Dancing Brave

Man Cave

Today is our contractor's first day of work on the house -- so naturally, Sue Miller, Astrology Czar, posted a monthly horoscope for Leo that included the following:

People you may hire to work for you could be problematic too, and you may be disappointed with the quality of their output. You'll have to hover over them more than usual, just to be sure they understand what you need them to do.

Well, that is wonderful news, Sue! Thank you so much for coming to this party. 

The guys are primarily here to work on the garage. (And the kitchen; more on that later.) Because we live in Southern California, garages used as actual car-storage facilities are not terribly common unless you have a gigantic one. We're not hiding our cars from any actual weather, see, so we can throw caution to the wind and sun-shades on our dashboards and turn those spaces into guest houses, or game rooms, or offices. We have friends who've done it, and almost every house we saw -- except for this one, apparently -- had been given the goods by its previous owners. 

Our garage is at the back of the house: You go up the driveway, through a car port and a chain-link gate, then across a small chunk of patio before pulling inside. (Not that we have ever done this; it has never been empty until today.) So this little tucked-away space is ideal for hanging out: You can close it off from the driveway, roll up the garage door, and leave it that way, so people can party on the patio or wander in and watch TV or play Wii or what have you, maybe go around to the hot tub... plus, Kevin can keep a workstation in there for himself. Ah, the possibilities. 

But of course, we couldn't do that while the garage was a musty, dusty, rotting hell-cave.

  

You might be thinking, "Eh, it's just a garage. Big deal. Garages are funky." But if you consider actually sitting down in there to do anything pleasant... no dice. People don't want to go in there. Hell, one Halloween, we played up its spookyness, hooked up an old TV back there and played Kevin's old homemade horror movies, made Kevin's old bowling table -- now gone, having been nabbed off our curb by hoarders -- look like a ghost, and put in strobe lights to make it all haunted and ugly, and STILL people didn't even want to go in there. Not even the people IN the old homemade horror movies.

I can't imagine why. It's so pretty! Also: I know that may look structurally unsound, or moldy, but it is neither. Or so we've been told. I won't promise, because that will tempt the planets to spin into my house of GOTCHA. And check out this groovy door:

 

Bowed in the middle, splitting along the bottom...

 

Purest awesomeness. Although actually, we did just find out that the reason it never opened all the way is because the brainiac who installed the lock -- which we never used; I know this because I never found out it existed until two hours ago -- put it so that the mechanism blocked the door from moving completely. Well done, ace. So that makes the door look about ten years more ancient and worthless than it actually is, but... it's like the difference between an 80-year old and a 90-year old: Sure, one has more marbles in the bag, but still not enough to play a game. You can imagine how good it felt today to watch the dudes smash through it with a sledgehammer (or whatever it was; I couldn't see because they busted through it from the inside, but I may have applauded).

The trick is to do all this work so that it's still legally, real-estate-wise, a garage -- which basically means, it has to have a garage door that's operable, so that no matter what you do to the floor, theoretically somebody someday could drive into it and leave their car there without leaving a giant pile of rubble in his or her wake. 

So, we're swapping in a garage door with windows up along top, and some sort of method in place wherein we could put up a shade or curtains that won't impede the door's function but would keep asshats from peering in at our stuff while we're away; cutting a regular-size door (with a step down to the ground, to make it flood-safe) and a window into the right-side wall, which will overlook/exit next to the hot tub; making the ceiling flat so that it creates attic storage above it, and adding a descending ladder; doing an epoxy floor; putting in wall storage; cutting a drainage trench outside the door just to be safe; putting in an edit station for Kevin in the corner; adding plenty of outlets; installing a small a/c unit and replacing the ceiling fan; adding recessed lighting on zoned dimmers; insulating it and dry-walling it... and a bunch of other things, many of which use words like "joist" that make my eyes cross and sound like a sex act. 

The idea, then, is to put a TV and a couch in there, probably our dart board, a spare fridge, and other things so that on a nice football Saturday we can open it up and let the dudes play in the yard or in the garage, without fear of them getting splinters or eating sawdust or making close friends with something that has "mite" in its name. And if Kevin has a halfway decent yet still sequestered editing space, he can try to come home early some nights, be here to tuck in the boys, and then go back into his Man Cave and work in relative quiet with minimal distractions. (I considered using it as an office, and someday I may want to, but for now Mama is way too afraid of the spiders in the Valley wandering up her leg while she's blogging. Theoretically they could do this inside the main house, also, but we don't think about that LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU.)

Of course, this all led to Kevin TiVoing every episode of Man Caves, which is how we came to see the one for the gun enthusiast that they tricked out with black wallpaper  bearing the whitened silhouettes of handguns. GUN WALLPAPER. Obviously Kevin is copying that. It's so us.

As for Sue Miller:

If you travel even a short distance for any reason - and it is possible that you will - you must be sure your car is in good working order.

I almost ran out of gas on the freeway on Friday. Does that count?

Saucy

Per usual, the pace of things tends to pick up as Kevin gets closer and closer to going back to Chuck. Suddenly the list of things he wants to do around the house gets longer and more pressing, we work harder to try and cook a nice meal and eat outside every night and we think, "Why didn't we start this sooner?"; we realize we should've been taking a morning a week to go see a movie while Maria has the boys... And then all of a sudden August is knocking on the door and we're trying not to let it inside, because when we do, that means this idyllic hiatus we've had is pretty much done. 

And also, I'll be 33, but let's not mention that because then the wrinkles on my forehead will deepen so much that I will lose my car keys in them.

It's really cute -- Kevin downloaded an iPhone app by Weber that has all these grilling suggestions, and he gets so excited to try any new thing from it. As much as he's looking forward to tackling a new season, new scripts, new challenges, our lovely family dinners have become the best part of the day, and once he's back we'll barely have any. I know that part of it is weighing on him, as well as being gone so much when he's used to seeing the boys for so long every day. He's the happiest father; I don't envy him how conflicted he's going to be when work revs up and he's stuck late at the office and doesn't get to tuck in the dudes, or won't have time to sit with them at breakfast because he has to a) get an extra hour of much-needed sleep, or b) hustle back to the edit bay.

For now, though, it's great. The other night he found a grilled lobster tail recipe, so we did that, and it came out perfectly. Our sauce-making leaves something to be desired, though. I mean, all our attempts came out just fine, but neither of us has developed an eye for when the damn things are reduced enough, or whether it should reduce at a simmer if the recipe doesn't explicitly say to do it... The champagne-vanilla butter sauce we made for the lobster tails was delicious -- and had the benefit of doing something that should've been on my 101 in 1001 list: Use All The Gift Champagne We Have In The Fridge But Don't Drink Because We Don't Like It And Also I Don't Really Drink Much Anymore -- but it definitely hadn't reduced down to a quarter-cup by the time we took it off the heat, and I don't think last night's balsamic reduction was as reduced as it could've been, either. They still TASTED good, so maybe it doesn't matter. Sauces are for patient chefs. But since we don't have in our mind's eye an estimate of how long these things take, and we are not patient but in fact antsy about getting everything on the table at once, we get panicky when the rest of dinner is warm and ready and the sauce is still puttering away on the stove.

However, I love sauces. A lot. I once turned to Jessica and said, apropos of nothing, "I'm REALLY into sauces right now." So I've decided I want to become really adept at making them. I want to be a saucy chef. This will become infinitely more difficult when Kevin isn't home and I'm trying to keep two dudes from climbing up onto the bookshelves, but let's pretend for this one glorious moment that I'm up to the challenge.

Kitchen Advice

If I were to blame anything for the slippery slope of home renovation we're about to careen down, it would be the microwave.

"What's the big deal?" you might ask. "So your wall microwave broke. So replace it. Done."

No. Not done. Never done.

Our appliances, when we moved into the house, were ancient. The brand, Admiral, no longer exists. The user manuals are yellowed with age, stuffed into those transparent folders you can clip into three-ring binders. The font even seems musty. This didn't bother us, because when we shuffled into this house we figured it was the perfect canvas for upgrading them ourselves over the years; like so many things you think you can't live with, though, it slowly became less and less of a big deal until after a while we actually said to each other, "Eh, it WORKS, mostly, a lot of the time. Let's go to Egypt instead." 

Last year, for Valentine's Day, Kevin and I finally gave each other a new dishwasher, because the plastic-over-metal racks in the old one were wearing thin and rusting, which we convinced ourselves would poison the beans. Also, it was so loud, we couldn't run it after midnight without risk of being arrested for a noise violation. But the real dinosaur I'd been yearning to kill was the wall oven -- yes, the same wall oven that once spent a month living in someone's repair shop because it wouldn't heat up properly and left a beef wellington raw in the center after six hours on 400. (And the same wall oven that returned to its alcove working pretty well... but missing a knob.)

A few weeks ago, I got my chance. The microwave, which perches above our oven, abruptly died. And it was sudden. One day it heated up my leftovers just fine. The next it needed five minutes to bring a modicum of warmth to a chicken tagine, and two days later, corn muffins took ten minutes to heat from room temperature. Goodbye, ancient friend with the turntable that didn't turn; hello, sleek modern something with things that do things. Right?

Maybe. A cursory glance at what was available, and we realized gas ovens these days are all twenty-four inches wide both inside and out -- matching the current capacity of our oven, more or less, but not the width (ours is the standard 30-inches on the outside, but it's insulated enough that the actual cooking space is 23-24 inches wide inside). Slotting a narrower unit into our more cavernous space would look dumb, and it seemed stupid to spend all that money on an oven that is substandard in cooking space compared to what most home-buyers are used to having and/or wanting. Just because we don't cook our turkey in the oven doesn't mean other people won't want to, you know?

But, ah, to put in an electric oven requires a special line installed to power it. That's $500 right there. And that's where our imaginations started to run a little wild. Because, see, our kitchen doesn't have a pantry -- no long, tall cupboard that's ideal for dry goods, or which can be compartmentalized to give you a place to tuck brooms and mops (which currently live in the corner, propped up against the wall). And so we got to thinking, if we're replacing all this stuff, why not reconfigure as well? Let's spend several grand just to avoid dropping $500 on the special electrical line! Makes perfect sense.

Currently, our kitchen has a separate cooktop over a cabinet with a pull-out drawer and a fan in the range hood, and then a single wall oven with a microwave above it and two cabinets: one below the oven, and one -- divided into vertical slots, for things like cookie sheets and cutting boards -- above the microwave. 

And here is a photo of the room, from before we bought the house, and shot slightly in fish-eye to look larger.

 

We don't have a table; we have two black and chrome barstools, then of course high chairs, a small black bookshelf for cookbooks under that window and the one to its left, and then to the left of the doorway from which this photo was taken, a Crate and Barrel kitchen island against the wall, black, with a blond butcher-block top. Also, our fridge is taller and a bit wider, and black; the dishwasher, which you can't see, is also black.

So, option #1, which we'll call Big Drama, is this: 

-- Knock out the cooktop and cabinet directly beneath it (but not the cupboards on either side), and replace it with a freestanding gas oven range, which keeps the energy efficiency of gas. 

-- Buy a range-hood microwave (or whatever they're called) and install it where the cooktop's fan is now, because it is designed to function as both fan and microwave.

-- Knock out the cupboard beneath the oven (but keep the one above), and use that entire empty space to install a pantry with pull-outs, and a tall, slim gutter to the left into which we can tuck the brooms and whatnot.

-- Re-varnish the cabinets. I think I would also paint the new pantry's door panel with chalkboard paint, for shopping lists and for the beans' artistic fun when they get old enough not to try and snack on the chalk.

Option #2, which we'll call Boring Minimalism:

-- Replace the appliances but keep them where they are

-- Possibly still re-varnish the cabinets (one of them is cracked up top, and another, the previous owner's kid drew on it with green ballpoint pen and every time I belly up to that panel the green flower there smirks at me).

Here are the reasons Big Drama is giving me pause, and I'm hoping you wise folks out there have some words of wisdom for me on these scores:

1) Are wall ovens considered more desirable than the other kind? If we're keeping the microwave lofted, we're not forsaking counter space to do this, but I don't know if there's any kind of idealized value placed on having an oven in the wall rather than on the floor.

2) Do we think it's stupid to put an oven where a dude could possibly reach it? Or are we likely to find one heavy enough (or even lockable) to make that a moot concern?

3) We have a 36" cooktop, so we'd want to replace it with a 36" range. Those are terribly hard to find; so far we turned up a Kenmore that seems fine, but the oven itself is still only 30" (which we could live with but it's not as stylish); a Fisher Paykel, about whom I know nothing (I've read scathing reviews of their washing machines but can't find anything about their ovens) that has no digital readout of temperature but does at least have a timer, and is attractive; a mad expensive Electrolux that doesn't have a timer nor a digital readout for temperature, but has a gigantic oven; and an even more mad-expensive Dacor, which is similar to the Electrolux. We MIGHT have located a place that could help us preview the Fisher Paykel but we're not sure, and the others are probably not available to view. 

4) Is the pantry as desirable as we think it is? Right now our dry goods are stuffed into a double cupboard above the counter -- the one to the left of the fridge -- and then part of another cabinet above the toaster oven, which we keep on the counter to the right of the cooktop. I think the displaced frying pans and saucepans can go in the cupboards to the left and right of the range (drawback: no drawer) or in our kitchen island (drawback: not near the range), and the displaced baking trays and bowls in the cupboard currently beneath the oven can take whatever space the cookware doesn't occupy (one potential hiccup is the roasting pan, but we'll worry about that later), and basically everything can shift up and around now that the dry goods would all be in our nice long tall pantry. Tupperware could go in a higher cabinet, for instance. Does all that sound reasonable, or am I insane?

5) If we re-varnish the cabinets, how dark do we go? We've never been a particular fan of white cabinets, which I know is one option, and we could just keep them the same but I'm not really a light-wood person. We get nice natural light in the kitchen, so that helps the space feel big. Do we shoot straight to dark wood (like most of our furniture in the other rooms) or will that be too oppressive? Do we need to re-evaluate our stance on white cupboards?

I'm sure there are other questions, but right now these are the ones we're trying to deal with -- like, will we get a better oven and a better cooktop if we just keep them separate and continue making do with our lack of pantry? We feel a bit squeezed out of the space we have, some of which is because I don't think all the cabinets are being used as best they can be, because they're not really designed with dry goods in mind. Will we regret putting an oven on the ground that curious hands can touch, or are they all made so well that a pre-heating oven won't hurt them if they bump it? Are oven doors heavy enough that it's unlikely Liam will tug it open until he's old enough to know not to do it? 

We are making such a meal out of this. But at least when it's done, one way or another, we can then proceed to make all future meals on nicer appliances.

Lordy

The other morning, I left the dudes in Mockatraz -- their gated-off baby prison room -- so I could clean up the remnants of breakfast in the kitchen. When I returned not five minutes later, this vision of Dylan is what greeted me:

Note: Those pillows are at least twelve inches tall.

We are so screwed.

Showdown

We stood in the kitchen, silent, staring, our gazes locked. Revulsion bubbled up in my throat, but for my own good I swallowed it and stayed silent. Neither of us moved. For ten minutes we were rooted to the spot. Disgust and loathing washed over me. Then disbelief. How had this become my life?

And in a moment, I knew what I had to do.

"KEVIN!" I bellowed. "KEVIIIIIIN! COCKROAAAACH!"

Silence. I clutched Dylan to my chest and he stared quizzically at me as if to ask, "What's the deal? Isn't this the part where I get some milk?" The roach paused, cocked its head at me, and said, "I got your milk right here, fool." Truth. 

"KEVIIIIIIIIN!" 

I had closed the door to the bedroom, to block out the sounds of my late soothing of an irritated little boy. It worked too well. Dylan stopped crying and peered up at my chin, wondering why these things always happened to him.

Because this wasn't the first time. One night in May, I walked in, flicked on the kitchen light, and to my right near the back door saw a gigantic black bug. Dylan squawked as I jumped ten feet in the air and ran away. Never having had a roach in this house, I reasoned that perhaps it was one of those black crickets, or a beetle, but it would be Kevin who did the diagnosis.

"Would" being the operative word. As in, he would have done it, had the bug not turned tail and fled while I was sprinting to the bedroom with a very shocked Dylan in my arms. We could not find it, didn't know where it had gone. Two nights later in the wee hours and the dark, as I walked into the foyer with Dylan en route to the kitchen, I felt a bug scamper out from underneath the skin of my foot as it closed on the ground. This time, my jump was twenty feet. I let out an ungodly yawp, half-gasp, half-yell, and tap-danced into the living room toward the nearest light switch. There, fleeing toward the front door, was a giant black bug. Again. 

This time, Kevin heard me -- awoken, no doubt, by the noise of a Bumble being run over by a bike that had emanated from my whereabouts. He killed it. It flipped over. It exposed itself as a roach. 

I announced, "We have to move."

But we didn't. Apparently, in the world, it's not considered sensible to pack up and move to a new house just because one roach got inside. I'm not sure why. I don't approve of that rule. Instead, we decided to reason that the creature had come into the house via four cardboard boxes UPS delivered days earlier; once we'd offed it, we'd seen no trace of any friends, so that had to be it. We were safe. Our night terrors and careful tip-toeing through the house could finally end.

Until that night. Ten minutes earlier, I had walked into the kitchen with the lights off and stood not one foot from where the bug lay in waiting, and I'd thought to myself, "A month ago, I couldn't have walked in here without the light on, because of The Problem. How far we have come." And then, moments later, I realized I'd left something in the kitchen and decided to smack on the light in order to find it. And there he was. 

The strains of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly echoed in my head as we faced off, ready to draw our guns. I trembled. The roach smirked.

Inspired, I backed away until my hand closed around the cordless phone. I used it to call Kevin's iPhone, which I knew was perched on his nightstand, next to his slumbering head.

No answer. I tried again, twice, thrice, six times.

Nothing.

The roach laughed.

Then the roach moved. He backed up toward the sink. Galvanized, I looked for something to hurl over his massive thumb-sized body. All I could find was a round plastic zipper case that had contained some Pixar toys Lauren got the boys for their birthday. It wouldn't contain this bastard. It would only spook him, and bounce off his armor. He stopped scampering and looked back at me and then gave me the finger.

Well. I don't THINK so, asshole.

And so I ran. Faster than I've ever run. Into the bedroom I burst, waking up Kevin rather rudely with the emergency bulletin that a deadly pest had infected our sanctuary yet again. Dylan shot his father a look that said, "Dude, you have got to put a stop to this woman."

"HE'S GOING TO GET AWAY!" I wailed, not even lingering, staying only long enough to make sure Kevin heard me before I ran back to continue keeping watch. Because I had to watch. I had to see where it went. I could not sleep knowing that the call was coming from inside the house.

The roach had paused in its flight, the cocky bastard, certain I wouldn't be able to corral the hunter in time.

That was his fatal mistake. He took one look at Kevin, saw doom in those striped pajama pants and the green suede sneaker, and snuck under the dishwasher. He thought he had us beaten. But just as Kevin was plugging up his entrance route, he spied the poorly hidden roach, flicked it out into the open, and beat the ever-living shit out of it. 

Yeah, that's right, motherfucker. You mess with the girl, you get the Pumas.

Three days later, an exterminator came and sprayed. He said the big roaches are making a comeback, but are a better sign than little ones, because it tends to indicate they're coming in from the outside rather than nesting under our roof. It's cold comfort. 

Or, no comfort. Because Wednesday night, as my friends were leaving, one of his comrades struck -- nestled in the corner of the door frame, right on the threshold, he sat throbbing and waiting. I slammed the door. 

"Can someone kill that?" I trembled at my friends on the other side.

I heard gasps. Then the smack of a shoe. "It didn't work!" someone yelled. Then, a frantic search for a blunt object. "This will do," I heard Carrie say. Then CLUB CLUB CLUB, and finally, "It's dead now." I like to imagine she pounded it to death with a rock, just like the cavemen did when cockroaches wandered into their sandy hovels. I passed her some paper towels, she scraped up its carcass, and we dispatched it into the trash.

And so the trail of the dead gets longer. Anything else want a piece of me? And by "me," I mean, "my bug-killing comrades who save my hide while I stand on the couch and shudder and weep and scream, 'NOT THE CHILDREN, DON'T TAKE THE CHILDREN.'" Although that is scary too. Perhaps I can't get close enough to a roach to kill it, but dammit, I can try frightening it to death. Just as long as I get it before it gets me.

My New Motto

Another house dream last night, this time with a better ending: We were walking around the house, falling in love with all its windows and its bedrooms and the giant kitchen, when naturally my parents arrived from Florida so we could show them. It was here that a bunch of other random details started popping up that we hadn't seen before, including a giant, uncovered indoor pool randomly installed in the marble foyer.

At this point, my father looked around and expressed some doubt that we needed a mansion with two pools and weird decor that was growing more 1970s-meets-Daddy-Warbucks'-house by the second. So I said, "But Dad, if it's good enough for JOAN RIVERS... " and we all turned around, and there was Joan, standing at the built-in bar, making herself a martini.

With those words to live by, I woke up -- but not before Dream Me heard my dad say, "Well, that IS true."

Fake Estate

Lately, I've been having a lot of dreams about buying a new house, and moving. They usually go the same way: find house, love house, then toward the end of the dream the house slowly morphs into something less than what I thought it was. 

First, it was this gigantic house that had a bajillion bedrooms all on their own floor-within-the-house, which we thought was so modern and fancy. Then when we went back after making a bid on the house, we realized that in fact they were observation cubes: Each room had four Plexiglass walls up at the top of its own mid-height flight of stairs. So apparently we had to figure out how to get curtains or wall decorations up there enough to give people privacy, without also denying them light. As opposed to, you know, walking the hell out of there. I can't remember exactly why we were so into the house in the first place, but it was one of those things where all of a sudden we were like, "Plexiglass is TOTALLY impractical, why did we not THINK of that?" It seems my subconscious wants us to live in a giant sneeze guard, like a buffet dinner course.

The next fake house had this huge gleaming courtyard in the middle, with a tile pool and swim-up bar, and we were just tickled. Until we did a walk-through during escrow, at which point I had to pull Kevin aside and point out that it had snake problems. As in, they were floating in the pool, which was now in a dirty and overgrown and chipped and cracked courtyard, and oozing out of crevices in the run-down walls. We were like, "Gulp. Can we back out?" It was like a Slytherin shanty, right down to the snakes appearing to find our distress deeply hilarious. 

And the third house was, again, totally fantastic, but as we moved in and I walked around it kept changing bit by bit until the ceilings were impossibly high and the rooms were all dark and narrow, and my office was actually just a bench in the den. And it was within this dream that I burst into tears about the prospect of leaving our current house, because of all the happy memories, and how it didn't feel like it was the trash compactor in Star Wars, slowly trying to grind me to a miserable pulp. (A reasonable objection, although Kevin was like, "What? It's just a tall house.")

Problematically, none of this has stopped me from noodling around on Realtor.com, because even though I know -- I KNOW -- we are not ready to buy or move, I keep wondering WHAT IF. What if The House is out there right now? Never mind that we can't afford it, that we need this house to regain a bit more value, that we said we wouldn't move until we had another kid and/or the boys outgrew their room. I just keep searching. And ogling. And bookmarking. And then falling into a pit of despair when the $1.6 million house with gorgeous views that we can't pay for and which isn't child-friendly suddenly goes off the market, because what if I were to win the lottery? And that was supposed to be our house? What then?

So it's no secret WHY I'm having real estate dreams. But maybe my psyche is trying to tell me to CHILL OUT and appreciate what we have. The other night, we fired up the hot tub and sat there, surrounded by the plants that give it a wooded feel, and just breathed in the crisp night air, and that feeling that we were in a different place altogether. It was nice to slow down and look around and enjoy. So I may not have a laundry room, or a walk-in closet, or even a GOOD closet; so the microwave might be broken, and you can't sneak across the living room floor because the boards creak so loudly that it sounds like a giant has let one rip. So what? It's home. And hey, those floorboards beat a burglar alarm any day.

Year One: To Liam

Dear Liam,

Moments ago, you crawled into the hallway, looked right into my office, smacked your hands on the floor and panted with glee, and then barreled toward me to say hello. Those are some of my favorite moments of the day -- the times when I feel like you know me, know that I love you, and want to tell me you love me too. Or you just want to see how loud and fast you can be. Either one.

You are such an exuberant kid. You are full of big plans, big thoughts, big emotions. You do nothing halfway. If you decide to teethe on your crib, you eat the heck out of it (every part of it bears the scars of your incisors). When you figured out how to slide open the entertainment center, you immediately tried to slap all the appliances therein and almost succeeded in turning off the DVR while it was recording England getting whipped by Germany in the World Cup. (In retrospect, I should have let you.) When you pulled up using just your hands on the sliding glass door, you then pounded on it in protest, either begging to be freed from the standing prison of your own making, or just liking the way it felt.

And you smile with your entire head. Not just your mouth, your eyes, your nose… when you get happy, your entire skull seems to explode with joy. It's contagious. Sometimes you even bounce on the spot just out of glee. One of my favorite sights is walking into your room in the morning and seeing you standing up at your crib, grinning madly. Or when I'm on the couch and you're on the floor, and all of a sudden the empty air is filled with one hand, then two, reaching up and clasping the table. Then there's a curly head, then your beaming face; you pause, snarl-smile with self-satisfaction, and propel yourself up all the way. It's like getting a visit from my very own lucky sprite. 

When you were learning to crawl, you were tireless. Unfortunately, you were also wrong. You would bite your lip and get that determined glint, slap the floor with your hands, and then throw all four of your limbs in the air, balancing on your tummy. We used to call it the Superman, and because it was the exact opposite of how to crawl, it of course never worked. But you were never daunted. You just balanced as long as you could, giggled, huffed a bit when you had to hit the ground again, and then gathered your spirits and tried again. Each attempt, and there were hundreds, bore an air of, "That one was practice. This one counts." Eventually we plonked you on the hardwood floor to teach you that you had the arm strength to drag yourself forward, and from that day, you were off.

Your first weeks were a bit like that. Early on you needed a bit of help with oxygen -- just a day, maybe a day and a half, with nasal tubes. But once you got things sorted out, you never looked back. Ditto with food: You didn't tolerate it well at first, and then one day your body figured out what to do with it, and BAM, the nurses were flummoxed by how skillfully you took to bottle-feeding, blasting through all their milestones in almost record time. In the span of about 12 hours it went from, "He'll be home in two weeks," to, "He'll be home by Friday," to, "Well, we're testing him tonight, so you might have him tomorrow." And you don't sit either; you don't see the point. Because you can crawl, and stand, and why do something boring and stationary when you can move and explore and find new things to put in your mouth? You are intrepid. In fact, we called you The Uncontainable, because you always tried to escape your NICU bed -- whether it was sliding down the edge...

... or in this case, rolling over it altogether, in a way that puzzled even the nurses:

We had you home a week before your brother, and I will never forget that first night. We drove you home from the hospital, your dad at the wheel and me in the back, slipping my hand behind your body in the car seat so that your tiny five-pound, two-ounce body wouldn't slump. We cradled you that night in total disbelief that anybody would allow us to have this perfect little person in our house. We put you in your crib, and it never looked more massive or imposing, a sea of cartoon animals cavorting around your compact, snuggly body as you assumed a position we didn't yet know would be your default: cuddled up next to the railing. (You always find your way there, usually with your head in the corner, but always with a part of it touching the cool wood of the crib, your legs either spread-eagled or tucked up under your bum so tightly that it's aloft. No in-between.) We slept badly that night, muddled through breast-feeding in the wee hours, and awoke for the day at 7 a.m. with the most profound feeling of relief that we had made it, and so had you. 

You were, however, recently the subject of our scariest baby-proofing moment, having located the cord of our baby-monitor camera up there on the wall -- your crib had shifted during a sheet-change -- pulled as much of it as you could into your crib, and wound it around you while you snacked on it. Had you fallen over, you might've been in dire straits as it cinched up around you, but thankfully your father found you first. And typically, you were very irritated that we broke up the party, but you forgot about it as soon as we waved the iPhone -- or a measuring cup, or the plastic bottom to one of your cloth toy bins, or any number of other toys-that-aren't-toys -- in front of your face. See, we had to distract you so that we could shift things around to mask the cord. Because you know. When we hide things, you see.

Right now, though, your favorite toy is Dylan. (Well, when you're not enthralled by Baby In The Window, or The Piano, or The Entertainment Center; we often say, nothing cheers up Liam like the sight of Liam. You are as endlessly amusing and fascinating to yourself as you are to us.) If Dylan is standing at the play table, instead of pulling up on the empty space next to him, you will use his shoulders, his pants, his butt, whatever. If he's on the floor, you will crawl over him and steal his toy while you're at it. If he's in the way, you will grab him by the hair and casually try to move him aside. If he's crawling to me, or your father, or to a toy, you dash over to catch up and see if you can get there first. If he's trying to walk around the coffee table, you will go all the way around just so you can pass him on the outside and ricochet between his body and the couch. Presumably because you can.

It's not in a mean way, though; it's as if you haven't figured out how else to play with him, so making everything a competition will have to do.

You, Liam, have no guile. Dylan plots a bit to get at things; you just go, including the time you essentially tried to climb up my face to get at my sunglasses. You can't help it, but you're so open. No poker face. We feel everything as you feel it, and probably with equal intensity. I often joke that your inner monologue would be written in ALL CAPS AND NO PUNCTUATION BECAUSE OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT I THINK I NEED IT OW THAT HURT WHERE IS THAT OTHER THING I LIKE TO EAT OH THERE IT IS GIVE IT TO ME NOW HEY DYLAN GET OUT OF MY FACE OOH THERE'S DAD LET'S PLAY NOW BUT FIRST I WILL EAT THIS STEREO CORD.

Your eyebrows raise up higher than the sky when you're unsure or shocked. When you're tired, you try to burrow your face deep into whatever soft surface you're with, be it the mattress or your father's shoulder -- or, in a few amusing instances, the air, which you  tried to rub against with a fervor that seemed to say, "If I do this long enough, it will turn into my bed." You get this purposeful, mischievous gleam when you see something you know you're not supposed to have, like when we would try to entice you to crawl by leaving our iPhones across the room (a promise we later had to keep by letting you play with it a bit; you slapped it and Britney Spears came on, which so delighted you that I thought you were going to jump up and throw a dance party). Your eyes cloud with almost tangible confusion when we try to feed you something you think is really shady, like the time you were trying to eat off your father's plate and you got a mouthful of mashed potato instead of the breaded chicken you were after. "NO!" your wounded, repulsed face said. "This is a betrayal of the HIGHEST ORDER." Then you bent down and shoveled as much of your placemat into your mouth as would fit.

You also don't always have much patience. If you can see us in the room and we're not paying attention to you, often, a wailing fit ensues.

It's short, but it's real: You can't believe that if we're at home, nearby, we would have anything else to do but fawn over you. (It IS unfair, I will agree, but it's a sad reality.) You're not nasty about it; just smart. You take your time to make your complaints known, and if we disappear again, you go back to whatever you were so merrily doing. It's like you're just testing the water to see if we'll bite. And if you want something and we're busy with Dylan, you don't like to wait. Once, while your father fed Dylan, you got so het up about the fact that you didn't have a bottle too that you scooted over, pulled up, and absently started chewing on Dylan's foot. He got upset, stopped drinking, wouldn't start again, and you won: Your bottle came next. But there's never any question that you're doing it to be nasty. You're just not that kind of guy. It's more like your uncensored way of living accidentally gave you a victory.

You don't withhold. You just throw it all out there, for better or worse. I hope that will serve you brilliantly someday, as you become a fearless adult. But it also makes me want to protect you, your heart and your mind and your body, with everything I have. I told Dylan I might always worry about him a bit more just because of how much tougher he had it early on, but the thing is, it's the difference between worrying infinity and worrying infinity-plus-one. And I worry not because I don't trust, but because I marvel at everything you have ahead of you and pray I can help you and your wide-open heart choose right. I can't wait to see what these loving, passionate, brave qualities shape you into, Liam. To echo what I said in Dylan's letter, you two are my miracles. I love you for who you are together and who you are apart. You're my heroes. I'm proud of you, and I can't wait to see what you're going to do next.

Love, Mom

Year One: To Dylan

[Why do this? What for? Click here.]

Dear Dylan,

As I write this, you've just woken up from a nap and are standing up in your crib -- something you just figured out how to do, with great pride, for the first time yesterday. Getting down, well, that is another story. You haven't mastered your knees, haven't learned how to bend them slowly, one hand reaching for the floor to brace you when you're ready to let go with your other one. You will; like all things, you will do this, and it will be all of a sudden, like you've been doing it for months, and when I clap you will fix me with that angelic expression that says, "What's the fuss? That was nothing."

But it will be something. Everything is something. For you, the fact that you're all about up, and not so much with the down, is a pretty metaphor for your life. You have always pressed on, against whatever came at you. When you came out, you were bruised but not beaten. Your swollen face bespoke a fighter, and that's what you are: You -- all two pounds, nine ounces of you -- breathed on your own from the get-go. You hated that feeding tube, the skinny, small lifeline through your nose into your stomach. One of the first things your father saw you do was flex that tiny hand, the one small enough to slip through his wedding ring, and pull that tube clean out of your nose, pulling up the tape that held it there. Then you argued while they tried to put in a new one. Because you didn't think you needed the help. You wanted to fight on your own terms.

And in a lot of cases, you knew better. You knew how much your body could eat. When we'd fret about whether this amount or that was sufficient, you firmly said your yeses and nos with your hands, slapping away the bottle when it wasn’t welcome and opening wide for it when you were ready.

And you grew. At your own rate, in your own way and in your own time, but you grew. You knew, better than we did, that you had this whole thing under control. That goes for milestones, too. Liam figured out the crawl first, how to pull to stand, and how to cruise. He would try for days; you sat back and watched, and then one day, just like that, did everything he'd labored for weeks or months to master.

Your brother fascinates you. At this point, your relationship is starting to blossom. Your face lights up when you see him; if we put you on the floor together, you often charge toward each other like somebody just blew a whistle. (Someday I expect you two to tell me you're going running with the bulls, and just for the record, I will scream and protest and shout everything from, "You'll be KILLED," to, "But THINK OF YOUR UNBORN CHILDREN," when that happens, even though a little part of me will gloat that I was right.)

You don't quite understand how to play together yet, so usually, it ends in toy theft or one of you crawling over the other, pulling hair, pushing heads, and creating general mayhem. But you're also drawn to each other like magnets. No matter where we put you, or what you're doing, you end up within a foot's reach of each other. Which makes sense; that's how you started life, so that's probably how you'll continue.

In twelve months you've gone from fifteen-and-three-quarters long to twenty-eight-and-a-half inches. You're almost seventeen pounds. You feel heavy, in the best way. You love to babble and shout. Nothing is worth anything unless it can be banged against something else and yield a noise. People in glasses fascinate you, and you try every technique you can to get them off their faces, often using misdirects that are surprisingly sophisticated for a kid who still can't hold his own spoon.

Once, you lovingly stroked Auntie Carrie's face for ten minutes, inching your hand higher, higher, higher, and then giggling off in middle-distance until you thought we were distracted, at which point you clamped your hand down on those glasses and pulled with all your might. (For a whippet of a thing, Dylan, you have always had a lot of might.) You were certain you'd bested us. And then you tried to eat them.

Everything, and I do mean everything, goes in your mouth. You love the remote control for our TV speakers. You chow down on the floor mat we put down in your playroom. When we are in airports, you crawl under the black leather seating at the gates and suck on their chrome feet. You have even tried to take a chunk out of my finger, and one day, we noticed angry red bite marks on Liam's ankle the size of your open maw. Granted, maybe he deserved it, but we hope this doesn't foretell a future in which we're sitting with your pre-K teacher as she explains to us that you are a dangerous cannibal. We're trying to teach you that biting people is not okay. In that tradeoff, we'll gladly give up a remote control or two. Also, please don't eat my shoes. I know they look yummy, but I promise, they're full of gross.

Lately, you've developed an aversion to the spoon. You'll eat from it at lunch, you'll tolerate it at breakfast, but at dinner you are like, NO THANKS, PRISON WARDEN. Your stubborn side flares up in full, and you shake your head "no," as vehemently as you ever have. This is a relatively new skill, too, by the way -- everything is a head-shake. Do you want more food? Shakes head. Do you want to go to sleep? Shakes head. Do you want world peace? Shakes head. Do you want me NOT to buy those really nice shoes I was looking at? Shakes head. Hey, thanks, kid. You're the best.

And oh, that stubborn side. Dylan, at this point, you will not sit unassisted. Or even assisted. If we get you in a high-chair, fine. But if we try to play with you on the floor, and arrange you into something approximating a seated position, you refuse. You kick your legs straight. Arch your back. Roll over so you're facing us, shooting us a pleading look designed to disarm us and force a surrender. You skipped right over this particular skill, and you could care less. You don't want to do it. Have no use for it. No matter how fun we try to make it look, you're like, "I see through you, lady," and scuttle off on your stomach to go pull up on a chair and stomp your feet. All you want to do is walk. You've been jonesing for it since you were five months and we held your feet to the floor. We called that prancing: We'd hold you still, and you'd march, knees up high, creeping forward millimeter by millimeter, a huge grin on your face. The first time we put you at a walker wagon, after watching Liam stagger unevenly across the room, you grabbed hold of that bar and zipped back the other way like you were being chased by an adult interested in making you sit.

Strawberry yogurt bites are your favorite new snack, but you're skilled at putting bits of bread, banana, chicken, and French fries into your mouth -- better than Liam. You have more precision, more deliberation. It's like every tiny piece you pick up is the result of a very firm decision you just made that, yes, you would like another bite, and you would like it just-so, into the left side, placed in there with your middle and forefinger. Or into the right, delivered by a quick palm. You do not seem to do anything lightly; you know what you want, when you want it, and how you plan to do it. And often, when you try something that doesn't work, you fake like you're abandoning ship, only to turn back ten seconds later and try again, as if we'll think you did it wrong the first time on purpose and this one, this one is for real.

And you're an incorrigible flirt. Whenever we're at a restaurant, and you spontaneously smile, I can follow your eyes and invariably find a woman at the other end of your gaze, cooing at you and waving. And from then on, forget it. You don't want to look anyplace else. She might be behind you, to the left, or directly in front, and whichever it is, you'll arrange yourself so that she's within your line of vision. Your smooth-moves smile is slightly crooked, rising up higher on the right side of your mouth, head slightly cocked.

You can deploy it while crawling, playing, standing, sitting in your high chair, or being held. And you always make the ladies wait for it. There is a split second where they engage, you stare, and then suddenly you give them what they want, and it's like shooting stars and rainbows and a herd of unicorns. One of your father's favorite memories is when he was giggling with you as you charmed one of the female flight attendants on our way to Pittsburgh, and when she walked away he looked down and realized your pants had dropped down to your ankles. You shot him an alarmingly knowing grin.

There's always a part of me that will worry about you maybe a touch more than Liam. And it’s not because I love him less, or think you are less capable. It's just because I can't shake the image of you lying in your incubator, under the bili lights to beat jaundice, which prevented me from holding you and making it better. Or the first time I held you, by then well under your birth weight, and you peered up at me with giant black eyes, pleading, almost as if to say, "Is this the part where everything is going to be okay?"

And it is. You are so much more than okay. Even when you cried, and fought, and banged your head, and didn't want food, or spit up what you did eat… through all that, you have always been so much more than okay. You are happy, charming, friendly, beautiful, clever, strong, and above all, healthy. You made it. You and Liam are my miracles. I love you for who you are together and who you are apart. You're my heroes. I'm proud of you, and I can't wait to see what you're going to do next.

Love, Mom

LettersTo Beans

So, I'm spending my quiet Friday writing letters to my boys. One for each.

It may seem like I got the idea from Heather "Dooce" Armstrong's monthly letters to Leta. And maybe on an unconscious level, I did. But I can tell you what really made me want to do this: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I'm a re-reader, and the previews for the film have me atwitter and desperate to dive back into that universe and revel in it anew. The other night, I got to the part -- and this is not a spoiler, at least, not the way I'm wording it -- where Harry finds a letter that his mother wrote to somebody in her own hand. He notes similarities in their handwriting, like the way they write their Gs, and says -- I'm paraphrasing -- that each was like a little wave, and there's something in that moment that is profoundly moving to me. I started thinking, what if the worst does happen, and the boys have nothing so personal of me? If their peeks into my handwriting, things I've written and touched, do not extend beyond duplicate checks? Some of the most intimate things I've read have been on the Internet, and ditto some of the most intimate things I've written. It's freeing, this easy, quick medium for unleashing your heart. But it's not necessarily personal, and all the typed characters in the world can't replace the warmth you feel from seeing words formed by a person's own fingers clasped around a pen.

So I'm writing these letters out, longhand, and tucking them into envelopes affixed to a blank page in their baby books (when those books come into being, anyway). But I'm sharing them here as a record, of what they've done, how I felt, and above all, in case the freehand versions somehow get lost or damaged through time. Harry only had a piece of his mother's missive; at least this way I can guarantee they'll find the whole. I'll post them Monday.