Lucas Camilo

So much happens every day in our lives that its hard to figure out when to sit down and blog. And then, when we do, its really hard to know which part of the past five or six weeks to talk about.  I hate that trying to give an overview makes the blog sound a little like a sappy year-in-review Christmas letter… We’re all doing just grand, and here are the parts we want to show off.  We’ll get into the messy weeds of our life in the next blog post, I’m sure.  For now, here’s the photo-album-ish picture of our family’s past month and a half.

Lucas’s growth right now mostly involves him getting deeper and deeper into whatever he’s already into. He has some new dinosaur books – a series of fictitious stories called Dinosaur World – that he has read literally a dozen times, and listened to more than that as audiobooks. Lately he has been combining his love of speaking in code (i.e. made up languages like “Runny Babbit,” based on the Shel Silverstein book), inside family jokes, puns, and knock-knock jokes. I would give an example, but most of his jokes really only make sense to Burke and me.  I wish making friends was easier for Lucas, but since he seems so absolutely delighted with making just the two of us laugh, its hard to complain.

This fall he often wants to do things by himself, which of course is incredibly challenging given his disability. So as I write this he is digging up virtual fossils on his Surface (Microsoft tablet) by himself. Burke and I grapple with how much we should limit his screen time given how few other “doing things by myself” options he has. But at this very moment I mostly just appreciate the nerds out there who wrote the code for this and every other dinosaur app.

Ida continues to get better at walking, though she is also very content to sit next to a pile of books and “read” for long, long stretches of time. Recently she’s shifted from babble reading to actually saying the names of things she sees in the books – watching her read to herself and point and say “bunny” is incredibly cute.  In fact, her language has taken off in the past couple months, and recently she started speaking much more in the command form. She first learned to say “COME BRUNO!” to Nonna’s dog. Then she tried it on her stuffed animals (which she pulls around the house on leashes), and then on our neighbor’s cat. Watching Ida yell “COME WATSON!!!” to an indifferent cat lying on the sidewalk was also about as cute as it gets. And of course she also now speaks to us in command form. Dinner usually ends with an abrupt, “ALL DONE! BIB OFF! DOWN!!!” We’ve taught her to say please, and she knows just how to smile and lilt her “peeeaaaasssse?!?” so as to make whatever else she’s just demanded sound pretty sweet.

I’ll let Burke tell you about his new job more in another blog post. For now, I’ll just quote Lucas, during Burke’s recent four-day work trip to Washington DC. “I’m glad Daddy won’t be going away for work any more.” He may be slightly overstating the local-ness of Burke’s new job (Development Director for the Social Justice Fund Northwest), but it is good news for all of us that Burke will be working for an organization based in Seattle. And I am incredibly proud that he’ll be working for such an awesome, progressive organization supporting the best of the best in northwest grassroots organizing. And I will say that Burke never asks for ANYTHING for his birthday, or Christmas, or solstice, or fathers’ day. So if you’ve ever wished you could get Burke something, you can give to SJF. Or even better, you can tell Burke you’d like to have coffee with him so he can pitch you on giving to SJF.

And my update is that I’ve been teaching a little more yoga this fall, including workshops for activists and organizers, and others supporting parents of kids with disabilities and chronic illness/conditions. I feel incredibly fortunate to get to be teaching things that I also want to be learning, and that students keep showing up to learn with me.  Often in the weeks leading up to one of my workshops for parents, I’m more aware of the practices I’m planning to teach about being gentle and kind with themselves, and the breathing and movement practices to help parents be more grounded, energized, and centered… And I’m able to catch myself spiraling in unhealthy directions (often breathless anxiety about the endless to-do lists for both kids care) and I remember to be nicer to myself.  So I’ve been feeling incredibly lucky to get to study and teach practices that help me parent in the ways I want to.

(I’ll spare you the update on all of our sleep, or lack thereof… There have recently been some sleep-deprived days when every one of those great self-care practices fall by the wayside and I knuckle my way through the day on coffee, sugar, some growling, then too much facebook and netflix.  I’m not proud, and also not really complaining, but I couldn’t make this post too picture-perfect.)

Sunday was the final day of a week off from school for Thanksgiving break for Seattle elementary schools. We spent four days on Whidbey Island with our whole closest-extended family, with grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. Ida loved being surrounded by constant attention, and Lucas liked the adventures of kite flying with his cousins and visiting his favorite libraries.  Our go-round of gratitude at Thanksgiving dinner was deeper than years past, as Lucas and his cousins get older.  Our nieces talked about gratitude for being together, for the big meal we got to eat, and for our access to clean water. Lucas thinks in geologic and cosmic time — he sometimes asks me what will happen to earth when our sun explodes — so he said he was grateful for being on this planet in this time period.

Its hard not to write about the election here, but honestly there’s so much to say I think I have to hold off.  I appreciate Lucas’s grand-scope vision — it is a miracle of evolution and conception and genetics and the fact that earth came together just the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon so that that we can be alive at all.  So I’m with Lucas.  I’m grateful to be alive on earth, even at this time.  (And I’m so grateful for all the people resisting hate, resisting pipelines, showing up with vision and love and audacious courage in large and small ways every day!)

Lucas wrote his own blog post about the Thanksgiving trip.  He’s better at being concise with his words – especially when he thinks that finishing a blog post means getting to his dinosaur games sooner.  But still, here is his account of the weekend.

i’m happy to be with my family on thanksgiving because

i like having a good time .
making up jokes .
flying kites with my dad
playin galaxy bowling with my cousins.
eating dinner with everyone.
reading books with everyone .
playing games .
talking .
& flying the squid kite