Love is...

I love that we can ask Dash if he's a little concerned and he knows we're quoting The Princess Bride.

I love that Mabel just spelled the word "sad" all by herself, and said she knew it was an A in the middle because it's the same sound as in "cat", which is the only word she knows how to spell apart from her name.

I love that Dash is reading an honest-to-God chapter book for his nightly reading these days. A simple one, but a chapter book nonetheless. Before vision therapy, the idea of his reading that much text on a page was unthinkable. The words don't go blurry any more.

I love that Mabel keeps announcing things like "Mummy, three and three more is six!" The wonder of math, afresh.

I love that B is reading The Hobbit to Dash at bedtime these days. I thought it might be a bit ambitious, but so far it's going well.

I love that when Dash criticized Mabel's drawing of a dinosaur, she replied, "When you say that, it makes me feel as if I'm not important." He apologized. I high-fived myself in the kitchen.

I love that Dash is finally old enough to make his own damn cardboard swords instead of bugging us to do it.

I love that Mabel can brush her teeth all by herself.

I love that we can take public transport into the city, walk around, do a museum, and get home again WITHOUT A STROLLER. Escalators and steps are so much easier than finding the hidden elevator every time.

I do love babies, but I love having big kids too.

Inter-

We went to the theatre a while ago, my husband and I. Say it the posh way, thee-ate-er. We left the children in the capable hands of a babysitter and took our cue to pretentiously discuss Beckett and Joyce on the metro into town. We even had a drink before the show. We'd never have had the audacity to book ourselves tickets for something like that - a real play, at night, in the city, no less - but we'd won the tickets so we had to go.

It's been so long since I've been to a live production of anything other than a tantrum being thrown that I'd forgotten all the things that make theatre such a different experience from a movie, even though on the face of it you might think they're much the same. This was a great example, though: a very intimate production, in the round, so that watching the audience opposite us react was as much part of the play as watching the actors. And being so close to the protagonists that you could reach out and touch them as they went by (if you wanted to; of course, I would never do such a thing) and admiring the grace and speed with which the actors moved the sets and props around between scenes, like a dance.

I love those moments when they're between selves; they're not quite in character yet, but they're about to be. The curtain call is the same, of course: it's the actors, not the characters, who are bowing to our applause. I strained to see if I could hear them speak as they went by, because the play was done with British accents and I'm sure the actors were American - but I didn't catch any hint of their real selves' voices to lift the veil a little further. I think this is why I love the blooper reels on a DVD so much: it's not just because they're funny, but because we see the actors being themselves just for a moment.

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I am between selves at the moment, I think. With the kids in camp for six hours a day, parenting is not the immersive experience it has been and will be for the rest of the summer, but I'm not quite sure what else it is I do; other than rush around getting last-minute things I might need for BlogHer. Once I'm there, I'll be a new self, or an old self - a new old self, perhaps. A professional amateur blogger, doing whatever it is such people do, in the company of many many others. A writer among writers, or a mommy-on-vacation. A woman among women (and some men, but not many, I'd say), without children.

Just me, Sheryl Sandberg, the Pioneer Woman, thousands of other women, and Queen Latifah too.

Tempus

The National Arboretum happens to be just a 15-minute drive from our house, in good traffic. And yet, we don't go very often, because once you've fed the koi, there isn't all that much for the kids to do - adults like the herb garden and the bonsai exhibit, and it's a great place to bring your mother, if your mother is like my mother, but for the children it usually lacks a little je ne sais quoi, where quoi is probably a playground.

But this morning we went with some friends and found that there is a playground, or at least a play area, with big logs to sit on and jump off, and a place to dig, and some sand to sit in, and the kids all enjoyed themselves mightily and we felt smug for exposing them to Nature so well.

Then I came home and wandered through the photos: these are from the first time we went to the arboretum. Mabel was about three months old, and beginning to smile enough for me to capture it on film digital.

And Dash (not yet three, back when he was Monkey around here) was running up the water feature by the columns that are meant to make you think it's the Acropolis of Washington DC or something.

This was today, at the bottom of the same water feature.

Time. Doing that passing thing it does. Crazy.

So how was your Memorial Day?

Things I would have done differently yesterday if I had an ounce of sense:

• Looked at the forecast, noticed the number 93 beside the letter F, stayed home.
• On exiting the metro in downtown DC, set off towards the Capitol, where there was allegedly some free music happening, rather than in the opposite direction, because after one and a half monuments, and not even the one I wanted to see (the new Martin Luther King memorial) we were drooping from the heat and the kids were demanding lunch.
• Brought a packed lunch instead of a snack which was devoured in five minutes as soon as we stepped off the train, because all the food in Washington DC is on the other side of the Mall and even if you know where the cheap food court is so you don't have to pay museum-cafe prices, (we do; it's in the Old Post Office) Dash still won't eat anything except bare nachos, otherwise known as tortilla chips, and then whine for the next twenty minutes because he didn't get an ice cream for "dessert". 
• Explained up front that tortilla chips don't count as lunch, so dessert is not merited. It's not like anyone else had ice cream either.
• Made a bigger effort to get Mabel to use the bathroom at the last place we were, so that she wouldn't spend the  entire metro journey home spinning around a pole and almost firing herself off - head exactly level with chair arms - because she couldn't sit still because she desperately needed to pee.

Things at least I did do:

• Wear sunscreen, put it on the kids. 
• Wear a hat.
• Bring water.
• Bring a stroller.
• Not have to watch helplessly as my child peed her pants on the train, because she held it all the way home.

Then we got home, collapsed in a heap, and made the kids watch Star Wars so they would shut up and leave us in peace. That was a good move too, but in all I can't help thinking the day would have been better spent at the pool.

Museum

I went on my first honest-to-God field trip yesterday, and it was a good one. Apart from the zoo, I suppose, you can't get much more classic for a school outing than the Natural History Museum - and when your kid's local natural history museum just happens to be the Smithsonian in Washington DC, you count yourself pretty lucky.

Because when the kids you're chaperoning are all museumed out, after live butterflies and beetles and caterpillars, and (dead) dinosaurs and whales and mummies (yes, really), and the Hope diamond to boot, you can take them outside and let them run around on the National Mall, with the Capitol to your left and the Washington Monument to your right, until it's time to go back in and see a few more dead mammals before the bus leaves. And they can take it all for granted, because this is just where they live, but some of us know it's pretty damn cool.

When I arrived in the classroom in the morning, the first thing everyone did was crowd around to show me who had wobbly teeth and who had lost teeth and who had new teeth coming in. Teeth, then, are big news with the six-year-old set. I suppose this shouldn't be a surprise to me, but since wobbly teeth are still a thing of aspiration in our house, it was interesting to see the higgledy-piggledy reality up close.

I had wistfully thought how nice it was to go on a field trip while my son is still innocent enough to hold my hand in public and want to sit beside me on the bus. Not so. My hand was disengaged as soon as we got to school, and he sat up front with his friend to play finger-lightsaber battles while I sat a few rows back with the girls and discussed why other kids were sometimes mean, what the best thing to do about it was, and where babies really do come out of.

Still, I think he was glad to have me along, if only to see him hold the big green caterpillar.

Dash holds a fat caterpillar.