Shannon Phillips

“Woo woo da-da!” Said while toddling over to where his father was lying in bed, and while clutching two toy engines to his chest.

So I’m pretty sure the correct translation is, “Daddy, I’m going to run these trains across your sleeping face now.”

Just this minute Robin came up and told me this story, pretty much word for word:

One time there was a little horse named Robin. He loved to run. “Neigh, neigh,” said the horse.

One day came a little dragon named Davy. “Rawr!” said the dragon. The horsey ran away.

One day came a tiger named Dad. “Rawr, rawr!” said the tiger. The horsey ran away.

One day came an owl. “Whoo whoo!” said the owl. The owl flew away.

That’s a great story.

“That is a great story,” I agreed: and, satisfied, he wandered away.

Robin and I made Valentines yesterday for his whole class—I cut out the paper hearts, he affixed the stickers, and I wrote LOVE FROM ROBIN on each one. For the last week at school the kids have been engaged in decorating shoeboxes as “mailboxes,” and today they’ll have a party where all the Valentines are delivered. Sadly, Robin has a cough and a sore throat and I don’t think I can in conscience send him to school. Maybe we’ll swing by around noon to drop off his cards.

It was particularly cute, because as soon as I explained the Valentine project to Robin, he said: “I want a special kitty Valentine for my friend Evie!” Evie—Genevieve—is an apple-cheeked, ringleted little girl at the school, and Robin is very much taken with her, mostly because she shares his interest in running around pretending to be a kitty-cat. It’s their special game and they play it frequently. He calls her his “sister kitty,” and she calls him her “brother kitty.”

“I need to go to school and see my sister kitty Evie,” Robin told me solemnly a few weeks ago. “Evie’s my best friend.” And the sentiment does seem to be shared: Evie will run up and give Robin a hug when he comes into the school, and I’m told that she asks about her “brother kitty” when he’s not there. Anyway, so I did draw a kitty-cat on the Valentine meant for Evie, and Robin was happy with that.

As for me, I got Sam an awesome pair of cufflinks, made from actual Key System tokens from 1945. They’re really very cool. I’ll try to get him to pose in them later!

Update: we did end up going to school for the last half-hour. Here’s Robin’s “mailbox”:

He really enjoyed looking at each Valentine and hearing who it was from.

Also, I wanted to give a shout-out to Dave and Terry on their 36th anniversary! Happy Anniversary, Nonna and Pappy!

Well, I managed to bork myself with my cowgirl approach to software upgrades. I was trying to update the version of PHP that this blog runs on, and I managed to completely blow away all the HTML/CSS customization I’d done.

So it’s gonna look like this for a while, until I get the time to try and muck it with it again.

Davy learned “No!” today.

I can already tell he’s going to get a lot of use out of it.

“I Fall in Love,” by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated from the Irish by Paul Muldoon

I fall in love, in the fall of every year,
with the smattering of rain on my windshield
and the pale and wan light toppling over the sheer
edge of my field
of vision, with leaves strewn in my way,
with the bracket-fungus screwed to a rotten log:
I fall in love with bog and cold clay
and what they hold in store for me and you, my dear.

I fall in love with all that’s going off:
with blackened spuds
rotting in their beds, with
Brussels sprouts nipped in the bud
by a blast of frost, rat-eaten artichokes, and,
like so many unpicked locks,
the tares and cockles buried in shifting sand;
it’s as if I fall in love a little with death itself.

For it’s neither the fall nor the coming to in spring—
neither shrug of the shoulders nor sudden foray
down that boring ‘little road of the King’—
but something else that makes me wary:
how I throw off the snowy sheet and icy quilt
made of feathers from some flock
of Otherworldly birds, how readily I am beguiled
by a sunny smile, how he offers me a wing.

I don’t have full-blown SAD but I definitely feel the waning light. Last night, after we celebrated the Solstice (I made a butternut squash tart, we put the candles on the tree, and opened the first of our presents), I climbed into bed at 7:30 and slept for twelve hours straight. I’m also mainlining chocolate. Even in California, winter is something you feel.

In honor of the season here is one of my favorite poems, by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (first in the original Irish and then translated by Paul Muldoon). It’s actually only the first bit of the poem, “Feis,” which is quite raunchy and depends for its symbolism on an understanding of the architecture of Newgrange: the Irish prehistoric monument constructed in such a way that only once a year, at dawn on the winter solstice, does the sunlight fully reach the inner chamber.

Nuair a éiríonn tú ar maidin
is steallann ionam
seinneann ceolta sí na cruinne
istigh im chloigeann.
Taistealaíonn an ga gréine
caol is lom
síos an pasáiste dorcha
is tríd an bpoll

Feasta
beidh na hoícheanta níos giorra.
Raghaidh achar gach lae if bhfaid is i bhfaid.

When you rise in the morning
and pour into me
an unearthly music
rings in my ears.
A ray of sunshine comes
slender and spare
down the dark passageway
and through the gap

in the lintel
to trace a light-scroll
on the mud floor
in the nethermost
sealed chamber.
Then it swells
and swells until a golden glow
fills the entire oratory.

From now on
the nights will be getting shorter
and the days longer and longer.

Davy has a scattering of useful words now: “Up!” “Bye,” “Mama,” “Da,” and the ever-useful “uh-oh,” but what he mostly says, over and over, is “Hi.” Dozens and dozens of times a day: “Hi! Hi!” And often this is followed by a kiss, always delivered with a dramatic, vocalized “mmmm-wah!”

It’s the first thing we hear in the morning: “Hi! Mmmm-wah!” Sometimes if he wakes up in the night he’ll give me a sleepy “hi,” and a kiss, before rolling over to go back to sleep.

It got me to thinking: basically, the first thing we wanted to tell him when he was born, the most important thing we’ve been repeating over and over every day since, was “Hello! We love you!” Not always in words, but most of what we say to him is aimed in some way at reinforcing that essential message. “You exist! We love you!”

It just slays me that he’s gotten the point so clearly, and is returning it in his simple baby way. “Hi! Mwah!” Hello and I love you. What else is there, really, to say?

So Davy had a check-in with the doctor today. He’s 31 and a half inches tall and weighs 21 pounds. Apparently he’s in the 70th percentile for height, and the eighth for weight. How? How is this possible? He eats all the time. Seriously. We took him to a party a few months ago, and I parked us beside the snack table, explaining to another gal there that Davy eats constantly. When we left a few hours later, she laughed: “I thought you were joking,” she said, “but he never stopped chewing this whole time.”

It’s a joke with Dave, the boys’ Pappy. He’ll cluck and pretend to shake his head every time he sees Davy reaching for a new source of food. “Don’t you ever feed that baby?” he says. It’s funny, you see, because we feed him constantly.

Anyway, the doctor seemed to think it was perfectly possible, and that Davy probably doesn’t have a tapeworm or anything, but is simply having a growth spurt. It’s true that he’s gotten a lot taller recently. He can wear some of Robins two-year-old clothes, even though he’s not yet eighteen months. Oh, and he walks now—not perfectly (it’s particularly hilarious when he gets a head of steam going and can’t quite figure out how to stop, so he simply wobbles around in circles until he eventually falls down), but well enough that he defaults to walking now rather than crawling. So I guess he’s doing something with all those calories he burns.

So, as it turns out, one of my kids is having a lot of trouble adjusting to Robin’s new school. And it’s not Robin.

Davy comes with us every morning, in the stroller, as we walk Robin to school. There’s some steps in front of the school so I generally carry Davy while I’m taking Robin in. Once inside Davy looks around wide-eyed, at all the kids, all the toys—the art supplies, the books—all the fun that everybody is already busily having. He watches Robin race off to join in whatever activity catches his eye.

Davy’s at that stage where he’s perfectly capable of making his opinions known on just about any subject, despite the fact that his vocabulary is limited to “hi,” “bye,” “mama,” “dada,” and an all-purpose “DA!” that translates to “I want that!” I hear “DA!” a lot when we’re leaving the school. He’ll be pointing back over my shoulder as we’re walking away, saying “DA! DA!” You don’t understand, mom! I want THAT!

Then when I put him back in the stroller, he starts to howl, arching his back and twisting and fighting. In his mind it is utterly unfair that Robin gets to stay in this glorious children’s wonderland, and he does not. To ease the sting, I’ve starting taking him down to the park after we drop Robin off, giving him a little time on the swings and in the sand. It helps, but it does seem like Davy’s getting madder about this situation each day it’s repeated. He has a pretty keen sense of justice, at least so far as it applies to injustices personally suffered.

Next year he’ll be old enough to go to school two mornings a week. And it won’t come a day too soon for Davy.