Category: Family & Home

Just received news that a childhood friend has passed on. Fallen to metastatic breast cancer, most likely a result of treatments for Hodgkin’s disease, aka lymph cancer, which she had dealt with for more than a decade. Stephanie was in her mid-30s. Stephanie and her sister and me and my brother used to play together when we were neighbors in Santa Clara in the 70s, and our families were friends. Aside from a reunion in the 90s, we had mostly fallen out of touch. I had heard that she had beaten the disease a while ago, but apparently it returned with a vengeance. Stephanie (on the left, above, with her daughter and mother) was living a very holistic life in Hawaii with her boyfriend and their young daughter Aurora. Her mother tells me that Stephanie faced death with total acceptance and love, and that her guru guided her out of this world. Of course I find myself wishing we had stayed in better touch through the years. Blessings, angel. You were a very bright star. You still are. The s’mores were great.

The way language forms in toddlers, there’s a period where parents aren’t sure whether kids are talking or not. Sometimes experimental proto-syllables come together in ways that sound an awful lot like language, but aren’t. And there are clear attempts at full words that nevertheless still manage to munge a syllable or otherwise fail to make it out of the mouth fully formed. Miles is in that phase now, where we’re just not sure whether he’s talking or not, but know he’s definitely working hard on it.

He’s also a big fan of Pirate’s Booty, aka “baby heroin” (yes, he eats a well-balanced diet and no, he does not subsist on junk; but he still likes his Booty). The other day Amy made the mistake of giving him some Booty before his proper meal. Needless to say, the subsequent attempt to switch from Booty to beans didn’t go well, and he kept pointing at the cabinet where the Booty is kept and grunting. Suddenly, Amy says, he said, clear as day, “boooo – teeee.”

Seems too context-perfect to be accidental, so we think “booty” is probably his first word. Or at least that’s what I really want to believe :) So far he hasn’t repeated it yet (despite our encouragement), so I’m not going to try and convince myself that it was. I wouldn’t mind hearing a clear “Mommy” or “Daddy” first.

The Mozart Magic Music Cube is unique in the universe of toys in that its construction utterly resists repair via either crazy glue or duct tape. Oh, sure, you can try, but I promise your fix will not hold. The battery retention panel is severely weakened by the presence of a switch right in the middle of the plastic, which leaves it with almost no structural integrity to resist the pressure of the spring-backed, outward-pushing battery. There is so little surface area to which one can apply glue without permanently sealing the battery in place, and no place to apply duct tape adequately without disrupting the large side buttons which are, after all, the point of the toy.

A two-foot fall is all it takes to snap the battery retention panel. Miles broke Simone’s cube. All repair attempts failed (the only thing I can imagine working would be to encircle the whole unit with an old leather belt, but that would of course ruin the lines, not to mention the functionality) so we replaced it for her. Then Miles went to visit and broke the replacement in the same way within minutes.

Embryonics, you owe us $70.

Miles is crazy for drums, a passion sparked at or near his first birthday by the gift of an actual drum, and by a book called Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb, which is about all these beatnik monkeys (with sideburns!) who play crazy rhythms on drums they wear around their necks. Starts with a single monkey beating out a rhythm with his thumb, then evolves to a thunderous chorus created by thousands of monkeys all playing at once. The book itself has a great rhythm. All the way through, meter like this:

One thumb, one thumb,
beating on a drum
dum ditty dum ditty
dum dum dum

Amy and I have fun riffing on this. The drum mallets, of course, don’t confine themselves to the drum head. Mallets on sliding glass door, mallets on daddy’s head, mallets on other toys. Crazy rhythms everywhere.

He’s also way into climbing now. Started with small footstool, then climbing on the drum, now climbing chairs and surfing the arms, riding Simone’s hobby horse every way but the way it’s meant to be ridden, using his schooldesk chair like an acrobatics prop. Seems to be made out of rubber, and is an excellent fall-er. Some bruises, but they don’t deter him, and no really serious ow-ies yet. He’s also taken to upturning chairs (including his high chair) from below, just to hear them thud.

Now that’s he’s moved pretty much fully from jar food to finger foods, cleaning up after his meals has become a home improvement project in its own right. This task consists of the following subroutines: Shake foodstuffs out of his clothes and hair, then wash his his face and hands in the sink. Scrub down the bib, sponge out the high chair, use a broom and dustpan to clean up the wreckage of his meal in a 6′ circle around the epicenter, then sponge same area clean with the “dirty sponge.” Finally, put away all the components of his meal – bean container, cheese block, cracker box, melon half, and so on.

This is why Amy has hung a picture of the wreckage of the 1907 San Francisco earthquake above his high chair.

Two weeks after installing lawn, it’s being sabotaged by gophers. Little piles and big holes dotted all over the place. Looks like I’ve blanketed over a serious warren. Caddyshack seems a bit less funny than it once did. Brother John said his sonic gopher stake did the trick, so we got one. 18″ long stake with 4 “C” batteries, emits an annoying high-pitched buzz into the earth every 28 seconds, lasts six months. Earth is denser than air, so signal should travel well (claims 6000 sq. feet coverage). Can be inserted so cap is flush with soil, for easy mow-over. Put your ear to the earth and you can actually hear it, though faintly. Allegedly the gophers will be curious about it for first 2-3 weeks, and hole activity may increase. Then they’ll realize the annoying neighbor is here to stay, and clear out. We’ll see. Better than dredging corpses out of the lawn. Another friend reported success attaching a hose to exhaust pipe and gassing them out. Would rather not resort to such dramatics, but listen up, gophers: we will prevail!

Any Ace Hardware has a dozen or so lawn sprinklers to choose from, from dirt simple plastic rings on up to precision oscillating drums with variable scope, built-in clog pick, and snap-on hose attachment. But none are as elegant as the simple anodized aluminum head. Red for rectangular lawns, blue for squares, green for circular (I think). Just like when I was five. How long has this sprinkler been manufactured without alteration? Seems to have looked like this forever. Simple, works, beautiful, why change? Finished final stage of lawn this weekend, installing bender board. Ready to plant the beds.

Last weekend started crunching away at the back yard, which has looked like a lunar landscape, preparing to lay sod. Saturday a.m. spent a couple more hours tweaking, then broke the cycle of infinite revision and added topsoil, fertilizer, rolled, and layed down 96 chunks of sod (images). By 3:30 we had a whole new back yard, amazing. In two weeks it’ll be usable, won’t be a mud factory, erosion center, eyesore.

Rarely does a project at home or work take less effort or time than expected. I thought this one would go all weekend, but the work went like buttah.

Let the “sod” jokes begin.

Hard to believe Miles is one year old already. Actually his birthday was back in September, but he was sick on the big day. We had a small party a week later. Now he’s on the brink of talking, is eating solid food and feeding himself (with hands, and working on spoons) and is into everything (everything). In this set, Miles goes hiking, takes a trip to Minnesota and meets all his cousins, sweeps like crazy, learns sign language, plays with hoses, wears Chinese silk, and toilet papers the house.

Also: Miles loves to push toys through the cat door. One day he decided he could follow his things right on through, but misjudged his hip girth by a couple of sizes and… No child labor laws were violated in the making of this short. Miles Stuck in the Cat Door.

Yesterday walked for hours with Amy, spying on people’s yards, siphoning inspiration for landscaping. Our backyard is tabula rasa – craggy, hard-pack dirt and clay, nothing doing. All brown, all the time. It’s going to be transformed. Today off to Yardbirds home and garden (like Home Despot, but left over from before the days of neighborhood-squashing superchains; groovy 60s bird logo, too) to order sod and topsoil. Spent rest of the afternoon with hoe and rake, cracking open difficult soil, removing rocks and weeds, chopping clods, slicing out roots, prepping the earth for the lawn we’ll install next weekend. This is one of those elemental tasks that makes you feel like a homesteader. “This dirt is difficult and I hate it, but dammit, it’s our dirt.”