Chas would very much like to walk, minus the falling down part. In the kitchen we were captive audience this afternoon. He would get up, look at us as if to say he’d just been given a $1000 gift certificate to Design Public, step step step witholding breath, then plop halfway surprised before looking up at both of us in pride, clapping his hands loudly and vigorously, grinning and soliciting our applause. At times like this I think he is entirely happy-go-lucky, just riding this whole walk-tease phase out; other times I perceive him as fiercely opinionated, like when I try to rescue my delicate cell fone out of his grasp and am met with the ringwraith scream, eardrums shattered and eyelids peeled back in strain. He’s a soft, snuggly bundle of conflicted joviality and frustration.

Ford and I visited the Montessori school at the end of our block yesterday morning. It was poised, pretty, just bubbling with children. They practice strict Montessori method, and I was impressed with the industriousness and self-reliance of a 4 year-old girl as she swept collage remnants with a child-sized broom into a child-sized dustpan. The place glowed with purpose and warmth and Ford (and Chas, for his part) seemed to enjoy it very much. In fact, he didn’t want to leave. He was attracted to station after station, wooden baskets and utensils, glowing freshwater fish tank and sunny windows facing the children’s vegetable garden.
But there are no openings until June 2006.
This might be our opportunity in disguise to travel this year and shuffle the boys out of the country for a little exploring, while we still can.

I feel as if I’m waiting for Them to come take Chas away. With conflicting travel plans coming from more than three loved ones, I find myself pushing Chas’ birthday celebration nearly two weeks following his actual birthdate. Is it so much to accommodate everyone’s schedules that they might be able to join us in celebration, or am I reluctant for Time to take away Chas’ First Year away from me, with all of the poignant milestones? He’s not going to be a baby once he passes his First Birthday, but a toddler. It’s not fair that decades of dying are preceded by the short, enthusiastic pant of life in that first year here.

The Austin Children’s Museum hosted “Bubble Day” this afternoon, for which we have been planning to attend all week. There was a special shirt Ford selected to wear, and a priority given to this event over all other appointments, even eating. We left Houston in the rain last night in order not to miss it. And Ford has been talking about it all week, All Week.

The entire visit, Ford whisked among the exhibits like an ER surgeon urgently attending triage, objective and meticulous, testing each demonstration and lingering where he saw fit before moving onto the next interest, oblivious to everyone else but with growing receptivity towards taking turns, nonetheless.

Chas, sometimes clapping with pride, figured out all of the baby room puzzle exhibits, but he petered out quickly along with my aching feet.

As we drove back tonight from Freeport (Texas), through a cloud of small insects that stretched sixty miles in the moonlight and caked my windshield, I realized that this may be the last time I ever willingly drive down past Chlorine Boulevard and the oil refineries on my way to this particular section of the Texas coastline. But we had to do it today, because Chas has never seen the saltwater and I was anxious to beachcomb and show Ford a few ctenophores and nudibranchs among the mile-high piles of sargassum. And I was sure that the longshore current would have brought, along with hurricane Emily, plenty of flotsam to collect at the neck of the jetty.

When we opened our doors on arrival, a warm effluvia (my God how pretentious of me) of rotting seaweed and crustaceans rolled through the car. Nickel-sized mosquitoes swarmed and fire ants began to gnaw on Ford’s feet as he stepped down onto the pavement. The sand, if you can call it sand, was a fine, sooty brown, not quite anything like sand but more like the fine sediment atop the ground after a flood. Particles of rock left to churn and churn and churn until there is hardly a surface to grind any further, sand grains the size of atoms remain. It is an irritating, virtually impossible sand to rinse off the body, and it carries with it the unmistakable stench of Freeport if you forget to clean you car out afterwards (just so you know, honey, I did). And the piles of sargassum, the miles and miles of mile-high piles of sargassum, were unprecedented. Even the flies gave up on the bacchus; I think they must have all lost their minds because I didn’t see a single fly on the beach. There were only the rounded remains of shell bits, and virtually no sea life besides the rotting seaweed and a few entangled shrimp.

Of course, it is difficult to comb the beach for wildlife when your baby is busy crawling into the Gulf like Kate Chopin’s Edna (in the final chapter of The Awakening). He was in love and wonder, on a blind mission like a sea turtle hatchling, flapping his huge broad hands onto the slick sand and beeline-ing it to the Eastern Australian Current or EAC as Crush calls it because that’s what sea turtles do, according the Disney/Pixar, and there was NO STOPPING HIM until the waves began to roll over his head and, unlike the baby sea turtles, he stood up, squinting and licking, unsure what to do next.

And just like those cute little sea turtles you see on Nova, I got Chas’ first sea legs on film, too. I can post it when we return to Austin this weekend.

Two small steps for Chas-kind. Happy he was to repeat this mission thrice over the weekend, though elusive to cameras. There is still the flutter of applause in my heart, the embers of an ovation. He took it all in stride, forgetting the third triumph as he grinned and drew my chin into a rather painful four-toothed bite.

OOh, OOOh, this is important: Chas stood and boogied for the first time today! He stood in the middle of the living room and bounced up and down to music! Grinning with wide, four-tooth abandon. Any other parent knows that this is truly a fun moment in time. It’s the last time they’ll ever do that move without frowning and shoving out their lower jaw as if to say, “I’m so fly, look, I can dance (even though I feel like a total dork out here alone on the dance floor).”

There are certain landmarks in a baby’s development that must be recorded.
I haven’t remembered to record the day Chas learned to climb the stairs, and stand alone, although it was sometime last month. I know now that he has a working intelligible vocabulary consisting of 6 words: mamamama, dada, dah (dog), bubba (brother), bubba (bubble), and buh (book). He can point when I point and clap with applause and he has a wonderful sense of humor that, these days, spreads great joy and levity. But today, at his girlfriend Sofi’s first birthday party, he impressed all of us by eating dog shit.
As with many milestones, we are often too caught-up in the moment of achievement to capture it on film, but when they are this impressive, such special advances are etched in our brain forever. Sofi’s birthdate, for example, will always be The Day Chas Ate Dog Shit.

This could very well be both the happiest time of my life and the hardest. Mothering both boys is a balancing act that I never seem to master with each day. There are always frayed edges or undone parts, sometimes it feels a little like I’m managing to walk across an invisible tightrope with the baby in my arms, that’s how fragile my grip feels. But as I stared into the lake today, beyond the bubbling enthusiasm of the pool, Chas crawled before my eyes like a gorilla in pursuit of a transparent blue beach ball with white polka dots. When he had finished chasing the ball across the concrete, he hoisted himself onto his feet and began to clap and smile. Evidence that my job is, despite the aching heart, pretty precious. I mean, he could learn to do these things on his own, I know this, but the job of being there to see it all–how fortunate I am to always be witness to these little miracles.

This could very well be both the happiest time of my life and the hardest. Mothering both boys is a balancing act that I never seem to master with each day. There are always frayed edges or undone parts, sometimes it feels a little like I’m managing to walk across an invisible tightrope with the baby in my arms, that’s how fragile my grip feels. But as I stared into the lake today, beyond the bubbling enthusiasm of the pool, Chas crawled before my eyes like a gorilla in pursuit of a transparent blue beach ball with white polka dots. When he had finished chasing the ball across the concrete, he hoisted himself onto his feet and began to clap and smile. Evidence that my job is, despite the aching heart, pretty precious. I mean, he could learn to do these things on his own, I know this, but the job of being there to see it all–how fortunate I am to always be witness to these little miracles.

This could very well be both the happiest time of my life and the hardest. Mothering both boys is a balancing act that I never seem to master with each day. There are always frayed edges or undone parts, sometimes it feels a little like I’m managing to walk across an invisible tightrope with the baby in my arms, that’s how fragile my grip feels. But as I stared into the lake today, beyond the bubbling enthusiasm of the pool, Chas crawled before my eyes like a gorilla in pursuit of a transparent blue beach ball with white polka dots. When he had finished chasing the ball across the concrete, he hoisted himself onto his feet and began to clap and smile. Evidence that my job is, despite the aching heart, pretty precious. I mean, he could learn to do these things on his own, I know this, but the job of being there to see it all–how fortunate I am to always be witness to these little miracles.