Today's top headline, of course, is Dave's triumphant running of the Long Beach half-marathon. He made his goal time, he felt "relaxed and comfortable" the whole time, and he was positively glowing afterwards. I was so happy and proud I got a little choked up when I finally saw him.
I reluctantly made the decision not to go to the race in person, not wanting to have to shepherd two small boys through a crowd of 50,000, so I was sad not to be there for the finish line. But Boom-Boom was able to take some great race pictures, and we all gathered for a celebratory brunch afterwards, so it was almost as good as being there for the whole thing.
Notable on the signs that the boys made for Dave: Zach's scribbles, which he described as "Daddy running fast," and Luke's small illustration of a man with three horizonal lines in front of him. "That's to show that he's moving fast," he told me. (Moving fast backward? Hahahaha. But I give him credit for the thought.)
It was fourteen years ago this month that I ran my marathon, and it was hard not to do the old "that was then, this was now" comparison. I have great memories of family and friends coming down to D.C. to watch the race; a soda-can-sized Satchmo stealing everyone's attention, and the triumphant uphill slog past the 26-mile marker at the Iwo Jima memorial. Could I do it again? It's hard to imagine making the time for three- and four-hour runs with small kids to be tended to, but I suppose people have made harder things work. Seems like if one of us is about to go down that road, it's more likely to be Dave, who now has a running itch to scratch...
Luke is up to his usual schemes, coming up with ideas for earning Lego money. The other day he blockaded the bathroom and announced that he had set up a "bathroom store." "It costs $39.99 to come in to use the bathroom," he told me. Needless to say, that didn't go over well. His Christmas list is a continuous work in progress, all on a single page. Amazingly, there are two non-Lego items on there (a water gun and a robot).
Even though some of this stuff can be annoying, I'm happy that he's generally happy. I think it's safe to say that making new friends is one of his strong suits. The best way to describe his kindergarten experience so far is to say that his dance card is full - his afternoon schedule is packed with playdates with new friends. Plus it's amazing to watch him in action. The other day at the soccer game he started chatting with one of the boys from the opposing team, and they sat and shared snacks together and declared that they wanted a playdate. Similarly, at a birthday party the other day he made a new friend and marched me right over to the boy's mom so we could share contact information.
Zach has a new and odd little routine in which he regularly announces that he wants to go swimming and then proceeds to take off all of his clothes. This is usually followed by him putting on someone else's swimsuit in an extremely comical fashion. (In this photo he hung the lining of Dave's swimsuit over his head so he could walk with the suit around his waist, barrel-like.)
Also, he's not very talkative around other people, but when he says something, watch out. This afternoon after a playdate, Luke and his friend's brother were grousing about some sort of altercation ("He pushed me" "He got in my face" "He's not sharing" etc.) and all of the boys were walking sullenly to the car, when out of the blue, Zach spoke up and said very calmly, "Ty, you may not push Luke." Which of course cracked everyone up and broke the tension of the moment.
Obligatory cute kid story: Zach was helping me unload some grocery bags and he pulled out a butternut squash. He studied it thoughtfully, then handed it to me and said, "Mom, here's a really heavy pear."
A long, long time ago, when I was a kid, we used to make applesauce-spice cupcakes for Halloween and (here's the old-timey part) we would hand them out to the trick-or-treaters that we knew. (I didn't live quite so long ago that we could hand out baked goods to the kids we didn't know). So this year my mom brought the fun on the road: She made them with Helena and Antonia in Seattle; and then she made them with Luke and Zach here in California.
The amazing thing to me is how she was able to engage both kids (well, I'm not that amazed that she could engage Luke but engaging Zach is quite an accomplishment) in decorating the cupcakes. Sure, Zach ate almost all of the chocolate chip noses, and a large number of the jelly bean mouths wound up on the floor, but who's counting? What was fun for me was to see both boys enjoying the same little Halloween activity that I used to love every year.
Yesterday, while Dave and Luke were at their soccer game, my parents and Zach and I engaged in more old-time fun (old time, in this case, referring to the 1960s) with a little social activism. We went down to the beach to join in the local 350 event (350 referring to the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in parts per million) for global climate change. I was kind of hoping we would be asked to form a giant "350" but instead we just formed a really big line that stretched on and on and on along the beach. Then we all did the wave, posed for the cameras, and chanted, "3-5-0! 3-5-0! 3-5-0!" I didn't think it made much of an impression at all on Zach, until he was going to bed last night and I heard him saying to himself, "5-6-0! 5-6-0!" That tells me two things: one, he was paying attention to a certain extent, and two, he definitely knows what numbers are, even if he didn't get them right. He might also be trying to tell us he's advocating for a higher carbon dioxide limit, but I sure hope not.
Today was the day of the annual pumpkin race, and this year Dave had vowed to get into the game and make our own pumpkin. He evaluated hundreds of pumpkins at the pumpkin patch, and finally settled on this one, which is tall and narrow and seems destined for racing when you put it on its side. We entered the "fun race," which meant we could just do unlimited racing, and it turns out we should have possibly entered it in the "serious" race. Pumpkin 51 (as Luke named it) won nearly every heat that it raced in.
I love the pumpkin races because it's fun to run into friends, check out all of the pumpkins, and see the whole town come out for a cause. Today I was especially excited because Zach voluntarily wore the cat costume that I made him (and he even consented to have the hood over his head every now and then). The best part about the costume is the tail, which is made from a super-fluffy feather boa. Zach has been wearing a loose portion of the tail around the house (stuffing one end into the back of his diaper), and so he was a little annoyed to learn that I had actually sewed this piece of tail to his pants. After several attempts to pull it off, he finally just decided to get with the program. If I can get him to stand still for long enough, we might just have a front picture of the cat costume by the time Halloween rolls around. Good times.
