Now You're Just Somebody That I Used To Know!

I had some work to do in the boys' bedroom, which meant that I couldn't make use of their sleeping hours to work like I usually do. It seemed like a good idea (obviously) to employ Locke's help with distracting Fox. They both went to the room across the hall and I was half listening to them playing while working on my project. When things got suspiciously quiet, I decided to check on them. As soon as he saw me, Fox started singing, "now you just somebody that I used to know!" and Locke chimes in with, "somebodeeeee!!" Apparently, they were trying to reenact their favorite music video which features two people who have shapes painted all over themselves to blend in with the shape-painted wall behind them.

 Naturally, I was just embarrassed for them and realized that I had to show them how to do it properly. It was clear that we all needed to paint an entire wall of their play room with shapes first so that we didn't look like total idiots. And then we really made this happen:

 We even made our own version of the music video and I couldn't have dreamed that it would turn out so well.

Shockingly good stuff right there. Just shocking.


Here is a later attempt at Somebody That I Used To Know paint by Locke. He really nailed it this time.

Bitties just being generally mischievous:

And this one time that I baked a pot pie. I am so domestic.

Locke's 5! And Summer is here! With a bit of winter. Because that's how we do it.

Locke turned five last week and got a bike. Ryan taught him how to ride it a few days ago and Locke's been biking like crazy ever since. On Sunday we went for a 10 mile run and he rode his bike for 6 of those miles. Then today he cranked out just shy of 6 miles again on his bike. I can't really express how excited I am that we're really getting to the point where I can go long distances with Locke and not have to carry or push him along.

They didn't show up as well as I'd hoped in this photo but the springtime flowers are looking so gorgeous!

Today was our first long distance outing where I just brought the single stroller for Fox so there was no other way for Locke to get around besides his bike. It was a pretty risky plan but we pulled it off without a hitch. Well. There was a slight hiccup. At one point we had to cross a busy street without a crosswalk and halfway across the road, Locke put his bike down, announced that he needed a drink, and pulled out his water bottle just as three cars were barreling disconcertingly close. But. He responded quickly when I took his water bottle and calmly directed him (with my best shrill and panicked, yet stoic voice) to hurry and finish crossing the street with me. And...we made it. Although all three cars had to come to a full stop before we did. So there is some room for improvement. But as far as making it the whole 6 miles without any fatalities or even injuries, it was a 100% success. So that's got to count for something...right? As I was pulling Fox out of the stroller after we'd gotten home, he said in a voice almost too soft to make out, "I love...I love going to adventures with you, mom." Such a sweet boy.

So it may be the summer part of spring this week, but last week we were lucky enough to get a snow day. Or as Fox likes to call it, free treats from the sky day. We got caught in the storm while jogging back from dropping Locke off to preschool and by the time we got home, the stroller cover was completely plastered in snow. As soon as we got home and Bitties got a good look of the situation, he grabbed a cup and started scooping snow off the stroller until the entire cup was full. But he didn't stop there, he started trying to scoop up all over the yard and ended up with many dirt and stick-filled cups before I realized that I really needed to be putting plates out to catch the snow. When all was said and done, this boy downed 8 cups of snow. Hopefully it was a good air quality day because that's a whole lot of sky to be eating.


As I mentioned earlier, it was Locke's birthday last week and Tess offered to host a party at her house. There was cake, friends, and new clothes. This boy loves clothes. It was some fun times.

To the man who used to live by the river

Today I saw your cart laying on its side in the river. I first noticed something was off when I jogged past your usual spot under the bridge to find your cart, rather than spilling over with the same grocery bags and trinkets that I'd grown accustomed to over the year, nearly empty; it's former contents littering the ground and jogging path. Over the next weeks, I kept looking for you, expecting to see your familiar shape huddled in your maroon blankets and sleeping bag...but the only thing I saw was that same cart, each day looking more dilapidated and abandoned as it moved by unseen hands ever closer to the river. I worried for you, this person I'd become used to seeing every day while out on my usual jog. This person who was always sleeping under a pile of blankets, surrounded by empty bottles from attempts to dull whatever pain it was that you were facing. I felt something of a kinship with you...and I'm embarrassed to admit now, I also felt a bit of pride about worrying over you. As if that, all by itself, made me a good person. But then I realized that in the hundreds of times that I did see you, I never once made an attempt to make a show of solidarity or even acknowledge your existence. All this worry and kinship was just a fantasy that existed only in my head.

So...that realization didn't make me feel so great. I may as well have been harboring delusions about my superiority over you and making erroneous moral judgments about why you were there. That's the lovely flip side to keeping our thoughts private: we don't harm anyone but ourselves with the bile of our own prejudice. But there does seem to be something...I don't know. Something wrong about harboring a fantasy of kindness and never actually sharing it. If I get to feel good about myself for not conveying contempt when I feel it toward someone else then it follows that I don't get to feel like a hero for secretly worrying over you.

Alright then. I promise you, right here and now that if I do see you again, I will acknowledge you. Probably not by talking to you...I could say that it's because you've always been sleeping whenever I've passed by but that wouldn't be completely true. The combination of my social anxiety and fear of engaging a strange man while I'm alone with my two small children hold me back. But I will pick up a couple things from the market for you that will hopefully be helpful and show you that you're not alone. I hope to see you again, even as I hope that I never do because you've found a better situation. But most of all, I hope I will actually take action next time when I'm in a similar situation instead of doing nothing until it's too late.

Friends

Locke and Fox have actually begun to enjoy hanging out with each other even more lately. It's pretty great. That's not to say that there aren't still roughly 30,000 daily battles between the two of them. but. I'm really enjoying the direction that we're heading.We recently got an ottoman and they're really enjoying helping each other hide in it--sometimes together as shown here.

 Dressing up is still their favorite. They've even developed a song that they chant while they're marching to the Costume Center: "Let's dress up, deu deu! Let's dress up, deu, deu!!..."

Locke is now officially the coolest person in Fox's mind. He's always looking to Locke to figure out what the cool kids do.

In case you weren't aware, dressing up is the thing that cool kids do.

 Locke was getting pretty irritated that Fox wasn't intimidated by his little orange sword.

Fox: "Oh no!! Vampiyah hunta comin' to get me!!"

Basically, I believe in cat reincarnation. That's what it boils down to.

So I was going to just write about something cute that happened this morning but I realized it won't really make sense unless I provide some background first. In my late teens and into my early twenties, I had a cat named Muffin. This period of my life was...not the happiest and I am not exaggerating when I say that this cat probably saved my life. I didn't feel that I had much to live for at the time. I had lost my faith in anything supernatural and the idea that purpose and meaning were things that I had to craft for myself left me reeling and rudderless. I remember casually telling my friends that everyone needs a Jesus--something that you can safely pour all your love into and know it will never hurt or leave you--and that's what my cat was to me. So basically, I took the void where religion used to be and...put. my. cat. there. I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And in my defense, she was a really special, sweet feline person. But while I was right about her being safe in the sense that she would always be a reflection of unconditional love,  the gaping flaw in my logic became apparent when she died of kidney failure at the tender age of six. I only mention this to underscore just how attached I was to this cat. Anyway, back to today.

This morning as I was getting ready, Fox picked up an old picture of me and Muffin. "Oohh...looka this!" He says, excitedly. I tell him that it's a picture of me and my silver kitty friend, Muffin. His eyebrows furrow and he proclaims, "No...no. That's me! Remember that? You were holding me!" This is either the second or third time that he's said this about this particular photo.

Now...I just want to say first off that I don't seriously entertain the notion that this could in any literal sense be true. For one thing, he's always asserting that he's the subject of photos (baby photos of Locke, for instance, are always actually Fox. According to Fox.). For another thing, I hate to be boastful, but I have enough skill in the arena of logic and reason to recognize how absurd it is to think that bitty Fox is really my dead cat made alive again. And yet...and yet. It is so comforting to me to take him at his word on this one. To believe him even knowing full well that this is impossible.

Maybe it's because he's part of what fills the same space in my heart that that silly, sweet cat left open and raw in her wake. Maybe it's because they share the same tendency to cry mournfully whenever I have the audacity to go somewhere and leave them behind. Or maybe it's just something innately human. A primal need to believe in things not because they're true but because they're useful. I don't really understand how a belief can be comforting even when the holder of said belief is aware that it's limited to the confines of their own mind. But. It somehow manages to work for me. My old kitty friend could never be replaced but it's so nice to feel that in some way, her tiny spirit managed to weave its way back to me through my little boy. So I'll roll with it. <3

Julep

I've been mildly obsessed with a group called Punch Brothers lately. It's rare to find artists that are incredibly talented in every single aspect required to make a song but (in my opinion) these guys have totally nailed it.

If I ever end up being able to write anything half this beautiful I...will be. good. good things are the things I will be thinking about my skills. This particular example of my writing skill has really bolstered my confidence. Here's their stuff:

I died happy in my sleep
Our children around and you looking down
from heaven's a julep on the porch
You and me rocking the grandfather clock is tick tick talking
to the time we used to wind it

She brought the sugar and the mint
And he brought the whiskey
Asked for my blessing
"Yes sir, I know she's
heaven's a julep on the porch"
You and me rocking the grandfather clock is tick tick talking
to the time we used to wind it

Now the time stands still
We can drink our fill
Out of silver
That will never
Tarnish like we will

You weren't just a girl that I should meet
You were the girl that I would meet
For drinks in the backyard
A beautiful daughter
A Lifetime of summer
And love ever after

I died happy in my sleep

Our children around and you looking down from
Heaven's a julep on the porch
You and me rocking the grandfather clock is tick tick tick tick
talking to the time we used to wind it
God the time We used to wind it...

Blasted Life

In case my voice is unintelligible or you just don't feel like watching a video, here it is all typed up:

I've noticed that I keep making the same types of home movies. They all feature the typical highlights and happy moments with family...but often with some melancholy undertones. I figured that I was just trying to do what we're all doing when we make home movies: trying to capture the good times so that we'll be able to reflect on them later. But the moment that I realized the truth behind why I'm so desperate to record our lives, my heart seized up with a pang of something terrible clicking unwittingly into place. Some realizations are so painful that it seems like only an idiot would think to entertain them. As someone raised inside the LDS faith, for as long as I can remember, I've felt a responsibility to do my part in ensuring that my family stays together forever. Even though my views have become secular as an adult, this feeling of responsibility has not changed. These pictures and movies are my meager attempts at thwarting mortality and even time itself all while knowing that this can't be done. Not really. But maybe that's okay.

Sometimes  I get so scared that I have to remind myself to breathe. When I tell you what I'm afraid of, you'll think it's ridiculous but please hear me anyway. I'm scared that heaven is real. Because I've seen it and even now it looks back at me through the thick warped glass of time--always inviting me in; always from the other side of the same endless glass. I'm scared to think that heaven is a truly necessary place that each person has to find a way to make for themselves...because I don't know if I can. It's like I can see the pieces needed to build it but assembling and holding them in place indefinitely is too big a burden for this lone, scattered mind. I'm scared that my disorganized attempts at creating my own solace will come crumbling down the moment that I face real loss. I'm so scared. I want...no. I need for Heaven..and Meaning...and God, Love, Purpose, Beauty and Justice to all be objective things that exist independent of individual perspective. Like proud thick pillars that are ever vigilant to do the work of keeping humanity propped up instead of the other way around. I need the Love I feel for my family to be a physical manifestation that will wrap us all in its warm golden glow and cocoon us from time and suffering.

But. While there's no doubt that Love is very much real, its domain is the realm of the subjective, making what I need from it impossible. And it breaks my heart. Because Love feels so much bigger than that. It feels like it should easily overcome physical possibility and help us transcend time. Regardless, what I can do is record a few snippets of our lives and see that those recordings are protected for at least a while--maybe long enough that someday our great-great-grand kids could see this...and hear how I loved them one hundred years before they took their first breath.

And who knows? Maybe all these attempts to reason everything out have only muddled my ability to see the truth and after I die, some part of my consciousness will continue to exist.  Maybe, if I've outlived her, I'll be greeted by my mom and my soul will get to collapse into her arms just the way it happens in my dreams. I hope so. But I try not to look for what I hope to find and instead to just...look. And not presume to know the answers to questions I'm not even sure are the right ones to ask. For whatever reason, my adult mind has been unable to weave the supernatural aspects inherent in the beautiful ideology of my childhood into the fabric of my reality.

Even so, I will never let go of you people that I love so much. I will take you, roll you up tightly, and bury you so deeply in my heart that on that quiet night when death comes for you, she will never find you here.  Instead she'll find the force of all your lives shining in my chest so brightly as to chase off the dark of night and her along with it. I will do this and I will not give a care to the impossibility that I know it to be. But. Just in case, I'll also make this video.

Bitties Finally Understands the Awesomeness of Dressing Up!

...and Bears couldn't be more thrilled.

This Halloween really awakened the costume lover in Bitties. For a couple of weeks now he's been spending the majority of dressing up, with coloring relegated to second favorite status.

...And here are some of Bears' latest costume works. Some of them are slightly...well. terrifying. This boy loves the spooks.

oh and here are a couple pics from halloween while I'm at it

Post Halloween face painting day: