Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

My kids are getting big. I have evidence for this: today, I decided to make a pot of tea, put some cookies on a plate, and read a book. I got all cozy on the broken (comfiest) part of the couch, put a quilt on my lap, and started to read. And, like cats, the kids quietly gathered. Makani had volume one of Heaven official's blessing-- I silently cheers-ed him with my book, since I was reading volume four. He cheersed back solemnly, and settled into the squashy chair with his tea. Maile appeared and settled next to me to read the I-Ching, and then sat on the carpet, casting oracles with three coins. Yin, Yang, like binary code, conjuring scraps of poetry and fortunetelling. Liko, not to be out-classed, helped herself to tea and cookies (rejected my strawberry kit-kat, thank goodness), and read Junie B Jones And The Stupid Smelly Bus, which is her very first chapter book. The lights were on the christmas tree, the cat curled her tail around her neat toes and blinked at us, the wind ...

 S torytime!     Today I had a long string of ignored texts from the pharmacy, informing me that our various prescriptions were all ready for pickup. It was nearly time to go pick up RJ from school, so I decided to stop at the pharmacy on the way. MP insisted on coming with me, because she is finally over her cough and still on strike for her online 6th grade classwork, and bored out of her mind. That meant I had to bribe Liko out of the bathtub, where she was happily practicing singing underwater. She proudly informed me that she could laugh underwater, so I never needed to worry about her drowning, and thus she would be perfectly FINE if I left her at home alone, in the bathtub, MOTHER!!      This was not as reassuring as she thought.      "Cake pop, Liko! Get out of the tub, come with us, and you'll get a cake pop!"     Geriatric motherhood means bribery.      She emerged, slightly mollified, like a queen...

The rally last weekend was under clear blue skies. A middle aged white man in a fleece jacket and khaki pants addressed the crowd from the pulpit. Pulpit? Yes. "Every world religion castigates its followers to be wise stewards. We are charged with the care and keeping of ourselves, our families and our earth. Without the clean air and pure water of our planetary home, we could not survive to glorify god." I was bemused, standing next to my new friend Cinnamon, hip length red dreadlocks, big husky dog on a leash, and well-used bicycle. We had not stumbled across a church meeting. We were at a Provo, Utah clean air rally. The previous week the air quality had gotten to "red." When I dropped the girls off at school, a placard outside announced "Inside Day." When the air is this bad-- grey-yellow and soupy-- the children can't play outside. Kids with asthma and allergies are encouraged to stay home; to stay inside. As if walls and 60 year old ins...

I'm about 5 weeks away from giving birth-- really a month and a day from my due date, but you never want to hex it by shaving days off your full 40 week sentence. My belly is profound, my bosom is bounteous. I groan and creak when I stand up or resettle in my chair. I require a phalanx of pillows to sleep (in the small of my back, under my neck but not touching my shoulders, under my left armpit and between my knees, no blanket but yes a sheet, but not covering my feet or arms) and even then I wake up to pee, to drink, to fret, to check facebook, to restart the soporific audiobook, to drink water, to swat mosquitos... My belly is moon-round and lightly marbled with new stretchmarks-- pearly little striations. I rub them daily with coconutty lotion. My girls sniff at me and grimace-- you smell like baby belly! This pregnancy-- I want to capture it before it's over. The baby bumps and rolls and stretches up under my ribcage-- sometimes jabs a sharp ankle or heel outward and...

It's easy to write when something awful grabs my brain-- or something annoying buzzes in my ear and needs expression to be silenced-- but today I am feeling raw and grateful and I want to write it down. Gratitude is so fragile-- a wet tissue paper feeling-- and I want to feed it, like drops of nectar to a thin-winged moth. So here is what I'm grateful for today. This moment: the girls are falling asleep together in my bed. They have twisted the sheets around their feet and around the quilt that Matt's dad recently sent us-- an heirloom from Vietnam-- a deep blue, hand embroidered piece of functional art. They are listening to an Aesop's Fables audiobook  on youtube. They are freshly showered, teeth brushed, stories read, and fully dressed in tomorrow's clothes: RJ in a homemade "bra"-- the tattered remains of a tiny satin dressup and black leggings with two meters of fake leopard tail pinned to the back-- and MP in a stylish pineapple and hello kitty...

Barbara Kingsolver has a great gardening analogy: feeding a garden only a steady diet of NPK fertilizer is like aliens trying to raise human children on a diet of only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I laughed when I read that, but also squirmed a bit. I can dump a ton of woodchips on my garden, import handfulls of whippy worms and turn in lovely half-rotted leaf mulch and the garden won't protest. What do you do with a kid who won't eat anything but peanut butter and jelly? Or, in my case, Mac and Cheese, quesadillas, or milk? Years ago I read about a lovely study done in 1939 by Dr. Clara Davis ( this page   and this article give a tidy summary) about giving a group of orphans free food choice and tranforming them into healthy little specimens. The take home message is: give kids a wide range of healthy choices, and they will select the foods most necessary for their particular little bodies, at that time. I found it a wonderfully comforting guiding principle. So I...

Hip hop tots in spandex and kiawe smoked chicken, teenagers screaming, wilting baked goods on the prize table, cankled hogs in the 4-h tent, hello kitty themed quilts and prize winning jackfruit... it can only be the county fair. The county fair turns familiar Kauai into a stranger, like drag queen make up and stage lighting. Throngs of people who are otherwise in different orbits-- middle schoolers and fashionable 20 years old parents-- show up to pat the duckies and piglets and ride the ferris wheel and buy Hawaiian T-shirts with bleeding skulls and shark teeth logos. Old ladies coddle their fussy little orchids and arrange them behind miniature white picket fences snuggled with dusty teddy bears, uncles bring in their pampered roma tomatoes and gawping achiote pods, kids haul out their mini-lego worlds. The 4-h kids feed their steers and hogs and shear their lambs and spritz their goats, tuck in their shirts behind their gleaming metal belt buckles and carefully batton their hai...

I read a lot of parenting books. Lacking a compound of extended family and helpful aunties, bossy how-to books fill in the gaps. They are great-- I especially like Playful Parenting , How to Talk so Kids will Listen , Parenting with Love and Logic , and Simplicity Parenting . But there are some things about Hawaii that make parenting here unique. My friend H. and I call it "Beach Parenting." It comes naturally on this island but would not be difficult to apply anyplace else, if you just "think beach." So, as an experiment in how-to parenting writing, here you go. Your own guide to parenting in paradise. 1. Sand. Get kids dirty. Sand is a miraculous substance-- take a little, it's light. Load a bucket-ful, it's heavy. It can be wet and cold to pour out into gloppy towers, or it can be crisp and hot enough to blister your feet. Put an irate bored child in the sand, and watch her relax. She will get into the zone, time will hold still as she grinds fistful...

*So I published this post last night, as is, and today it was bothering me-- and I realized that I need to contextualize it a little better. I haven't read the comments yet, just so you know.* Morning-After-Contextualization: I have been reading and thinking a lot about human evolution. I find the vision of an ancestral environment very moving-- up until 10,000 years ago or so when humans developed culture, language, institutions, religion. I'm intrigued especially by the traits that we usually wouldn't call biological- the cultural, the religious, the familial. Recently I've read a really stupid book -- Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters -- that completely ignores culture as an impetus for behavior-- and a really wonderful book -- A Natural History of Parenting -- that will inspire you and blow your mind. Both illuminate the surprising evolutionary roots of common human stuff. Trends, choices, behaviors can be seen through that lens in a fascinating way. Re-se...