almost twosies

I should be fired. I am alarmed at how much time has passed since a posting! And this is IT, this is the time- that SO MUCH is changing. Literally, every day a metamorphosis.

Well, let's not waste time with regrets, but just jump in.

Okay. You are almost two. Your brain is startlingly elastic. You can count almost to ten. For a long while, it was "one..... two..... one, .....two!!  And we laughed about breaking the "three barrier", of that mythic future moment in which you were going to be able to jump off into the void and finally land on three. Then, one day, just like that, you said it. Like it was nothing. Then about a week or two later, you were playing by yourself and i heard you quietly to yourself, "six, seven... eight!"  So we are up to eight. Sometimes I hold up the counting cards and ask you how many bears there are on it, or balloons or whatever, and you nonchalantly answer the correct amount. I have no idea of whether it is a guess or not, but .....I have to remind myself of the voracious ability that you are, right now.  Jamba is better at testing you, challenging you, and I have to remember that now is the time for that sort of thing. That this is when all your synapses are wildly overconnected to each other and you can LEARN things in a way my mind has completely forgotten.

A few weeks ago, we got back from a trip to California, and I would like to write about it. Shame that there were no words put down in the moment, but that is how it goes. The long and short of it is that we took a plane, (for the first time all three together as a family) and first we went hot-tubbing at Harbin Hot springs, taking turns swimming with you in the kiddie pool and taking our own solo dunks in the hot and cold pools, camping along the banks of the trickling stream at the base of the hill (where a frog sat sentinel on the rock we had to jump on to cross) where you got to spend your first night in a tent under the starry night, and we saw a pack of deer, with baby fawn, on our walk up to the pools and met a little boy on the deck outside the cafe who was the self-appointed guardian of a mama robin who was sitting on her eggs in a nest they had (foolhardedly? wisely?) built right off the side of the deck, so they were at perfect eye height, a touch away, and he had studied all there was to know about their patterns and the birds who threatened their eggs and performed his robin whistle for us, and then we drove back to SF and got into a car with Rachel and drove up to the woods for the annual reunion of all our Bay area friends along a river up in the Trinity Alps.

And something happened, there, for you. One day, in that wild place- the closest you have been to true wilderness, with the butterflies thrumming the skies and the forests so alive with their forestness, and the clean clear streams that you were actually allowed to play in- and we noticed this remarkable transformation.

It might have started the moment we got out of the car... Four year old Chloe, daughter of Jim and Giulietta, had been asking her mother eagerly all day for the baby girl she had been promised would arrive, and so she excitedly ran up to the car when we pulled up. She put out her hand to you, and you took one look up at her and fell hard. You took her hand, and the two of you just walked off together into the metaphorical sunset, which was then being performed by the trees of main camp. That image of you two, hand in hand and walking away without a look back, will be seared in my mind forever. Her tall and willowy, you a plump little peanut. The cuteness factor was a little outrageous.

So the two of you played and played, and swung in the hammock together and ran around with the dogs and you helped her not to be afraid of the doggies, and you twirled together in a world of your own, under the gaze of the adult world. It was what I have always wanted for you.. a tribal situation in which you and your friends are the undercurrents of the rippling and dynamic stream of community (forgive the cheesy metaphors) and not just the sole focus of our attention. Anyway, after a day in the fresh clean air with such a special friend, you came back to the tent with us to be put down for the night, and we were all snuggling on the air mattress and suddenly you sat up and started, just SPOUTING language. Sentences, nonsensical syllables, all connected in a stream of language, came pouring out of your mouth where before there had only been single words uttered in slow punctuation. You were just kind of blabbing. Talking, pointing at the walls of the tent, and then you shrugged your shoulders up in a kinda "i dont know!" way, and then continued on.

It was absolutely stunning. We were floored. We waited for you to finish and then we both said, "Sava, where did you COME from?" Oh my god we are both so in love with you. It was wonderful, also, to see you fall in love with a friend more your own age, because up to this point, you have existed side-by-side with some playmates, without forming any attachments. But you fell in love with her instantly, and it was so nice to see that side of you. That ability to form friendships.

So much more to write about our trip to California, but I will leave it at that for now. All I know is that, sitting in front of the statue of Quan Yin at Harbin Hot Springs after a dunk in the cold pool, I made a solemn vow to return to this place so that you could grow up blessed with the same contact to the natural world that I had. I want you to know these places in your bones.

Okay, so now you are starting to play with sentences- the big puzzle right now is how words fit together.  You are starting to get ideas like subject verb agreement, and concepts like "I and You". However when you want me to pick you up and hold you, you say "I hold you". I ask: "Sava, do you want me to hold you?" and you say "No, I hold you", as you lift your arms to be picked up. It is so cute. I am going to miss the passing of some of these twist-ups. For instance: wardawn has officially passed on. Sometime after California. You charmed the pants off everyone there, by calling "water" "wardawn" (which your dad finally figured out was because when you used to be in the bath, he would ask "Sava, do you want the water on?), so that people were starting to use it instead of the real word. And then we came back, and one day you woke up saying "water", just like the rest of us. I never got a video of you saying wardawn, and now you won't say it anymore. It is very sad.


You are incredibly athletic and bold in your skin. So full of energy and life that it is very hard to get you to sit still. In the mornings, Grayson, Emi and Kim sometimes gather together on the lawn to do Bagua together. They will be standing in a circle crouching and circulating their chi in a series of poses and breathing exercises, and I will come over and let you loose on them. They love it: you are like the distillation of all the chi they are attempting to generate. And you must feel something from their energy circle: because you just start going crazy: giggling, turning around in circles, falling down on your head, chasing Nico around and screaming with glee. They doing all these serious joyful poses with the widest grins on their faces.

You love nothing more than to jump from great heights into my arms. A current favorite game is to climb up on the back of the blue velvet couch and jump into my arms from there. You have complete trust in your physical prowess (for which you boast many a head bump and scrape and splinter, but luckily so far only minor injuries) and your favorite state is naked and with no shoes on exploring the different surfaces of the planet with your bare feet: sidewalk, asphalt, wood floor, grass, mulch, thicket. I worry about worms penetrating your tender soles and scan the vicinity for broken glass, but i feel somehow that this early experience with unfiltered walking is the more important thing to protect. I try to stuff my worry inside and hope that you continue to find the world a safe and welcoming oasis.

I have to go now, to my studio to spend a few moments painting, but I will be back, and I promise to write more. I love you
Mama