At The Palace (Hotel, that is), San Francisco, CA.
Wordless Wednesday passed, well, wordlessly.
This moment above lasted about a split second, as the girlie was cracking herself up and sticking her scarf in every imaginable position on her head (including covering it entirely). Speedy Baba had teacup in the left hand so’s to keep her camera at the ready in the right.
Ready/ not ready.
Tick tock tick tock go the remaining minutes of first grade. She is getting waves of verklempt and fits of excess bodily energy (bouncing, faux ballet leaping bottle rocket variety) over the looming truth of it. Â A week and a day, then it’s all behind her.
Between bouts of nostalgia and fits of enthusiasm she declaims (and I agree with her), “It’s all going too fast!”
In the nick of time, and I mean the nick, I post a lil’ something for Dana Rudolph’s gift to the queer family blogoverse, Blogging for LGBT Families Day. This post here of course means I’ll have to push forward to yet another day my in-the-queue explano-post, the one in which I outline just what day job it is that has sucked up nearly all available oxygen from my posting here. Don’t resent the job, though! It’s the parenting thing: Very. Hard. To be full-time. Worker. Plus all-time. Parent. If this were any other kind of blog than a parenting one, I suspect you’d have seen hide and hair of me, rather than neither.  Still, flying in the face of the past three month’s anemic posting, I have faith the blog’s oxygen supply will get squoze out of somewhere. I do.
Meanwhile! A few notes on the occasion of Dana’s 6th Blogging for LGBT Families Day! First, here are things I contributed to her 1st, 2nd, 3rd, & 4th. & 5th.  We’ve both been at this a while. In fact, I still remember where I was (in the living room of the beloved’s and my first wee home, on a laptop) when I ran into Mombian.com for the first time, and shouted “Eureka!” What a revelation. I was  just a half-year into my parenthood at the time, and was already starved for what she had to offer, astounded that she was offering it up. For free. On the internet. (Nostalgic? Here’s her first post.)
[Ed note: this is the other shoe, the first of which pair dropped on Tuesday.]
Peter Pan’s direction to airborne children heading toward Neverland — “first star to the right, and straight on ’til morning” — always thrills, but for my daughter, the magic really started with Harry Potter. Or rather, it was Harry who cranked it up a notch. The magic itself started long before he came on the scene: it started when our girlie’s custom mix of cells started waking up and banging around, working diligently toward their destiny as the perfect receptacle for her, the one who would wait patiently through several near-miss conceptions then a miscarriage, before dropping effortlessly into my beloved’s womb, then our arms, right when we needed her most. She knew.
We all have special powers. My job as a parent is to pay close attention, and notice as many of my childrens’ as I can, that I may clear the path ahead–when it ought to be cleared. Oftentimes the path-making is their job, in which case my job is to remove myself to a proper distance off in the underbrush, sit on my hands, and bite my tongue. Guess which job is harder.
One of my daughter’s powers is her Olympic imagination, from which I’d bet she draws a majority of her day’s enjoyment. We’re fortunate enough not to have stepped on it too much, though its care and feeding can pose a challenge. Leaving her alone to her own devices a lot helps a great deal.
As seen in The Bone Room, a place I actually took the kids to, yes I did. Six and four years old, thank you for asking. We were in search of a witchcraft store that sold live owls (yeah, I know: I told her, too, but she wasn’t about to believe me that we would find it difficult to purchase an owl, alive or dead, anywhere within the city limits). This was the closest I could get us to.
Hey, it was worth a try. Several minutes in  – I think it was when we passed a tidy row of some half-dozen small alligator heads, you think I am kidding, I am sorry to say I am not — they were both fairly convinced that while it was a witchcraft store, it was one that practiced the dark arts. Italics hers.
With any luck, I’ll have enough time on my commute to or fro work to tell a bit more about how we managed to get here, and where we went thereafter. Meanwhile, you can peruse the links and try hard to consider my kids lucky that I did not call to their attention the owl pellets, about which the store’s website enlightens us, thus:
owl pellets are the indigestible bits of fur and bone regurgitated by owls (and other birds of prey). These sterilized pellets can be taken apart to reveal the owl’s last meal, expect to see bones from mice, voles, and numerous other small creatures.
I run across things like this around the house all the time. Not sure whether to call a child psychiatrist or a literary agent.
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God bless Mexeco
In lieu of something written by me (I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!*), I offer here, for your Cinco de Mayo reading pleasure, something written by my daughter at an unspecified time last month. Â It just appeared in the house one afternoon. I know two of her classmates and chums have visual artist moms who have been volunteering art instruction in the class, and I know at one point — months ago, I think — they talked about Frida Kahlo. Â I asked the girlie where she learned this stuff, and she said there was a book in the class that she’d read.
So there we have it.¡Viva educación! Viva las madres y las artistas mujeres y las madres que son artistas! ¡Y hoy, especialmente, viva México!
As written [with translations as needed]:
When I read this, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that Frida Kahlo died nearly 60 years ago. Â Other than that oversight, this is pretty spot-on. She will always feel pain, but she will always be a wonderful Artist.
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