In those cases, though it never works, I say in my falsetto voice, “Hi, I’m your mom. I have blonde hair and I’m a girl.” I then try to help him. As I said, this never works. Instead, it starts one or both kids on a project of cataloging all of the proof they can see that I’m not really their mother.

Sunday night, when we were at dinner, we had another one of these incidents. I can’t even remember what it was about, or why Molly was busy. We were all sitting around the table, and Patrick needed something, and he insisted Mom was the only person who could help, and Molly was there but busy, and even though it was hopeless, I said, “Hi, I’m your mom. I have blonde hair and I’m a girl.” And I tried to help.

“You don’t have curly hair!” exclaimed Alex.

“You don’t have abwainhose!” protested Patrick.

I should point out that Patrick’s articulation isn’t great. It’s even hard for us to understand him sometimes. But this one stumped us. Both Molly and I stared at Patrick. “What?” we asked, nearly in unison.

“Abwainhose!” Patrick said.

Molly & I stared at each other, dumbfounded. Was he trying to speak Chinese again?

“Can you say that again, Patrick?” I asked.

“A… bwain… hose!” he said, and pointed to Molly’s pony tail. There it was, a brain hose, coming out the back of her head! We have no idea where he got that expression, but it’s one we’ll never forget! 

Yes, by the afternoon, there was just as much paint streaked on various surfaces of our house as you’d expect.

Saturday morning, I was pumped… I was going to run 10 miles for the first time in my life. But halfway through the run — at a pace and a time I’ve done many times before — my heart suddenly started racing and I felt light headed. I stopped to catch my breath, and I just couldn’t get the energy to get going again. I don’t know if it was a failure of willpower, or if I’d “hit the wall” (I hadn’t had much to eat that morning). Whatever the reason: 10 mile run FAIL. 

Worse: Sunday night was an “adult soirée” sponsored by the Seattle Music Teacher’s Association. I’ve been practicing Bach’s Invention Number 4 for a few months now, so (at the prompting of my teacher), I decided to perform it. The “performance hall” was the lovely Victorian home of a fellow student. We filled his entire first floor. My turn to perform came near the end… third to last. I sat down at the piano, focused, and started playing. And about a third of the way through the piece, I missed something. I can’t remember exactly what I’d done, but I found myself unable to remember what to do next and unable to figure out how to recover. For me, I play by memory because I can hear the music in my head and match my fingers to my internal concert… but there was nothing but silence between my ears. I plunked out a few notes, trying to remember. My arms started trembling violently and it was hard even to press a key down to make a note. Complete failure.

And honestly, I’m pretty excited about it.

Because who’s seeing me fail? These guys:

For better or worse, I know I’m a role model to them in everything I do. So I want to be the best role model for failure I can possibly be. Yup, sometimes I’ll push my lifetime-of-no-exercise body too hard, like Saturday’s run. But I’ll keep lacing up the shoes. And they’ll see me keep practicing piano every day, because I want them to see that’s how everybody gets better at things. But I also want them to know that even if you practice, you’ll sometimes fall down on your face in public. And that’s OK. Just try again. 

I think it’s working, too. When I was practicing piano on Saturday, I hit a wrong note several times and grumbled (loudly!) in frustration. Alex came up to me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t play this right,” I told him.

“That’s OK, Dad!” he told me. “Just keep trying and it will get better. It’s like me and swimming lessons! Last week was really hard, but I just keep trying, and this week was easier.” With those words of encouragement, he went back to playing and I went back to practicing. Yeah, it was a pretty bad weekend: But I’m proud of how good a role model for failure I’m turning out to be!

Postscript, back at the soirée: While I was staring at the keyboard in panic, unable to remember where I was in the music at all, my teacher called out from the back of the room, “It’s OK! You can start again from the beginning.” So I did. I finished the piece the second time, with a few awkward and long pauses where I got tripped up, but I never lost the thread of melody in my head. I’m sure it sounded awful because with my shaking hands and broken confidence, all I wanted to do was finish and spared no thoughts for the nuances of the piece. But I finished. It was horribly frustrating and embarrassing, yet in spite of that, I really wish Alex could have seen both the failure and the recovery.

Every now and then, Alex interrogates me when the music is on: “What does this make you think of?” I have to give him an answer, no matter how much I was paying attention to driving instead of to the music. This must be something that he does in music class at school. Occasionally I can get him to tell me what the music makes him think of. Typical of a six-year-old, the answers are either profound or nonsensical. I can’t decide which. Some of the more memorable:

“This makes me think of a pretty forest, and there’s a girl walking through it. But there’s something scary… there’s a wolf hiding and it’s going to try to get the girl.”

“This makes me think of remembering. Of remembering something that hasn’t happened yet.”

“This makes me think of a happy time, but someone you love has died.” (This is the only one where I remember the music that was playing… one of the movements of Vivalidi’s Summer.)

Because he’s been getting more mature each month, it shocks me when he slides back and has bad days. Saturday was one of those. We decided to spend part of the afternoon learning to ride his bicycle. It’s a struggle to get him practicing. While he has fun while riding (mostly because he can make me run behind him), he’s so scared each time he starts. We offered a bribe of Baskin Robbins to get him out Saturday afternoon. I talked it up… how good the ice cream will be, how I’ll get my favorite — rainbow sherbet — and how much I think he’d like that too.

Even with the bribe he was defiant, short-tempered, and… well, six. (And he had a great time once he started riding.) I don’t know if it was the fear of falling that made him cranky or if something else was making him have an off day. All I know is his bad mood returned at Baskin Robbins, of all places. I don’t even remember what was making him whiny while we were there (I think we were arguing about cups versus cones), I just remember that nobody was having a good time as we ordered. Plus, a little league team was there, so there were no free tables and we had to sit outside in the parking lot. Not a good beginning to what was supposed to be a reward. Alex eventually gets chocolate ice cream with both a cone and a cup, and I get my rainbow sherbet, and we settle down outside.

While we were eating, and trying to turn everybody’s mood around, Alex looks at my rainbow sherbet and asks, “Dad, where did you find that kind of ice cream?”

Thinking he was asking me when I first had it, I answered, “Oh, this has been my favorite since I was a little boy.”

“No… I mean, where did you find it? I looked for it and I couldn’t find it…” He starts looking sad, and Molly and I both realize that he’d been trying to find the rainbow sherbet behind the counter in the tiny, little-league-infested ice cream parlor, when everyone’s tempers were on edge, and he just ordered chocolate because that was the best he saw.

“Alex, I didn’t even look for it because I knew they’d have it. Did you want rainbow sherbet?”

He looks even sadder, and nods his head… and then just breaks down in tears. He was sad in the way that only a little boy can be.

What could we do? We bought a kids cup of rainbow sherbet. Everyone’s day improved. Here he is, double-fisting in the parking lot:

Molly & I won’t forget this weekend for a long, long, time. As a delayed birthday present, Molly had arranged for our regular babysitter to watch the kids overnight on Saturday. We decided to spend our night away at the lovely Inn at Langley. We’d been to Langley once, ten years ago, for their annual Murder Mystery weekend, and I’ve always wanted to return. It’s not far from Seattle — maybe an hour and a half, depending on the ferry traffic — but it feels like another planet. It’s a sleepy little town that overflows with art galleries and amazing views over the Saratoga passage to the Cascade mountains.

We were a little late getting out of the house on Saturday. It turns out it takes longer to get a babysitter ready to spend the night than it does to get a babysitter ready to watch the kids for an evening. Plus, it had been an unusually busy Saturday morning, so we didn’t have a lot of time to pack or prepare beforehand. I glanced at the route on Google maps, and it seemed straightforward: Head to the Mukilteo ferry, then follow the signs for Langley. But I didn’t have time to look at the ferry schedule, so when we finally got everything settled with the babysitter we just started driving north and hoped for the best.

It turns out we had amazing ferry karma. We got to the ferry dock at 3:11 and we got to sneak on the 3:15 ferry. What luck! All during the ferry crossing, we were playing a memory game… when was the last time we rode that ferry? We remembered having the kids with us, because we remembered parking in the ferry lot and walking on the nearby beach. (We saw scuba divers getting out of the water!) But where had we been going? Molly thought we’d been heading to visit my college friend Cynthia, but that didn’t make sense. Cynthia lives by the Hood Canal, and you can’t get there from the Mukilteo ferry. We would have taken the Bainbridge ferry when we visited Cynthia.

We still hadn’t solved the mystery when we got to the other side and started driving. After driving about 10 minutes, I started getting really confused. There were no street signs pointing the way to Langley. The street signs I did see made no sense… Port Gamble? I remembered biking through there and I didn’t think it was on Whidbey island. Signs for Bremerton? Why? We came to one fork in the road — we could go West or South, and I had no idea which one would get us to Langley. That’s when we pulled over and consulted the map on my phone. This is what went through my head, with horror, when I saw the data from the phone’s GPS.

Not only were we far from Langley — we weren’t even on the same landmass! Instead of being on Whidbey Island, we were on the Kitsap peninsula. I muttered, “I could have sworn I was supposed to take the Mukilteo ferry! What happened?” It took another minute or two to realize: Yes, I was supposed to take the Mukilteo ferry, but the Mukilteo ferry isn’t the first ferry north of Seattle. It’s the second! Without knowing it, we’d hopped on the Edmonds/Kingston ferry by mistake. (And, incidentally, the last time we’d taken the Edmonds/Kingston ferry was to visit my friend Cynthia over by the Hood Canal, so the mystery was solved once we knew where we were.)

At this point, we had two not-good options. We could turn around, take a ferry back to the mainland, drive to the Mukilteo ferry, and take it to Whidbey. That wasn’t a lot of drive time, but has two unpredictable ferries. Or, we could drive around to Port Townsend and take the Port Townsend/Coupeville ferry over to Whidbey. A much longer drive, but only one ferry. We decided one ferry was better than two (and for what it’s worth, Google Maps agreed that driving to Port Townsend would be marginally faster.)

We got lucky again in Port Townsend. The ferry had just docked and was starting to unload when we got there. Things still could have been bad: The Port Townsend ferry is one of only two in Washington State that take reservations, and we didn’t have one. What saved us is it still isn’t peak season, so we were able to fit on the small boat.

Once we got over to Whidbey, finding Langley was easy. However, the mistake cost us about two hours, so by the time we got to town the shops were closed. Still, the Inn was nice, we had a nice meal, and we were treated to beautiful weather the next morning. Plus, we woke up gently to morning sunlight on the water rather than by hyper kids jumping in the bedroom next door. So in spite of the mishaps, it was still a nice… no, epic weekend.

Remember this from three years ago?

I wrote at the time:

For two days in a row now, Alex has come home with his face covered in magic marker. It looks like war paint.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that for the past two days, one or both of the full-time teachers in Alex’s room have been out sick.
I have a theory that the toddlers sensed the weakness in the regime, realized they had strength in numbers, and took over.

Well, three years later, there’s another substitute teacher, and now we have this: