You have the words of life.

I ran into these words as I read on the train yesterday. They struck me so strongly that I felt inspired to stand up and, in an act of freedom of expression and something resembling street art, write them in the foggy window with my finger. I didn't. I probably should have.

L'homme n'aboutit à rien par lui-même.
Vers qui irions-nous?

From John 6.

You ought to know.

Another observed difference between boys and girls.

When boys get hair in their eyes, they leave it there. They jerk their head. They blow it. They cut it. Maybe, on a good day, they brush it over with their hand: swiftly and rough.

When girls get hair in their eyes, they tilt their head gracefully, sweep the hair gently to the side with their hand, and then the hand slowly continues down to their cheek, further petting the side of their neck, following down to their chest while never lifting from their body until it finally returns to their side, as if they are dramatically auditioning for a shampoo commercial or the like.

These strange creatures and their instincts are marvels.

Reasons I Enjoy My Kids

When a parent finds himself on vacation, what he most wants is calm and quiet, a respite from whiny requests and runny noses. He wants to enjoy luxuries, like being able to think, or being able to hear himself think. But the kids are on vacation too, and calm and quiet are hard to find. What vacation becomes, then, is a time to actually enjoy those kids. Without the typical worries of a day, those runny noses are not a distraction nor a nuisance, but a strange pleasure. Vacation is a rare opportunity to see the kids for who they are, to relish them and all their quirky neediness, to watch them as if watching a cinematic masterpiece.

A parent staring at his sleeping child, fascinating creature that he is in that eery state of calm, can't help but wonder what he's dreaming of, in what wild ways his subconscious is processing the events and filing the information of his day, to what strange worlds he is traveling, where and with whom he is exploring. It was with great delight, then, that we heard the kid calling casually in the night from the next room over, for the first time revealing what we've always wanted to know : "Mama! There's a movie in my head about a cat who eats everything!!"

Having an 18 month old strapped to your front does not make a winter's hike more comfortable, but it does make it more enjoyable. I like the way the warm air from her nostrils forms droplets of condensation on the top of her pacifier. I like the way she arches her back and cranes her neck to see the snowy trees. I like the way she sleeps, lets me kiss her in her sleep. I like the way she, when finally the end of the hike is reached and she's liberated from the harness, walks like a cowboy staggering into a saloon just descended from his horse.

When the other kid is overcome with joy but feels a bit shy about it, he opens his jaw wide but keeps his lips tight, hiding a grin and making his face long, then looks out the side of his eyes and closes them slowly and repeatedly, batting his outrageously long eyelashes. It's a look that is crackingly sweet, like he's about to burst but doesn't want you to know it. It's a look he shot back to his mother and I, walking behind him, over the shoulder of his grandfather who had just agreed to carry him up the trail a ways.

The golden age of cuteness is between 18 months and 4 years. After that I'm rather convinced kids grow in awkwardness as they stretch out, lose some innocence and struggle to make sense of the world. Still, there are plenty of delights. Like our six year old who is beginning to tell genuine jokes and new bright ideas through his charming toothless grin. And the way he was more than glad to play the role of scout on our hike, leading the way stomping through snow, never once complaining about the hike and instead declaring at its end that he enjoyed it. This is new, he is growing up, and it's a pleasure.

Playing a high-speed matching game with the kid, his little brother asked to join in. He did much better than I expected, and with each match found he raised his fist triumphantly in the air, shouting between giggles, "I WON!!!" But he was just as excited for the others, shouting to me each time I found a match, "You won, papa!!!" sometimes with an enthusiastic hug.

Besides dreams, another subject of parents' curiosity is what the kid talks like on the playground. Childish playground banter is inherently selfish and absurd, defying logic and ultimately determined by who insists most strongly, or most cleverly, or with the threat of the worst force, or by who wins the most admiration according to any given criteria du jour (ie coolest shoes, best Pokemon cards). What makes all of this even more fascinating for us, of course, is that the only playground banter our kids know is in French. So when it was time tonight to decide who got out of the bathtub first, the kid employed playground rule. His version of eenie-meenie-miney-mo is Scooby Doo est malade, mentioning something about the hospital being closed and ending with an inevitably rigged 1, 2, 3. When I insisted it fell on him so he must get out, he quick-wittedly claimed "Mais non, ça a rebondit sur lui !" pointing to his brother and then adding in what should have been obvious explanation with a shrug of the shoulders, "C'était invisible." And as they got out and played with the whirlpool forming in the drain, the kid said in his show-off voice, "Mais attends, regarde, je vais faire un truc de malade !!"

And what's most meaningful is watching a bond form between siblings. Amidst fights and giggles and wrestles and tricks and games and scares and jokes, the strongest of bonds is forged. The girl scoots in to sit in the lap of her biggest brother, or she sits next to him and gently rubs his back. Or at bed time, we overhear the sweetest sound of the other kid employing his most nurturing voice, calming his sister who cries, singing her a song until she agrees to settle. It's in the way they say good night to each other as they crawl into bed, they way they greet each other with a good morning as they rise.

All this is sacred. All this is vacation.