Uh-oh, it's magic.

The glasses and scarf came in the mail Thursday afternoon, in the nick of time for "storybook character dress-up day." He tried them on with his corduroy jacket, and checked himself out in the mirror.

"All I need now," he said, "is to have black hair, and grow taller."

And looked at me as if I were the person who could make it happen.

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all in green went my love riding

My father used to recite that line of e.e. cummings whenever I wore his favorite color. I thought of it this morning as I kissed young Baggins goodbye.





all in green went my love riding by e.e. cummings

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Disclosure

I'm not sure if this declaration is intended to be contrite or territorial. Either way, I appreciate the honesty.

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The Scrooge of School Picture Day

Today is school picture day. I hate school picture day. Those of you who follow me on twitter might have caught me grumbling this morning that school portraiture is to photography as school lunches are to cuisine. I'm a rank amateur with a cheap point 'n' shoot, but I can take a photograph of my kids that's a hundred times better. Why on earth would I shell out a minimum of $12 (the lowest priced package this year) for a couple of wallet size photos from a turnstile operation with all the technical skill and artistic merit of a coin-operated photo booth? As a matter of fact, I like photo booth pictures much more. It's a racket, in my opinion. And don't even get me started on the recently adopted tactic of taking pictures again in the spring. I'm going to write in my own package code on that form when it comes home in the backpacks: NFW.

I explain my objections to my children, and they nod and act like they understand, but then I worry that, deep down, what they hear is, "Mommy doesn't love you enough to want your school pictures," and I always cave in. One of these days, I'll arrange them all in an album in chronological order, I tell myself. But the prints come back, and are soon buried under mail and homework papers, eventually getting tossed in a box or drawer, still in the envelope.

Next year, I swear--every year--I'm going to stand firm.

But then I remember these, and how glad I am to have them, as dated as they are. Pull-down painted backdrops and all.

First school photo at two years old.
My teacher Mom brought me in for picture day.

First Grade.

Second Grade.

That's the thing about cheese, I guess. It gets better with time.

What's your stance on school pictures?

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Husk

My freshly minted sixth grader had his first school dance on Friday night.

"You're sure you want to go?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "Yeah. I guess."

I watched him queue up against the building with his classmates, my eyes playing connect-the-dots with the tops of their heads, graphing the zigzag line made by their wildly different heights. Closest to the entrance, jostling for admission, the seventh and eighth graders looked like a race of giants. A security guard stood there with a metal detector in hand. A metal detector. This is not your mama's sock hop, I thought, remembering my first dance, at the end of sixth grade. We were still in elementary school then, top of the food chain. It was the last year I wouldn't dread going to school, until I reached the other side of junior high.

It's so hard not to project our own experiences onto our children. I've never been more grateful that I have sons, not daughters. The difference in our genders is an obvious reminder that they are not me. I don't know what these years are like for boys, the "tweens." I don't like the word at all. It sounds made-up--trademarked and sanitized, as if puberty were a sitcom dreamed up by Nickelodeon. But maybe it's better than no word at all. There was no name for what I was then. Pupal. Inchoate. In between.

The goth and emo kids, with their black fingernails and bowed heads, reflect a truth about puberty that Nickelodeon doesn't. It's a kind of death, in the way that metamorphosis is death. We are not the same creatures coming out of it that we are when we go in. However splendid our new selves may be, our childhood is discarded. The husk on the ground behind.

My son has barely begun to spin his cocoon. He moved into his own bedroom over the summer, and we've been working on re-decorating it to suit a middle-schooler's style. It's a mash-up of Legos, Beatles, skateboards, electronics and stuffed animals. Perfectly in between. He seems to love it in there. I never know, when I open the door, whether I'll find him laying on the bed, listening to music with his headphones on, or crouched on the floor over his action figures.

He's like me at that age in so many ways, but so much is different. Our family is in a different place than mine was then. Maybe things will be easier for him. Maybe they'll be easier for me than they were for my parents. One can hope. I was so angry with them all the time. When I was thirteen, I hated my father. And anyone who says, oh, no, you didn't really, has either forgotten what it was like to be thirteen, or was someone who probably wouldn't have spoken to me in junior high. I loved my father as much as a daughter can love. He was the sun that rose in my consciousness every waking day of my life, and the moon that shone down at night. I miss him every day. And I hated him for most of my thirteenth year. He knew it, but he loved me through it.

He was given to lecturing. Remember the Gary Larson cartoon that was captioned, "More than any other punishment, Jimmy dreaded his father's lectures?" That was me. Once, when I was in grade eight, he said to me, "You have to think about what you do, Kyran, because people are going to follow you."

I stared back sullenly and seethed. How could my own father so profoundly misunderstand who I was and what life was like for me? People follow me? Was he crazy? Classmates got up and moved away from me if I sat at a desk next to them, and that was the only sign they gave that I wasn't actually invisible. Who was going to ever give a damn what I said, thought or did? He must be talking about a daughter he wished he had. How could he say he loved me, when clearly, he couldn't see me?

And so. Here you are. Not following, exactly. But reading. Caring. Commenting. Seeing something he saw, when no one else did, when I couldn't.

It's what I'm ready to do for my son. To hold that vision of his splendid winged self if he should lose it in the dark. To see it if no one else does, if he can't believe in it himself, if he hates me for it. But I'm also ready to see and love him just as he is, in between. He is not me. I'm not my father or my mother. I need to try not to project, to take these years as they come.

Because the one thing I'm not ready for? What will really throw me for a loop?

A kid who comes home from his first dance, announcing he had the time of his life.

"Mom! It was awesome! Me and my friends started break dancing, and the other kids started following us!"

Now what am I going to do with a kid like that? Who's happy and popular, and likes middle school?

Love him anyway, I suppose.

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Say Hello to His Little Friend

For eleven years, my eldest son has lived under a benevolent, but totalitarian, regime that would not recognize his Second Amendment rights. Then, certain interfering foreign powers (his Canadian grandmother) sent him a little money as an end-of-school gift, and a requisition for a Nerf gun was rashly approved, because--hey, how much damage can you do with foam bullets?

Thanks to an international network of Nerf insurrectionists, posting tutorials like this one to YouTube, we're about to find out.

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Language of Love

"You want to go to the grocery store with me?" I ask my youngest.

"Only if I can eat some cheese!" he says, with the shrewdness his brothers might negotiate for Cheetos, with their day-glo coating of "cheese-flavored" dust, more closely resembling deforestation agents than actual cheese.

But he means real cheese--not the imitation of its flavor by chemists who've evidently never tasted real cheese, not the vinyl textured processed kind, or the rubbery, bland ropes of it packaged for kids as string cheese. He means the cheese that is found on the opposite side of the supermarket from the dairy case, over by the deli, where tiny cubes of expensive, imported cheese are set out for sampling with frilled toothpicks. Crumbly, stinky, rind-skinned, glorious cheese.

This one knows the way to my heart is through his stomach. His brothers, raised at the same table, offered the same foods, wrinkle their noses at anything stronger than the little red wheels of Babyel -- baby cheese, a friend from France calls it. Pablum. They wrinkle their noses when something unfamiliar is set before them at the dinner table, or when they wander through a cloud of spices in the kitchen. Even his father, at 46, regards new dishes with an unconscious expression of suspicion. Not this one. He climbs up on the kitchen stool and breathes deep.

"What's that good smell?" he asks, as I fold dressing into boiled potatoes for salad.

"Fresh pepper," I say.

He inhales again, eyes closed.

"What else?"

"Dill weed, lemon juice, horseradish," I tell him, as if this were a Bible lesson, and I were teaching him names of the disciples.

At the grocery store, we discover that all the cheese samples have been eaten. My budget is tight this week, and no amount of pouting would move me to add an off-list bag of chips or candy bar to our cart, but I console him by offering to buy a wedge of his choosing. He chooses an apricot-colored "Thousand-Day" gouda we've never tried. It costs twenty dollars a pound. We leave with a four-ounce piece, wrapped in cellophane. Edible gold.

We don't even wait to get it home, but eat it in the parking lot, making ecstatic cheese noises, the conversation that needs no words, speaking each other's language.

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Graduating

We watched our eleven-year-old graduate from elementary school this morning.



I've heard it said that a boy belongs to his mother for the first half of childhood. Then he belongs to his father.



I think he'll be in good hands.

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Obedience Training

The Puppy Whisperer from Kyran Pittman on Vimeo.

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The Household Goddess

Sometimes being a mother of boys means finding rocks in the washing machine, presiding over belch contests at the table, and waging a losing battle over the default position of the toilet seat.

Other times it means you can walk through the house looking like this



and your five-year-old will stare up at you with enormous wide eyes and say, "Mom. You look gorgeous right now."

Without even a trace of sarcasm.

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Green Yeaf and a Side of Shausage

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Live by the Sharpie, Die by the Sharpie

I was still patting myself on the back for this "silly sock day" parent hack, when my third grader decided he'd draw his silly faces on the bottoms of his socks. And then walked all over the hardwood floors while the permanent ink was still fresh.

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Transmorgrofire a la Carte

On the transmorgrofire menu today:

• Bug
  
• Normal
  
• volassarapter
  
• Eell
  
• Baboon
  
• tiger
  

Or, I'm told, today's special permits a combination of any of the above. The ethics of which may be questionable.

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Sweet funny valentine

My 11-year-old had this waiting for me when I got up this morning. I love it more than all the chocolates and all the flowers in the world.

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Wild Thing

You make my heart sing.

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Arrow of Light

My newly minted eleven-year-old crossed over to Boy Scouts tonight after five years as a Cub, a monumental achievement, given that his mother barely lasted two weeks in Brownies. I was as proud as if I had produced the first college graduate in our family history. It was an elaborate ceremony, with the Boy Scouts and Troop Leaders sitting opposite the Cubs, waiting to admit them to their ranks. I may have briefly struggled with the urge to lead the assembly with the Spongebob Movie anthem, "Now That We're Men," but mostly I had to blink back tears, watching our solemn and proud boys face us, their parents and den leaders, and prepare to shift their allegiance. Every single one of them so fine, straight and true. Every one of them so ready to make that crossing, like every eleven year old boy that ever lived.

It deserves a ceremony. Some say it requires one.

As I watched them waiting for their names to be called, the cheesiness of the props and the cliche of the Native American references fell away, and I felt like we were all participating in something as sacred and as old as time. Whatever it's called, however it's done, it serves a purpose. The boys were almost visibly vibrating with the resonance of the symbolic call to cross over.

I have my issues with the Boy Scouts of America, as I do with just about any institution, and from time to time, I've been known to poke fun at knee socks on grown men in short pants. Also, if we stay married through one more Pinewood Derby, it will be a miracle. But I've come to appreciate it for what both my sons (and next year, I imagine, a third) get from it: guidance, adventure, and exposure to organizational skills that--face it--are in short supply at home. (A requirement in my son's handbook: "Make a list of maintenance tasks required to keep a household running smoothly." Me, to my son: "Just walk around the house and make note of everything you see.")

But there's more to it than that. I don't have the first clue how to raise boys into men. Their father does, but it takes more than one role model. There are no male teachers at our elementary school, and while I don't consider it a handicap to be surrounded by strong, loving, capable women, something's missing from my kids' education. They find it at Scouts, thanks to the wonderful Dads who serve as our pack and troop leaders. And so I'm grateful to them, knee socks and all, for being there, tonight and every week, ushering my sons safely forward, welcoming them to the company of men.

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The Cusp

He stands in the music section of Barnes and Noble, the twenty dollar gift card burning a hole in his pocket, indecision burning a hole in his heart. In one hand, he clutches yet another definitive field guide to Pokemon, the cartoon characters that have been his obsession since first grade. In the other, an object of recent desire, a newly remastered Beatles cd. He is ten years old for only seven more days. He is moving into the in-between place. Moving out of childhood.

One night, several weeks ago, I peeked into his bedroom, and saw the baby in his sleeping face. The glimpses of that are so rare now. I gazed from the doorway a long moment, not knowing if I would ever catch that sweet sight again.

I wonder how aware he is of where he stands poised, how much consciousness undergirds the angst he feels as he weighs the little boy's book against the young man's music. I remember being his age, holding my favorite doll and stuffed animal to my breast at night, weeping quietly with the knowledge that I was passing from their world into another, one where I wouldn't be able to hear them speak.

Sometimes I look at my own weathered, sun-spotted hand, and am amazed to think it is the very same hand that once closed around my mother's finger, and grabbed at my father's beard. It feels like we move on as we go through life, but we never leave our own skin. I wonder if my baby self ever visits my face at night.

He chooses the Beatles album, and in spite of--or through--my own poignant projections, I'm pleased. I discovered their music the summer I was eleven, and listened to nothing else until I got through junior high. It's a good map.

We get home and rip the cd to his new MP3 player. Not many "pretend" toys in his pile under the tree this year. I toss it to him over the back of the couch, and he catches it. "Thanks, Mom!" He can rest his chin on my shoulder easily. It's time for braces, and middle school, and talks that I am nowhere near ready to deliver.

He puts on the headphones, and jumps to his feet, bigger than mine. My little boy is gone, I think. Into a world where he won't hear me speak.

Then he skips across the family room like a runaway shadow, and I smile and think, not yet.

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Thinking outside the (amazon) box.

On the fourth day before Christmas, my true love gave to me an Atomic Cerebral Enhance-O-Tron. God knows I need it.

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Minions

When your kids are still imaginary, you dream about all the cute, original, clever costumes they will wear at Hallowe'en, and how cute, original and clever you will seem by association. Then you have real kids, and they have their own ideas. Actually, they have Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney's ideas. Nothing but that $30 licensed costume (on sale the next day for five bucks) will do.

So I was really thrilled and surprised this year, when my boys ventured beyond Saturday morning cartoons for their costume ideas. We were lucky to snag the wonderfully soft and fuzzy Max costume on Amazon before the seller mysteriously disappeared (I'm guessing we are the proud owners of a bootleg wolf suit?). My Max has hardly taken it off. He wore it for nearly 72 hours straight this weekend. If you look closely, you can probably see cheeto dust and cereal O's clinging to it.

My middle son was a ghostbuster. The proton blaster was fashioned out of duct tape, milk jugs, foam pipe insulation, and a couple of funnels. We slimed him with silly string.

I'm not sure what my eldest was, exactly. I think some sort of fascist.

And me? I was one lucky devil.

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In and out of weeks and through a year.

Nearly there.

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