rudderless

TWo!

Dear Roo-

A few days ago, officially, you turned TWO! Two years old! Your big day was folded into the craziest of months, installing the engine, getting underway for the first time, celebrating with grandparents. But what a week to be TWO! This morning you’re sitting in your usual spot on the settee, legs folded underneath you, your hands crossed on the table, watching Wallace and Gromit with Sophie. I will remember your wild sun-bleached hair, pink tie-dyed shirt. Your constant narration of the movie- “Dat Doggy! Dat Sheep! Dat a white sheepy!” You’ll drink from a sippy cup, which you’ve been relegated to on the boat, due to your insatiable urge to pour water from one container to another. You’re a candidate for Montessori school if there ever was one! But aside from the no-spill cups and the binkies that you horde like candy, there are very few remnants of babyhood in our lives. I can’t remember the last time you rode in a stroller or wore a diaper, or the last time I rocked you to sleep.

We celebrated three times, the first with Tabitha, your first friend, two days older than you. Our water girls played in the pool and dressed up, ate pink cupcakes and gummi worms. You savored the singing and the candles, but took so long to blow them out that you felt the heat of it on your nose. Now you decline all candle-blowing duties. Thankfully, Sophie is here to help!

A week later Goonie and JoePop came down and after swimming, we shuffled you upstairs for a bath while Sophie and I decorated the condo. You were pleased and surprised and approached the present-opening with the utmost seriousness. Your pink cake with weeping M&Ms was truly a work of art. But what we’ll remember most from the weekend was you pulling your trains around the round table in the living room hundreds and hundreds of times. The simplest kind of fun.

Your real birthday was a good old normal day on Rubi. Daddy worked on the running lights. We went for a nice swim, had a long nap, made pizza and surprised you with a donut and two candles. Simple and sweet. Happy TWO!

And now we’re off on a real adventure, Rose! In just a few days we set off for the great white north. We’ll sail from here to Fort Pierce and then on to Beaufort, North Carolina, and eventually to Boston and Maine. This fall will bring your first Transatlantic adventure (by plane, not boat!) and a few stamps in your passport. Then your first real winter! Last night we were out walking after dinner and it started raining- one of those tropical showers that can turn a dry parking lot into a lake in minutes. Suddenly there were puddles everywhere. You were in the very definition of your heaven, splashing and running, “swimming,” trying to catch water on your tongue. You are one for adventuring, never complaining about a fall or scrape suffered in the quest for fun. You are your Daddy through and through- confident, determined, stubborn, wicked smart. If we can keep the adventures coming, and manage your energy (and acrobatics), it will be a very memorable year indeed. John often wonders, looking at you, how his mother managed to raise five kids, and “this” as the youngest! It’s clear to me. I love you fiercely. Our frustrations and challenges are balanced by this crazy love for your happiness, goofiness, the crazy way you just emanate light and life. You glow, Rose. You truly do. You’re a charmer, even as you terrify us.

Thank you for being exactly who you are. So different from our first-born, who loves you so dearly, who says, “Rosy, I’m so glad I have a sister like you.” I know just what she means. A sister full of ideas, of fun, of mischief at times, but most of all, full of enthusiasm, curiosity, and love. You’re a beautiful girl, in so many ways. Holding you in my arms two years ago, I had no idea who I was holding. If I could have only imagined . . .

Happy, happy birthday Roo. We love you!

Underway!!!!!

It’s been over four years in the making, but this baby left the dock!! We went out for a spin! Our boat MOVES under her own power. And gracefully at that! How good it felt to wake up Friday and get out a chart, plug in a GPS, stow the accumulated junk on the table, throw off some lines and GO SOMEWHERE IN OUR BOAT. We took two trips on Friday- the first, for us, while the girls were with a babysitter. And the second, with them. They were totally nonplussed. Sophie read a book in the cockpit and barely looked up, like this was the most normal thing in the world. Rosy relaxed into the motion and nearly fell asleep, even after a two hour nap. While we hollered and high-fived around them, they were simply at home.

And that’s all we’ve wanted for them. We did this for them, but also a little bit for us. One thing parenting has taught me is that they will never understand what we do. There is no way for them to conceive of the hard work involved. The constant meeting of needs. The sleeplessness, the working, the taking of walks when all you want to do is lie down. The four years of boat projects, just to make a floating home.

They won’t understand it, until they have kids of their own, and renovate a house or a boat or an RV or canal barge while parenting two small kids. And when the work is hardest, I have to remind myself that we chose every bit of this. We chose to make this our home, because before there was a Sophie or a Rosy, there was this part of us. In the midst of living with and loving them, we’ve also made something for John and Ellen. This is who we were, who we are, and who we will continue to be. Leaving the dock on Friday, that fact is what I was most thankful for.

Underway!

Dad’s Day

We told my Dad we were going to dinner, and look where we ended up!
When we arrived, Paul, the pilot greeted us with a mouthful of what were possibly the most disgusting teeth I’d seen in a long time (and mind you, this is not a rare occurence in the Keys. Our last auto mechanic had about one tooth in the front . . .). We were all averting our eyes, wondering in dental issues had any bearing on small plane safety. Paul muttered something about Obama promising dental insurance and out popped the mouthpiece. We were won over.

I love that my dad loves stuff like this- gliders and floatplanes and helicopter rides. I love that occasionally I get to do something like this with him.
Happy Father’s Day, JoePop!

Golden Girls

This has not been our finest month. Between the stress of the engine situation (that miraculously arrived, yay Yanmar!), the weather, and feeling like we may never be able to sit and enjoy our boat, we are, in a word, fried. To read a book in a quiet anchorage . . . it is a goal so close, so tenable, and yet in the flurry of last-minute preparations, it feels like a lifetime away.

There has been a highlight. Our ladies. Our sisters. They have found each other. Today they were sitting at the table in their usual spots, Sophie surrounded by about six dozen toys and bits of jewelry. Rosy with wild, wild hair and the orbit of cracker crumbs that usually surrounds her. They were sharing watercolors and talking to each other like the Golden Girls. “Oh, I wike that color Sophia. It’s pretty, Sophia.” “Now wash your brush off, Rose. Don’t make them all brown, Rose.” Sophie was endlessly patient, even as Rosy made mud of a few colors. She even praised the concoctions- “That one’s better than the first yellow!” It was so unexpected, so perfect, I just sat and watched.

Whether it’s happenstance that they’ve discovered one another on the boat, whether it has anything to do with the close quarters of the hot months, or the lack of many other playmates- I have no idea. But I do know that they’ve slipped into a rhythm of true appreciation and true friendship. They look out for one another. Sophie puts Rosy’s shoes on when we leave the boat. Rosy, as stubborn as she is, is willing to share most anything in the world with Sophie. These past two years were hard, hard times for all of us. Adjusting to a colicky newborn, then managing the emotions of Sophie’s jealousy. Juggling the praise and “special time” they both needed. But we’ve somehow, on the eve of a second birthday, arrived at the good place. I can send them off together and know they will be a team. Today Sophie was trying to think of something she could play with Rosy. Her eyes got big and she laughed, “I know Rosy, we can MAKE MISCHIEF!!”

It is what I wanted most in the world for them. I hope it lasts. Something tells me that it will.

I read a caption on a photo of a little boy recently. His mom wrote about how fast the time was flying, how she wished she could slow it down. Her husband said something so perfect- “Remember, we made him for him. We didn’t make him for us.” We made them for who they are, and who they will be. We also made them for each other. Rose and Sophia.

Stifling

I know I’ve belabored the heat of the last month, but I felt somewhat justified when I heard today that after one of the coldest winters on record in South Florida (and no complaints about that!), we had the hottest May ever. Ever. This morning the heat index was well over 90, before 9 AM. We look forward to a climate where winter is the time to batten down the hatches and cozy up around a fire. To make slow-cooked food and loaves of bread in an oven. Right now the oven is off limits. In fact, I have cooked little other than coffee this week, trying to keep the boat at a reasonable temperature in the late afternoon. It’s a good challenge- finding ways to feed a family with veggies and salads and bread baked in someone elses’s oven. If anyone has a favorite no-cook recipe, I’d love to have it. My sister’s black-eyed pea salad is on the list for this week.

These are time I miss my grandmothers. Peachy would have had an entire compendium of recipes fit for the Southern heat. Granny Ross would have had practical suggestions, and maybe a jar of homemade pickles from her sister’s garden. When it starts to feel hot on our little yacht, I try to imagine not so long ago, living in the southern part of Georgia, in the summers without air conditioning. Or living in Houston, Texas, where my mom grew up, lying under the attic fan on hot nights, running across hot asphalt, barefoot. East Texas can be a very hot place.

Recently I came across a recording of my grandfather, telling the particular circumstances of his birth, on August 20, 1917. He was born in a small town in Eastern Alabama, not far from Columbus, Georgia, where he lived as an adult.

“I have often wondered what it was like to birth an overweight baby in Camp Hill, Alabama in August of 1917. Must have been terribly hot. All the windows would have been open. I think the house had screens, as I was told. There was a spigot over the porch, with fresh water. That was the sum total of the plumbing other than chimney pots and a privy in the backyard. Dr. Louis Hamner presided over the proceedings, I’m told, and apparently they went quite normally for those times.”

Quite normally for those times. As hot as hot can be.
I wish I could channel some of that normalcy, just to ask a few questions. Get some advice, and continue to feel grateful for my particular situation, with wet kids every night and the cool confines of our boat to slip into.