At 21 months: So I will not forget

The beach fills him with unbridled joy. He loves splashing in the surf, chasing seagulls, playing in the sand. He’s just started feeling brave enough to stand and walk in the water by himself, without holding our hands.

"Mah??!"

He’s getting more confident about stairs, too, and can often climb them without help, if there’s a railing.

He points at airplanes and asks “mah?” Same with cars, buildings, fences, fire hydrants, pretty much anything we pass on a walk when he’s feeling vocal. And the construction machinery in our neighborhood this summer has been a giant attraction. We may or may not have spent a full hour one morning watching it in action.

In a previous entry, I mentioned that after he hands something to a person, he nods his head emphatically, as if to say, “There. I gave it to you.” In a true “duh” moment, John and I realized that he was bowing, as he was taught by his foster family. We’re keeping this going; if we bow to him, he bows back.

He loves it when I rub and tickle his chubby thighs. His arms and legs are the brownest brown after half a summer spent outside, punctuated by a few pale-pink scars on his knees and elbows.

He “blows” me a kiss in the morning when he sees me carrying my work bag. And he wants to blow bubbles, but so far he just holds the wand near his mouth and looks up at me.

A fun game we play on the back deck: I creep toward him as he runs around the furniture giggling hysterically; he allows himself to be caught and I tickle him and kiss his neck.

He likes “Ring Around the Rosey,” “Hello Everybody,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” “El Pollito.” When he wants us to sing, he tries to do the accompanying hand motions and/or bops his head, and it’s up to us to figure out which song is being requested.

Current favorite foods: Yogurt, grapes, strawberries, animal crackers, zucchini, scrambled eggs, fruit smoothies, cheese, hummus, sweet potato, Cheerios, raisins, anything in soy sauce.

When faced with an in-ground swimming pool for the first time, he eagerly allowed himself to be placed in a blow-up tube and paddled away like a pro. His happiness at being in that pool is hard to describe.

He laughs when people around him are laughing.

Our current bedtime routine: Bath, pajamas, hair blow-dry if needed, warm milk, toothbrushing (“With some on top and some beneath, they brush and brush and brush their teeth”), Aquaphor on his upper lip where the pacifier chafes, pacifier. Reading three books (the last one usually being “The Going to Bed Book” by Sandra Boynton), saying “Time for sleep; night-night, light” as we turn off the light and turn on the white-noise machine, going into the crib, and then singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” until he’s asleep.

He still loves balls and toy cars and his stuffed musical seahorse. The broom is an endless source of fascination, as is the dustpan. (Would that it were always so.)

This week I bought him a new Sandra Boynton book. He climbed into my lap so we could read it together, and he was visibly excited to turn the pages. It just swelled my heart.

He rides in a green plastic toddler seat on the front of John’s bike, pointing at things as we fly down the street to a restaurant or the zoo, Marvin the Martian in his big black helmet.

He now drinks out of a sippy cup without letting the water cascade down his chin for fun.

Current favorite books: Anything by Boynton, “Go Dogs, Go,” “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” “Five Little Puppies Jumping on the Bed,” “The Pigeon Loves Things That Go,” and a book of classic nursery rhymes. He can identify certain animals and objects in books, such as a mouse and the moon.

Almost every day, we’re amazed to discover he understands a new English word: “sleep,” “more,” “airplane,” “phone.”

He’s been taking a music class for babies and toddlers. At the first one, he stayed on my lap the whole time, silently taking it all in (finding comfort and security in me, his mom; oh, these things still bring me so much happiness). By the third class, he was running around, grabbing instruments, moving his arms to the music, but still wanting to be held if he wasn’t quite sure about a certain activity.

Other than a full diaper, he has no bad smells. This fascinates me about toddlers.

Sometimes, when he’s watching his Pororo cartoons on YouTube, he waves to the characters, as if they could see him and wave back. And this just pulls at me so deeply, makes me want to protect him from all the scary things in this world. It almost gives me a tug of sadness. He is so innocent. He is so little.

When we bring him into our bed to sleep, he immediately burrows up against me.

On my first day back at work, he and John and Stella met me in the neighborhood as I walked home from the el. When I saw them, I crouched down and called to Will, and he ran along the sidewalk to me (he’s getting faster, but he still has that clumsy, jerky toddler gait) with a grin on his face, and I caught him and hugged him, his arms around my neck. I will never forget that moment.

How to have a successful staycation

Plan your three days off work during a week in which it will be sunny and breezy, with highs in the upper 70s and lower 80s, every single day.

If you feel just a wee bit guilty when you wake up at 8:30 a.m. on a Wednesday and proceed to leisurely drink coffee on the deck with the newspaper, get over it.

Virtuously write up a list of chores, but flagrantly disregard all of them.

Do as much as you can outside. This includes all meals, reading, guitar playing, and daydreaming.

Spend at least two afternoons at the beach. Read, doze, swim, drink Coronas, and watch your dog leap and bound with joy in the waves.

Devour the second book in the Game of Thrones series for two-hour stretches at a time. Do this on the deck if possible, with a few breaks for a slight doze in the sunshine.

Never get up before 8 a.m.

Have breakfast with a friend at a neighborhood café that always reminds you of cafés in Europe. However, unlike Europeans, order scrambled eggs and tortillas and fruit and big mugs of black coffee.

Enjoy shopping in the empty H&M store downtown. Admire your husband in a new tweed jacket with elbow patches and yourself in three fun fall sweaters.

Lazily make your way through the September issue of InStyle magazine, cold beer(s) and pita chips and goat cheese at your side.

Have your world thoroughly rocked during a small concert given by a hugely talented alt-bluegrass band.

Easily get a table at an always-crowded tapas restaurant. Go for the pitcher of sangria, the sausages, the stuffed mushrooms.

Sit out on the deck late on a weeknight. Savor the warm breeze on your skin, drink wine and listen to quiet music, and talk about everything and nothing with the one you love, as your dog sleeps at your feet.

Stay out late on a school night at the awesome Frightened Rabbits/Death Cab for Cutie concert.

See an amazing documentary that you probably wouldn’t make time for otherwise.

Get your name in early for an always insanely crowded taco joint. Kill time with drinks and aimless ambling and hipster watching. (Count the mustaches and hats.)

Do a photo walk downtown, exploring nooks and crannies in the city you’ve lived in for 10 years—but in which there’s always something new to discover, if you just keep your eyes open.

Me with my pen and my summer ale

I feel the days slipping past, a beaded necklace sliding through my fingers, and I’m trying to feel the texture of each piece before it’s gone, make the most of each balmy green day, but many times I fail.

(Part of me wants it all to whoosh past in a blur—the part of me dreaming of that small someone across the globe—but to be honest, I’ve tamped that part down pretty well. Before we found out about the delay, I thought about our little guy a lot, several times a day. I talked about him with John, ruminated about future-y things, trolled around parenting and baby-gear websites. I’m not really doing that much these days. I don’t know when we’ll see his face, and after that, when we’ll bring him home. I don’t know how old he’ll be. I don’t know what paperwork we’ll have to update and resubmit because of this change in timing. So I’m just trying to focus on other things. It’s easier that way, even though again, I feel the time moving, more and more days in which we’re not parents. I’m sad for John. I do think about that.)

I’m always one to worry that I’m not making the most of things, living my best life, soaking everything in… although I suspect I’m not the only Chicagoan who feels this way in the summer. July is almost over! Am I opening my arms wide enough to embrace it all? I sat on the deck with John last night, he playing Bruce Springsteen on his guitar, Stella snoozing on her mat, and me with my pen and my summer ale, making a “Rest of the Summer” list.

Have more friends over for grilling and deck lounging. Bring a picnic to Millennium Park for one of the free concerts. Visit a few particular restaurants with outdoor seating. Hit the big Green City Market in Lincoln Park a few times. Explore the Cuban and Korean street festivals. Walk down the street for ice cream at least once a week. Sit outside and watch the sky and listen to the crickets. Do a photo walk in the late afternoon. Wear dresses more often.

I’m already doing many of these things, plus bringing Stella to the dog beach, and training for the half-marathon (I broke my 5K personal record with a 25:36 this weekend—pure happiness!), and going to neighborhood fests, and taking a photography class, and eating and reading outside whenever possible. I’m tending my plants, smelling the marigolds and cooking with fresh herbs. We hosted a big outdoor party for friends and neighbors. In July we spent five nights camping in northern Michigan, and we’ll be taking a few days off at the end of August and “vacationing” here at home. I’m working hard, and editing side projects for friends, and not watching much TV.

Sometimes it seems like when I’m busy and booked, I yearn for the couch and a magazine. And when I’m sitting at home with InStyle and a basket of laundry, I think about all the other interesting and edifying things I could be doing. I tend to fret that I’m not making the most of city living, that I’m not exploring, learning, volunteering enough. The truth is that I like doing those things, but I also like sitting outside and watching the sky, feeling the air, listening to the crickets. And watching and feeling and listening are enough. They really are.

In my head lately

Things I have been thinking lately, in no particular order:

I can run 13 miles. I know this because I did it twice. The first time was fairly hellish. The second time, yesterday, was much better. I’m excited to do this with thousands of my closest friends in exactly two weeks (!!).

What if, when the baby comes, the person who picks him up from child care is also the first person home and has to walk the dog? How do we do both in a fast and efficient manner, where no one cries or has an accident on the rug?

Also, what kind of child care should we use?

Apparently we’re going to Italy in less than four weeks. Apparently one should make some loose itineraries when fortunate enough to have three days in Rome, five days on the Amalfi Coast, and four days in Tuscany. One now has plans for the long Labor Day weekend…

Throwing a party for 40 people on your rooftop deck is stressful, but realizing you have 40 friends who want to spend a Saturday night on your roof is pretty darn awesome.

Sometimes, when I’m watching TV at night, I look to the entrance of the hallway off the living room, and I see a tiny little boy standing there in a sleeper, holding a blanket and sucking his thumb.

I suspect adopting a baby from Korea is going to bring some really good new friendships into our lives.

I have seen the Chicago skyline from the north many, many times, but it never gets less breathtaking, especially the first time it’s approached on foot, after running six miles south on the lakefront path. Turning the bend around the domino tables, and pow—I actually consider it a kind of reward.

Stella actually understands when it’s the weekend and that that should equal a ride to the dog beach. She follows us around the house, and she starts dancing in place and wagging her pointy hound head if I change my clothes. Apparently something is working inside that golf-ball-sized brain.

I do not approve of darkness at 8 p.m.

If I worked at an adoption agency in Seoul and my responsibility was to match infants with their parents, what kinds of photos of those parents would I want to see?

Where is the child who will become our child right this very second?

******

This past week, we went to an outdoor concert at Millennium Park downtown. David Gray and Ray Lamontagne—oh yes, we were excited. We packed our picnic basket (including a clandestine bottle of wine under the cloth napkins), hoisted up our camping chairs, and I grabbed a light scarf because it was unseasonably cool, daytime highs in the 70s. We claimed a patch of turf close to the stage and proceeded to enjoy a really fabulous show, while the sun set behind the skyline and couples held hands and swayed together and someone, somewhere, smoked some pot.

Ray played my favorite song of his, a sad, quiet one with a violin called “Jolene.” There is this plaintive line that just pulls at the proverbial heartstrings, that I always sing along to: “Still don’t know what love means.” And so I sang along to it in my camping chair, with my plastic cup of cabernet, and suddenly it had a new meaning. I thought that it was very true, that there is a type of love that I don’t know yet, the meaning and experience of which I don’t understand. I know love, but not in all its manifestations, not yet. We are so, so incredibly on the cusp, sometimes I’m in awe of it.

This is summer 2010

John is in our new backyard, cutting the grass. OK, it’s not really a backyard; more like a backpatch. Our yard's dimensions are about equal to a king-size bedspread. But it’s still grass and it still grows, so he bought an electric grass trimmer—the kind people use to trim around sidewalks—and it does the trick. Next he takes on staining the deck. It all feels so grownup, so white-picket-fence, so summer.

I think about my dad cutting the lawn with the old push mower. A quintessential summer smell, that and the marigolds ringing our vegetable garden to keep the rabbits away. We have a pot with some yellow marigolds on our back deck, and sometimes I stop to breathe it in, that sharp clean sent that abruptly rockets me back to, say, 1984, to a Pennsylvania suburb, to playing spy with my little sister around the corners of our backyard…fireflies in plastic bug houses, zucchini bread and sprinklers and bee stings and the apple tree, the cherry tree. How lucky am I to have those memories?

We make new ones now, in our new home, in our little family of two, three with the dog. Now we have a deck; we sit outside to eat dinner and, on the weekends, breakfast—“It feels like we’re on vacation,” I always remark. We bring Stella’s bed outside and she drowses in the warm breeze. I deadhead the geraniums and petunias when I return from my runs. I’m up to 11 miles now—I did that this past weekend, I ran 11 miles, no walking except for water stops, and although that last mile was hell in the scorching sun, I did it. This summer, I run three times during the week and do my long run on Saturday mornings. I dread it and I love it. I think about it often as Monday slides toward Friday. I wonder if I can do 9, 10, 11, and now 12, but each time, I can. The half-marathon is in two months.

I walk Stella and listen to the old church bells tolling through our neighborhood that I love so much. I’m starting to recognize faces now, and we smile at each other as we pass. I shop at the neighborhood farmers’ market for greens, berries, lamb, mushrooms, milk. We drive to the dog beach and watch our greyhound sprint and leap in the waves and across the sand. We go to street fests to hear music. We pack picnics and sit in the grass. We camp with a horde of family on the dunes of Lake Michigan. We choose our weekend restaurants based on whether they have outdoor seating.

John plays his guitar better than he ever has before, thanks to lessons, and I play with my new DSLR camera. We eat a lot of grilled food and invite people over to eat it with us. We drink a lot of microbrews. We feel stressed about work, but then the stress passes. I do freelance editing. When I finish a chapter, I eat an ice cream bar and watch an episode of Season 1 of Mad Men. The money will help pay for plane tickets to Italy.

This is summer 2010, and there probably will never be another summer quite like it.

Hot enough for ya?

Originally posted to Diary-X

I knew summer was going to sneak around the corner and smack us upside the head, I just knew it. We’d been having this lovely, suspiciously cool spring (highs in the mid-60s, maybe reaching 70 degrees). Last week I was wearing a light coat. Ha! Ha! A coat! Today it is 94. (Although it feels like 100, the weatherman informs us from his nicely air-conditioned TV studio. He’s wearing a suit, and not sweating.)

Gee, is it obvious how I feel about hot weather? It’s not my favorite thing. I can handle the mid-80s, but when it gets to turkey-broiling temperatures, I’m not pleased. This morning I started to perspire while brushing my hair. Yesterday, on the bus ride home from work, rivulets of sweat were running down the backs of my knees. Does that sound downright unpleasant, or what? I was not a happy camper. If it wasn’t for J.K. Rowling, I probably would’ve thrown myself out the bus window.

The pup doesn’t like the heat much, either (some African dog he is). He lies on the hardwood floor in our living room, tongue lolling, breathing short little panty breaths. When the spot he’s on gets too warm, he heaves himself up, paces around a bit, and flops down with a “thunk” on a new, cooler patch of floor. I admit, I really like the “I’m too hot to wreak much havoc in the apartment” side of Murphy. Perhaps we should leave the air conditioner off.

We have a window unit that came with the apartment. It’s in the living room. Our place is just small enough that this one air conditioner can cool it off to acceptable levels. However, using it even moderately ends up tripling our electric bill. Honestly, I don’t mind lying around the apartment in a tank top and boxers, feeling hot. It’s feeling hot when I’m out and about, going to work, etc., that bugs the crap out of me.

Last night John played in a softball game with some friends, so I planned a peaceful evening at home alone. I made turkey chili (I know, I know, probably not the most appropriate dish for a heatwave) and ate it while reading the newspaper. I ambled around the apartment picking things up. I petted Murphy; his only response was to roll his eyes up at me. Too hot to even lift a paw. I finally settled down on the couch with my Harry Potter book (which is quite a bitch to lug around, at almost 900 hardbacked pages). I’d been reading the book slowly, wanting to savor it, but I’m beginning to fear bumping into a spoiler somewhere, so I’m picking up the pace.

I read Harry for about an hour, and then at 9:00, the lights went out. Poof! One minute the lamps and CD player are on (may I recommend the vocal stylings of Lucinda Williams?); the next I’m sitting in half-darkness, the room illuminated only by the streetlights outside. Murphy raised his head, then flopped it down again.

Well, it was a good excuse to go for a jog. It wasn’t any cooler outside, but at least there was a breeze. People were trickling out of their dark apartment buildings to walk their dogs, talk on cellphones, and gather in knots, chatting. I said hi to a few people and went on my way, thinking the power’d be back when I returned half-hour later. Sirens streamed around the neighborhood—“Bet there’s a lot of people stuck in elevators,” one of my neighbors remarked cheerfully.

Our block was still black when I got back, drenched in sweat. I felt my way up the staircase and joined John, who’d gotten back from his game, and Murphy up on the roof, where the breeze was stronger and the lights from Wrigley provided quite a bit of light. A few of our neighbors were up there, too, wine and beer in hand, and we passed an amiable half-hour or so getting to know them better. I liked that part.

Luckily, the power was restored at midnight, so our fridge food is largely unspoiled and we didn’t have to spend the entire night fanless. This evening, I believe the air conditioner will be rumbling to life. If you’re anything like John, you probably don’t want to hear me bitch about the heat for the next two months.