tiffandtheboys

“Tell ya’ what”….. is how Carroll’s stories often began.  And they were incredible, but also terribly credible because they were mostly about our family (which is a very twisted tree indeed)….and we knew the characters in his stories well enough to know that he painted just the right pictures, with just the right colors.  Carroll was a southern gentlemen above all else.  He loved his sweet Miss Emma more than all the leaves that fell from their trees and you know there was an endless supply of them.  To describe him to a stranger I would say, well, I can’t do him justice, but….Carroll was one of the most charming, sweet, generous to a fault, loving, honest, trustworthy, handsome, belly-ache funny, kind, impassioned, opinionated, thoughtful, and dear men that I have ever had the honor to know.  He is so very loved and will be so very missed.  I know that he knew that.

My heart is with you EJ,

Tiff

I have to apologize because I began to write this entry back in August, but it is now early October which tells you a little something about my life right now.  Anyway…..

The boys were thrilled to spend a day with Opa on Sunday (two months ago).  He came down from San Luis for a little visit and they entertained him with the latest dives and swim maneuvers in Bubbie and Papa’s pool.  We were thrilled to see them.  Chris had a day with his dad, which is both wonderful and painful at the same time.  I think, like any child, the relationship they have involves the sweet memories of watermelon in the summer sun, and the sharp smack of a spanking or timeout chair (depending on the decades in which you did the majority of your misbehaving.  Anyway, it was fabulous to see him and let the boys climb all over him, physically and emotionally.  They were in heaven.  Chris introduced him to Margo (see archives under Meet Margo) and all he could do was shake his head in dismay.  I think sometimes we do things because we really want to do them, but also, in part, because we enjoy the reaction that we will receive from those in our little orbit.  Take Alex, for example (poor guy is always standing in as my example).  Sometimes he gets this twinkle in his eye and I can tell he is about to do something for which he knows he will be punished…..and yet, he wants to do it anyway.  I think some of that is just the deep desires of a four-year-old comet with a burning tail full of stardust and no where to put it.  But sometimes, I really think he enjoys the science of action and reaction.   Watching with a sick, masochistic kind of glee as my eyes widen and my voice rises to that particular level of shrill that only a mother can produce.  But then there are those moments that fill me with glee to witness his Alexness.  The other day he came out of his room with a mile-wide grin and said, “I’m goin’ mango, Mom!”.  I had to stop and let my 4-year-old language interpreter’s program whir into action in my head until I realized that he meant, (of course!) ‘going commando’, which, in our house, means clothes sans underwear.  He was so  very proud that I didn’t want to dampen the mood (no pun) by correcting his word choice.

I am, at once, fortified and exhausted by the machinations of all three of these little people who careen about me.  Please remember to hug and love those that make you craziest in your life, because those are the ones that give you the most.

Much love,

Tiff

So I met my brand new niece for the first time last night.  I got to hold her and am amazed at how quickly you forget what eight pounds feels like.  She is just beautiful.  Mom and baby are doing well and in that euphoric first 48 hours where you just can’t imagine what all these other parents are whining about.  I mean, your baby is perfect and sleeps all the time and hardly ever cries.  That is all true in the first two days….the hospitals have planned it that way, so that upon arriving home with your little bundle of perfection you will be completely thrown off balance when that same baby suddenly (and much like a tiny vampire) will ONLY sleep while the sun shines and needs to suck on you every 12.3 minutes in order to sustain that rosy glow for all the night time activities that they want to enjoy.  Okay, having said all that…..she really is perfect.  We took the boys up, with the constant whispered admonishments of “Shush.” and “Hold Hands.” and “Alex, don’t touch that.”.  Alex was particularly in awe because she is a “whole new other person in the world”;  and she is a GIRL….he desperately wanted a sister, so this is as close as he’s gonna get.  The idea of teaching her how to make lattes and scrambled eggs in the playhouse hacienda in our living room is almost too exciting for words.

I am so proud of Ru and Brian for choosing to take on this endlessly frustrating, but infinitely rewarding new life.  Nothing will ever be the same…..once we wrap our hearts around that ‘whole new person in the world’, we can’t imagine a world without them.

love to you all,

tiff

Margo…..hmmm….where to start.   Chris has been eyeing her for several months as he has gone through the requisite training, license appropriation, and insurance shopping.  She purred to him each time he would pass by her foster home on Ocean St. as he drove to work in the sweet gas-guzzling warhorse that we still call Plum.  (Yep, that is the Plum PARKED on the street behind Chris and Margo, banished from the garage forthwith upon the new girl’s arrival).  Everyone, especially Chris’ Mom, is horrified that I have not stopped this affair from commencing.  She has only been with us for four days and yet I am already starting to understand the benefits of polygamy.  She makes him so very happy.  This, in turn, makes me very happy.  The end result is a happy house where there is virtually no need for an adult time-out.  The second night, he took Margo for a sunset ride and the next morning, as I picked up the crumpled pile of ridden clothes from the bathroom floor (yeah, he still does that, it’s not like she is a miracle worker or anything), I had to kill two bugs that he had inadvertently kidnapped during his ride.  I could almost hear the conversation between the two of them.  “What the hell  happened?   There we were flying along without a care in the world and then, BAM, we are trapped in the folds of some day-trader’s leather jacket and now some crazy woman with wild hair and a pink-floyd t-shirt is coming at us with a swiffer duster.”   Bottom line, I told Chris he needs to shake off a little better before coming into the house after he and Margo have been out for a cruise.

Honestly, I thought he would shop around for several months, so that I would have time to wrap myself around the idea of him spending time with someone else.  But alas, two days after getting his temporary license from the DMV, she appeared.

He has let me sleep until 7:30 the last two mornings knowing that he and Margo will be together for a good hour before the temps start to rise.  He comes home with his hair in a helmet-shaped mohawk and a grand-canyon wide grin.  My only fear is that in six-months he may get a wandering eye and want to replace her for a younger, shinier version…..and that simply can’t happen.  I have already grown to love her.

love to you all,

tiff

Just as that famous old church hymn “Gladly, The Cross, I’d Bear” caused the toddler to question what the heck an astigmatic bear named, “Gladly” had to do with Jesus, so goeth my three-year-old into the land of misconception and odd aphorisms.  Alex and Sam took me to the store this week with a very short, but essential list of items to be obtained.  While shopping I was blessed with a play-by-play summary of Alex’s favorite Backyardigans episode.   For those of  you not able to receive the Noggin channel, I must tell you that this show is pretty phenomenal.  It involves five critters, not all of whom would necessarily be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but who are quite real, heroic, and adventurous nonetheless.  They manage to involve themselves in a variety of situations which invariably demonstrate the importance of teamwork, sharing, manners, respect and bravery; and if that were not enough of a selling point, they also incorporate original choreographed show tunes reminiscent of the Gene Kelley–Esther Williams–Astaire & Rogers genre.   But I digress, so there we were walking through the store and Alex was describing the ‘Medium Showers”  that they had to endure in the space ship on the way to the “Gram Nambula”.  (Meteor showers and Crab Nebulae, duh!)  At which point, Alex stops in his tracks like we had just blown a tire on the cart and said (quite loudly), “Mom!  We forgot the ham sanitizer”.  And darned if he wasn’t right.  We had already passed the soap aisle where such a product might be found.  It was only mildly ironic that the reality of a vegetarian female living with and cooking for four hugely carniverous males, might really appreciate such an item, were it to actually exist.   Anyway, my point (do I ever really have one?) is that ones use of language can be an amazing insight and reflection into personality and perspective.  Alex knows that we use the “ham sanitizer” on our hands to keep them relatively clean, but in his mind perhaps he assumed that it was made out of ham.  He probably wondered why we didn’t just skip the middle man and rub Spam all over our hands.  As for the “Medium Showers” , maybe  it was simply star-rain that was only halfway between small and large in size.  The “Gram Nambula”, is one for which I have no interpretation, other than the fact that when he said it to Mom, she looked at me and with a deadpan gaze said, “Didn’t he play with Crosby and Stills in the 60’s”?

I love having three other pairs of eyes besides my own old, myopic, jaded ones with which to view this rapidly spinning world of ours.  It keeps me just this side of crazy…..and that’s really where we all should be.

Much love to you all,

tiff

This is the Easter story that Alex shared with us on Saturday on the drive out to Jalama Beach.  “On Friday, Cheezus lost his skin…then they (the bad guys) put him in a cave, and on Easter Sunday he got his skin back and came out of the cave.”  Mind you, Cheezus is the only one that this happens.  This colorful version of our Savior’s resurrection was directly relayed to him by Mrs. Miller, the director at his preschool (aka Mrs. Cheezus, according to Alex) during chapel at his big-boy preschool at the Presbyterian Church.  According to the gospel of Alex, none of us ordinary folks get our skin back.  We just die and go straight to heaven.  There it is, Easter in a nutshell.  And to think there has been so much confusion and bloodshed over this seemingly simple and straightforward holiday.  Of course, we celebrated with great reverence and piety the way most Americans do…with chocolate and the search for the eggs left by the Easter Bunny in our front yard.

I have been struggling with my own demons lately.  You know you all have them, too.  They are those horrible little trolls that live in the recesses of our subconscious that say mean things to us.  They spout the same stuff that the bully in our third grade class did. They tell us we are faltering, skating on thin ice, not achieving our potential, and perpetuating the fraud of impersonating a good and whole human.  So I am fighting them right now, which in not an easy task when I am also simultaneously trying to build three healthy, relatively balanced little egos under my direct and often interminable (according to Alex) supervision.

Don’t get me wrong… with regard to the development of my children, I am aware that all the Legos are pretty much already on the table.  I have very little control over the choice of blocks that each of these boys has been given.  However, having said that…there is an art to the way those blocks can be assembled.  I watch them as they try out the different configurations.  I try to slyly suggest a certain balance to the wings and the wheels so that their very original little vehicles (hovercraft, rocket, boat, motorcycle-parachute-jetpack…whatever they happen to choose) doesn’t crash and burn before it even has a chance to lift off.  I have become a master at the whisper of a suggestion that actually makes them believe it was their idea to begin with.  By the way, this works on husbands as well, but only infrequently.

​I want them to love themselves, but not be arrogant little buggers.  I want them to repect and be loving to others, but not at the expense of their own dignity.  I want them to pick up the Dorito bag on the beach, not because someone is watching or even out of guilt, but because it is a good thing to do.  Better to do, than not.  I want them to love the feel of pleasure, sheer and abandoned, but not become so addicted to it that they shirk their responsibilities or fail to own the consequences of their actions.  These things may seem simple, but they are often hard to teach especially in light of the fact that I am still trying to master them myself.

I am standing at the kitchen counter with my Mac plugged into the wall by the sliding glass door because there is nowhere else that I can be without wee Sam trying to mess with the cord.  He has already gotten his first shiner.  He climbed on top of a four-legged stool and flipped it like he was turning a calf in a roping contest.  The result was a four inch red scrape on his belly and a tiny cut at the corner of his right eye.  I thought I had him figured out.  He was such an easy going baby.  He is still a happy kid, but he has the fearlessness of Alex and the ‘heart-on-his-sleeve’ of Zach.  I fear he will be the most challenging of all.  Constantly in the emergency room and getting his heart broken around every corner.  He is standing with palms pressed against the glass of the door. Desperate to be outside, he is wanting so much to feel the grass crunch under his feet.

But since it is raining, and that is simply not an option right now, he knows it is still pretty cool to be dancing around on the carpet to Sting with nothing but a diaper and a grin. Making his mama belly-laugh is just an added bonus.

​Later Chris comes home with the big boys from their swim class.  Alex is mastering the underwater bubble blow and Zach is swimming like a dolphin.  They thought that Sting was a bit too mellow to dance to…they wanted something a little more “rockin” as Zach put it.  So we chose Fat Boy Slim…Weapon of Choice (the instrumental one, of course, so that Alex doesn’t go into preschool with some “gansta” talk for share day.  Then I danced like a lunatic with all three of my little charges as the sun set.  Another day lived, survived, relished, enjoyed, stumbled through….my verb changes depending on the time of day and the number of Tylenols I have consumed.  Out of the corner of my eye I see those little trollish demons of mine skulking away.  They are no match for the therapeutic powers of a bit of Fat Boy Slim and dancing with my babies.

Love to you all,

tiff

Sam began waving last weekend.  Mostly towards himself, but also randomly and indiscriminately toward other things:  a danish pancake, a bottle of ketchup, a hubcap. Occasionally, he will accidentally wave to a person, but for the most part we are greeting inanimates.  Alex is also doing extremely well in preschool.  His favorite project so far involved a pink construction paper pig which they “painted” with chocolate pudding.  He was attempting to employ a very minimalist technique to the piece, so much of the medium had to be consumed.  Zach is also loving school.  I forgot to put his lunch in his backpack yesterday and so I got a glimpse of him at recess when I went back to sneak it in.  It was incredible.  It was like seeing an enormous box of puppies let loose.  A bunch of little three foot people shrieking with delight, running around, often without destination or purpose, and tricycles whipping around the little sidewalk track at the speed of light.  It was evidence that pure joy does in fact exists, but my attempt to find it in a latte or a doublestuff Oreo are woefully off target.

On a more practical note, we have been shopping for a new couch since our old one (purchased BZ-before Zach) is starting to collapse and swallow things whole….namely, our butts, but also small toys, loose change and our posture.  So the new couch and ottoman arrived yesterday.  They look like something out of a shrink’s office so I have dubbed them, “Siggy and Otto”.  Very few people know this, but Freud, in fact, had a sidekick named Otto who had many of the same super hero duties as Batman’s Robin.

Anyway, the boys are in heaven, Otto is the perfect height for puppet shows and playing the ever popular, “You’re on my side!!!” game.  So before the delivery men could even leave the premises (and before I could delineate the ground rules….no bouncing, jumping, knife juggling on the new furniture) Alex got a running start and vaulted up onto the Ottoman.  I should interject here, that the new furniture is dark brown leather and just a tad on the slippery side.  He proceeded to slide right over Otto and disappeared into the deep crevasse that is found naturally between the habitats of a wild north American Ottoman and it’s couch mate.  (And they do mate for life, by the way, they simply stop speaking to each other after five or six years, like the rest of us “lifers”.)

Sam, Zach and I stood there in silence for a moment and then we heard a faint, “help”, at which point, Alex popped his head up with a huge grin.  And so our newest game was born…..the “Help me, I’ve fallen into the abyss” game.  Mattel’s got nothin’ on us.

Love to you all,

tiff

There’s no turning back now.  Alex had his first full day of preschool last Thursday.  He also wore his big boy undies.   It’s a whole new world for him; the first taste of institutional education (albeit watered down for the ordinary Elmo-addicted three-year-old), and the often exhilarating and disquieting world of bladder control.   I didn’t cry that first day, because, to be honest, I assumed I would be getting a phone call before I reached the minivan, to tell me that he needed to be picked up.  I could almost hear the conversation in my head on the way back to the car.  “We are terribly sorry, Mrs. Bloyer, but neither Alex nor our teaching staff is ready for this giant leap.”  And yet, the call never came.  I arrived back at the pick-up time and peeked through the tiny rectangular window in the door.  To my amazement, he was sitting quietly on the rug listening to the teacher and wearing…..(drumroll, please) the same pants in which I had left him.  Granted, the moment we got back to the car, he looked up at me sheepishly and said, “Mom, I think I hear the pee.”  Which is code for, “Sorry, but it’s too late.”  Who cares!!!!  I was so proud of him for making it through the whole class, that I was still hugging him and giving him high-fives as we changed into a fresh, dry pair of Scooby-Doo size 4 drawers.  It seems only now as I look up and see that little boy in the picture with Drooper (a dog I carried around when I was little) stuffed in his tiny backpack, that I am feeling a bit emotional.  He looks so very fragile, which is really funny, for any of you who have actually seen the damage that this gentle tornado can inflict, but still….how to protect him, and still let him be the little funnel cloud that he is.   What a scary prospect this is…the whole growing up thing.

Last week cousin Mitchel, turned fourteen.  It seems surreal to me that the sweet, round-faced, tow-headed blonde baby that I remember is now a tall, lanky fourteen-year-old with a bohemian mop of curls for hair and a centered goodness that is rare in anyone, let alone a teenager.    I am sure it will feel like mere moments have passed when I see my boys reach those teen years, but right now I am trying to be here in the moment and appreciate all these tiny triumphs that make me feel like coach, cheerleader, teacher, and student all wrapped up in one.

Love to all, tiff

Zach started Kindergarten on August 29th and completed his first full week today.  He LOVES it.  I, on the other hand, am adjusting a bit more slowly.  He had a buddy in his class that also attended preschool with him, and he is making all kinds of new friends as well.  Sometimes I feel as though I am having phantom pains from a missing limb when I realize that he is not in the van with Alex and Sam and me.  The first day, I cried as soon as I got back in the car and Alex asked why.  I told him that I was just gonna miss Zach.  He said, “Well, Mom, we are picking him up later, right?”  Yes, of course, we were….but I was missing that chubby, pasty, little baby boy that had Michelin rolls on his thighs and curly blonde hair.  The one that had Chris and I holding him out at arms length, bewildered and wondering, “Is this what they do?”.  Now, with Sam, the third and last wee man to grace us with his piercing gaze and Michelin thighs, we are still in awe, but far more confident that, “Yes, this is what they do”….and while we may kid ourselves that we have power to change and mold the course of these little flash floods that we call children….we really don’t.  Frankly, you can only hope that the damage can be kept to a minimum; that the land which is flooded by these small wonders will be somehow changed for the better; and that we as parents can watch them flow and turn and choose their paths.  I saw a card the other day that said a lot.   It said “Nobody tells you that Babies are thieves…stealing your heart and taking your breath away”. Well, I have three such thieves in my little world, and believe me, my heart has been stolen and I am beyond breathless.

Love to all,

tiff