Pre-Marital Sleepover

Serena was looking at the inside of Raf's wedding ring yesterday and asked him what the inscription -- No jokes, no laughing-- was all about.

"Your mom used to make me stay up too late, joking and laughing, and I had to work the next day," he said.

"She used to sleep over, before you were married?" she asked.

"Yeah," Raf said, wondering if she was treading into awkward territory.

"Wait," she said, mulling this over. "So would her mom pack her some extra clothes, or would she just wear what she was wearing the next day?"

Flash Opera Moment

My friend Deirdre (check out her blog, I just love it) is a big fan of random "flash" moments - in which crowds just seem to randomly break out and do something amazing (a song, a parade, a dance, whatever) in unison. It always makes me cry happy crocodile tears - How lucky are we that the world is like this?! This one is very cute, but you also have to see the one on Deirdre's blog, featuring a bus driver working on his birthday, too.

Leaving for the Old World

Emme is ready for Europe!!

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One Little Lost Tooth, Part 1

Marlowe lost her first tooth a few weeks ago and now the one next to it is loose. I wonder where she'll lose it... in Spain... or in France... or on the plane in transit??

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True Grit

This is the knee of my good friend's son, Harry, whom I've nicknamed Sharkboy. From that name and the sliced-up look of his wound, you'd think he got attacked by a shark or Wolverine of X-Men; instead, it happened on our pool slide, which cracked on the side as Harry was sliding down on his knees. The sound was horrific -- his mother, sister and our friend all cringed, thinking his shorts had ripped. It was like that sound, like nylon ripping, scree-scree-screetcchhh.

Harry didn't make a sound, just grabbed his knee after he'd splashed into the pool, and it was his sister's reaction -- Oh my god! Oh my god! -- that even alerted us that something was not right. Harry, who's almost 9, didn't flinch. Didn't cry. Didn't react when his mom and I felt like we wanted to puke or sit down so we wouldn't pass out. Just asked for a cold drink while we tended to his scary wounds. I scrambled to find Neosporin and band-aids in my new house, which has no real organizational system in place yet, while Harry's mom taped an old linen napkin around his knee.

After they left, Harry a little bewildered by the early departure, I took my kids down the road to see the new baby horses. To my surprise, when we got there, Harry and his family were already there. Harry was still in his swim trunks, walking shirtless and barefoot through the hay-filled area next to the horse corral. In the afternoon light, I admired the warrior god within him, his innate toughness and true grit. As the mom of three girls, I see toughness in a very feminine way -- my youngest fighting back tears as her dad helps loosen a tooth, my oldest daughter's mud-soaked soccer uniform after playing a quarter as goalie, my middle kid's bad-ass-ness on the handball court -- but this was some sort of primal testosterone-laden strength that I've only experienced in watching my husband walk through his life.

My husband had approvingly nodded in Harry's direction when he was with us on the 4th of July, bouncing on the trampoline and riding to and from the fireworks with his head out the window, eyes closed. When my friends and I got stuck on the other side of our backyard fence after a walk (I'm still getting used to the lay of the land and didn't know there wasn't a gate on the back side of the property), we had to climb over the chain-link fence and, as we hopped down, Harry ran up to us, saying, "I'll go next!"

I know we won't have a son and I can't say anything but "it is what it is." Still, despite my horror at being the owner of the slide that f-ed up Harry's little knee, I have to admit to a bit of gratitude at being there while he showed us what he's made of. Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, indeed.

Silliness, idle hands and video cam

Silly Girls Father's Day 2010 from Erin Shachory on Vimeo. Singing and camera work by Serena. Dancing and choreography by Emmeline. General silliness by Marlowe.

My kids are crazy. I mean, seriously. This is just over a minute, so don't feel like you have to see the whole silly thing, but it adequately captures our "quiet" time together as a family...

Father's Day 2010

Here's my family, the proud patriarch and his smiling, happy girls. Sometimes I feel badly that we didn't have a son. Raf came from a family of four kids from a force-of-nature Israeli dad, growing up with a strong older sister and two younger brothers. All of them could bond over sports and business, topical issues, politics, farting, burping, scratching. Okay, so their sister is far more demure than all of that, but she was able to allow the men in her family to be who they are, not always nagging about the farting, burping, bodily noises, Adam's apples and other unexplainable male traits.

Coming from that background, my husband is still a little flummoxed by the girliness in our household. There's drama, there's a lot of chatter, lots of pink and fluff and frills, more tears than any injury could truly justify, and (for him) the unnecessary nuisance of someone always acknowledging a strange smell or noise. And so I feel badly that he doesn't have a son to share these things with, along with the sheer physicality, strength and logic that another male in the house could provide.

The other sad thing is the loss that I can tell he's feeling today. I mean, we had a GREAT day. We're in Malibu and our good friends spent the whole day with us, beachin' it and hanging out in the sun. But when his brother Sky called after dinner and they were reminiscing about their dad, I felt his sadness. He remembered that, when his dad was alive, Father's Day was ALL ABOUT ISAAC. No one could bow out, no matter the reason. If he wanted to BBQ (something my husband really doesn't love to do), well then, we'd BBQ. After he got off the phone with Sky, Raf said, "I forget that I'm not the only fatherless child." He was, of course, referring to losing his dad three and a half years ago, but I know he was also feeling the recent loss of his brother Max, whose strong personality was so much like Isaac's.

We're staying in Isaac's beach house, where Sky grew up, while we wait the last few days for our new house to be finished. On one hand, I'm thrilled to spend the first few days of summer in a lazy haze on this famous beach road, watching the sun move across the sky as the girls jump the waves for hours on end. But on the other hand, this is where Max spent his last few months and I know it's suddenly become the saddest place in the world for Raf, and it's been hard for him to relax and truly enjoy this time.

Today, however, he seemed to let go and enjoy the sound of the tide. I caught him looking at the ocean a lot, as though he was memorizing this spot and the bewitching spell it cast on both his father and his brothers. At one point, the girls were laughing and yelling at the waves and he laughed, remembering how he and Max had done the exact same thing as kids.

It's a cycle, life. The kids become the fathers and the fathers must leave the earth to, hopefully, become kids once more. As a mother, it's hard to just sit back and observe this dance that kids and fathers do, but it's not my place to interrupt or even to understand. Just like the sun, dancing across the sky until it trades places with the moon, I must orbit this relationship, witnessing and recording it, saying that yes, it happened, and yes, it was magical.