I can’t believe it, and you probably can’t either: we have never hired a sitter to watch the kids. I realized this when we were the only guests in the sushi bar this evening that had about a quart of white rice scattered on the floor beneath our table and from which a preschooler’s voice echoed across the restaurant: “DABBY DOTS OF JELLY! (giggle giggle) SALTY ON MY TONGUE AND YUMMY IN MY BELLY! (ikura) LOOK Daddy! There’s rice on the wall!” But this is us, and these kids are having fun eating fancy with us, being served with luscious glazed pottery and playing with the food-art. And the money we saved for not hiring a sitter pays nicely for two cold bottles of sake. DOWN THE HATCH, HONEY!

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.

I can’t sleep because I am getting my hair cut tomorrow and I’m giddy as a schoolgirl and I can’t wait because my hair is driving me SO crazy that I’ve almost taken the safety scissors to it but I didn’t because Angelique is wonderful and worth the drive to Houston with two young children under the age of four in the dead heat of summer.

Inexpensive is good. Cheap is better. But at what cost? Photojournalist Michael Wolf has documented the flipside to the euphoria of cheap and returned my thoughts towards weekend garage sale shopping and the recycling of consumer goods.

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.

Once again, I was squandering away a perfectly good hour of sleep when I stumbled, falling completely in love with the designer Josef Frank, by the kitschy beauty of his supernatural textiles on display at Stockholm’s Svenskt Tenn. I was ready to pack a few days worth of clothes with my toothbrush and board the next flight to Stockholm before realizing that:
a. not only was he, to my disappointment, already dead, but that
b. my youngest child was sitting up in the bed, screaming for me to pick him up.
His designs seduced me as Feodor Rojankovsky’s illustrations first did, when I was a very young girl, in the pages of John Langstaff’s Frog Went A Courtin’ and Over in the Meadow.

Even if the the plan backfired and these stickers became a commodity, I still think the You Are Beautiful campaign is a lovely thing.

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