Boston,  Essay,  Kid's Boston

bippity boppity boo

September 3, 2014 / 6 Comments

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My friends, it was a wonderful summer in the city. It’s not just my projection: weatherfolks back me up to say that it was one of the most pleasant summers in a long time. With no pool membership to our name, I didn’t regret one day that hovered around 70 with a breeze. Loved each and every one.

There was still a heatwave the week of the girls’ birthdays, that second week of July. It appears to be an annual furnace week in Boston, no matter what the year. Forged in the fire of hot bricks and slate roofs, these girls.

I won’t tell you the mornings were quiet with the sound of birds chirping and rainbows percolating, no. Summer is high construction season in our neighborhood, these old stately homes being updated to all manner of modernity. I see the friendly contractors, bashful about their dust and clamoring, more than I see my own neighbors. Mornings began abruptly at 8am with the bang of jackhammers and the slam of dump trucks. And planes flying overhead whenever Logan needed to re-route, determined by an algorithm I don’t understand. But one day I will corner the right person on an airplane and she can explain it to me.

(note there I said SHE can explain it to me. As a mom of girls, I’m really working on my projected personal pronouns. All our stuffed animals have turned out to be male and I’m sick of it.)

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Every now and then we’d peek out at a huge moon, or hear fireworks in the distance, or find the pink sunset sky too irresistible, and climb up to the roof to watch. From there we can see one of our friend’s patios. They have a huge framed rooftop patio, chock-a-block with boxes of plants. My friend says it took a long time for them to have a baby, a long time to eventually find a surrogate mother to carry their baby, and while she waited and waited for something to care for, she nourished these plants. Now their little boy has a babysitter while she is at work, and the babysitter is very good at watering the plants. All this to say that everything worked out in the end, and they ended up with a rooftop full of greenery to remember it all.

Once, we went over to this lush rooftop for dinner outside, with three other young children besides our own. All five children fought almost constantly, loud screaming wrestling battles with shoves and pulled hair. But the adults serenely drank glass after glass of wine, didn’t hover or apologize, did shifts to eat all of their dinner, and shrugged over the barbaric toddlers from the Empire of Shelfishdom. It was nice.

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So many days ended with cool nights. All six of our windows on the left side of the apartment wide open, bedroom doors propped open, and wind blowing through. I am a certified insomniac of the mothering variety. Blame it on the wine, blame it on the midnight midsleep screech of Joan, owl-like and over even as I wake. I am startled and alert at odd hours. But I find the temperature has dropped even a few more glorious degrees and the wind is gusting from one side of the apartment out the other. Sometimes our pinned-up art has blown off the walls and onto the floor in the gusts. It’s dark but I can see everything by the lights of the city and I walk through quietly to poke around for a minute.

Plenty of stops for ice cream with sprinkles. Plenty of extra iced coffees when the day turned long. Still, flies-buzzing grouchy mornings followed by splashy baths in the tub to rinse hot-headed babes. Lux likes the water cold cold cold and I admire that.

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I didn’t really expect Joan to start riding the carousel this summer. I don’t think we put Lux on it so young. Maybe we did? Without fail, Joan’s glee would attract the attention of bystanders, who would nonetheless look suspicious when I had to pin her screaming flailing child-tortured body to me after the ride ended. It was always worth it for that three minutes of joy.

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We didn’t visit any museums and didn’t miss them. October can have them. Their long tiled hallways will seem to be fresh all-new territory. However the library received as many visits as ever. Lux is at this glorious, perfect moment where you can show her “the shelf about skeletons” and she’ll pull down every book and look through each one. Just as she hit this moment, Joan turned menace, sweet noisy menace, taking plastic animals from the children’s section and stuffing them into fiction shelves in the adult section, dumping whole carousels of books in the young adult sci-fi, screaming when I pull her away from the stacks of DVDs.

This summer we saw our first magician. He was billed as a pirate show on the flyer, but he showed up at our playground as a magician. Oh was I? He said to me. Well that’s my mistake. This show is more appropriate for this age group anyway. He warmed up slowly, with too many “this is how your parents look” jokes for two-year-olds who have young, hip parents. But anyway Lux was enthralled and after a few faux tricks that ended in kiddo titters, eventually he pulled out plastic flowers and a real live rabbit. They learned abracadabra and bippity boppity boo and chanted it back to him after every trick.

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