really bad day yesterday. I couldn’t hide it or swallow it, not even for the kids. They got some of the brunt of it.

At bed time, Ali apologized for any part he played in my hard day, and I just melted and told him thank you, but he was always more important than whatever happened in a given day, and I would always love him no matter what, and tomorrow would be a better day.

He said, “I think tomorrow after school we should go to Sonic and then drink our cherry Cokes and watch a movie and pet the cats.”

I am such a lucky mama. Kids show us that, given a chance, people are fundamentally good.

Nov29: Ali: “Have you ever seen a Easter bunny chop down a tree with a teeny tiny egg?”

Me: “Uh… no.”

Ali: “Whyyyy?”

Me [chuckling]: “Why would I?”

Ali: “If you’re ever watching a movie and you see it, come tell me how funny it was. Because that would be so funny.”

Nov29: I’m doing a gentler Couch to 5k type program (None to Run), and I did Week 2 on an Alabama beach (and at a trampoline park, informally).

I feel like a super hero running on concrete now. It’s so freaking easy, LOL.

Nov30: Recent Ali-isms:

“Before liftoff the plane gets a check just like going to the doctor.”

After getting cherry Cokes at Sonic today, I asked him not to tell Ayla we got them, because I didn’t plan on getting her one.

He said, “Well, I was planning on sharing yours with her.”

Fair enough. A better idea, actually.

Later I told him again that I wasn’t mad at him on Monday, I was just having a hard time. I said, “I should have just asked for a hug.”

He said, “Yeah. Or you could have gone to your room and just took a minute to calm your body down. Take a reset.”

May my kids always be more emotionally mature than I am!

Summer 2022

Jun2: Behold the Unicorn Train. Guess who got to push it?

I know the horses can go forward if you go up and down on them, but the kids weren’t interested. Ayla just sat there expectantly and Ali used it like a scooter.

I got tired of bending down to push Ayla, so I found a skate helper thing, which wedged right in between the back legs and worked perfectly. Then Ali got jealous that I was pushing Ayla around and not him. Here is his solution, haha. (He held onto the skate helper with his feet.)

Ayla would not part with her rainbow sunglasses or her red panda.

(This is Tiny Tots at Wheels & Thrills in Owasso. So much fun it was a nightmare getting them out the door when it was time to leave!)

Before we went, Ali asked if they had “fun stuff. Like, do they have vacuums?”

Just before we left, he gasped and said, “I see a purple vacuum!” Sure enough, there was one hanging next to a door behind the concession stand.

Meanwhile Ayla gasped when she saw “diney-doors” (dinosaurs) on the side of a video game. These kids know what they like.

Jun3: Nothing makes a two-year-old want to play with a toy like trying to put it away. (I’m trying to put approximately 875,000 toys away right now, and she suddenly can’t live without any of them, or even with them being anywhere but on the floor being played with. She’s busy.)

Jun3: Ahmed: “Hey! No running in socks.”

Ali: “We’re not running. We’re just… jump walking.”

This kid is seriously going to be a lawyer. He can pick apart anything or find any loophole with his own 4-year-old version of semantics, any time.

Jun3: Overheard in the backseat:

Ali: “Say ‘Why?’, Ayla.”

Ayla: “Why Ayla.”

Ali: “No, say ‘Why?’ to me.”

Ayla: “Why to me?”

Ali: “No, ‘Why?’ to me.”

Ayla: “Why to me?”

Ali: “No, ‘Why?’ to me.”

Ayla: “Why to me, why to me, why to me!”

Jun6: I love these babies

Jun6: “I want to jump on the trampoline outside right now.”

Ayla’s longest sentence to date!

Jun8: The kids are so happy to be back in Tippi Toes!

Jun9: Great place to get some zoomies out! (click for video)

Also, I’m glad there’s a place where they have access to these riding horses. They look super fun (you make them go by bouncing up and down in the saddle, and you can steer them), and I did not want to be asked to buy one (or two)!

Ali even tried roller skating a little, but he didn’t last long. I remember it took me a long time to figure out how to go without just kind of rolling my feet back and forth and going nowhere. He’ll get it when he’s ready. He did great for a first time.

Jun9: Automatic flushers are seriously Satan for people with skittish newly-potty-trained kids.

They’re Satan anyway, but like super double Satan now.

Jun11: Happy as pigs in mud (click for video)

Jun12: Middle aged mom summer. Wish I had taken my camera into Big Splash. The kids had a blast. Ayla bellowed her anger all the way home that we had to leave when it closed. Ali was disappointed too but handled it very maturely

Jun13: Went to the Jenks Planetarium with Ali, where we got a cosmic perspective, from our home planet all the way through to the large-scale galactic superstructure of the known cosmos.

Afterwards I asked Ali, “Do you have any questions?”

“Mmm, yeah,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked, on the edge of my seat, wondering what query a full-scale overview of known reality had sparked in my son.

“How does a Zamboni suck up the ice?”

Jun14: “You know those dinosaurs with the really long necks? Those are called long-neck-a-sauruses.”

~ Ali

(Ayla would know better)

Jun16: We were talking about getting a kitten, and I asked Ali what he would name one if we got one.

He said, “Um… Grass… Clippings.”

“Grass Clippings?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You want to name a cat Grass Clippings?”

“Yeah!”

“Okay,” I said slowly trying to think of a diplomatic response. “Tell you what. If we find a green kitten, we can name it that.”

Learning to say no without saying no is such a #ParentSkill

Jun18: Whimsical cucumber beauty

Jun18: There are times I catch a glimpse of Ayla and it is, very simply, a living baby photo of me. It is so strange. (She thinks it’s the funniest thing in the world to hide in my closet.)

I’m glad I know she is very much her own person, though. Even literal clones (like identical twins) are totally different people. It is all so fascinating.

Jun19: Happy Happy Father’s Day to all the wonderful Babas out there! We see you being amazing and doing so much for the next generation (and often having a good time doing it!)

Jun19: I love that she’s just touching my arm while she watches cartoons (after a long napless afternoon at a little pool party)

Jun19: Father’s Day fun!

Jun22: Ayla and Ali playing ponies in the morning

Jun22: First cucumber from our garden!

ETA: It was almost as thick and sweet as an apple, and Ali ate way more than his share — and we let him!

Jun22: I got so jealous of watching my kids have fun at Tippi Toes, I signed up for an adult ballet class. It’s so funny how they’ll introduce a move (like a jumping arabesque, or sauté) in the kids’ class and then I’ll do it in mine.

Ali asked me, “Will there be turtles?”

They dance around with stuffed turtles in part of their class.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

But it turns out we do dance around with masks for one number…

Jun23: It felt like an actual vacation today going to the dealership ALONE to get the car serviced.

What inestimable luxury to just get up and pee when I wanted to instead of waiting for the right moment, herding two small kids into a tiny stall, trying to keep them both from putting their hands on the floor or the toilet, acquiescing to Ayla’s insistence on getting toilet paper for me (even though her hands were all over the floor despite my best efforts) (ew), then washing everyone’s hands (which is a whole-ass production even if there is a stool for the kids to stand on, which there almost never is).

What a wonderful thing it was to just get myself a complimentary cup of decaf without two munchkins insisting on hot chocolate for themselves, which will be a bitter disappointment for quite a while due to it being way too hot to drink, and thereafter a clear and present danger of a sticky mess explosion.

How sweet it is, in a moment of lull, to just take out my phone and read a book and even have time and space now and then to look up and sigh and think a complete thought about life, the world, humanity, instead of constantly being fully in charge of the safety and entertainment of two beings who are forever on the brink of some need or desire or meltdown or climbing on something or jumping off something or…

Watching after two small kids is many things. One of those things is draining. So. Very. Draining. Some days / weeks more than others.

Jun24: I am crying laughing listening to Ali do voice searches on our TV for highly-specific (non-existent) YouTube videos like:

“Search for golf course zero-turn Toro Lego Grasshopper lawnmower for kids on YouTube.”

Sometimes the search engine will interrupt him before he can finish, saying, “Here are some videos…” I think I can sense some exasperation in her voice…

Jun26: Ali: “I want a kitty shirt.”

Ahmed: “You have a [Mickey] mouse shirt.”

Ali: “Yeah. Kitties like to chase mouses.”

Ahmed: “How do you know that? You’ve never watched Tom and Jerry.”

Ali: “Did you say Connie and Jerry?” [Family friends]

Ahmed, laughing: “No.”

Ali: “Did you mean Jerry the Shrubber?” [A Monty Python-inspired nickname for Jerry, a landscape artist]

Ahmed, laughing: “No…”

Jun27: New kitten. Ali wants to name her Kitty Kitty Kitty. Ayla just calls her Mateo. Still working on it.

Another skittish street rescue, but not quite as bad (or in as bad of health) as Mateo was when we got him. Hopefully growing up with kids, she’ll actually want to have something to do with them!

Update: She actually came out of her bathroom / temporary headquarters today and explored a little. Mateo would never have done that on his second day here!

Mateo accidentally met her last night when I was stepping out of the bathroom, which I kept closed yesterday to keep them separate. They actually seemed just curious for a minute, then one made a one-millimeter move, and both started hissing. But while they are both hissers, neither is aggressive. We’ll see how it goes!

Jun27: “Fish pee and poop in the ocean and then they drink the ocean… They shouldn’t do that.”

~ Ali suddenly realizing the deep, dark secret of aquatic life on the way to swim class

“You guys look like Legos.”

~ Ali to his grandparents, talking over Facebook chat, as their car went through a dead zone and they started to pixellate

Jun28: Looks like a salad to me

Jun28: Name? Isabela? Liana? Grass Clippings?

Jun29: Ali has been bugging me for days to make “gingerbread mans.” Finally did it. He asked at the store if we could make “alive” ones. I said, “How would we do that? Sounds intense.” He mumbled to himself for a while and all I could make out was, “They don’t have blood vessels.”

(And some days you and your kids pretty much have Pirate’s Booty and gingerbread cookies for lunch. And that’s OK. Not looking forward to the soul-sucking clean-up job — whole kitchen is a disaster — but oh well.)

ETA: He’s licking a kiddie knife. There’s no sharp edge and no serration. It was just for spreading frosting, since I realized too late I don’t have any frosting tips to make nice designs.

Jun29: Garden post

Jun29: Isabela (?) and Mateo are not hissing at each other anymore. Not snuggling or anything, but not hissing. We also realized real quick that she wasn’t having being shut up in the bathroom at night. The whole house is hers. But so far she orbits around her bathroom headquarters.

Jun30: Ali: “Are you out of your mind?”

Ahmed: “Yes.”

Ali: “Well, get in your mind!”

Jul2: The new kitty, Isabela, keeps trying to play with Mateo, generally by running straight at him. He runs off like he’s being persecuted by the paparazzi.

But he likes to watch her play with things that aren’t him. It’s fun to watch their relationship develop. Meanwhile she lets Ali pet her, even if I’m still not allowed. He’s giddy with kitty love.

Jul3: Ayla: “I want to check your heart.”

Me: “OK.”

[She checks my heart with her stethoscope]

Me: “How’s my heart, doctor?”

Ayla: “I don’t know.”

Jul3: This little fluffer nutter is all over the house and all over her parents on the couch and playful as heck madly chasing Ayla’s Indiana Jones whip around. Very lovey dovey and purr-y when she wants to be, and kitten-wild but (so far) not destructive. Ali continues to be madly in love.

Ayla in her cute Moana bathing suit just because. She is one fearless swimmer and relentless jump-in-the-pool-er. She barely surfaces before sputtering, “Do it a-denn!” (again) and flailing back toward the side of the pool for me to lift her out again.

Jul4: 4th fun with all tha grandkidz!

Jul4: Pool fun with the cousins on the 4th! At my half-brother’s step-brother’s place. We’re all family!

Jul5: I won’t do it, it’s just for us, but sometimes I wish I could record the songs I improvise for Ali when something’s on his mind.

Some nights he lets me off easy and just asks for his special version of Silent Night.

Tonight I sang the “My Lawnmower’s On Fire Blues”

Jul8: Gargoyles

Jul10: Having to use a PIN to re-open devices has no doubt accelerated Ali’s numeracy.

Jul10: The day has finally come! Ayla flits around the house in frenetic dances like I used to do as a kid. And I’m not gonna tell her to quit or she’ll break a toe. She can break however many toes she wants. Some things are worth the risk

Jul11: We got the baby swallows off to college. Godspeed, kids!

Jul11: Tiny dancer (click for video)

Jul12: I was listening to the Jan 6 hearing and got a question from Ali that no parent wants to hear from their child:

“Who’s Donald Trump?”

Ugh, kid. Where do I start?

Jul12: Farm visit this cloudy morning

Jul13: Bounty

Jul14: When Ayla called our new cat “Mateo,” I said to her, “She’s Isabela, honey.”

Ayla said, “Oh. Tapowa! Tapowa!” She started yelling and chasing the kitty, who zoomed around, always ahead of her.

I said, “Honey, if you yell, she won’t like that.” I knelt down close to Isabela and said quietly, “Isabela, it’s me. It’s OK.”

Ayla plopped down and said more loudly, “Tapowa, it’s me!” The cat fled, and Ayla chased her under a bed. Ayla peered under the bed yelling, “Tapowa, it’s me! Tapowa! It’s me!”

(Sometimes she says something more like “Eesabewwa,” but when she gets excited, it’s “Tapowa.” Or Mateo.)

Jul17: Cason Christmas in July was a success!

Jul18: No pic, we ate it too fast, but dinner tonight was:

• Squash casserole with squash from the garden (take THAT, squash vine borers!), butter, eggs, cornbread mix, and a bit of brown sugar, topped with seasoned breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese
• Tomato cucumber salad (from garden) with lemon, olive oil, and feta
• Bean soup with garden herbs, scallions, and garlic
• Hot dog circles cooked like sujuk

Jul19: I am learning so much botany and entomology as a home owner. Who ever heard of cicada killers? But I kinda like them. (I like cicadas just fine, too. Their discarded exoskeletons are everywhere.)

Jul19: The kitty has started coming into Ali’s bed every night when I’m singing him to sleep to play and cuddle a bit. Ali is in heaven. Absolute kitten bliss.

Ali was surprised, by the way, almost affronted, when I told him not every mom sings their son a song before bed. He said, “Well, they’re doing it wrong then.”

Jul21: Ahmed: “Pamela, are you ready?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ali, are you ready?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ayla, are you ready?”

“I’m a little pony!”

Jul23: Lake day

Jul23: She loves the plunge. Gets mad if you don’t let her jump in deep and swim a bit (click for video)

Jul24: It has been a good summer. A good year. Unhealthy mental patterns have been unraveling bit by bit. (Following years of work, breakthroughs, etc.) Reading about some of my frustrations, habits, and actions of just a few months ago seem alien to me now. A sure sign of change.

I’m enjoying parenting more and more, too. These kids are compelling me more than anything in my life to finally grow up! To truly learn to let go of so much that can be let go of, to enjoy what’s right in front of me, to accept things as they are. (Some things can be changed or improved, of course, but accepting things as they are is the first step toward that anyway.)

I have a long ways to go, but it’s been a good year. 42 isn’t bad. Maybe by my next birthday, I will have figured out the question to the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything…

Jul25: Ayla, after giving me a headband: “It’s a cutie mark?”

Me: “Aren’t cutie marks on your butt?”

Ayla: “Uhhh… Yeah.”

Me: “Do you have a cutie mark?”

Ayla: “Yeah.”

Me: “What is it?”

Ayla: “Umm… My… my… my… my diaper!” Cue hysterical laughter

Jul25: Timeless

Jul26: Welp, that’s the third time Ayla has made a child cry by yelling at them. She is fiercely territorial.

No child has made her cry, even by tackling or hitting her. (Well, other than Ali, of course, usually by annoying her. Big brothers figure out the buttons to push.)

I’m not praising or blaming her. Just the facts. (She’s 2.)

ETA: She has also taken lately to scream-singing long operas, and often the only thing I can understand is “NEVER NEVER NEVER” and “IN THE MOOOORNING!”

Just now she said something I didn’t understand. I said, “What, my love?”

She said, “You heard me.”

Ooh the sass on that one…

Jul26: Found a stuffed kitten that looks like our kitty. I think Ali likes it. He named her Fuzzy. [ETA: Later renamed Isabela.]

Jul26: Our morning plans fell through so we went to the mall and got cookies and watched the ponies (carousel). Also rode it a few times.

Jul27: Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

Ali wants to ask Elmo if he’s the same kind of monster as Cookie Monster.

Jul27: Just 3 more weeks of summer? How did that happen?

It’s starting to drag, though, haha. Especially with this weather. The kids don’t want to do anything but screens. I keep having to drag them out into a hot car. We swim at the neighborhood pool most evenings. It’s been fun. But yeah, we’re ready for a change, I think.

Jul28: Ayla came up to me carrying a stick she found and said, “Wanna pight, Mama?” (fight)

I said, “Sure, but not with a stick. Let’s fight with the [foam] rainbow swords.”

So Ayla sword fought with her Baba and me while Ali played Minecraft, which he taught himself to play by watching Youtube videos.

We got the brain and the brawn right here

Jul28: I really just can’t with this little half pint of sweet cider half drunk up. Currently in her Elton John phase

Jul29: Ayla Fierce

Jul29: Hey, Maw! I got on the TeeVee! (click for article and video)

(Ran into a reporter from News on 6 while hiking in the rain at Turkey Mountain.)

Jul31: Sunflower in the rain, moonflower at its feet. First hummingbird at our feeder today.

Jul31: Mama’s little hooligans

Aug1: One of these things is not like the other. Dang sneaky hiding cukes…

Aug1: Meanwhile, Ali and I grew a real live cantaloupe! Just the one. Had to pick it early because some critter mauled it a bit. But still has that ambrosial taste.

I’ll open the watermelon with Ali tomorrow and see what we get.

Our pumpkin is still hanging on. Waiting for the stalk to get fully woody.

(Yes, out of six big ol’ vines, we have exactly 3 modest fruits. No others are even starting. I didn’t trellis them. They’re just sprawling on the ground. Pollination seems to be fine with the cucumbers, so maybe that’s not the issue here. Who knows?)

Aug3: I just realized Ali thinks “vomit” is two words: the verb “vom” and the direct object “it.”

Our cat was spayed, and the vet said she may vomit in the first 24 hours. Ali said, “I don’t want her to vom. I don’t want her to vom it up.”

After we checked on her and saw no vomit, he said, “She’s not vomming!”

Also, today I gave him some gummy worms and M&Ms in a little bowl. He said with radiant delight, “I love candy salad.”

ETA: Ayla grabbed a ribbon stick at Discovery Lab (she still calls it Da Stawbewwy — The Strawberry) and sang, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to Rainbow Dash!”

Aug4: Sunflower with a bee visitor and crescent moon. And our moonflower twig is all grown up! (With a cosmo right in the middle of it.)

Aug4: This girl who loves to “dink balls” (drink boba tea) is two and a half today. Last six months of babyhood. Soon to be a little girl. (By my reckoning. The transition from 2 to 3 is astonishing.)

Aug5: I’ve been watching a few episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series for the first time. I was blown away by how awesome Nichelle Nichols / Uhura is, in every way.

Just before I learned of her passing (after a long, legendary life), I saw the episode The Naked Time and that line when Sulu is under the influence of a virus that makes him act drunk.

He brandishes a sword, grabs her, and says, “I’ll protect you, fair maiden!”

She deadpans, “Sorry, neither.”

OMG. Dead. Super spicy for the 1960s. Hilarious. And apparently ad libbed!

Hats off forever, Ms. Nichelle.

Aug6: I tell my kids I love them all the time but don’t prompt them to say it back. Today I said it to Ayla, and she said, “I love you too, Mama.”

The other day I said it to Ali, and he said, “I love you so freaking much.”

Better honor than a Nobel Prize, that is

Aug8: Me to Ali: “Do you know what adoption means?”

Ali: “Yes.”

Me: “What does it mean?”

Ali: “It means adopting… something.”

Me: “What does ‘adopting something’ mean?”

Ali: “It means if you want to adopt something, you just… adopt it.”

Me: “What does ‘adopt it’ mean?”

Ali: “It means… something I don’t know.”

I’m glad I won’t be grading this kid’s college college papers

Aug8: Ayla’s obsession right now is putting band-aids all over her little ponies (mostly larger plastic knock-off ponies).

Art supplies. It’s just art supplies. Not “waste,” and no ponies are harmed in the making of this art…

Aug9: Lately Ayla asks me to sing the “Rainbow Unicorn” song to her every night, which she gently directed me to make up (i.e., looked more satisfied the closer I got to these lyrics, and completely satisfied once the song was fully saturated with her two favorite things). It goes like this:

Rainbow rainbow unicorn
Unicorn!
Rainbow rainbow unicorn
Unicorn!
Rainbow rainbow unicorn
Rainbow unicorn!

[Repeat, repeatedly]

I guess for her, life is (literally) all rainbows and unicorns…

Aug9: Hello Mr. Moon

Heya Sunny

Aug9: When the clay dough keeps getting in the pony’s hair, obvious solution: pony hair cut

Aug9: At Grandma’s request

Aug10: Found a use for the giant hiding cucumbers. Apparently they are dragon eggs.

Aug10: Isabela, who was not impressed when I tried the cucumber trick. She looked down and sniffed it. Mateo just stepped over it.

Aug11: That’s a wrap on Wheels & Thrills for the summer! Ayla’s riding the bigger kid horses now… sniff And she’s forward facing in the car now. And Ali starts pre-k in a week…

Aug11: Right now Mateo is moving his tail a lot (more than normal) and Isabela can’t resist playing with it, and Mateo keeps growling at her to get her to stop, but then moving his tail around again until she plays with it again.

My two cats are just like my kids, is what I’m saying.

Aug13: I can’t bear to tell my kids not to run at the pool. I still remember the pure, unbridled, transcendent joy of running at the pool and the stultifying feeling of it being forbidden, my joy quashed, with no appeal. I was more than willing to risk an occasional scrape and bruise as I gradually improved my “running at the pool” skills.

My kids are awesome at it.

Aug13: Ali and I went to the first annual Broken Arrow Pride Fest, and there were protesters with posters of Biblical verses lined up along one side. But they weren’t doing much.

Some guy without a shirt or shoes on was wandering around, however, trying to proselytize on the sly. He asked why I brought a child here, and I said, “My son is going to grow up in a beautiful diverse society, and I’m so glad.”

He gestured toward the festival and said, “So you support pedophilia?”

Well that escalated fast.

Look, son. Priests and preachers have engaged in a lot more pedophilia than drag queens have. It’s not even a contest.

I said, “Of course I don’t. And I’d appreciate it if you’d get away from me and my son.”

He said, “You should get away from me. The light shall not shine on you today. You are too blind, you don’t know and you don’t see.”

I said sadly, “You are too blind, you don’t know and you don’t see.

As we were walking away, he said, “I put a curse on you.”

I turned back in amusement. “That’s your loving God?”

He said, “I tried to put a blessing on you. But then God gave me a message to brush you away.” He mimed brushing dirt off his shoulder.

We kept walking away and Ali said, “That guy is bothering me. I don’t like him. He’s a bad guy. He’s bugging me. He’s a bugger.”

I almost choked on my popsicle laughing. Out of the mouths of babes.

I promise you: That kind of nonsense is a lot harder to explain to a 4-year-old than the fact that some kids have two moms or two dads.

Aug14: Ali has gotten so brave at Big Splash. He swam all the way to the biggest waves in the deep end of the wave pool (with his backpack floaty on) on his own initiative, and he did the big winding water slide all by himself (after a lifeguard said we could go together, but then the lifeguard that actually had veto power said no at the last minute — which didn’t throw him at all). He had a blast!

Aug14: About once a day, apropos of nothing, Ayla gets our attention and asks:

“Hey, Mama? Why did the dinosaur go to the volcano?”

(In her two-year-old accent, it sounds like: Why didda dinodaur doe to da boltano?)

We say we don’t know, and she says, “Oh.”

I wonder if she’s trying to tell a joke, or if she has a recurring dream about a dinosaur voyaging to a volcano, or what.

Aug14: My Persian cucumbers are supposed to be the size of hot dogs (see one correctly sized cuke at left). I obviously suck at getting them in time, haha.

One plant has too much room to grow. It goes up the poles, into the tree, into my cherry tomatoes, under a bush, into a bush, over a bush, intertwined with a random pumpkin vine…
The other has too little room to grow and has become a dense bush.

In both cases, it’s all too easy for cucumbers to hide.

Next year I’ll know better. Though I still have to figure out a system, maybe along the fence with some wire trellises? The fence is a bit old, though, and I don’t want to end up over-burdening it. Or spending a fortune on trellises. We’ll see! Hashtag learnding

Aug15: Ali is slowly, painstakingly putting together a Lego build meant for 8+. Watching his spatial reasoning skills is a treat.

Aug16: Ali met his new teacher for pre-K at Grissom Elementary’s new public Montessori program. So excited to set this guy off on a new adventure with new friends and so much to learn!

He was happy and excited afterwards. Partly because we promised donuts, but I think he also liked it

I talked with the teacher and assistant for a while, and they were new to Montessori but had just done basically a Master’s degree in it and will continue to learn throughout the year and beyond. It’s so wonderful to see people learning new methods and applying them to our precious little ones.

Aug16: Handsome boy ready for school!

Aug16: Ali insisted on a selfie

Aug16: Nothing sweeter

Aug17: Happy happy birthday to a wonderful dad, grandpa, and all around human! (click for video)

Aug18: Off he goes…

Aug18: Ali’s teacher’s report on his first day:

“Oh, what a wonderful young man!”

Ali’s report:

“It was great!”

Whew. That’s Day One done and dusted! He directed us to Sonic after school for a First Day of School cherry limeade and then came home and ate the donut holes with chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles I picked up for him this morning. All is well. He’s like a different kid from the beginning of summer. So chill and confident.

Aug19: Consignment for the win! We got Ali a light hoodie, a warm hoodie, two regulation pairs of shorts (there’s a limited list of things a kid can wear to his school), a winter jacket, and three new toys, plus a bonus rainbow skirt for Ayla… all for less than $50

Aug19: She is a performer. Whole rock operas in the morning.

Way too awesome not to share (click for video)

Aug19: I love so much how these two cats love each other. She melted his fearful old heart. He even groomed her just now

Aug20: Little Miss Rainbow Unicorn

Aug20: Ayla all day (click for video)

Aug20: Brunch family photo

Aug20: I asked them to smile and look happy so I could get a photo. Got about 2 minutes of this (click for video)

Aug20: Best of the lot

Aug20: Today Ayla wanted to watch a “unicorn video on Youtube” (her constant refrain these days) before her nap, and I said no. Ali came in the room with a magnetic sketch pad and suggested I draw her a unicorn on the sketch pad and she could watch that.

OK. Why not? I drew a unicorn and gave it to her. She settled in and watched it like it was a video on a tablet for quite some time. I later had to go back and take it away from her so she would actually sleep.

When she woke up, the first thing she said was, “Where’s my unicorn picture?”

These kids are funny little ducks.

Aug24: Ali’s doing great in school, but I got in trouble four times in one day. First I walked him all the way to his classroom instead of handing him over at the outside door. Then when picking him up, I forgot to bring my little colored sign that tells the kid-sorters which class the kids are in as they bring them to the parents.

Then, deep in a conversation with Ali after school (in which he informed me that he didn’t get to eat the lunch I packed because it had peanut butter in it — d’oh! I’ve packed him PBJs so many times, I literally didn’t even think about it, much less remember there’s a peanut allergy in his class — strike 3), we walked across some lady’s lawn (well, there’s no sidewalk), and she scolded me for that.

Meanwhile, Ali says his day was “great” most days after class (and he has a new friend named Aurora), but in the mornings he does not want to get up early (7 instead of 7:30) and does not want to go to school. He also thinks of his friends at Bethany sometimes. And he just started complaining that they play with the same toys over and over, and he doesn’t like it.

It’s so hard to know if we’re doing the right thing, or if he’s just being a contrarian 4-year-old. We have a bigger, non-Montessori school we could have sent him to here in Broken Arrow (5 minutes away instead of 15), or we could have paid for another year of Bethany. I feel like this is a better option in the longer-term (BA schools are just overwhelmingly big and don’t seem like a great fit for our boy, and if he stays in Bethany this year, he may not be admitted to Grissom for kindergarten next year), but it’s a little rough to put a 4-year-old in a new program that still doesn’t have all the kinks worked out.

Aug24: Aylasaurus

Aug24: Ahmed: What did you do at school today?

Ali: Played with power lines.

Ahmed and me: [surprise emoji]

Still not sure what he’s talking about…

Aug26: I don’t enforce politeness with my kids. I just try to model the behavior I want to see with faith that humans are generally pro-social, especially when they have security, dignity, and autonomy, and they’ll pick it up when they’re ready.

I also don’t enforce sharing except with communal property.

Yesterday it swelled my heart so much when Ali had goldfish snacks from school that Ayla didn’t have. She said to him from the car seat next to him, “Are you going to share, Ali?”

He said, “Yes,” and handed her a goldfish.

She said, “Thank you, Ali.”

He said, “You’re welcome,” and he kept handing her goldfish and eating them himself until the snacks were gone.

All on their own initiative

Today we went to Ayla’s school that she’ll start on Monday, which she and Ali were both at last year. She said rather plaintively as we were leaving, but also with resignation in her voice, “I want Ali to be here.”

At the beginning, and for many months, Ali wanted absolutely nothing to do with a younger sibling. It’s been so fun to watch their relationship grow. I know he wishes Ayla was at Grissom, too. Hopefully in two years, she will be.

Aug26: Surprise visitor

Ali singing Peace Like a River for Grandpa

Aug26: I was reminded today of when Ali was 2 years old and walked up behind me in the kitchen and said, “Where’s the women? Squeeze the women?”

I turned around, eyes wide, and said, “Excuse me?”

He was holding a lemon squeezer.

Aug28: Silly me. Thought I’d sing “American Pie” to Ali tonight before bed. We didn’t get very far.

Me: “Bad news on the doorstep…”

Ali: “Why bad news? What’s the bad news?”

My brain: “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”

My mouth: “Uhhhh, it’s not absolutely certain, really. It’s just a song that’s kind of sad and kind of happy sometimes.”

Ali: “Why?”

Me: “That’s just how this song is. Anyway…”

I somehow muddled through “The day the music flies” and “This’ll be the day that I fly” (Ali asked if they were going to take a plane ride to Texas), and I’m never making that mistake again.

I asked him after the song if he wanted some water.

He said, “No, but hug.”

I said, “Butt hug? OK,” and backed my butt toward him. That got him giggling so much I had to sing Silent Night (with my own lyrics — no reference to a virgin, and “sleepy Ali” instead of “holy infant”) to calm him down again.

Aug29: Ali’s past tense of “drink” right now is “droke.”

Ayla the other day said to me, “Hey, guys?” She paused a moment. “I mean, Hey, guy?”

Aug30: I am now officially a Cougar. At least that’s what my new over 40 women’s soccer team is called

Aug30: End of summer, start of school year. Whew!

It’s been a fun and lovely summer, but I’m also a little psychotic from being all things to two people for 3 solid months with a back injury that’s been hurting since late June, haha. (It’s finally starting to feel a bit better. I may even start playing soccer again soon.) Sitting at the lovely Lodge at the Gathering Place reading a novel and letting some sanity filter back in!

(I was actually on top of the world most of the summer. But the past couple of weeks have started to get to me. I need to refill my cup like I need oxygen.)

Spring 2022

Feb12: Valentine cupcake fun! Ali’s idea and he picked out the cupcakes, frosting, and toppings and helped a lot with the making. Also pictured: his frosting art from after we made Ayla’s cake and had lots of frosting and glitter sugar left over.

And Ali with his new jeweled crown. He’s been eyeing it at Walmart for a while. We do call him Prince Ali a lot. My mom got me a tiara around this age, and it was the coolest thing ever. Magical. Hopefully they can use it for royalty dress up for many years to come!

And we got matching $10 sunglasses after we went ice skating. Ali did amazing again, achieving occasional forward motion on his own (with the walker) and later giving up the walker to hold onto my hand and the wall, then just my hand. We only fell once. I think we’ll both start taking weekend classes soon. The little kid classes are right before the adult classes. Who knows, I may end up a hockey mom.

A good day 🙂

Feb13: Grandma and Grandpa stopped by bearing gifts — flowers, chocolate, muffins, and cookies. But they waited to late to take a photo — by now Ali knew they were leaving soon, and he was NOT happy. But he survived. Always good to see y’all! (I borrowed Ali’s crown for a minute.)

Feb13: SkepticAyla and flowers from Grandma and Grandpa ❤

Feb14: Grandma coloring with Princess Ayla and Crown Prince Ali

Feb17: After seeing Moana (a million times), Ali wants so badly to visit the South Pacific.
Me, too, kid. Me, too.

Feb19: “Those things [breath mints] give you breath like the wind. You can get breath from the wind and you can get breath from breath mints.”

~ Ali, age 3

Feb19: One of Ayla’s most impressive (and adorable) full sentences lately:

“Hey, Mama, give me more Cheetos, right now!”

(She says “Teetos” for Cheetos. She says “dimmy” for give me. And she learned the “right now!” part from her brother, even though it’s never gotten him very far… Babies experimenting with language is one of the most entertaining and amazing things ever.)

Feb20: This is Ali looking in a mirror saying, “I’m a little cat!”

Feb21: The kids had so much fun at Turkey Mountain today with some Forest School kids. We hiked down to a pond, then up to a place where beavers had been very busy. They were fearless and cheerful. It’s wonderful to witness.

Feb22: Ali won $1.75 from his parents’ swearing (all quarters mine except one) plus a 75 cent gift from his dad and another dollar from his Grandma. So he went to Dollar Tree to pick 3 things out (even though it’s the $1.25 tree now). He got some gummy rabbits, his very first gun toy (pictured, orange), and a ceramic egg to paint. I needed to come up with a way to hold the egg while he painted it, and after wandering the house a bit looking for ideas, I stuck a thick crayon in PlayDoh and the egg on the crayon. Worked perfectly.

And now I have to think about the fact that he got his first gun. I wasn’t sure he knew what a gun was. But I remember the thrill of projectiles as a kid. Sigh.

Still, a pretty good survivalist haul: Food, a weapon, and art. Civilization right there.

Feb22: Ugh, another week without school. They were already off Monday for the holiday and Tuesday for conferences. Now Wednesday is canceled and Thursday looks bad. Go away, winter! I cannot get anything done these days at all.

Well, I do get things done, of course. The list just keeps growing much faster. Kids demand all your attention all day and more. And there’s no magic fairy who cooks or cleans (or plans or does household admin work), either.

Oh well. Lots of cozy play time with the kids anyway.

Feb23: OK, it was a good call not going to school today. We had snow, then little hail pellets, and now… sneet? Like halfway between snow and sleet?

We probably won’t leave the house for 3 days. Good thing our Blue Apron came yesterday.

Feb23: I made the mistake of telling Ali that as a little kid, I hated going to the bathroom and leaving whatever I was doing. I dreamed of having a toilet in the living room.

Guess what? We now have a potty in the living room.

It’s one of those days where I just need to keep everyone happy while Baba does Important Things. But I will fix this

Feb24: A stomach virus (mine) and an hour-long tantrum (not mine) during an important meeting (not mine) is a heck of a way to start a snow day.

But later Ali was his old self again and said something that melted my heart: “I don’t want to watch a video. I want you to read me a book.”

Of course it was the one time I wanted him to watch a video and give my sick butt a break, but…

Feb26: Ali asked for a vacuum to use in his blanket fort, and he said, “Where can I find one?”
I said, “Well, the one you got as a Christmas present is in that closet [aka the quiet one].”

He said, “No, I want a different one.”

“There are a few by Ayla’s door.”

“There’s only one.”

“The yellow one [toy Dyson with minimal suction]?”

“No, the pretend one [Muppet-themed baby vac]. I want a different one.”

“I think the popcorn vacuum is in the guest room.”

“No, not the popcorn vacuum.”

“Where’s the wooden one?”

“No, not that one.”

“Which one do you want?”

“The blue one.”

“The quiet one is blue, isn’t it?”

“Not that one. The blue one that really has suction.”

“Oooooh. Yeah, that one is next to our room.”

Jeez. How many vacuums do we have to go through to find the right one?

Feb26: We still can’t safely leave our house. (Haven’t left it since Tuesday.) The driveway is covered in solid ice. A snow shovel wouldn’t help even if we had one. Just gotta wait, I guess. Good thing our Blue Apron came just before the bad weather, and our freezer and pantry are well-stocked.

Feb27: I tried to get a pic of Ayla in her “Ona an’ Osa” (Anna and Elsa) shirt, but she always rushes over to look at the phone, and all I can get is a selfie. Oh well!

Feb28: Happy Happy Birthday to such a fantastic husband and father. We love you so much — and need to take more pictures of you! This old random one was the first I could find

Mar1: That feeling when you’ve planned a day to relax and do less house work than usual and go to bed early after doing some reading… and then on the way home from getting dinner, your son hands your two-year-old daughter his Boba tea on the sly in the back seat (after his mom specifically reminded him she is not allowed to have drinks in the back seat) and she dumps it out. On arriving home, exhausted from a crazy couple hours wrangling kids on errands and starving for dinner, you find the sticky, milky mess and realize you need to clean the baby, the car seat cover, the plastic car seat, the straps and buckles, and the car upholstery, and it involves YouTubing and mixing and scrubbing and baking soda and laundry and more errands tomorrow to get enzyme-based upholstery cleaner so the car won’t end up stinking like puke, and just when you’re at a stopping place and come into the kitchen to finally have your dinner, you see your son has made another huge mess with a glitter craft project thing he wasn’t supposed to open yet…

So yeah, it’s 11pm. Instead of being done at 8 and reading ’til 9 and going to bed for some much-needed catching up on sleep, here I am. There’s no such thing as “planning a relaxed day” when little kids are involved. Oh well. The kicker is, without the giant mess(es), we could have done the craft project together and then played together after the bath. I’d so much rather play with my son that clean up pointless messes. And tomorrow is going to be a bust because I’m going to wake up already exhausted. Again.

No more drinks in the back seat at all for the foreseeable future. It’ll be a few days until I can use our car again. The baking soda is working now. Enzymes will start working tomorrow. I don’t know how long it’ll take to dry. I hope it doesn’t still end up smelling like treacly taro puke.

Mar2: Just put in my last ever pair of contact lenses, inshallah. Starting in April, my eyes will be able to both see and breathe for the next, let’s say, 70 years

Mar3: Ayla calls Discovery Lab “Da Stawbewwy” (The Strawberry).

The other day in Ali’s tent, he was making static electricity sparks with his hands and said delightedly, “I can make light with my fingers!”

(I was terrified of those sparks as a kid. I was afraid I’d die of the shock or set the house on fire or something. Love his happy enthusiasm.)

Mar4: We went to the JBF second-hand sale, and Ali got a Raya and the Last Dragon light-up sword with sound effects and a funny-looking gun that makes fart sounds when you pull the trigger.

It is life. Both. Baba and Ali are sword fighting in the back yard (Ahmed with a stick). I’m jealous. I always wanted a light saber as a kid, and this sword is even cooler. He’s living my dream! And the fart gun is basically the best thing ever.

I also finally got myself a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for three bucks.

Mar5: Meanwhile, in the heart attack files…

Picture this: Ahmed is out shopping. I turn around to attend to making breakfast, and when I turn back around, there are no kids. Anywhere. I know they didn’t go with Ahmed. I call their names. I yell their names. Nothing.

I turn off the burner and sprint out the front door because this is the most dangerous route they could have taken. I look up the block and down the block. Nothing.

I go back inside and look upstairs, then all the way around downstairs, calling their names increasingly frantically. I check the back yard. No kids. No sound. Heart stopped.

Finally I force myself to stop panicking and start thinking. Given all the current evidence, what’s the most likely scenario? They are hiding from me for fun. Please, God, that it is so.

I check their favorite spots: Under my bed. In my closet.

Aha. My closet door is closed (it almost never is) and the light is on. I open the door and look in. Under my hung-up shirts, I see two little chunky knees in pale blue sweat pants and a fart gun poking out.

“We were just playing hide and seek!” Ali announces once I tell them I see them and they come out giggling.

I’m honestly impressed they hatched and executed the plan together so well. But I’m pretty sure my blood pressure will be elevated for a while yet.

ETA: The kids wanted to play the game over and over, and I left them in the closet longer and longer (because hey, it’s a little “break” to do laundry and other chores), and finally it was Ayla’s nap time, so I took her upstairs (under intense protest, for the record).

Ali is remarkably quiet and content in my closet for a suspiciously long time, so I go in and check on him. He has his little ukulele in front of him and immediately puts his hands behind his back and says, “I’m not doing anything.”

He’s clearly doing something.

“What’s in your hands, Bud?”

“Nothing.”

“Show me.”

He brings his empty hands out. “What’s behind your back?”

“Nothing.”

I reach back and find an empty tube of toothpaste.

Uh oh.

I notice his hands are all white. I notice the ukulele is half white. And there are gobs of toothpaste inside the ukulele. And probably subtle smears of toothpaste all over the carpet.

I have an outsized reaction (Ali has been pushing a loooot of buttons lately) and then ask Ahmed if we should just throw it away. “If you can clean it, that would be better,” he says. I tell the boys to figure out how to clean the ukulele or throw it away. I’m out. (I do clean my closet carpet, though. Sigh.)

Mar5: Ali’s Rainbow Fish project, completed (his idea, I just drew the fish and cut it out).

Tough gal Ayla with a chainsaw in one hand and the head of her enemy in the other (or maybe it’s a Widda Boony — Little Pony).

Ayla coming after US with her chainsaw.

Family tableau featuring Ali’s new soccer duds. He’s joining a little class soon.

ETA: Ali took his rainbow fish to school, and I have a feeling it’ll come back with most of its scales missing

Mar5: We want to do stuff with our backyard now that we have a little patch of ground. Butterfly-friendly bushes for sure. A redbud and/or dogwood, if possible. A raised bed for veggies and herbs.

But I have no idea what I’m doing, what time of year to plant things, what plants are most suitable for our area, where to put a raised bed for the best sun/shade ratio, etc. Where does one even get started?

Mar6: My old flip phone is finally kaput. What should I get next? The smaller, the better!

Mar6: It’s funny looking back on “Facebook memories” and subconsciously checking if they’re before or after July 2017, when I got pregnant with Ali. I just realized I do it. If it’s after June 2013 and before July 2017, I think, “Oh, I was still in the Big Sad then.” That was four long-ass years.

Mar8: Today (when the kids have dance after school) was supposed to be my big day to work on my novel. Nope. I went to Home Depot to get caulk-scraping tools and caulk to fix the shower. Ahmed and I spent more than an hour just scraping caulk.

When we were about to take a break, the toilet overflowed, creating another hour-and-a-half job that had me sweating in a small smelly space with my hair in my face and my nose running and dirty hands that couldn’t do anything about my hair or nose. Sensory hell, basically. I still have to do the laundry resulting from the mess and scrub the bathroom floor that my dirty feet walked on. (I already did the area around the toilet, although it is not caulked where it meets the floor, and some water went under it — gross. And I took a bath and then skated on clean wash cloths to get out of the bathroom.)

By the time I finish my lunch and the bathroom floor, it’ll be time to get the kids.

I never wanted to be Bob Vila. I wanted to be… a lumberjack! Leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia…

Mar8: Ali kept saying this word “Axolotl,” and I thought he was making something up or mispronouncing something.

Nope. He just knows more about endangered Mexican salamanders than I do.

Mar9: Welp, I am about to enter the smartphone age. I’ll pick it up tomorrow.
I have resisted so far because I don’t want to be one of those people who’s always on their phone even out in the world. I’m on my computer plenty when I’m at home! I want to smell the air, hear the birds, maybe even smile at people when I leave the house.

I hope I can keep it to bare utilities (and a sweet camera).

Mar9: Me: clearing my throat loudly

Ali: Are you puking?

Me: No, my throat is just filled with mucus.

Ali: Oh. Are you muking?

New word. You heard it here first. Better than “hawking a loogie,” right?

Mar10: Small sweet thing: Ayla found a little doll at the mall and put it in a little doll bed and brushed its hair out of its face the same way I brush her hair out of her face when I put her down to sleep.

Mar11: Holy crap. I expected my iPhone translate to understand my Russian. But my very old, very limited Chinese? Impressive.

Mar11: Finished the caulking. I’m caulk of the walk. Walking around with big caulk energy

Mar15: We planted 11 twig-looking saplings today, courtesy of the Arbor Day Foundation. 2 Eastern Redbuds, 2 Sargent Crabapples, 2 Washington Hawthorns, 3 White Flowering Dogwoods, and 2 Crape myrtles.

We didn’t really know what we were doing, and I’ll be surprised if like 2 of them survive. But I am glad I clipped everyone’s fingernails before we started digging in that moist loamy clay-ful dirt!

Mar15: Bam! Bam!

(She was hitting me with the hammer and thought it was hilarious. I redirected her to pound on the bed)

Mar17: Ayla is ready for St Patty’s. Kinda

Mar17: Grandma and Grandpa came by with a new dump truck and Lifesavers! Can’t beat that!

Mar17: Ayla was so glad to see them, but has resting skeptical face

Mar17: So yard work is in my life now. (Picking bagworm bags out of our mystery tree.)

Can’t wait to start planting herbs, berries, and veggies! After clearing out a bunch of bushes way past their prime, volunteer trees, and Bermuda grass growing where it shouldn’t. (The owners before us apparently weren’t into yard work. They kind of “set it and forgot it” like 20 years ago.)

Mar18: Fun day in the forest yesterday

Mar18: First soccer game of the spring season after a long soccerless winter. Man it was fun. These are the good old days.

Mar19: Ayla found some paper towels and said, “That’s a baby tower.”

She also found the insert for her My Little Pony she got at Christmas, and she sits down and “reads” it like a newspaper.

(Her “everything phrase” these days is Doppita. Kind of rhymes with Boppity, but with an A on the end. Sometimes she uses it as an actual word, as in “I doppita cheep!” (I dropped the chip.) But mostly it’s just a word she uses when she doesn’t know what other word to use.)

Oh, and when she says Red Bull, she means rainbow.

Another edit: Ahmed and I had a silly misunderstanding and laughed about it while Ahmed was holding Ayla. She looked very seriously at him and then me and said, “Dass funny.” She didn’t get the joke, but she understood what was going on!

Mar20: Ali mentioned flamingos yesterday, and I said, “What are flamingos?” just to see what he’d say.

He said, “They live in the water.”

“Oh. What are they?”

“They have big noses.”

“Oh. Are they animals?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of animals?”

“They stand with… one foot, or one leg… They passé.”

Passé is a move in ballet where you touch your toes to your opposite knee. That boy is really learning his dance moves!

Mar20: Baby’s first (very slow) 4 wheeler ride at Uncle Doug’s

Mar21: How much fun can kids have?

Mar21: Oh what a glorious morning. Spring “Break” is over (it was fun, but no break for me), the kids are back in school, and I’m writing while it thunders in my soon-to-be-fruitful yard.

On the way into school today, the kids went on ahead as I held the door for some parents even more heavily-laden than I was.

Ayla always holds my hand on the way in. “Hand, hand, hand!” she insists if I forget or am too slow.

When I finally got inside, Ali had taken over and was holding Ayla’s hand

Mar22: Tuesday is the Tippi Toes dance class day for the kids, and every week I have to choose between taking the extra 45 minutes for myself and my work or going and watching the kids be adorable and delightful.

I’m usually a distraction for them, though (Ayla always runs right up to me and says, “Whatcha doin’ here, Mama?” and there’s another little boy who tries to hug me), so I usually just show up for the last few minutes. I wish there was a video feed!

Mar26: Picnic at Zink Park with Tulsa Area Forest School

Mar27: Ayla found this dress in her closet and grabbed it. As soon as it was on she started to passé. Ali got in on the action too!

Mar27: Ayla trundled up into Ali’s tent bed to watch a little video before bed, then Ali wouldn’t let her leave. She decided it was a good idea to stay, too, and sleep in Ali’s bed. We decided to let them give it a try, telling them we’d listen in and see if they could actually sleep.

Ten minutes later, Ayla was still goofing off and Ali was still shushing her. They’re in separate beds now.

But man, how cute was it to have them both bunking up in the tent! (Ali’s twin bed has a tent cover over it.)

Mar28: Our playroom: lived in version

Mar29: Ayla says, “I’m Doctor Ayla”

Apr1: Wild skies over St Crispins

Apr2: Isn’t Ayla getting big? They have so much fun

Grandma wrote: These two were doing a dance about fish (GOLDFISH) and they were just adorable. The fish would get on the rug, then jump up and SWIM and we were amazed by it. So cute!

Apr2: Ali just before his second soccer class. Grandpa got to watch (along with Baba) while I was gone.

Apr2: Ali scored his first goal! And I missed it! Probably lots more to come, though…

Apr3: Homecoming (after a 3 day yoga/meditation retreat)

Apr5: My new fave photo ever

Apr6: I love weeds. So many little flowering weeds have come up in our yard and attracted butterflies, before I even went and got fancy weeds like milkweed to plant.
I took the kids to Woodward Park today and showed Ali how to pull the little pinky-purple things off henbit and suck on the end. He called it Drink Flower. He asked if he could pick some, and I said, “Sure. Those flowers are free.” He was amazed and carried one around reverently the whole time we were there. Even took some in the car with him in case he wanted a drink along the way.

Hooray for the weeds that come unbidden.

Apr6: My motto lately is “All Good Things.”

I get frustrated and overwhelmed sometimes by all the things I want to do (plus all the things I need to do, plus all the things I should do). There is never time for one-third of them.

It’s good to take a breath and remind myself that my “problem” is that I have too many good options. (Cooking and cleaning aren’t always my favorite options, but we do have a home to clean and good food to eat, and I am able-bodied to do the things.)

All good things.

I am a very lucky human.

Apr6: I. Am. So. Happy. 4 kinds of tomatoes, poblano and Serrano peppers, rosemary, spearmint, parsley, lavender, lemon basil, chives, and so many flowers! Will it grow and bloom and fruit? One way to find out!

Apr7: Ayla, wearing a blue examination glove:

“I’m the doctor, and I’m gonna put you in jail!”

She may be just a wee bit mixed up…

Apr8: Ayla is kinda weird lately. She screamed until we let her take a bike helmet to bed, then fell asleep like this.

Apr9: Watermelon Zamboni gummy bear cake with shark candles. Asked and delivered. Currently hiding in the laundry room.

Apr9: And the coconut cake Ali won by scoring a goal last weekend. Really just another cake we needed to feed the cousin crowd.

Apr9: Ayla always comes prepared.

Apr9: “This is the best birthday ever.”

Yesssss

And no surprise, the kids all went straight for Ali’s gummy bear cake… Now we’ve all tried everything. Lots of full bellies.

Apr9: The best birthday present is a visit from the cousins!

Apr9: Ali got his big gift and is tearing around the house on it

Apr11: Saw this little dress and had no defense against it. None.

Apr11: Ali got jealous of me taking pics of Ayla and said, “Take a picture of me! Cheese!”

Ayla said, “No, that’s my cheese!”

Apr13: It’s not until you have a 4-year-old asking you 4,000 questions per day that you realize:

1. How little you, personally, know and
2. How little humanity in general knows

Apr15: Sweet pic. Everyone smiling! (I may have been doing a little peek-a-boo action behind Grandpa)

Apr17: My grandma, my brother, my daughter, and me. Happy Easter!

Apr17: Doug: The many faces of Ali (trying not to smile for me) 🙂

Apr17: My grandma and my daughter. 90+ years apart.

Apr17: I’m sad that I basically don’t listen to music anymore because I hate fiddling with iTunes and an external speaker and my computer asking me 20 times if I want to log in with my Apple ID and crap. Also, shuffling through 1000 songs is pretty disjointed. You can’t really decide on or set a mood unless you scroll to the right place and put it on the right setting, or take the time to make a playlist. Blah.

I found an old boombox that plays tapes and CDs at my parents’ house (I think it was mine) and found a bunch of excellent old tapes and CDs. I am SO EXCITED. Music is back!

Apr18: Since there’s no way in hell I’m paying $42 for 4 small pics (all of the same pose), much less $95 for one digital pose (and it goes up from there), here are Ali’s adorable school pics with the shirt he picked out special for it

His shirt says LOVE IS ALL AROUND. His favorite color is rainbow

(LOL why is everything for kids such a racket?)

Apr18: And our little princess…

Apr18: My poor tomato and pepper plants have been living in their original plastic containers in my kitchen for 10 days because it’s been cold, rainy, and/or windy the past 10 days and there’s just never a good time to plant them. (I know, I know, I should have waited. I got excited and jumped the gun.)

I guess I’ll plant them tomorrow, even though the dirt is mud and it’s going to rain AGAIN on Wednesday. At least it’ll finally be warmer. (As in, not getting into the 30s at night.)

Godspeed, plant babies.

Apr19: I did about 8 hours of yard work today. Planted 10 plants (including my beautiful raspberry bush). Dug out dozens of volunteer trees / plants that are getting out of hand. Pruned the heck out of volunteer trees and shrubs too big to dig out without professional help. Weeded and weeded and weeded. Then gathered the weeds into big garbage bags. Several of them. I still see weeds when I close my eyes.

It’s nice to have dirt under my fingernails. It’s nice to have a little piece of earth, teeming with life. (So many worms, grubs, crickets, ants… a whole subterranean world. Sorry to disturb you.)

Apr19: My pretty little grandma with her own personal small town stylist!

Mom wrote: Thank you Darlene! It was “hair day” for Mama only. She has her own stylist!

Apr24: I said, “You want to say cheese?”

She said, “No.”

I said, “You want to say cheeseburger?”

She smiled real big and said, “Yeah! Cheeseburger!”

Apr24: All hail…

Apr25: I caught Ayla roaring in her sleep last night. (She’s in a big dinosaur phase.) It was pretty much the cutest little tiny fierce thing ever.

Apr27: Wonderful visit from Aunt Emily!

Apr27: TFW a perfect little row of seedlings comes up and you haven’t the foggiest idea what you planted there. (I know most of what I’ve planted. This row? 100% forgot. Lettuce maybe?)
I need to get some popsicle sticks and mark what I plant.

Meanwhile I have dozens of flower seeds planted in my front beds, which only get about 4 hours of morning sun. Morning glories, zinnias, and cosmos. Good luck, kiddos.

In back, my friend Emily bought me a couple of butterfly-friendly li’l flowering bushes. I can see them out my bedroom window next to the milkweed I planted. Can’t wait ’til it all blooms into a butterfly haven!

The little redbud and dogwood twigs I planted are leafing out. I planted too many too close to each other. Gonna have to make some Sophie’s Choices down the line. But for now it’s fun watching them grow. I didn’t have huge expectations in the poorly-draining clay I planted them in before knowing anything about soil amendment.

Next step: digging out many poison ivy and poison oak vines, clearing the fences of the little volunteer trees I couldn’t uproot by hand, and hacking back and digging out some ugly pointless bushes so I can replace them with food and/or pollinator-friendly beauties.

Thinking of planting my super shady front bed (by the garage, shaded by trees in the morning and the house in the afternoon) with azaleas and some small dogwoods in the fall, after I clear the current crap out (grizzled old bushes and dead crape myrtles) and improve the soil a bit.
But I’d be glad to hear about any other plants that are happy in shady clay.

Apr27: Ayla: “I da wobot montey”

Apr28: Ali the other day called gummy worms “worm gummy bears.”

He also said passionately, “I love them so bad.”

Apr28: My poison ivy gloves and my Klingon dagger digger. Wish me luck.

Apr29: This is what I call our Wild Corner. I wish I had taken a “before” pic. This is after clearing out 90% of the poison ivy. There are also mulberry trees, a grape vine, Virginia creeper, and more. I still need to clear out 90% of the thick matted roots. So far so good on not getting got by the ivy oil.

Apr30: Every now and then I come in from the yard covered in sweat, holding an implement covered in dirt, and Ali says, “You’re like a farmer, Mama.”

Apr30: Someone got a haircut. Two someones ate Nutella for dinner and ignored the lovely meal I prepared. Oh well!

May1: Ali found this beautiful rainbow bracelet and wanted it so bad. How could I say no? And he puts wipes in the zamboni blade place so it makes a wet trail on our wood floors like a real zamboni. He also came up to me today and presented me with a “wax booger” from his ear.

Thanks, Bud.

Meanwhile Ayla saw me putting drops in my eyes and asked, “Whatcha doin’, Mama?”

I said, “Putting drops in my eyes to make them more wet.”

“Why make more wet, uh, octopus?”

I just laughed. Was she trying to hit a word count? LOL

May1: I love that Ali loves lawnmowers and weed eaters and zambonis and flowers and rainbows and tiaras and dancing and make-up.

I love that Ayla loves dresses and tiaras and hair bows and twirling and baby dolls and dinosaurs and mud and Spider Man.

We all contain multitudes — so many more than any box society may try to fit us into

May1: That feeling when there are dozens of tiny sprouts coming up in the flower beds out front and you don’t know if they’re flowers or just weeds saying, “Thank you very much for the bare soil!”

May2: Yep. That’s my girl-a-mole

May2: Ali wrote me some notes. He said they were shopping lists.

When I asked what were on the lists, he said, “Whatever you need.”

Pretty good trick!

May2: Welp, there is absolutely no point trying to get the kids to bed right now. That’s the loudest thunder I’ve ever heard — and felt. It feels sometimes like an earthquake.

Ayla is pretty chill. She just says, “Boom!” when a big thunder hits. Ali is wary like a cat who senses you’re about to give him a bath.

May2: The gardening rabbit hole is deep and wide. From flowers to fruits and vegetables, native plants and cultivars, pollinators and pests, soil types and amendments, painstakingly getting rid of invasive (and itch-inducing) species (and trying not to add new ones), wondering what poisons may have been sprayed in the past and therefore where it’s safe to plant edible crops, taking care of an ailing tree, when and how much to water (not a problem lately: the sky says “always”), when and how much and how to fertilize, drainage, mulch (there are different types that do different things), getting rid of ugly old hedge stumps and digging up foundation-endangering mulberry trees (much as I’d love to keep them all)…
It’s taking over my life.

I think I see a relative stopping point for the year after a couple more weeks of lots of work. Well, not stopping. Slowing down and not learning obsessively so much. Then in the fall, a whole other vista opens up…

May3: Today when I went to Southwood Nursery to get more dirt and compost (or “poop dirt,” as Ali calls it), Ali found cantaloupe and corn seeds. So I guess I’m planting those, too. Somewhere.

And I found some deep red nasturtium seeds. I immediately took 7 of the seeds and planted them in random places among my other plants. This is fun!

Tonight was an epic battle with the Bermuda grass creeping toward my tiny leafing twigs that may someday become ornamental trees.

Funny story: I made a modest donation to the Arbor Day Foundation and they promised me a dozen trees in the mail. I was kinda like, “Yeah, right. OK.” Sure enough one day, 12 twigs came in the mail with a note to PLANT THESE IMMEDIATELY. Ahmed and I went into panic mode. We didn’t know where to put 12 trees or how to plant them or… anything. It consumed the next 3 days the way the baby rats ruined Phoebe’s life on Friends until Mike’s sanity prevailed.

Finally we got them in the ground in more or less acceptable places, but kind of sunken instead of mounded, without any kind of soil amendment… Just generally pretty badly done. Also surrounded by Bermuda grass, which is taking over every part of Sun Island — the sunnier raised-ish bed in our back yard — that I haven’t yet fully turned over and hand-weeded. It’s stayed away from the trees pretty well due to pine needle mulch, but an epic battle was coming sooner or later. My hands and back are super sore. And there’s much more Bermuda to go.

A nice way to spend time until a pretty crescent moon materializes in the sky.

Oh, I also fixed a bunch of downspouts that were busted and discharging water way too close to the foundation. And I got some splashguards for our outdoor faucets so that water is diverted from the foundation if the faucet is turned on without a hose, or just dripping. And I felled a few volunteer trees that have gotten too big for their britches.

Next up: Digging out as many old roots as I can from the South Bed and filling it in with dirt and plants, finishing the Bermuda War on Sun Island and planting that with melons and pumpkins, pole beans and cucumbers, clearing as many trees as I can from the fence line, waging all-out war on the poison ivy roots in Swamp Corner and Wild Corner [I got a hazmat suit for that], figuring out ground cover / pollinator-friendly stuff for Wild Corner, planting bee-friendly annuals in Swamp Corner [just to see what they do, I don’t have big hopes] along with the swamp milkweed and swallowtail fennel, making a puddler for butterflies on Shade Island — hopefully maybe soon to be named Butterfly Island? — and carting off our giant and growing pile of yard waste.

That’s my list for spring anyway.

Oh, I also want a passionflower vine, catmint, salvia…

You know, I’m going to stop there, because otherwise I’ll never stop.

May4: Future cirque du soleil

May4: I said, “Say cheese!”

She said, “Rawrrrrrr”

May5: Ali made some Mother’s Day gifts at school. When he got home, he took them and ran into his Baba’s office and said, “Happy Birthday, Daddy!”

I swear, he just likes messing with us

May5: Tonight was the night, after so many days of rain, for an epic three-hour battle with poison ivy roots, wearing a plastic super-apron (that covered my neck and arms), plastic booties over my feet and ankles, and sunglasses for eye protection.

It was a mucky mess, but prime root-pulling conditions. Still took tremendous effort. I couldn’t quite get everything, but I got about 95%. I know it’ll just grow back, but it’ll take a few years for it to get back to where it was, and I’ll be snipping and pulling all the while.

I’ve already had a few more spots of itch pop up, but nothing terrible so far. Tomorrow I need to try to get some of the ivy on the neighbor’s side of the fence (if he’ll allow) and bag everything up. I’ll be glad to have this hazmat nonsense behind me, without having to poison anything but myself a little, LOL. Then I can throw some quality dirt on top of Swamp Corner and Wild Corner and plant cool stuff like butterfly fennel, milkweed, salvia, and passionflower vines. My yard will be a free VRBO for pollinators.

Swamp Corner may take a while to figure out — the drainage is terrible — but we’ll get there. So far a swamp milkweed (that I could resist planting in a small turned-over area far from the poison ivy) is thriving. Maybe it’ll just be Swamp Milkweed Corner.

May6: Ayla found the knockoff My Little Pony that I had put on her birthday cake. She said, “My widda boony.”

I said, “That’s right. You got a pony on your birthday cake.”

Ali piped up, “And I got a ‘boni on my birthday cake!”

[Zamboni, that is.]

Already a wordsmith!

ETA: Earlier he saw a fire truck without its lights on and said, “Maybe it’s on its way from the fire back to the fire station.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s just going to get gas.”

“They must need a LOT of gas. I bet they use a hundred of gas!”

Oh for the days when “a hundred” was the biggest number I could think of…

May6: Well, the Poison Ivy War is over, for now.

Poison Ivy: A couple dozen small chemical burns

Pamela: ALL THE POISON IVY ROOTS

(As far as I know. Please don’t tell me if you know otherwise.)

I hit a snag when I realized how many different random roots and vines and even small trees were entwined with a stupid wire thing the previous owners zip-tied up against the fence many years ago. I removed pointless junky-looking wire panels from several places around the property, and this was the most difficult. I needed to remove the wire thing to even be able to identify the last of the poison ivy roots and extract them, and that necessitated clipping wire all around the trees that were snagged (and ruining my nippers) and snipping plenty of vines I didn’t know what they were (RIP a whole lotta Virginia creeper), then pulling with all my might and trying not to get scratched all to hell by cut wire in the process (and failing — I am quite scratched up).

When that was FINALLY done, I also needed to nip back a whole lot of winter creeper vine to get to the last of the poison ivy vines that were entwined with them. What a mess! It was like a million wires going in all directions with no identifying features until you came upon a group of 3 leaves popping out. (Gosh that stuff grows fast.)

That done, I went to the neighbor, an older gentleman who lives alone, and offered to clear out the poison ivy on his side of the fence, since I was already suited up for it. And I didn’t want it sneaking under the fence again.

He said, “I’ll get right on that, don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

I was like, “Oh, no, I’m not that worried about it.” I wasn’t trying to get him to do it. Didn’t even cross my mind. “I was just offering.”

“That’s all right. I’ll get on it.”

This went back and forth a few times until I said, “I’m really not worried about it. I was just offering.” And we left it at that. I don’t know if he doesn’t want me digging around on his property or just didn’t want me putting myself in harm’s way to get his ivy. Either way, I left feeling bad for bringing it up at all.

Next I bagged up all the ivy roots and threw it in our garbage can. So glad to have that nightmare behind me. No more wearing a hazmat suit, then scrubbing myself with Dawn dish soap (to tackle the oily part of the poison ivy oil, urushiol) and dousing myself in isopropyl alcohol (to try to dissolve any lingering urushiol via the alcohol group) at the end of the day. (Organic chemistry is fun!) No bets on how bad I’ll look tomorrow despite my precautions, but it will be with a warrior’s pride

After that I tried cutting through the roots around one of the old bush stumps in the South Bed. I cut a dozen roots around it and it still doesn’t budge. Not even a little. I was definitely defeated by the bush stump, especially after exhausting myself in Wild Corner. I guess I’ll try to find a chainsaw and at least cut it flush with the ground so it’s not so ugly. And hopefully the roots I cut will die and rot, and so, eventually, will the stump.

It has me feeling pretty hopeless about all the other old holly bushes that need to be gone so I can do pretty stuff in other places. And the rangy old crape myrtles that need to be mercy killed. Even hiring someone to kill those things is not fool-proof.

Meanwhile my flying saucer morning glories (see pic) sprouted on one side of the front steps but not the other. The other side was completely drowned in the rain. I may try one more time to plant them, then just give up and put a potted plant there this year.

My cosmos, zinnias, and bee-friendly flower combo pack are sprouting beautifully in the Front Bed, although some of those were pretty bedraggled by the rain, too.

The mystery sprouts next to my heliotrope turned out to be lettuce. I’ll have myself a baby lettuce salad in another week.

I was so absorbed in my battles, I completely forgot that my last soccer game of the season was tonight

I think I kind of assumed it would be canceled because of how soggy everything is, and I never checked. When I did check (too late), there was no notification it was canceled. Oops.
Hopefully this is the busiest I’ll ever be with the lawn and garden. The previous owners left us with plenty to deal with! Once a lot of that is done, we can just have fun. Or at least fewer hazmat suits, wire scratches, and chemical burns.

May7: “I dot my dinodaur. It’sh a BID dinodaur!”

(I got my dinosaur. It’s a BIG dinosaur!)

Ten bucks at a garage sale. I saw it and knew Ayla would love it! Ali said it was too scary for her. I said, “Naw, she’s a pretty brave girl.”

May7: Ali and I had some adventures today. After his soccer practice (he scored another goal!), we went to The Bubble Museum (The Philbrook, which had a Giant Bubbles and Box Forts fun day), where Ali made the coolest little cardboard house. Then precisely at 2pm, the Powers that Be began systematically dismantling all the box forts, and Ali was horrified and furious.

Next we went to see the roses at Woodward Park, and Ali was saying passionately, “I like rainbow colors, but I love red and white roses. They smell so good. I want to EAT them all!”

I said, “Well, you can eat roses. You can make rose syrup.”

So guess what we’re doing now?

(It’s from our own roses — we didn’t steal them from Woodward Park!)

May8: Enjoying my rose (decaf) coffee on Mother’s Day. Ali had such a nice idea making rose syrup from the roses in our yard

May9: Well, that was a long day spading up and hand-sifting fifty pounds of weeds (mainly Bermuda grass) out of my Sun Island bed. But tomorrow is the fun part: Planting watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupe, corn (Ali’s idea, he loves corn), pole beans, and cucumbers (all seeds).

And more flower seeds in various places, because why not? Including a (hopefully eventually) tall one outside the dining room window that’s a favorite of hummingbirds.

May10: Big day at the ol’ homestead. I mixed raised bed soil, Bio-Tone, and compost on Sun Island and in the South Bed (by the house) and Breakfast Bed (the one outside our dining room). Laid out all the plantings with little wooden garden labels Ahmed got me for Mother’s Day. (No more planting things and then forgetting what the heck I planted.)

When Ali got home, he lovingly planted his little marigold seedlings from school next to the big marigold in the garden. And we managed to plant all the planned flowers in the Breakfast Bed (seeds) as well as corn and cantaloupe on Sun Island. Then it was bath time.

I don’t think Ali understands how long it’s going to be before we have any chance of actually seeing corn or a cantaloupe, if we ever do at all. I hope he doesn’t end up hating gardening due to this!

In the course of mixing soil in Sun Island, I unearthed a root about 18 inches by 4 inches. There was more to it, but I had to hack and saw around it to get it out and clear space for my lettuce, arugula, kale, and green onion section. The tomatoes, peppers, heliotrope, lavender, milkweed, raspberries, blackberries, hyssop, penstemon, and herbs are doing great.

Still to plant: Watermelon, pumpkins, giant sunflowers (why not?), catnip, cucumbers, and pole beans.

Next year I’ll try to figure out root vegetables. Don’t have any more space in my head right now. Or time to overturn any more dirt. Every space is spoken for. (Although I may throw some radish and carrot seeds somewhere, just for kicks. They didn’t do much at all when I tried to grow them indoors in a clear plastic pot to try to watch the roots grow. Got nothing close to a radish or a carrot. Just some spindly leaves.)

May11: OK, it’s official. I am not going to finish writing my book before the kids are out of school next week. Gardening took over my life this month (happily), and it’s just not going to happen. Once the kids are out of school, my life gets that much busier.

Which is fine. It’s easy to be wise on paper. Much harder to live it. I’m going to focus this summer on living the wisdom in the book, which should help it ripen and help me finish it more authentically in the fall, without feeling rushed or resentful. Method writing, basically

May11: Ali brought home a red Solo cup of grass that he grew at school. I said, “Oh, what kind of grass is it?”

He said, “Window grass.”

Meanwhile, Ayla expresses her excitement about “Milkshake Day” (the day we go get boba tea) by saying, “I wanna drink balls!”

She also demolished some seaweed salad and edamame the last time we got sushi takeout. A far more sophisticated palate than I had at that age.

Ali still lives on bread, milk, and sweets. (Pretty much.)

May17: I kind of painted myself into a corner (again) doing a garden tour and buying 8 cool native pollinator-friendly plants. That meant I had to figure out and prepare suitable places for them ASAP.

Three solid days of work later, I only have 2 more to plant, and I know where I’m going to plant them. One will be pretty straightforward. The other involves a whole lot more Bermuda grass mass murder. (I did so much of that in the past 3 days, my hands are weak with fatigue.)

After that, there’s only one other (large) infestation of Bermuda grass to get rid of and replace with pine bark mulch (gosh that stuff smells good — like an Alpine vista), and I can pretty much coast for the rest of the season. Sit back and watch things grow!

Just in time, too. The kids’ last day of school is tomorrow.

May17: When I close my eyes, I still see Bermuda roots.

I have rarely experienced this phenomenon since Tetris came out. Oh, I did keep seeing coral reefs when I closed my eyes when I was spending lots of time diving in the Sinai. That was sweet. Better than Bermuda roots

May18: Can’t believe it. I’m finally at a (relative) stopping point with my gardening work. I have a few more seeds to plant, some mulch to throw down, but it’s kinda chill. I was able to be done at 7pm today instead of full dark. Whew.

My back is glad the worst of the clearing and pulling and digging and forking and lifting and hauling and pouring and mixing is over. And my sincerest apology to the millions of worms I disturbed. I hope you’ll enjoy the compost.

May20: Robert Earl Keen! Been years since I’ve been to a concert. 20 years since I saw Mr. Earl Keen

Thanks for the tickets, Mom and Bill! Thanks for hanging out with the kids, Ahmed!

May21: First dance recital. Ayla did great but refused to wear all accessories for some reason. Ali… eventually got his costume on and was carried on stage, and froze until it was over. Oh well. Otherwise fun to watch

Honestly, though, they should at least have a dress rehearsal before these things. A lot of adults would have a hard time walking up on a stage they’ve never been on wearing weird new clothes and performing.

May21: A rather large friend from Stigler

Ali was in hog heaven…

Ali’s joy face

May21: “You know yesterday? It’s still that day. Yesterday is still… going.”

~ Ali, after a long and apparently confusing nap

May24: Ayla kept bugging me to get her an orange. I was busy and asked her to wait. When I got to the kitchen, she was still loading more on her tray

Edit: She’s eaten 4 so far. Still going…

Edit 2: She finally stopped at either 8 or 9, I lost count.

May24: Ayla’s getting big for her toddler bed, so we put Ali’s old queen mattress on the floor in her room and Ali’s pink and green house-looking tent on top of it for her to feel snug in.

She saw it all and exclaimed, “It’s a nice bed!”

Hard to explain, but it was extremely precious.

May26: I took the kids to Adventure Avenue today, a fun little place with a mini town of shops and a doctor’s office and a vet, etc, plus a million cool toys.

(We’ve been house-bound for days with the cold rain, plus this is some kind of holiday week where everything fun indoors is either closed or booked up.)

Ali was mad because the wooden vacuum that had been there last time was not there this time. Ruined everything. (He still had fun. But he always reports on whatever went wrong and claimed it wasn’t fun today because of that. Similarly, he’ll declare it “a bad day” at school if anything went slightly wrong. But he loves school and his friends. I digress.)

Ayla found a set of about 40 realistic dinosaur figures in various species and sizes and delighted in setting them all up in various configurations on a bench in the snack area. Another little dinosaur enthusiast, a boy on the older end of 2, walked up and tried to play with one of “her” big T-rexes. She screamed “NOOOOO!” at him so loud and insistently, he ran away sobbing and couldn’t calm down. His mom had to take him home. I felt awful, and I apologized.

But two-year-olds gonna two-year-old, I guess. Ayla’s used to defending her territory from a 4-year-old. And she’s pretty dang fierce.

But that sweet little boy definitely didn’t deserve it.

He told me excitedly, before the incident, that he was going to see dinosaurs tomorrow at the zoo. I hope he doesn’t end up associating dinosaurs with Ayla and get scared of them.

May28: Ali has a knack for coming up with Youtube video ideas no one has ever done before.

“I want to see a dinosaur using a leaf blower.”

“Um… Yeah, I can look for that, but I don’t think we’ll have much luck…”

May28: I am not injured in the slightest, but I was hit by a very slow-moving car as I was perusing plants at a native plant sale in a parking lot. She was pulling out of her parking spot. Slowly, since there were lots of people around. Thankfully.

As soon as I yelled, “Jesus f***ing Christ!” she slammed on her brakes and got out, apologized, and said she hadn’t seen me. I was just glad I’d had an eye on Ali, if not on my own 4 o’clock.

Being body-checked by a mini-van, no matter how gently, will sure wake you up in the morning.

May29: “Hey, the videos that we watch, do they watch us?”

Excellent question, Ali

Christmas ’21, Ayla turns 2

Dec17: Ali has an “OK to wake” clock that turns from orange to blue at 7:30, which is the wake-up time we’re all aiming for since that’s about when Ayla wakes up and it works for our morning routine and gives us adults a bit more sleep.

When Ali wakes up, no matter the time, he unplugs the clock and comes right down.

Dec19: I am in no way qualified to do this. Skills-wise or temperamentally. But cookies were made today, and they were decorated, with homemade hand-colored buttercream frosting.

I do admit to using a cookie-cutter approach when it came to cutting the cookies.

Dec20: Ali is an engineer. Not will be. Is. He has his Cozy Coup tricked out with a rearview mirror, windshield wipers, and a trunk, among other things. There are new additions every day.
As things fall off or whatever, new ones are added. He’s been trying all day to figure out how to put a super heavy padlock on the door. So he can lock and unlock it.

He’s also a goofball. (He wanted to be a present, and Ahmed had the quick thinking to use a blanket instead of paper.)

Dec20: Fever-y baby wasn’t having mom anywhere but here. All day long. To Do list? For another day.

Dec22: Had fun wandering all around Tulsa Botanic Gardens and millions of colorful sparkling lights. I’m glad Ali picked out that hat — it makes him much easier to spot!

Dec24: Ali went on a treasure hunt today with clues all over the house. He liked the chocolate (cho-law-co-late) coins best.

Dec24: Ayla is such a barefoot bushwhacking goofball. She would have been right at home on my Grandma and Grandpa’s little farm/ranch, tramping around the creek and gathering eggs. Feeling her little feet turn into hobbit feet as they acclimated to the gravel. Playing in the cow’s water trough. Climbing on hay bales, watching for snakes. Delighting in the latest crop of wild kittens. Feeding apples to the horses. Playing dodgeball with rotten plums on the ground. Climbing trees, trying to pick mulberries and put them in buckets and bring them back but just eating them all instead.

Those were such good times.

Dec24: Tonight we made chocolate chip cookies for Santa and opened a Christmas Eve Box from the grandparents. Ali went through it like a Tasmanian devil, throwing things behind him. Ayla laughed a deep-throated, almost evil villain laugh when she saw the candy canes. She was super excited. I opened one of the ‘canes for her, thinking she’d suck it for a while and then put it down and wander off. Nope. She crunched the whole thing right down in record speed.

Dec25: Well, so much for Christmas morning. Ayla woke up early, unhappy about something, and cried for more than an hour. Wasn’t interested in her presents or stocking.

Ali finally woke up at like 8:30 (two hours later) with a fever and apparently had a crap night of sleep, along with his father. (Ahmed slept in the room with Ali to keep him from getting up 80 times in the night, after the second time he got up.)

Ali was excited about presents, though it was muted by feeling bad. He ripped through them fast. The watch was the most wanted gift, and it was opened last, but it was too big. He seemed to like it, though.

Ali then opened his big box gifts, and a little ways into trying to build the new play kitchen, he begged off and now he’s resting on Baba, all pitiful.

Ayla still yells any time I try to give her a gift or her stocking, but she’s playing with Ali’s stuff and the new little Fisher Price play house.

Ho ho ho!

ETA: Ali puked and started to feel a bit better then. He hates the watch. I don’t blame him. I couldn’t find what he asked for and thought I got something “better.” But it’s kinda futzy and complicated. I’ll just go find what he wants when I can. It’s $5.

Ali putting on a brave face and getting started

The aftermath

Ayla feeling a little better. Ali feeling worse.

Just before he puked

Ayla on the warpath again

Ayla opening her mini diapers, finally. She loved stacking them and giving them to Aunt Val and taking them back again. Hasn’t used them as diapers yet. (She normally loves trying to diaper her dolls with normal diapers that are way too big.)

Ayla saying “cheese!”

Found a good deal on a cool play kitchen. They were outgrowing the Facebook freebie I got. But it definitely gave us a lot of fun! And I’ll pass it on

Dec26: The kids are much happier today and playing with all the loot. Ayla has carrying her two ponies around by the manes (oops, I stand corrected, one is a “unitorn”) and Ali is circumnavigating the house pushing his new ferry boat bath toy, making tug boat noises. It has his mini gum ball machine on it.

For my own records:

Both kids got a play kitchen, downhill racetrack, and Fisher Price doll house
Ayla got mini diapers, silly squirt soap, bath toys, ribbon streamers, My Little Pony, talking puppy toy, and small plush unicorn

Ali got a card match game, silly squirt soap, ferry bath toy, ribbon streamers, wooden trapeze to hang somewhere, tea set, and watch (which was the wrong one and he hates it — oops. The one he wants is $5. We’ll find it when we can. Stupid Santa! 😛 )

Dec26: I’m glad my 93-year-old grandma still has cat-like reflexes. Somehow she got sat next to the trash can, and I threw some cardboard toy-packaging innards that caught some air, sailed the wrong way, and would have hit her in the face if she hadn’t punch-blocked it!

Sorry, Grandma.

Otherwise we had a great time in Stigler

Dec26: This photo is called OH NO LEVI IS ON FIRE!!!

Dec28: It’s a “Do 6 loads of laundry and try to put the house back together while the kids run around, eat McDonald’s, and/or watch movies” kind of day.

It still cracks me up how much it cracks Ayla up when the “baby dinodaurs” hatch in the Good Dinosaur movie. She also gets insanely excited and laughs and laughs when the T-rexes lope across the plains. “Dinodaurs running! Dinodaurs running!”

And tomorrow will be another day a lot like today, but with only one load of laundry. Houses (and kids) are demanding beasts.

Dec28: So today was kinda lame, with endless housework and Ali extra sassy with a holiday hangover, especially after staying up late at Grandma’s. Ayla’s been skipping naps for the past week and being a bit friable, too.

A trip to a nature reserve, and a hike in the woods, helped end the day on a good note. Ayla adored playing in the sand and gravel, picking it up and giving it to us or just sifting it through her fingers and cackling like it was the greatest thing ever.

At one point Ayla found a great stick and Ali took it and ran away. Ayla protested loudly.

I said to Ali, “That’s not very nice. Taking a stick from a baby.”

“She’s not a baby,” he said.

I sighed. “Semantics.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s a man stick.”

I legit would have done a spit take if I’d been drinking something

ETA: Pic of two little kids running off into the woods together. We expected them to come back pretty soon. Who knows how far they would have gone if we hadn’t gone chasing after them! (It was a safe area, a nature reserve. We wouldn’t have let them get lost for real.)

Dec29: Ali just now: “I’m hiccuping. I’m hiccuping. I hicked up.”

Dec30: My kids will have almost nothing to do with non-CGI animation. Old pen-and-ink animation must look like black and white to them.

Dec30: Ayla being cute in her special dress from Grandma. She was captivated by the heavy bocce balls. I let her play, even though I feared for her toes!

Dec30: Little baby Ayla (almost 2) finally moved from the Pack n Play into a toddler bed. She took to it like a champ. Loved playing on it, then when I asked if she wanted to sleep in her Pack n Play or in her new bed, she emphatically said, “New bed!”

She didn’t even want me to rock her to sleep. She wanted to be in bed while I sang her song.

Sweet little moppet! With her (usual) stuffed animals and new pillow and blankets. Sleeping like a queen.

ETA: I couldn’t sleep (still can’t) and checked the monitor around midnight. She was nowhere to be found. I went up to her room. Not there. I was about to consider panicking when I noticed her little fleece nightgown with stars on the floor. She had apparently pushed against the Pack n Play that I pushed against her bed to keep her from falling off, and fallen off. And then just went with it and fell asleep (or stayed asleep) on the floor, half under the bed, wedged against the Pack n Play.

I put her back in bed and wedged something very heavy against the Pack n Play so hopefully now it can actually serve its intended purpose as a bed rail.

P.S. Ali was 22 months when he transitioned from the Pack n Play to a queen mattress. After Ayla came home, he simply refused to set foot in the Pack n Play ever again.

Dec31: Aunt Emily got Ali a VACUUM BLANKET for Christmas. How cool is that?

Dec31: Ahmed is putting together Ali’s new Hot Wheels downhill race track thing.

Ali said encouragingly, “You’re doing it, Baba! You’re the future!”

Dec31: Ayla’s favorite phrase right now: “DIDDA BATUMEE!!!”

(Give it back to me.)

Dec31: It’s been a beautiful and hectic year. We have a new house and a “baby” who narrates the most fascinating stories that no human can understand, sometimes illustrating with interpretive dance. A sweet son who thinks fart jokes are the funniest thing in the world and hide and seek is a kind of heaven, who’s smart enough to give us heck sometimes. (He doesn’t miss anything.)

We had pizza, red wine, and sparkling cider for dinner. The kids had chicken nuggets. So it goes. (Cinnamon rolls for breakfast tomorrow.)

I think the biggest breakthrough I’ve had this year is really getting it through my head that there’s no benefit to beating myself up, even if I’ve screwed up in the same way for the 400th time and feel hopeless. The 401st time (or 447th) is always an opportunity for change and growth, and shame will just make that growth harder. My inner critic is (finally) rather quiet these days, and I’m doing better in a lot of ways than I have in years. I have quiet hope. I am quietly striving. I am doing my best. It is enough.

I’ve been blazing through my year-end To Do list, clearing the deck as well as I can, and I’m hopeful 2022 will be the year I finally finish writing my novel and begin looking for a home for it. I’m grateful I can easily publish it myself if it comes to it. The book wanted to be written. I’m writing it. Its fate will not be simply to sit in a desk drawer, as it may have been in the past if a traditional publisher couldn’t be found. These are wonderful times in many ways.

I wrote a morning mantra of sorts to read every morning when I wake up. (I plan to start waking up an hour before the kids to have time for stuff like this.)

May my morning rituals connect me to higher wisdom so I may embody it through the day.

May my list be tasks to tackle & enjoy, not an excuse to be absent or separate from my life.

May my love radiate from a spirit not preoccupied with getting my own needs met.

May my feet tread in beauty every day on this good earth.

May I make time for and see the value in my heart work.

I originally included these two as well, but they feel internalized enough to leave out for now:

May I not waste energy castigating myself when old stories take over, but gently aim back toward a better path.

May I accept with grace when there genuinely aren’t enough hours in the day. Life is full!

Oh, and I got a Bullet Journal so that my daily To Do list this year will be finite and I’ll have things crossed off at the end of the day instead of deleted into oblivion, making me wonder what the heck I did all day. This year I’ll know.

Give yourself some grace. You would not be here if the universe hadn’t conspired — wildly improbably — to bring you here, including by exploding stars violently to distribute the iron that made its way into your blood.

Every new year starts with such hope. Every new generation brings new hope and carries it forwards. Even if we all screw up in the same way for the 400th time and feel hopeless. The 401st time (or 447th) is always an opportunity for change and growth. Always.

Jan1: Such a fun night of play this evening in the play room. Ali has his new trapeze with yellow grab handles underneath, and he was swinging on it over a Nugget cushion. He was this close to doing his first backflip while holding onto the rings but didn’t quite let himself go all the way over. He did monkey around upside-down for a while.

Ayla is in a phase of loving to carry big and heavy things, and she had fun jumping on the other Nugget cushion, jumping off it, and folding and unfolding it. She also put our big foam blocks in a row and tried to walk across them like a tightrope. It was super difficult and wobbly and she kept falling off (usually falling onto a big foam block) and laughing.

We were having too much fun to get pictures, but I did get a video last night of Ayla narrating — orating? — some huge story about the cars on their new ramp race track. I didn’t get this part on film, but one time she made her point so forcefully she fell backwards onto her butt. After a brief pause, she got straight back up, without even using her hands, and continued without missing a beat. Orating baby ninja.

I love these kids.

Happy New Year ❤

ETA: Here’s 10 seconds of Ayla narrating / orating about her new car ramp. Ten seconds out of several minutes. I’m treated to lots of this (sometimes with interpretive dance), and she’s started orating at strangers as well. Love it

I’m sure she knows exactly what she’s saying. I can’t wait until I can know, too!

Jan3: Ali, bless his heart. He was doing gymnastics on my bed and a flailing foot kicked my computer and cut / bruised my thumb. He felt bad and filled a drawer in my room with bandaids and “blood lotion” (Neosporin) in case I needed it.

Jan3: I think this will help me tremendously with meal planning: A template, instead of an overwhelming blank slate every week.

Monday: crock pot chicken
Tuesday: Monday’s leftovers
Wednesday: Vegetarian
Thursday: pasta
Friday: fish or red meat

Jan4: I’m a bit of a pack horse on school days. I have to simultaneously bring in two kids, two bags with extra clothes and winter apparel, two nap rolls (sleeping bags), two lunches, two water cups, and two loveys (stuffed animals).

More and more Ali will carry his own backpack and Ayla will even carry her nap roll. Other days I’m carrying all the stuff plus Ayla.

Ali’s class announced the phasing out of naps over the holidays. Unable to comprehend the scope of my liberation, I brought his nap roll this morning out of habit, only for it to come back unopened.

Tomorrow and every day thereafter? One less sleeping bag to carry in and out every day. Woo hoo!

Jan4: With both kids dropping their last nap at the same time (yeah, pray for me), I really hate this new earlier bed time. We have dinner, do baths, and just start revving up the fun when it’s time to brush teeth and go to bed, and the kids protest mightily. But any later and they don’t function the next day.

And they won’t nap, period. It’s just not a thing anymore.

Jan9: Any guesses what “dop me now” means in Ayla-speak?

Chocolate milk.

Jan11: Today was/is a good day.

Jan11: I’ve been Home Alone the past couple of nights while Ahmed “drove to Houston real quick” to do some urgent paperwork at the Turkish consulate. (All is well, just workaday stuff.) It’s been hectic, but the kids were kind enough to make it non-miserable.

Ayla tonight was literally eating guacamole with a spoon. That’s. My. Girl.

Last night Ayla tore the last two bells off a jingle bell ornament Ali got somewhere, and I randomly put them down the back of Ayla’s footie pajamas for no reason, and she started running around with her butt jingling.

This inspired Ali and me to sing, “Jingle butt! Jingle butt! Jingle all the way! Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open butt!” over and over and over while Ayla ran around and around, her butt jingling all the way.

Oh what fun.

Jan11: Ten year challenge. In 2012, my only baby was a book called Fast Times in Palestine. Now I have two more babies and another book (perpetually) almost done!

Jan12: Someone in a parenting group asked how to explain to her baffled 5-year-old why he can’t take his penis out in public.

It was a good question. I replied:

“Honestly, it’s healthy for a kid to question why some parts are private.

At the end of the day, it’s simply a cultural norm. One of many kids have to learn to “fit in” in the society they were born into.

Other cultures, and nudist colonies, have different norms.

My son asked me today if dinosaurs were put in boxes when they died. I told him no, that’s just a cultural norm in our society. Honestly, I question that cultural norm. There’s no real reason for dead bodies to be put into giant expensive boxes, etc.

But as for taking penises out in public, that’s one kids just have to accept for now. Because it’s a cultural norm, because it makes people deeply uncomfortable, because grown-ups can be arrested for doing it, etc.

Isn’t it wonderful how kids inspire us to question things we take completely for granted?”

Jan13: Ali wants to learn all about “electishutty” and the building where it’s made (power plant).
He’s fascinated by the wires (and agreed the cat bus on Totoro must be magic since he didn’t get shocked when he walked on them).

So. How can I find out where our electricity comes from (as in which building generate’s our area’s power I guess?) and then arrange a tour? Is that a thing?

Last week he wanted to see the building where radio comes from, and we walked into an I Heart Radio office building and up to the 5th floor. Unfortunately all was dark, as apparently everyone’s working from home. He did get a Dum Dum from another random office in the building.

Hoping for a more inspiring field trip next time. (And I’m sure he’d still like to tour a radio station some time!)

Meanwhile Ali’s dreams are haunted by a “bad camel” that keeps trying to eat him. It apparently thinks he is a carrot. (We fed carrots to camels at Pumpkin Town in October. Oops.) It is haunting my nights, too. It takes a long time to fall back asleep after your son wakes up screaming.

Jan14: If Ayla points at the sky and says, “Apple doctor!” she means ‘helicopter’ and she’s probably pointing at an airplane.

Close enough, kid. I get you.

Meanwhile Ali wants his own house where he’s the Baba and Ayla is the Mama and I make babies for them.

Reality TV here we come!

Jan16: My little artists, and my goofball snow bunny with her new duds from Grandma!

Jan17: Feeling a bit sad and frustrated. I’ve been trying all month to work on my novel, and it never makes it to the top of the To Do list. Everything else comes first. Sigh.

Jan17: It’s so unfortunate and one-sided that older people remember being younger, but younger people don’t remember being older.

Jan18: Good news: I was able to work on my novel today.

Bad news: It took up most of the time just to figure out what I need to do next. That’s OK. Part of the process. But dang I wish I had like 10 uninterrupted hours per day. I could blaze through this.

Jan18: Grogu and me

Jan18: Tonight I made for dinner: baked salmon, roasted asparagus, and jasmine rice.

The kids ate: Jello.

I tried.

Jan21: Thank you, everyone, for the birthday wishes. I had a chill day reading old journals, finishing up some projects, and enjoying myself, then picking up the kids and bringing them back to see their visiting grandparents. They all had a great time while Ahmed and I went out to Juniper and had a lovely dinner + drinks.

I’m a very lucky woman and life is good

ETA: My birthday cake was a frozen coconut cream pie perfectly thawed. Easiest thing ever, and so delicious

Jan21: Happy kids on Grandpa’s lap. Happy parents dining downtown!

Jan23: Ali just now: “They letted me into the front seat of the plane when we went to Texas. They just letted me do that. But I didn’t know how to drive the plane yet.”

It was more than two months ago. He remembers everything.

Jan23: Ali has been wanting to ice skate for a long time, and I took him today. I was impressed how well he was able to stay upright, with straight ankles. After a while we found a “walker” thing, a metal frame that he could hold onto while skating. I held it while hovering over him and skated him pretty fast, and he just held his legs and feet straight and enjoyed the ride.

Finally after a while I gave him some space to try on his own and showed him how to put one skate sideways a little bit and push off. He achieved forward motion, which was awesome enough.

“How do you go fast?” he asked.

“Well, that takes some time and practice.”

But he had a need for speed, so he let me skate him around the rest of the time and kept asking me to go faster. I’m going to have a butt of steel if I keep this up.

After public skating was over, Ali was treated to his first Zamboni experience, and afterwards he found the Zamboni guy (a teenager with a mullet) and asked him a few questions. Or at least prompted me to ask the questions, haha.

Then two local hockey teams took to the ice and started playing hockey.

“I want to skate with them,” Ali said.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Well, we didn’t join a team, pay our dues, get the equipment, and get a uniform.”

”I want you to do that next time,” he said.

Sure thing, kid. I’m sure they’ll take a 42-year-old woman and a 4-year-old kid and put them on the team next week.

Now he’s in the car crying because he wants to go back.

Jan25: I made crock pot chicken and dumplings last night with cut Italian green beans.

The kids ate yogurt.

I really thought the recipe would be kid-friendly, but the biscuits turned weird and the chicken had no flavor, even though the “gravy” (more like soup) around the chicken was delicious.

I don’t seem to be very good at crock pot chicken. It was similar last time. The sauce was good, the chicken was boring. (Whole breasts.) Sigh. It sucks to not really want to do something anyway and then be bad at it.

Jan27: Ayla had so much fun at the new Discovery Lab she completely exhausted herself, cried hysterically when we had to leave, fell asleep in the car on the way home, refused lunch, and is also refusing her nap, haha. I guess we’re going to have to get an annual pass so that she doesn’t feel like she has to fit everything in in one or two visits!

I wish I had a video of her playing with the giant scarves in the wind tunnel — a large area surrounded by powerful fans that created an updraft vortex. Pure joy on her face. She picked everything up so quickly. And she loved the tube that vacuumed up ball pit balls, and I’m sure Ali will, too! (The whole ball area is loads of fun.) We also played with some parachutes, some giant foam blocks, and tunnels and a slide made out of plastic tape.

Her next year, going from age 2 to 3, is an in between time, when the “baby” era fades away for good and the “little kid” era starts. I’m so excited to see her say and do more and more.

ETA: I took Ali after school, and he loved it, too! Especially the ball vacuum. He loved the flying scarves as well. He fought me all the way out the door and to the car wanting to go back.

Jan27: I dreamed last night that I was roller skating (I think) and Neil Gorsuch was in the middle of the rink, and I kept trying to talk to him, to tell him Brett Kavanaugh was an unqualified, entitled joke, to get him to come around and help get him out of SCOTUS. (Yeah, right. I know. Shows how powerless I feel.)

All three of Trump’s picks are problematic. Gorsuch came after Republicans delayed for MONTHS and wouldn’t confirm anyone under Obama. Kavanaugh is an unqualified, entitled joke who repeatedly lied under oath. Amy Coney Barrett was rushed through DAYS before an election after a legendary justice finally lost her life, exhausted to her last breath by trying to outlast a shamelessly antidemocratic political party’s hold on power.

I am sad and angry about that. Even in my dreams.

Jan29: There was a little construction paper animal picture on a construction paper package. Ayla pointed to it, and I said, “What is that? Is it a hedgehog? A porcupine?”

“Mouse,” she said.

“Oh, it’s a mouse?” I said.

“No, it’s not,” Ali said authoritatively. “It’s a head chalk.” [hedgehog]

Jan30: We don’t stress manners in this house, assuming the kids will pick it up authentically when they are ready.

Today Ayla asked me for apple juice, and I filled a straw cup for her (about 15% juice, the rest water) and handed it to her.

For the first time, she looked me in the eye and said sweetly, “You’re welcome.”

Jan30: I’m not the world’s craftiest person, but I saw curtain ties similar to this on Amazon and thought, “I can do better than that.” With Michael’s having so many beads on clearance, I can make them for all the curtains in the house with plenty left over for Ali to have fun with.

Jan31: Looks like Ayla is going to have another sleety day like when she was born, when she turns 2 on Friday.

Dead-of-winter birthdays are the worst. (Mine’s January 21.) Sorry, baby. I did not plan it this way, haha.

I’ve always wished I could have an honorary birthday in May or June or something, but the hope/idea never really went anywhere.

Jan31: Be still my heart

Jan31: They have little lists sometimes of what the kids said that day to a question at my son’s preschool. Everyone said something they learned about penguins, and Ali’s entry was, “They eat worms.”

I thought, “Oh, that’s cute, he thought they eat worms because they’re birds and birds eat worms. But there aren’t any worms at the South Pole.”

But I asked him about it, and he seemed pretty sure of his answer. So I kept my thoughts to myself and googled it.

Silly mama. Some penguins do eat worms. And not all penguins live at the South Pole! I’ve seen tropical penguins myself (at the Galapagos Islands).

Ali 1, Mama 0

Feb1: And suddenly (3 days before she turns 2), Ayla is talking in complete sentences. Especially when she’s upset. (Kind of like how my Russian gets better when I’m drinking. I worry less about perfection and just go for it.)

“Hey, Mama, where you going?”

“Why did you throw that?”

“I don’t want to go to bed!”

Feb1: This is me trying to clean my house:

I need to clean the counters. But first I need to empty the dishwasher so I can put the other dishes in. But really I should vacuum first, because the vacuum will run out of charge and then be ready to vacuum another room later. OK, I’ll listen to an audiobook while I do that. Oops, I don’t really want to listen to any of the audiobooks I have. OK, I have some credits. I’ll check out the wish list. Hm, I don’t really want to listen to any of those, either. OK, I’ll check my Amazon wish list for other books I keep meaning to read / listen to. Uh oh, Ayla wants some jello.

Half an hour later, I haven’t unloaded a single dish or turned the vacuum on.

Feb1: When Ali is “wasting” wipes or tape or something, it helps to think of them as “art supplies.”

Feb2: Finally got rid of the Christmas tree yesterday #NoRules

Feb2: Ali said he’s learning about ocean life now at preschool, and after talking about it for a while, I said, “You know, I can scuba dive. I have a license.”
“Scuba dive?”
“I can put a mask and tank on and breathe underwater like a fish. Play on the bottom of the ocean.”
“Where is it?”
“What?”
“The mask.”
“Oh, I can rent those when I go to a place where I can scuba dive.”
“Like where?”
“Oh, like Egypt, Croatia, Arkansas…”
“I want to do that.”
“Sure! When you’re a little older…”
“No, I want to do it right now. With a mask for a 3-year-old.”
OK, now I have to google if 3-year-olds can scuba dive… Nope. 10 years old is the absolute youngest.
But if any 3-year-old could do it…

Ayla is deep into her Moana phase, and I’m not mad. Ali was deep into it when Ayla was born, and it brings back sweet, if exhausting, memories.

I wonder if the people who made the movie knew they were making it specifically for just-turned-two-year-olds.

Also, this soup [pressure cooker ribollita] is spectacular. And Ali wanted to make “chocolate eggs” (he saw it on Leo the Truck), so I gathered ingredients for vegan truffles (since I can’t do dairy) with coconut milk and finely chopped cashews. Alas, they were too bitter for Ali. I will have to use lower-quality chocolate next time.

Ahmed and I like them just fine.

Preschool was canceled today due to bad weather, and then nothing happened whatsoever. Oh well. Cozy day in.

Feb3: Ali finally “slept in” this morning until 7:30 and didn’t wake poor Ayla up at the crack of dawn. She slept until well after 8. Cozy little moppet. Even though when Ali did finally wake up, he started yelling like crazy about the snow.

Meanwhile it’s a Snow Week pretty much. Day care noped out. Just entertaining kids and catching up on housework since I had a dairy allergy attack that took me out from anything but minimal effort for a week.

Next time I see something labeled “Milk Candy,” I’m going to take it seriously. I assumed it was just milk-flavored, and below the threshold for affecting me badly, but it turned out to be a sinus-seeking ballistic nuclear dairy missile.

Feb3: Tomorrow is also Ali’s two year anniversary of being a big brother. Ayla is older now than Ali was when Ayla was born. Such a tiny thing!

Feb3: Ali just found our empty Blue Apron box, filled it with plastic vegetables, taped it up, and delivered it to me in the kitchen.

Feb4: Two years ago at 5:59pm, this tough, funny, chill, cuddly yet independent sweetheart joined our family and world. Happy Birthday, sweet Ayla!

Feb4: WHOAH. I just realized our baby shower for Ali was on February 4. Which turned out to be his sister’s birthday!

Feb4: Ali today playing in the snow: “Do we have a dasher through the snower?”

Feb4: I had to “dash through the snow” (seriously, the roads here are terrible — more like creeping along the snowy roads and still briefly losing traction at least once) to get ingredients for Ayla’s strawberry birthday cake with chocolate frosting. Ali “helped” me make and decorate it. And licked plenty of batter and frosting along the way.

Ayla ignored the cake; she only had eyes for the $2 “Widda Boony” (little pony) cake topper, which she soon realized was also a “Unitorn.” Eventually we caught her attention with the Happy Birthday song, which she sat through rather skeptically. We tried to tell her / show her how to blow out her candle, but she didn’t quite get it. So Baba blew it out and re-lit it. Then she got it and, after 3 tries, blew it out herself. And earned some fist-bumps all around.

Then we traded her a piece of cake for her Widda Boony, and she ate happily. Ali had 3 big pieces. The only thing he had for dinner tonight was 1.5 ears of corn even though I made romesco chicken with poblano peppers, cous cous, and labneh. Oh well. Ayla refused all food for dinner, as she has been often lately and just wanting “Top me now” (chocolate milk). Teething?

Meanwhile Ali and Ahmed’s snow man is slowly and dramatically dying. It’s still cold but sunny.

We haven’t even given her her presents yet: a balance bike, magnetic face-maker game, wooden scoops and pea gravel sensory bin. Plus a card from Great Grandma Pat. She talked with family in Turkey (boy did she talk!), and she’s still randomly singing, “Happy bowday, Ayla!”

Feb5: Welp. Ayla’s balance bike was too big for her. So I guess Ali got a balance bike for Ayla’s birthday. He loves it!

Feb6: Ali found some dental floss in a drawer, and it’s amazing how much fun two kids can have with a bunch of floss. Running around with big ropes of it dangling from their mouths (tow ropes, apparently) while the cat chases it — that’s just the beginning. I don’t even know all the worlds they are passing through with those big white strings.

Feb7: Ayla woke up at 6:08am, almost an hour and a half early, saying, “Mama, Mama, Mama…”

I went in there and she stood up and looked at me and said, “Maui take the heart.”

Maybe she’s seen Moana just a few too many times…

Feb7: Does anyone else find it distracting that Pixar makes the characters’ cheeks puff out slightly when they pronounce the P sound, even though real people’s cheeks don’t do that (because we tense slightly to prevent it)?

No? Just me? OK.

Feb8: Ayla is a happy camper. Guess what the song’s gonna be for her class’s dance recital? “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana!

(It’s Ali’s dance class, too, and he likes the song, too, but he’s past his “totally obsessed with Moana” phase. Though he is starting to understand its moral shades of grey — how Maui isn’t all good or all bad, and he makes bad decisions sometimes because he’s scared and insecure, etc.)

Feb8: The cutest little girl at Ali’s preschool, named Lenox, always lights up and says, “Hi, Ali!” every time she sees him. It’s the most adorable thing in the world.

He usually kind of stiffens and looks somewhere else or just ignores her and keeps doing what he’s doing.

I’m sure it’s a typical-ish thing for both of them to be doing. But I can’t help but hope he doesn’t end up as socially awkward as I am.

ETA: OK, so there’s a hilarious coda to the Ali story about the girl who always says Hi to him.
The Valentine-themed question for the class today was, “Who do you love?”

Ali’s answer: Lenox!

Lenox’s answer: Momma!

Feb11: Some cousins stopped by!

Feb12: It must be a universal human instinct

Feb12: Woke up to a happy surprise this morning: Ahmed had come home a day early from his work trip to Nashville! Everyone is so happy to see him again.

It was a long, exhausting week but a fun one. The kids had a hard time sometimes with their dad gone but handled it better than I had a right to expect, with plenty of calm, quiet empathy from their mama and lots of Skyping with Baba, the grandparents, and the cousins.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Beach Fun

And two more months are done and dusted. Things are going so fast there’s barely time to try to document some of it. Much less other long-term projects I have like finishing Ayla’s baby book (heck, Ali’s isn’t even really finished yet), creating an “Origin Story” book for Ali (for his fourth birthday) with pics of him as an embryo, pics of some of his genetic siblings and half-siblings, etc, finishing my novel… There was so much nice forward momentum in early October after hiring an editor to help with my first chapter, and I literally haven’t had time to look at it since.

But life is full and fun!

Facebook Stories

Oct17: If Ayla doesn’t know how to say something, she’ll say, “Da na na na.” We are supposed to translate. Mind-read, actually. It’s funny she’s found her little “This means I’m trying to say something” phrase.

Oct19: Ali’s school-a-versary. I’m so proud of all he’s done and all he’s grown in a short year! (Well, it was a long year, but still just one year.)

Oct20: Today Ali and I went to Pumpkin Town, and he spent some time in the play houses making pretend food. We sat down to eat a pretend meal, and I said, “Bon appetit!”

Ali said, “What does that mean?”

I said, “It’s something French people say before eating.”

He paused a moment, then shrugged gamely. “Old apple eat!”

Oct20: Ali’s first ever carved pumpkin. He did the eyes then asked me to make an angry mouth. Quasimodo vibes.

Oct22: It’s gonna be a long day, y’all. Up at 3:50am with two kids to drive to the airport and catch our 6am flight. The plane was heading to the runway, lights dimmed, when suddenly there was a hydraulics issue and we went back to the gate.
Everyone deplaned after a while, and of course we’ll miss our 9am connection in Dallas. So we were rebooked on a 4:30pm flight.
Still in Tulsa, waiting for the first plane to get fixed. We’ll spend a lot more time in Dallas than we bargained for, too.
Crazy idea: Why not check the hydraulics before you load the plane?
Uuuggggghhhh, we coulda slept a normal amount if we’d just known we’d get a bum plane anyway.
The kids are hanging in there but alternately calm and wild / miserable.
Not the worst thing in the world, but not the best.

Oct22: Ali was about 6 months old when lawn mowers, weed eaters, and leaf blowers kept “saving” him from naps. Hmm…..

Oct23: Well, that’ll get your heart going in the morning. Ahmed was outside and I saw a big black dog barreling straight toward him. I wasn’t sure where the kids were, so I ran to intercept the dog and it diverted into our garage — and then straight inside our house!
Turns out both kids were inside the house. Ali was at the door and hid behind it as the dog ran past. (He kept amazingly cool.) Ayla was on the stairs, and I grabbed her and shut her in Ahmed’s office. I went and got Ali and shut him in the pantry. (Both these rooms have glass doors, so they could watch the fun.) Then Ahmed and I chased the dog all over the house trying to get it outside. At one point it barreled up the stairs, and I was like, Oh God, it’s gonna pee on something.
After a long, merry chase (merry for him), we finally got him herded toward the door and Ahmed had to pick him up to get him outside.
He had a collar. I think he was a poodle, and bigger than your average bird dog, with fairly close-cropped hair (no fancy stuff). Less than a year old, it seemed. A big goofy puppy, lost and rambunctious, having an adventure.
But until it was OUT OF MY HOUSE, away from my kids, all I saw was a tornado demon who might bite someone’s face off.
I hope he finds his way home.

Oct24: Hmm… I think I’ve put some brain pieces back together. It’s not as bad as a year ago, that’s for sure! But the process of buying a house, moving, arranging the house, and getting all the new stuff we need for the house (with two small kids underfoot) has been its own kind of exhausting. I look forward to seeing how life is a year from now. Onward and upward!

(Oct24, 2020: Not complaining, just remarking:
This time last year I was dealing with pregnancy insomnia and frequent night pees.
I haven’t slept through the night since.
Looking forward, one sweet day, to putting the pieces of my brain back together.)

Oct25: Ah, the Bolt Era (in Oct 2019). Followed by the Coco Era. Ayla doesn’t seem to get quite so invested in movies, other than a few weeks’ run of wanting to watch Totoro all the time.

Oct26: Vroom vroom.
Also, check out what Ali did for Fall Break! (Third from bottom)
Also, Ali raided the office candy dish at his school so many times they first tried to hide it and then took it away altogether 🤣
It was never a great idea anyway with so many kids walking past it every day…

Oct30: Looks a lot like Ayla, huh? Ahmed’s niece Belinay

She maybe looks a little like me, too?

Oct31: Here we go! Indiana Jane and Funny Ghost ❤

My brother pointed out that Ayla was kind of a mix of Han + Indy

Oct31: Pretty good candy haul!

Oct31: Baba carrying Indiana Ayla with Ali Ghost trailing behind…

Oct31: Nom nom nom. (Ayla’s white shirt is now tie-dye from her drooling on it in all the colors of the rainbow!)

Nov2: We don’t have a wake alarm because Ali unfailingly wakes us up in plenty of time to get out the door at 8:40am.
Well, this morning a reminder alarm went off at 8:30, and everyone was still asleep! Somehow everyone was dressed, lunches were packed, and the car was loaded up by 8:43. The kids even had breakfast, though Ali had candy for breakfast and Ayla had a croissant in the car. (I usually don’t allow food in the car seats.)
Whew.

Nov3: Me to Ali: “You got ketchup on your clothes.”
Ali: “Just one clo. My sleep sack.”

(Ali calls his footie pajamas a Big Boy Sleep Sack.)

Nov8: It gives me such joy to see Ayla absolutely inhale any kind of fresh guacamole or avocado smash with singleminded fervor. The whole rest of the world (and meal) is dead to her.
Me, too, baby. Me, too.
(Also, of course, she has to do the dipping herself. She wants to do everything herself these days.

Nov9: Watching Frozen with Ali, I said: “Oh, hey, there’s the reindeer.”
Ali looked at me very seriously and said, “Snow deer.”
Right, buddy. He hangs out in snow, not rain. What was I thinking?

Nov9: Ayla does not understand how pendulums work. When I sit on the yoga swing for her to push me (at her request — she can’t say the words, but she can get it across), she stands right behind me, pushes me, and can’t understand why I come right back and knock her on her butt. (Gently, and it only happened a couple times before I put an end to that game.)
She tried pushing her doll instead. The doll didn’t knock her down, but it kept coming back and hitting her in the belly, and she ended up just kind of defending herself and then pushing the doll away again. Over and over.
She figures things out fast. I’m pretty sure she’ll get this one before long. It’s fun to watch them learn by doing. This is the basis of any understanding of physics.

Nov10: There’s a Facebook group I follow called “Visible Child: Respectful/Mindful Parenting,” and it has cut my parenting stress by at least 65%. Probably more.
The basic idea is that children are human beings and worthy of respect and consideration as much as anyone else.
Crazy, right? And yet it’s just generally not how our culture treats kids. We treat them like we’re bigger and stronger and right and kids just have to go along with it or else.
Obviously there are things that are non-negotiable. Mainly health and safety issues.
But with lots of other things, there is PLENTY of wiggle room to make a kid feel included and heard. Visible. Real.
It gets repetitive sharing my victories with the group (which is huge now with so many people recommending it like crazy), so I’ll share a couple here:
Bed time has become bloated and miserable with Ali, with him constantly asking for one more thing until an hour has passed, he’s over-tired, and he’s set up for another day of not having enough sleep and feeling “a little bit sick” all the time. I was getting fed up and feeling lost.
I said on the way to school yesterday, “I think you’re feeling a little bad because you’re not getting enough sleep. And one reason for that is that bed time keeps taking so long. How can we make bed time go more smoothly?” As soon as I said it, an idea struck me. “Maybe we can make a checklist and just do the same things every night in order?”
“Yeah!” he said.
“OK. I’ll work on it today, and we can work on it together when you get home.”
I made the basic checklist, and he helped expand it a bit at bed time, but nothing too crazy. We followed the checklist last night, I didn’t feel like a chicken with my head cut off, and he was asleep in record time and woke up saying, “I don’t feel a little bit sick today!”
It’s amazing how just asking a kid’s opinion can open space for all kinds of new ideas.
Today on the way to school we were talking about things we’re grateful for, and then I said, “It’s also OK to talk about other things — things we want to change. What do you wish was different?”
“Our house,” he said.
I immediately felt a bit defensive about how hard we worked to find and furnish the house and make it a wonderful place for him and his sister to grow up. I still miss things about our old place, too.
But I just said, “Oh? What would you like to change about it?”
“Christmas lights.”
“Oh, we need Christmas lights?”
“And a Christmas tree.”
Ah. Glad I kept my projections to myself and just listened! Usually a winning strategy 🙂

Nov10: Just after posting a couple parenting wins, I lost it when Ali (once again) asked me for a specific food, and I prepared it for him, and then he rejected it and wandered off, having had nothing nutritious for dinner yet again. (This was after he rejected the first thing I prepared for him as “too spicy,” even though it’s not all that spicy at all.)
That still makes me angry — the wasted food, effort, mess. And the worry about him eating at least one healthy thing in a given day, which he pretty much has not today. The most nutritious thing he had was apple cinnamon Cheerios with milk for breakfast. He’s abysmally picky. A sugar fiend. It makes me feel like a failure.
He’s 3. It’s my own stuff. I’m still working on it. Working on a lot.

Nov12: At the airport, Ali ran into a store and ran out with breath mints. I took them, gave them back to the store, and said to Ali:
“You can’t just run into a store and take things. That’s called stealing.”
Ali: “I like stealing!”

Nov12: I could cry with joy. Our plane actually took off this time. On time!

Nov12: A jolly Sikh man in a turban with a white beard passed by us at DFW airport and kindly waved and cooed at Ali a bit.
After he passed, Ali asked me, “Is that Santa?”

Nov12: So grateful to say everything went smoothly today, starting with a Pakistani Uber driver who empathized with our previous travel adventure but reminded us God is arranging everything for the greatest good. Inshallah.
Grateful for the warm welcome from my Aunt Barbara and Uncle David, and excited to meet “Ali’s new cousins” tomorrow (my Olson cousin’s kids).
Going to bed in Bridge City, a bit late but with full bellies and happy hearts.

Nov13: Ali is having fun with his “brand new cousins” in south Texas (my cousins’ kids). Ayla is Mrs. Fussy Pants so far, but here’s hoping some chicken nuggets and a good night of sleep will put things right!

Nov14: Just arrived in Alabama. Ayla is asleep. Ali is scarfing down chips because he didn’t eat anything else all day 😕 The kids weren’t as miserable as we feared. (Pretty miserable at times, but it coulda been a lot worse.) Turns out we can survive a pretty straight-on 6.5-hour drive. It only took us about 8.5 hours (with stops)!

Nov15: Ayla woke up this morning, popped her head up from the Pack n Play, and said, “Hi. We diffa house.”
We are in a different house, baby 🙂

Nov16: Ali got to sit in the cockpit of our plane (that took off! on time!) and found his great Aunt Barbara’s vacuum cleaner.
Ayla has had a runny nose and a bad attitude most of the time since we left Tulsa. (But she’s still cute.)
Ali just spiked a 103 fever randomly. He has a hacking cough that won’t quit and won’t let him or anyone else sleep. I feel like I have a newborn again, as far as feeling run down and desperate for sleep.
“Vacationing” with two sick kids in a strange place where no one is sleeping well is pretty much maximum exhausting. Ayla wants to be carried EVERYWHERE and neither kid will eat anything but juice, cookies, and candy most of the time. They just refuse every meal and wait for snack time. We’ve resorted to Pediasure.
But we’re having fun (sometimes)! Ali has seen a ton of wildlife: sandpipers, pelicans, skates, dolphins, a crab, and so on. Ayla loves digging in the sand. Here’s hoping things will smooth out a bit from here!

Photo 1: He got a wing badge and everything.

Photo 2: “It’s dusht like Baba’s!”

Photo 3: “Cheese!”

Photo 4: You again?

Nov17: Ayla on the beach, finally having fun! Her cousins make her laugh a lot ❤ (Ali was not super cooperative with the pictures, but he’s having fun, too!)

Nov18: Mom’s eye recovery has gone well, thankfully!
Meanwhile I have a sinus infection. Fun.

Nov19: Couldn’t sleep last night due to sinuses cemented shut. Got up to watch the eclipse (might as well get something out of a sleepless night) and it turned out I got the time wrong and missed it (other than a bite taken out of the moon around 4am). Both kids woke up insanely early and whiny.
This day is starting out just super, LOL.

Nov19: Send help. I’m sick and have zero energy, Ahmed is working, and two small kids are stuck in a small apartment with me.
We’re getting to know the Disney Channel all too well. And Ali is making a shell cake in the kitchen using a hand mixer.
I want to check out of this universe for a while. Alas. No “sick days” for mamas.

Nov20: Things are looking up. I’m not in nearly as much sinus pain, I was able to breathe/sleep last night (except between 11pm and 2am), and Ayla broke the 7am barrier and didn’t wake us up until almost 7:30. And the kids were happy to quietly watch Totoro until 8:30 and let Ahmed sleep in.

Nov20: Just a silly little story. Ayla was playing with some dinosaur pop-its and saying “ROOOAAAARRR” in a deep, throaty voice (for a toddler). Her cousins wanted to interact with her, and one of them said, “Hey, Ayla. What does a horse say?”
Either she had forgotten her adorable little whinny, she was just in ROAR mode, or the pressure got to her.
She said in a deep, throaty roar, “HOOOOOORRRRRRSE.”
Her cousins cracked up for ages and will NOT let her forget it. Probably never will 🤣
ETA: She also likes to say, “Come on, [let’s go to the] beach!” But it sounds like, “Come on, bitch! Come on, bitch!

Nov23: Ali: “I want to go ____.”

Me: “OK, put some clothes on.”

Ali, 20 minutes later, still in underwear: “I want to go ____.”
Me: “OK, put some clothes on.”
Ali, 20 minutes later, still in underwear: “I want to go ____.”
Me: “OK, put some clothes on.”
Lather, rinse, repeat.

Nov23: Just a few hours planning / shopping / in the kitchen. Not gonna stress 🙂

Nov23: First photo: Ali was hiding behind a door and told me, “Go away. I’m not going to do any thing.” Right. Clearly he was innocent of whatever he was about to do.
Turned out to be him gathering a Band-aid, the tube from my Nosefrida, and Ayla’s sippy cup to make a “water vacuum.”
Second, third, and fourth pics: We went to a super cool train museum in Foley, half an hour from Orange Beach, then wandered around the town square, where there was a huge Christmas tree and several little wooden houses that were just for show, and Ali kept trying to break and enter because he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t play in them.
Fifth picture: Woke up to this delightful message. Yep, this is Alabama.

Nov24: We tried. This was the best we could get!

Nov24: Either Ayla has started the “Why?” phase really early or she’s just copying her brother.
Either way, there’s two of them now

Nov25: One-eyed grandma showed up at the beach! 😛 Happy Turkey Day!

Nov25: I was able to breathe through at least one nostril all night long last night. It’s been more than a week. It’s a Thanksgiving miracle!

Nov25: I was wrong about Ali: He didn’t just eat dinner rolls. He also ate gravy and cranberry sauce 🤣
I’ll call it a win!

Nov27: Even on a beach in Alabama, Ali needs to find his nearest vacuum friend.

Nov27: Ayla is at an age where photos are well-nigh impossible, but she was sure glad to see Grandma and Grandpa!

Nov27: HOME SWEET HOME

18 hours total in the car with two little kids went better than I feared. (6 hours to Alabama from Beaumont, then 12 hours from Orange Beach to Tulsa.) The worst part was when everyone was finally awake and hungry at the same time at 6pm, and we were so far out in the middle of nowhere we couldn’t even find a McDonald’s for another hour. The kids were not amused.
There were about 17,000 repetitive “why” questions — just Ali making conversation. He has decided he wants to see a volcano made of rocks (as opposed to toy volcanoes and workaday smokestacks, which he calls volcanoes), so maybe we’ll go to Hawaii one of these years.

Nov30: I often think about how I wish I could just offer editing / ghostwriting to people who need it and have good things to say, but often don’t have money to pay me.
I have friends who are therapists / counselors and desperately wish they could provide their services to everyone, not just people who have access to money and/or good insurance.
I know doctors who would happily give care without worrying about insurance and payment if they could.
Teachers? They do so much because they know their work is incredibly valuable and meaningful, despite often insulting pay.
I imagine massage therapists often wish they could give a massage to people who really needed it, not just whoever could afford it.
And on and on and on.
With UBI or other ways to eradicate want (which we already could do, it’s not actually out of our reach), most people would not just sit on their butts. That gets old quick.
If we didn’t have to worry about survival, imagine how much good we could do for each other, just because we want to.

Nov30:

1. I and Ayla at the beach.
2. We got a four-foot real Christmas tree, and we just kind of let the kids have at it for a minute before we intervened. They hung up the ornaments, tags and all 🤣
3. Our first stockings, hung by the TV stand with care, but they will not stay up. How do you hang stockings on a thick mantle without either making nail holes or buying expensive heavy stocking holders (which could fall down and brain a small child)?
4. Happy tree! Our first one not made of a cone of felt fabric

Dec2: I feel like this is Ali’s first “real” Christmas where he understands things and asks for presents and has his own stocking and will remember our traditions, and I keep thinking, “He has to have everything I had as a kid on Christmas plus everything I wish I had, and I definitely need to find a bunch of old-timey candies and nearly-inedible giant red apples and nuts in the shells and nutcrackers — not the decorative ones, the silver tools that actually crack nuts — and Star Wars (original trilogy only) playing on a loop on TBS, and what’s our baking tradition going to be now that I finally hand a stand mixer and I wish we had a creek but at least he’ll have cousins to play with…”
Whew. One thing at a time. Got the personalized stockings, went to Cracker Barrel for chocolate gold coins and other goodies, we have our silly little tree with plastic ornaments, I’ve gotten him maybe half a dozen gifts (out of at least a hundred things he keeps asking for, LOL), and there will be plenty of time for baking. Even if there are crazy supply chain issues, I can probably find flour and butter somewhere.
Every time we pass any kind of toy aisle anywhere, he finds something he needs/wants for Christmas, and I say, “OK, put it on your Christmas list,” and he either takes an imaginary pad out and writes it down with an imaginary pen, or he asks me to take an imaginary picture of him with the item. It’s a good way to say “No” without saying “No.” And hopefully on Christmas he’ll be thinking about what he got instead of the 95 things he didn’t get

Dec2: Today Ali asked why his brother wasn’t in school. I assumed he meant his cat brother, and I said, “It’s not a school for cats.”
He said, “Well, I think we should find a school for cats for Mateo.”
“Oh yeah? What would Mateo do in a school for cats?”
“Well, you know, fun stuff like lunch and naps.”
Sounds exactly like cat school

Dec3: Ali has a song from Cocomelon he likes to sing in the car. The kids keep asking, “Are we there yet?” and the parents finally suggest they play a game where they all say what they see. Ali always says “Trees!” and “Houses!” and stuff with the same wonder the kids do on the video.
Ayla wanted to play today, and amazingly, Ali piped down and let her. Here’s how that went:
“What do you see?”
“Tais!” (sky)
“What do you see?”
“Taoz!” (clouds)
“What do you see?”
“Moon!”
“What do you see?”
“Tarz!” (stars)
I know she didn’t see stars (it was 9am) and I doubt she saw the moon. I think she just started with the sky theme and went with it

Dec6: This little girl, who has never allowed anything to stay in her hair for more than 0.8 seconds, grabbed some scrunchies from the cart in Walmart today and then asked for help putting it in her hair.
Smart girl — she found something that definitely won’t pull or hurt!

Dec7: Two nights ago we saw the crescent moon, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter all lined up, evenly spaced, in an arc that filled half the sky.
Yesterday Ali came home with a toy telescope in his backpack.
We still don’t know where it came from. If it belongs to the school or another student. If someone gave it away. The teachers don’t know, either. Ali conveniently lost it when we said we needed to take it back to the school and find out who it belonged to.
Ahmed finally found it in a random drawer just before bed time. Ali, stalling bed time as always, asked for “his” telescope over and over, and we kept telling him no, it was bed time and the telescope wasn’t his.
Finally he said, “Can we look at the planets?”
And just like that, this physics major mama wasn’t mad anymore, haha.
But we’re still taking the telescope back. (It does nothing to actually help look at planets — the “lens” is just a scuffed clear plastic panel — but it’s adorable he thought it would.)

Dec8: Last night I made the coolest build-your-own pasta salad with lots of toppings.
Ali just ate all the mushrooms (sauteed in white wine). Ayla just ate all the cherry tomatoes.
Oh well.

Dec8: When Ayla says “apple pie,” she means pineapple.
Just to save you the frustration

Dec9: Here’s how Ali sings Jingle Bells:
Jingle bells, jingle bells, jing along the way
Old MacDonald is to ride in a one horse open train
Train train trains, train train trains, jing along the way
Trains trains trains, tra-trains trains trains, trains trains trains trains trains, yay!
I asked him this morning if he needed to pee, because he was grabbing at his pants.
He said, “No. I just did that because trains have a penis that they use to blow smoke out of.”
OK then.
Meanwhile Ayla’s in the phase where if you say, “Bye, Ayla!” to her, she replies sweetly, “Bye, Ayla!”
She also loves to lead the way, saying, “Tum on! Tum on!”

Dec10: Today I get to fold laundry and wrap presents for the two sweet children I am so lucky to have.

Dec11: Just a random funny moment:
I was about to turn on the blender, and Ali clapped his hands over his ears. Ayla looked at him and apparently wanted to do the same, but she was holding a chicken nugget in one hand, so she split the difference and put her free hand on top of her head.
Then the blender started going, and suddenly Ayla knew what time it was. As the Vitamix got louder and louder, she quickly moved to put the chicken nugget on the ground, then moved even more quickly to bring it back up to her mouth for a last bite before tossing it on the floor and covering both ears.
It cracked me up.
She also says “Hey da doe” when she gives me something: “Here ya go.”
And “Hab it” for “Give it to me.” I think it comes from me saying to her, “Can I have it?”
It is hard to tell the difference between “Don’t want it” and “That one” (meaning, “I want that one”).
They both sound like “Daow wann.” Much confusion ensues, haha.

Dec11: Hearth and tree. Our first of each.

Dec12: So, Ali is obsessed with making hot cross buns. (Thanks, Cocomelon.) I’m afraid we’re going to spend hours on the project only for him to realize it’s just dinner rolls with a little icing on top. (We all hate raisins, so no dried fruit in them — yech.)
And he’s going to say, “Ewwy!” and spit it out.
Oh well.

Dec12: So, Ali has decided that instead of currants/raisins in his hot cross buns, he wants marshmallows. I’m thinking we add chocolate chips, too.
Whether Hot Cross S’mores is a disaster or the Next Big Thing remains to be seen. Stay tuned.
(It’ll take until dinner time. Lots of mixing and kneading and rising and baking. So, don’t hold your breath or anything, haha.)
ETA: The dough is proofing. Half s’mores, half plain (in case of s’more disaster). I made the mistake of telling Ali the yeast farts to make the dough rise. He wants to hear the farts.

Dec12: Not the prettiest or fluffiest hot cross buns ever made. Apparently one should be more serious about kneading than Ali and I were. Even with two rises / 2 hours 15 min worth of proofing, they’re no dinner rolls. More like scone-encrusted biscuits. But definitely edible! Ali likes ’em. How was your Sunday?

Dec12: Spent hours yesterday un-scrambling this scrambled egg of a house, in part to put things that go together back together (blocks and kits and stuff aren’t as fun to play with after they’ve been strung from one end of the house to the other long enough), but largely to take stock and choose a bunch of toys to give away before the holidays (in case anyone needed them — and we got some grateful takers via Facebook).
Re-scramblization to commence in 3….. 2….. 1…..
Meanwhile Ayla is outgrowing things like crazy, and I’ll have a big bin of girl and boy clothes for toddlers to give away soon. And a whole bunch of very sentimental baby toys that we aren’t quite ready to let go of yet, but that day is coming soon.
All in all I’m glad to leave the baby years behind — onward and upward to new (and hopefully less sleep-deprived) adventures. But I do wish that when they were babies, I could have known all the wonders and personalities coming. Babies are fascinating but so inscrutable. Even if you can decode their wants and needs and likes and dislikes, there’s sooooo much more coming. I would be that much more fond of baby Ali or tiny Ayla if I could interact with them now! Linear time is so limiting sometimes…

Dec13: I keep stalling wrapping the presents and putting them under the tree. We literally wrapped boxes of toys Ali already had and put them under the tree just for fun (Ali helped wrap them, he knew what they were), and he only lasted a few days before he opened them. Like it was burning a hole in his mind.
I’m going to have to install a guard if I wrap real gifts and put them under the tree, or it’s gonna be a feeding frenzy, or at best a begging fest for the next two weeks.
Totally normal and age-appropriate, haha. I was exactly the same! In fact, one year when I really should have known better, I snuck down around 2am to open gifts, since technically it was Christmas morning. I got my little sister up, too. My mom heard noises and went upstairs to look for us and thought we had been kidnapped.
Nope. Just poor impulse control.

Dec13: Not just talking. Also constantly being underfoot like a cat, putting his curly head between me and whatever I’m trying to do, touching and smushing and handling and shaking and grabbing things while we try to bake something, “Why?” “Why?” “Why?”
All perfectly normal. A lot of deep breaths for this easily-sensory-overloaded person!

Dec13: I told Ali some snakes live in the water. He said, “Do their grandmas live in the water?”
“Yeah. They all do. I mean, not all snakes. Most snakes live on land.”
“Why?”
“That’s just where they live.”
“Do some of them live on snake airplanes?”
“No, motherfking snakes to NOT live on motherfking planes.”
Kidding. I didn’t say that. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I said, “Well, on one movie they did. But it was just a silly movie.”
“Can we watch it?”
Haha, no, buddy. We’re not watching that movie any time soon.
Meanwhile Ayla has developed a very clear fashion sense. She likes purple and horses. And she likes watching “We-doe Tutt” (Leo the Truck) as well as “Horse Mane” (the My Little Pony movie).

Dec13: Holy cow. I’m all caught up on Discovery. (Almost — one episode to go.) I guess endless dishes and laundry is good for something.

Dec14: The new My Little Pony movie on Netflix has overt anti-fascist and anti-bigotry messaging, and I’m here for it.

Dec14: Yeah, so. This is both me and my son sometimes.
Sorry, Ahmed Doğan

Dec14: Ali got a hair cut (at his request) and blowout, and I am low key traumatized, LOL. Ahmed hardly recognized him.
(The curls will come back. We had a perfectionist hairdresser who wanted to straighten it so she could make sure it was even.)

Dec15: I buried the lead a bit yesterday because I spent all my energy trying to get a decent pic of Ali and ran out of time to get a pic of Ayla before we headed to Jenks Park and BBQ.
But THIS little squirt got her very first haircut yesterday. You can’t really tell. It was just a half-centimeter all-over trim (plus snipping her little rat tail mullet off), but it was her very first cut, and she did amazing. I think it helped that she watched Ali brave his hair cut first.
I really wish I’d had a camera, because their little heads look hilariously tiny on that big chair with that big robe around them. She had the world’s biggest pout the whole time, just infinite aggrieved sadness with her chin tucked slightly, and every once in a while she’d whimper, “Don’t want it.” But it was over in a flash and she was so happy again.
Even more impressive? At Jenks Park (Veterans Park in Jenks), Ayla followed her brother up a ladder that was far too big and far too advanced for her. But I spotted her and gave her a chance (assuming she’d give up or wouldn’t make it, I’d catch her, and she’d know from experience that it was too hard for her now), but danged if she didn’t get all the way to the top and only need the tiniest assist to bridge the last, biggest gap. The second time she tried it, she didn’t need an assist at all.
The third time, she had a bad foothold near the top and did fall, and I caught her, and she laughed. Brave girl.

Dec16: There are lots of things that give me comfort that are incontrovertible (or seem so), whether this or that religion is “correct” or not.
One is that everyone who ever existed, existed. They caused ripples throughout space and time that will endure forever. The ones I love probably caused some of the biggest ripples within me. I carry them forward.
Two is that we don’t really understand how time works. I studied physics in college, and it helped me understand how little we know. Time seems linear to us, but there may be vantage points from which it is not. Everyone who ever existed, in a sense, still exists somewhere on the timeline.
For these reasons, I don’t tend to put deceased people in the past tense. It feels weird. They are still rippling. Maybe in some sense they are still existing. I certainly never say “I loved them.” I still love them. That love is mine, it is now, and it is real.
Three is that there may well be “higher powers” we can’t yet begin to fathom. I don’t claim to know the nature of them. But what human scientists know, compared to this vast universe, can fit on the head of a pin. So I try to be a bit humble on this point.
Four is that I had an experience once of losing my ego completely — my sense of identity. I was not on drugs of any kind. I was under the stars. And suddenly there was no barrier between myself and the rest of the universe. Which makes sense. Quantum-mechanically-speaking — even chemically — the boundary between myself and the rest of the universe if very fuzzy. Merging with the universe for a moment was a wonderful experience. I do not fear it.
(Some scientists are beginning to play with the notion that consciousness, rather than matter, is at the base of reality. Intriguing to say the least.)
Five is that we are surrounded by mystery, majesty, and beauty at all times whether we realize it or not. The universe if f***ing cool. Ants alone, giraffes, supernovae, clouds, children, trees. We are lucky beings indeed.

Moving In, Settling In

Well, it’s been a very intense *checks watch* two and a half months. Ayla’s school had already ended by the time I wrote my last update on August 4, and Ali’s ended two days later, then we went to Stigler for a while I think, then we came back and closed on the house on August 17, cleaned the carpets, and got a new washing machine. (The dryer was back-ordered for weeks, and we didn’t get that until October 9.) The kids were still out of school that week.

We moved our primary residence to the new house on August 21 but still had two weeks until our lease on our apartment expired. I used every spare moment while both kids were (finally back) in school over the next two weeks moving the rest of our stuff, cleaning, doing laundry, etc. It was just never-ending. Meanwhile I was learning the new schedule and protocols of the new school, where Ali goes 5 days a week and Ayla 3 days a week, and on days they both went to school, I felt like a crazed pack mule wrangling both their bags, both their nap rolls, and both kids through a long, crowded hallway, and digging out their cups and lunches and handing them over at their respective doorways.

Nowadays Ali will carry his own backpack and Ayla will walk, so it’s not so bad.

Meanwhile there were a million administrative things to do, changing addresses everywhere and turning utilities and internet on and off at each place. I also signed both kids up for extracurricular classes — Tippi Toes dance for both and a storytelling / theater class for Ali. But Ayla was eventually kicked out of the dance class for being too little (in fairness, it was supposed to be 3 and up, and although she did amazing, the bigger kids weren’t so careful around her), and Ali refused to do anything Ayla wasn’t doing.

We took the kids to the aquarium and the state fair, and Doug and his family came down to visit the house, and we got patio furniture, a cute little plastic picnic table for the kids, and a California King Avocado bed for the master bedroom (we still don’t have a bed frame), we played some soccer, I hung up infinite laundry on indoor racks (it never ended), we went to Pumpkin Town several times, I hired an editor to work on the first pages of my novel and the query letter, Holly and Ivy came down for dinner one evening, this week was “fall break” with no school on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, and this weekend we’re helping my parents move out of their apartment that was close to ours. End of an era, and a bit sad, but our new house is lovely, and it’s amazing for the kids to have so much space to run and play inside and out. And for us to have so much space for dinner guest and/or overnight guests, finally!

But the housework… It never ends. There’s such a difference between 900 square feet you don’t really care about all that much and 3400 square feet that are yours for probably at least a decade. I’m actually trying to keep the toilets sparkling clean instead of just passable. I plan to scrub the tubs more than twice a year. There’s ridiculously more carpet to vacuum and hard floors to sweep (and eventually mop), and ants to fight off by keeping the breakfast nook floor (our dining room) scrupulously clean. A least it is a hard floor, though, so I’m counting my blessings there!

Facebook fun

Aug 5: While I was gone, Ayla learned to say “Don’t do that!” apparently from us saying that sometimes when she drops / throws food.

It sounds like: “Don’ doe dah!” Breathy and high-pitched, like everything she says

Aug5: Ayla is absolutely frenetic when she swims. It so exhausting but so much fun watching her have so much fun. I put her in the floaty for a while, after like 30 seconds she signals “all done” and wants me to carry her all around in the pool. Then she wants me to put her up on the side so she can jump back in instantly. Like her butt makes contact with the side of the pool for less than one second. Over and over and over. (Such joy on her face, though!)

Then she keeps pointing down into the water and trying to claw herself away from me, so I dip her in the water so that her head is submerged, and she comes up gasping and coughing gamely, then I spin around in place for a while, holding her and letting her legs trail in the water, then I back up and count to three and release her so that she can “swim” toward me (with the help of momentum) for like one second, then I bring her up again, gasping and coughing gamely.

Then we go to the stairs and she stands on one and tries to sit on the next one but her mouth is underwater so I rescue her and she keeps climbing, then turns back around immediately and leaps into my arms again, then she wants to do it again, and again, and again, then I just get too tired and put her back in the floaty, then after 30 seconds she signals “all done,” so I carry her all around in the pool for a while, then…

Whew. Can’t wait to have a little kiddie pool in our new backyard next month so she can entertain herself!

Meanwhile I’m slowly learning to speak Ayla. If she is holding a spoon and points at the fridge, she wants yogurt. Now I know.

Aug5: OMG. They’re both eating my whole grain banana date spinach egg milk cinnamon pancakes.

*internal happy screaming/dancing*

Aug6: Ayla’s words so far, in approximate order:

Meoooow = cat

Mama

Baba (dad in Turkish)

Bye

Uh oh

No

Mine!

No = nose

Hah = hat

Wow

Baw = ball

Ow = ouch

Oh oh (barking) = dog

Wa wa (quacking) = duck, or any large bird

*Maniacal laugh* (neighing) = horse

Joo = shoe

Baby

Don’ doe dah = Don’t do that (said when she drops or throws something she shouldn’t)

She has significantly more receptive language (can point to most body parts when we say them, etc), and she loves to “sing along” to songs. She’s learning lots of animal sounds, and her neigh is insanely sweet and funny. It sounds like a high-pitched, unhinged laugh.

Aug6: Someone on a parenting support group wrote:

“My husband has been home with us for a week (with our ten-week-old and 17-month-old) and he says he’s feeling emasculated. He’s an amazing dad and wonderful husband but he wants to feel accomplished at the end of the day.

I explained to him I feel this everyday, like I never get anything done and yet never get to sit down. It’s just how it is raising little ones. Any suggestions on how to get him to feel more comfortable with being home?”

I replied:

“Our society has, for centuries, disrespected and denigrated “women’s work” (caretaking, child raising, cooking, cleaning, etc) as fundamentally lesser and undignified.

Even though society would COMPLETELY FALL APART if it didn’t get done.

It has also disrespected and denigrated women while simultaneously shaming women who didn’t take on those roles, and shaming men who did.

So, it’s a big nasty cake that has been baked, and no wonder if affects so many people — men and women alike.

I hate the undignified feeling of being “Cinderella” on my hands and knees cleaning up under the damned high chair again, you know? I could be working on a novel I’m writing, exercising, reading, going for a walk, traveling solo in the Middle East like I did in the freedom of my child-free 20s… Like, millions of things.

And yet, someone needs to clean under the damned high chair.

[Ahmed does his fair share in our household and then some. He is not at issue here.]

I don’t know how to completely reform society, but somehow it needs to happen.

It’s a privilege to be able to raise my babies, but it’s ridiculously hard and ridiculously undervalued.”

Aug6: Today was a sweet day. Ali’s last day of (summer) school. I asked him afterwards how he felt now that he would never go to his school again. He said, “Great.”

He’s been vaguely complaining about his school all summer. He’ll have a new one starting in a couple weeks. We’ll see if he just hates school in general or what, haha.

He had his first Boba tea after school (I was worried about him choking on the balls, but he’s a champ with them), and while we were waiting, Ayla sat on my lap and Ali tickled her and hugged her and they were so super sweet. Until Ali took it a little too far and Ayla started saying, “No, no, no!” Such is the way with older brothers, haha.

When we got home, Ayla pulled some dolls out of the closet and she played with one and Ali played with the other one. Ayla put hers to bed and put a blanket over it. She kept pointing at it and saying, “Baby,” and then putting her finger to her nose and saying, “Shh.”

Now we’re going to Big Splash for the first time for the kiddos. (I know it has a new name. I do not acknowledge it. I have so many good memories of Big Splash. I’m a reactionary in a progressive body, I guess!)

Aug6: Ali is just starting the “endless questions” phase, and his questions yesterday were, “Where does water come from?” and “Where does our brain come from?”

He may have asked the wrong person.

“Well, kid, 14.5 billion years ago…”

Usually his eye glaze over pretty quickly and he asks for a snack

Aug6: We had SO MUCH FUN celebrating the end of (summer) school at Big Splash. It’s such a great-sized water park — not big enough to be some massive crowded tourist attraction, but plenty big enough to be a whole lot of fun. Definitely getting season passes next year.

Ali, Mr. “Didn’t Like Water Play At School All Summer,” suddenly found his water mojo in the wave pool, laughing uncontrollably as the waves pummeled us.

Ayla waded straight into the huge kiddie pool area. She seemed to take great pleasure in “plopping down” on her butt only to kind of float down gently into a seated position. And she loved sitting down with her head above water. It’s just her size. Like a series of gigantic, clear puddles.

She liked the wave pool, too, though not as much as Ali did!

(At one point, while the waves were off, he was paddling his arms around in a kind of unusual way and said, “I’m a lawnmower boat!” That may just be his billion-dollar idea…)

He wanted to go on this giant kind of scary slide but was too short. Meanwhile he wouldn’t try any of the slides in the kiddie pool area. Go figure.

On the way there, his question kick continued. He’s obsessed with Billie Eilish’s song “You Should See Me in a Crown.” He calls it “One By.”

“Who is singing?” he asked, though he knew.

“Billie Eilish,” Ahmed said.

“Biddie Eiwish? Did she didn’t like the song and so she sent it to us?”

Ahmed laughed. “No, that’s not how that worked. She liked it, so she shared it with everyone.”

“Oh. Is she in California?”

“Actually, she is. How did you know? Who told you?”

“Does she have a phone?”

“Yes, she probably has a phone.”

“Is she a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Is she can do some vacuum?”

“Probably.”

“Is she a better vacuumer?”

“Better than who?”

“Better than you.”

“That would be really hard. I’m the best vacuumer in the world.”

And that was the end of that line of questioning.

Ali also calls ambulances “anabwences.” We stuffed ourselves silly on Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ after the swimming, and Ali insisted the Oklahoma Joe’s catering truck was “a anabwence.”

Then we saw a helicopter transporting a patient to St. Francis Hospital.

These are the days.

Aug7: A tale of two kiddies.

Ali’s Mother’s Day gift this year (Look at me, I’m so cute!)

Ayla’s Father’s Day gift (I will probably murder you in your sleep)

Aug7: Ayla when she was sick with RSV a couple weeks ago

Aug8: Ayla gets so emotionally invested in Cocomelon videos. Precious and hilarious.

Aug10: My mom set an alarm on her phone and told Ali, “Now remind me to take my pill every time the alarm goes off.”

She made the alarm go off to show him what it sounded like. Then she couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. She said, “What do I do now?”

Ali said, “Take your pill!”

Aug10: BUSTED. But fast on the getaway. And DGAF.

Mom wrote: She took my drink.  She took his car.  And we are powerless against her.

Aug11: So, Ali had a small bowl of butter for dinner tonight.

That is all.

Aug11: Today’s task: Choosing a washer and dryer for our new place.

Leaning heavily toward the LG machines because they have clear lids so that Ali the Engineer can watch the machinery go.

Planning on a top-loader. Trying to decide between an agitator or impeller (leaning toward impeller).

Domestic adventure, ho!

Aug11: Frito chili pie. Canned chili. Canned pinto beans. Garden tomatoes. Avocado tomatillo salsa. (Sour cream and cheese for the dairy eaters.) Sweet onions. Pickled jalapenos.

Sometimes a super simple meal can be just perfect.

(Of course, Ali ate like 3 chips and a bowl of butter. Whatever. Ayla ate like a bear about to hibernate, like she always does!)

Aug12: Ayla has started using at least 10 new words in the past few days:

ish = fish

ah gah = all gone

doe = door

hand 

pig

moo

I’ll write more when I think of them. It’s starting!

Aug12: Ayla was just standing there, looking to the right. A wasp landed on her left pinky, stung her, and flew off.

What a freaking jerk.

She cried for a few minutes, then went back to normal, other than she cries every time I wipe off her left hand. No apparent swelling.

Still. What a freaking jerk.

Aug12: As my brother said, using that corn dog to soak up the bowl of butter he ate yesterday. Calories are a victory at this point!

Aug12: Handsome boy with his laundry in the window…

Mom wrote: Grandma multi-tasking at her finest. Drying laundry, a waitin’ on a train.  Sounds like a bad country song.

Aug12: There’s a runt pig being bottle fed at the gift shop in Stigler. Not as a publicity stunt. The pig just needed help.

I took Ayla down there to see him. He was such a wee little thing, not much bigger than my hand, perfectly formed from the snout to the curly tail. It slurped down the bottle and then the owner got it out, and it bucked and squealed a little when anyone petted it. Ayla plopped down and watched it mince around on its little high heel hooves and petted it so gently. And I think she said 3 new words just while we were there.

Aug13: Rice, butter, cow connective tissue… that’s a healthy breakfast, right?

I’m talkin’ ’bout a rice krispy treat.

Aug13: When I was 11 and had bangs and mom jeans.

Aug13: Ayla finally learned how to say “Yeah.”

From now on, it’s not just “No, no, no!” and a blank look for yes

Aug13: Happy happy (early) birthday to my amazing step-dad Bill Cox!

We love you lots. Sorry we’ll be so busy closing on our house on your actual birthday

Aug14: Pig pics! Ayla is a pig whisperer, it turns out. She just sat down quietly, and the pig was all over her. (No pics of that.) She was so gentle when she petted him, too

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Aug15: Unprompted Ali poop in the potty [happy dancing gif]

Aug15: And just now, Ali asked for noodles, chicken, and broccoli for dinner. And he’s eating it! [wide-eyed emoji]

Aug15: Tonight Ali saw an airplane (ayer-pwane) go by and said, “Hey, I think I know why it’s called a airplane. Because it has to go in the AIR. So it’s a AIRplane.”

He also corrected himself: “We find it… We found it.”

That broccoli is making him smart [laugh emoji]

Aug17: Oh my goodness, our realtor found out I was allergic to dust mites and dusted the blinds in our new house for us.

Thanks, Keli Brooks Smith! It means a lot!

And by the way, we are officially homeowners now.

Or, well, technically our lender owns it, but details, details

Aug17: Our new digs. I’m especially excited about the back yard for the kids and the sweet office for my husband and me (not at the same time, unless the kids are in preschool).

There’s a play room and 3 bedrooms upstairs, and we’ll live up there for at least a few years. Which means the master bedroom downstairs is open for guests.

Come on out if you need a south Broken Arrow escape! (It’s pretty close to 101st and Garnett.)

We need lots of stuff, from patio furniture to fun indoor kid stuff to fun outdoor kid stuff to a ladder and lawnmower. If anyone is getting rid of these or knows of any good garage sales, send ’em our way!

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Aug18: Grandpa’s early birthday cake. With some underwhelming pyrotechnics, LOL. Can you see the 70 on the cake marked out in candles?

Aug19: Running on fumes. Recovering from a viral (non-COVID) infection, dealing with the million administrative tasks of moving, packing and transporting our stuff little by little each day (with the big final-ish push on Saturday), living in a skeleton home with everything in disarray, living on McDonald’s (because who has time to shop or cook?), all while Ahmed is working full-time-plus and two little kids need a lot of attention (Mom and Bill are watching them part of the day, thankfully, otherwise this would simply be impossible), and I was just about to take a much-needed short nap when I remembered Ali has a dental check-up at 3.

Glad to be moving.

Moving sucks.

Both these things are true

Aug21: All the books are in the new home. That alone was a huge undertaking. And kid stuff accumulates like crazy. Blankets, quilts, clothes, kitchen implements, furniture, a million other random things. We have a small and reasonably tidy place, yet the sheer volume of stuff is exhausting.

The good news is, we won’t need to worry about it for another decade or so, by which point we can garage sale it all away.

Thankfully the weather is cooperating. It’ll be cloudy but not raining most of the day. And no one’s back has gone out, so that’s a win! (Knock wood)

Aug21: Ayla was pushing her little horse toy backwards across the floor.

“She’s mowing backwards,” Ali said. “She’s going to make it tall. She’s going to make the grass tall again!”

Aug21: The worst is over. There are just some random things left that we can take in a few car loads. Did NOT have the bandwidth to deal with these last things today. But the Unreasonably Heavy Mattress (DreamCloud is no joke) traveled downstairs on a raft of plastic and was not damaged. Neither were we. Hooray.

I’ve packed up a suitcase and we’ll all “camp out” in the master bedroom together while we slowly put the house together.

Soon we’ll have a dining room with hard floors and not effing carpet!

Aug21: And we are online at Casa Dogan and ready for sleep!

Aug22: Ayla decided sleeping was for chumps last night and neither she nor her parents were chumps. Then Ali woke up at the crack of dawn. Send help.

Aug22: My body is tired but my heart is happy

Aug22: We still have a little ways to go. We got to the new place late last night (after moving as much as we humanly could), and the kids slept poorly (i.e., everyone slept poorly). We barely had the energy today to go pick up the cat (we had to leave him at our place overnight) and his paraphernalia and a few other necessities from the old place, have lunch, unpack enough stuff to get to the couch, put the couch together, find all the stuff we need to send the kids to their first day of school tomorrow, find a little time to play with the kids so they don’t feel completely neglected, have dinner, go shopping, bathe everyone, do bed time routine, and put the kids to bed.

*deep breath*

(We pretty much haven’t breathed in a week.)

So yeah, we still have roughly 7% of our stuff at the old place, even after five days of exhausting work, and two more weeks to get it all out. We can manage that. We can breathe through it.

What we couldn’t manage was doing what we did without help from Mom and Bill watching the kids while we worked. Mom had an especially rough time with two kids for nearly all of Saturday, and they wouldn’t nap and were acting hog wild after the rough and weird week. And I know all too well how exhausting that is.

THANK YOU for everything. I hope you understand how much we appreciate it!

Aug23: Last night we actually got to sleep like 7 hours, thank God. But the cat woke us up a couple times. I got up around 1:21am and saw crazy bright moonlight making a shadow under the back porch.

I walked out to look and saw a spectacular waning gibbous moon trailed by Jupiter and Saturn across the zenith.

I’ll call that a good sign.

Aug23: Both kids were rock stars at their first day at their new school. Maybe they tell all the parents their kids are stand-outs for being good-natured and having fun, but it’s always fun to hear. Ali was a “leader,” which apparently meant he was first in line or something? They seemed to act like it was a minor big deal, whatever it was.

Ayla clung to me and cried in the morning, and it was hard, but they said all day she was just happy to be doing whatever they were doing next.

They both ate great. (Turkey and cheese croissants, cheese-flavored cauliflower chips, grapes, hummus for Ali, a macaroon for Ayla.) Ayla put herself to sleep but only napped about 45 minutes. Ali didn’t nap but lay quietly.

Best of all — Ali said it was a good day. That’s a high bar for our little man. I’m so glad.

Aug23: Ali was so sweet with Ayla tonight, asking if he could give her a hug before bed (she enthusiastically hugged back) and then asking if he could sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to her (her favorite song).

She settled right down to sleep after that (and my usual nightly song to the tune of Edelweiss)

Aug24: No longer using a soup pot as a wastebasket #progress

Aug24: “Hey, Ali, don’t wipe your nose on the TV.”

Yep. I said that.

Aug24: Ali: “What’s California mean?”

Ahmed: “Your Aunt Val lives there.”

Ali: “With MacQueen?” [Lightning McQueen]

Ahmed: *chuckles*

Ali: “Does she say, ‘Hi, MacQueen’?”

Ahmed: “You’ve gotta ask her next time you see her.”

What say you, Val Monticue?

Aug24: Poor Ali had his first bloody nose today. Tripped and fell on the driveway. When we asked what hurt worst, he said it was his hand. His hand was not injured at all but got blood on it from his nose.

He also skinned his knee and got a big band-aid.

Oh, and we got a lawnmower! It’s mechanical, so a whole new world for Ali to explore. And for Ahmed to wrestle with.

So many doings in these days.

Aug25: We went to the hardware store yesterday and passed by a giant dog with dalmatian markings, big as a St. Bernard but thin like a greyhound. [Harlequin Great Dane]

Ali didn’t even glance over. So I stopped and said, “Hey, you just breezed past that dog,” and pointed at it.

He said, “Uh huh. OOOH. There’s a carpet cleaner!”

Sure enough, there was a carpet shampooer just to the left of the giant weird dog

Aug25: Ayla doesn’t have school today, but when I was dropping off, one of the teacher’s aides talked rapturously about how Ayla was just singing and singing, and how much she must love music.

Yep! Our “music room” is still overrun with bins and boxes at the moment, but it’ll be a proper music room one of these days. Can’t wait!

Aug25: Ali is now obsessed with “belly button videos.” Just random videos that have to do with belly buttons.

Can we please go back to vacuums? (It all started with a video of a vacuum hose stuck to someone’s belly button. We can’t find it again. I think he’s hoping to stumble across it?)

Memory from Aug 27, 2016: All of us get to be ourselves, and that is pretty amazing!

I try not to be jealous

Of birds because

They fly in a way

I never will.

I try to look at

Musical savants

And be glad that

Someone gets to do it.

I see Olympic gymnasts

And prima ballerinas

And know it is a life

I will never know.

But I also know

That I am me

And that is something

No one else can ever be.

Aug27: I’m watching Ayla learn to eat jello with a spoon (a very different skill from eating yogurt with a spoon), and most of it is dropping onto the (hard) floor, and I don’t even care 

ETA: I think she’s got it! She’s started not turning the spoon upside-down on the way to her mouth. And also just using her hand when she really wanted an embedded mandarin orange Right Now.

And now she’s back to yogurt, and I saw her flip the food upside-down in front of her to see how it didn’t fall out. And she took a few bites with the yogurt spoon right-side-up.

#Learnding

Aug27: We still don’t have a dryer at our new house, so I went to our old apartment to do two big loads of laundry today (way too much for a drying rack to handle), only for that dryer to break down. Then on the way out, a handle broke off a plastic box I was carrying to bring stuff home, and a bowl broke and sliced my finger. I had to clean that up and was late to picking up the kids.

Then I got home, and both kids were buck wild and just wanted their Baba, who was in a long meeting in an office with a glass door and no lock (yet). So that was super fun.

But then finally we went to get Chinese food (the kids ate a ton, like they had been starving for days) and play at LaFortune Park. A little festival was going on, and after the kids did the slides and swings for a while, we went back and watched the music. Ali said, “I see a guitar!” and later, “I didn’t know they had a singing place here!” Both kids watched, fascinated. (Two electric guitars, one acoustic, a bass guitar, and drums.)

The house is still about half chaos. Our entire kitchen hasn’t been moved yet. (I know, I know — believe me, we are moving at the highest speed we can manage, and it is slow AF with two kids.) The kids are learning new routines, people, and places at their new school, and so am I.

I still have to deep clean the old place. I have another week to do it.

And Ayla tripped down the stairs yesterday, and in the process of lunging to try to catch her (I failed, and she rolled down a few soft steps, none the worse for it, though I about had a heart attack), I did something to my right middle toe that has it swollen, discolored, and very painful today.

We still need to get a garden hose.

I keep trying to remember to grab the bread knife, and failing.

We are tired. In another two weeks the chaos should be in some better order. But the pace is so slow when you have two littles and so many other things to do besides.

I can’t wait to have all this sorted and just be able to live. (Today was a night “off” of shopping and arranging and everything else, to *just* have fun with the kids.)

ETA: Oh yeah, and Mateo disappeared. He was missing over 24 hours until Ahmed found him in his office closet. (Ayla’s favorite pastime right now is closing doors.) Mateo didn’t make a sound the whole time. And he still spends much of his time in that closet. But he’s finally eating and venturing out more.

Aug28: I love how Ali calls Ayla “silly girl” sometimes, and he pronounces it “siwwy gowoh.”

Aug29: Tonight we were heading to the garage to get in the car and go to the park, and Ali said to Ayla, “Why don’t we hold hands?” They held hands all the way to the garage, and Ali said, “Aren’t we cute?”

Um, yeah. Yeah, you are.

Ayla, for some reason, started doing her happy stomp dance, and Ali and I did, too, and she started laughing and dancing at our silly behavior.

At the park, Ali decided I ate too much of his imaginary ice cream and I needed surgery to remove the excess ice cream. I lay down on a slide, and he cut my stomach open with scissors and used pliers to get the ice cream out. My first ice-cream-ectomy.

Then he taped me back up.

When I was up and around again, he ran to me saying, “Here’s your Dum Dum!” Because of course you get a Dum Dum when you go to the doctor. I pretended to take it and put it in my mouth.

Ayla came running up, opening and closing her little hand, begging for a suck of my imaginary sucker.

Ali said, “Oh! I can get you a Dum Dum, too, Ayla.”

Ayla waited patiently for him to come back from his slide clinic and give her a Dum Dum, too.

Of course, he gave her imaginary candy — aka nothing. She was confused and not at all amused. Her face clearly said, “What the hell, bro?”

At twilight the fireflies came out at Haikey Creek Park (our local park, super close), and I said to Ali, “Hey, look at the lightning bugs!”

He watched for a while, then said with some trepidation, “Are there thunder bugs?”

On the way back, there was a really bad skunk smell. So now Ali is watching Youtube videos learning all about skunks.

Good grief, if I had had Youtube as a kid! What a magical thing!

Aug29: Mungees on the ranch.

Aug30: When Ali was this age, he said “Gah gai!” for “All done!”

Ayla says, “Don’t die!”

Aug30: It has been a dream of mine for a long time to have enough room for the kids to have their own little wooden table for eating.

Meanwhile, Ali’s dream of having his Very Own Real Vacuum came true today! ($23, and its filter just throws fine dust in the air, but it really does an excellent job picking up small things like grass and fuzz, and Ali’s excitement is worth it!)

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Aug31: Yesterday on the way to school, Ali said, “I’m going to be sad a little bit when you leave me there.”

Sure enough, he sobbed and clung to me when I left him there. But his teachers said he had a great day.

The next day on the way to school, he said, “I’m not going to be sad when you leave me there today. I’m just gonna be happy.”

And he was. He walked right into class without a look back.

That’s some emotional awareness right there.

Meanwhile Ayla marches into preschool every day like it’s her dream job and she’s the boss.

Sep1: Because of Wheels on the Bus, Ali calls windshield wipers “Shwishwishwish.”

“Mama, turn on the Shwishwishwish.”

Sep4: We came close to taking Ali to the ER last night with retractions / difficulty breathing related to some kind of virus (not COVID, he tested negative for that).

Meanwhile I’ve been hearing stories of ERs turning away car accident victims (including children) because they are overrun with  non-vaccinated COVID cases and ivermectin poisoning cases. I was honestly terrified to take Ali there. (Ali is, of course not vaccinated. He’s too young.) And I was terrified not to take him there.

Thankfully albuterol and oral steroids set him right enough to sleep peacefully on his side and wake up energized.

But Jesus, what could have happened…

This is one reason I have absolutely no problem with mandating vaccines. (Can we also mandate not taking livestock medicine? Can we just mandate against stupidity? Gaaah.)

Sep4: Once after I yelled at Ali and apologized and said I was just feeling stressed and it wasn’t his fault, he said kindly, “You should do meditation. That’s what Grandma does when she’s stressed.”

You’re absolutely right, buddy. I perpetually intend to meditate, and it keeps getting swallowed by the days. But this week I’ll do it! Starting Monday. Tomorrow I recover from 3 weeks of moving house…

Sep4: Ali held aloft his fortune cookie and said to his Baba, “Do you remember? You break it and then you take out the tag.”

Thanks for the refresher, Bud.

Sep4: Labor Day weekend, everyone in the family is sick, but at least no one’s in the hospital, and the kids are happily sick (especially Steroid Boy).

I worked 6 hours today cleaning the old apartment and somehow packing yet another whole carload of crap (a large framed picture, the curtains, cleaning supplies and tools, a giant floor lamp, the internet stuff, and on and on), all while sick, then I turned in the key and the three-week moving saga is officially over.

Other than figuring out and arranging the new place, which is in some kind of order but still needs at least another week of work.

Sep4: Ayla’s vocab is exploding. Her favorite word now is, “Bite!” As in “I want one!”

Sep5: Cute pics two years ago, in the apartment we just left. Lots of good memories. Here’s to more memories in the new place!

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Sep5: My world is rocked. I thought “Who Wants to Live Forever” was a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad about the AIDS crisis by Freddie Mercury that got co-opted by the show/movie Highlander.

Turns out it was written by Brian May, inspired by and for the movie Highlander.

Sep5: Ayla has finally gotten to the point where not every meal is a complete mess-splosion apocalypse.

Just in time for us to finally have hard floors. Oh well!

Sep6: We found a water bottle with straw that we liked so much for Ali, we got one for Ayla, too, for school. Unfortunately, her little 18-month-old hands couldn’t push the button to open it or push hard enough to close it.

So we kept her school sippy cup and just gave her the straw cup, already open, at home.

She worked for hours with single-minded focus, and by the end of it, she could open it with two thumbs and close it with both hands.

That’s how she is. She will focus on a skill for hours until she nails it. No prompting by us required.

ETA: It’s more accurate to say she kept coming back to it hour after hour, not that she literally sat there for hours with just the cup. But she can definitely spend a lot of minutes with one thing like that! And then keep coming back until she figures it out.

Sep7: “Say hello to my little friend.”

Sep8: We finally have a functional enough kitchen that I could cook a real dinner last night (ginger/garlic/soy marinated salmon, mashed potatoes with feta, and spinach fritters — Ali just ate feta cheese), though we never found the pot lid or the potato masher.

We have beds assembled and everyone moved into their correct rooms (instead of all camping out in the master bedroom) and even some curtains on the windows. Ayla is out of her SlumberPod tent and in the open air of her new room and doing great.

Just about six more bins to go and the bins are empty at last, but everything is still in weird provisional places. It’s like 3D chess trying to figure out what goes where. A highly iterative process.

We have a (mechanical) lawnmower, weed eater, and leaf blower, and we’re figuring out the sprinkler system.

About 3 more weeks until our dryer gets here. Daily washing and rack drying until then (and plenty of crunchy clothes and handkerchiefs).

Such a process, but it’s going!

Sep9: I’ve been crazy busy / productive and also sick all week. Going to sleep early but still feeling exhausted all day.

I gave myself an hour to read a book before picking Ali up today after rushing around the house all day in an ADHD frenzy trying to get things cleaned, arranged, etc. I can’t get one thing done without running across 3 other things that need to get done first. Repeat ad nauseam.

Exactly when I was going to take a refreshing shower and finally relax for a rare, sweet hour, Ahmed got a call (after I didn’t hear my phone).

Ali’s school is so full of kids who are sick (including some confirmed COVID cases), he was sent home with a 100.1 fever (not even technically a fever) and a cough (same cough from the cold he had last week) and had to get another COVID test. It was negative, but he HATES them. It gets worse every time he gets the damn swab up his nose. This time he was hysterical for more than 15 minutes, trying to hit and head-butt me and crying and yelling while we waited for the results.

I am so sick of this.

The school asked me to take both of my kids out tomorrow anyway because they’re so skittish. I don’t blame them. But damn. So much for my plans tomorrow to either really take a run at the house and get a ton more stuff done, or catch up on sleep, or God forbid actually relax and do something I enjoy for a little while. Stay off my feet and let the strained muscle in my lower leg (from the move) finally heal. Nope.

Whine over.

I guess we’ll go to the Aquarium until nap time. Not the worst place to limp around.

Sep10: I can’t believe I did that. We hadn’t watched the movie Tangled in about a year. Ali was 2.5 last time he watched it, and of course he didn’t really get it then. He’s starting to get it now.

At the end, when [SPOILER ALERT] Eugene cuts the hair and Gothel turns old and then falls out of the tower, I said without thinking, “Welp, she’s dead.”

Ali said, aghast, “She’s died? Why is she died?”

He doesn’t understand that she’s “the bad guy” and she “deserved it,” because if she didn’t die, Rapunzel would be enslaved forever. (Yeesh.) She was just a woman he followed through the movie, singing songs and stuff. Something horrible happened to her. He was horrified.

When Rapunzel started crying about Eugene dying, Ali lost it completely. He wailed, “Turn it off!” We thought if he watched Eugene come back to life, he’d feel better again. But the damage was already done.

Bless his sweet heart.

Sep11: That time this bench kept trying to eat my son…

2019: Anyone else’s kid repeatedly and deliberately manufacture a desperate crisis if you stop paying attention to them for more than five seconds? “Save me, Mama! Save me from this thing I’ve done 30 times today!”

Sep11: We had been together about two years at this point. Not quite married yet. (We still have those hampers.)

Sep12: I think the play room came together nicely. Next project: Books books books!

Sep12: Two years ago today, we came out as a soon-to-be family of 4. Poor baby Ali. Had no idea what was about to hit him.

But now he wants to hug and kiss her every night before bed (probably as a bed time stalling tactic, but I’ll take it).

Sep13: Ali loved My Neighbor Totoro. He calls it The Big Teddy Bear Movie. He cheered at the growing tree part. Thanks, Tim!

Sep13: Tonight Ali was sad at bed time because he missed his grandparents and missed his old school and missed his old house. I empathized that missing people is hard and change is hard.

He said, “Yeah. But you can’t move backwards. You can only move forwards.”

[Wide-eyed emoji]

Sep14: Getting back on the wagon after about 3 years of mostly convenience foods. It’s actually pretty easy to be vegan and grain-free for the first two meals of the day to pack in other stuff — smoothie with berries, soy milk, spinach, and pea protein powder for breakfast, lentil soup and salad with balsamic and olive oil for lunch. (I’m leaving dinner alone for now, since I don’t want to eat separate from everyone else.)

And yesterday I did 30 minutes of yin yoga, today 10 minutes of cardio. (Starting slow, don’t need injuries.)

Fall soccer starts on Friday. Always motivating.

Sep14: I tried to get Ali to watch Ponyo, but he just wanted to watch Totoro again (and repeat all the things he and I said the first time we watched it).

When the girls find a post that’s a bit rotted and about to fall down, he said, “Their house is a little bit broken!” Just like last time.

I said, “Yep.”

He said, “Just like our house was a little bit broken.”

Eh, true. A door knob fell off. Some wood needs replacing. I had to tighten the screws on the hand rail of the stairs. Some light bulbs have burned out. Etc.

I said, “Yep.”

He said happily, “EVERYTHING’s a little bit broken!”

He’s on a philosophical streak, I tell ya.

Sep14: Ali and Ayla went to their first dance class today. Ayla technically wasn’t old enough (it’s supposed to be 3 and up), but the instructor encouraged us to try a class and see.

She was just as good as can be, following directions almost perfectly, waiting her turn, etc. She was better than some of the 3-year-olds. Including Ali. When the instructor asked Ali what his name was, he stared at her in stony silence.

Ayla pointed at him and piped up, “Ali!” (It was super cute. She just learned to say his name.)

He spent several minutes with his back turned to the whole thing. Then he sat on my lap and watched. Then when some plush turtle toys came out, he asked if he could get one just to play with while the others danced with them, and the instructor said sure. So he did.

Then when the ribbon wands came out, he did the same and played with one, mostly swishing me in the face with it. Toward the end he watched with more interest.

The instruction was way too advanced for the age and no one really did much of anything she modeled. It was too fast, for one thing, and she also never explained how to point the toes or plie or anything. She just did quick dances and expected them to dance along. Maybe they’ll pick it up in a matter of weeks? Ayla kind of bopped along the whole time and actually did try to point her toes once, but everything went by too fast.

Afterwards the instructor asked if Ali would dance with the class next time, and he said cheerfully, “Yeah!” He said it in the car, too when I asked the question again.

So we’ll see. He sure likes to get the full picture of something before he’ll dive in. I think that will serve him well once he’s a teenager!

Sep15: Ayla right now loves pointing at Ali and saying, “Ali! Ali. Ali!”

Then she may point to herself and say, “Ali?”

I said just now, “You’re Ayla?”

She pointed at her eye. “Eye… la?”

Yep, you got it.

Meanwhile, Ali has been experimenting with word sounds. He’ll say, “Hey! Shoe wooks wike bwue.” (Shoe looks like blue.)

Or, “Hey! Car looks like carpet!”

Also, for the record, one of Ayla’s first words has been “mawmower” (lawnmower).

Sep16: Ali’s teacher today was kind enough to speak with me while Ali was in a kiddie drama class and let me know he was doing great and making friends, and he was one she could count on to ask for help when the other kids were being wild.

I get to see him sad in the morning as I drop him off, and tired and restraint-collapsed when I pick him up. So that was lovely to hear.

Sep17: Fall soccer season started and we won the second half of the game (after shaking the cobwebs off during the first half, lol). All in all, the math did not work in our favor, but it was fun, and I got to see a sunset and moonrise and hang out with Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Sep18: Here’s the problem with learning an entirely new area of expertise, like cooking: You run into phrases like “turn the dough out” and have no idea what they’re talking about. So you google it, and it means “tip the thing over and dump the dough out.”

Why didn’t you just say that?

I’ve been learning to cook for years. Now that I have a stand mixer (and soon a food processor), new worlds are opening up, haha. Homemade quiche butter crust, here I come. No more frozen margarine crusts from Wally World.

Sep19: At Walmart, Ayla kept randomly shouting, “Bubble boo ixx… waayaanee.” (W, X, Y and Z)

Obsessed with the ABC song like her brother before her.

Sep21: If my kids were named after what I craved during my pregnancies, Ali would be Boba Tea and Ayla would be Sugar.

Sep21: The kids get stickers at the end of every dance class, and Ali kept saying, “I want the one with the germ. I want the germ one.”

The instructor had no idea what he was talking and let him pick.

It was this one.

Sure enough. It looks just like a coronavirus. (It’s a glowing heart.)

Meanwhile he kept talking last night about my “walking dad.”

It took me a while to realize he meant Bill — my step-dad 

Both kids are still loving the dance class. Ali got plenty of twirling practice at Grandma’s place when the cuckoo clock went off. I reminded him of this, and he said, “Yeah! Then Grandma knocked it off the wall. Now it’s at the cuckoo clock store.”

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Sep21: Haven’t posted a pic of Ayla in a while. Here ya go.

She’s “bow ba bow”ing along with Blue.

And she needs a hair cut! (So far she won’t tolerate top knots, head bands, or clips.)

Sep23: Fun day at the zoo with Grandpa! Ali got a plush rhino and Ayla picked out a red panda. We saw rhinos, giraffes, elephants, chimps, giant tortoises, flamingos, and more. And we rode a train and a carousel. I think a membership is in our future.

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Sep25: Ayla’s mom holding the poles and a bucket.

Can someone digitize the photo of me feeding a dead squirrel to a bird dog?

Sep26: Our doorway. Waving good-bye to Grandma and Grandpa.

Sep28: So nice to have a backyard… and grandparents to share it with!

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Sep28: Let the record show, one of Ayla’s first polysyllabic words / phrases is “Doe toe doe” (Totoro).

Right after “Don’ doe dah!” (don’t do that), “Doe ‘way!” (go away), and “Mawmower” (lawnmower).

Sep29: My helpful, sweet, curious, sensitive, beautiful, silly son.

Thanks for making me a mama.

Thanks for being a great big brother.

Thanks for being you

Sep30: Ali got up earlier than everyone else today, and when he greeted me, wide-eyed, at the bottom of the stairs, he said:

“I… I… I just ate… one baniwa wiper… two baniwa wipers… three baniwa wipers… four baniwa wipers… five baniwa wipers. Just five. Wet me show you. I need to show you there are some left.”

I don’t know if he ate just 5 vanilla wafers. But it was an adorable confession.

Sep30: Suddenly Ali can spell his name. I guess he learned it at school. (We don’t push these things, just play around with things, including numbers and letters, at home.) Grandpa held up a wooden A, and Ali said, “A L I!”

I asked Grandma and Grandpa and Ahmed if they had taught him, and they all said no.

Then Ali got a mischievous look on his face and said, “A L I… P P I!”

Anyone who’s watched Blippi knows why he added those last three letters 

(Blippi always emphatically spells his name at the end of his Youtube videos so parents can look him up and subscribe.)

Oct1: Fearless Ayla (with her shiner from falling on our rock patio) ran right in the middle of the animals.

Meanwhile, Ali enjoyed the animals from Grandma’s arms!

Goofy Ayla

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Oct1: Last weeks with the lello vacuum at Grandma’s little Tulsa house

Mom wrote: The difference in little boy Ali, who made me vacuum every day, and big boy Ali?  THE KID CAN VACUUM!

Oct1: Just a girl, her mama, and her Tiger Pig.

Oct1: I figured out tonight that I can order Ali around — and he’ll obey, happily — if I use a silly grumpy Wookiee voice. (He doesn’t know what a Wookiee is. Star Wars would make him cry right now. He doesn’t like fighting. I don’t actually sound like a Wookiee. More like Cookie Monster.)

Then after a while he asked why I was so angry and asked if I needed a hug.

Wookiee heart melted.

Oct1: Our dryer will finally come in 8 more days. Since the wait was so long, they upgraded us to a dryer that can do steaming, or something. Probably wasted on us, but I’ll take it.

Ready for laundry to not be twice the work! It’ll be so exciting to be able to wash my kids’ nap rolls any time I want and not have to wait overnight for them to dry. It’ll be nice to be able to do bigger (and fewer) loads because I won’t have to worry about having enough room on the drying racks.

No more stiff clothes and towels or worrying about mildew.

I wish I could live without a dryer. I much prefer life with it.

Oct2: First big bunch of visitors to the new house. We have patio furniture. Places to sit. Iced tea and cider. Brown butter apple pie with streusel today (Ali’s idea). Come on by!

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Oct3: We were watching a cartoon with nursery songs.

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily merrily merrily merrily…

Ali: “WIPES HIS BUTT?”

Oct3: That feeling when you *know* there’s some missing chili, and you finally find it down the back of your daughter’s shirt.

Oct4: Ali wants to be a strawberry ghost for Halloween. Apparently, it is strawberry flavored. I don’t have any sheets I want to sacrifice. No pink sheets at all. Any ideas?

Googling “strawberry ghost costume” produced no useful results.

Oct4: First parent-teacher conferences with the kids. In short: No notes.

Ayla is “so bright” (if a little serious and suspicious at times) and you can see the gears turning in her head when she’s trying to figure something out. Super chill. Very attuned and attentive. Not yet super empathetic (Ali at this age was more sensitive to others), but good at holding boundaries (taking back toys and saying, “Mine!”). Loves going to the window when she hears sirens. Loves singing, dancing, and imitating what the teachers are doing. Understands and follows directions well.

Ali’s teachers said, “I’ll gladly take a classroom full of Alis.” When he’s class leader, he gets excited to go to the window and check the weather. Follows directions, attentive and engaged, sweet and has friends. Rock star with scissors. (They gave him paper to cut up to show his skills, and he had it in shreds before they turned back around. They basically had to gather some “confetti” and staple it to the evaluation paper to show me.) They said he seems very happy there.

(The only shocking thing is that I asked how much he talked about lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners, and they looked at each other like they had no idea what I was talking about.)

I am a very, very lucky mom.

P.S. The kids got flu shots today. I was honest with Ali about where we were going, and he fought me on the way to the car. But we talked in the car about what it feels like, what it does, how he’d get a Dum Dum and ice cream afterwards, etc, and he didn’t fight anymore. He was amazing.

Ayla recently had her 18 month check-up, and she was wise to the gig pretty fast. “No no no no no!” wagging her finger and shaking her head. Poor baby.

But once she got her watermelon Dum Dum, all was right in the world.

Oct5: Bless her little heart. Ayla was kicked out of her dance class, not because of anything she did (she was doing amazing), but because it was technically 3 and up, and some of the 3-year-olds were a little rough and rowdy, and they worried she wouldn’t be 100% safe, being so little.

Today I happened to pick Ayla up first and bring her into the huge room where Ali’s class spends the last of the day and the Tippi Toes dance class happens in the back.

Ayla started squirming and saying, “Toes toes toes!” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at, so I put her down. She marched straight over to the dance class, and the instructor said, “Oh, do you want a hug?”

Both our hearts fell.

“Or are you going to break my heart by sitting in your old spot?”

Ayla broke our hearts by sitting down on her old spot, as if to say, “It’s been a while, but I’m finally back. All right, it’s dance time! Let’s go, guys! Yay!”

Having to pick her up and carry her out of there, crying and protesting in disbelief, was so, so sad.

But it’s wonderful to know how much she loved it! Hopefully she can start next year 

It’s not your fault, little girl. They want you and you did so good. You just need to keep growing a little more.

Oct6: I made duck tonight with a sauteed grape pan sauce, thinking Ali would just eat bread like usual. To my surprise, he tried it, and to my greater surprise, he loved it! He said, “It’s kinda like mushrooms.” (As far as I know, he doesn’t like mushrooms. But I guess “kinda like mushrooms” is fine.) He put away half the duck I had prepared.

Ayla, uncharacteristically refused to even try anything and just ate bread and cheese.

(I also made a roasted delicata squash and brussel sprouts salad with slivered almonds and parmesan cheese. Neither kid touched it, although Ali did valiantly try it. Oh well. More for us.)

Oct6: I caught Ayla today using a stethoscope to listen to her stuffed elephant’s heart. She looked up at me and said, “Dottor!” (Doctor)

Ali’s Halloween costume came in the mail, and it came with a tiny cloth pumpkin bucket. Ali asked me to put some candy in it, but I didn’t have any. I said, “On October 31, you’re going to need a much bigger bucket than that. You’re going to get so much candy it’s going to blow your mind.”

His Baba put a breakfast bar in the bucket, and Ali said a little later, “I want to eat this bar.”

Ahmed said, “Eat it.”

Ali said, rolling his eyes, “I can’t eat the package.”

I’m sure he meant to say, “Baba, can you please open the package for me?” Haha, three-year-olds.

Oct6: Oh what a joy to sit on our back porch sipping tea while the kiddos play.

Ayla has her water table, Ali has his leaf blower.

Oct7: Nothing is funnier than when Ayla poops in the bath and then shrieks and desperately tries to get away from it, as if a dread sea monster has suddenly appeared.

Oct7: Last small load of crispy, wrinkled clothes with sad sagging collars before our dryer finally arrives on Saturday.

It’s going to be amazing getting a large load done in 3 hours instead of small loads done in 12 (most of it drying time). It’ll cut the job by more than half.

And don’t tell anyone, but I haven’t done sheets in weeks because I have nowhere to hang them to dry.

Oct8: Happy ❤

Oct8: If there were any justice in the world, I’d be going to bed right now and sleep ’til morning. Can’t believe I have 90 minutes of soccer to play

ETA: It was a good game. The score was uneven, much like last game, but the actual team mismatch wasn’t so crazy. It could have gone either way if our team had been a little less under-manned (and tired/lazy) and had a little more luck.

Whatever. It’s a “rebuilding year.” Just glad the game was fun this time

Oct8: Friends are starting to go into menopause, and I feel like we need some kind of cincuenta-añera to mark it, instead of just kind of mostly ignoring it. With crazy Met Gala outfits or something.

I’m not there yet, but I’m a little jealous, to be honest, since I’m done having kids and would like to be done worrying about it. Excited for this next phase of life!

I’m grateful I got to be young when I was young. I’m grateful I get to be middle-aged now, with so much more perspective, so much more selective about what I care about. (Worried about / preoccupied by so many fewer small or ultimately unimportant things.)

I’ll be grateful for every year I get.

Oct9: Any piano players on my list?

Do you ever learn the first half of a Sonata and then not want to put in equal effort to learn the second half since so much of it is just recapitulating the first half (which was better than the second half), and the effort doesn’t seem worth it?

Like, after a while sometimes it feels like the composer is just filling time, you know? Like he was paid by the note or by the minute or something. Even if the first part of it was totally banging.

Anyway. I have learned several half-sonatas.

Can’t wait to get a piano for the new house! Maybe I’ll learn some second halves eventually. But I’ll probably just pick another one and learn the first half again.

Oct9: Tonight Ahmed said to Ali, “You see that big star next to the moon?”

Ali said, “Well, it’s not a star. It’s a pwanet, actually.”

(Ahmed knew that. But he didn’t know Ali knew it.)

Happy half-birthday, baby boy. 3.5 today. Magical boy, magical age.

It’s been almost one year since we first put him in “school” 2 days a week. I’m so glad he has thrived with his friends and play!

Oct10: Ali thinks the older sister on Totoro is the older brother, and he calls the little sister Ayla.

Oct15: Ayla has some serious Glen Campbell hair going on and won’t let me put ties, bands, or clips in it, and Ahmed won’t let me cut it. Oh well. C’est la vie, my shaggy mulletted child!

Oct15: My parents are moving out of their apartment (next to our former apartment) tomorrow. So many fun memories made there when we didn’t have nearly enough space for everyone at our place.

The new house is bigger than both apartments combined. We had good times. Looking forward to many more!

Mom wrote: This is the entrance to our second floor apartment.   A slight turn to the left and the pathway over to Pamela and Ahmed’s third floor apartment.  All of this will be history tomorrow.  Ali says he will vacuum the whole place before we leave.

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18 Sweet Months, New House

Ayla is a year and a half old. Such a fun, sweet age.

Goodness, I just looked at my last update post, and it was lamenting that summer still hadn’t really started yet. Now summer is almost over! It’s Ali’s last week with Riverfield. Ayla’s day care already ended. It’ll be two more weeks until their new school starts. (They’ll be at the same school, new for both of them. It’s bright inside and has gorgeous, shaded playgrounds. The teachers really seem to care. And it’s far cheaper than Ali’s “old school,” as he calls it.)

Both kids have spent a ridiculous amount of the summer sick. If it wasn’t a stomach virus or random fever, it was HFMD or RSV (ugh, poor Ayla). Snot everywhere, all the time. Missing so much school I was getting salty about paying for it. (And I’m definitely not getting any work done on my novel.) Ali still has his little cough, though not so bad as before. He’s eating and pooping well, so that’s good!

Meanwhile so much of the summer was taken up with researching houses and neighborhoods and schools and visiting houses for sale on the weekends, etc. We bid on two houses and lost to cash buyers. Then on the 4th of July we finally bid high enough (almost 10% over asking) to beat a cash buyer. It was a huge relief, and the house is lovely. We’ll have a dedicated play room and a dedicated music room along with a nice office for my husband and a guest room. There’s a neighborhood pool and playground and pond, and we’ll have a nice big backyard and a large driveway and sidewalks for wheeled toys.

But it’s a bit of a psychological adjustment to realize we really are settling down in suburbia for the next ten years or so. I guess it’s fun to imagine we’ll pick up at any moment and go live in a yurt in New Zealand or something. Buying a house kind of puts the kibosh on that. On the other hand, in ten years we’ll have a whole lot of the house paid off (it’s a 15 year mortgage), the kids will be tweens, and we can think about selling the house and taking the kids’ opinions and values into account when thinking about where to move next.

But I guess we’re “responsible adults” for the next decade. Our forties. By the time that adventure may be over, we’ll be 50. I guess we’d better eat well and exercise while we enjoy stability and suburbia, haha.

These definitely have the potential to be (more) awesome years. All in all I’m excited about it. I’ve never had a place that was mine, one where we could have guests over comfortably. It’ll be a whole new ballgame. And with little kids, having space for play and learning (and not driving each other too crazy, haha) will be priceless.

Facebook posts

June 9: Ali took my temperature and said, “What’s this? Is it a mometer?”

I said, “It’s a thermometer. But I guess when you’re measuring your mom, it’s just a mometer.”

Yeah, moms can make dad jokes, too.

June 9: Ali Polliwog. We’ve graduated (after a stomach virus) from weeks of eating almost nothing to occasionally eating Uncrustables, ice cream sandwiches, and chips.

#Progress

#IDidNotExpectThisToBeWhatIConsideredProgressAsAMomOhWell

June 9: Wow. A person in my favorite parenting Facebook group posted this sentence, and I got chills. So insightful.

“If I am really honest about my own wounds of childhood, it isn’t that a kid at school called me a name or mocked me, it’s that I didn’t have the skills and relationships I needed to be able to be resilient and move past these events as a child.”

June 13: Ahmed came in the living room wearing a lime green soccer shirt.

“You’re all green, Baba,” Ali said. “You’re all green. You’re green like the mop.”

Ahmed went and got the mop. Ali was exactly right.

June 15: Y’all, I can’t with this little girl. I did not make her like this. It’s all her. We put the dress on her. She put the bracelets on, and after Ali came home, she stole his hat and shopping bag and…

https://www.facebook.com/pamolson4/posts/10106163372069763

June 15: Photos of Miss Dooley today (everything but the dress is all her)

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June 16: I read The Rabbit Listened to Ali last night, and after all the other animals kept trying to solve the little boy’s problems, and the rabbit just came and snuggled up next to him wordlessly, Ali said quietly, “Rabbits are really nice.”

The boy gets it.

June 16: Ali said, “Look what I can do!” to Grandma and spun around on one leg.

His Grandma said, “You know, there’s a French word for that: pirouette.”

Ali said, “There’s a French fry? Is it wet?”

June 16: Surprise bonus grandparent / cousin visit! On their way to Grandparents’ University at OSU.

June 18: Ali wanted to watch lawn mower videos on Youtube. I said, “Hey, what about videos of big brothers meeting their baby sister or brother?”

He said, “No. I want to see a lawn mower mowing a baby.”

I laughed. “Lawn mowers don’t mow babies. That would hurt.”

“Well, I just need to see about that.”

June 19: There’s a game I play sometimes called “Where the heck did I just go?”

I don’t have a smartphone, so I generally hand-draw maps if I need directions. Then if I get lost, I’m just lost until I call someone for help or find my way back to something familiar.

Then I go look at Google Maps to figure out where the heck I just went.

June 19: You don’t control whether your child is brave or timid, what shape and size their body will take, or what their interests will be. (Or so many other things.)

What you do control is how supported and loved they feel as exactly the person they are.

June 19: Yesterday, after viewing a house, we went to LaFortune Park (or “A Fortune Park”, as Ali calls it) and saw a family fishing for crawdads in the creek. Ali saw the crawdads that had been caught crawling around in a bucket. After we passed, he said, “I saw some bugs in there.” These creek lobsters were at least 4 inches long. Big bugs!

We stopped on the bridge to watch the family catch some more. Ali said, “I don’t want to fall down in the water. The bugs will eat me.”

I said, “Crawdads don’t eat people. They just eat bacon, apparently.” The family was using bacon as bait.

After he was done watching and we headed to the car, Ali said, “What’s ‘bacon’ mean?”

LOL, you know you’re married to a Muslim when…

June 19: Got beat out on a dreamy house with a “cash offer that couldn’t be beat,” even though we bid $11k over asking.

Yeah, this is gonna be rough.

It’s harder than I thought imagining our lives in these places (homes, neighborhoods, views) and then having it ripped out from under us.

But we’re also tired of living in a small apartment. And we don’t want to rent some over-priced depressing house, locked into a rental agreement, only to have to move again. (We’re month-to-month now at the apartment.)

We’re finally in a good place to buy a house. We just… can’t.

June 20: Ali tried to give Ayla a high five, and she didn’t put her hand up.

So he slapped her face.

“I gave a high five to her cheek!” he said happily.

June 20: Yesterday, Ali’s friend Owen had a party at a super cool splash pad. Ali doesn’t like to get wet these days for some reason, so he watched the other kids do water play and ate cupcakes. Pretty soon Owen got tired of being wet, too, and changed into dry clothes. Ali joined him on a dry playground. When they saw each other, they just threw their arms out wide and fell into a sweet hug. It made my mama heart swell.

Last weekend we went to Woodland Hills Mall to pass the hottest part of the day, and Ali and Ayla rode the carousel. Ali rode in the wagon part that doesn’t go up and down or have a fierce face. Ayla rode a horse, and the first time looked very trepidatious. The second time, she was hanging on with just one hand like an old pro.

Today I took Ali to Woodland Hills again to let Ayla nap, and he chose the lead horse and rode it three times.

The other day, our neighborhood Walmart was apparently being repainted and updated, and it looked very weird with signs taken down and primer or something streaked all over.

Ali said, “Our Walmart is broken.”

Ayla has started saying, “Uh oh!” any time something drops down. And she tries so hard to sing along and do the moves for Wheels on the Bus. Her favorite part is the Mommy going “Shh! Shh! Shh!” She puts her finger in her mouth to do it.

When she sings, “All through the town,” she says “Ahhh” with her chin up, then ducks her chin and says in a lower tone, “Thooo,” then picks her chin up a bit and says, “Doooown.”

It’s fun watching her little mouth try to do what my mouth does and make the sounds. (And my exaggerated chin movements, apparently!)

June 22: I still can’t get over the fact that whenever I squat down to be on Ali’s level, he squats down, too. Doing what I’m doing, sure, but no longer on my level. Defeats the whole point.

That kid really cracks me up.

I can’t bear to “correct” him because it’s so funny every time.

June 23: Anyone who puts carpet in a dining room or a bathroom should be… gently re-educated. After you high-five their cheek.

June 24: Ali Dustbustering the Hoover. In Stigler. Have fun, buddy!

This is my second weekend “off” in more than 3 years. And this time I have a second kid who’s still here. So, not really off. Off-ish.

June 25: If parenthood were 12 hours a day with, say, one weekend off per month, it could be a hell of a fun job.

24 hours a day with no real break, ever? (You can’t even count on naps or nights.)

It’s a lot, yo. At least in these early years.

June 26: Someone’s happy to be in Stiglerville!

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June 27: Yesterday I gave Ayla some chicken and waffle strips, and she saw a ketchup bottle on the table (that I had used for something else earlier) and grunted for it.

So I put a spot on her tray, and she grabbed a waffle strip and dipped it right in. I hastily opened a little container of pancake syrup and put that on her tray, too. She grabbed a piece of chicken and dipped it in and kept dipping chicken until it was all gone. Then she finally dipped the waffle strips in and ate them, too.

I expected an epic mess, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I feared. Most of it ended up on her shirt, hands, and thighs, which were easy enough to clean, and she never tipped over the little container. And now she knows there’s something out there even better than ketchup to dip everything in!

June 27: Sometimes, before I work on my novel, I read excerpts from critically acclaimed books that aren’t very good to boost my confidence

June 27: Welp, Ayla’s first time cracking an egg was a total failure. I was cracking eggs for a quiche, and she kept holding her hand out for one. So I gave her a bowl with an egg in it and showed her how to hit it on the bottom. She picked it up and set it down gently.

I picked it up and mimicked hitting it hard on the bottom of the bowl.

She picked it up and threw it over her shoulder. It landed and exploded at her feet.

OK then. I guess that’s one way to do it!

June 27: Ali’s back! Good to see his sweet face.

And funny to be reminded that he learned “Somethin’ else” and “Someone else,” and he says “Somewhere nelse.”

June 27: Ayla is all dressed up and nowhere to go. (She put her shoe on all by herself!)

June 29: Ali patted the bushes today and said, “Someone needs to get the hedge trimmer and hedge these.”

He also calls shredded cheese “sprinkle cheese.” Now you can, too!

June 29: Ayla has mastered the stairs so well (at least the ones that have baby railings), she’s started showing off by walking up the stairs backwards.

We also have a fidget popper toy we always give her in the car, and after a while she started looking for it and grabbing it for herself in her car seat each time, settling in like an old lady with her Sudoku.

She’s started patting her diaper every time she answers nature’s call, and once she even went and grabbed a diaper and lay down. Which she instantly regretted, because she hates diaper changes, haha.

Meanwhile Ali calls his pinky his “little piggy.”

Today Ayla opened her mouth wide and I said, “She has one molar on the left.”

Ali said, “Lawnmower?”

When we were driving, Ayla was hollering to get out of the car seat, and Ali said, “Can you get her out?”

Ahmed said, “I can’t right now, I’m driving.”

Ali said, “Can you get her out on the road?”

I said, “No, baby, we can’t throw the baby out on the road. The police would get us in a lot of trouble for that.”

Ali said, “Well, you can throw her on the grass. She’ll be safe there.”

Great thinking. An excellent compromise, which we…

Just kidding.

June 30: My two kids:

Today, Ali wanted a strawberry, but with no leaves, not cut up in any other way, and with the seeds removed.

Meanwhile Ayla ate an entire strawberry, leaves and all, before I could stop her.

June 30: Aunt Val’s in town!

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July 4: Family 4th fun!

Thanks, Uncle Galen, for bringing the equipment!

July 4: Always deep in thought. Profound Hot Wheels musings.

July 4: My brother posted this. It’s true. Even though Ali’s “style” is a hat we hastily bought after he ate too much vitamin D, some sunglasses we found abandoned at a park, hand-me-down shorts from his cousins, and a shirt from Grandma

Still, it’s an attitude. Not everyone could pull it off…

July 5: Great pics of happy Ali and his doting grandparents

July 5: Peekaboo with her patriotic tutu

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July 6: Apparently everyone in Tulsa has the summer bug. Ayla was our plague rat.

July 6: Holy cow, we have a house. We probably only got it because it was the 4th of July weekend, so maybe the cash sharks were taking a break. And we *barely* got it.

It’s a great house. A little further out than I wanted (not far from 101st and Garnett), but close to some parks, nature trails, highways, and a neighborhood pool. All the infinitude of possibilities reduced to one place we’re just starting to get to know.

It happened so fast. Literally we saw the house Saturday morning, made an offer that night, and found out we got it the next day (the 4th). It felt unreal. Almost like a game, and we honestly didn’t really expect to “win.” My head is still spinning.

We’ll close in mid-August, on my step-dad’s birthday

July 7: The other day, our cat Mateo scared Ali and made him cry. Mateo has been extremely skittish and prickly since our friend found him treed by two loud dogs when he was way too young to be without a mama. He scratches and bites us sometimes. Almost never breaches the skin, very rarely even hurts much, but it happens. He is not the world’s sweetest, gentlest cat (though he does cuddle right up to me every time I sit down).

I told Ali about Mateo’s past, and about how when you are too loud or too rough around him, he gets scared and sometimes might bat his paw at you or even scratch you. He asked some questions about where Mateo’s mama is now, and so on.

Later I heard him say to Mateo, “I’m sorry I scared you, Mateo.” Even though Ali is still kind of scared of Mateo.

Ayla has the sweetest little butterfly hands when she pats you on the back when you’re hugging her. *pat pat pat*

(Though she has a bad habit of throwing food and drinks, and she recently managed to put a hairline crack in some mini mason jars with lids and silicone straws that we’ve used since Ali was tiny. We had to throw it out. Should have learned my lesson, but I gave her another one yesterday, half full of water, and she threw it straight down onto the bone behind my big toe. It’s still painful and swollen today and I probably won’t be able to play soccer tomorrow. Taken out by a toddler.)

ETA: Tonight, when Ali was hugging me good-night, he asked if my leg was hurting. Apparently his Baba told him it was. I said no, just my foot is still hurting from where Ayla injured it. (He saw it earlier and said it looked like purple marker.) He bowed his head down and gently kissed the injured spot

July 8: Ayla’s words these days:

Mama

Baba (dad in Turkish)

Nanu (thank you)

Baw (ball)

Die-bye (bye bye)

Cocomelon (she babbles something that sounds like it)

Meow

No

Mine!

Uh oh (when she drops something)

Quack

Boo! (when she plays peek-a-boo)

She does motions to Wheels on the Bus and babbles along to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Her receptive language is definitely getting better, but she’s not as verbal as Ali was. I wonder to what extent it’s because we had all the time in the world to spend with him and walk with him and read to him, and two kids is so much crazier.

July 8: I am vibrating with joy at the thought that we’ll soon have room for a piano. It’s been decades since I had regular access to a piano. Beethoven and I have some catching up to do.

Also, anyone have a piano they don’t want?

July 8: Watching Brave Little Toaster movies is like smoking a looooot of pot. Like too much.

July 10: We went to Go Ballistic yesterday, and Ayla wandered over to the Build a Bear corner and lost her ever-loving mind over a not-yet-stuffed tiger. Dancing and cheering and hugging it and dancing some more. She has never cared anything about any stuffed toy or doll, so I went ahead and got it for her.

Then of course Ali had to get something, and he chose a white cat and named it Maisie, like the cat from the Brave Little Toaster movies, which he calls “Vacuum Stories.” (There’s a vacuum cleaner character, too.)

Ali loves to tie stuffed animals into his cat robe, and he asked my help tying his new white stuffed cat in today.

I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I put it upside-down and the cat’s butt was in your face?”

He laughed, and I did it. He looked down at the cat’s butt.

Then he said, “Nooooo… Can you just put it upside-up?”

July 10: We were walking by the river and I said to Ali, “You see those dark clouds? That means it’s going to rain.”

He considered this for a moment. Then he said, “Is it just going to wain quietwy?”

(He’s not a big fan of thunder.)

Later, just before it started raining hard, I said, “Oh, wow, I smell lots of petrichor!”

Ali said enthusiastically, “Yeah! I smell petwafore, too!”

July 12: Soccer injury + Toddler injury

I blocked a power shot with my inner thigh, and Ayla dropped a heavy glass on my foot. Not in that order. (The toddler injury has been healing for almost a week but still hurts. Playing soccer on it yesterday was dicey, but I made it.)

#FeelingSore

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July 12: Ayla loves to have the wind in her hair

July 14: Evening in with Grandma. Everybody wins! 

(Ahmed and I had to put our heads together about house stuff and other matters. I don’t know how anyone with kids gets anything done without a Grandma to help out…)

July 16: Pediatric urgent care did not have Dum Dums. How dare they.

It’s OK. We found a giant sucker at the pharmacy on the way home.

(Infected bug bite. No sign of tick-borne illness, thank goodness!)

It took almost 3 hours to get someone to look at it for 5 minutes and say it was probably fine and prescribe some high-powered Neosporin. Sigh. No telling what the bill will be. Oh well.

July 18: Ahmed got Ali some mint ice cream, and he can finally live the dream of eating as much “toothpaste” as he wants.

July 19: Swimming with Ayla (almost 18 months) is like wrestling a 30-pound octopus with 20 claws and a strong knee-thrust.

She’s a daredevil. She keeps pushing me away, gets submerged a bit, claws at me until I grab her again, then wants to do it all again, then doesn’t know what she wants and twists around and claws me for no reason and flips on her back and back on her front…

Then she wants me to put her up on the side over and over so she can “jump” in (from sitting), then she wants me to take her to the underwater stairs over and over so she can climb up to the top them climb back down again and jump into my arms again.

She is pretty much rapturous the whole time.

And I woke up with a very sore back, haha.

Also, when she watches the Ants Go Marching song, the way she says, “Uwaa… uwaa” (Hurrah… hurrah) is insanely adorable.

July 19: The family that vacuums together… Wait, how does the saying go?

July 20: Ali was pulled from school last Tuesday for a random fever. He was fine after a day of rest. Still had to take him to the doctor’s office to get a doctor’s note so he could go back to school (their policy). The doc saw the same thing I saw: He was fine and had no fever. Waiting for the bill.

Took him to urgent care Friday for an infected bug bite.

Today, minutes after dropping him off at school, we got a call that he vomited twice. I was kind of heartbroken I had to pick him up because it was Make An Ungodly Amount of Guacamole day. Boy needs to learn to appreciate avocados.

We’ll have to take him to the doctor again tomorrow to get another doctor’s note.

Meanwhile I pulled a muscle in my lower back, and everything is painful, especially wrestling my freakishly strong girl into and out of her car seat.

No help this week other than Youtube. Thank God for Youtube.

July 21: Annnnd now Ali needs a last-minute rapid COVID test to go back to school.

I cannot catch a break.

July 21: So Ali caught a little stomach bug and had to be traumatized by a COVID test in order to go back to school. I could tell it really, really hurt him. (He has allergies.) He cried for a long time. (It was negative.)

Afterwards he wouldn’t even accept two Dum Dums from the nurse (one for each nostril, she said, trying to be nice). After she left, he told me to throw them away. (This never happens. The boy is candy crazy.)

All because of another spike in COVID cases, overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated.

People. We have a safe, effective way to end this. Get the shot. For Ali’s sake if nothing else. He doesn’t deserve to have a stick shoved up his nose — both nostrils, bless his heart — because you won’t suck it up and get a little jab.

Many, many children who will lose parents in the coming weeks and months don’t deserve that, either.

July 21: After Ali’s COVID test we went to a park, and Ali met a 5-year-old boy (they exchanged names and ages) and they started playing together. The older boy wanted to move to a different playground (20 feet away) and was trying to convince Ali. I think that’s what they were negotiating. Either that or something to do with a “treasure map” (scavenger hunt sheet) that the older boy had.

He said, “I’m five. I’m an expuht.” (Expert.)

It was super cute.

Later Ali wanted to show off his little orange lawnmower, and he let the older boy play with it, and he was being kind of rough with it. I wanted to step in but figured I’d let the boys sort it out.

Next thing I knew, the older boy was saying, “Sorry, I’m sorry!”

He had broken a front wheel off by banging it on the ground trying to get the dirt off, after he got it dirty dragging it hard through the dirt. He apologized several times and meant it. But Ali’s lawnmower was still broken.

Ali said quietly, “That’s OK,” but he was clearly shaken.

The other boy said, “It’s OK. I said I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t trying to be mean or anything, it’s just hard when you’ve done something that you know wasn’t a good thing to do, especially when you’re a kid. He wanted it to be OK. And he apologized, which was exactly what he was supposed to do.

But Ali’s lawnmower was still broken.

Ali kept playing with the boy, pretty cheerfully, but after he left, Ali told us that he was really sad his lawnmower was broken.

I said, “It’s OK to be sad.”

Ali said, “No it isn’t.”

I said. “OK. It’s sad to be sad.”

I’m really proud of him. He has better emotional regulation than his mama already.

We’re going to try to glue the wheel back on, but it’s an awkward break, and it may not work. This is already his second lawnmower after the first one got lost. We did find the other one, but then a back wheel came off its axle. We haven’t fixed that yet and may not be able to. We didn’t feel we needed to since the other was was still in good order. So we were kinda sad, too. I feel like if I buy another one, I’ll be solidifying a precedent that I’ll just buy a new thing every time something breaks or get lost. That doesn’t strike me as a sustainable policy, LOL.

Tangential question: How do you handle sincere apologies when you want to accept it but don’t want to pretend you’re not still sad about what happened?

July 22: Every time I get Ali out of the car lately, I catch him putting just his right sandal back on. I thought it was kind of weird but didn’t press. Kids are weird.

He also kept asking me what kind of shoes I was wearing every time I sat down in the driver’s seat. OK. Kids are new at making conversation. They do their best.

Turned out there was a method to the madness. A long time ago I told Ahmed it wasn’t safe to drive in flip flops because they can get caught on the pedals. So we always take one shoe off — the right one — when we drive in flip flops / sandals. Ali had seen Ahmed take a flip flop off and asked him why.

So now Ali was making sure I was driving safe and also pretending to push the gas and brakes on the back of the passenger seat — and removing one sandal when he did so to be safe.

July 23: Ali just said something about “Tolar bears,” and Ahmed had to correct him. (Polar bears.)

Ahmed said they lived at the North Pole.

Ali said, “Nipple?”

Meanwhile Ayla pointed at some tiger cubs and meowed like a cat. We let it slide. Then she correctly “hoo hoo”ted at owls.

Now they’re all 3 singing the ABC Song. (Ayla very approximately.)

July 25: Ali is so funny. Ayla is sick again (RSV is my guess), and after Ali woke up, he found me and said, “I want you to go get a Dum Dum so I can give it to Ayla so she doesn’t feel sick anymore.”

I said, “Oh, well she already had some juice and a little food, I think now she just needs to rest a bit. But that’s really sweet of you to think of her.”

“Oh.” Ali paused a moment. Then he said, “I just want you to go get a Dum Dum. For myself.”

Right. Slyly bring up the subject of Dum Dums to be nice to his sister, assuming that once the Dum Dums were out, it’d be a short trip to getting one himself.

When that didn’t work, take the straight route!

Later he said, “I just want to eat a Dum Dum with my quiche.”

I said, “How about you eat some quiche and then have a Dum Dum for dessert?”

“No,” he said. “I just want to have a Dum Dum for wunch.”

July 25: Ali: “Is that a fruit fly on the apple slice?”

Ahmed: “Yes.”

Ali: “Is that his wunch?”

Ahmed: “Uh, yes.”

Ali: “Well… We bought that for us. For ourselves.”

Also Ali Julian:

“Coke makes me sparkle.”

July 25: Ali, holding his lawnmower and the front wheel that was broken off by a boy at the park:

“Now that the front wheel’s off, it can be an edger. And now it’s a tricycle lawnmower!”

He laughed at his own joke and then said, “Noooo, it can’t be a tricycle lawnmower…”

But hey… why not?

I love how that sunny boy finds the good in things. He’s my comet of joy.

July 26: Oh man. Today is the ten year anniversary of losing my garnet and gold birthstone ring — my favorite possession for literally as long as I can remember. My brother’s friend’s toddler apparently absconded with it.

I guess it’s officially time to give up ever seeing it again.

Sorry, Ayla Rain. I’ll have to give you something other than what I planned since I was a little girl.

10 Years Ago

July 26, 2011

Feeling sad — my favorite possession, my birthstone ring, the one I had since before I had memory, is officially missing 😦

July 26: Ayla wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist like a little cat.

July 26: Ali: “I droke the drink. I droke it up!”

July 27: Is it possible the never ending burn / tickle in my throat is from the wildfire haze from the west coast?

And poor Ayla is literally coughing her lungs out on day 5 of RSV

July 28: It’s so crazy buying a home. You don’t really know what the neighbors are like. You don’t know what it sounds like at night. You don’t know what the air quality is like in August. I recently learned that Broken Arrow doesn’t fluoridate its water and sometimes has sediment issues in late summer.

We literally had to make the decision on whether or not to buy in a few hours on 4th of July weekend. As much as we madly researched, there’s only so much you can do.

In this market, many people are buying sight unseen.

I’m hopeful, but gosh, what a gamble!

July 29: Ayla is so. freaking. adorable when she signs for “more.”

She looks like a little supplicating mouse, looking up at me with big eyes and tapping her little fingertips together…

And she knows I will give her more of ANYTHING if she does that.

ETA: Imagine this little face and her tapping her little teeny mouse paws together.

July 31: My sweet boy in his party clothes! (Friend’s birthday party).

Ali at the party with his new haircut, done by me. Not my finest work, but he’s always cute anyway!

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August 2: Back in Tulsa after my dad’s funeral

August 2: Thank you, Carl, for the universal consciousness you instilled in me. May more people find the light, and may we enjoy it together.

August 2: Because of Cocomelon, Ali is always wanting to pick up trash on the side of the trail or the road. Which is wonderful. But in COVID times, he even wants to pick up nasty QuikTrip cups with unidentified liquids (and probably germs) still in them. (Some of the liquids even have unidentified solids suspended in the liquids. I wouldn’t want to ask if I could.)

It’s kind of heartbreaking when I have to discourage this wonderful impulse in my son.

August 2: Legion was a really fun (if deeply dark at times) and thoughtful watch. Helped me through this rough time.

August 3: 3.5 is a wonderful age. They are such PEOPLE now.