Not-beach-day Saturday

Maybe on a weekend afternoon, you decide you'll all go to the beach, because it's a nice day and your sleep-challenged toddler loves the beach so much, and it's well before his nap time, and you figure he'll toddle around on the beach a lot and tire himself out and fall asleep on the way home. And then you get to the beach, and you turn around and see this. 

So you stretch out all your parent-flexibility and decide to let him sleep. You park at the beach and, in whispers, devise a new plan: you'll take back roads all the way from Jenner to Petaluma, where you'll eat dinner at your friends' restaurant. The drive should take you a good ninety minutes, allowing him a nice long nap.

The drive is heartbreakingly scenic and, by necessity, quiet. Every so often one and then both of you peer over your shoulders, nervously, as though you are carrying a backseat full of illegal explosives, and then, seeing closed eyes and flushed face and tiny chest solemnly rising and falling, you grin at each other with relief so profound it borders on hysteria. He wakes up when you're almost through Sebastopol.

So you Google-map for playgrounds between Sebastopol and your friend's restaurant and end up at a beautiful park you've never heard of a few miles from your house. And the slides and sand and open spaces turn your sleepy-faced baby into a blur of joy.

Maybe late that afternoon there is the crispest, roundest moon you have ever seen in the pinkest sky.

Maybe the reddest trees.     

The End.

I like this

"If your heart is bleeding, make the most of it.

There is heat in freezing. Be a testament."

Motherhood can be really lonely sometimes. You’re pretty much never alone, certainly never ever again in the way you were pre-motherhood. You have a little person with you, needing you, all the time, and in the few moments that little person is not with you they still need you, they are still firmly attached to every one of your thoughts, illuminating the corners of your soul where quiet and dust used to hide. But you’re alone in how much that person needs you. No matter how supportive your partner (and I say this with full recognition of how ridiculously lucky I am to have one as supportive as Adam); no matter how richly empathic your community of friends and family and mother-peers--you are the only you your child has, and that astounding responsibility can be intensely isolating. And I like this video for serving as a reminder to all of us, mothers and others, that that is okay.

Also, I am now officially obsessed with Tanya Davis.

Also: Why do so many things I love beyond reason come from Canada? John Fluevog. Giles Herman. Vasanti Cosmetics. And now Ms. Davis. Canada, can you adopt me?

Adam's birthday

This video was Adam's birthday present from Kamal and me this year.





The day after his birthday, we went to the beach. That's been our tradition for Adam's birthday; it was actually Adam's tradition years before I came along.

It was Kamal's first time at the beach since he's been able to walk. I don't think he's ever had so much fun anywhere. Ever. It was incredible how excited he was. He was literally shouting with joy. He'd be toddling at high speed along the shoreline, leaving tiny little footprints in the sand, mouth wide open with delight, arms waving in random happy patterns, and suddenly he'd let loose this thrilled "YAAAAAAAAAA!"

He fell asleep SO. HARD. on the car ride home, then woke up to eat takeout with us from Ono'z in Guerneville. 

You get to see deliciously chubby baby legs in this photo because both of the pairs of pants Kamal was wearing (it was COLD at the beach!) got soaked through from sitting in wet sand.

It was a good, good day.

Just for the sake of history, here's Adam and Kamal on Adam's last birthday, in the pop-up outdoor dining room I jerry-rigged around the gliding picnic table I got him as a present:

And here's the video I made him the year before that, before he was ever Daddy, just about a month before we found out we were pregnant with the little embryo that would become Kamal:



Adam's birthdays are my favorite.