Parker has taken to photobombing when the camera points at his little brother. Smile! (Didn’t go through. Will have to use stand-ins here for now.)

Does anyone else remember not just playing marbles, but trying to have the prettiest ones, so you would finally get Mom’s permission and watchful eye and go simmer them on the stove–no boiling, it’s always a risk but still you don’t want a million shattered bits of glass in her pot, just those clear marbles with the thin twist of colors down the center, making them leap into crackly patterns surrounded by transparency, breakdancing into kaleidoscopes within while staying smooth and round on the surfaces. Hopefully. The final objects were never a sure thing till they were safely cooled off and done.

Woke up this morning with the mental image of my eyes close to the stove from my then-height, standing staring intently (and a little bit bored) at those small glass balls, watching the tiny bubbles forming and slooowly separating from the sides of the pan but no big airholes allowed to form (keep that heat down), waiting for the marbles to become more colorful, done just so. They took a very long time at that age and a steady concentration.

Haven’t thought of those in…! But it suddenly seems like it was early training for appreciating the steady click, click, click process that is knitting, keeping the stitches bubbling steadily up. Sometimes with a cooling-off after the finish to realize that no, I didn’t mess it up and yes this IS gorgeous.

I not only coveted my oldest sister’s prettier-than-anybody’s marbles (which is what got me to beg and plead for that one session at the stove), I wanted to be able to sound like her too, like, yesterday, at the piano, and I remember her playing Fur Elise. A lot. That one seemed simple enough to aspire to–well, the first part of it, anyway. I started lessons the last year she took them.

I just didn’t quite get to this point in that first year, though. These guys had way too much fun. Don’t miss the picture frame falling down and the window shimmying.

You know that one person’s color combination is someone else’s total no-way-jose. And I am, after all, the daughter of a modern art dealer.

I was wishing I had a smallish zippered-top tote and went looking. Richard glanced at my computer to see why I was suppressing a guffaw–and then wrinkled his face trying to think of something positive and polite to say.

Finally, “Turn back before it’s too late!”

Did me in, I tell ya, I burst out laughing. The LLBean site: it lets you design your own tote bag (even if it won’t quite let me link to my concoction–yeah, I’d probably hide it too if I were trying to sell the things). Handles, body, pocket, bottom, gusset, you tell it what colors go where on the dream knitting (or boat, but c’mon, knitting) bag of your choice.  They do stop you from putting ember orange in some areas, but it’s okay in the body with the jadeite pocket, the purple zipper, the spruce handles (worse than it sounds)… And those handles will be the color of the body on the inside edges and the chosen handle color on the outside just to make sure you get the full effect of that contrast.

Actually in a weird way I kinda like that one I clicked together. But then I am my father’s daughter.

Oh. Hi, Dad! *waving*

Can you believe Hudson is three weeks old as of yesterday? With the best mom in the world.

I told the audiologist today that I had taken to turning the hearing aid volume down two notches to avoid the feedback and it seemed to work while not impacting the sound too much–and I can always kick it back up as needed.

He, meantime, took the aids apart and put the new molds on.

No feedback. But the sound was noticeably different. And not in a good way.

“Does it sound hollow?” he asked me.

“Yes!”

“The base is too loud. Happens sometimes as an effect of going further into the ear, but I can work on that via the settings.”

That helped some, and I’m giving these a try, but so far I want to go back to the others. It’s definitely nice to have options, though. While we were at it we bought a clip-on bluetooth mike that I can pass around a room or hand to a speaker. Lanyard now added. I’ve wanted something like that forever and now I have one!

And: this afternoon I was looking through a skylight and happened to see Coopernicus! Perched near the top of the neighbor’s tall tree, and I got to watch as he suddenly dove down.

I walked to the other side of the house but he was faster than me, which certainly wasn’t a surprise; there was not a critter in sight near the feeder. Not even a squirrel.

Friends dropped by tonight and we experimented with/without the remote mike–either way, I heard them far better than I ever have before. Cool. Next round, hearing grandsons!

So we had several paper bags’ worth of old documents that needed to be shredded, a task we’d been avoiding for awhile. Time to get to it.

I googled… (Not open on Saturday, not open on Saturday, well so who *is* open on Saturday.)

Okay, backtrack. A number of years ago a local woman wanted to set up a yarn shop, and as she later told me, she and her husband went to check out a spot that sounded like it had potential. It was in San Jose.

They walked in the doors, looked at the cavernous size in that old building and told the rep in disbelief, We can’t afford THIS!

No, no, let me tell you what the rent is going to be. Turns out the owner had an eye towards gentrification and a yarn store was exactly the kind of image he thought would up the value of the neighboring spots in his building.

She made the place gorgeous, with a welcoming front that would pull anyone inside. One of my knitting groups met there for awhile.  I once quietly pointed out to another knitter the bullet holes through some of the squares of glass near the high ceiling and wondered how long those had been there.

I guess the place did its job too well; the owner decided to bring the rent closer to the newly-perceived market value about the same time the downturn hit. And that was the end of that shop. It has been missed.

So here I was today, four years later, looking up shredding services, and was stunned to see the picture as well as the address of one place pop up on my screen.

I looked again.  Yup, that’s it, that’s the spot. And thought, what a comedown! I mentioned it to Richard.

“Well, it is kind of the same.”

Wait, what?

He put his hands together over his imaginary goofed-up knitting and then pulled them forcefully apart: “You know. Rip it, rip it.”

The Dancing Queen amaryllis, it blooms yet again. I think I’ve had this bulb about ten years now.

My mom reports that her recovery from her knee replacement surgery is going quite well. But then she is one patient for whom they never had to worry whether she would let pain get in the way of doing her range-of-motion exercises so scar tissue won’t set in and limit her later: if it needs to be done, my mom gets it done. There are walks waiting to be taken and flowers to see!

An angel food cake was baked.

Parker played and laughed and had a great time Skyping tonight, but singing Happy Birthday was just too over that gotta-be-shy-now edge. He was adorable. And any time we see each other across the monitors now there has to be some flashlight playing: it’s become part of the deal. You…light up myyy liiiiiife…

Hudson, meantime, yawned back at us from his daddy’s arms as if to show his brother how this singing thing is done, and waved his arms and legs and occasionally looked wide-eyed straight into the camera–one time with a smile. His due date was actually yesterday. He already looks so much older than last Monday.

And their parents looked so happy too.

Bliss.

What a long day.

It started with a phone call–and I heard the phone ring, without any aids in, as I stepped out of the shower, which is an exceedingly rare but turned out it was a needful thing–letting me know that our oldest had been in a car accident.  I grabbed my old aids quick, wet hair and all: a teenager with pedal to the metal had hit her car hard enough to spin her out into a parked car that then was thrown into another parked car.

This is our kid with the autoimmune hemophilia. But after some time in the ER, she’s home and recovering. Thank heavens for airbags and attentive doctors and her good friend who came to get her. It was the guilty teenager himself who called 911 for her.

Then three of my cousins and their families were locked down in the Boston area as the whole world prayed for everybody’s safety, hoping hard for a good outcome. The one with young children had them visiting her parents in New Hampshire, where they did not have to see.

And then, as I’m sure you already know, the surviving bomber was captured and taken by ambulance to the ER and nobody else was hurt and he didn’t die either and the crowds poured out of everywhere and lined the streets to cheer all those officers, all those agents, all those long hours they’d put in to protect everybody, facing down their fears for us all, and it was a finish line of celebrating, joyous fans after the kind of marathon that nobody should ever have to go through.

My sweet husband this morning, wanting to see a way to forgive, wondered out loud if, like the DC sniper case, we had someone young and impressionable in thrall to an older, more evil man, and perhaps he might still be malleable enough to be able to come to see what he’d done should he survive being found. There was no doubt in our minds that he would be found. We had sat through a neuropsychologist’s lecture, years ago, where the man had said that in our youth our brains are not fully myelinated, and that what that means is that we physically cannot draw the mental line from A to B to mean C will happen; “So if your kids act brain damaged, it’s because they are,” he only half joked. Around 20-22 for men, a little earlier for women, that is when one can begin to see the future impacts of one’s actions.

That lecture has made it easier ever since for us to understand and forgive anything a teenager might say or do.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe have already run profiles of the two bomber brothers suggesting that very dynamic between them.

A cop said to one of the reporters as the ambulance drove the guy to the hospital, There will be justice, not revenge.

And in those words he represented the best of America in the face of what was done to us.

(And to clarify after Kelli’s comment: yes, absolutely. He must be held accountable to the full extent of the law for his actions.)

Richard and I went back to the audiologist this afternoon. (Last week he couldn’t get out of work.)

I reminded John that I got my first set of hearing aids at 27, all-in-the-ear types, and they fed back constantly. Constantly! Just turning my head so my hair moved would do it. I asked the audiologist there in New Hampshire if that could damage my hearing–I mean, loud noises from other sources can, right, so…? She flatly pronounced it a no. That made no sense to me.

And then we moved here and I got referred to John; I asked him the same question and his reaction had been to go, and I will never forget the words because I was so grateful for them, “Huh. Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I’m going to go to Stanford to find out.” And he took their audiology department my hearing charts old and new and came back to me and said, Yes, and you’re a classic case. You need to stop using those.

I had lost 15dB of my hearing permanently to them. So I know how important it is to avoid feedback, I finished, adding, and the new right one especially sometimes feeds back.

Yes, it is important, answered John, and took new impressions to make larger, tighter earmolds and hopefully that should solve it.

He and Richard chatted while I heard zero with that stuff plugging my ears.

John, taking the finished impressions out: So the new hearing aids really are helping?

Richard answered that when I got those first aids all those years ago, feedback aside, I was dumbfounded by the world of sound. I’d had no idea how much I’d lost. I stepped out my front door into a quiet morning and had no idea what on earth–oh! It was birds! You could hear birds without seeing the birds? Wow! And I would drop a pin, just to hear it hit the floor. You really could. Who knew. I was ecstatic.

Richard said, And it’s like that all over again. All the other times there have been new aids, it’s never made as much of a difference like it did then, but these do.

I told the guy about hearing the hawk, the jays, the dog I didn’t even know the neighbors had, the high-pitched squeal today as the automatic doors shut again and again at the post office, ear-splittingly loud–in all the twenty-six years of living here I had never known that was there. Wow.

John is a very even-keel kind of guy, but by this point the grin on his face burst into a “YES!” as he pumped a fist. Everything he had hoped for as much as I had, as we had not quite dared to hope. And there it is.

But there’s a little bit of holding our breath. The new type of mold is hard and it is frankly more prone to feeding back–but it is also partly responsible for my hearing so much better. It transmits sound better. If the bigger ones coming don’t fix the problem, I’ll have to go back to the soft type. We all so hope not.

We come back in two weeks when the new molds come in. But I said to Richard, huh. They’re squealing less since we left his office.

Maybe he jammed them in there harder than you do?

Or maybe at a different angle (bigger molds would take care of those variables.)

Still learning. Hoping hard.

Today we celebrate our oldest: Happy Birthday, Sam! It snowed that day; today there was so much wind that I wondered, looking up through a skylight, whether a limb or two on that big tree might come down. (It held.) A finch leaving my feeder suddenly got thrown far sideways in the gust but recovered and made it to the safety of the trees to ride out the worst with some of its flock.

My cousin Tina had kids visiting and they decided that maybe watching the marathon with three grandkids in tow under age four would not be the best idea after all and so they went to the JFK library instead, figuring they would have it all to themselves while everybody else was at the race.

Which they pretty much did.

They left at 2:40. By the time they got home it was clear they needed to turn on the TV…

Ezra Klein wrote a beautiful, moving tribute from the point of view of a marathoner’s husband celebrating the cheering crowds and the history and the runners and the rescuers here. I highly recommend it.

We had recall work and then, it turned out, major warranty stuff as well being done on our car, and there came a phone call saying that a rental car was covered with that warranty. The Prius was going to be staying there for a few days.

The dealership that used to drive me nuts, this afternoon, sales and service people alike on the floor wanted only to make life easier for every single person who walked in those doors. There was a genuineness, a quietly shared vulnerability, a need to reach out. Sit, sit, (while I waited for the rental to be delivered) may we…  I don’t drink coffee or tea, and they were keenly disappointed not to be able to give me that small gesture, wanting to be able to Do Something; I regret not having asked for a simple cup of water, for their sakes’ and my own.

Note all the runners and first responders and average people alike who ran TO the fire and the smoke in the bombings today, their need to help others instinctively and instantly more important than their very lives. That, that is who we are as Americans and as human beings and we will never forget those who by doing so ran against the force of the wind to rescue us all.

If you need to ask, you need to do it.

I’d done the hot water scouring to get the mill oils out of the silk baby afghan and the rinse water still had blue. Should be fine, thought I a few days ago, and laid it out to dry.

It bugged me. I finally said something to somebody, more to out myself than anything.

If you need to ask, you need to do it.

And so yesterday it was hot water rinse after hot water rinse and when I say hot water, I mean my husband left the setting on the new water heater higher than we’ve ever had it: I was putting that afghan in and then pushing it down into the water with something else so I wouldn’t burn my hands.

Finally, on the fifth time soaking (making seven in all), it came out clear enough to wonder if any blue effect left was just reflections across the water from the afghan itself. It felt okay, finally, so, done.

The afghan and its matching hat are a lighter blue than they were. And that’s fine.

Meantime, I called my mom today and it was not that much different really from the usual in terms of hearing her. Huh. A letdown.

Richard came home: “Oh good, you’re wearing the blue tooth.” (Second glance.) “But why don’t you have it turned on?”

Oh. Riiiiiight. Forgot that you don’t just take it off the charger in the morning like a cellphone, you have to turn it ON. Duhhhh.

And then I went off to knit night, where I heard one woman’s voice–and from across the noisy room–for the first time. Ever. Hadn’t realized I actually didn’t know what she sounded like.

Another woman, after I explained I had new hearing aids, went, “So that’s why you don’t sound deaf anymore.”

“I sounded deaf? I try really hard not to.”

And then she added, “I’m going to have to be careful what I say now,” and laughed a good one.

Walked out of the room while working on dinner, walked back in exactly as the hawk appeared behind the feeder, giving me a beautiful close-up view as a pair of finches freaked and took off.

And… More than the traditional bracelet (there was one, and Parker wanted one on his arm too in solidarity with his brother), the hospital had this monitor on Hudson: that baby wasn’t being taken anywhere by anybody he wasn’t supposed to while he was their patient. Alarms would have sounded.

Sounds quite sensible to me.

I wrote this, saved the draft, and walked outside to do my evening tour of the still-growing number of apple blossoms.

And heard, with the new hearing aids, surely nowhere near all of them, but here, and over there, and way over thataway far across the fence, all the birds with lower-pitched voices, and they weren’t crows…

I’ve heard descriptions for years now of peregrine parents in nesting season e-chupping at each other. I came in and played an online recording to be sure, and there it was–I now know what that sounds like in hawkspeak. I guess I really do have a pair out there, since they’re talking to each other. It had simply never occurred to me that I (or anybody) could know by hearing them. I heard the birds!!! My mind, it is blown.

The phone rang: Were we all home? Would we like to Skype and see Hudson?

And how! It was a race for the monitor.

Big hands like his daddy, thick full black hair like his Uncle John had had at birth, oh so gorgeous like his mom. Beautiful. More pictures coming.

Which makes everything else sound so very trivial, but here goes: Michelle did buy the car yesterday, a Civic coupe, her father leaving work early to drive to Dublin with her for it. He came home going, wow, that was the most laid-back dealership I have ever seen, and I went, yes, isn’t it?

We all piled in after she got home from work tonight to admire it and check out little details we’d missed–oh, did you know it does this? Look at where all those airbags are, how big that trunk is. I wondered how I’d missed that it had a sunroof?

She started grinning and suddenly the consensus was, time for a joyride! Let’s go get chocolate! And so we not only did, we discovered a new dairy-free (do you know how hard it is to find those?) dark mint chocolate that was very good. Equal Exchange Chocolates. And Green and Black’s had taken her very favorite Maya Gold that they’d changed to dairy contaminated and in the latest shipment they’d taken the dairy back out again. She had checked every time she went to Whole Foods, where the allergics shop, hoping that hoping would somehow get them to change it back so she could enjoy them again. The packaging was a little different: could it be? (Reading the new label…) YES!!! There was a little dance in the chocolate aisle. Thank you Green and Blacks for celebrating with us!

And.

Today I was finally at the audiologist’s to try out the long-talked-about new hearing aids that had been about to come on the market and are finally out. For the last three months I’ve been afraid the whole idea was a fool’s errand and quite an expensive one;  four years ago I’d bought the very best and the very newest, the top of the line, and surely not much had changed in that short a time.

Then John Miles put the new ones in and fiddled with his equipment awhile.

And turned them on.

And the moment he started talking I nearly burst into tears. It was that different.

He asked for my cellphone and synced it to the new bluetooth and then asked for the number.

I heard it ring.

This doesn’t happen.

I heard it ring! From not right up against my ear and on speakerphone but down the counter from me in regular mode!

He walked out of the room and talked via my cellphone and his landline where the bluetooth-induced time lag wouldn’t be an echo problem. (All these things I’m learning that I never had to know about before because they just didn’t apply to me.) Again, listening, I was stunned.

He cautioned me that I would likely still have problems with women’s voices on the phone, higher pitches being a problem, and my reaction was that hey, compared to what I’ve had? Which on a cellphone is nothing? I love my Iphone but it’s been text only, and on a landline I couldn’t hear people who were talking into a cellphone.

He explained that there is a theory that you hear better if both ears are hearing at the same level, and so the two aids cannot be made individually louder or softer. No more turning down the ear next to Richard when he’s sitting next to me at our side-by-side monitors and calling towards Michelle in the kitchen. “I married the loudest man I could find,” I told John, and he managed not to die laughing on the floor but simply looked me in the eye with a suppressed impish grin as he answered, “Yes. Yes you did.” (Well, and he’s been married to me for a long time. This has not made him more soft spoken.)

So. Both ears at same volume and can’t change that. Tap the right one to make them both go louder, tap the left for quieter, or tap the volume on the bluetooth receiver necklace thingummy, which will pick up the cellphone from up to thirty feet away.

Tucking my hair behind my right ear somehow made it go louder a couple of times. I think. I don’t always hear the beep that signals the change, it depends on the ambient noise.

I cannot tell you the depth of the sense of reprieve it gives me to be hearing things that had been lost to me. They were gone from me forever and now they’re not.

By Federal law there’s a 30-day tryout period. But I am never ever going back.

Seven pounds one and a half ounces, 19.5″ long, 2:51 pm, 10 days early, and the sweetest face on the planet. I just want to hold those wobbly new eyes in  mine.

And to tell Parker what a good job he’s doing of being the big brother.

Two possible routes, the GPS said, one up the most heavily congested freeway in northern California (and that’s saying something), the other a ride through beautiful valleys with the hills to each side, a few extra miles but no extra minutes.

Was this a trick question?

And so after our last session of our church’s Conference this afternoon (there are two more sessions Sunday) Michelle and I jumped in the Prius and she drove as I watched birds hover on the winds through those valleys on our way up past the sign that said Sacramento this way, Stockton, that.

Lots and lots of turkey vultures (that’s a raptor, grinned Michelle as she kept her eyes on the road), but also hawks: redtailed, I think, and there was what might even have been a peregrine falcon. The sky was just overcast enough to soften and deepen the colors all around, and on this fine spring day the hills were green, not yet the gold dust coming in a few months.

And so we arrived in a good mood. There was a couple wrapping up their deal and a few workers around but basically we seemed to have the place to ourselves. We found someone to ask for Dante, and he phoned him; shortly thereafter the man Michelle had emailed with came inside the dealership and led us to the Honda they’d been talking about. (She had told him flat out his price was too high and he had agreed to a lower one without her even being there yet–how often does that happen? And she had the printout in case she needed to prove it.)

He had told the place we were coming and had asked this morning for it to be detailed, and it appears that upon our actually walking in in person someone had gone oh, this one’s real, and had pulled it into the carwash–other than that, the thing had a long way to go. Carpets desperately needing to be shampooed, what looked like a shopping cart having ricocheted all the way down one side, a child’s vivid pink bracelet in the trunk. I’m guessing someone traded it in when they needed to be able to get another carseat in. Or got tired of wrestling with one in a coupe.

Seeing it flawed gave us–her–more leverage than seeing it pristine. Michelle had walked away from several salesmen and cars at this point but I had to make myself not say out loud, Oh, this’ll be so perfect!  As was the salesman, who was the antithesis of pushy; I liked him on the spot. Such a relief compared to some I’ve encountered, about whom the nicest thing I could say is that only my husband existed in their eyes, even when it was my car we were buying.

I did say to her, Do you want to look at that Fit in Pleasanton on the way home?

(Mom, the Fit was in…) she said afterwards. But appreciated the help.

And so we went home. They will clean and they will check out the mechanicals a little more closely and they will get rid of those scratches and they will email her Monday to let her know it’s ready and still at that same price. Or we don’t come back. And they know it, because she is a serious buyer but we are hardly close by.

And so we took 680 home, Michelle happy to drive, me happy to watch raptors soar.

And then I made blueberry pie, because, you know, some Saturdays are just near-perfect like that.

Four more rows of ribbing to finish off that baby afghan as I type. Got the 25 repeats done I was aiming for and found I had maybe maybe enough yarn to do another–and decided to save it for a matching hat (it should stretch that far) and baby booties (which might even fit before he’s three this time. I can only get better at this baby knitting thing.)

Meantime, being thrown so badly back into serious sickness by a common bug had me more worried last week than I wanted to admit, even to me.

Michelle M quilts as well as knits, and four years ago when I was doing all that hospital stuff she was making me a get-well quilt. Somehow its shipping time wasn’t quite there yet… Till she asked me about a week ago how to get this to me?

It’s far prettier than my nighttime sideways snapshot shows. The anticipation, the box, lifting the quilt out and going oh wow!, feeling thought about and cared about and marveling that she would go to all this everything for me, it gave me a tremendous sense of reprieve that I don’t quite know how to say. Her timing was perfect.

And she had no way to know it, but my mom quilts and several years ago Mom and I went to a quilt shop and I picked out fabrics for a quilt for her to make me whenever my turn in line should come up (no hurry).

The light fabric Michelle picked? I did too, or one very like if it’s not that exact one.  Mom’s will be different and the two will go very nicely together. All the more perfect.