Ada: I love you, Claire.

Claire: I love you too, Ada.

Jeremy: Get a room!

On Sunday the whole of Cortland was closed off for a block party.

“It’s the biggest party I have EVER NEVER SEEN!” said Claire.

Yellow balloons, sausage onna bun, a petting zoo with bunnies and pigs, pony rides. Pony rides! When Salome took Milo down off Pixie, he burst into inconsolable tears.

“That’s right Milo,” said Salome. “Horses make you happy and sad.”

“She told the groom all about selling Noah,” said Jack. “She was all ‘I had a horse. I had to sell him.’ She’ll tell that story to anyone who likes horses. She’ll tell it to someone with a horse tattoo. She’s like a recovering alcoholic.”

“Sort of,” I said. “Only us horse people? We never recover.”

I’d been joking that every time I encourage Ada’s love of horses, Gilbert kills a kitten, and Gilbert had acknowledged that this was so; so when I found Gilbert supervising Ada’s pony ride I cleared my throat very loudly.

“Goodbye Ada!” he said as she rode away.

I said: “Goodbye kittens!”

“What I keep in my pants, by Julia, a baby.

“A soy bean!”

Q: Your daughter looks very happy to be on a pony.

R: Yeah, my daughter looks happy. Your daughter looks completely intent on absorbing every nanosecond of the experience for later recall. Believe me, I know.

Q: I hate you.

R: She’s got it baaaad.

Q: If the first garage virus wipes out all the horses, you’ll know it was me.

R: Damn, and it would be so easy. You wouldn’t even need a virus, just an antibiotic-resistant strain of strangles… wait, what the hell am I saying?

Q: It’s so easy to socially-engineer you people. “So, tell me about infectious diseases of the horse!” “Well, I’m glad you asked!”

R: I hate you.

C: Hey man, catch this!

Milo: Da?

Salome: “Hey man, catch this!”? Where does that come from? Did it come from school?

C: No! It came from me! It’s my joke!

R: Yay! You’re going to the potty like a big girl! You’ve got potty power!

C (witheringly): I haven’t got potty power.

R: Oh really? What have you got, then?

C: I’ve got the Potty Power DVD.

“HAI!” means Hi! It’s so clear it’s actually kind of uncanny.

“Da! Da! Da!” means That! That! That! and not Daddy, as you might think. Which said, sometimes That! does actually refer to Jeremy.

“Mammammammamma!” means How could this happen to me, an innocent baby?

Remember how she was born with her fist raised? She’s become very insistent upon her rights. If Claire gets a sip of ginger beer, Julia also gets a sip of ginger beer. Failure to comply will result in consequences! Baby power!

Other cool Julia facts: her favourite thing is to hug. Sometimes if she’s with Blanca she’ll twist around and hug me or Jeremy, then twist around and hug Blanca. This game could go on for an hour and she would be perfectly happy.

When she has hauled herself up into a standing position at the coffee table or TV cabinet and is standing there playing thoughtfully with a video cable or phone, she will emit a piercing whistle of pure joie de vivre.

You know how when you’ve just fallen in love and it makes the whole geopolitical situation seem more hopeful and colours prettier, and you think about that person and even the memory of the scent of their skin hits your heart like a shot of brandy? Julia is like that.

A good weekend is not a weekend in which nothing bad happens. Tragedies large and small may be unfolding; in fact, they almost certainly are. The world is scary, as Claire has pointed out, all the times. The powerful are cruel and unaccountable, and the disempowered are not necessarily people you’d want to hang out with either. A good weekend is an act of will. It’s flipping the bird to the Blue Angels when it sounds like they’re about to land on your skylights.

On Friday Claire’s ear got the all-clear, and the girls and I had lunch at Citizen Cake, and bought a brand new mattress at 75% off from a discount store. Claire behaved brilliantly through all of this, but when I took her to Holly Park and then the grocery store, she melted down three times in quick succession.

Weirdly and unnervingly, a random elderly passer-by tried to circumvent Claire’s tantrum by poking her jovially in the leg. Claire, who has a very healthy sense of her own personal space, aimed a warning shot at the woman’s sensitive parts.

“Well! That was aggressive,” said the woman disapprovingly.

As Jeremy put it: “There’s nothing as infuriating as the kindness of strangers.”

Saturday morning the three-year-olds and various hangers-on met up at the Randall, which Claire likes to call the Tarantula Museum. We got to pet a rat and a tortoise and a king snake.

“I think I want a snake,” said Quinn.

Saturday night Teacher Dan took the kidlets, and J and I met Ian and Kat for a very good meal at Incanto (grilled pear salad, pork shoulder with brussels sprouts, bay leaf rice pudding.)

I tottered home high-heeled and drunk and was extremely hung over this morning, but a trip down to Pacifica for a beach brunch with the one-year-olds and various hangers-on proved an effective tonic. We talked about fibroids – “You should have kept it, and told her that it was her twin!” – and placentas – “I would totally have eaten it. I’ve been in California too long.” “BYO at Chez Panisse?” “Well, Cafe Gratitude wouldn’t want it.” “What if we told them it was marinated seitan?”

I’m not feeling very empowered right now. I need to find a cure for various diseases including cancer and broker a Mideast peace accord and do something about North Korea and try to get the Republican pedophiles and war profiteers out of Congress and Senate, and I can’t really do any of that; but by God I can enjoy San Francisco and my godless liberal friends. And I do.

R: …so they changed the law, and now I can apply for British citizenship.

Grant: Yay! Then you can marry me and solve my visa problem!

R: I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long.

Julia wakes. Julia grins. Julia is showered in kisses. Julia chuckles.

She holds a caregiver’s hands in her own small fat fists! She walks the length of the hallway, shrieking for joy!

Julia’s hair is white. Her eyes are robin’s-egg blue and silver. Her skin is pink and gold. She has no neck. Her beauty is awesome.

Julia eats. She eats yogurt and cereal and bananas and broccoli and yams and carrots and yellow squash and bagels and rice and edamame and avocado!

Whatever that is that you are eating, Julia would like some please!

HAI!

Julia laughs and wiggles and laughs and wiggles and laughs! Suddenly and abruptly Julia cries!

Julia falls asleep!

C: Oh no! The water is all gone, down to the bath’s bones!

R: How about wearing these clothes Miss Claire? Your new purple corduroys?

C: NO!

R: But they’re pretty –

C: I wanna be my POWER!

R: Oh. What is your power?

C: Blue jeans.

R: Not purple?

C: NO. BLUE.

R: Ookay. And how about this shirt?

C: NO. My power is SHORT SLEEVES.

R: Right. Good. Here’s a short-sleeved one, is that okay?

C: Yes. That is my power.

R: Oh. Whew.

C (indulgently): Silly mummy.

Every first of the month I swear to myself that this month I’ll get back to blogging every day or two. The girls are kicking my ass, it’s true. They have me surrounded. I call myself the old woman who lives in the shoe: I have so many children, I don’t know what to do.

I’m exhausted and disorganized and overcommitted, but I must say that there are compensations. Lying in bed next to a sleeping Julia, smelling her sweaty baby hair. Tickling Claire until she falls over laughing. The blessed quiet of the house after everyone is asleep.

I love them so much that it feels like an intense resonance in my bones, as if they are vibrating at the frequency of the colour blue.

(Claire typed all this, and worked out the spellings for herself. -J)

ratcl

jermi

julia

blaca

ruwin

ada

mostar

bbibi

milo
azwold
dora thu ixspora
maggi

(Ed: mostar = monster, the subject of her latest library book. Oswald, Dora the Explorer and Maggie are her favourite TV shows.)

Julia

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

The Duboce Park playground has low, friendly equipment with soft rounded edges for the convenience of the very small. It’s the first time I’ve seen Julia really storming around on her own, all confidence and glee. I swore I wouldn’t get sentimental when my little one started to grow up, but I’ve got this bit of dust in my eye. Snif.

Playground

Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens.

Claire derailed our plans for the day by announcing that her ear hurt. So much for Symphony in the Park. It was our first ear infection in almost four years of parenthood, which makes people like Bryan and Shannon say things like “Pfft, amateurs.” The doctor prescribed some magical ear drops with local anaesthetic properties, and Duboce Park playground is next door to Cal Pacific, so we squeezed in a quick play before nap time.

Lately I’ve realized that I’ve added a new category to animate and inanimate objects. An inanimate object that is networked is more “alive” to me than, say, a rock. My desktops are alive, Tivo is alive, my laptop is a sort of Lazarus or Christ-figure – alive when there’s Wifi and dead when there isn’t.

Yesterday this eccentric view led to a small tragedy. Let’s gloss over the unappetising details of exactly how my new phone got wet and skip to the part where I fished it out, dried it and called Jeremy to see if it was still working. As it turns out, this was exactly the wrong thing to do, and it phlogisted the ethereals or something. Jeremy’s voice got fainter and fainter and eventually faded away.

The poor phone; it wanted to live. It struggled valiantly to stay up, but eventually the light on its screen flickered and went out. It died in my hands.

I was stricken. I really need to anthropomorphize less.

It’s unbelievably lucky that I uploaded all the good pictures to Flickr only days before the phone gave up the ghost.

Multimedia message

Originally uploaded by yatima.

One of my favourite pics of Claire. Taken with my new phone.

R (reading from a wholesome book): “I’ve dreamed of being an artist ever since I was a small girl.” What do you two want to be when you grow up?

Ada: I want to be a horsy farmer.

Claire: I dreamed I had a horsy and it died.

Grown-up dinner with Uncles Barney and Rob. I had steamed asparagus with parmesan and a delectable truffle emulsion; roast duck breast with corn crepes and fat tart raspberries; and warm chocolate pudding. Jeremy had cauliflower soup with curry oil, venison with juniper berries and a selection of fine cheesestuffs. We split a bottle of Sandhill 2001 cabernet sauvignon, and finished up with macchiatos. Everything was excellent.