They picked up these flags at the Florida state line welcome center.

Since this weekend is the Hangout Fest in Alabama, we headed east to the lovely gulf shoreline along the Florida panhandle – less than an hour from home.

Crushing a sand castle with his mighty strength

I’m sort of in this picture, too

We packed light – a couple of juice boxes, some toys.  I packed a backpack for each boy with a towel, some fruit snacks, a water bottle, and their swimsuit.  I wore my new Popina Swimwear suit (not a paid ad – I linked to it on purpose to share it with all of you.  Retro suits, super comfortable, no tugging to keep it in place . . . love it, highly recommend it, will put some pix of me in it below).  We threw a few other items in a beach bag and were off down the highway, wind in our hair.

Speaking of hair . . . 

The neon sunnies are from the Color Run, and I sorta love ‘em.

Side view.  In case you’d like it modeled by a non-model.

We spread out a double-wide beach towel – a gift from The Professor’s aunt, given to us many years ago – and anchored the corners with our bags, shoes.  I put the boys in their swimsuits and rash guards, we all applied copious sunscreen, and then waded through the deep, powdery white sand to dip our toes in the surprisingly rough Gulf waters.

The boys were satellites, sometimes letting go of my hand and braving the waves solo, wandering further and further away, then hurling themselves at my legs and grabbing on, nervously giggling.  They tumbled a few times.  We tried to let them find their own feet.

We took breaks from being in the water to build sandcastles – me fetching water in buckets, to and fro, to and fro, while The Professor showed them how to fill a bucket with wet sand and then flip it over on a flat spot, lifting the bucket carefully, carefully.  We adorned the castles with the two mini-American flags they’d picked up at a rest stop.  They knocked them all down, making monster sounds, RAWWWRRRR, filling their clothes with sand, their hair with sand.

Today I was in the waves, up to my knees or more, holding Liam’s hand.  We caught a piece of kelp, and I showed it to him, told him what it was called.  Suddenly I was spun back into my high school days, when I used to live in Northern California.  We would go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, look at the otters and sea lions, walk along Cannery Row and eat at Domenico’s on the pier.  Sometimes we would go to Santa Cruz, watch the surfers.  When we drove over the mountains (who is “we?” friends, faceless friends), we would buy cherries from a roadside stand, warmed from the sun, and eat them and spit the pits out the window as we drove, the wind in our hair.

I remembered also the beach trip I took with my family four years ago, in Pensacola.  Jack was just one year old.  We stayed on the Navy base in special military beach housing.  I went for long walks at night with my sisters, watching others with flashlights and nets, crabbing by moonlight.  We went to an air and space museum.  My brother’s girlfriend was there.  The Blue Angels flew overhead, practicing for an air show, and we watched.  The next year, when Liam was just a few months old, we went to Sandestin with The Professor’s family.  It was a period of high seaweed, the one week out of every year when the entire first few feet of water is blanketed in the stuff, and wading out into the water was like moving through stewed collard greens.  Slimy, warm, green, and smelly.  We played games in the evenings on the table in the family room, left the balcony door open, sea wind drifting in.  My mother-in-law made jokes about chucking in a ham hock and calling it dinner.

Today, holding Liam’s hand as he was thrown around roughly by waves, I was in the here and now and also in all of those other places at once.  I’m struggling to write this in a non-ridiculous way, but I began to feel as if all of my beach vacations were little stars, pinpricks of light on a vast black expanse, and that together they formed a constellation that means Beach Vacation to me, in my life.  Like they were separate stories themselves, but also together drew a bigger, more nuanced picture.  And then I pondered that everything we do, every experience or memory or minute is a star in our sky, and the way you string them together in your own mind and heart is your own little set of constellations.  I thought of beach memories, but I could just as easily have recalled every time Liam had held my hand, or each time I had played in sand with my boys, or each time I’d spent a Saturday morning in fun with them.  You connect your stars in different ways and you read different constellations, and thus do you stand back and behold the expanse of your life, summarized in a meaningful way, but with individual moments still clear to you.

And back when neither of us had jobs, and money was tight and seemed like it always would be tight, and it felt like we would never get out – my constellations were more ominous patterns, looming, bright but frightening.  Now when I look at the expanse of my life and the pinprick star experiences scattered across it, I see only beauty . . . luck . . . love and happiness.

Anyway.  Perhaps in time I’ll learn to express how this image came to me in a better way, but at one point I looked down at the seaweed clutched in my son’s little chubby hand and I saw galaxies, nebulae, a whole field of stars splashed across my mind’s eye, a translucent film laid across the knobbly spreading pattern of an ordinary piece of kelp.

Then he tumbled, was caught in the pull of a wave, and I dragged him up by the hand, both of us a bit startled, laughing out loud.  ”Do it again!  Do it again!”

We did it again.

The little man himself, in profile

Beach bum

1. Daily Morning Yoga.  Doing pretty well with this one – 3-4 mornings a week!  It’s been great for my old creaking joints.

2. Trip to Visit Siblings. So far I’m totally sucking here – 0 for 0.  Student loans are a drag, man.  In August we get a “raise” when Jack switches from daycare to free public school – maybe I’ll be able to play catch up then.

3. Run Three Organized Races.  So far I’ve run the First Light Marathon relay (5 miles), the Azalea Trail 5k, and the Color Run 5k.  So this one’s done!

4.Take a Long Leisurely Bike Ride. Not yet.  My tires are flat and The Professor took the bike pump to the NOLA apartment, so we’ll have to remember to bring that back.

5. Increase Charitable Giving. I think it’s gone up just a titch.  We did increase paying our taxes by plenty-hundred dollars when the payroll tax holiday expired.  I like to think of that as charitable giving – it’s going towards services for the poor and sick, right?

6. Write Something 10+ pages long for pleasure.  I have actually started a piece or two.  But not gotten very far.  I was focused on writing publications for work lately, which is not so much “for pleasure” as it is “hideously boring for all but maybe seven people in the world.”

7. Read Ten Novels.  I’ve gotten through seven this year – not bad for a busy lawyer!  Here is what I’ve read so far, along with a brief review:

a. The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain.  5/5 stars, loved it.  This is historical fiction, a beautiful story following Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson.  It is told from Hadley’s point of view, and takes place almost entirely in Paris in the twenties, during its golden years of concentrated talent.  Really, really good – ignore the snarky NY Times review, which was really, really bad.  I enjoyed this quite a lot.

b. Broken Harbor, by Tana French.  Tana French’s The Likeness is hands down the best mystery I’ve ever read – none of her other three can match it, but they’re all worth reading anyhow.  Broken Harbor is the latest, and it is a page-turner.  It doesn’t end in a totally satisfying way, but is a great read, like all of her mysteries (each first-person-narrated by a different character out of the Dublin Murder Squad).

c. Blue Nights, by Joan Didion.  Blue Nights is not a novel, it’s a memoir, but it captivated me.  You can read more about my reaction to it here.

d. Play it As It Lays, by Joan Didion.  Spare, merciless, a difficult read because it is so cruel.  My first Didion novel.  Wonderful, but vicious.

e. The Mercy of Thin Air, by Ronlyn Domingue.  I’d give it a 3.5 out of 5 – decent, but not amazing.  Whenever I go to Faulkner House Books on Pirate Alley in the Quarter, I get a recommendation from whoever happens to be there.  The latest recommendation included The Paris Wife and this book, because the writer is from Louisiana and the work takes place in New Orleans in the 20s.  The book described a lot of familiar landmarks to me, and the passionate love story was moving.  But it jumps back and forth in time in a way that is too choppy and confusing, and the writing and the story were good, but not great.

f. Thud!, by Terry Pratchett.  Any Pratchett is a good Pratchett – fun, satirical, lots of slapstick.

g. The Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett.  Again, a solid read.  Not my favorite Pratchett, but even mediocre Pratchett is more fun to read than just about anyone else.

8. Do 200 workouts.  I’m on #70.  So just a touch behind schedule, but still doing well!

How about you?  Read any good books lately?  I’ve got two more on my nightstand waiting for me to make time for them – Metal Man Walking, written by a friend of mine, and The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, the Pirate Alley book-maiden’s last recommendation.  I also still have your recommendations – I love Ann Patchett, so State of Wonder is on my list (I have Taft and Bel Canto), as are The Language of Flowers and the trilogies by Garth Nix and Hilary Mantel.  If ya’ll are still looking for recommendations, I did like The Paris Wife, and of course Julia Glass remains my favorite novelist that I “found” in Pirate Alley.

I’m in Plano for the week, at a conference.  I’m staying in a depressing extended stay hotel, which reminds me of my 2011 summer at my firm, when I also stayed in a depressing extended stay hotel.  The difference then was that I had a CAR.  Here, I have no car – I am at the mercy of the hotel shuttle and its random schedule.  I will probably break records for the smallest meal reimbursement request of all time – just $38 for the week, consisting entirely of Wal Mart groceries.  This has been a week of mac and cheese, omelettes, and red wine from a screw top bottle poured into a juice glass.

It’s also been a week of long runs.  One thing I do enjoy when the children are out of my hair is a good long workout, and I did a five mile run today and yesterday, exploring the pleasantly boring suburban streets filled with foreign engineers and their families.  (Seriously.  This is, like, Little India.)  I have been watching bad tv, doing some work at night, and drinking too much coffee in an attempt to stay awake through the looooong days of Power Point presentations.  I don’t sleep well in hotels, either, so I’m getting to the point of Majorly Sleepy, on this, my fourth night away from home.

I prefer my weeklong conferences to be in exciting cities, where I can walk around and sight see and try different delicious foods and eat alone in restaurants like a brave girl.  If I’ve got to be away from the boys, I prefer it to be somewhere cool.  But . . . eh.  You take what you get, right?  In the absence of a cool city, this week I’ve enjoyed some amazing bad television – including The Office (abominable these days, not interesting since Season 3), Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and some sort of criminal show with Kevin Bacon.  I’ve savored some bad red wine.  I have eaten a box of Great Value macaroni and cheese.  I have slept in until as late as 7am.  The only thing better than a vacation is a change, right?

Jack’s birthday on Thursday was, of course, under Murphy’s law and all of the other laws of physics that occasionally make working parents crazy, the due date for an absolutely enormous doc review project that took over my life.  I pulled almost-all-nighters on Tuesday and Wednesday nights in an attempt to assure that I would spend at least five minutes with my baby on his birthday.  Thursday morning when I woke up at 5 am after just 2 hours of sleep, I billed another hour, and then gave myself a couple of hours off to spend making Jack feel special.  I went upstairs and taped streamers and balloons in the boys’ bedroom doorway.  Liam woke up first, of course, and ripped some down in his glee, of course – but Jack was still impressed.  I carried him downstairs and plied him with his favorite breakfast – yogurt and fruit snacks.  I let him open a few of his gifts, including LIGHT-UP SHOES MOM!  OH MY GOD THESE ARE SO COOL!!  (Thanks, Aunt Amanda!)  Then I played a video from his birth,* which the boys wanted to watch three times.  I wept quietly behind their jaunty little heads while they chatted about the cute baby on the screen.

(I had forgotten how black Jack’s hair was at birth.  It all fell out immediately and turned white-blond, but when he was born his hair was the color of charcoal, and his eyes deep blue.  He was peaceful, contemplative, as brand new babies tend to be.  His first name is actually John, and his middle name is Calum, which means dove – we’d struggled with a picking middle name for him, wanting one that was unique (since John is so common) – we chose Calum because he was so peaceful, so quiet, with that newborn air of wisdom and calm.)

I went to work for a few hours and then met the Professor and Jack at his new big boy school, which happened to host kindergarten registration on our little future kindergartener’s fifth birthday.  We had to fill out umpteen forms, and I kept dating them 4-25-08, instead of 4-25-13.  (*insert parental anguish about WHERE DID THOSE FIVE YEARS GO*)  I like the school.  I think he will, too.  After pre-reg I went back to work and the boys went home for Jack to take a nap.  I was getting close to the end of my project but not quite there, so I enlisted a handful of paralegals and secretaries (all mothers) to help me.  All I had to do was say “It’s my kid’s birthday and I gotta get this out before I can leave,” and they jumped on my requests.  Together, we got the thing finished by 5:45 and I was out the door.  (I bought them all little $5 gifts the next day.  I know it’s not required, but I appreciate the support and I wanted them to know it.)

Anyway, the kid wanted to go for pizza on his birthday.  So the Professor told me he’d meet me at the Mellow Mushroom on my side of the bay.  So I went to a Mellow Mushroom on my side of the bay.  He went to the OTHER Mellow Mushroom on my side of the bay.  Long, frustrating story short, my big boy’s birthday dinner was over by the time I got to the right restaurant.  Luckily, he didn’t really notice – just said “Hi mom!  Look at this present I got!”  Thank heavens for small children and their poor concept of time.  And now we know there are TWO Mellow Mushrooms within a few miles of my workplace (but twenty minutes’ drive apart from each other!)

Liam and I swung by the grocery on our way home, and bought a tiny white frosted cake dusted with rainbow sparkles, and a helium birthday balloon.  I told Liam to pick out a balloon for Jack, and he chose the pink “Congratulations!  It’s a Girl!”  If I wasn’t worried about visitors getting the wrong idea, I would have just bought that one.  But we were having a party Saturday and I don’t want rumors going around, so I steered Liam toward a more appropriately-messaged balloon.  We bought it all and took it home and ate a bit of cake, and then put the boys to bed.

Saturday was Jack’s party.  We invited his whole class, plus a few friends from church and my coworkers’ 3 small kids.  We had it at our house, in the backyard – and were blessed with glorious weather.  I put out every toy the boys own, including a water table and a hose spraying thing, and then we parents milled around on the back porch while the kids picnicked on beach towels and tortured the dog with the water hose.  Jack wanted a dolphin party – he’d consistently requested this theme for several months – so I bought a few undersea decorations from Party City, and found a dolphin balloon ring toss game online.  Voila.

You see the dolphin balloon in the foreground?

Check out my mad cake decorating skillz

Virgil photobomb

Beach towel picnic

NOT a “Congratulations It’s a Girl” balloon

Jack greeted every guest with charming enthusiasm, racing up hollering their names: “ADELAIDE!!! Adelaide’s here, Mom!!!”  ”OHMYGOD IT’S ANNAROSE!!!!” “Joe!  JOE!!!!!  It’s Joe, it’s Joe!!!”  Etc.  They all played well in the yard, we ate PB&J sandwiches shaped like fish, “under the sea” fruit salad, and “seaweed dip” (spinach and artichoke dip).  He opened presents, we sang Happy Birthday, and a few slices of cake later, everyone went home and the Professor and I were cleaning up, then napping heavily.

The next day, both children were caught up in a deathly grip of a miserable tummy bug that kind of wrecked everyone’s week.  I had a mediation on Monday, I was teaching an offsite seminar on Tuesday, and arguing a dispositive motion on Friday, and continuing to do the doc review project from hell in the in-between times.  In the end, the husband took off all the days but Tuesday – I ended up sending a colleague in my stead to the seminar.   Luckily it’s the end of the year for him, so he didn’t have to cancel any classes.

Anyhow, it was a good fifth birthday.  Since then, Liam has kept asking if it’s June fifteenth yet (his birthday).  Conveniently, he wants an octopus party.  So I’ve got all the decorations – we’ll just see if we can find a blow-up octopus balloon.  I’ll make an octopus cupcake cake. I’m already looking forward to it.

Meantime, I leave for Texas for the work-week.  Normally I love doing offsite trips – I get a little break – and I’m looking forward to this seminar, but a week is kind of long.  I’ll miss my sweeties – all three of them.  And the dog, too, I guess.  ;)  I’ll make sure to bring them little pressies from Texas.

OK, this disjointed post that I wrote in snatched minutes here and there over the course of 9 days can, well, just go ahead and END.

*not the actual birth – that was not filmed! – but my exhausted punchy self holding him in the hospital room in his first few hours.

*Allow me to take a brief moment and acknowledge the hideous week we all just lived through – some of us more harrowingly close to events than others.  So.  Yeah.

The Bostonians

All of us non-Boston MILPs send our love to all of you, who had your city turn into a Michael Bay movie overnight.  As an aside, I was surprised at how many MILPs live in Boston – there are a large number of Boston women in this group.  I have collected below our Bostonians’ reactions to the happenings of this past week, raw memories all together.  I will just list the posts without commentary – I’d hate to sound flip.

Magic Cookie, Friday, April 19,  Lockdown.

Mommy Madness, Sunday, April 21,  Well I love that dirty water . . .

Portia, Tuesday April 16, Distracted; and Sunday, April 21, It’s Over.

suzyjd, Sunday, April 21, Intensity. 

 And in other news . . .

AAL comforted Bostonians, and all Americans, with sloths.  Naturally.  ***I MUST ADD THIS, an unofficial addendum to AAL’s post.  We all could use a few more sloths in our lives.*** She also ponders how to see herself, 3 years out of lawyerin’ . . . reports some happy news . . . and shares some pix of Pea’s additions to the lady den.

But I Do was a bit less perky and a bit more pissed off after Monday.

Butterflyfish has me singing the Beastie Boys now . . . describes her littlest one at one . . . and joins in on the conversation the CM started about Leaning In.

FOTD has a picture-post-heavy week, showing us a day at the park, a sweet master, and a scallywag of a party, arrrrr maties.  She also opines on being a mother, and having a mother, and patience, and love, and all those sweet motherly things.

Magic Cookie saves me from having to read Lean In myself – - – see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, *gasp, are we there yet?*, Part 9, and Part 10.

Cowgirl in the City needs some advice.

Frenchie Flip has a busy weekend and some money woes.

Grace goes a little crazy, has kind of a cool week at work, and gets weary of fielding the “when’re ya gonna have number two” inevitable question.

Izzie has more work drama, and blogs about having multilingual, multicultural kiddos.

Kate is displaying Rosebud art, buckling down for finals, but still has time for walks and entertaining company in her study hidey hole.

LC is contemplating a doctor prescribed diet.

Lag Liv struggles through dealing with illness and inquisitive children (I remembered this exchange with Landon that LL describes when the bad guys actually did THROW BOMBS AS THEY RAN AWAY FROM POLICE, straight out of a child’s nightmares), and goes wild on her closets.

Mommy Madness gets in shape for hiking season.

Pseudostoops reminisces about an old favorite site and posts some recipes.

PT Law Mom quotes ATL, and worries about Pumpkinhead.

Hard Boiled Egg threw a shower, and suggests some reads.

Daisy JD talks beauty, and searches for a needle in a haystack.

The boys accompanied me.  As we rode to the fairgrounds, my littlest asked if I was going on a run.  ”Yes, Liam,” I said.  ”Tin I doe wiff you?” he lisped, his face open and smiling.  ”No babe, you cheer for me at the end!” was my perky reply, to which his smile broke, his face slowly crumbled, and a couple of enormous tears pooled in the corners of his tiny little black eyes.  ”Bu- bu- but I wanna doe wiff you, Mama,” he said very sadly, quietly.  He was really heartbroken at the thought of me running off without him.  I suppose a 5K is just half an hour to me, but half an hour is kind of eternity to a kid.

So in the end, I told each boy that I’d take him for a part of the course.  The race map showed that it doubled back on itself several times, so I figured I’d take them each on a little leg of the run before finishing on my own.  Liam’s heart will sometimes have to break and I will have to live with it, but not this time.

Late, we inched our way in heinous traffic to the fairgrounds, and could see puffs of color rising like smoke from the grandstand set up at the Start and Finish lines.  The Professor did battle in the chaos of the poorly directed traffic in the grass overflow parking lot, while I took Jack’s hand and hustled him towards the Start, anxious that we would miss our starting time.  We threaded our way through a crowd which had gathered in front of the grand stand.  On stage a young radio DJ type guy with a microphone was hosting party games with the crowd of folks who’d already run the course and were enjoying the post-race festival atmosphere.  I pulled Jack towards the huge ballooning arch marked “Start,” along with all of the other people in still-white shirts.

You all are likely well acquainted with my biggest boy‘s sensory sensitivities – fading with time as he becomes more resilient and mature, but still there.  This event was an absolute nightmare for him.  I was expecting a freak out, and I knew he wouldn’t be cool with getting doused with colors, which is why I took him on the first leg of the course (I could easily avoid the first color station, where volunteers douse the stream of runners, and thereby avoid the stress on Jack). However, in the crowd at the start people everywhere were opening up little plastic packets of colored cornstarch and throwing them at each other – music blared – men carrying cans of colored water on their backs shot people with spray hoses – laughing teenagers frolicked and hustled and teased each other with color bombs, weaving through the crowds.  It was mayhem and silliness, and Jack was absolutely not having it.  He screamed as if being murdered, and took off running in terror more than once, desperate to get away from a bag of innocuous purple cornstarch.  I tried very hard not to be exasperated – I know that when this happens he is experiencing something different from me, and it causes him as much stress as I would feel if being chased by a lion or something.

Anyway, his dad was back in the parking lot, finding a spot and gathering up the stroller and snacks, so Jack was stuck with me.  Rather than go back through the crowds to the parking lot, I decided to pick him up – all going-on-60-pounds of him – and run with him away onto the course, which was less crowded and more predictable.  He chilled out a little, but still cried the whole time, begging me not to go through the “steam” (the color stations did indeed look like puffs of colored steam were rising in the air – I will be coughing up colored corn starch for weeks).  Although he enjoyed doing the 2K fun-run we signed him up for last month, he did not enjoy this little jaunt at all, and he was making me pretty miserable as well.

Anyway, I carried his scrambling, desperate little body for about a quarter mile til the first double-back point, at which time I saw his father and handed him over.  Transformed back into his normal self, Jack sat happily in the stroller and ate Goldfish crackers for the rest of the day.  And that was the end of Jack’s color run experience.  I promised not to make him do it again.

Liam was my next running buddy, and he gamely took my hand and jogged a good while.  Eventually I picked him up and carried him on my back, and we jogged a while more.  When we reached the second double-back point, where I’d planned to hand him over to his dad so I could finish alone, I discovered that a tall barbed wire fence separated me from the Professor (what is this, a prison?  It’s an empty fairgrounds for heaven’s sake!  What’s the barbed wire about?)  At that point I knew that Liam and I were in it together for the whole three point one.

He. Was. In. Heaven.  He ran sometimes and walked sometimes, but rode on my back most of the way, ordering me to “WUN!  WUN FASTER MOM!”  He kept saying “I wike you, Mom.  I wike you a wot,” checking his reflection in my sunglasses, giggling at the people around us being doused in color.  He wasn’t fully on board with being doused himself, until I told him he could wear my neon sunglasses (to keep corn starch out of his eyes) and hide his face in my shirt.  So, brave little soldier, he held the glasses onto his head with two fat chubby hands and buried his face in my neck and silently clenched his little body as we skittered through the first color station, where volunteers doused people with buckets of colored water and opened packets of puffing corn starch onto our heads.  After we made it through (the volunteers noticed he was nervous and sweetly avoided hitting him), I showed him that my white shirt was now green on the back, and he got a kick out of that.  At the next color station, he didn’t clench, and held his head up.

At one point, he told me to run slower because he was trying to sleep and I was “messing it up,” which I think was a joke.  He also loved to joke that he was sooooo tired, so I could say “You’re tired!  I’m carrying you, I should be tired!” and he would giggle with delight at the hilarity of this exchange.  Approximately seven gazillion people asked me if I’d give them a ride next, which Liam also found to be the height of comedy.  We held hands and ran sometimes.  Sometimes he nuzzled his head into my neck and made little sounds of pleasure, just happy to be close to me.

At the finish line, I plopped him in the stroller where he rested and enjoyed some restorative juice and Goldfish, and I ran through the last color station alone, getting doused in glorious red.  I collected a yellow color bomb and had The Professor shake it all over me – and I’m not kidding, Jack leapt out of his stroller and ran a mile to escape from the horror of it.  We headed over to the fringe of the crowd and danced to music.  The young MC on the stage did a countdown to a color release, and everyone in the crowd tore open their color bombs at once and the air above them swirled with purple, blue, yellow, green.  Jack asked me if we could go on the course again, so he could get colors on him like Liam had.  His father and I rolled our eyes at each other above his head.

I enjoyed the morning.  As we made our way back to the car, the Professor pointed out the run’s similarity to a color festival held in India this time of year, and I thought – what a glorious thing, for a whole country to devote a day to delighting in color.  We turned onto the pavement, and someone handed me a flyer, told me to wear sneakers to work on Monday in solidarity with Boston.  It occurred to me then, that I hadn’t once been afraid at this organized race, packed with people.  It occurred to me then, to think of us runners, our friends and family watching, cheering, a normal and ordinary and fabulously fun day.

Did you know I once had a brush with a bombing?  In London – the nail bombs of April 1999.  I was there for a month, and one night while I was watching Macbeth in a Soho theater with friends, a bomb went off a block or two away from me and killed a pregnant woman, severely injured her husband, killed two of their close friends, too.  (A homophobic neo-Nazi, not much older than me, turned out to be the murderer.)  We were locked down in the theater for a very long time while police swept the streets, looking for more explosives.  Eventually, in the wee hours, I was escorted out of the theater by a police guard, who took us in small groups of 2 or 3 and then surrounded our bodies with their own and rushed us across eerily empty London streets, until we reached a distance that they determined was far enough to be safe.  I can tell you, nowhere felt safe, nowhere felt far enough.  My friends and I walked for miles before stopping in a disco and getting as drunk as we dared.  My hands shook when I held the shot glass.

I don’t know why I appended this little memory to the bottom of my innocuous story about our Saturday morning activity.  It was not my intent to do so, when this post started out.  I suppose I wanted to tell you that, 14 years and thousands of miles away, I feel far enough away to be safe.  And I’m not, I know I’m not.  None of us are, right?  We walk through perilous days, all of us in the sniper’s sights, working to keep at bay the knowledge of our precarious life.  The knife is pressed to our throats, and still we keep running, laughing, gathering, playing, loving one another.  Gasping breaths of colored air, lungs drawing in clouds of blue and red.  A purple exhale.  A pile of sodden, colorful running gear in the laundry basket – a little boy in the shower, yellow and green swirling down the drain.  Under the guillotine, always, and doing my best to keep my eyes not on the blade above, but on the beautiful world around me.

It was a lovely Saturday morning.

So, although I kept my news exposure to a minimum yesterday, here is what I saw with my newly disciplined eyes:

I saw 27,000 people decide to devote time and resources to pursuing a difficult physical challenge, many of them raising money for charitable causes as part of their effort.

I saw tens of thousands of other people come out in droves to cheer them on.

I saw a bomb blast, caught on video by countless smart phones and digital cameras, and then saw dozens of police, national guards, and race volunteers run immediately into the smoke.  I saw them battle through temporary fencing, rip it down in their drive to get to a place where a bomb just went off, apparently too caught up in rescue-mode to think about the potential for danger to their own bodies.

I saw the hospitals of Boston somehow set up triage and operating rooms to care for a larger magnitude of seriously wounded people than they could possibly have been designed to handle.

I saw thousands of people in Boston open homes to the stranded, to feed them, house them, drive them around.

I saw social media platforms immediately designed to help families and loved ones find each other after the blast.

I saw millions of people, far from the chaos, flock to charities and social media, to provide monetary and emotional support.  I saw recent victims of chaos in other cities and towns in this country project messages of solidarity, and vow to use their experiences to make Boston’s recovery easier, faster, more gentle.

. . . And I saw the work of one person (or small group of people) who planted these bombs.

Millions > one

Love > hate

Call me a drippy hippy, but that’s what I have decided to focus on today.  What a beautiful world.

A couple of smiles on a glorious Palm Sunday

We had a lovely Palm and Easter Sunday.  Holy Week was a special time for me at our church last year, and I missed being a part of the festivities and celebrations there.  But we enjoyed getting to know our new church’s traditions, which included a child’s parade of palms on Palm Sunday.  Afterwards, Jack solemnly informed us that he was scared because he wanted me to go with him up the aisle, but he sucked his thumb so he wouldn’t be afraid.

The intervening week was unremarkable, until Thursday evening when a car full of family pulled up to our door.  The Professor’s sister, her husband, and their two girls drove down from South Carolina to spend Easter with us.  They actually beat me home – I ran to the grocery after work and got home at 8:15 pm or so, and they were already inside with The Professor.  We let the kids run wild for a few minutes, gave the family a tour, pulled out the trundle from under Liam’s bed, and put the three preschoolers down to sleep in the same room.  There was then much pouring of wine and snuggling of the new baby niece, and we went to bed far later than was good for us.

On Friday we all went to work as usual, and I met the family for lunch at a local oyster house.  That evening we decided to stay in, and I made a delicious green pepper and sausage pasta bake, bread, and asparagus.  Then, on Saturday morning, after a quick trip to urgent care (my sister in law was feeling somewhat poorly), our men took the kids to the playground and the SIL and I got pedicures and brought lunch home.  Saturday after naps, we took the family down to the beach.  It’s hard to convince people of the fabulosity of Alabama Gulf beaches, so we thought it bet to prove it to them in person.

This was new baby Harper’s first experience with sand.

The day was warm, the water, cold, and the wide expanse of beach was thinly populated.

Brothers on the Beach

These two are coming up on ten years of marriage, and are still stinkin’ cute together

Jack, Ella, and Liam get their “toes” (and everything else) wet.

Pirate Booty

We had a really good seafood meal in a restaurant overlooking a dock full of jaunty yachts and sailboats.  The boys behaved, the baby never cried, and my brother in law got all the seafood his little heart desired.  It was great.

That night, the Easter bunny visited.

Four baskets for four kids

These baskets didn’t stand a chance

After the kids tore into their baskets and hunted for plastic eggs around the house, we all got dressed and headed for church.

Ready for church

I am in this family. I’m just always the picture-taker.

Then we came home and had pork roast with apples, glazed whole carrots, twice baked potatoes, and chile cheese grits, plus wine, rolls, and apple cake with vanilla ice cream for dessert.

It was an unintentionally monochromatic meal

After dinner, my in laws took the children to our front porch and got some lovely pictures of the children.

Wee baby Harper was a trooper through this photo session

My husband’s sister’s husband’s mother (yes) sent these bunny masks along for the kids.

A shot of all four kids

And just my boys.

Aaaaaaan this is Aunt RG’s favorite. Look at that sweetheart! 3 months, and delicate and beautiful and so very easygoing.

After their paparazzi moment, we decided to dye the 18 eggs I had boiled days before.  We never got to it ahead of time, but I’m glad we ended up doing it because the boys talked about that activity the most.

We stripped the children to their underoos and let them have at it.

Liam worked hard on his eggs

The kids went to bed clutching the stuffed bunnies their grandmother had sent them, and the four adults set to work on laundry.  Ahhhh, what fun!  Getting all of that beach sand out of their clothes and out of my washer took some doing.

So that was our Easter, in pictures.  I hope yours was as lovely!

In the bags that I’d packed in my room in the United States, at the time uncertain as to the cultural significance of different beachwear in Brazil, I included both a one-piece and a bikini. I’d read warnings about Brazilian beach bodies being a shock to the American eye – everyone wears a thong! many of them look awesome in a thong! Alert! Alert! Potential embarrassment ahead! Apparently, according to these guides, Brazilians are both more fit and less prudish than the typical American beachgoer. That knowledge put me in something of a bind.  I was in trouble either way – I would be revealed as a Tourist if I wore a prudish American 1 piece or a 2 piece that revealed my gooshy two-babies-grew-here belly.

The fact that I pondered this dilemma at all reveals a cultural bias that I wish I didn’t have.

In Brazil, all ages, all sizes, every single adult wore a 2-piece thong, no matter the state of their butt, belly, or skin.  Saggy old skin, heavy bodies with rolls under the bra strap and at the thighs, young and tanned, medium sized and cottage-cheese-thighed.  I wore a two-piece, along with every other imperfect, beautiful body that day.  Nobody in Brazil cared.  And when I say nobody cared, I don’t mean nobody said anything or nobody pointed and laughed or nobody smirked and rolled their eyes.  I mean nobody cared.  The absence of caring blared at me like an alarm.  It was an incredibly foreign feeling, and highlighted for me just how hostile American beaches (and malls, and restaurants, and streets and cities and schools and suburbs and everywhere else) can be.  Not a single person spared a moment to ponder the bodies on display – not mine, not even their own.  I unclenched.  Spread my blanket.  Smoothed my extra baby belly skin into a position where it didn’t get pinched by the corner of my book.  Pondered the cellulite puckering my upper thighs, but did not attempt to strategically hide it with piled up sand.

Awash in body acceptance, comfortably bare-bellied under the roaring sun, I applied sunscreen and read about the snow.

*************

Today I attended “boot camp” –a 45 minute YMCA class run by an incredibly fit woman in her late thirties who could kick your butt. Every one of you. Guys, too.

In this boot camp, we did 3 sets of a 4-exercise circuit, and then did 3 sets of a different 4-exercise circuit, and then did 3 GASPING sets of a 4-HIDEOUSLY-CRUEL-AND-IMPOSSIBLE-exercise circuit, at which point we all collapsed onto the ground and she cracked her metaphorical whip and told us to get our lazy tails in the air and do twenty squats. After drinking some water, of course. She doesn’t want us to die. Just suffer.

I go to classes like this several times a week at lunchtime, according to my “200 workouts in 2013” New Year’s Resolution. Today’s was my 41^st workout of the year – I’m making progress toward that goal.

As a result of pursuing this particular goal, I’m stronger, my resting heart rate is a touch slower, and the small sprinkling of musculoskeletal ouchies that have been plaguing me lately are flaring up less often. The black bags under my eyes are less present in the mornings. I drink a lot more water, to keep up with the inordinate amount of sweating. Aside from perpetually having at least one set of muscles sore from “yesterday’s workout,” I feel pretty great. As New Year’s Resolutions go, this and the daily yoga are the most wildly successful at improving my daily life.

It’s funny, because if I’d made my New Year’s Resolution a weight-loss goal – the one I often make, the one I haven’t been able to keep since my thyroid died in 2010 – I would be utterly failing. The scale has budged not a bit, except to fluctuate up or down a pound or two.  Haven’t lost any inches, either. I can’t tell you how disheartening it’s been to have a goal to lose 15 pounds, and to do work towards it, and to consistently fail.  I can’t tell you how many workouts I skipped or poor food choices I made in 2012, because I knew it just wouldn’t do any good – I’d still weigh the same old same old, no matter what I did.

All I did was change the metrics, and it changed my outlook. I’m healthier because I’ve chosen to aim for “healthy” instead of “skinny.” [Insert every essay ever written about women and judgment and body image in America right here – I don’t need to repeat it.]  [Also, I’ve been a judger.  I’m trying not to be, anymore.]

I struggled a lot with culture shock in Brazil.  The Portuguese immersion wore my down – I spent most days hungry because I didn’t have the energy to navigate a non-English fumbling attempt order a ham and cheese popover.  The traffic kept my stress level elevated at all times – at any moment I was certain a bus would come hurtling over the curb and crush me against a crumbling city building.  I could never relax as I walked through the city streets, keeping an eye on the air conditioning units precariously perched on window sills and an arm curled protectively around my bag.

But I loved the beach there.