A Quiet Moment

Dear Roan,

On Saturday we had a rare and beautiful quiet moment. Quiet moments with you are pretty much nonexistent. You are either extremely physically active, very (loudly) focused on some task, or dead asleep. You really don't spend much time loafing around.

It poured rain Saturday morning, the kind of rain where you only have to step outside for half a minute, or run from your apartment to your car, and you're drenched. It was so windy that umbrellas were useless. We drove an hour out to Long Island, to go to a birthday party for Mia and Taj. We'd only been in the car for 15 minutes when the rain turned to ice, and then snow. Snow in October!

After the party, Thunder McQueen had a nice layer of snow / slush. The tops of awnings, roofs, signs, were all white with it. And it kept coming, that wintry mix. By the time we got back to Brooklyn the roads were slush and the tree branches were bowed over with the weight of two inches of snow, bent over the roads in a low lying canopy. It was like driving through a tunnel of trees. It felt magical and it took me a while to realize why I'd never experienced this: it never snows here so early, and when it does snow, the trees are all bare, without the weight of their leaves to bend them low. The next day we would be warned to stay out of parks, away from the trees, whose branches would be snapping off all over the city.

You fell asleep in the car and you woke up groggy and tired. All three of us dried off and got in bed. You laid right on top of me, draped over my belly with your head on my chest. For a long time, maybe 15 minutes, nobody moved or talked. I thought maybe you'd fallen asleep, but you were just relaxing, staring into space. It was some quality family quiet time. We cuddled and watched the snow fall in our yard. Then Fred ruined the moment with some kicking and squirming and I told you how to feel for the baby. Then you said you wanted to "wash" something, which is what you say when you want to watch TV, and you and Daddy got in a fight over whether to "wash" soccer or some dinosaur show with terrible child acting.

As I've gotten older and increasingly pregnant, I've had to recalibrate my idea of a wonderful moment. They all used to involve a lot of action and some degree of chaos. Racing down the hill with you, watching your sneakers kick up puffs of fall leaves, hearing your wild laughter, it's still a damn good moment, but running anywhere at this point, with 30 extra pounds and no clear view of my own feet is unpleasant.

15 minutes of quiet inactive togetherness? Heaven.

Staten Island Ferry

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

October is holiday season for Jews. There are the high holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But then, after those, comes the best holiday of all: Sukkot!

Sukkot is 8 days long. During that time, you build a fort, or sukkah, and you live in it. Amazing! One of the things I've held onto from childhood is an undying love for building forts. When I heard about Sukkot I thought, "finally, here is a holiday that rivals Christmas!"

Of course, most regular Jews don't move into their sukkahs, they just eat some meals in them. And like everything else in Judaism, there are a lot of contradictory rules about how to make one. I decided to keep things cheap and simple and build a PVC pipe sukkah with tarp walls and thin wooden slats for an open roof.

This wasn't my first sukkah. Last year I became totally obsessed with building a sukkah the day before Sukkot, and went on a frantic 6AM trip to Lowe's to buy materials. I bought PVC pipes and a hacksaw, but they didn't have the right joinery. So I improvised with some spare parts I found in plumbing. That ended up being a mistake.

Another mistake: trying to build the sukkah by myself. To be fair, I wasn't totally alone, I had Roan to "help" me. I'd bought buckets and sand to anchor the vertical pipes, only they kept toppling over before I could get the joinery and horizontal pipes attached, because a certain toddler kept shoveling out all the sand. I finally got it up, hung blankets for walls, and was so excited that I called all my friends to come over and celebrate. They did, bless their hearts, and the damn thing collapsed in the first mild breeze, with 4 toddlers inside.

R.I.P. sukkah 2010. You only lived 3 short hours, but you taught me a lot. After two more trips to competing hardware stores I finally ordered the correct joinery online and retired the sukkah materials until 2011.

And now Sukkot has come again! With Jay's help and all the right hardware, we built our fort in less than 2 hours. Then we decorated it with white Christmas lights. I waited a full 24 hours to make sure it was stable before planning a Sukkot party.

5 kids from Roan's preschool came over to celebrate. It was raining so we had to eat inside, but after dinner the rain stopped so the adults sat in the sukkah and kids chased each other around the yard in circles, only coming into the fort when they had an injury. When hosting a party, it is sometimes hard to sit down, have a beer, and truly relax. Yet I did just that in the sukkah, at full dark with the lights blazing and kids running all around, screaming with laughter. It felt like we were in the eye of a storm. I took a moment to bask in my accomplishments: the sukkah was stable, my son was happy, nobody needed anything from the kitchen. I was living the good life.

I didn't take any pictures that night. But here are some shots of the sukkah in daylight, with two of the walls rolled up:

Daddy Race

Texas Trains

Last weekend we flew to San Antonio to visit Grandma and Grandpa Lyons, Auntie Lisha, Uncle Damon, and Cassie. We visited the Texas Transportation Museum, which is primarily devoted to trains.

There are steam engines, diesel trains, and a some assorted stock cars, flat cars, two cabooses, and two coaches that are decked out in 1920s splendor.

I took this picture in an attempt to record the temperature, which was about 95 degrees. On October 1st.

There were also model trains indoors, similar to the kind my father has. I have a theory that was confirmed on our trip to the Texas Transportation Museum. There are two kinds of people who are obsessed with trains: little boys, and old men. Anyone else at a train museum is there on behalf of a little boy or an old man.

When it was time to go, Grandpa Lyons bought you this engineer hat: