"Write now is good."

Root for the little guy, for he is us.

The above video, "i lived on the moon", has inspired me to poetry. It is animated by Yannick Puig, who was inspired by the band Kwoon's music to make this for their song. The combination of image, story and soundtrack are absolutely stunning.

I've been living in an imaginary world lately. My young one has reached the age where an unfamiliar sound outside the window most definitely means a lion is approaching. We instantly morph from parent and child into two explorers saving baby animals as we run from the predator, our arms full of plush creatures. Tinker toys become a satellite space station, until it breaks and spills rocket fuel all over our carpet. Then a dinosaur with a mop appears but admits it cannot clean the entire mess by itself. So three firemen, one firelady, and another dinosaur with a special "cleaning mouth" show up to help. And these were just some of today's adventures.

At this age, children create imaginary monsters and conflicts in order to problem solve, to develop mastery over social skills, to learn to deal with emotions. Seeing this now with my own child, it's so clear how this rich pretend world helps to cement feelings of self-confidence and budding independence. We have to do this, and we've all gone through this. We humans are wired to do so. The mythical quest to overcome obstacles and grow beyond them will forever be a basis of our stories — our most personal and private ones, and those we share as a culture.

Seeing my little one face and overcome these pretend, yet also very real, frights leaves me speechless most days. I've seen already that I can't provide all the answers to these big questions, but I also know that being there, like the steadiest rock, in the process, is so vitally important. This video somehow helped me find words around it:

We hold hands
To explore and imagine together,
To create and tell our stories,
To face monsters.
Our hands still touch
Even when
You are on the moon
And I am at my tree.
I will see you
Because I can fly now!
Through it,
Above it,
I can do it.
I'll be there soon.

Visit Poetry Thursday for a vast collection of poetry from our community.

Puzzled

This week's prompt for Sunday Scribblings is "puzzled":

The arctic winds kept us trapped again. As the clarifying winter sunlight streamed in from outside, I mused what next activity could take us further through the endless-inside afternoon.

Vibrant purple, blue, red, green, orange and yellow plastic shapes shimmered on the floor. I gathered them in my arms, placed them in a candy-striped hinged box and said, "Let's go spell 'cat' on the refrigerator."

"Cat!" he shouted. "I love cat!"

We trotted into the kitchen and plopped down onto the tiles in front of our huge palette.

"C-A-T," I said, pulling out three magnetized letters and placing each carefully on the ivory door. "That spells cat. Caaaaaaatttt," I said slowly, tracing my finger across the letters.

He grabbed a bunch of the letters and smushed them quickly onto the fridge. Too many consonants, letters upside down and sideways. "What does that spell?" he asked, proudly pointing at his "word."

"Hmmm," I said thoughtfully. I narrowed my eyes and drew in my lips, trying to devise a way to actually speak what he'd created: an upside down U next to a sideways G, placed above an upside-down R and M, layered on top of an upright E, a sideways D, and an A.

"Uggerm-eeduh," I said, smiling as I slowly pronounced it.

Peels of laughter answered me. "Say it again," he implored between the snorts.

"Uggerm-eeduh."

"Ha ha ha ha ha! Again!"

"Uggerm-eeduh." Now I was laughing.

Winding down into a sparkling grin, he grabbed another random letter out of the box and placed it next to the A. It was an I.

"What does THAT say?" He tapped the fridge hard, eyes wide and smiling already in expectation of more spoken nonsense.

"Uggerm-eeduh-EYE," I said, placing extra emphasis on the I-sound as I pointed to it. He giggled so much he was almost silent. Then he took a deep breath and reached for another letter.

I puzzled out these evolving words for another fifteen minutes. At laughter intervals, I'd return to ones like "hat" and "hug" to show how letters could form names that were part of his daily life. Because every-day concepts and objects, grounded in reality, should be interesting.

The child mind does not work this way. What's more interesting: hearing your mother say "rug" or "oomeg-erex-quig-idy-thut-ed"?

I let myself fall into the silly magic of sounding out his creations. He made them and laughed and slapped the floor with glee every time I pronounced them. My sounding them out also confirmed that they were real.

Nonsense is relative. Play is crucial. Recognition in parents' eyes means the world. Shared problem-solving creates more understanding not only of the task at hand, but also about each other.

For more takes on "puzzled," go to Sunday Scribblings.

"Water-park" — a true story

I submitted the following for Adbusters issue #68. They asked for non-fiction, slice-of-life pieces of 200 words or less.

While mine didn't get picked up, I still have my blog for sharing it with the world. So here, dear readers, is "Water-park."

Trapped in our houses for days by the rain, we were determined to play outside despite occasional drops. Yet after moments, my friend and I, and our children, found ourselves cornered again. This time we were far from our cars, surrounded by a deluge and cowed by relentless booms and flashes as the storm exploded overhead.

Twenty minutes passed without it lessening. Huddled under the park’s only portico, sitting on metal benches with our feet nearly covered by fast-rising water, we suddenly felt tingling in our legs as the latest blast hit nearby. 

“That’s not good,” my friend said, clutching her girls — one sobbing, one silent. I grabbed my son, eyes wide, his hands pressed tightly over his ears. 

We needed to leave. Afraid that a stroller trudging through soaked fields would become a lightening rod, we discussed what to do. Would staying or going doom us less?

I bolted towards the parking lot, my son tucked in, crying as water pelted us. “It’s gonna be o.k. Mama’s got you!” I shouted above the din, holding him closer.

We got there. We were lucky.

Breathing hard, lightheaded and stunned, I readied us to gather our friends.

I was really shaken by the incident I describe, and became more so as I read newspaper reports of what happened nearby, caused by the same severe weather system. Lightning struck and killed two teen boys, and injured another friend with them, as they tore across an open field attempting to outrun the approaching storm.

Some serious cloud appreciation

I was reading dooce one day last week and noticed a link she posted to some interesting cloud formations. As I'm a proud member of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I clicked through immediately. This site features some spectacular sky and nature photography. And I saw photos of lenticular clouds, which I'd never seen before.

Skywatchers sometimes mistake lenticulars for UFOs because they are often perfectly round or oval. Since the clouds usually form and hover over mountain tops, groups of them look like extraterrestrial ships scouting for a large enough landing area for the entire fleet. As I viewed the images, I reflected how unlikely it would be that I'd ever see a formation like this with my own eyes. They are seen under certain conditions, but I thought the odds were against me.

File this under, "Anything's possible!" As my family and I cloudspotted after some spectacular weather yesterday, we saw lenticular clouds! And I captured them in pixels. I got three clear shots through the glass window before the lens-like forms began to lose their contrast with the surrounding clouds. Here is the clearest take; it is nowhere near as dramatic as seeing it with the naked eye, so I've drawn in a couple of arrows for emphasis:

We do not live near mountains. Another theory about "lennies" is that they are "cloud-cover" for UFOs. Interesting. The imagination takes flight...

A Tale of Two Harrys

At left, Dirty Harry. (I last saw this sometime in my 20's.)

At right, Harry the Dirty Dog. (Currently in heavy rotation in our house.)

Just another example of how putting on the "parenting ray-bans" makes some things look completely different.

Goo goo, ga ga? No no!

In The Infant Grammarian — The Genius of Baby Talk by Emily Bazelon in Slate's current issue, there's such an interesting discussion of how the young human brain learns — and hears — language. Here's one key point:

"And research has shown that they [children] are surprised and put off when adults mimic childlike speech. Ask your 2- or 3-year-old 'Want go school?' and he's likely to make a face at you. 'Kids seem to know they're speaking funny and differently from adults,' says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale who thinks the errors of baby talk are about short attention span and poor articulation, not parameters or grammars."

Young language learners are certain in their skills, wherever they are in the learning and speaking process; the article reinforces that the human brain is wired to acquire language. Advice to parents:  Cut the baby talk, and watch your children's words fly; they will eventually, in their own way and their own time.

The Color Kittens

Every member of our household, and many visitors who like to read stories aloud, have recently been mesmerized by The Color Kittens. Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, wrote it, and Alice and Martin Provensen illustrated it.

Kittens Brush and Hush mix colors all day long. They see objects that they like and then blend paints to match those objects' colors. I won't give away what color is their favorite.

One of the most giggle-eliciting scenes from the book is when the color kittens wake up from a vibrant, technicolor dream:

"It was morning. They crawled out of bed into a big bright world. The sky was wild with sunshine. The kittens were wild with purring and pouncing — pounce, pounce, pounce."

The magical concept of this book is that little kittens, through exuberance and passion for mixing paints, somehow make "all the colors in the world." Very inspiring to young ones — and some old ones, too.

Ice pops, rocket ships and innovation

First we opened the refrigerator. Then we took out the apple juice. I reached for our stainless-steel milk frother, imagining another use for it. Together we poured apple juice into it, then I released it, with difficulty, into the toddler hands that wanted so much to do it "all by myself."

He began to pour the juice into the clear, plastic, rocket-shaped, frozen-treat-wonder receptacles. I reached in to prop up the pitcher's underside.

"No! All by myself."

I released again, watching and wondering, What was I so concerned about?

He spilled. I took a paper towel and blotted around the ice pop molds.

He continued to pour. I want him to have this experience, I told myself. I want him to learn to pour, and spill, and then keep pouring, complely unstoppable, until the ice pop-starts are done.

And still part of me wanted to help him do it. Why? Was I that afraid of such a minute amount of apple juice spilling again?

He poured all the way to the top of one of the six molds resting, rocket-ship-tip down, in a tray which held them firmly vertical. He stopped pouring. A slight juice dome bulged over the mold top. We looked at it, deciding.

"That one is too full. You can drink some out of it," I suggested.

He leaned forward and drank some. Excess juice spilled out. He smiled and leaned forward to drink again. He kept drinking out of the mold until he could drink no more. Then he moved to the next mold and continued.

My heart rate sped up.

"What about the ice pops?" I asked. "If you keep drinking, there won't be enough to make them." Then I realized we had plenty of apple juice left.

He kept drinking, smiling between sips, rotating the tray to move to the next juice-filled mold.

I sat down next to him. "Can I have one?" I asked. He nodded, and I took a rocket-ship juice cup out of the holder and drank. It tasted slightly sweet and highly fun.

Ice pops can wait.

Abercrombie & what?!?

We were at a mall today. We were at this same mall two days ago. We visit this mall perhaps twice a year, when we either need something immediately or when my favorite store — "The Internet" — doesn't have it. We are already way over quota for mall visits this year.

Two days ago, when we walked past the store/nightclub known as Abercrombie & Fitch, backbeat blaring, reaching way beyond the store walls and tearing into eardrums for miles around, I pumped my fist in the air. I did it without thinking. I couldn't resist.

"Wouldn't it be great to set up a hidden camera across from the A&F to see how many people break out a little move as they walk by?" I asked my husband.

He laughed, nodding yes, as we pushed our stroller as quickly away as we possibly could.

Today we were really desperate. We needed something immediately. We had shopped and shopped and had not found anything. Our next brainstorm: Abercrombie & Fitch. Yes, we had come to this.

And having reached this open-to-anything level, we scoured every store we walked past. So before reaching the bold, blaring A&F, we found another one directly across from it. In smaller, lower-case letters above its door read, "abercrombie."

When I'm shopping and can't find anything, I get very emotional. A cloudy haze of fashion fears and anxieties descend and blanket me in confusion. I literally can't see anything: fabrics, colors, which are pants and which are shirts. So I asked my husband if he could go in first to scope out the store. He descended behind the velvet rope and doorman and emerged a few moments later.

"It's for kids," he said.

"Kids?" I replied, shocked. "That stuff is for kids?"

My ears pounded from standing just outside the store.

"Who could let their kids go into that place? It's so loud it could damage anyone's hearing. No responsible parent would let their kids into that place." Here is where my stress peaked.

But A&F had already considered my parental concerns. As we walked across the mall's span to the big A&F, it became entirely clear which store was for little kids and which was for the club kids. The decibel level in the kids' abercrombie, though still semi-deafening, resembled a zen monastery at sunrise mediation in comparison to the full-frontal flagship A&F, which, seeming to sense our hopelessness, beckoned us to enter its pulsating walls.

Happy birthday, Mr. Sendak!

Today is Maurice Sendak's birthday. Prolific illustrator and children's book author, his books Where the WIld Things Are and In the Night Kitchen are still among my all-time favorites.

Then there's Chicken Soup With Rice, Alligators All Around, One Was Johnny and Pierre — lyrical, memorable, constantly eliciting giggles.

And don't forget Higglety Pigglety Pop! with its trademark intelligent-faced animals and chubby babies.

In 1969, Sendak wrote this about his beginning to In the Night Kitchen:

"I have written a new picture-book text, and I'm mad for it — and it's mad. I feel so sure of it, something not common for me. It comes from the direct middle of me, and it hurt like hell extracting it. Yes, indeed, very birth-delivery type pains, and it's about as regressed as I imagine I can go. Simply, it's divine."

Genius and success look easy, but it's really hard work!

Thanks for the lifelong inspiration, Mr. Sendak.