"Swear!"

 Content Warning: The following passage contains explicit language. It is a reimagining of a beloved literary character who reminds us all of Felix...along with another literary character who reminds us all of Felix.

"Ow!" said Tigger.

He sat down and put his paw in his mouth.

"What's the matter?" asked Pooh.

"Hot!" mumbled Tigger.

"Your friend," said Eeyore, "appears to have bitten on a bee."

Pooh's friend stopped shaking his head to get the prickles out, and explained that Tiggers didn't like thistles. 

"They why bend a perfectly good one?" asked Eeyore.

"But you said," began Pooh--"you said that Tiggers like everything except honey and haycorns."

"And thistles," said Tigger, who was now running round in circles with his tongue hanging out.

Pooh looked at him sadly.

"What are we going to do?" he asked Piglet.

Piglet knew the answer to that, and he said at once that they must go and see Christopher Robin.

"You'll find him with Kanga," said Eeyore.

Tigger had been bouncing in front of them all this time, turning round every now and then to ask, "Is this the way?--and now at last they came in sight of Kanga's house, and there at last was Christopher Robin.

He was slumped in a low chair, sipping from a plastic cup that he he balanced precariously on two fingers. His lank, blonde hair hung limp, and he sprawled back with his belly out upon seeing the approach of Pooh and his friends. 

"I've been finding things in the Forest," said Tigger importantly. "I've found a pooh and a piglet and an eeyore, but I can't find any breakfast."

Christopher Robin rolled his eyes and took a long sip of whatever he was drinking from the plastic cup. 

"Well that's no surprise. I'd only ask you for help finding something if I wanted it to stay hidden. Christ on a bike, you're all up early." 

He gave a leering look at Pooh. "I thought I left you stuck in a hole somewhere."

"But Christopher Robin, you pulled me out!"

"Well, see if you can get stuck again. And make sure that Rabbit's trapped inside when you do."

Piglet tried to explain what had been happening with the search for Tigger's breakfast.

"Don't you know what Tiggers like?" asked Pooh.

"I expect that this one likes the little baggies of cocaine he thinks he's buying on the sly from Owl's cousin. Tell him that if he does another line of that it'll take the edge off of his appetite, but if he does it around me I'm going to turn him into a fucking tiger-skin rug."

Christopher Robin belched and conjured up a sucker apparently from nowhere that he put in his mouth, then began inspecting his nails.

"I know what I like," said Tigger. "Everything there is in the world except honey and haycorns and--what were those hot things called?"

"Thistles."

"Yes, and those."

"Jesus," murmured Christopher Robin, and tucked the sucker behind one ear. Without turning around he raised his voice.

"Kanga! Kanga, you useless bloody Aussie, get out here and give Tigger some breakfast."

So Kanga and Roo came out, and when Roo had said "Hallo, Pooh" and "Hallo, Piglet" once, and "Hallo, Tigger" twice, because he had never said it before and it sounded funny, they told Kanga what they wanted, and Kanga said very kindly, "Well, look in my cupboard Tigger dear, and see what you'd like." Because she knew at once that, however big Tigger seemed to be, he wanted as much kindness as Roo.

"I can tell you that all the biscuits, crips, and whiskey is gone from that cupboard," said Christopher Robin, "There's just a bunch of useless shit like flour and salt."

"Shall I look, too?" said Pooh, who was beginning to feel a little eleven o'clockish. 

"The last thing you need is another meal." said Christopher Robin pointedly to Pooh Bear. "Honestly, when was the last time that you could actually fit into a pair of trousers?" That seemed to remind him of something, and Christopher Robin unbuttoned the top of his own. "Ah, that's better."

Pooh found a small tin of condensed milk, and something seemed to tell him that Tiggers didn't like this, so he took it into a corner by itself, and went with it to see that nobody interrupted it. 

But the more Tigger put his nose into this and his paw into that, the more he found things which Tiggers didn't like. And when he had found everything in the cupboard, and couldn't eat any of it, he said to Kanga, "What happens now?"

But Kanga and Christopher Robin were all standing around Roo, watching him have his Extract of Malt. And Roo was saying, "Must I?" and Kanga was saying "Now, Roo dear, you remember what you promised."

"What is it?" whispered Tigger to Piglet.

"His Strengthening Medicine," said Piglet. "He hates it. Christopher Robin, can you make Roo take it?"

Christopher Robin looked thoughtful for a moment, glanced at Piglet, and farted.

"Oh, Christopher Robin! Christopher Robin, what did you EAT?" cried Piglet.

Christopher Robin grinned evilly. "Bacon sandwich."

Tigger, trying to escape the smell, but his noise in the Extract of Malt. He sniffed, tasted, and jumped back in surprise.

Kanga said "Oh!" and then clutched at the spoon again just as it was disappearing, and pulled it safely back out of Tigger's mouth. But the Extract of Malt had gone. 

"Tigger dear!" said Kanga.

"He's taken my medicine, he's taken my medicine, he's taken my medicine!" sang Roo happily, thinking it was a tremendous joke. 

"What you lot need," said Christopher Robin, shuffling out, "Is some Brain Strengthening medicine."

Then Tigger looked up at the ceiling, and closed his eyes, and his tongue went round and round his chops, in case he had left any outside, and a peaceful smile came over his face as he said, "So that's what Tiggers like!"

"Nor shall you do my ear that violence To make it truster of your own report Against yourself. I know you are no truant."

 J and I have been learning the hard way for at least the past seven years that being the youngest of the family is a completely different world than the one that we grew up in. People prize your cuteness and babyhood over your wisdom and maturity. No one takes you seriously. You have the least amount of physical and moral force in any disagreement with your older brothers.

And, for Felix, it's been uncomfortable and unsettling to watch him internalize the abuse (intentional or otherwise) that he gets from his older brothers. We've sat on the sofa after bedtime puzzling over the things we hear him saying, wondering whether we are going to need some extra help with him. And where we're going to get it. And whether it's fair to the other two. Or whether we're just imagining it.

But there certainly is no doubt that he pours out a stream of abuse about himself: "I'm dumb, I'm stupid, I can't read, I'm a dork..."

The child is an enigma to us, and I suspect that he is an enigma to himself. He has no context by which he can understand who he is. Why is he slower, shorter, and and apparently less clever than the two people he spends every day with? 

I don't know if we would have had the energy to even attempt homeschooling if we'd known at the outset that we'd be answering these sorts of questions.

We had a week of very light book-work this week and spent most of our school time taking a standardized test online. The state requires each of our boys to be formally evaluated at least once a year, and in the past we've used a teacher friend to administer a reading test. These tests are great, but the scoring is very complicated and doesn't mean much to the boys. (What does a 4F mean?)

Two years ago the school district got persnickety about the type of testing that James was doing, so we switched to a standardized cross-discipline multiple question test. The great thing about this test, we discovered afterwards, was that it gave you a comparison to the level of each boy relative to his peers. (Supposedly)

Do I really believe the levels that James and Owen scored at? Not particularly.

But they did very well, and they took great encouragement from the news that they are well above grade level in almost everything that they are doing.

Felix, who has struggled through every stage of learning to read for the past three years, did not want to take this test. He didn't like the mouse, he didn't like the computer, and he didn't like sitting through 50 questions per section.

But when we called him into the kitchen and told him that he was doing the work of a third grader in some subjects and scoring like a fifth grader in some others he absolutely BEAMED. He couldn't wait to tell the babysitter. He looked like he was floating with pride and delight.

J was quick to assure him that we would still love him and be proud of him even if he didn't do well at all on his test. He is (apparently) a little behind in Spelling, so we'll need to do some catch-up work with him on that.

But I think that on Monday morning it might be marginally less hard to convince him to start in on his schoolwork. And maybe, just maybe, he won't spend so much of the morning arguing that he's a dumb kid.

"Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed"

 For people who enjoy fresh herbs and garden vegetables as much as J and I do we are pretty terrible at gardening. 

Some of it is not our fault. For one thing, we are both really busy. It's hard to weed the garden on days when you are out of the house to go to work before 8 AM and won't get back from your concert until close to 11.

It's also really hard to summon the desire to go weed your garden when you get back from a Sunday morning of church rehearsals and services. You don't need to go work in the garden, you need a nap.

There are some other factors as well. We have very sandy soil in the backyard and not a whole lot of direct sunlight in places that are convenient for a garden. There are bunnies and birds and rodents that live in our backyard and help themselves to whatever does grow up. Our hoses all leak and our sillcocks are temperamental. 

But maybe we just both have brown thumbs.

I put in our first attempt at a garden before Felix was born. James, Owen, and I made a trip to Lowe's and picked up seeds and topsoil. We excavated a little rectangle of earth on the western side of the house and made a crude mound that was enclosed by old bits of baseboard that we'd pulled out of one of the bedrooms.

Unsurprisingly, nothing but mint and one sad, anemic-looking carrot every grew there.

Last year J's mom gave her a fancy spinning planter pyramid. I filled it with topsoil, planted herbs, peppers, and salad greens, and watered it every day when I got back from my run. But I also never thinned any of the shoots or did any weeding. We had a few useable basil leaves that came out of the top and might have pulled out a handful of thyme once.

What we really need, I think, is to get a child interested in gardening. Like Owen with his typewriter, James with his smoothie-making, or Felix with his lying around and ordering other people to pour him drinks, we need a child that will become fascinated with the art of gardening for its own sake and look after it on their own without any prompting or reminding. 

This is the year that we're putting the pergola in the backyard. Maybe, since we'll all be out there anyway, this will be the year when we finally get around to doing the weeding.

"Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge"

 J and I are going to the game this Sunday. 

It wasn't even remotely on my radar until yesterday. I had only been concerned about when the game would be held. (I couldn't watch the wild card round because I was stuck playing a concert.)

I was relieved when the schedule came out and the Bills weren't in the Saturday night slot, but didn't think anything of the fact that I could not only watch the game, but I might actually even be able to attend. 

Pax was the one who put the idea into my head. He asked if I'd like to go with him, and that turned into a flurry of seeing how many tickets were available and affordable.

Some of you may know that we promised the boys that if we read 500 books as a family over the past year that we would take everyone to a Bills game. 

We were over that mark before the season even started, and Owen probably read 500 just on his own. But then we looked at the schedule (we could only make the Chiefs game happen with work schedules) and the prices (I used to be able to get tickets for $7 each when the Bills were bad) and had to walk back the promise. 

And we really couldn't afford five tickets for Sunday...but we could swing two.

I delivered the news as gently as I could to the boys. Owen had a good sulk in his room. It really is unfair.

In our very slight defense, it could be out to be the worst night ever if we end up staying out in the dark in single digit temperatures only to have the Bills lose. (And, as J pointed out, the Inauguration as the thing we're waking up to on the following day.)

But I think this team is different. I think this year is different. And, crucially, J and I are going to help. We're going to help incite some false starts from all the way up in the 300 section.

Go Bills.

"How is it that the clouds still hang on you?"

I've never appreciated what a cloudy place Rochester, NY is in the winter until I've had a telescope.

We just got back from Pennsylvania. I could've at least brought my small telescope down but opted not to because I didn't want to be crammed to the gills with baggage and Christmas presents. (As J later pointed out, I would've had all of the room that her suitcases were taking off since we dropped her off at Dulles before returning.)

The sky in Hanover was incredible. There was immediately less light pollution, the temperature felt positively balmy, and there were two perfectly clear nights without even any moonlight obscuring the stars. I showed Jupiter and Saturn to two of my little nephews and wished that I'd brought a telescope down with me.

Even on the drive back to Rochester I was aware of how clear the skies were as it began to get dark. It was dark and clear at the border, dark and clear in Corning, and dark and clear in Geneseo. And it was dark and cloudy in Rochester. And cold.

Last night I had a late afternoon rehearsal, and it was, as ever, cloudy. I actually fell asleep in the backseat of my carpool. I awoke just as we were pulling into the Victor park and ride. Just above some fir trees, gloriously, was Venus right next to a waxing crescent moon. All else was obscured by clouds, but just for one patch of sky there was a glorious sight. I drove home planning on getting out as soon as possible. By the time I got back it had all clouded over again.

Part of this is on me. If I really wanted to see some stars I could go out with a mug of tea and wait for cloud breaks. I'm out running at about 6 AM most mornings, and I can usually find a patch of sky somewhere with at least a little visibility.

But it's hard to want to go stand outside in the cold and to just get colder and colder. I'll do it, eventually.

But it would help if Rochester wasn't so cloudy. (And cold.)