His first sentence, Hope Valley, CA.

Behold, above, my boy’s first sentence (beyond a great number of “I [heart symbol] U Baba” sentences, each of which I have kept on their various scraps of paper).  The scatological cant of this one, while a touch wince-inducing, cannot diminish my pride in his literary and comic prowess.

We are back now to civilization and our work in it, after a week in the state’s least populous county, up in the Sierra Nevada, utterly sans internet, cell phone reception, or even movies on a TV!  Folks, these places exist, and I highly recommend them for periodic purges of digital and media detritus. We were fortunate enough to be staying in a cabin its proprietors call Harmony House, situated at the eastern edge of  Hope Valley. A perfectly named spot from which to launch what we all hope will be a splendid new year.  My predictions, if it in any way resembles last year: full, busy, challenging. Also rewarding, fulfilling, and an honor to be around to be a part of.

Hope your last year ended splendidly, and that this one began full of promise.

Next time around it smacked Baba in the kisser. That’ll learn me to pay attention.

To wit (re: paying attention): I’ll be untethered from ye olde internet next week. Digital Sabbatical time, thank you GwenBell et al.!  Clarity, monotasking parenthood, and board games all shimmer like palm trees at a distant oasis.  Between now and the oasis: a bit of extendo family revelry, cooking a feast for a dozen, and the kids’ favorite holiday.  I can think of a few ways I could be more fortunate (one, two, three, maybe four more loved ones alive now that should be; rifts bridged; wounds healed).  Other than that, my cup runneth over.

Halloween trick-or-treating peanut, Berkeley, CA (2010).

Visual coda to yesterday’s post, in which I mentioned our boy’s Halloween costume choice of last year. I wrote a few words about it at the time, here.  If I were to have to guess now, I’d say there’ll be a long gap ’til the next such outfit makes a Halloween appearance, though of course I could be wrong. In the intervening year, his haberdashery pace car has shifted from Big Sister to Main Boy Chum at Preschool.  For all the complex reasons that are behind such evolving self-understandings. Advancing years, increased exposure to peer groups, push of culture, pull of self, survival instinct; you name it.

The costume  above met a glowing reception throughout the neighborhood last year, though, and not just because there were blinky red lights underneath the tulle (yes there were).  I mean, really. The kid looks better in that outfit than I ever could.  Also? At least the grown-ups in our neighborhood love kids unconditionally and clearly share our conviction that the best thing we can do for them is clear the runway ahead and help them take flight.

Re: clearing the runway and helping kids take flight (into a world they’re in the process of making) – below, I’ve collected a smattering of nifty resources by and for parents of gender nonconforming kids. Halloween’s pretty much the primo occasion for this, since it’s the one day of the year kids have a wide(r) berth to explore performing different identities.

Here’s one of my favorite blogs on one family’s journey, genderwise: Labels are for Jars.  After you check out her extremely thoughtful posts, you can go on to check out the blogs on her blogroll.  Sarah Hoffman writes about her “pink boy.” Like so many (mostly mothers, but some fathers, Accepting Dad a stellar voice among them) writing about nonconforming boy kids, also has amassed a great list of valuable resources and done a lot of work at her kid’s school, which she’s written about. She’s got a book in the works, and if blog is prologue, we can expect it to be very good. Transparenthood, also very thoughtful, explores parenting a boy child born in a girl body; Sam’s now 15.

Like Sarah Hoffman, Cheryl Kilodavis, author of My Princess Boy, has done an enormous amount of consciousness- and awareness-raising, after she did some on herself as her son began to follow his own path. I met and interviewed her last February when she was on book tour locally, but had just become job-smacked and had to put the interview in the can, where several other notable ones are moldering. (Ordinary people have backlogged scrapbook and family photo album projects; bloggers have backlogged blog posts.) The succinct thing I can share from that chat with her is that she is enormously sincere, very very smart and open, learning all the time, and evangelical about spreading understanding among parents like her who were previously totally unprepared for nonconformity like this in her child. Check out her Acceptance Groups page.

No post on kids in gender nonconforming Halloween outfits would be complete without reference to Nerdy Apple Bottom, who blew the top off this topic last year when she posted about her son’s Daphne outfit and its reception at his (then) school.  And yes: comment count on that post is accurately reflected at over 47,000.  So not kidding about the “blew the top off”; the Today Show had her on as a result. Sarah (the blog’s author) is a phenomenal person, as I can attest now after having had the pleasure of meeting her last August in San Diego. This year she’s done a photo project, Just B, in which she’s taken portraits of her kids and their friends having a nondenominational blast with a box of costumes. (Whole series here.)

As to organizations, Gender Spectrum is the best one I know of, founded by (who else) a loving mother of a gender nonconforming child. Said mother, Stephanie Brill, just happened to be a midwife / educator / author of two books about conception, childbirth, and queer parenting, so she hit the ground running, as a perusal of Gender Spectrum’s resources will make clear. Their page Understanding Gender is a great first stop for folks, and her book The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals, cowritten with author/educator Rachel Pepper, is top-notch and one-of-a-kind.

Collecting this list of online resources has made it evident to me: parents (mostly mothers) are becoming transformed and expanded by their kids, and are turning around and working to transform and expand the world so it can fit them. Which I consider a pretty neat trick.

Guy and buildings, 5th and 41st, New York, NY.

Took this one for me boy, who loves him a nice bow tie.

Ridin’ the range, okay, the family room, Berkeley, CA.

Hold up! Berkeley, CA.

Wordless Wednesday is better than No Post A’tall Wednesday, I always say. Or rather I’m trying to get back into the habit of saying.  

He is treating my gardening hat very nicely, but I do think we’ll have to get him his own cow poke outfit soon. The boy has a flair for the dress-up, no doubt about it.

A great many Wednesdays around here have gone by wordlessly of late, so the post title is a bit misleading. Slowly (slowly! I am a 21st c. resident, on a 20th c. timeclock!) I am finding my way back here. I feel a post comin’ on soon (ok, I see a chunk of time on a plane tomorrow, some of which time I may wrestle to polish off a long half-baked explanatory note). On the other side of this upcoming weekend is a wee clear patch in the ongoing (thrill a minute!) steeplechase that is my new job. I have pencilled in “catch breath.” Hope also to ink in “write more.”

Meanwhile, me boy.  Yes, that’s a haircut up under the cap there. He wanted it. Sigh. He can come back again to the Roger Daltry/ Robert Plant look again in his teens, I s’pose. Grandma’s looking adoringly on in the blurry left foreground. And me, behind the camera lens, catching another glimpse of him as a young man (as I try to catch my breath).

Artist’s reverie, Oakland, CA.

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.