Muddy Day

After an unusually dry winter, Los Angeles is finally getting some rain. There was a major storm yesterday and while it cleared up by morning, it left behind a lot of wet, muddy puddles. Here are the kids getting very dirty in the damp sand area at the pirate park.

I'm in a book!

Specifically, this one. And so are a lot of my friends. So for goodness' sake, why not buy it? It comes out June 14 but you can pre-order it now! In both paper and digital forms.

Beatrice's memory

Here is Beatrice reciting almost all of her book Peedie from memory:

She can in fact recite most of her favorite books in their entirety, including Olivia, Madeline, and Big Dog, Little Dog. Which means I can no longer fool her by skipping some pages in her longer storybooks: "Read The Runaway Bunny," she will say, "and read all the pages."

In general, Beatrice has an incredibly good memory. She knows, for example, the names of every child in her preschool class and the children in the next grade up, too, as well as the names of their parents, the cars their parents drive, and the design of their lunchboxes.

Beatrice at a birthday party with her school friends Adeline and Nicolas

More than that, she has a long memory - she often starts up a conversation with me by saying, "Do you remember ... ?" and then recalls the smallest details from her birthday party last May or her trip to Dallas with Dev last August. Sometimes I'll think she is making up something only to find later that she's remembering a real event I had long forgotten.

I don't know how much of this is typical for all kids her age and how much is just Beatrice - Dev says he had this sort of memory as a child so perhaps that's where she gets it - but it's led to a number of nice developments. For one, it's all the more gratifying to plan parties, holidays, and other events knowing that she'll lovingly recall details from them for a year afterward.

Beatrice and Miller at Jack's house

More than that, the improvement of Beatrice's memory has assisted in the development of two other signs of maturity: gratitude and remorse. Anyone who has ever given Beatrice a present might like to know that she remembers every single gift she's ever been given by anyone, no matter how small, and every time she uses the gift she thanks the giver again. It's "Thank you, Rosemary, for my pizza set!" or "Thank you, Travis' mommy, for my dog book!" every single time she takes them out to play with them. She also thanks me for everything I do for her, including regular parental duties like changing her clothes, making her dinner, cleaning her room, or helping her brush her teeth, and often weeks after I helped her with something she'll say at random, "Thank you, Mommy, for changing my sheets when I spilled water all over my bed." In the beginning, she learned to say thank you simply by rote but over time I think she has developed a genuine sense of gratitude that is one of her more charming traits.

Miller's father Evan helping Beatrice pick oranges

Even more affecting is Beatrice's sense of remorse. As with favors and gifts, Beatrice remembers every single bad thing she has ever done. And as with saying "thank you," "sorry" seems to have gone from a rote recitation to a genuine state of mind. Weeks after Beatrice has committed some wrong and been chastised for it, she will say out of the blue, "I am so sorry I hit Arthur with a shovel," in the saddest voice, or hug me and say, "Mommy, I am sorry I am sometimes too bad."

Of course, lest you think Beatrice sounds too perfect, I remind you that these heartbreaking renunciations of past deeds don't necessarily translate into her doing better next time.

Comically, her powers of memory have well outpaced her powers of cognition, so she can recite the alphabet and the numbers 1-20, but she doesn't really understand what letters are and she can only meaningfully count to 4. But it's interesting to see the ways in which memory allows her to have a sense of self, relationships, time, and cause and effect.

Arthur, Month Ten

Arthur is ten months old! and celebrating with his first tooth. Or his first teeth, as overnight he went from having none at all to having six in various stages of emersion.

Otherwise Arthur spent most of this month working on standing and walking unsupported - he's very close now, but his balance is still not quite there.

This month I took a four-day vacation to visit my sister in Reno and then rented a cabin in Lake Tahoe with my friends Lilli, Melissa, and Sara. Dev spent that time drilling Arthur in walking with a cart. He also didn't put him in pants.

(Beatrice walked with the same cart here, at 14 months. In typical second child style, Arthur hits all his milestones before Beatrice did.)

Arthur's favorite new place to go is Kuki's Playshop, an indoor playground about a mile from our house, and of course he still loves the baby gym.

He's also been working on communication, both with speech (he added "mama" to his repertoire) and gestures. In fact, Arthur is fond of making emphatic gestures, underscoring his babbles by pointing, clapping, throwing his hands up in the air, or slamming them down on the table. The first time he said "mama" he pointed right at me, said "mama!" and then threw his hands up above his head laughing in victory.

He's very resourceful, motivated, and, as his resume says, a self-starter: completely on his own he taught himself to use a cup*, to put on socks, and to draw with chalk or crayons. He also independently invented the game of baseball using a wooden spoon and a tennis ball he found.

As I say every month, Arthur and Beatrice are spending more and more time playing together, but it continues to be true - they have a lot of private jokes and games and while Beatrice loves bossing him around and telling him quite clearly which of her "belongings" are "not for babies," she also readily shares toys and treats with him.

(Beatrice is in her ballet clothes.)

She continues to enjoy playing "mother": today at lunch Arthur let out a short little sneeze and she exclaimed, "Don't worry, Arthur, I'm getting you the thermometer!" and then rushed off to the bathroom to find it.

* "How," you might ask, "did he teach himself to use a cup?" By taking a small plastic cup, dipping it into the dogs' water dish, and then drinking from of it, of course.

A sad day.

Today Beatrice said goodbye to the pacifier.

I didn't mean for it to happen today - I was planning on letting it go on her third birthday in June - but nap time came around and I couldn't find a single pacifier anywhere, until finally after ten frantic minutes searching I just came back into her room and told her she'd have to nap without her "mimi" today. And then once we had gone for one nap without it, it just didn't make sense to go back.

Enjoying a mimi at two months old

We first gave Beatrice a pacifier when she was a few weeks old and she loved it: it was an instant reset button, it cancelled out all her fussiness or bad moods instantly. She slept with it, she took it in the car, she chewed on it when she was teething.

Originally I had intended to take it away when she turned one, then when she turned two, but at each juncture, I figured, why? Why take away something that she clearly adores, that gives her so much comfort and happiness? I hoped she'd just gradually grow out of it on her own, at her own pace.

Beatrice at two months old

Over time, though, the pacifier started becoming a real problem. She'd lose it at night and start shrieking in the dark until we ran in and found it for her. She'd drop it in a store and it would roll away and I'd be stuck crawling around underneath the clothes racks. She'd throw it out of her stroller into a filthy sludgy gutter and I'd have to try and find some way to clean it off. And instead of becoming less attached to it, as I'd hoped, she only seemed to become more attached to it. She would have two or even three at a time: one in her mouth, and backups in her hands (reminding me of a chain smoker). And once she could talk, she was constantly begging, bargaining, whining, even lying to get it.

We tried to limit pacifier use to nighttime but it kept expanding to night, then night and naps, then night and naps and car trips and when she was sick and when she was upset - until the only time she definitively didn't have it anymore was at school, and even then she'd race back to the car at the end of the day to find it waiting for her in her carseat.

A big part of me felt like, if she needs this thing so much, why should I take it away? But another part of me felt that the very fact that she was so addicted to the pacifier meant that it had to go. Plus, on a practical note, she was starting to get an overbite.

So today after nap Beatrice and I took all her mimis and put them in a box and I told her we were going to give them to "brand new tiny babies*" at the hospital who needed them, and then I gave her some ice cream and told her she could pick out any toy she wanted at Target. All the while I felt terrible because I knew how much I was asking her to give up, and that once the excitement of ice cream and a new toy was past, she'd realize she'd given away her most prized possession and it wasn't coming back.

The idea of the tiny babies captivated her and she asked me to retell the story seven or eight times, asking questions about where the hospital was and where the babies were, and she told me that she loved the tiny babies and that she wanted to help them. At bedtime tonight, she never once mentioned a mimi, though she did drag out the nighttime ritual longer and longer - one more story, one more song - and then finally, I left and that was that. After more than two and a half years, no more mimis.

Beatrice with her chosen toy, an electronic chipmunk that squeaks and moves around

*We took Arthur's pacifiers away, too, but he never really cared much about them either way, so it was a much less dramatic send-off. Beatrice insisted he get a toy at Target, too, though, a plastic airplane from the dollar section.

Vegetable Garden!

Finally, a real garden! After all the fun Beatrice and I had with last summer's forays into vegetable gardening I couldn't wait to have a full-fledged garden this year, and thanks to Dev now I do. With help from our gardener Jose and his crew, we cleared the back of the yard of its mixture of roses, weeds, discarded plant pots, dry leaves, and black widow spiders, and replaced them all with two large planting beds that Dev built for me. Each one is 4 x 10 feet, with trellises along the back wall for climbing vegetables.

BEFORE

AFTER

We are still planning on re-landscaping the entire front and back yard this year but until that big project kicks off I can now stay busy with edible gardening (my favorite kind of gardening).



For summer crops we planted:
Bull's Blood beets
St. Valery carrots
Shishito peppers*
California Wonder bell peppers
Florida Market eggplants
Clemson Spineless okra
Black Beauty zucchini
Golden zucchini
Small Sugar pumpkins
Blue Lake pole beans
Kentucky Wonder pole beans
Amish Pie squash
Waltham butternut squash


In the fall we'll start some winter crops like asparagus, broccoli, kale, lettuce, radishes, and spinach, and maybe second rounds of the more successful summer crops (since in Los Angeles there's not that much difference between summer and winter).

Everything's organic and almost everything is hierloom: we got all of our seeds online from Baker Creek Hierloom Seeds and Sustainable Seed Company.

I've spent the last few weeks immersing myself in information about crop rotation, companion planting, and pollination (did you know you have to soak okra seeds in water for 24 hours before planting them?), and I'm sure I have tons more to learn, but I'm going to look at this year's garden as a test run. By planting a wide variety of vegetables, I can hopefully figure out what grows best where.

Meanwhile Beatrice is beside herself with excitement and wants to check the yard every day to "harvest vegetables." Maybe this year she'll have a pumpkin that isn't a fraud.

*Recently Dev and I went out to dinner at the Lazy Ox Canteen downtown with our friends Chris and Nadia and I had Japanese shishito peppers for the first time. They are now one of my all-time favorite things. Nadia said she started growing them herself after first tasting them at a sushi restaurant. I simply cannot recommend them highly enough, they are so delicious.

Before and After #4: Front of the House

Our second* major renovation project is complete!

We added a brick and wrought iron fence around the front yard, allowing Beatrice, Arthur, and the dogs to play there without running into the street. The fence also helps visually separate our house from the very similar-looking house next door and generally amps up the house's "curb appeal."

BEFORE

That house on the left? Not ours.

AFTER

Dev designed the fence and gate and built it with the help of contractors.

He also insisted on adding this very elaborate (but admittedly useful) integrated mailbox system into the gate.

This one change has made the front yard so much more useable, it feels like we doubled our total amount of outdoor space. Arthur in particular loves playing in the front yard while waiting for planes to fly overhead.

Thank you so much Suzan and Naresh for all your help, we appreciate it so much!
After we finished the front fence we decided to brighten up the front porch a little bit.

One thing I didn't like about the front of our house was how flat and exposed the facade was, so we replaced the carved wooden brackets holding up our porch overhang with more substantial square pillars to add a little more dimension to the front of the house. That small change had a really big effect - now the house looks larger, more substantial, and there's more depth to the front.

BEFORE

AFTERThen we added a new bench, a new light and doorbell, and yes, a monogrammed pillow.

OLD
NEW

But my absolute favorite part of the entire project is the new house number I got from this shop on Etsy.

OLDNEW
This summer we'll be redesigning all of the landscaping in the front and back yard, and I still plan to re-stucco and repaint the house exterior, but we're well on our way!

Arthur eating dandelions

*You may remember our first big project was Beatrice and Arthur's room.