Last weekend Austin and I went to a garage sale, where I was half-heartedly hoping to run across some Matchbox cars.  I’ve only bought three, and I try to keep one tucked in my pocket or bag for an instant emergency diversion. Problem is, we’re constantly losing them. And when we lose one and find it in a certain spot, like, say, in the cranny beside the carseat, Austin expects them to always appear there. Which has ruined many a perfectly fine drive to daycare.

I’m not much into garage sales, and expect little from them. But just as I was about to give up hope, I spotted the jackpot of all toddler jackpots: a box full of toy airplanes. They were 25 cents apiece. “How much do you want for the whole box?” I asked the man, who identified himself as a military pilot who has flown the real-life version of his young son’s toys. He counted the planes carefully. “Let’s see… there are 21… how about five bucks?” (Talk about getting nickle and dimed.) I happily paid it.

The fleet included several military-style aircraft which I cannot identify, some commercial passenger jets, a Secret Service limousine and SWAT vehicle, and a Chinook helicopter* (the one with dual rotary blades on top). Austin promptly identified the “he-caw-coo,” and put it in his mouth.

We brought them home to Mimi’s, where Austin clapped with delight. “Dee do duh BYE!” he said, over and over. (Translation: This is the PLANE!) He opened the soda cabinet, cleared off a shelf, and recommissioned it as his own private hangar. He parked his planes there one by one.

I didn’t really understand the whole toy-buying impulse until now. Having observed that kids typically prefer wooden spoons, Tupperware, and discarded boxes over the toys they contain, I tried to refrain from buying toys. When friends and family generously bestowed upon us great quantities of toys, we hid the majority in the attic, bringing down a “new” toy once a month. When the old ones pile up, we “recycle” them, rotating batches in and out of the attic, where they are forgotten until we bring them back out to much delight.

But when you figure out what your kid really likes, you want to buy him more. Even if you don’t really understand why (Cars? Really? Why not bikes? Boats!?), it’s hard to resist going overboard and buying them a whole dang fleet.

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* This helicopter thing is meaningful for a couple of reasons. First, because Grandpa spent the majority of his career working on helicopter flight simulators and cockpit technology. Second, because it’s one of a few words I always mispronounce in my head, and am terrified I’ll say out loud incorrectly (HEEL-i-copter, AY-loe vera, and DASH-hund). And lastly because, when I was five years old, I saw a Chinook helicopter flying overhead. I pointed to it and said, “Look! A helicopter!” A snot-nosed kingergarten boy said, “No, it’s a PLANE.” We argued about this until he saw he wasn’t going to win a verbal match, so he hit me in the face. I promptly verified my accuracy with the teacher, then asked for permission to hit him back. (I was denied the justice of clobbering him back, but took some smug satisfaction about being right.)

Having kids does unfortunate things to your floor plan. It can shrink a perfectly spacious home overnight. One day you’ve got a roomy 3/2 with a guest bedroom and an office. Next thing you know, you’ve got a nursery with a toy closet and an office/guest room that’s slowly filling up with everything that used to fit somewhere else. The walls close in. The clutter creeps. You can’t cook dinner without stepping on a pet, a child, or a toy. And your guests find excuses to go home early.

In our inevitable quest to upsize, we found a 4/3 with bonus space in our Ultimate Dream Neighborhood, where one could walk to dinner at cute local restaurants and bike to Free Friday Flicks in the kid-friendly park, right next to the community pool and a small mixed-use zoned village. Our contingency offer was accepted. We mentally moved in. But the new house didn’t pass inspection. Something about the second floor being built for attic space instead of living space, and the first floor buckling under all that weight. Bummer.

Just before we received the money-pit report, we got a lowball offer on our house, which we countered with a highball. After signing the papers, we promptly freaked out about where we would live should the other party accept. (They haven’t. Yet.) Thus enused a frenzy of late-night real estate surfing, obsessive discussion about build-vs-buy, and incessant laps around the Ultimate Dream Neighborhood looking for fresh For Sale signs. Eddie jokes that he’s on the neighborhood watch list. “There’s that freak again,” the neighbors must say. “Casing our joint.”

We have now seen upwards of 30 homes. And despite our growing discouragement, there is an upside. I’ve become a house whisperer. A real estate clairvoyant. Suddenly, I can walk in a house and get a read on who lives there, what their lives are like, and whether they’re happy. The houses speak to me.

On Saturday we visited a house that told me, “Three women live here. They get along well. One is getting married, so they’re all moving out.” On Sunday, we visited a FSBO dude house. The bachelor of the pad told me he was engaged to a chick from the aforementioned chick house. I wondered how they would merge her Anthropologie decor with his lake-house trappings. Their houses were mum on that.

Then there are the houses that tell me, “Bad things happened here.” Like the one which called to attention the hairs on my neck as I walked down the creaky stairs into the creepy basement. Maybe it was the musty smell. Or the exposed toilet and shower in the windowless concrete room that seemed not quite as cushy as a jail cell. This house said to me, “It puts the lotion in the basket.” I got out as quickly as I could. Eddie came to the same conclusion.

Lately our own house started speaking to me. It says, “Stay, and be happy with what you have.”

I think it was our house that said that. Or maybe it was our accountant.

My father was born on the fourth of July, 75 years ago in a house in rural Kansas. This was his holiday. So we chose today to scatter his ashes in the place he loved most: the sea.

We decided to go early, when the fishermen go, long before the boaters with coolers of beer. Austin woke us at sunrise, and we headed out in the Boston Whaler after the sky had turned from pink to blue. It was a little late by the fisherman’s clock, but early enough to find glossy water and quiet air.

Mom and I had been dreading this day for seven months. “It just seems so final,” she said. We’d decided in December to wait for a day when the weather was pretty and the water summer-blue. Dad’s ashes stayed tucked in the hall closet, not forgotten, but hidden from view, in a modest brown box inside a parcel that came in the registered mail and remained unopened.

It hit me yesterday, that he’s gone. Really gone. For Mom and me, it hadn’t seemed real. Until now it had seemed as if he were simply away on a business trip. I spent the day wrangling all sorts of emotions. I picked a fight, projected waves of anger at externalities, sulked and moped and stomped around before I realized what it was really about. Underneath the layers of subterranian denial lies a rawness that’s hard to face.

Dad’s sister requested a portion of his ashes. We weren’t quite sure what to put them in. We searched the house for something appropriate, something meaningful or symbolic. But nothing seemed right, and the hour was approaching. We settled on a small, white aspirin bottle with a tight seal and the label removed. We could find something prettier later.

I carried Dad’s ashes to his tackle room. They were heavier than I expected. I searched for something to use as a scoop, something that wasn’t a spoon. There was nothing. I opened the box, unfastened the twist-tie that sealed the clear bag, and used my hands. The ashes were a gray, fine dust, uniform and free of chunks of things I was terrified to find. My pulse quickened and I tried not to think about it too much, that this is all that’s left of my father’s body.

I left the bottle on the rigging table and carried the box to the dock, where Eddie, Mom, and Austin were waiting in the fishing boat. Dad’s fishing boat. It was the first time Mom and I had been out on it without him. We crossed the bay in a heavy silence.  A pod of dolphins surfaced.

We planned to scatter his ashes at the tide line, the visible threshold where the water shifts and the baitfish feed. We’d briefly considered doing it at a reef where we fished, but a reef seemed too static. The tide line is capricious, and always the first stop on a fishing trip, to fill the baitwell. This morning’s incoming tide had pushed the tide line to the bay side of the Destin Bridge, near the shallows where boaters gather and drink. Not Dad’s scene. So we motored out through Destin pass, into the open Gulf.

Dad’s been fishing these waters for more than 30 years. He loved trolling for king mackerel, bottom-fishing for snapper, trying to coax grouper out of their hiding holes in the reefs. He enjoyed the minimalist approach of fly-lining, letting a live bait on an unweighted hook swim around in the deep blue. Once he decided to try chumming, and we had reeled in one beautiful mahi mahi after another, their rainbow skins turning yellow in our fish well. But that had seemed cheap. Somehow, like cheating. We never chummed again.

Today the water was an achingly beautiful blue, as it usually is this time of year. With few words and no superfluous ceremony, Mom and I together emptied the bag into the blue. I didn’t know what else to say except, “Bye, Dad.” The water turned milky for a brief moment, and then the gray swirl drifted away and vanished. We cried quietly, eyes stinging with salt and sunblock. Then we rigged a solitary rod and trolled.

The water was freckled with rising baitfish, and another pod of dolphins surfaced nearby. Then we witnessed something special — a huge manta ray taking flight, leaping twice into the air. None of us had ever seen that before.

Stare into the sea with the sun behind your head, and your shadow has a halo of sunshine and sea. It has filled me with wonder since I was a child. I wanted to feel a presence. I’m still pondering what I felt. Mostly a combination of peace and emptiness, a sad void deeper than the blue.

If Dad had been here, we would have caught a fish.

No, it’s not a parody of the Police song. It’s a sentence. An Austin sentence. It means, “This is the pool!”

Austin began speaking in sentences virtually overnight, right around his year-and-a-half mark. He speaks them with such declarative certainty that they could only be sentences. Granted, we don’t always know what they mean, but we are able to correctly interpret many of them. And in my book, if we’re able to get the gist of what he means, that counts as communication.

He’s starting to pair objects and possessives, too. For example:

Daddy gagoo = Daddy’s goggles.

Autas  gagoo = Austin’s goggles.

What’s more (and pardon me for bragging with the gushy abandon of a new parent), he is able to follow relatively complex verbal commands, like, “Put the orange bucket in the blue bucket,” “Help mommy put your toys in the bin,” and “Go make mommy a margarita.” (OK, so we have a ways to go with that last one.)

To my great delight, he loves books. He constantly brings them to us to read to him. Sometimes we test him. If we ask him to point to the cow, or the barn, or the front-end loader, he rarely errs. When we ask him to show us the thing that goes Moo, same deal. When he spots the book “Moo, Baa, La La La” and immediately says, “YA YA YA!” we have to remind ourselves that he’s not reading, just remembering. And grandpa would be so impressed that he knows the difference between a “bye” (fixed-wing aircraft) and a “hee-caw-coo” (rotary wing aircraft).

A little proud, you say? Damn right I’m proud! In fact, I have to make concerted efforts to keep from becoming obnoxious. That’s why I frequently call my friends Sasa and Marija, whose daughter Tara, a mere three months older than Austin, can already sing the ABC song and Twinke Twinkle Little Star in English, speak sentences in Serbo-Croation, and sing a Buddhist prayer song in Hungarian. That keeps us modest.

The development of A’s language skills has been a curious process that’s fascinating to observe. Some weeks he seems to take leaps and bounds. Other weeks, he fixates on a few words with earnest repetition.

One week it was Daddy. Which meant monologues that went something like this: “Daddy. DADDY! Dadd-EEE! DAD-dy. Dad-die?” The next week was “cars” and “rice.” Last week he surprised  his daycare teachers by picking up a toy rotary-wing aircraft and announcing, “HEE-ca-coo!”

Of course, many words come out as relatively close approximations. Which is why we bring to you this translation guide:

• gars = cars
• mo = more
• boh-oh = boat
• peees? = please
• TEE-too = thank you
• autis = Austin
• anka = ankle
• no = nose
• nigh-nigh = bedtime
• mesh = mess
• moo = cow
• wowers = flowers
• bye = plane
• gars = tractor
• gars = train
• da-da-da = duck
• baa = sheep
• feshh = fish
• baclaw = broccoli
• rysh = rice
• octo-pizza-pus = octopus
• mina-mina-mina-mina = I want some of whatever you’re eating
• buta-buta-buta-buta = I bet you’re wondering what the heck I’m saying

Another happy announcement! Our good friends Mike and Emily welcomed their first child, a daughter named Lila Rose, just days after Melanie and Blake had their twins. Emily is also a professional photographer, and she took these fine portraits when Lila was just a week old. Looking at these, I can practically smell that intoxicating new-baby scent that emanates from the top of a newborn’s head.

You might remember Mike and Emily from our recent Canyonlands vacation. Em was 7 months pregnant, but that didn’t stop her from hiking to Angel’s Landing, biking 20 miles, and braving sheer 1000+ foot cliffs that scared the convertible pants off of at least one visiting senior hiking club, who was shamed when a very pregnant lady passed them on the uphill trek. She was living, breathing, waddling evidence that pregnancy is not a disease.

My hat goes off to Emily, who in her quest for a natural childbirth endured 24 hours of hard labor WITHOUT AN EPIDURAL before the doctors ordered a C-section. Yeah. In labor hours, that equates to roughly an eternity and a half. There should be some kind of medal for that. For the rest of us, there are drugs.

Emily also deserves some credit for enduring the last trimester in the midst of a live-in major home remodel. During which they also hosted house guests. For that, too, there should be a medal. And for others, drugs and hard liquor.

Though Mike, Emily, and Lila Rose live all the way in our former life in San Francisco, we try to get together at least once a year for an adventure of some sort. We are thrilled that they’ve joined us in the wild adventure of parenting, and through them we’re vicariously re-living the thrills we felt just one-and-a-half years ago. We hope that Lila inherits from her parents a love for all things green (literally and architecturally speaking; Mike’s a newly fully certified green architect, and Emily is a photographer of green architecture). And we hope that Lila can convince our car-loving Austin that hybrids are the way to go.

Today was a bittersweet day for me. We celebrated Eddie’s second Father’s Day, and my first Father’s Day without Dad. (So brace yourself for a post that will be disjointed and wandering and emotionally bipolar.)

The happy: Eddie got up at 5:30 on an attempt to beat the 100-degree heat with an early-morning mountain bike ride. After he returned, we treated him to a Father’s Day brunch of paella and fish tacos at Rojo, one of our favorite local haunts. While A. snoozed in the car seat, we drove around scouting Craftsman-style houses (news flash: we withdrew our offer when the house we liked didn’t pass inspection, and now we’re evaluating the option of building). I don’t think Eddie would be embarrassed for me to note that his gift was an hour-long (professional) massage, followed by a home-cooked dinner of Gingered Scallops, one of his favorite foods.

In short, it was a lovely day honoring the father of my child. He is my best friend, my partner in all endeavors, and everything I wanted in a mate, and more. He is the kind of dad sons grow up wanting to emulate: smart, fun, capable, trustworthy, funny, adventuresome, kind, and tough, but not too tough to be goofy. It’s no wonder A.’s favorite word is “Daddy!”

But as the first Father’s Day after the loss of my father, it had some heavy moments.

The heavy: While A. and I waited for Eddie to return from his ride, we engaged in my son’s favorite pastime: reading books. Usually he likes the short board-books, but lately he has become transfixed by the longer, riddlesome Dr. Seuss classic, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!. I was reading it aloud in a very theatrical, monologue-worthy voice, when the gravity of the lines struck me. It’s actually quite poignant. It reminds me of the animated children’s films that incorporate sophisticated puns and clever adult jokes that go over kids’ heads but keep the parents from being bored. It’s like that, only darker–an emotional ping-ponging between enthusiastic atta-boy optimism and cold, hard reality:

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers
who soar to great heights.

You won’t lag behind because you’ll have the speed.
You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.
Because sometimes, you won’t.

I’m sorry to say so
but sadly, it’s true
that Bang-ups and Hang-ups
can happen to you.

You can get all hung up
in a Prickle-y Perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You’ll be left in a Lurch.

You’ll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And chances are, then,
that you’ll be in a Slump.

And when you’re in a Slump
you’re not in for much fun.
Un-Slumping yourself
is not easily done.

Pretty heavy stuff for a children’s book, eh? Not as grave as Ring Around the Rosie, that children’s rhyme that’s really about Black Plague, but a helluva lot more weighty than Gossie, the small, yellow gosling who likes to wear bright red boots. And gosh, how true.

The sad: In the Seussian vein, I spent part of the day bouncing between un-Slumping myself and feeling giddy about how lucky I am to be married to such a great hubbie and father. I felt guilty that I let my sadness creep in and impinge upon Eddie’s day, but I guess it was sort of inevitable.

As I’ve noted before, it’s funny how grief can ambush you in unguarded moments. It didn’t hit me today until mid-brunch, when I overheard the REM song, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” That being Dad’s name, it was the little thing that nearly sent me weeping into my fish tacos. I later called to check on Mom, who is incredibly strong, but admitted that the reality is starting to hit, like on the lonely night before Father’s Day. Some days, it feels like he’s on an extended business trip. Today, he’s really gone. And we miss him.

If you’re new to the blog, please read this post to hear a bit about his life.

Mom took the last photograph of my father and me, in our special place, the dock.

I have some wonderful news! Our good friends, Melanie and Blake, welcomed their beautiful twins, Wesley Thomas and Sophia Taylor, just a few weeks ago. There’s a word I reserve only for sights such as this: precious. (This amazing photo comes courtesy of proud papa, who was a professional photog in his former career. For the record: He did not pose their arms; they just did that twin thang.)

I am filled with awe and admiration for the parents of twins. Having only just figured out how to reconfigure our existence around one little being, Eddie and I can’t fathom the complexity of two. Twice the feedings (without twice the boobs). Two times the mess, fuss, and squirm. And talk about double doody! The only thing harder might be having three. (Did I mention they already have a bouncing, lovely, precocious toddler named Ali?)

Handling all of that joy, love, and doody would be utterly daunting to most women. But Mel is no ordinary woman. She’s a super. She’s the kind of woman who actually HOPED for twins, which are bestowed only upon those of us with the wits, wisdom, and wherewithall to handle them. Not only did Mel walk around for nine months simultaneously formulating two new humans from scratch, she did so while running the regional office of a major home health care company, taking care of a bouncing toddler, and supporting a hubbie who is training for an Iron Man (which, as Eddie can attest, is like another full-time job).

<Standing ovation.>

I’m sad that Blake and Mel live halfway across the country now. But thanks to telegraphic text conversations, long-distance calls, and this blog (Mel checks nightly and gives me much-needed grief when my posts grow infrequent), we manage to stay in touch as much as two working moms can. Which sometimes means yelling “What? What?!” over the din of screaming kids. But sometimes those are the most poignant conversations of all.

Those of you who know Blake and Melanie, please join me in congratulating them on their lovely twins. I can’t wait to meet them! And neither can Austin.

Best caption wins a half-dried tub of Play-Doh! Enter in comments below.

After receiving our retro school pictures from the annual portrait session, I received these awesome candids from A.’s daycare teachers. They capture some of the real-life moments that I miss, sadly, while I’m at work. It’s interesting to see what our kid is like when we’re not around, so I have a dual appreciation for these pics.

It’s been a big year. Now that everyone’s walking, we parents no longer have to put surgical booties over our shoes every time we walk in the room. The seven kids in A.’s class recently made the switch from two naps to one, and two weeks ago traded cribs for cots which made room for new furniture and toys, like these tables, which they love. Often when I come to pick A. up, he wants to show me how he can sit in his own chair at the pint-sized table.

The kids have developed unique friendships. A.’s best pal, B., is a gentle giant who loves to give unintentionally bone-crushing hugs. He and A. are always wrestling, sharing snacks, and sometimes giving each other big, slobbery kisses. It’s fascinating to watch 18-month-olds who can speak just a few words but are nonetheless able to develop relationships. I’m glad they’re staying together when they move up to the toddler room this August. That means new teachers, a roomier room, and a graduation to the almost-big-kid playground.

Continue reading this post to see a few funny pics A.’s teacher took in Easter, when we brought out the bunny ears…