Per David, the song is this:

Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the street

Muhmuhmuhmuhmuh,

Life is but a dream.

I’m tired.  Too tired to play with C&D, too tired to blog, too tired even to watch TV on mute.

Not quite ready to fall asleep, earlier this evening I pulled out my new knitting needles and yarn.  Halfway through the evening’s second knit row, Carmen found me in the bed and began stroking the yarn.  "Mommy is making Carmen a square," she marveled, rubbing the rustic wooliness of the yarn and fingering the texture of the stitches.

"I’m just practicing," I told her.  If I thought she’s understand it, I would have also told her I didn’t know how to bind off yet, and that I’d probably be knitting rows until the yarn ran out.

I finished the row and Carmen snatched a knitting needle and began poking it through my almost-a-square.  "I’m showing Mommy knitting," she told Matt and David as they walked in.

"That’s IT!" he said, pointing at the bamboo needle as Carmen handed it back over.  "Whatever that is, that’s what they had in your head at the hospital!  It tapered like that, and it was pointy!"

Only nine rows into my new knitting hobby, I’m trying to figure if that was helpful information or not.

I realized yesterday how grateful I was to not have to wear headgear when I had braces (I felt and heard everything transmitted through the metal halo and directly to my skull), and that I probably wouldn’t like playing in the NFL, either (those helmets).

Best part, though:  after the MRI and cerebral angiogram (both done while I wore the halo), my doctors decided the shunting seen previously was most likely part of my brain’s recovery, and nothing to worry about.  No need for the Gamma Knife after all, woo-hoo! 

Gamma Knife surgery tomorrow at Memorial Hermann to get the remaining bit of AVM.  Stories (and maybe even pictures) after. 

“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”

“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit. “No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it along the way.”

–A. A. Milne

The sun is down by 6, and we park across the gate.  We have the playground all to ourselves.

It’s been this way for weeks, with occasional exceptions, like when someone had tennis lessons and a sibling was bored.  For a while some sort of playgroup met on Wednesdays, but now they are gone by the time we arrive.

Where do they go and what do they do, the little children that live here? Are they eating a late dinner?  Are they being put to bed, deaf to our laughing and whooping in the semi dark? Are they still at nursery school in the extended care program?

I like having the park to ourselves.  I don’t have to follow C&D too closely.  In the dark and suburban silence, here in the big city, I only hear the crunch of gravel under their feet, their singing or requests for a harder push on the swing.  Matt and I talk, and I rest.

Still, I feel a little strange, playing in the dark, at a park in this other neighborhood.  I wonder if someone will ever come and play.  And then I wonder if the neighborhood police will ask me to leave.  Clearly we don’t belong there.

Nobody’s birthday: Last night I sat typing in the car, parked in the garage. I had WiFi from the house and tea in the center console (who needs Internet cafes?) Upstairs Matt and the Dynamic Duo played and tidied up the kitchen. They baked a small cake, just for fun, and after David dug around in the kitchen drawers and found a set of birthday candles, the Duo decided that we needed to celebrate a birthday. We designated a birthday dolly, not shown in the picture because he’s flammable. C&D said they were clowns* (an appropriate role) and eagerly inserted about a dozen candles into the cake. Carmen sang Happy Birthday (and I guess decided mid-song it was my birthday, instead), and then the Duo blew out the candles with the customary birthday huffing and puffing. Carmen had so much fun (and maybe so much cake) that she couldn’t fall asleep until nearly midnight.

Ranch day: With a pleasant breeze, and a high near eighty, we escaped town and headed west. We did some visiting, gave the pigs a good scratching, loved on some chickens, watched our favorite horse work on following directions (C&D need to work on that, too), and C&D got to harvest some turnips and beets. Now the Duo are in the bathtub, getting the hay out of their hair before bed.

(Carmen insisted on stuffing her veggies in her overalls pocket.)

(Riding the calf-style roping dummy, aka “the sheep.”)

* Clowns. A certain potty DVD makes them think this is a common visitor at birthday parties.