What did you say?

My sons are setting the dinner table, telling jokes to each other in Latin. I am fairly sure I heard "pater" and "mater" in their somewhere.

My daughter is watching her favorite princess movie in Spanish and I see her little mouth singing along with the tune.

My youngest son is writing in Mandarin Chinese on the white erase easel in the kitchen.

My husband emails me something that looks like gibberish until I look closer. It's tech-ese.

My e-mail inbox has a message from a French client: "Ravi de parler en Francais avec vous!"

And I wonder why I have a hard time completing a sentence in English.

The three year itch

We have never lived anywhere longer than three years.

It is now coming up on three years and I am itching to start packing the boxes. Technically, it has been one year in a rental and a year and a half in the current home, but still, there is a conspicuous little itch.

This time, I want to stick around and resist the impulse to move until Vee and Kee are out of the nest. Plus, we have not seen everything there is to see in the Bay yet. (That is usually our reason for moving.)

So, how to resist the call of the winds for three more years? Harumpf.

Wha...?

Do you talk in your sleep? If so, what type of thoughts go into your unconscious mutterings?

Every night as I tuck Jee in, I tell him a story about the mystical Knight, his dragon, Dragonini, and the Puffles (little fuzzy creatures). For whatever reason, tonight Jee requested:

"Please don't let there be anything scary in it. No attacks, no scary things. Can they just solve a problem tonight?"

I reassure him, snuggle in and tell him a wonderfully sweet story.

One problem -- I am exceptionally tired and begin to doze off.

But my mouth can still work while I'm asleep / nearly asleep.

From what I understand, I tell some wicked good stories in that state of semi-consciousness.

In this particular situation, I was awakened by Jee: "No! Mom, stop! You said nothing scary would happen. The dragon is invincible, right?"

Of course, in his little world the dragon is still invincible and his momma will always be there to protect him from harm. I ask him what happened in the story since ___ (the part I last remember consciously telling him). Wowza. He is fairly good at retelling and he wove quite a story of power, deception and guilt. (I had just finished "The Kiterunner" whose main theme is guilt.) As Jee retold the story, I felt very much like I was on the therapist's couch and my little son was telling me exactly what I was worried about and why.

Of course, it was all cloaked in dragons, knights, and puffles, but still, it was transparent.

What an interesting little phenomenon.

Grateful for groceries?

I dislike grocery shopping. It is painful to be around so many people moving so slowly.

Tonight, the farmer's market (which usually has all we need) was closed and I needed lunch fixin's for morning. I cringed and did the dirty work of slogging up and down the big box aisles.

Grocery shopping is hard, but coming home and having to unload those groceries adds insult to injury.

Ironic enough, that's where the silver lining is -- when my kids were little, I trained them how to carry in the groceries, checking the car for all 14 (or however many) bags, checking to make sure nothing fell out in transit, closing and locking the car, wiping feet off at the door, carrying the bags into the kitchen. I also trained them to look inside the bags of groceries so that if they were overcome with an irrepressible desire to whack their brother with a bag, they would do it with a bag of bagels, not a bag of eggs, or worse, a bag of cans.

Last night as I came home from grocery shopping, I was excruciatingly tired. Beyond tired. In that land where you forget what it feels like to not be tired. Where every bone and muscle screams and the mind goes numb. The last eight days had drained me on every level. During those days I had looked evil in the face and stared it down. I had won, but it was shallow, too heavy a price.

As I pulled into our pathetic little strip of pavement that we call a driveway, I was so relieved to know that my sons, my wonderful children, would jump up and run out as soon as they heard my car pull in.

They would unload the groceries.

You have no idea what a relief that is.

The Schedule

So, I like to schedule out my days.

I don't know if this is a healthy way to approach life, taking the best advantage of the time I have been given, or if it's some bizarre neurosis.

It drives me nuts to not have a schedule.

The thought of "just winging it" makes me panic.

I am most miserable on days when there is no defined goal, no path to travel, just a flat and lazy existence. The thought of relaxing on the beach in Tahiti sounds fairly unpleasant.

My favorite days have been ones where I took a step back from the day, looked at the breadth of possiblities, examined their relative importance and then assembled them like multi-dimensional puzzle pieces. So many factors to consider, so many possible combinations and when it all fits, I get a rush of ownership. It's a beautiful thing.

Lately, life has been chaotic. What I would give for a bit of stability.

Fog

This morning, Vee went out for a run. When he walked out the door, it was a wall of fog.

So exhilarating.

He came back on Cloud Nine, explaining how the fog condensed on his glasses and he ran into a trash can because he couldn't see two steps in front of himself. Without the glasses, the fog condensed on his eyelashes. When he came back, he was soaking wet and so thoroughly happy that he gave me a big sloppy hug.

I love fog.

The White Towel

Our eldest walks into the living room where we are all sitting, working on our various projects, and with a white towel in hand asks, "Hey Dad, can you get the files off this? I need to give it back to Jaimy tomorrow."

All of us just sit there stunned. Did he just ask us to download the files off a white towel?

Dad: "Uh....."

Kee: "Yeah, right."

Me: with my mind racing for what I have read lately about various smart substances in bendable form, "Vee, what are you talking about?"

We're all searching for a cable sticking out or a wireless sensor on it when Vee laughs, pulls out a hard drive and says, "Sorry, can you get the files off the hard drive. The towel was just so that I could get it home safely."

You know, when I was a kid, I would write notes to my friends and swapped those. When Eee was a kid, he would occasionally bring a floppy disk to school. Vee & Kee? They use flash drives and, for bigger tasks carry around 160G hard drives.

Maybe for Jee and Aee it really will be a flexible substance that can carry the data, but for now, it was just a hard drive in a towel. Ha.

The part of this that gives me whiplash is that their educational environments (all of them) are anti-tech. What does that communicate to a kid? I am beginning to see how the original hacker community was born.

Landing spot

You know that feeling when you have worked a tremendously hard, long day; you feel like you have given every last little ounce; you walk in the door to your house and you... collapse. And if feels oh, so good.

I love this feeling. It seems like everything is blissfully good in that environment which is "the safe spot to land".