It is nap time. We took a long walk and our two fell asleep and basically napped there and back. Now the big kids are building, and she is puttering. Her brother, the five, and her housemate, the six, know the nap time routine. I took these pictures when I heard a German song coming into the kitchen, where I had finally arrived to wash dishes. First I saw only the five and six gazing at one another and crooning. Then I came around to the room where they were, to see what others were doing, and I realized they were putting the two down to nap.
She wants us to be with her. She doesn’t want to stay here without us.
It’s ok, I say, she napped already. She can get up and play.
They try again, covering her with a blanket, stroking her cheek, lying beside her, singing in German, clearly now a lullaby, and then she is done with that game and they are all up for more quiet afternoon play and I am here to think about how to make a place open to the world where brothers and sisters and housemates can be together all day, take rests, sing lullabies, in their native language, feel at home.
Earlier in the day, my seven was busy helping the two to get her breakfast. I love babies, she said to me, love in her voice.
I know. I said. I love that we can all be together here. So many places aren’t like that.
I know, she got it.
Sort of like if you said boys could only be with boys and girls could only be with girls, you’d be missing out on so many people in the world. It’s kind of like that with ages. I wish there were more places where we could all be together.
And then later, we were at the new park in Davis Square and it was full of kids in t-shirts from a corporate day care center. It felt chaotic. Kids were crying, hitting one another over the head with shovels, forced to take water breaks when they were busy, to get off riding toys for a reason the teacher explained which made so little sense I can’t retell it here, then allowed, because no one was looking, to get back on. Then they all went home, like the seven dwarves, with their matching t-shirts on the hot day, over their regular clothes, holding a long rope.
My five looked over, holding the carriage as the bigger kids walked along beside us, approaching the cross walk on Holland Street. “There are sooo many of them.” he mused.
There sure were, all the same size more or less, no water play for this crowd on a hot and sunny day, water feature built into the city park there broken after only a month of use, no big kids to look after the little ones, all the big kids off at camp with big kids, no babies to love and sing to, all the babies off in carriages being pushed around the sidewalks or inside doing baby things. Sooo much of the world is that way, it feels invisible most days, till you stop and think or till someone sings a german lullaby in your presence in the middle of the day to his baby sister or housemate while you are doing dishes nearby, child care, and home, where on earth are we headed in this world on this day with our children and babies and teens, I wonder, remembering my fifteen year old son was also part of our day, as we had called upstairs to wake him when we left for our walk and he had been the subject of our conversation on our walk, as my three wondered if he was up, wondered if he was trimming the bushes, then he appeared as we ate our lunch, asking about the trimmers, and as we got ready for nap, ready already for his break, but in time to say hello to the grandma and the auntie of the three, grandma who introduced herself to my boy, as her granddaughter talks about him at home and I thought about all the family in family day care and how hard it would be to be anywhere else but here today, charter school teaching on my mind, but not in my heart just now, hard to imagine going back to a place without babies and homemade lunches and walks that are purely adventure, no goal or objective to go along with a thematic curriculum, just life lived as well as we can live it every day.
