I watch him go through these doors to his apartment in the retirement community so long and hard now. Used to be he’d turn and wave and shamble off, only looking back once to wave me away (‘gwan now, doll; go home).

Now, stooped by his ninety-one years (this Wednesday), he turns and looks over and over again.  And so do I.

We’ve been here before. (Back then, when she was two, and again then, at two and a half. Clearly it’s a thing for me: I just counted over half a dozen “carousel”-referential posts here.)

We come to Tilden Park’s Christmas Spectacular (ok, official title is “Fantasy,” but we rotate its name for fun) more or less annually, since she and her brother began to be big enough to not be overwhelmed by a carousel.  Okay, since they were old enough for me to not be overwhelmed by the prospect of holding their wee bodies on a moving zoo animal on a carousel.

We’ll be back every single year, until the youngest of them can no longer grasp enough of a wisp of his childhood self to enjoy the ride.

I really don’t know what to expect with these people. When they reach the tween verge, and the tug-of-war with their past and future intensifies, what will they do with these childish things? They are so full now, with such easy access to a wisdom most would attribute to advanced years, and an equally easy access to a weightless imaginativeness most would attribute to extreme youth.

What I want is for them to continue to hold that paradox, all the while being fully immersed in their present. À la the reformed Scrooge, who, at the end of his three-directional hell ride, vowed to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!”

A gal can, and does, dream.

She fits in my lap, barely, but that doesn’t stop her from wanting to cuddle there, nor does it stop me from hoisting her there and doing all I can to hold and preserve, ’til she’s ready to get up.

The bittersweetness of her disappearing childhood–gradual, utterly inescapable–is a taste she knows as well or better than do her mother and I.

Because she is so adept at putting her feelings into words, we know the acuteness of her awareness. She hears her mama’s or my casual reference to something she used to do when she was a baby, or watches her little brother play with a toy that was once hers (and now, for good reason, is no longer), and it all comes back in a rush: the longing for her own, lost, younger self.

And yet that feeling, powerful though it is when it comes, is wedged right next to its opposite: an insatiable appetite for new knowledge, longer words, more complex keys to vaster mysteries.  The grown-up girl-sounding statements, pronounced as much to hear what they sound like coming out of her mouth as for anything else.

She lurches forward, swirls backward, glides ahead, and then stops again and looks back, hand at her brow, shielding her vision from the bright light of the inevitable.

I’m perpetually bracing for the moment when she is, have been for coupla years now. Still: safe. Not for a whole lot longer, I fear, but she may well surprise me. She pretty much does daily.

Past swingery here.

Twilight trampoline jumpers, Berkeley, CA.

It was a crepuscular time of day, this particular one an extremely beautiful version of it.  Filled with the bittersweet of the ending of one thing and the possibilities in the beginning of the next.  All in a twilit season: summer’s ending–you can feel it–and winter’s sending its feelers out.  This evening was unseasonably warm, though, and so the children had to be out in it.

After dinner, the they carefully ushered unicorns from the back of their cousins’ house to the courtyard between the houses. I was told their names were Sarah, Rosie, and Twilight. I was also warned that they’re spooked by: “odd bodkins,” “creaking, crackling noises,” and “flash photography.”

Before long, the siren song of the trampoline beckoned the kids.

To take any of these pictures and not frighten the unicorns, I couldn’t use a flash.  Which of course renders a much truer image.  Moving objects move.  Static ones (a house; a tree) abide.

You can barely see the children.  Some essence remains visible, but the rest is a blur.

Didn’t want pictures with her first grade teacher, or her principal, both of whom she loves so much that the thought of a photo op with them got her teary instantaneously. Really it was only partly for her and hugely for me. So I gave them my heartfelt thanks instead, knowing that we are more indebted to these to women than we will be able to say in any lingering moments on the schoolyard.  As she always had to do when I was the one to pick her up, my girlie tilted her body at a near 45-degree angle and pulled me by the wrist out of the schoolyard.

We had the obligatory, ritual post-end-of-school ice cream, then journeyed to a super-fun playground in nearby Emeryville. Taqueria fare for dinner (they give kids warm corn tortillas free, off the griddle). Home, we watched a movie together, cuddled on the couch (the unspeakably inane Curious George 2, testament to how much we love them).

For the second night in a row, the lil’ monkey — less and less lil’ by the day — wanted to pile pillows on the floor in my office and sleep there (her brother in our bed these nights). The change is so hard– she’s been testy all week, and she cried for minutes on end last night, damp in her towel in my lap beside the bath, insisting never to want any other teacher than Ms. Vines-Aquino ever again in her whole life, even through college. But there’s a part of her that also instinctively knows to move with it. I think bedding down solo in a new room these past two nights is part of that.

After reading HP (again), she was finally tired enough to go to sleep.  Her last words, before shutting her eyes and snuggling into her makeshift nest: “No more first grade ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again.” Then she put her fingertip to my forehead, and tapped it for emphasis: “This marks the beginning of summer, this moment right… here.”

That’s my fortune.

The girlchild is already well into the “paper fortune teller”/ “cootie catcher” game playing era. (Here’s a pretty good set of directions how to DIY. Plus I like the book the website’s in support of.)

Next thing you know she’s going to be studying for the S.A.T., and just a blink after that, calling me up and telling me to find cheap tickets to Oslo to attend her Nobel ceremony. Whoosh, it all goes so fast.

Boy oracle, Los Angeles County Open Space, CA.

This is what happened: they found a dead field mouse whilst hiking, and buried it. (OK Mama buried it, managing to do so without touching it, no simple matter.  Baba looked bravely on from a distance of 15-20 feet.)  Then they gathered bouquets of lupine, mustard grass, and other wee wildflowers,  laid them at the base of this tree, and held a ceremony for the spirit of the dead field mouse, wishing him safe travels on his journey to his next life. The lil’ peanut perched himself on a spot affording the best vantage point from which to watch the proceedings.

Some dog-walking passers-by looked upon the scene and exclaimed, “Oh, sage, please enlighten me!” or some such. Since oracles in days of yore used animal entrails (among other somewhat less grodie things) to aid in their divination, they mightn’t have been far off the mark.  Except: as a tireless sidekick to his sister, and therefore the youngest in most any clump of kids, he is more often seeker than prophet.

Like the field mouse, I reckon that won’t last for ever.

She was following him around, interviewing him, videotaping him with my cameraphone. He was doing all manner of things with a hula hoop (other than hula-ing it). A random, blessed afternoon in which I was well aware how very very fortunate I am.

Whenever he comes even close to skinning a knee — the surface of the skin isn’t even broken; maybe there’s just a wee abrasion — he calls out with a dramatic intensity on a par with graduates of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, “IS IT BLEEDING?!”

Don’t know when it will be that I stop keeping Band-Aids (the never-fail placebo) in my wallet. When that day comes, a major chapter of this parenthood will have come to a close.  Of course there’ll be whole new ones to follow. Probably in which I turn around and apply the Band-Aid to myself.  (“Is he even in this ZIP CODE?! This AREA CODE?! The frigging TIME ZONE!” Or, “Would it kill her to just text me back A SMILEY FACE EMOTICON SO I KNOW SHE STILL  POSSESSES THUMBS AND EYEBALLS?!”)

That day will come. And I’ll be damn lucky to see it.

In related news:  right around when I got the good news this blog was a finalist for Best LGBT Blog for the 2011 Bloggies (about which, again: thank you! whichever of you nominated it! now aren’t you glad the voting period is over and I can get that sticky post down off the top of the page?), I got even more fantastic news. And I’m not talking about the boychild finally (FINALLY!) forming a more direct relationship with our household plumbing system, if you know what I mean. That itself was thrilling news. Thrillinger still has been the unexpected appearance on the horizon, then the bearing down   la the Queen Mary (and you have to picture me dutifully bobbing around in my dingy, waiting to flag this baby down for ages), of a real, live, bona fide, fantastic, made-to-order, I couldn’t be more hopped up about it, full-time, J-O-B.

I am a modest and circumspect type (*cough!*), so I will wait a bit ’til I say much more about it other than, WAHOO!

All the hopping around the house WAHOO-ing was quickly followed by feverish flow-charting and Excel-wrangling and phone-calling and text-messaging, since we had to facilitate the transition for the first time in our parental history from being one-and-a-half income-earning parents to being two full-timer/ over-timers.  Overnight, the childcare puzzle bumped up from tic-tac-toe-level complexity to three-dimensional chess. (Fortunately, as we’ve learned before, the more the merrier.) The S.S. Full-time J-O-B comes at what feels like an optimum time, family-wise.  And we live in co-housing community, so no matter how wobbly the transition, we’re likely to be able to summon helping hands when needed.  Hey, what do you think we’ve been meeting and compromising and processing like mad for, these past five years?  The steep discount on our shared DSL? The eased grocery run burden? The free ‘n’ easy loaning back and forth of sugar-beers-cars?

Perhaps not surprisingly, through all the hub and the bub, I have been unable to give all my LD-appropriate thoughts the time and care they so richly deserve. Smack dab in the midst of the Bloggie voting period. So that whatever droves might have drove here wound up seeing… well, the blogular equivalent of my butt crack smiling sideways up from the rear of my jeans waistline as I bent over tending to my offline life. Heck, I even had a great chat with Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy, when she was in town over a week back. My fondest hope is that my interview with her gets to see the light of computer screen sometime before my interview with Lisa Cholodenko and Annette Benning does. Which, given I talked to those gals going on nine months ago, ain’t saying much. Still, a gal can hope.

Meanwhile, I tell myself what gobs and gobs of spiffy Anglomaniacal merch can now help remind me: keep calm and carry on.