Things I Learned This Summer

It's been a great summer. We didn't cross the country, but we did some fun things, and our kids are happy. It's also been a hard summer for me. I worked more, and had less childcare, and no or less school for the kids. I had several trips that I went on solo, which were each amazing, but also required monumental amounts of childcare coordination and scheduling.

Here's what I learned on my summer vacation:

• All camps should have drive-through drop-off and pick-up. Letting the baby sleep, keeping the special needs kid buckled-in safely, or the dog comfortably stay in the car is so wonderful. I am ever-thankful to the camps that made things easier for parents this summer. It specifically made my life less complicated.
• We need to figure out a way for there to be childcare for special needs children. Really. What happens to all of those aids when school lets out? What happens to those aids after 1pm every afternoon. Finding childcare for a special needs kid is always hard, somehow during the summer it is a lot harder. Maybe we could private pay our schools to have after school care like every other typical kid has? Where is the after-school care for special needs children?
• Camp for my son is one of the most awesome experiences we have as a family. He gets time in the woods with people who focus on him. We know he's safe so we can relax and leave the doors unlocked for a few days. If you have a camp in your area that offers care for special needs kids.. make a donation to them today. They are life savers for the parents, and the learning the children and adults do at those camps is life-changing. 
• Air conditioning is not a luxury for our family. If things get "more than regular" difficult and I am hot, I cannot function. The first things I do is turn on the air conditioning when I am going to need to deal with something hard in our house or car.
• My children love the outdoors. I've always known this, but it is amazing how happy they are when we are in a National or State park. It's like they might actually be 'getting' the lessons we are teaching them about the beauty of this country, and the amazing natural resources we have right here in our own state that no one else in the world has. 
• From our house, it's possible to drive to Yosemite for dinner, and we will be doing that at least once every summer. It is ridiculous not to. If you live that close to a National Park, please go, or send a donation in to keep it well-staffed and full of rangers who answer every single question my daughter can squeeze in.
  
• It's also possible to get to Muir Woods before lunch; even with a gaggle of children. We will be doing this more often as well. A lot of it is wheelchair accessible.
  
• I get teary-eyed every time I'm in a National Park. I am just that sappy.
• In-n-Out Burger can provide the right nutrition and fun for my family, and as long as we don't do it all the time, it is not only okay, it is a happy, inexpensive treat that makes everyone relaxed. And if you go to In-n-Out  and then stop by my house, assume one of my children will steal your milkshake. They don't care if you have a cold.
  
• I need to put in automatic sprinklers in the front yard. I cannot actually water that many square feet every single day by hand. It looks like my front yard is a chapter out of The Grapes of Wrath, and the crops from our garden this summer are about as good as a 1937 Texas panhandle farm. 
• My son has a lot to say if we are willing to wait patiently for him to answer the questions we ask him. Once again, he is teaching me that I have a lot to learn about listening and not assuming.
• Home-brewed beer is awesome, not that hard to make, and something my husband and I can do together that does not involve leaving the house or watching television.
  
• I miss my family when I don't see them, and even though I make them crazy, I think they might miss me too. As much as I love living in the Bay Area, it has been a summer with no visits to my family in the O.C. 
• Buying school supplies for my
• kindergartner was unexpectedly one of the most exciting and heartbreaking things I've done lately; there are no more babies in my house. 
• Always buy more sunblock than you think you will need. Now that we have taught children that they must wear sunblock, it is very hard to get them out of the house/car without it.
• I live in such a great, warm, activity-filled city, and we love going to all of the music in the park concerts. We have also discovered another version of a perfect summer Saturday in our town: farmer's market with friends, beer garten with those friends, and more friends, splashing and running around the downtown square fountains, then home for a family nap.
• and, of course, I figured out that my children will get older no matter how hard I hug them. I knew we were all going to grow up someday, I just didn't see it coming for a few more years.

I hope you had a wonderful summer. We had our first day of kindergarten this morning: 

My Tiny Babies

They were never small, either one of them. My kids have always been on the long/tall side, and while skinny compared to the rest of the family, they are both strong and healthy. They have grown a lot this year, both emotionally and physically. The big trip gave us a nice grounding moment before the school year shook us by its tail, and this week of Thanksgiving will be another touchstone to remind us of how wonderful it is to be a part of our family.

I've been purging the house. It's eight years overdue. We had a lot of things to begin with, then we had Jake and I think I just never got rid of anything that was still useful ever again. I have too many sheets, towels and pillow cases, hundreds and hundreds of books, more shoes than Imelda. I went through 13 boxes/plastic bins filled with my children's clothing, and more than two bins of their shoes shoes. I sorted them all by size first, then called friends so they could place their orders. One family wanted 2T warm clothes only, and possibly some size 8 shoes. I pulled out the next sizes for my sister's boys, the items that Princess Lucy won't wear because it looks "too much like boys." (She does love camo though!). Then I went through again quickly and picked out things from each bin that had I had little memory of a kid wearing it, or at least I knew I wasn't emotionally attached. This sounds ridiculous even as I write it. Who gets attached to a cheap Hawaiian shirt or a blue dress with apples all over it?

I can remember something about almost every single item in those 16 crates. I can remember that Jake wore the beige sweater with the little red zipper on the Golden Gate bridge. I took a picture of him, and I was so scared his little ataxic body was going to lunge and leap over the four foot barrier and land in front of a car or worse, go over the side of the bridge. The stripey sweater he wore in Montana, the last time we went vacationing with those close family friends before our marriages went in different directions. Jake got caught on the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the property. I made a new land speed record that day rushing over sage and dirt to get to him. By the time I screeched to a halt, he had slipped out of the sweater, calmly pulling his body down and out, leaving a striped scarecrow on the fence.

Lucy came home from the hospital in the pink onsie with snaps up the front, and monkeys printed on it. And the little blue and white dress with the duck embroidered on the front? Cheezy I know, but she  wore it on her first visit to feed some ducks at a nearby park. The multi-color sweater with the hood? I bought that the day the ultrasound revealed that Lucy was a girl (and then with the worst kind of buyer's remorse, I worried that I had somehow overstepped a boundary and had invited misfortune into our lives, jinxing everything.)

I remember buttoning and zipping and folding and maybe even ironing so many of those tiny clothes...but only as I look at them again. I think this is how my brain works: an event occurs, a good thing, a bad thing, any thing, and I remember the event for a very short amount of time. But apparently I really do remember it because it gets stored in a long-term memory section of my brain, only to be released again when I see the sweater, the street sign, the wedding invitation, the pen, the shoes. I use objects as external hard drives. If I don't see the object, I'm afraid all those memories will be gone.  Now I know I sound like a crazy person.

There's another thing happening as I clean out all of these things. I get closer to the corner of the closet with the baby crib.

Baby. Crib.

It is beautiful. Jake stayed in it until he was too tall and I was afraid he would tip over the rails, and Lucy jumped out the day before her first birthday, prompting a hasty trip to IKEA. We packed up the crib and put it in Jake's closet.

Every time I open Jake's closet door I have a flood of memories looking at those beautiful wood slats; Jake finally pulling to a stand in his sunny bedroom with yellow walls, when we thought he never would, and Lucy jumping up and down yelling MAMAMAMAMAMAMA to get out of bed. I remember Descartes and I putting that crib together, and arranging the room before Jake was born.

Now getting rid of that crib would hardly remove all of the beautiful memories I have of my children as tiny babies but there is something keeping me from passing it on to the next family. At least I thought there was; I thought that our family was not complete without another child.

This whole time, I've had this crib in the closet, thinking that we would change our minds and have another baby. Getting pregnant with Lucy was a big decision after Jake, and though we thought we would have three or four children, I've realized (after some long discussions) that I am not really missing having another person in our family, and I cannot actually imagine where or how another child would fit, into my heart, or our home, or our schedule. I just don't have a hollow any more, and I know I used to feel that ache, as if we were not complete--but my heart is full now. And we are whole, and happy and as hard as it feels some days, we are on track. 

***

What I am wanting, what I confused with wanting another child, is that idea of fresh and new, and possibility. It's that whole hope thing again...and while we're at it, I want that fearless part of me back. The woman who was carrying a perfect child and made sure we bought a house near the best elementary school. The woman who read Thoreau, and C.S. Lewis to put that beautiful boy to sleep at night. The woman I was before I broke my leg on the front stairs and had to ask for help, really, really ask for help for the first time in my life. I am trying to get some more pieces of that woman back, and somehow I mixed that up with having another baby, because while I do like myself now, I really did like the woman I was then too--she was awesome, and she knew it.