From Top: Clara thinks she might be in over her head bathing with her bros. Middle: Mikey Legaspi, PhD flanked by his sisters who are wearing their daughters. Bottom: Shess and I got our noses pierced after Mikey's graduation. Clara was in the sling for moral support and to keep me from shrieking like a banshee.

Little Life

We are in the process of buying a house virtually twice the size of this one. This means that we will no longer have the quaint little life; bath toys and hair dryers in the same bathroom, the avalanche of winter coats in the 9 inch deep closets, our chubby kitty with no room to really exert her inner cheetah. My sis and her hub recently just moved from an apartment to a house and she says that she misses him when he's on the third floor. I would tease her about this except that when Geoff was walking this contractor through the new house, I was on the third floor changing Clara and could not make out any of the conversation.

The new house, the old house. We're calling Duval St. our "old" house even though we've only lived here for 2yrs and 1mo. So begins the life between the old and the new. As we pack, I am reminded of a friend who loved to pack for trips and described it like "wrapping presents for yourself when you get there." It probably says a lot about you, your style of "leave-taking," as Li Young Lee the poet calls it. My style of leave-taking is that I have no style. I'm watching Ms. Hoke, our neighbor, prepare to leave her home of sixty years. She suffers from emphysema, the price, I guess of being an elegant Germantown woman of the forties. She is in her eighties now. I bring her dinner twice a week and she gives me the Times after she reads it. She exudes dignity in her leave-taking. She asked the mailman to bring her 20 change of address forms. The last time she moved, your change of address form was the same thing you sent to your friends to say that you were moving. She steadily has collected her boxes and she's held on to the business sections of the Times so she can wrap her trinkets. I want to possess that same diligence. I am probably going to just throw the bookshelves in the van, books still in there. We're only moving 500 yards away. Yes, in the mix of moving clothes, there will be loads of dirty laundry. My mantra: take care of people first, things last. So, a trip to The Franklin Institute for three stir-crazy children will have to trump energetic rounds of precision packing. Nursing a teeny girl will have to come before feverish labelling sprees. Building lego rockets has to come before culling the business cards.

I have this confidence that we will get packed. Manny and Benici have tied up bundles of their books and Manny was rigging up a contraption by which he can attach the bundles onto his scooter. Benicio has dubbed the closet in their new bedroom at the new house, "The Boys Club." Little Clara Margot will probably not remember this house at all. Like Benici, she'll probably take her first steps just after we move. Benici's first steps were at Geoff's Grandparents' house in Brookhaven. I wept because they were not in OUR house and because neither of those granparents were in that house ot witness them. This house is special for her because she was born HERE. But the new house will be special for her because we believe that it is our "stead" as Geoff calls it. It will be what 1610 was for me, the ancestral home, the rooms and layout that still are in my dreams. The hope is to have many great firsts at the new house. So far the new house has been our first rehab project, our first independent financial endeavor of this magnitude, our first collaborative design project of this magnitude. It has been a real first for us in terms of first stress-induced insomnia and frankly, I think this process has grown us up tremendously.

We live by the verse, "To whom much is given, much is also required." We see this house as God's lavish gift to us and as our friends around us are teaching us, we want to extend as much as possible the hand of hospitality. So if we served our community adequately with 1200 sq. ft, with 2200sq. ft. we want to swing for the fence when it comes to loving folks. We could each have our own bedroom if we wanted!

I guess what I want to say is it feels good to articulate the magnitude of this blessing. Being in the transition and persisting through it. Being in the city and loving the city, as we have ALWAYS felt was our calling. May we continue to live a little humble life but I also can't wait to have a bigger kitchen.

Top: Benici, Manny and Cousin Cato doing super poses on Lancaster Ave. in Wayne Bottom: Nici, Sulayman and Manny at their final concert at Settlement Music School

Top to Bottom: Geoff and his darling baby girl at 30th St. Station, Mem Day 5K, Big Dad holds Clara with her cousins at Darwin's Bakery in Cambridge, Mom and Dad flank Mikey the day he graduates Harvard with his PhD!

To Bully and To Be Bullied

If it didn't hurt my heart to I would photograph Benici's left eye. It has three scratches that form a ring around a textbook little shiner. The worst is that I think I KNOW how he got it. No, the worst is that I know from whom he got it and that Benicio chooses to protect the kid's name. Benici maintains that he "fell." Even though I know the toy in question is a little triangle jet-pack. My blood is boiling. I applied Neosporin to the cuts three times today and had to bite my tongue from asking again and again how he got this. Geoff and I were both there and we really want to protect his decision not to disclose the sequence of events. He clearly does not want our pity. And I know that a mother's pity does not a man make. My first few rounds at asking for the story I was feeding him the script, "Did someone want the jet pack? Was there a scuffle of arms and elbows?" He wouldn't budge.

It is on days like this that I hate community. I wish I could shrink back from friendships and shelter my precious babies from aggressive frat boy behavior. Or I wish I could offer other parents books on discipline or boundaries. The thing is I know that these parents do have books on these topics, that they grieve to see their kids hurt other kids. If they don't grieve, they are embarassed and flustered. What's weird is that these same bullies have offered the hand of friendship to my sons. And for some reasons that I get and some reasons I find masochistic, they have reciprocated.

Tonight at our neighbor's Slip n' Slide Party with about 10 families sipping Rolling Rock and watching our kids frolic on this giant lawn in Germantown, there was some teasing and Manny came up to me and said, "Mom, their calling mean names over there." He went back to the group. In a minute he returned to me, confidence regained, "Mom, you know what I called (this kid)? I called him "Squirrel Acorn!" I bit my lip and my friend said, "Saying that empowered him. That was from inside him." Our other friend said, "That one is for the books."

Our sons are so different but on these languid and structure-free summer days, I see them depend on eachother more and more. The hope is that they will have eachother in the face of bad bullying behavior. That they will have an adventure to live and that they will rescue the glory and might of brotherhood.

This week, we went to ride scooters at the park and my boys were running and playing "Supers" and this younger boy was watching them and then returning to his mother's side. Then I heard the mother tell the child not to be afraid of the big boys. It occured to me and Manny and Benici that they have reached an age that they are now formidable, that they have a playground prescence. I tried to ask them not to scare the little kid and Benici said, "But we're supers." And Manny said, "If he gets scared, that's an accident." I can see how it's a balance, letting them be their full-on unapologetic male selves and then having them be tender-souled inclusive cooperative selves. It's in me too, I wanted to shove the jet pack kid off the trampoline. I had visions of choking the smirk off his face. And yet, later the same kid was listening to Manny's silly word combinations and was convulsing in paroxsysms of laughter. This is friendship, I guess. Being in the game, offering the vulnerable hand and risking that it might be bitten. But then knowing others well, seing God's image in them and walking with them through this life.

Our Incred-a-Beatty's pose at the 5k race on Mem Day Weekend. Benici and Manny did the 1/4 mi. run with Mema. They were super-fast in their handmade capes.