tough stuff

Sasha had a big crash on her bicycle recently. Fractured her wrist, knocked her teeth around, bloodied up her knees. I babysat her the evening after the big event (but before she got her wrist cast) and, perhaps following my lead, she was totally nonchalant about the whole thing. I think after her dad's fussing, her mom's hovering, and a host of medical professionals doling out pitying "poor baby"s, she just needed someone to see her in all her injured glory splayed out on the couch during a summer heat wave and just shrug and say, "bodies are good at healing."

"Yeah," she said, touching a lip swollen to four times its usual size. "My mouth is already feeling better. I can probably eat hard things tomorrow. I'm gonna save this cookie for breakfast."

And, shortly thereafter: "I hope my bike is okay -- I haven't even checked on it!"

She is going to be just fine.

Hugs,
-MP

getting a move on

We are mostly moved into our new apartment -- or at least, it is more and more resembling a liveable space and less a precarious cardboard maze.

We did a bunch of the move by bicycle.

I hauled flattened boxes generously donated by Sasha & Ezra's parents

For about three weeks, we spent our days off packing boxes, labeling boxes, and pedaling boxes the mile and a half to our apartment. Or just roping random pieces of furniture together in bike trailers and pedaling the load slowly over potholes and train tracks.

we borrowed this awesome trailer a couple times from the bike shop where HB works

For me, moving by bike wasn't so much about badassery or green energy or being a hot alternative hipster mess; it was mostly just the practical solution to wanting to move stuff during our month of double occupancy, when we don't own a car.

We did rent a u-haul for the stuff we just didn't have the equipment to safely move by bike -- couches, mattresses, that sort of thing. With help from my parents and our favorite housemate RK, we spent all of Saturday driving the u-haul back and forth and getting stuck waiting for literally every train that chugged through the city that day. (We moved RK's stuff too, to her new apartment.)

The best thing about our new apartment is the location. It's walking distance from a weekend farmer's market, a daily produce stand, our favorite bakery, our favorite brunch place, a good pizza place, a community garden (which has a 3+ year wait for a plot, dammit), and the park that hosts our city's chapter of Food Not Bombs. Our apartment is also just a few blocks from the apartment where RK and our other favorite former housemate E will be living! We had hoped for a close proximity but hadn't prioritized it at all; we just got really lucky.

we took a picnic dinner to the park last night to watch the clouds at dusk

Our apartment has some other good features, like front steps for my ambitious tomato container garden, a gas stove (which we have to light with a lighter half the time?) and enough space in the living room for me to cram both my desk and my drafting table into a corner. And a bathroom we're not sharing between five people, and a kitchen that will stay clean when we clean it, and windows that are less than a century old.

It has some weird built-in-the-1920s oddities too, like a bathroom sink with separate taps for cold and hot water, and a door in the bedroom closet that leads not to Narnia but to the toilet, and approximately three electrical outlets in the whole damn place, but it has charm, you know?

We took around freshly baked cookies to introduce ourselves to all our neighbors last night because we are those people. So far everyone's really friendly but a lot of them smoke cigarettes on their porches, which is frustrating because it's technically a non-smoking property and I'm a sensitive and delicate butterfly. One apartment has kids (!), one has a hilariously bug-eyed chihuahua named Nibbler, and one was so full of pot smoke that I'm pretty sure my hair still smells like it after the sixty seconds it took to hand cookies through the doorway to the extremely delighted occupants.

Stay tuned as we continue trying to adult.

Hugs,
-MP

cycle challenge

The family that HB used to nanny for organizes a regular group bike ride for kids in our city. This time around, I asked Sasha if she wanted to do the ride with me. Did she ever!

Sasha tends toward sedentary. She prefers tv programs to parks, read alouds to running around. But at the same time, she completely idolizes me and my bicycling ways. She often says that she wants to be just like me when she grows up, "not owning a car, and riding my bike everywhere." Recently the hero-worship has won over the discomfort of physical activity. Just in the last few weeks, she's taught herself to ride her bike without training wheels, without much formal assistance or even much encouragement. She just decided she wanted to do it, and practiced and practiced after school every day until she got it down.

So with her training wheels off, the seat raised, wheels refilled, and bicycle frame lovingly buffed, Sasha, HB and I joined the group bike ride for kids!

Sasha did fantastic. She totally challenged herself in areas she has previously been hesitant to explore: riding up and down surfaces that are not perfectly level without getting off and walking her bike, riding on streets where cars travel and not just the sidewalk in front of her house, riding in a relatively straight line (important when you're in a big group!), and riding for longer than 20 minutes at a time (admittedly with very long breaks in the middle for kids to buy treats at the cupcake and ice cream shops along the ride).

Since the ride, she tells me that all she wants to do is ride her bike.

My job here is done.

High fives,
-MP

life update (transitions, pt. 2)

We have a lot of exciting transitions happening in the next few months. Let me explain. No, there is too much; let me sum up.

Moving to an apartment with HB; major reduction in hours with Sasha & Ezra, ending care with Athena; starting regular hours with Jaden; working on a graphic novel; taking weird summer intensives at grad school; traveling in the fall; starting regular preschool teaching (hopefully) between November and January.

Okay, but here's the long version.

wavelength

Sasha and Ezra's dad is a nice guy. He always says thank you very sincerely when I leave for the evening. He's patient but firm with Sasha, which I've been trying to emulate more lately because she seems to respond so well to it. He's generous about money, offering to pay me extra when he gets home late (or early) and making it clear that if there are any supplies I buy for doing activities with Sasha he will reimburse me.

But in a lot of ways I feel like we don't really connect. Perhaps part of it is that we're farther apart generationally than I am with Sasha's mom (or Athena's parents). Perhaps part of it is that we have some different approaches to indulging Sasha's very frequent demands to spend as much of her time as possible staring at a screen. Perhaps part of it is that we just don't chat much when I hand the kids off to him and so we don't really know much about each other's lives.

But I think another reason I feel like we're operating on different wavelengths is because I suspect he had very little involvement in the nanny hiring process. I don't think he knows how I advertised myself.

This family and I connected through one of those online caretaking directories, and there were a few things I made clear in my profile about myself that I hoped would be attractive to the right families: one is that I value diversity education and cultural competency (which is all liberal-code for "I am queer," or at least "I'm supportive of queer folks," if you didn't know). Sasha's mom totally got this, but Sasha's dad is a different story. Another thing I made clear is that I am deliberately car-free and prefer not to drive clients' kids around. I have my license and could do it in an emergency, but the main reason I was so clear about this on my profile was less about liability and more about my comfort level with driving. I literally cannot picture myself ever owning a car, much less using one as my primary mode of transportation. Car-free families exist, and our city is particularly bike-friendly; lots of car-free families live here. (The family HB nannies for is car-free; she bikes the kids around on their massive family bike, which has two toddler seats mounted to it.) This not-driving-your-kids-around thing was so important to me that I made sure to reiterate it in every interview I had with families.

This week when we got home from taking the bus to the science museum, I told Sasha's dad as I handed the kids off to him that Sasha had a great time riding the bus and that she was a champ walking to and from the bus stops, which were each about half a mile from our destinations. He nodded and then started going on about how the bus is inefficient and the city is really "spread out and designed for cars," which I personally believe, as a person who has commuted all over the city exclusively by public transportation and bicycle for a year and a half, is total bullshit. He pointed out that he doesn't want the kids in the house all day when summer vacation gets here (which I totally agree with) and then suggested getting me a zip-car membership, or leaving one of their cars for me. I get that he wants me to take the kids to the pool, to a nature reserve, to the park, to a community center, to the children's theater, but those are all places we could get to by bike if we had the proper equipment, or by bus if we have a little more patience.

When I got home, frustrated and unsettled by the conversation, I basically sniffled and sighed to HB about how I wish we had our own kids so we could really do things our way. Nannying someone else's kids, in someone else's house, and trying to meet someone else's expectations, is sometimes challenging and unfulfilling.

At least summer vacation is a good six months away, so I don't have to deal with working around the driving thing quite yet.

Hugs,
-MP