nuggets, 05/20/12: where the wild things are

I feel overwhelmed looking at the 400+ photos from the past two weeks. There's so much to say and so little time. Summer vacation is just two weeks away, and school is at its busiest.

Mule's ears (inside the main flower are dozens of mini-flowers that are exactly like the big flower)

I'll begin with a story from last weekend.

For Mother's day, we headed over to Edgewood Park to try and take part in one of their famed docent-led wildflower walks. I've known about these walks for a while but was not sure if our kids were up to doing one. Raya is presently at the stage where she wants to sit in the carrier but then wants to walk; then wants to walk but then wants to be carried again; then wants to be carried, but not in the carrier and instead in someone's arms. You get the picture.

Edgewood County Park, Redwood City

Still, as with so many decisions to venture into the unknown rather than hold back in self-doubt, this one paid dividends in gold. My kind of gold, at least.

Here's how it went. We got there at 10 am, and we were greeted by four docents waiting to take people along the trails. There was only one other family with kids, whom we happened to know somewhat (what are the chances?), and we got two docents to lead us on our hike. A docent, for those of you not familiar with the local lingo, is a volunteer wildflower aficionado; a docent does something else for a living, and on the weekend s/he leads people along the trails, showing them trees, flowers, and grasses, for the love of it. 

I know of nothing more beautiful than a person who does something for the love of it. That was our leading docent (above), who also happens to be an English teacher. Hallelujah.

blow wife!

So, while she and I dissected the etymology of flower names ("blow wives," anyone?), Raya ate crackers along the trail,

and Sava connived with his friends,

or admired flowers.

On the way back, Rado and I talked about the complexity of the moral and spiritual landscape that we have come to appreciate in our adopted country. This place is home to some of the vacuous, ruthless materialism that people in other parts of the world find repulsive and we find merely distasteful--the notion that money buys happiness, that more is better, and work is a way to acquire stuff not a means to infuse our lives with meaning; at the same time, as we've learned over the course of the last decade, this country offers a place for everyone, and, it seems, everyone does live here. There are those who make money, and there are those who scorn it. There are those shopping at Walmart, and there are those growing their own food. There are those paying tens of thousands of dollars for private-school education, and there are those unschooling. If someone has thought of it, someone else is doing it. It is the greatness of this country.

Sandy, our docent, embodies the largeness of spirit and the courage of imagination which, when I witness them, reassure me that I couldn't possibly live anywhere else. That there is a park which is sustained by the work of volunteers (it almost got turned into a golf course not long ago); that there are volunteers who spend hours in the park cleaning out weeds, maintaining native plants, smoothing trails, and leading hikes; that all this is free to anyone willing to drive five minutes off the highway; and that our children should have unlimited access to it all--the people, no less than the landscape--makes being an immigrant here feel like an immeasurable gift.

So we are thankful. And we hope, somehow, to transmit our thankfulness and sense of wonder to our kids.

:::
I've also been preoccupied this past week with reading and rereading Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? I used to read Winterson in college and was intrigued by the title of her new memoir. If you think you know what it means, you almost certainly are wrong. It is very much worth reading to find out.

Ed Levin County Park, Milpitas

Winterson had a hell of a childhood, and she is, for lack of a better word, a complete wacko. Her writing is beautiful, poignant, and heart-rending; like her exquisite novels (Written on the Body, Art & Lies, etc.), the memoir feels like watching someone rip her heart out and hold it out for public viewing, as it pulses. Her story makes most other people's childhoods seem like fairytales with happy endings. Still, against all odds, she keeps going, and her will to live seems (almost) undefeated.

I am tempted to write down a few quotes here, as I scroll down through photos from our Sunday outing two weeks ago: Ed Levin County Park, Milpitas. It was supposed to be a weekend when Sava learned to fish (with another free program offered by the Department of Fish and Game), but we had the schedule wrong and arrived too late. So, we contented ourselves with watching hang gliders run down the mountain, walking around the pond leisurely, playing with roly polies (Sava had four crawling on him at one point), and observing a cow for a very long time . . . indeed.

So here goes.

"Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy--which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it--yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass--they have to--because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered.
What you are pursuing is meaning--a meaningful life. There's the hap--the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use--that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
The pursuit isn't all or nothing--it's all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories."

"Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your own life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become"

More on reading (like all great writers, she is a student of literature, first and foremost):
"The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture--exploit the new thing then move on. 
There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are."

Speaking of wild things, Maurice Sendak is dead, but Raya loves his immortal book. For a few days there, I thought we'd never ever read another thing.

"Mommy, I want to go back into your tummy!"

Sava, in contrast, would read about airplanes all day long. He's been sabotaging my reading times at night lately, as he is not very keen on the Brothers Grimm, and if he convinces me to have "tati" read to him, Rado mostly humors his wishes to read about WWII military aircraft.

:::
Stuff They Say 

Raya: I'm gonna attend to my babies. That means I'll take care of them.

***
One day a week or so ago, Rado had to put both kids to bed. When I came home, he seemed visibly spent and told me he'd yelled at both of them. Then as he recounted to me how he'd put Raya in time-out in her crib because she had defiantly refused to help clean up a bunch of small balls which she had strewn all around living room, I just wrote the whole exchange down.
Rado, when he went to pick her up from her crib:

Raya, do you know why you are here?
I refuse to answer that question! 
Do you want to stay here some more or do you want to come out?
I will answer!
So, do you know why you are here?
Because I didn't clean up the balls! 
When the next day they almost had another spat, Rado said:

Raya, you don't want to see me upset like yesterday!

to which she replied blithely,
Why, what happened yesterday? 

***

It's nearly summer here, and the kids have already had at least three trips to the pool. Each time they come out frozen, blue in the lips, and shivering, but each time they are elated. So, we let them do it. 

Sava now dog-paddles short distances without any help, and Raya floats with just arm floats on. It's amazing to have two kids in the pool and to not have to hold either of them. 

You can't tell, but he is shivering.

When leaving to go to the pool on one of these occasions, Raya exclaimed:

Tati, your shirt is quite unlike a swimming shirt!

"Quite unlike"? We don't know the source of that phrase, but we feel certain that it must be a literary quote, though she obviously is using it in her own sentence.

There's been quite a bit of water play in the backyard, too, and some serious head-dipping in the water table.

I love how simple things make them immeasurably happy.

***

Sava got a new fishing pole from Bob and, after two days of playing with it non-stop, he managed to take it apart in a way that made it seem broken. I was pretty upset but proud of myself for doing a good job of not seeming too upset. Still, I did tell him in a calm voice that I was mad he had managed to break such an expensive present so quickly, to which he replied, bawling through tears:

I'm mad at myself, too! I wanna put myself in jail!!

The dear soul.

***

I was reading to Raya one of her many favorite books, Franklin's Last Trip. When I read the last line, "And he could hardly wait to tell her all about his adventures at the museum," she shot back:

I say barely.

What? 

I say barely.

Took me two long seconds to figure out that she was offering a synonym for "hardly."

Watching a Saturday morning fireman training right in front of a park where we were playing

***

I'd like to know whether bedtime in all households with more than one child is the madness that it is at our house. Seriously, it's as if they ingest an invisible substance right before bed and their brains go on high alert for silliness. They know they are not supposed to jump on Sava's bed, and while Raya gets her fair share of reprimands, we frequently blame Sava for going along with it. When I came upstairs two days ago to get ready for bed and saw the two of them going crazy on the bed, I automatically said: 

Sava!

to which Raya just as automatically replied:

Last warning!

When I looked at her quizzically, because I just couldn't contain myself, she shrugged her shoulders almost shyly and said, 

I just made that up!

No, she didn't. She knows that this is what exactly we would say. 

Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve

Another lovely hike we did since the last blog was at Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve (above & below). It took us exactly three hours two walk two miles because this is what half of our party looked like:

They walk off the beaten path, and they march to the beat of their own drum.

***

At the dinner table a few nights ago, Raya:

Mommy, do you think owls are much smaller than wrens? And do you think they can pull teeth out?

Yes, that's a literary reference, too, but not a quote. She was genuinely curious.

:::

Random

We really won the jackpot on amazing neighbors and a best friend for Raya. So so lucky.

***

He is really into rope-jumping lately,

No, he's not face-planting here, though it looks like it

and she loves to go out in her pajamas: 

***

Thanks to a game "No Stress Chess," Sava knows all the rules of chess, and he and Rado love to play; it is the dearest sight to behold:

If Sava wins, there is a victory dance; if he loses, Rado has to distract him with silliness in order to keep him from crying his eyes out:

***

If it's not chess, it's legos. 

Sava loved the space shuttle that baba Vili and dedi Rumen sent him:

***

She loves taking her babies to the park to swing them:

***

We finished a year of music classes, and it would be fair to say that: 1) Raya enjoyed them more than I could ever have imagined a kid of mine would and 2) she was the most enthusiastic participant every single class. 

It probably will be one of my sweetest memories from her second/third year. I feel so lucky to have been there with her to share this.

We'll be back next year if our schedule allows.

***

I leave you with my favorite image of the past few days: Sava reading to Raya, while she camps out in her sleeping bag on the floor; he is reading about bears:

Happy Sunday, everyone. (Yes, I break my internet-free rule just tonight to post this. More on that in the next post.)