Late nights, broken teeth

The mountains are calling and I must go

A little over a month ago we moved from Orange County to a mountain cabin in the Los Padres National Forest. This is what we wake up to in the morning:

We knew that things would be different. We now have to drive nearly an hour to get to an affordable grocery store. We've already had near-freezing weather, snow is on the way, and we've exchanged palm trees for pine trees. We literally live on the side of a mountain, and we're still figuring out exactly what that means. While we were moving in, Lindsay got a little education from a conversation with our neighbor:

Neighbor: Do you have any cats? Do you want one? 

Lindsay: ? 

Neighbor: I found a feral cat, and I've been feeding him and nursing him back to health. 

Lindsay: Well, actually we’re kind of allergic to cats.

Neighbor: We’ve also got raccoons here. You like raccoons? 

Lindsay: They're alright . . . 

Neighbor: There’s a whole shed full of ‘em across the street. I feed them too. See? There’s one on my porch right now. They’re real friendly. 

Lindsay: Oh, wow. Okay. 

Neighbor: How do you feel about bears? 

Lindsay: Real ones? The big kind? 

Neighbor: Yeah, they get big. This guy finds a mother bear with cubs, and he takes out a pistol and shoots her. Idiot! Anyway, those cubs were living under your porch for a while. 

Lindsay: Our porch? 

Neighbor: Yup. Animal control said to just let nature take its course, but . . . 

Lindsay: You fed them? 

Neighbor: Yup. 

So, gotta watch out for those critters. I'm waiting for the day Addison wanders in with a moose on a leash.

We were a little worried about how well Addison would transition to a new place. When you're three, your house and your routines are your whole world (heck, they're still my whole world). And for the first day or two, she had a tough time. She missed her Grammy and Gramps. One night, she sobbed for 45 minutes, saying that she "just does not have any friends here!" and "there are not so many people here!" And recently, Addison told us that "sometimes when I'm playing by myself in my room, I pretend I have no friends and am very, very lonely."

Still, it wasn't but a few days before she was wandering around at the playground holding some random kid's hand, instructing her "husband" to dance with her like Beauty and the Beast. 

And she's excited by neighbors she can interact with. While we construct make-shift play equipment in the backyard, she has conversations with our elderly neighbors, who tend a garden and always pop something off a plant for Addison to put in her mouth. She loves their cherry tomatoes. 

With a little coaching, Addison wrote them a thank-you note, on which she drew tomatoes and a space ship. I couldn't find her for about thirty seconds, and then I heard something outside. She was standing at the fence between our lots, shouting at their house:

Addison: "Neighbors! HEY! NEIGHBORS! I HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU! HEEEEEYYYYY! COME OUT HERE! COME! OUT! RIGHT! NOW!"

We're still working on what it means to be "neighborly," though I can't fault her enthusiasm.

The adventurous streak is strong in this one. She gets that more from her mother than from me. I love her boldness, her confidence, her inquisitiveness, even if it sometimes catches me off-guard. But I can understand that there's nothing quite like exploring a brand new place, especially when that new place is filled with rocks, lakes, mountains, and all manner of furry critters.

In the end, Addison has transitioned to our new life even better than I imagined she would. Every day that she snatches up her staff and asks to walk to the park or the library, I'm inspired by her excitement for a new quest. When she requests some time to go out back and dig a hole, I'm gratified by her eagerness to go out under the pines and get her hands dirty. When we step outside to search the clear night sky for the brightest, luckiest star, I'm reminded that she's an adventurer, and that to her, the magic of the world vastly outweighs the anxieties. She's a brave kid, and it's gonna stretch me to keep up with her.

Texting

On falling down

“As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” 

                                                      ― Martin Luther King Jr.

If there's one concept I wish I could teach my daughter, it would be this. The Universe seems inexorably to succumb to decay. But in each of us is a creative power that trumps the destructive forces that surround us, if only we will have the will to use it. From the ruins of tragedy may be built soaring towers of transcendence. 

Thunderpants, sprinkler, baby potato, Sprinkling love

A million splashes

Our new place is a short walk to a park with a fishing pond. As we walk along the road to the pond, Addison and I fill our pockets with little flat stones. Skipping stones is a new skill that Addison is keen to learn. As I skip a rock, she counts the splashes: "One . . . two . . . threefourfivesix!" And when she tosses her own rock like a shot-putter hurling a cannonball, she waits for the single massive splash and shouts, "Whoa! A MILLION splashes!"

We go to the pond almost every day. I scan the ground for likely candidates as we walk. My heart skips a beat when I pick up a really quality skipping rock, something with a comfortable heft and a nice place to curl my finger around it. The kind of skipping rock that's so beautifully formed, so perfect for its purpose, that you save it for last and then don't want to use it after all. Because in the end, the very best skipping rock is the one that skips the farthest and then sinks into the depths, beyond recovery. Such great potential paired with the heartbreak of such a singular moment, a brief triumph that can never be repeated.

As I watched my daughter bend down to pick up stones in the dirt shoulder of the road, I considered her little self. So perfectly formed. And her hand fits so perfectly in mine. I kind of just want to keep her in my pocket and never let her go.

But really (I have to keep telling myself this), raising a kid is like having a perfect skipping stone that's MAGIC. You throw it out, and it skips incredibly, beautifully across the surface. And then it comes BACK. It always comes back. So long as you've treasured it, cradled it in the palm of your hand, loved it with all you have. So long as you pause a moment before launch, breathless, preparing yourself mentally for all that will come. If your throw is true and pure, imbued with the experience of many past successes and many hours of practice. If you've earned the stone's love, it comes back.

And then, one day, the stone will learn that it can throw itself. All those times when you launched it out there with your heart in your throat -- they were all for this purpose. So that someday, even when you're not there, the stone will keep throwing itself out there, and keep skipping gracefully, magnificently across the surface, and never sink to the bottom.

"Whoa! A MILLION splashes!"

Booming the scares, taking care of hurt monsters, phoning dead relations, wanting new parents, PICKLEWEASEL!

We're almost done with our move up into the mountains, blog post to come soon. In the meantime, there have been a bunch of conversations I wanted to record. As first seen on my Facebook page, here they come:

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Addison has recently been complaining about scary things at night, something that's never been an issue before. She'll come running out of her room at bedtime, saying, "Scares! In the dark! There are scares in my room!" 

So Lindsay tried to teach her a little trick with an invisible magic wand to make the scary things go away: 

Lindsay: Just say, "Abracadabra scary things away, BOOM."  

And then Addison's maternal instincts kicked in and all her fears of things that go bump in the night faded away, to be replaced with this:

Addison: Oh no! You boomed the scares! But now all the little scares are hurt and they don't have their moms and dads to take care of them. I will be their mom now. Poor scares. Poor, poor scares.

And so Addison, now refusing to go to bed for a different reason, starts wandering around to all the dark little corners of her room muttering "it's okay, scares. It's okay. I'll take care of you."

Kids. They take that parenting manual and really scribble all over it.

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My daughter, running breathlessly out of her bedroom: 

Addison: There's monsters in my room! 

Lindsay: Oh? 

Addison: Yeah. And some of them are hurt. And I need to take care of them. 

Lindsay: Okay, well, get back into bed and take care of them. 

Addison: Okay. 

I can see that we may have a new bed-time routine.

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As we near our move-out date and Addison contemplates what it means to move from one home to another, and since she thinks about her deceased (great) Grandpa all the time, this is where her thoughts went: 

Addison: Does God have rooms? 

Lindsay: Uh. What? 

Addison: Like to sleep in... 

Lindsay: Um. Maybe? 

Addison: Let's call my Grandpa and ask him to ask God to give us some rooms to sleep in after we die. 

Because when you travel from one place to another, you always want to know that there's a safe place to land. Count on a kid to remind you that mundane things act as analogies for the big concepts in life. I'm gonna have to put some extra special thought into cozying up her new room.

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My daughter's revolution continues. She said, "I want new parents." 

The reason? "I want new stuffed animals," she said. "These stuffed animals are not my favorites." 

Me: And why do you need new parents for that? 

Addison: Because they will have different stuffed animals. They can still be named Lindsay and Neal. But they will wear different clothes.

Lindsay: But we'd miss you so much. 

Addison: It's okay. My new parents will bring me to visit. Or maybe you can come live with my new parents, too. 

My, how easily we are replaced. It's a little sad that she'd trade us for a new set of stuffed animals . . . but at least she doesn't mind if we still live together.

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Typical phone conversation with my daughter: 

Me: I have something to tell you. 

Addison (from a distance): No! 

Me: Ok, then I'll tell you this: Pickle-weasel! 

Addison (suddenly much closer and engaged): Pickle-weasel to you!

Me: No! Pickle-weasel to YOU!

Addison (at max volume): NO! PICKLE-WEASEL TO YOOOOUUU!

I'll treasure these conversations.