My punkin lamb peeping the world through a pair of “100″ glasses.
The girlie’s Kindergarten class celebrated their hundredth school day earlier this week. So, so long ago was her first. An excited, nervous, pre-K little girl ago.
Who’s in her place now? If only I could can catch hold of the happy, self-posessed blur in front of me, I’d tell you.
Partly in service to the students in the class I spoke to the other day whose online questions I didn’t have time enough to answer in person, and partly in service to the random assortment of you readers who may have asked such questions at one point or another, if goaded to by a class requirement, I offer up the following smattering of Qs and their As.
To make matters reasonable, I am going to pull off the feat of keeping all the answers to Twitter-length, otherwise known as 140 characters or fewer.  For those of you who are not Twitter denizens (Twenizens?), you will see, over and over again, both its strength and its weakness. Brevity: the soul of wit, but also of vast oversimplification.
When kept to this constraint, we can see that sometimes a pithy reply is best. Â Many Twiterers (-erers), however, myself included, are compelled to post strings of related Tweets when one won’t do. Â Do let me know if you think a thought/conversation ought to be strung out a bit more and we can carry on in comments or in another post.
For context, students were assigned the six-part essay I excerpted here a few years back: “Confessions of a Lesbian Dad.”
A: Easy, on the 1 hand: I’ve never been anything else. But family slipped a little 1st few wks; newbies do weekly. I explain; it all works out.
A: Girl 5, boy 3. They’ve only known us, so our family’s the baseline reference pt. Gal often calls me Babbi. I try not to think of the kid in The Brady Bunch.
A: Never, never, & never. Much to my great relief on all points. I use descriptor “1/2 way betw. a mama & papa†most often. Makes sense to all.
It’s happened again! The beloved opened another show (per usual: a runaway smash hit; this one is Once Upon A Mattress), and our family life is beginning to find its equilibrium again. Granted, equilibrium is preceeded by both kids having various breakdowns all over Mama, but veteran parents such as we are now (don’t laugh) are totally ready for this. It’s the babysitter effect. The kids hold it together for the duration of the crisis, and then after calm is restored (parents returned; whatever), they go all to pieces.
Come to think of it, this effect holds true later in life, too. It might be more drama-worthy to show people panicking in crises, which is why we see this in movies. But the shit usually hits the fan when the dust is settled and everyone thinks it’s safe to get back in the water.  To mix a metaphor or three.  Like the never-ending half-life of big grief, the truer aftermath of crises – the slow-mo, quiet, solitary breakdowns; the displaced/misplaced catharses –  will rarely appear on the big screen. The rest of us know better, though.
But so. Mama is now home again, rather than 24/7 at the theater, Baba gets a morsel of childcare furlough, and business can be gotten down to! (*Sound of palms rubbing enthusiastically.*)
First order of which is, holy moly! LD is a finalist for the Lesbian Lifestyle Best Parenting Blog award!  Yahoo!  And thank you whoever you are, for nominating this thing!  As do so many, I aspire to greatness, and whether or not I manage to get this thing to achieve it, or do so with any reliability, it is an enormous honor to think that one or another of you-all’s believe it might be noteworthy or voteworthy.  In fact, please go vote if you feel so inclined! Daily, evidently, ’til midnight March 2nd. There’s email confirmation of vote, etc., etc., to keep people’s noses clean, so watch your transom and follow up by clicking the vote confirmation link.  Etc., etc.
Valentine’s Day train ride, Berkeley, CA.
Way back when the beloved and I had our commitment ceremony, circa 1997, we made a point to celebrate all kinds of love. Familial, platonic, romantic; all of it. Â We did that partly because we were uncomfortable about having drawn people from far and wide to pay attention only to us-us-us. But we also wanted to thank those we gathered around us for equipping us with the capacity to love one another so well. Â Any celebration of a union is implicitly a celebration of all that makes it possible. Every time we love and are loved well, we learn more about it, and are empowered to do it better with others.
So Valentine’s Day mit kids ropes us all in. A hike in the hills, a picnic, a spell-binding train ride. Yummy Chinese food for dinner.  Okay, so only some of us had champagne with our dinner.  And only some of us had the salted chocolate caramels in front of a movie after the kids were in bed.  But hey. Any good train needs a caboose for the staff to chillax in.
[Here are the O'Jays, on whose "Love Train" no wee photo caption could ever improve.]
At Mama’s Royal Cafe, Oakland, CA.
We went to Oakland’s legendary Mama’s Royal Café the other day as a foursome, for the first time in forever. Or rather, for the first time since the little guy was in a baby seat, which feels like forever. It’s a long period of diminished engagement with the world, these early years. The dark side of the moon.
“Can the little one last the duration of ___ (X, Y, or Z public sphere experience; you pick it) without a physical/emotional collapse of excruciating proportions? Can we?”
This has limited our luxury dining out experience to a coupla taquerias. It could be worse: a good taqueria was always my other culinary pilgrimage (aside from Mama’s) when I returned home to the Bay Area during my half-dozen years’ expatriation in the Great Upper Midwest.
But with the youngest youngin at three, we’re beginning to see the light. Â We made it through the whole meal at Mama’s with nothing more than a little pre- and post-food loopiness. Â On the little guy’s part. Though the beloved and I got a bit dizzy, too.
“Here we are! In an actual restaurant! And nobody’s spilled anything yet, or burst out crying!”
We’re gonna drink it all in, all of this. There’ll be a time (won’t there be?) when we’ll be lucky to get the two of them to sit with us in public for the duration of a meal without texting their chums under the table.
“ZOMG Baba just said I <3 U!!! Again!!! LOL!!! BTD!! CUL8R!”
There’s a story that goes along with this. Â Details to be appended to this here post later tonight, after I get the kids in bed.
Long ago, back when people picked up newspapers in their hands in the morning and read them, then put them down and went on with other parts of their day (what a time!), The San Francisco Chronicle used to run a piece called The Question Man. Somebody – presumably The Question Man – went around town asking folks some interesting question. A column’s worth of the short (Twitter-length) replies were printed alongside a thumbnail photo of the respondent and her/his name, age, occupation, and hometown. Through this we got a pulse-reading from our neighbors on matters great and small.
While I read it regularly – along with Art Hoppe and Herb Caen and later Jon Carroll —  none of the questions or answers were memorable. Except one: “When is a person ‘middle aged’?â€Â The phenomenon (middle age) was a speck in my distant future, but I took a mild interest in the answers just the same. Some folks named a year — 30, 40, whatever. Others used some other marker, like “When your marriage is older than your dog,†or “When you are the same age or older than movie stars and national-level elected officials†or some such.  But one really stuck with me. One woman said, “Middle age is when you no longer apologize for yourself.â€
This last definition of middle age has stayed with me as the most compelling, until last Sunday night, when I discovered that middle age is really when you are capable of SPRAINING YOUR FINGER PLAYING AIR GUITAR WITH YOUR KIDS.
Yeah, yeah, I know. Dictionary definition of “pathetic.†I’ll only add, for the record: it was to Lynard Skynard’s “Free Bird,†and it was worth it.  And this post took me 40 minutes to type.
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[Addendum: a hearty congrats to Vikki, of Up Popped A Fox, this year's reigning Lezzy Award-winning Best Parenting Blog! Go! Read! Get hooked!]