February 14, 2011 ~ Day 67 My Valentine

I've been putting off writing about Valentine's Day because we didn't really have one this year ~ at least not yet. It isn't just that we have been completely wrapped up in moving to our new home and cleaning the old one - we also have three young children and no babysitter in our new neighborhood.

Valentine's Day just happened to be frenetically busy and I spent the entire day focused on my two sons and their respective Valentine needs... special cupcakes, cookies, treats and cards for their friends. In fact, I spent most of my day bringing gifts to people I love and basically forgot that the occasion had anything to do with romance.

What I really believe is that any day can be Valentine's Day when you are with the person you love, and that I am lucky to have love in my life. At some point my husband and I will have the opportunity to celebrate each other with a candlelit dinner, and I look forward to that evening whenever it finally happens.

I also believe that our children are the best Valentine's Day presents I could ever receive, and I feel really glad that I was able to spend the majority of my day hanging out with my eldest son - just the two of us. I took him to a special classroom Valentine's Day party which also marked his last day at the old school... and bought/brought red velvet cupcakes which looked and smelled divine.

At the end of the school day, my boy came with me to our 'old' house and helped me to pack boxes and load things into the truck for over four hours. We shared a large order of carne asada fries replete with guacamole and sour cream, and sat together side by side on the bare floor of what used to be our dining room - just eating and chatting like two old friends. It was an unexpectedly poignant moment with my little man. Any parent with three children close in age knows how rare and special it is to have a block of time alone with any one of them.

On the drive home my son reached forward from the back seat and handed me a card with a bear and a heart on it (recycled from the large bag of Valentines he had received at school). "Here mommy, will you be my Valentine?

How could I refuse such a tender offer?

"I would LOVE to be your Valentine, honey."

So while there may not have been much time for romance on the actual day of February 14, 2011... there was a vast amount of love given and received within our family of five. I think St. Valentine would approve.

February 13, 2011 ~ Day 66 Prayer

I am praying with all of my heart, sending loving thoughts and all of my healing energy to someone very special. I would normally not write about a friend's personal life so candidly but my dear friend has been very open about her situation and has kept a wonderful blog about what she is going through. She wants to educate others and bring awareness to the disease and the benefits of early treatment.

Today this much loved friend is undergoing (right now!!!) a ten hour surgery for very early stage breast cancer. She has chosen to undergo masectomy which reduces the risk of recurrence by well over 90%. I am obviously very concerned about her and have read up on this surgery to see what she will be going through; and am relieved to have read that survival rate at 5 years for this type of cancer at this stage is just about 100%.

That's a darn good thing for all of us. She is the most amazing woman - with such an incredible sense of humor. I adore her. She manages to make being a great wife and mother look easy, and to give so much of herself with a genuine joy and zest. She and her husband are madly in love and it really shows through in the way they are together; it warms my heart to see that kind of affection. She is also incredibly tenacious, going through another long medical odyssey in the past six years in order to bring their three sons into the world. For all that she has suffered in her life, she manages to embrace each day with a warm heart and optimism. She is also a very gifted writer with an MFA in creative writing but she wears her talents so humbly!

I just can't say enough good things about my friend, she is an angel walking on our Earth. The world needs people like this.

My friend is also incredibly brave. Today she is facing what mothers fear the most ~ separation from her children. She lost her own mother to breast cancer at the age of nine and has spent the last few decades waiting watchfully to see if she also carries the genes for this disease. Sadly, she learned last year that she did indeed have them... which led to even more intensive observation and luckily they were able to detect her own cancer at the earliest possible stage. It seems a terribly sad circle of life that she now knows breast cancer intimately from the perspective of both child AND mother.

That said, I believe my friend is going to BREAK her family cycle today. Since she first told us about her cancer, I have prayed every single day and night. I can't explain why but I truly believe that she will be 100% well when all is said and done. In a strange way it feels like life has brought her this opportunity to end an era of familial pain and loss. She will benefit from modern medicine and modern technology so that she can move on to live another sixty years and raise her babies to adulthood and beyond. I'm not just being optimistic... I truly believe throughout my core that she is going to make it through this and come out stronger than ever from this intense experience. Still, I wish more than anything that she didn't have to endure the experience.

Knowing the power of a mother's love, I'll bet the spirit of her own mother is somehow watching over that operating room today.

We don't get to choose the hard lessons that life brings to each of us along the way. I guess in the end what matters most is how we rise to the occasion. My friend has walked through the past weeks and years without bitterness, managing to laugh and find humor even in the greatest moments of stress. I admire her so much. She inspires me to want to be a better person, a more graceful person.

Wherever you are today, whenever you happen to read this post, I would deeply appreciate it if you could send love and prayers for healing to this special lady who deserves a million more chances to show the world what she's got.

If she was here with me right now, I know my friend would ask me to pray not only for her - but also for everyone else in our world who is suffering... to send them my compassion and love as well.

Girl, I'm doing it right now in your honor. Love you so much!!!

February 12, 2011 ~ Day 65 Welcome Home

I am sitting on the narrow linoleum floor of my new kitchen with my back against the refrigerator door, mainly because the only outlet for three-pronged plugs to be found in the vicinity is about two feet away. Half-unpacked cardboard boxes surround me and the kitchen sink is full of dirty dishes that I really need to wash tonight. Maybe we'll try out the new portable dishwasher?

The house is deeply quiet, now that I've managed to calm my sugared out children (thanks, Valentine's Day!) and get them to bed. My husband is out at a coffee shop working on computer code, and for the first time since about midnight I am enjoying complete and utter peace.

Looking around this amazingly scuffed, worse-for-the-wear home we've just moved into I do notice all of the rips in the screens, the stains under the kitchen cabinets (I wonder how many years those have been there!) and the jiggly sound the refrigerator motor makes when it turns off.

Oddly as it sounds, I LOVE IT. I love all of it. I love every ripped plastic blind, every scratched bit of paint. Every single thing that makes this home old and a bit scroungy. This house feels lived in. It feels warm and comforting. It feels alive and friendly. Most of all, the entire house feels like your favorite threadbare bathrobe that was once fuzzy and is now merely soft and rich with the fresh scent of laundry soap.

I never would have believed that it would be possible to live in a home that was TOO nice, TOO fancy, TOO large. My husband and I aren't very materialistic but we have always sort of shared the notion that a large lovely home connotes prosperity and happiness. For whatever reason though, we were never really that happy in the gorgeous massive house we've just left.

There was a lot of sorrow and stress in that house, we grappled with a lot of grief there. We never had enough money to furnish it in a style that befitted its elegance, and I could almost HEAR the pristine walls and stained glass cabinets griping over our stained mismatched furniture - just like the fancy train in "The Little Engine That Could" who refused to pull the good little engine and her cargo over the mountain because they weren't important enough. "I, house the likes of YOU? I think not!"

What a profound lesson then, to discover over the course of almost 21 months that bigger is *not* always better... and perfect is perhaps hard to live with on a day to day basis. It gets overwhelming to feel like you have to act like someone you aren't (in my case, someone neat and tidy!) in order to live up to the house you live in.

Typing these words I am reminded of the difference between myself as a teenager dating versus myself now as a 35 year old mother and wife. At age 16 I tried so hard to be the 'ideal' girlfriend, whatever I thought that was. I wanted to be the smartest, prettiest, sexiest, most affectionate girlfriend and couldn't get my head around the notion that being with someone who was trying that hard to be perfect all of the time might quickly grow exhausting... or at the minimum, it might be uncomfortable or annoying.

Nearly twenty years later, I have to laugh at the notion of ME being the best at anything. I feel lucky on a daily basis if my mom clothes manage to match and I'm actually wearing skinny jeans rather than maternity pants (nearly two years postpartum). I still haven't learned how to apply makeup and if my husband is really lucky I might throw on a coat of mascara and some lip gloss before we go out on the town.

I feel like a failure about 90% of the time as a parent, but I figure that if I can just keep my chin up and continue showing up in the morning with a positive attitude, I'll never be a total failure. I have no idea what I want from a career, which makes one wonder why I invested almost 30 years in studying and taking classes. I've had a lot of trouble keeping the house clean since having three children, despite the fact that I spend multiple hours cleaning each day. Even my health has taken a huge hit in the last few years, although I'm on the road back from that.

Like my new house then, I am a total, glorious mess. Yet I don't think it is a coincidence that I have a darling husband who manages to love me despite the fact that he has watched two children entering the world through the graphic and bloody process of birth, and a third sliced right out of my womb to the point where he could see my organs working within my flesh. Ironically, the more of a mess I have become the more he has loved me. Perhaps like our new house I am more comfortable to live with on a day-to-day basis without the hard edge of perfection hanging around my countenance.

The list of things that are wrong with this new house is lengthy and yet, I just don't care. BB gun pellet hole in the dining room window? Okay, we'll deal with it. Back fence rotting? Fine, no problem. Cast iron pipes that won't work with a garbage disposal? That's alright, I'll scrape the plates more carefully before I rinse them. There are probably fifty things wrong with this house already and yet I love it more after two days than I've loved any house in three years.

It probably sounds crazy but I feel like this home gives me permission to let my hair down and just be myself.

Now that the bulk of the moving is over and we're down to unpacking scores of boxes, my husband is falling in love with the community and house as well. Last night we spent a few exhausted moments cuddling on the couch and he confided with a smile in his voice, "It's a great place, hon. We're going to be happy here."

This evening I returned with another load of boxes from the old house and discovered that he had planted me some yellow Gerbera daisies in the fertile soil next to our new back yard gate along with a note staked to their side that read: Welcome Home.

I took it all in ~ the chaotic, happy sounds of my children playing, the vast stretch of land extending behind me into the night, and the smallish slightly shabby house illuminating our garden with radiance tumbling from its brightly lit windows. Inhaling the beautiful, chilly night air I thought to myself happily, "That sign could also read, 'Welcome Back To YOU'".

February 11, 2011 ~ Day 64 Embrace the Crazy

One of my closest friends who also has three small children likes to say, "Embrace the crazy!" I love the way she says this because it so describes how I feel about my life all of the time these days. Here is a good example of what I mean.

We moved to a new house yesterday (well, 80% moved in) on the day of an local city event which drew over 120,000 people to the neighborhood we were leaving. The roadways entering our town were like a parking lot for hours in the morning, while the roadways leaving our town were like a parking lot for hours in the evening. Despite this, my son and I managed to get through the throngs and back to our old house for a few hours at dusk to gather more boxes, bedding and kitchen items. We spent an hour using my old skateboard to roll the heaviest of boxes to our truck, since neither of us were able to lift them.

It took another 45 minutes to get back to our new house and by this time it was 8pm and we were famished and exhausted. We entered to find the other children covered in beans and rice, screaming their little heads off. The screaming was apparently infectious because shortly thereafter the oldest son (who had been sweet and helpful to me for the preceding 4 hours) started to shriek loudly as well, racing around crying and (unfortunately) hitting.

By 9pm I had managed to feed the children and get them bathed (after discovering that we'd also forgotten the shower curtain) but we discovered we had left the night lights at our our old house. This caused another hour of distress as my sons wept with dismay when they understood that they would have to sleep without their special lights. At 10:30 I began cleaning the kitchen and unpacking boxes and by 12am I realized that I was too tired to think straight so I finally got into the blessedly hot shower and almost fell asleep standing up.

Thankfully we have no working clocks yet in this house because I would surely have bawled my eyes out if I knew exactly what time it was when my husband accidentally woke me up in the middle of the night and then began to kick me in his sleep. It seemed like I had only just managed to fall asleep again when (still pitch dark outside) I began to hear the first morning hysteria of the new day - shrieking and screaming and crazy laughter from the bedroom that two of our children are now sharing. The new house is so small, they seemed to be screaming from either side of my head!

Before I knew it they had rushed into their brother's bedroom and were dragging him out of bed. "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" he wailed, "I'm sleeping!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Bleary eyed, my husband wearily stretched and announced, "Ugh. Time to get started again with another long day. I NEED coffee."

We've now been awake for almost five hours and in that time I have broken up seven fights, given two time outs, iced my younger son's head from where his brother hit him with first a ball and then a door, unpacked boxes, somehow managed to get them all bathed, fed and dressed, researched a new electric dryer (as many of our old appliances will not work for the new house) and sadly forgotten to eat breakfast. It's time to leave now for my nephew's birthday party and we still have at least 5 more trucks full of stuff to bring from the old house today, not to mention 60 Valentines to make for my two sons' classes.

I still haven't found the box with my clothes so I've had to recycle most of yesterday's moving outfit, but I am thankful that we now have a dial tone. I'm thankful that tomorrow is a school day and I will have a break from the fighting between my sons for a few hours.

Before signing off though, here is a list of the top 5 best things about this weekend so far:

5) Beautiful glossy backed crows live in the large tree behind our home and land on the garage roof periodically. Like the neighbors, they have been warmly welcoming.
4) It is a beautiful sunny day and there are no massive city-wide events today, so moving should be easier.
3) Today is my nephew's birthday party and I am so grateful that my sister's entire family made the three hour drive south to help us move this weekend and even scheduled his party here so that they could be with us.
2) We have a brand new mattress for the first time in our nearly 9 years together! So far it seems pretty comfortable! Nothing like a good night of sleep (or at least a few pleasant hours...)
1) Despite all of the many things that are falling apart in this old house, we all love our new home and neighborhood.

More soon...

February 10, 2011 ~ Day 63 Over The Fence

I brought my children to the new house first thing this morning (on two hours of sleep, agg) to clean and spiff it up before we start to bring in all of the major furniture tomorrow. With bicycles and helmets in tow, I had just gotten them all set up to play in our new back yard when over the fence I heard a "Yoo hoo!" and was happily surprised to see a blonde woman pop her head up over the white wooden posts to say hello.

Willowy and put together, she was a beautiful lady somewhere in the 'middle age' sporting a black top and leggings... and very large black pearl rings. (A bit fancier than me in my scroungy leftover maternity pants, which I really need to give to Amvets one of these days.)

"Hi!" she beamed, "Are you moving in here?"

"Yes, we just signed our lease yesterday! Are you the one who takes care of this beautiful garden?"

This is one of the most attractive features of our new home - right beyond our back fence on the dirt alleyway that separates us from the neighbors - there is a stretch of publicly owned land where loving hands have built and tended a community vegetable garden. It is gorgeous and well designed: wooden train stakes forged into in elegant boxes filled with soil and compost - overflowing with fresh leafy greens and a variety of herbs and vegetables. My husband and I have wondered since we first saw the house who tends this garden!

"Yes," she blushed, "That's me. We've been working on it since December. I'm Sydney*, and we live just across the alley. This is a wonderful place. You are going to be very happy here."

For the next ten minutes while my one and three year olds raced around the yard, Sydney filled me in on her backstory with our new house. She has a niece who lives one block away who is our age and has small children close in age to ours - two boys and a girl, in the same order. She really wanted her niece to apply for our rental ("I couldn't believe what they were renting it for, you guys have this place for a steal!") but they weren't up for the stress of moving with their three little ones.

Sydney told me all about the neighbors on our street that she knows, which ones are friendly and outgoing... which ones have children. She described the summertime festival on our street and how friendly the neighborhood is as a whole. "And your family lives on the very best block of the very best street!"

"That's what everyone keeps telling us! We feel so blessed and lucky to be here."

She shared little nuggets of local gossip such as the fact that the neighbor a few houses down has a heart of gold but a booming sense of humor. "He'll be the one who'll introduce himself by saying something like, 'So you have THREE kids, hmmmmm? How did THAT happen?'"

Before we parted ways I entreated Sydney to give me gardening lessons once we've settled in. "I absolutely love what you have done here with the community garden and I would be so excited if you would show me how to create something like that in our new (huge) back yard."

I added, "I'm really sorry your niece didn't get this place but we're so grateful to be here and I am really happy to have a friend across the alley."

What a great start to the day! We're apparently trading one small, tight-knit community for another. Every single time I have spent more than ten minutes at the new house I have met somebody; a new neighbor, a mother with a stroller, a jogger from down the block - it seems like there are potential friends everywhere.

Our children also spent three hours playing outdoors this afternoon while my mom and I worked on the house ~ riding their bikes and running through the yard. They had such a great time leaping and laughing and riding around ~ this move is going to be fantastic for their physical fitness level... and it was such a thrill as a parent at bedtime to see how tired they were. The actually *asked* me if they could go to bed because they were so worn out from all of the activity. Wow!

Speaking of bedtime, it's high time for me to head in that direction as well. I'm thrilled though to know that as of tomorrow we will live on a street so friendly that folks work together on community gardens and pop their well-coiffed heads over fences just to say hello and 'Welcome to the Neighborhood!'





*Name changed to protect the privacy of the party in question.

February 9, 2011 ~ Day 62 Warm and Bright

We did it!!!!

This afternoon my husband and I signed the lease on a new home and a new life, all of which begins this weekend and will thrust us into an entirely different community.

The sweet guy at the property management company handed my husband and I our new house keys and I have to say that as soon as I placed that shiny silver gateway upon my ring, something in me shifted. "I have a home," I thought, and I promptly jumped in my truck and drove down the hill to unlock its front door for the very first time. My husband took our children to spend time with their grandfather giving me a much-needed break and the opportunity to spend a few hours on my own, bonding with our new house.

Even though it was after 4pm on a relatively chilly winter afternoon, as I entered the front door I felt its walls exuding warmth captured from the setting Sun. Four out of its six rooms were brightly illuminated thanks to large windows overlooking the back yard and a new coat of white paint throughout has done wonders to class up the place.

Despite the fact that it is about half as big and much more run down than the place we are leaving, I feel like this new home has such peaceful energy. It feels like a happy place where there has been laughter and love; and even if that isn't true, I believe that our family will definitely bring laughter and love into its walls. I stayed in there for an hour this afternoon, putting away the first load of boxes and toys from the move, and felt both safe and really comfortable.

I'm actually a strong believer that all buildings carry the energy of the people who have lived there before. More than once I have performed a sage smudging on a house that I felt carried bad energy, or left clumps of herbs up in various crannies near the ceiling. We briefly owned a house seven years ago that carried both a resident ghost AND the other 'ghosts' of LSD and crystal meth use when it was briefly used as a meth lab. (The funny thing, is that it never occurred to me until right now that we may have been inhaling a lot of weird stuff that year, chemicals leftover in the carpet, etc. Interesting.)

That house required a LOT of protective herbs!

Weirdly enough, the house we are now leaving in 2011 has had terrible energy since we moved in and I can't figure out why! As far as we know, nobody has ever died here. Our landlords own the house outright and had it built for their own family in the late 1980s. They are all healthy and seem quite happy, I haven't a clue why this place has such a bad vibe. Perhaps it has something to do with all of the Navy stuff happening just a few blocks away - we do have nuclear subs based here, toxic waste stored nearby and lots of artillery shelling that takes place frequently within earshot. I cannot explain it, but something has made this home a true challenge since the very first week when we moved in. Seriously. Within one week of moving here I was hospitalized, my father died and my child was born via c-section 6 weeks early due to a dangerous pregnancy complication.

Over the past 21 months this house has consistently brought our family bad luck; to the point where I not only smudged every single room with sage and chanting... I also promised the house spirit outright that if it would just leave us alone and let us thrive again, we would not be here any longer than five years in total. That was about 9 months ago and I have to say, since making that promise our family has grown stronger, healthier and happier. Now we are leaving and I am very pleased that we are keeping our end of the bargain.

Our current landlords have jacked up the rent for whomever takes over this place... which makes me feel even better about vacating the property. We will now be paying over $700 less per month for the new home, with better local schools and equally fantastic proximity to shops and ocean. My husband's dream of owning a home is edging steadily closer to our reach.

Best of all if the owner of our new home ever decides to sell his property, we as the tenants will be offered first right of refusal. This means that someday we may actually be able to *buy* this incredible 8000+ square foot property! My husband and I are both very excited about that prospect, even though we know that (a) we don't currently have the funds to make that possible; and (b) the opportunity may never arise.

At the very least, we both feel confident that we are putting down roots in the community where (with the exception of our year in Italy) we will raise our children to adulthood. I cannot wait to enroll my eldest son in the local kindergarten... he feels the same way and asks me every single day when he can start at his new school. We've already seen our preschooler flourishing in his new classroom and it has inspired all of us to believe that we will ease into the different routine with grace and happiness.

I locked up the house tonight to go get some dinner and return to my family, feeling truly optimistic about our future and excited for the many transitions ahead. Starving, I decided to splurge at the fancy nearby health food grocery superstore, to enjoy some of their tacos and pick up organic produce at the same time. On the way to the market was a ton of traffic and three times I nearly turned the car around. Finally I arrived, purchased some food and made my way to an open table to eat.

"Hello, do you remember me?"

I looked up to see the exquisite pre-natal yoga teacher I worked with closely throughout my second (best) pregnancy. She is an absolutely beautiful spiritual-type German woman with flowing curly hair, interesting jewelry, bright blue eyes and lots of tattoos upon her skin. (I can guarantee that each of them has a profound meaning; that is simply the way she rolls.)

"Of course I remember you. It has been so long!"

"Did you have your baby? I have thought of you often in the past few years, I remember that your pregnancy was very difficult."

"Yes! She made it and so did I, thankfully. It is so nice to see you. Do you teach yoga in this part of town too?"

We chatted for a few more minutes, catching up on our respective children and lives, and I learned that she teaches two yoga classes for people with back injuries ~ just a few blocks from my new home! What a blessing!!! I could not believe it. This woman was an integral part of my life for nearly three years - I studied yoga with her off and on from 2006 through 2009. I haven't seen her in almost two years and out of nowhere on the day when our family has just signed off on a new life, she suddenly reappears and is offering a class for people with disc herniations just like mine!

If ever there could be a "sign" that we've made the right move, this was surely my sign. Within two hours of signing my lease I found that I already had a kind friend in the neighborhood. Some angel up there is truly looking out for me. (Thank you!)

Time will tell how things ultimately unfold for us at the new place. It may be great, or maybe not. Either way, I'm filled tonight with a sense tremendous relief and real elation to be moving forward into a new life with the people dearest to my heart.

February 8, 2011 ~ Day 61 Tap Fever

One of the coolest things about the neighborhood we are moving to this weekend is its highly visible support of creativity. Within four blocks of our house I have already discovered two music schools, two art schools for young children, a bead shop, a needlepoint shop, a piano gallery and best of all, a tap dancing academy.

I believe I've mentioned in the past that my kid loves to dance. He's got a gift that I never had, the gift of coordinated movement and natural rhythm. He comes by this honestly with two dancers in my immediate family so in a way he lucked into the right home because far from wanting to squelch his fervor to dance, my husband and I are enthusiastically supporting his search for the style that fits.

About a month ago he tried out a hip-hop dancing class and was very disappointed, but perhaps that was for the best. Now we are moving and we've discovered a whole new kind of movement - tumbling and tap! Our son could not be more delighted, he absolutely LOVES his tap classes and thankfully does not yet feel at all self-conscious about being the only boy in the room. Right now they are practicing a dance to perform in April that has something to do with Mickey Mouse and Goofy. He's all about swinging his arms, tapping his toes and doing something that his teacher calls "the penguin" move. It's pretty darn cute to watch.

This little guy is going to be our artist for sure. Yesterday when I volunteered in his kindergarten class (the one he will be leaving on Monday) I was charmed to see that he was singing quietly and dancing in his seat as he worked at one of the four classroom centers putting together Valentines. He reminds me of Matt Dillon's character in the movie "The Flamingo Kid" (1984) ~ always humming, even at the dinner table.

In addition to singing and dancing, my kid loves to paint. He is prolific - I can't keep up with all of the paintings he produces, and constantly have to rotate them on our family room bulletin board. He will use just about anything to create art with - found objects, tape, oil pastels, crayons, markers, it doesn't matter to him what the medium may be because he sees potential in just about everything. He is also sort of a natural on the piano, putting together his own melodies (one note at a time) according to what sounds good to him.

I realize that a lot of parents (especially a lot of fathers) might not be too excited about having a son that prefers tap dancing to T-ball. I guess our boy is just lucky then to have both a mommy AND a daddy who love him for being who he is. When I told my husband over the telephone this afternoon that the kids and I attended another tap class his first question about our son was:

"Did he have fun?"

"Yes, he loved it. He was tapping away with his arms in the air and a huge grin on his face."

"That is so awesome. I'm happy for him."

And that's the kind of great guy I married. He doesn't take it as a slight on his own masculinity that one of his male children prefers watching Angelina Ballerina to Transformers. (This great attitude actually works out strongly in my husband's favor, as I find it highly attractive to be with a man who supports our children no matter what.) Our boys could float around the house in pink tutus if they wanted to, and their dad would probably just laugh and pretend to be a goofy dancing spider or dancing bear to play with them.

I am really interested to see what my son's future holds. He showed signs of being a rockstar soccer player this Fall, scoring more goals than almost anyone on his team. Yet he equally adores watching clicking his heels as he dances down our hallway. When he was barely three years old he memorized the words to all of the songs in 'The Sound of Music' and used to sing them in the bathtub. I wonder who he is becoming and how he will manage to blend all of the many worlds that he has access to; I wonder at what point (if any) he will have to begin making hard choices about which activities he wants to pursue in earnest.

There are typically a lot of tough knocks for sensitive boys who show a flare for something that American culture has designated 'for girls'. This is especially concerning when it comes to today's scarily invasive digital technology where cyber-bullying has become routine... where videos can be recorded and broadcast without consent over the Internet, leaving young children and adolescents vulnerable to harsh scrutiny and scorn. It is worrisome for me as a parent to wonder how my son will manage to navigate through potentially rough waters and chart his own course toward success, stability and true happiness.

I feel especially grateful though to know that if he ever decides to go full bore into pursuing a career as a professional artist, we have my brothers in New York City who are already deeply enmeshed in the dance and theater world there. With a single airplane ride I could connect my boy to a vibrant hub of possibility, with uncles who adore him there to mentor and watch over him along his way. My boy has options, and a relatively easy path toward finding a community of similarly-minded peers. That is a huge relief.

All people enter this world with unique talents and abilities. I feel so blessed to have participated in the creation of a warm-hearted little tap-dancing bug who finds absolute joy in movement. It's an honor to witness his life unfold.