dalleyfamily

by canardchronique | May 12, 2011 · 2:23 pm

Yes, we made it back. . . But I don’t know when to stop.

As I am loathe to leave a project unfinished, I plan to laboriously continue to work on this blog– I have quite a bit of material that was started & never finished whilst we were abroad, and I feel compelled to finish displaying it like hanging out laundry that should’ve been washed weeks ago. I am not quite sure how to handle the chronological failure that will occur once I start posting forward & backwards in time– I will try to mark the retroactive posts somehow, maybe with a category tag– but perhaps it will just add to the mystery of the trip. Regardless of the foolishness of it, I will bloodily push ahead.

Having said all that, the following post is based on events of today– a Thursday 12 days after our return. Or 13 days after the Royal Wedding, if that’s how you mark time. It’s a bit self concerned, so if you are hoping for the “antics of those crazy kids,” or pictures of same, you will have to patiently wait, dear reader, for a post in the not-TOO-distant future.

I feel the absence of the kids more than I thought I would. When people asked me, before we left England, if I was going to be sad to go from spending so much time with the kids to spending so much less, I had told them “no.” That with the care and activity I knew they were going back to here in the States, with the peer socialization (especially for Finley) that I was NOT able to provide whilst we were in England, I had felt very good about going back to work & having them do the same. All of this is exactly as true as I had anticipated. What I had NOT anticipated, though, was that somehow when I was visualizing coming back, imagining going back to doing what I had been doing before– creating “future memories” in my mind– I was subtly adding the kids in to the fringe of these anticipated work days. That a trip to the copy machine in the middle of the morning might allow me to check in on Sawyer, somehow sleeping in a darkened office at Nick On Sunset; that I would be working at my computer while Finley drew at the drafting table in my office; that I could skip lunch & take a break later in the day in order to pick Eli up from school. I believe I thought at the time that I was making up impossible situations among other “more serious” ones in order to entertain myself– that these mixed-up fantasies of combining work and family were little comic departures from the list of purposeful activity I was looking forward to returning to. In retrospect, this imaginary list was mostly made up of these “mixed” moments; the pleasure in these imaginary situations was not based on their impossibility, but on the physical presence (rather than just a mental one) of the kids in my workplace.

While I enjoy my work very much, and do not wish to leave the world of that work behind in order to solely stay at home (though I was able to find some creative outlets & projects whilst I was at home), this return to work ONLY, without the presence of children, has been bittersweet. I am glad that they have returned to their accustomed activities without complaint (at least, so far), but I wish that I could incorporate them into this version of daily life, in a small way, after having them be such a big part of daily life for four months.

The School Year Has Ended. . .

…and it has been truly beautiful outside. Sorry for not updating in ~~a while~~ FOREVER; initially, Eli’s class wanted to check out the Blog (per request of one of his teachers), and so we had him record an intro video and left that post as the top post for a while. The school term ended on the 8th of April… I became a little lazy… and then, suddenly, our trip to Wales interfered. Now, somehow, nine days have passed (almost a month if you discount the “Sawyer Has A Lot To Say” post), and we need pass on some of the huge backlog of post-able times.

I am starting a new category for this post; “Leaving for America.” This, sadly, marks something out (a line in the English clay, as it were) & has been filling me with pre-emptive nostalgia. Perhaps that is why I have found it so easy to put off the writing of this post. I began telling friends several weeks ago that there is something fundamentally messed up about going on a four month trip, and spending the last month– ONE FOURTH OF THE TRIP– anticipating the end with a false sensation of immediacy. Stupid it may be, but I definitely did it. You don’t have to be a bearded, crunchy hippie, sitting on the roof of the world in Nepal, to believe that we would be better suited to “live in the now,” and not choose to experience the pain of tomorrow before it gets here. (I DO have the beard, if not the “crunchy-ness,” however.) The kids felt it, off and on, which sucks, as undoubtedly the better part of what they felt were echoes of OUR anticipatory anxious-nesses… If left without our influence, I think they would probably have puttered along right to the end, and THEN had a short and profound bout of “feeling sad,” were we not starting to get a little mopey and wistful.

However, in an attempt to adopt a more positive attitude… It has been gorgeous outside. Highbury Fields has taken on the aspect of a upstate New York farm field during the Summer Of Love on several occasions. Allow me to show you a recent image:

"Hey, if you think really hard, maybe we can stop this rain..."

That shot shows the park somewhere between 9:00 and 10:00 am! Mid-afternoon, the Fields put some of the beaches in SoCal to shame.

In order to make good use of this beautiful weather (and because we thought the niceness would be shorter lived than it has been), we had a very early going away party two weekends ago. To use an Eli-ism, “It was SUPER good! I really liked it!” Among the pleasant aspects– our friends Amol and Charlie brought Pimm’s to share. For our American readers, Pimm’s is the very buisness. The description may throw you off, but it is wonderful stuff: most people make it in a jug, mixing one part Pimm’s mix, and three parts lemonade (by which the British mean 7-Up or Sprite), in which you float ice, slices of citrus, strawberries… and SLICES OF CUCUMBER AND MINT. That’s right, I said cucumber and mint. It is a fantastic summer drink– you can see the similarities in construction to Sangria— don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. Lana made some incredible food, and we had a great time in the “back garden.”

— — — — —

Somehow, it has grown late– I am going to go ahead and post this, rather than write it to a more typical length. (Are those muffled sighs of relief?) I figure that may help to motivate me to write several nights in a row, while providing the world with at LEAST a little snippet of information. I hope you all enjoy your Easter holiday tomorrow.

Sawyer Has Many Things To Say. . . And They Are All “Uh Oh.”

Sawyer has been slowly adding to her vocabulary:

Mama– meaning the obvious

Dada– again, fairly straight forward

Nigh-nigh– we initially thought this meant she wanted to go to bed, but now believe it to mean “I want to EAT,” an activity that always goes on at bedtime

Nah-nah– a request for the ever popular banana chunks

AND NOW…

Uh Oh– meaning “I just dropped something (again) and I want you fools to pick it up (again) so I can play with your emotions while making a HUGE MESS.

Please allow me to elucidate: