Honeybee update.

The bees are flying. And if you look very closely at some of these pictures, you might be able to see little yellow-ish sacks of pollen on the backs of some of their hindlegs. See them? Although, that might also be sawdust, which apparently some bees were mistaking for pollen in these last weeks of winter, when it was warm enough for them to fly but hadn't been warm for long enough for the trees and flowers and plants to be producing pollen and nectar. But they're only nibbling at the pollen patty that we put in their hive, so they must be getting something from somewhere these days.

Little A is obsessed with the bees right now. Whenever we come and go through the backyard, she says, "Oh, bees wake up!" or "Oh, bees sleepin'" depending on whether they are out of their hive or not.

We spend what feels like hours -- but is more like minutes -- drawing bees on the blackboard and on the sidewalk.

"See?" I tell her. "The bees go to flowers and get nectar and pollen and then they take it back to their hive and they make honey!"

This gets repeated many times a day. It's sort of a "story" for her and it serves to assure me that keeping bees in the backyard is helping her learn something. Something about production? Or supply and demand? Or the natural world? Or the cycles of the seasons? Well, something more than just this:

Whenever I get close to the hives without a bee suit on -- such as when I took the pictures above -- Little A tells me "Be really careful. Stand back. Like me. Bees get in your face. Stand back. Like me. Like me!" And eventually I must respond to her commands and move to the other side of the yard with her. She hasn't yet been stung -- we don't think, anyway -- but she knows from our own warnings that we need to be cautious around the bees. Respectful.

The other evening when we were drawing the bees on the chalkboard and when I got to the end of my explanation of how they make honey, A turned to me and said, "Share?"

"Yeah," I said, half-laughing. "They sort of share with us."

"And we sort of just take it from them," I said under my breath.

It's a tricky dynamic, I suppose, and not one I'm likely to get into with a two year old. We sort of help the bees, but mostly we just contain them, and they're really industrious so they make a lot of honey -- more than they could ever eat -- and so we take the "extra." (Or we plan to -- we'll have to see how they do this year.)

But she's just two and we're talking a lot (A LOT) about sharing these days, so the lessons about symbiotic versus parasitic relationships and insect self-awareness and top-down and bottom-up power structures are going to have to wait.

In the meantime, we'll eat honey. Fingers crossed.

My MINE! Phase

For a day or so, two-year-old A has been dragging around a copy of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and insisting, "My book."

The first few times she declared it "hers" and started paging through it, my husband and I were charmed and our thoughts, comments, and questions showed it.

"She's so advanced!"

"A real feminist!"

"What do you think the impact of the first person point-of-view is on the reader-narrator relationship?"

Mostly A responded with "My book!"

We've been struggling a little with the whole notion of "mine" these days. I heard an Early Childhood and Family Education teacher once say that the "mine" phase was a necessary evil to get to the sharing stage. After a whole day of "My coat! My foot! My dog! My potty!" I find the "mine" phase mostly just evil.

The worst, perhaps, are the public "mine" meltdowns.

A and I make two or three visits a week to our local food co-op. (I know, food snobs. Feel free to hate us.) She genuinely seems to look forward to these trips. Mostly, her enthusiasm is because of the "tiny cart," as she calls the child-sized metal contraption that she gets to push around the store. I consider this these carts to be a blessing (I need to get her excited for our semi-weekly trips) and a curse (I spend much of my trip herding her along the aisles and making sure she doesn't ditch our tiny cart-full of food when she realizes there are samples available in the cheese department).

But the real problem with the tiny cart occurred the first few times I let her use one. At first, when she realized we had to leave it near the front of the store and could not bring it home with us, she was mildly bereft. "My cart," she mumbled as she watched from over my shoulder as it disappear behind the sliding doors.

"It belongs to the store," I explained. She was easily talked off the ledge. That time.

The next time, however, we returned the tiny cart to the otherwise empty corral just in time for another little boy to lay claim.

"My cart!" A screamed. She arched her back. She struggled against me trying to physically calm her with my arms already loaded with groceries.

I was confident that most of my fellow food snobs heard her scream all the way to the car. In a quieter moment, away from the immediacy of the cart and the food co-op and the little boy who had "taken" "her" cart, I tried to explain that the carts belong to everyone.

"We take turns," I explained because taking turns is something that she seems to understand better than "sharing." Taking turns is immediate, concrete. Your turn. My turn. Your turn. My turn. Whereas "sharing" is so abstract. Do we use it at the same time? Who does it really belong to?

After a few more trips to the co-op (during which she didn't have to witness someone actually taking "her" cart) and a few more calm, away from the moment discussions, ("If you want to use the tiny cart, you can't cry." "The cart is for everyone." "We take turns.") it finally seemed to sink it.

"Tiny cart," she'd say. "Take turns. No cry." And she seemed fairly happy about it.

But now I had this Margaret Atwood book to deal with.

One afternoon, I went to pick it up off the counter near where she was enjoying a snack.

"My book!" she declared and pulled it from my hands.

"No," I sighed. "It's Mama's book," as I reached for it.

"Mine!" she demanded in that terrible nasally, whiney, bratty voice.

It's that voice. It's that voice that does it to me.

"No. It's Mama's book."

"Mine!"

It was the voice. It was that I just wanted to put the book away so that it would be on my adult bookshelf (and I don't mean "adult book" in any kind of pervy way) and not buried under nonsensical picture books in which animals talk and everybody spends way too much time counting and talking about colors! It was many things. But mostly, and I'm not happy to admit it, it was not one of my finer parenting moments.

"Look, Ada. It's Mama's book. You don't even have money to buy books. In fact, you can't even read it, much less get the subtleties of Atwood's style and message."

"Mine!"

"NO," I exclaimed. And, no, I don't know why I didn't just let this go. I was turning into some sort of a toddler myself, desperate to lay claim to everything in my small, small kingdom. "This is Mama's book." I gave up on trying to actually put it away. "But you can take a turn with it."

"OK!" she exclaimed, her emotional state flipping like a coin tossed in the air.

"OK," I said. I walked away as she was commenting "birds flying!" as she looked at the cover illustration.

No, I thought. Those are the hats that the women have to wear in the story. You don't know anything about that book, do you? But later I realized that Atwood does call them "wings."

Had I won that argument? Had she learned something about what is and is not hers? I'd like to think that, if nothing else, she might have learned a little something about our separateness. When she was a newborn, I fretted over whether she would "bond" to me, if she would "attach" enough. But now there are days when I worry over her separating from me, over having boundaries between us. I want her to know she is her own person and, just as importantly, I am my own. We must, after all, go through this mine phase in order to understand sharing with each other. I want her to know that her body is hers and my body is mine. That my thoughts are mine. And hers are hers.

And that book, Goddamit. That book is mine.

A Shopping Day in Three Acts

Yesterday morning, Little A and I headed off to Toys R Us in the suburbs. This is not typical for us. We don't often just go shopping -- and especially not to a toy store. But we needed something for an upcoming trip and it seemed the best place to go. They had the thing we wanted. And they also had a lot of other things. A lot. I debated getting something for Little A's play kitchen, but everything seemed so plastic-y and cheap. She doesn't need this stuff, I thought to myself, as I pictured our living and TV rooms, already overwhelmed by her toys. We left with promises of finding more "babies" elsewhere. I am grateful that she doesn't yet understand that things at stores can be bought and brought home.

We went to a nearby mall for lunch and on the way out we stopped in to another toy store, Creative Kidstuff, which is very fancy and pricey. It's the type of place where the people working there greet you and ask if you need help several times. Little A loved playing with the train table and the doll house that were set out. I considered getting her some clothes for her baby doll, but they were really, really pricey. She doesn't need this stuff, I thought to myself, as I pictured our living and TV rooms, already overwhelmed by her toys. I got her a small pack of stickers for $1 and headed out. The stickers will last her for weeks and weeks.

That evening we went to the Midtown Farmers Market. We walked there with Eric. I bought some jam and some vegetables the next few nights. Eric got us some burgers and stir fried vegetables for dinner. We sat out at a little table that even had a seat for Little A, who played for ages with rocks she found on the ground. She said hello to a few neighbors and a few of the farmers she knows. We walked home, our bellies full of food and our pockets full of rocks.

Pilot Design Rocks My Mantel... and My World

The conversation went something like this:

Me: "We need something to fill that space over the mantel piece."
Husband: "Yeah. Also, what time is it?"
Me: "We need a clock in here too."

And then we bumped into each other and we were all, "You put your chocolate in my peanut butter!" and "Your peanut butter's on my chocolate."

Not really. But it might as well have.

We had space. We needed a clock. Enter Pilot Design and Keith Moore, a Minneapolis-based designer and wood-worker who I'd seen around town at various art shows.


His stuff is awesome. (See above clock -- the "splat" on my living room wall above the mantel.) Modern, sleek, functional and well made. Check out his website. Look for the wavy bookshelves. Your mind will be blown.

My husband also got to visit his workshop, which he deemed, "pretty cool" and then tried to explain to me how the clock was made but he was drowned out by me shouting, "Let's hang that thing up!"

I'd love to have his bamboo chests (that sounds weird) for the disaster that is our closet right now. Thanks for everything, Ikea, but your storage "solutions" have become storage "headaches."

It's a Big, Beautiful Machine

Saturday night, U2 played TCF Stadium here in Minneapolis. It was the first outdoor stadium concert in Minneapolis in 30 years. My husband and I were there.

We were the snarky ones in Section 226. I spent a good portion of the night texting sardonic, not terribly clever tweets ("Bono, The Edge, and those other 2 guys are really rockin out." "I thought Bono could keep the rain away by the shear force of his will and the power of his sunglasses.") and shouting cynical comments about the size of Bono's ego into my husband's ears. We "people watched" and played "Suburbs? South Minneapolis? NE Minneapolis? Student? Uptown?" in which we tried to guess where fellow concert goers lived based solely on appearance. Bono, with his entirely leather outfit and sunglasses, stumped us. We don't get a lot of that around here.

So if we were going to be so jerky about it, why did my husband and I shell out 100 plus dollars and sacrifice a night away from Little A? We're not particularly huge U2 fans. I think that somewhere in the basement, I might have a Joshua Tree CD that never made the transfer to the hard drive. Even so, like most Americans, U2 has been unavoidable. It has, inevitably, been the background music to a high school or college memory. So, yeah, U2 has a little nostalgic meaning for us.

But the truth is, we had a great time on Saturday. Yeah, yeah, part of it is that I always have a great time with my husband, no matter what we're doing, but it was a little extra thrilling to be a part of this spectacle. There were 60,000 people out, energized and geared up to partake in a cultural phenomenon. The college girl on the bleacher next to us was beaming excitement like laser beams out of her face. She was so amped up and jittery and gushy, she could have easily been on something. But she wasn't. Her drug of choice was Bono's awesomeness.

We guffawed a little at the foursome entering the stadium, all swagger and soaking up the adoration, to Bowie's "Space Oddity." We sang along to the songs we knew. The stadium floor literally bounced. The rains came. And we stood in it, getting soaked, more or less not complaining. We watched the fireworks from a nearby festival explode behind the stage. We had to leave right before the first encore (see above mention of time away from Little A) but we could hear "Where the Streets Have No Name" as we walked through the nearly empty surrounding campus to our bikes. They riffed a little Purple Rain into "One," as a shout out to local hero, Prince. We biked home in the rain, my husband leading the way as droplets covered my glasses.

That Sunday, we still talked about the show and still marveled at the size of Bono's ego. The man had stood, listening to a crowd of 60,000 people sing his own song back at him and declared it "the most beautiful sound in the world." Really, Bono, really? Your own music being sung back at you is the most beautiful sound in the world? More beautiful than children's laughter? He'd mentioned the Peace Corps and Gabby Giffords and Somalia and Burma. Oh, man, did he mention Burma. (As a side note -- and it's a long random story that I'll post about at some point -- but I can read a little Burmese and someone needs to teach Bono how to pronounce Aung San Suu Kyi. I can do it. I can teach him. Bono, give me a call so that I can help you. Please. Call me.) We wondered, is Bono going to save the world or does he just think he is?

The next evening, while on our family walk, my husband brought up a book he'd read in college: Garcia by Blair Jackson about Jerry Garcia. (Yes, don't worry, I give my husband plenty of grief about his long-haired hippie days.) The thing that fascinated my husband about this book is that it looked at the entire culture and industry that had risen up around this stadium band, The Grateful Dead. Thousand of people followed them from place to place and bought t-shirts and food and transportation (and weed, lots and lots of weed). They had roadies and drivers and techs. There was a lot of money and a lot of jobs. And it all mostly centered around this one guy, Jerry Garcia. He didn't necessarily deal with it very well. In fact, he did a lot of heroin to deal with it.

Of course, this made us think of Amy Winehouse and other musicians (Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Robert Johnson) who flamed out at 27. Can you imagine being 27 and suddenly (seemingly) all of these people and industry and fans are relying on you? One day you were playing guitar in the basement with your buddies or singing at divey clubs and then the next you're performing in front of thousands of people and thousands of people are relying on you, your talent -- not just for their entertainment but, in many cases, for their jobs. That's a lot of pressure. When I was 27, I was mostly reading books and drinking in bars on the Upper West Side while in graduate school.

But not so with Bono. How does "the sunglassed one" not flame out? For one, he's quite a bit older than the artists mentioned above. But my guess is that he has to have a giant ego. He has to know that this entire tour, the whole machine, which costs three quarters of a million dollars in overhead every day even when they aren't actually performing, rests pretty much entirely on his back. No wonder it gave out last summer.

His music, his banter, the performance, the spectacle, it can't alienate anyone. So if it seems, at times, a little hokey, that's OK.

In other words, I get you, Bono. I get you.