The Moment You Fall Asleep

Last night, when I was tucking Peter into bed, he asked me, "Why don't I remember when I fell asleep last night?"

I didn't know the answer.  It was something I had never really thought about before.  But it was true. I didn't remember the moment I fell asleep either.  So, last night I tried to stay awake to remember but couldn't.  I was too tired. Likely, as tired as Peter was the night he couldn't remember the moment he fell asleep. 

Days and nights pass thusly, in turns. On our spring break trip to Ella, we climbed to the top of Ella Rock, a 1,000 foot ascent, and back down the other side into Ella town. Then, tuked back to our farmstay at Amba. 

After a short dinner, we sat in the common room of the Clove Tree House. Most of the lights off for not to attract the mayflies. They are drawn to the light with specific agency to mate, the male mayfly, then promptly spiraling to the floor, dead, while the females bury themselves in the earth to bear young. 

One sconce is left on. Beetles helicopter toward the light, dive into the upturned glass hemisphere of the sconce, never to return. A beetles cemetery of lifeless carapaces fill the bottom of the sconce, somehow escaping the eye of the men and women who are charged with cleaning the farmstay on a daily basis. 

Peter was asleep on the couch, exhausted by the day's excursion, shirtless, his face tucked into the crook of an elbow, shortly after polishing off his watalappam, a kind of steamed pudding prepared with jaggery, eggs, and coconut milk, and spiced with cardamom. 

He wouldn't remember this moment he fell asleep either. But, fortunately for him, I did.

Funeral for a Butterfly

Clementine found an butterfly with an injured wing this week. 

She tried to rehabilitate the butterfly, including enlisting her brother to craft an artificial wing. 

Unfortunately, it didn't make it. She held a funeral for it, burying the butterfly in the backyard. 

The Ping Pong Ball Jar

Since the kids are home all the time because of virtual school, our patience with them is often tested. It goes without saying that we love our children dearly but too much of anything is not good. 

I know we have it better than most, and many parents are struggling balancing so many more worries and burdens than Elise or I have. Yet, we find, because the kids are always around positive reinforcement has been somewhat lacking.  We say, "No." more than we want to. We redirect, and guide, and correct more than we want to. We yell more than we want to. 

In a plan to add more positive reinforcement, Elise came up with the idea of the Ping Ping Ball Jar.

Every time the kids do something good (or kind), but mostly unsolicited, they get a ping pong ball in the jar. When the jar fills up, they get something special. The first (and to date only) time they filled up the ping pong ball jar, we ordered out sushi for dinner.

At some point in between the madness, we spent three nights in the Sinharaja Rain Forest, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It took me some time to fully embrace the true benefit of telework, in that it could be done from anywhere, and not just at the house. So, the kids went to school and I worked from here one day:

The trip deserves a separate blog post, if only to describe the drive there.

One of my least favorite parts about online school (surprisingly, not the fact our kitchen has become a cafeteria and the dining room the lunch room) is art. On some level I do appreciate the fact Clementine's art teacher is trying to maintain the kids' creativity and her commitment to a well-rounded curriculum. But there are few art projects that don't involve either full-time parental supervision or don't create a gigantic mess we then have to clean up. 

So, it was a welcome and delightful surprise when Clementine crafted the Love Robot for Valentines Day all on her own out of some red acrylic paint,  a toilet paper tube, and a few red pipe cleaners. 

The kids didn't have Presidents Day off, so I took Sam fishing after school. This time, we drove down to the Station at the south end of Marine Drive. The spot we picked was at the mouth of a canal, polluted with plastic, leaves, and other man-made detritus. 

It was windy and the seas were high, though the tide was going out. The waves washed over the rock jetty. We had to step over the ocean to walk out to the end of the quay. We walked to the end, and Sam set his tackle box down on the rocks, but the water came right over the top, so we picked a spot more in the middle of the pier, a place where the ocean spray covered the sea-facing rocks, but the land-facing rocks were still mostly dry. 

I picked a spot to sit and read while Sam prepared his line. He fished for about 45 minutes, catching nothing more than a plastic bag. I glanced up from my book after a particularly high wave smashed into the rocks and saw Sam's open tackle box floating in the canal. The wave and lifted it up off the outcropping and dumped it into the water, spilling everything inside into the ocean. 

I scrambled down the rocks to the edge of the water but couldn't reach it. I pointed to it helplessly (Sam still hadn't noticed), but I couldn't get his attention and he couldn't hear me over from the end of the pier over the wind.

Finally, he saw the box in the surf and joined me, tears in his eye, racked by confused sobs. He swallowed his grief quickly and earnestly set to attempting to retrieve the box from the canal. He stripped to his swim shorts and dove into the sewage-filled waters. He grabbed the box. I extended his arm, expecting him to hand the box up to me. Instead, he grasped my arm, forearm to forearm,  and I hauled out of the filth like Han Solo exhuming himself from trash compactor on the Death Star. 

Though he knew all his gear was gone to the fishing gods, he had said he didn't want to leave the box to the sea, too. I put my arm around him, feeling his disappointment as acutely as he did. Perhaps, more so. After a year or more of loss, this was one more blow, a sucker punch to the gut. I wanted to scream into the foam, "FUCK FISHING! FUCK SRI LANKA! FUCK THE PANDEMIC!"

But who would hear me? It wouldn't bring the hooks, line, or sinkers back. And we could always buy them again. I was disappointed in myself. How could I be reading while Sam was fishing? Why didn't I see the box wash away? Could I have caught it? Would I have had time to save it?  It was just a tackle box, just fishing gear, when people were sick and dying, I know. 

It took both Sam and I a few days to get over the loss. 

We're not quite ready to go back yet, but I know we will be. 

Blasting

Even for those parents who are good about setting boundaries with their kids when it comes to screen time, the pandemic has proved challenging. Elise and I are not perfect when it comes to limiting our kids time on devices, but we try. It's important to is they experience more of the world than cam be presented on a 9-inch screen. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic-- for a year now -- the kids have been attending classes online, virtual school, the Distance Learning Program (DLP). We are thankful and appreciative they have this option and the program is as good as it is. Still, sitting in front of the computer from 8:30 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon is exhausting.  When the normal school day involves so much movement,  this is the converse of that. 

I'm proud the kids have remained involved in our own version of extracurricular activities. The three of them have their own swim practice with a coach two mornings a week. These are the calmest of days because swimming calms and centers them for the day.  They also play tennis twice a week. It could be more but it seems to be a good amount, at least for the time being. 

They still, too, have "P.E.", but doing aerobics or jumping rope in front of the computer screen is a poor substitute for a rousing game of dodgeball or Capture the Flag. There is no recess. They do get a morning break, but, alas, we don't have a playground in our house. 

Clementine reads on break. Peter "blasts". This is the term we have affectionately settled on for Peter's active imagining. I get it completely because I used to do the same when I was his age, superimpose my own thoughts and images upon the world around me. 

Peter is a huge fan of Godzilla. He is the action movie junkie. Robots, space ships, super heroes. You name it. Anything with explosions, destruction, and general pandemonium.  He makes his own stop-motion movies with the iPad. Mostly Godzilla with lego men and matchbox cars. He wants to go to film school. It's hard to imagine him not making movies. 

When he blasts, he's making movies in his head. Laser blasts and explosions. Photon torpedoes and ion cannons. At the beach, he is imagining Godzilla rising up out of the waves and striding ashore, trees snapping like twigs and villagers fleeing before him. 

At the house, he paces back and forth making explosion sounds with his mouth, convulsing sometimes as though the explosive shock waves are buffeting his own body. Elise thinks he looks like he is having a seizure. It is quite extreme. But the last thing I want to do is encourage him to imagine less.

It seems like a huge victory when screen time is so pervasive. When we're having to reevaluate our own relationships with the glowing squares that have become our windows to the world when our preferred means of interacting with it have been taken away. 

It's in His Blood

Sam loves fishing. 

I have some idea where he gets this love. It's not from me.  It was Sherlock Holmes who said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." A derivation of Occam's razor or the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied without necessity", or more simply, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. 

However unbelievable, then, the only explanation for Sam's affinity for fishing is fishing is genetic; it is carried in DNA.

My fishing gene lies dormant. Sam's and his grandfather, Jidu's, does not. 

In a day and age when most kids his age are drawn to video games and computers, given the choice, Sam would steer for the sea or a lake. Don't get me wrong. The kids loves his video games.  But what 13 year-old kid doesn't?  But I am proud of the healthy balance he is unconsciously creating. Amid a global pandemic no less. Perhaps, because of the pandemic.