C: I like elephantses.

I keep telling people it’s good for my milk production, but really? I just love beer. Jamey’s been making homebrew stout and my friends, it is the business: it would make each one of you lactate. And if you really loved my kids, you’d lactate.

We had dinner with the S’mores and the O’Sullivans, and then Jeremy and I packed the kids into the Maclaren Twin, the two of them folding neatly into its beautifully-designed carapace. Jamey watched and said “I love your little family!” We walked home along 24th and up Mission, and it was a warm sweet San Francisco night, and Claire enjoyed the stars.

I am thirty-five years old. I’m married with two little kids and a giant-ass mortgage. I have a demanding full-time job and a bad-tempered cat, everything in my house is lightly sheened with baby blurp, yogurt or kibble, and I’ve never been happier.

I called Mum and said “Congratulations! I’m AWESOME!”

Only one tiny thing is needed to complete my happiness: a Swedish Warmblood mare, six years old, 16.2hh, bright bay with a white blaze and four white stockings, a trot that levitates, a huge jump and a kind and willing disposition.

I shall call her Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper.

Oh, and justice for Iraq, Palestine, Israel and Darfur, regime change in North Korea, Australia and the USA, and real action on Aids in Africa.

And a book contract.

And some chocolate.

Maybe lots of chocolate.

I am a woman of simple pleasures.

We moved all the furniture around. Why? Why do we do this to ourselves?

Julia has this long, cooing gurgle that just slays me. She was doing it to me and Blanca the other day and there we were, two grown women, completely slain. She finishes it off with the sweetest imaginable grin, all: “How about that cooing, huh? Am I a rock star or what?”

Claire and I had an interesting conversation.

C: I’m fat.

R: Okay. Fat is good.

C: I’m really fat.

R: Huh. Are you sure? You don’t look that fat.

C (casually): Fat’s hiding.

…said her first word this morning:

“Milieu.”

That’s my girl.

Today is a write-off. This morning burly men swathed my house in tarpaulin and started ripping shingles off the roof. I hope they were the guys I hired. This afternoon I have to see the dentist about the work I was so thrilled to postpone last year, after I got pregnant with Julia. I hate dentists almost as much as I hate vacuum cleaners and being woken up by the contractors. Poor me. Where is my fentanyl lollipop?

Back at work full time. Sleepy, bewildered. I love the J-Church, a totally civilized way to get to work. Kids awesome but loud. Watched the Werner Herzog film Grizzly Man. Protagonists eaten by bears. Should have been called Grisly, Man. Reminded the cat Bebe of terms of our agreement: she can eat our bodies, as long as she waits until after we are dead.

Jeremy: When I woke up this morning, I opened my eyes and there was Claire. She was standing next to the bed with this huge armful of toys. She’d been watching me sleep and when she saw my eyes open she got all excited: “Are you awake???”

I love Bernal so very much. There’s a tree on Folsom Street festooned with red sweaters, one for every death in Iraq. Then today, for the State of the Union, someone wrote “BUSH STEP DOWN” in huge letters on the north slope of the hill.

I have these very occasional days when I am inhumanly efficient, and today was one. I had Claire dressed and dropped at school by 9.30, and got to work before 10. I unpacked all the boxes from the move to the new office and set up my new work area. I exchanged friendly chucks on the shoulder with my colleagues. I led a productive conference call to prepare for a big panel session at an upcoming show. I booked interviews for a couple of weeks out, realized I was duplicating part of a colleague’s work and corrected the error. I found a cafe that does excellent pasta for lunch. I did some important and long-overdue banking. I picked up Claire and took her to Nervous Dog for a quick playdate with Salome and Milo, and then I came home and played happily with both girls until Jeremy turned up.

Unfortunately I didn’t get around to doing any, you know, actual writing. Baby steps.

Jeremy: I’ve been reading Jeff’s paragliding blog. It’s like conversations birds would have. Ten thousand words for updraft.

=-=

Danny (after a silence): See, I read your blog, so I already know how you are.

-=-

Alain: Your post is untrue. Only a mother and crazy uncle can tell.

=-=

Claire: Zerbuts are preposterous!

-=-

Jeremy: I made scones. Claire calls them scum.

Claire, 2003:

Julia, 2006:

Claire, 2003:

Julia, 2006:

I certainly wasn’t expecting to reap the benefits of two children at, what is it? Ten weeks? (How can it be only ten weeks?) But Julia loves Claire so much, it’s nuts. Jeremy dragged the bouncy chair down from the attic, so these days Julia spends her mornings watching Claire eat her breakfast. If Claire goes out of sight, Jules makes heartbroken complaints. When she’s turned towards her sister, she coos and gurgles adoringly.

Claire is taking the hero-worship in her stride.

Claire likes to play in Appleworks. I keep a document on the desktop for her, and sometimes we type in our own names. This morning she scrolled back through the document and found everyone’s names.

“That’s Daddy!” she said, pointing to the word Jeremy. “And me! No, Julia! That’s Julia and that’s me! And that’s Mummy!”

Jeremy and I stared at each other in amazement; then there were high fives all round.

Jamey: Are you at the park… in Berkeley?

R: Yes, we’re all here… in Berkeley.

J: Great! I’ll meet you there! In Berkeley!

R: Cool. We’ll see you soon, in Berkeley.

Grant reminded me recently of a great Kushner quip: “Heaven is a place much like San Francisco.” Claire has been reading the Miroslav Sasek book “This is San Francisco”, and so nowadays whenever she sees the Golden Gate Bridge or Alcatraz or a cable car, she asks “Can we go to San Francisco?” I sound like a trendy vicar when I tell her: “Honey, San Francisco is all around us.”

I mention this because today we went to a clothing swap at my yoga instructor’s sister’s house, and it turns out that my yoga instructor’s sister is married to Brewster Kahle of Internet archive fame. They live in one of the old officer’s residences in the Presidio with this quite awesome view out over the Palace of Fine Arts and the bay. Claire played the piano and while we all frantically tried things on, Julia slept beatifically amid the piles and piles of clothes.

Afterwards Carole, Jamey and I took the kids down to the Warming Hut, and Claire lost part of her cheese sandwich when she was mugged by a starling.

On Kevin Kelly’s recommendation I just watched one of the most amazing films I’ve ever seen. “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life” is a 1925 documentary by Merian Cooper, who went on to make King Kong. The filmmakers travelled from Turkey across Arabia to what is now Southern Iraq, then followed the migration of a Bakhtiari tribe over the Zagros mountains. You watch fifty thousand people walking barefoot over Zard Kuh, the highest peak.

I close with a witty observation uniting these various anecdotes, an observation I haven’t thought of just yet.

Last night I put Claire to bed.

“I wanted to look at the necklaces,” she said.

“You sure did.”

“The man was putting colours on the animal.”

“That’s right. We were in the Mayan art store on 24th Street. The man had a wooden rhinoceros, and he was covering it with tiny glass beads.”

“Very sharp.”

“That pointy thing he was using to pick up the beads? Yeah, that did look sharp.”

“I wanted a necklace.”

“You did, and I didn’t buy you one.”

“And I cried and cried and cried, ALL the way home.”

“Yep. You bothered everyone on the bus.”

“I went like this: uh-HUH, uh-HUH.”

“Uh-HUH.”

“Uh-HUH!”

“UH-HUH!”

We both collapsed in giggles.

Three-year-olds are challenging. Quite literally: it’s their job to make you nuts, because they’re experimenting with how far they can push people before people go nuts. I’ve had to be far more patient and creative with Claire these last few weeks than I ever have before. It’s mind-bending. I’ve taken good degrees at good universities, ridden half-broken Arabians across Turkey, apologized to people I’ve wronged: I am no stranger to the difficult. But raising that kid is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

What makes it worth it is that moment (and it is rare) just after I get something right, after I don’t snap at her, after I think of something to distract her or charm her or make her laugh; that space that opens up between us, full of possibility. In my mind I call it glad grace, like the silence after a perfect cadence, when the voices of the choir seem to hang in the empty air.