New Summer Pics, Hike Up Kearsarge
I've added to the gallery some great new pictures Kristen just took of Sofia ... very beautiful, very cute. There are also some fun shots of all of us on a recent hike up Mount Kearsarge. About 20 minutes west of Concord is the little town of Warner, which has a fine little bookstore on its Main Street, an Indian museum and Mount Kearsarge. The mountain is a nice one to tackle with a toddler and a three-month old, since most of the four-mile climb is done on an auto road. The last half mile is a scramble up a rocky path to the stony summit with some magnificent views of central New Hampshire and out toward Lake Sunapee. A few years ago we might have scoffed at a mile-round-trip hike as not being worth the drive, but it really is nice to be able to summit before the kids either lose their patience or fall too deeply asleep. It leaves plenty of time for David to get down from the backpack and play on the summit, and at his age he can spend an hour tossing pebbles in to bushes to see how they cascade among the leaves or picking up sticks and poking the ground with them...

Holy Ball

When the kids were baptized they were each given a bottle of Holy Water afterward. Kristen sent me this note earlier this week.

"David found Sofia's bottle of Holy Water in the office and asked to drink it. I told him it was very special water for blessing, but not for drinking so he wanted to be blessed and so I blessed him and asked if there was anything special he wanted to ask of God and he thought and said "a ball" paused, and then said "a holy ball". So we prayed for that, whatever that may be. Maybe he meant a Wiffle ball..."

OWWWW!
I have only been wearing contact lenses about a month, and it never occurred to me to take them out (or take any other precautionary measures) before cooking dinner last night. To go on the side with our fajitas, I seeded, chopped and sautéed two big jalepeño peppers. Later that night I tried to take out my lenses. It was a long, horrible ordeal. I have not been able to put them back in since. Lesson learned.

Mixed Messages At Dinner?
I asked David to stop playing with his food at dinner tonight. Then I realized I was the one who'd gotten the spoon with the big pink-and-orange-rubber-lizard-handle for him out of the drawer. It's like handing a kid chocolate and saying "don't eat any sweets." I clammed up and let him play. He made the lizard crawl across the table, leaving a trail of yogurt. "Hiss," David made the lizard say, "hiss, hiss." I want a lizard spoon too, and a lizard tumbler to sip single malt Scotch from. My nephew Nick got me a martini glass with a Hot Wheels car instead of a stem for my birthday a few years ago. Vroom, vroom. Hiss, hiss. Yum, yum.

New pictures of Sofia!

They say you always take fewer pictures of your second child than you do of the first ... maybe it's because now you don't have a free hand to hold the camera! In any case, we haven't been neglecting Sofia's portfolio as much it seems, I've just been neglectful about getting the pictures posted online.

In A Strange Country
After I got back from church we went downtown. The air was as thick, wet and warm as clay and it settled on us as we walked, David alternately on my shoulders and gamboling on the sidewalk and Sofia asleep in the Snugli at Kristen's breast.

Main Street in Concord is always quiet on Sundays. Most of the shops are closed and the restaurants don't open until dinner. Today, the sidewalks seemed wider than normal and the heat shimmered on the blacktop and came licking off the store windows when we stopped to examine the strange folk-art pottery with the laughing mouths and bulging eyes, the old furniture, the used CDs, the sunglasses, the books and books and the black porcelain statue of the bulldog and the dragonflies and the stuffed fisherman.

We sat at the counter at the Village Sweet Shop, the only customers, and ate good homemade ice cream and shivered happily in the air conditioning. David made a mess with his dish of raspberry chocolate chip, but he ate most of it. I spoon fed some of it to Kristen and I think David thought it was funny. Sofia slept and woke and found she was still in the best of places and went back to sleep again.

After, we walked through the alleys up into the square by the old jail that's now a Mexican restaurant. There's an elaborate, corner-shaped brick waterfall in the middle of the square and the pool at the bottom has two short fountains. David loves it, and walks along the brick wall that encloses the pool, and lies down on the wall and sticks his hands in the water and tries to look up under the waterfall. He would stay all day, most days, if we let him. We stayed a long time, because the air was so heavy and it was nice to sit by the moving water.

It may have been the heat or the deserted squares and alleys (the squares and alleys make walking in Concord magical even on normal days), or it may have been that it was the end of a pleasant weekend spent with friends and children -- likely it was a combination of both -- but the city was like a strange country to us, in the best possible way. The feeling has lasted through dinner -- we ate fresh fruit with whipped cream for dessert and Kristen and I drank cold white wine with soda and lime -- and through putting David to bed and through picking up and settling in for the night.

If it only it would last through tomorrow, when I have to leave Kristen, David and Sofia still sleeping in the already-hot pre-dawn darkness and start another work week. If only it would last the summer. Forever.

It seems I've been coming back to this a lot lately, how lovely, strange and terrible the common world seems when you're looking at it as though you've never seen it before. I think I have David to thank for the perspective.