The Aunt from U.N.C.L.E.

During our trip to Virginia, Kiernan got some quality time in with an aunt and an uncle.


My brother Mason (Kiernan codename: MayMay) just graduated from high school in June. I was fortunate enough to be able to go out to Virginia and attend. Everybody seemed pretty happy to have me there, although it seemed that the first words with which I was greeted were often, "Where's Kiernan?"

This is, I'd have to say, as it should be.

Luckily I could tell people that Kiernan would indeed be visiting in August, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother, Wendy. She had two weeks of work in West Virginia and worked it out so that Kiernan and I could spend one of those weeks with my parents. I say "worked it out" because she had to work around the fact that I was terrified of flying alone across the United States with Kiernan. I should say this anxiety is not out of any fear of flying, just of a general apprehensiveness about wrangling a rambunctious boy who is on the cusp of his ___ twos (no modifier before the word "twos" is in any way implied) inside a metal tube for five hours straight...on my own. So Wendy arranged the flights so she would fly with us into Norfolk, turn around the next day and fly to work in West Virginia, come back to Virginia at the end of the week, then turn around and fly back to West Virginia at the end of the weekend with us.

Yes, yes...I know how lucky I am.

At any rate, Kiernan hung out with Mason for the first part of the week, calling him, as I mentioned above, MayMay. We're constantly trying to help Kiernan refine his language, so I spent the days in Gloucester Point, where my dad lives, trying to get Kiernan to say "Mason" clearly. He got it pretty quickly, but to my surprise, Mason preferred the early version. I should not have been surprised. One of the weird sadnesses of Kiernan's unbelievable aptitude with language is the cute versions of words he leaves behind. I'll probably post about this seperately (and more comprehensively) at some point, but one quick example is "Bup." For awhile Kiernan would not say any word that began with a vowel without putting a consonant in front of it. So his Aunt Amy, for instance, was "Mamy". And a request for us to pick him up was, for a long time, "Bup! Bup!"

Wendy and I have this little look of mourning we share more and more when Kiernan leaves behind one of his baby versions of a word for the more accurate, grown-up version. Having seen the way my stepmom Sandi looked whenever someone mentioned Mason going away to college at the end of August, I realized that parenthood is one long road of these types of looks.

Incidentally, it looks as though Mason is holding Kiernan somewhat gingerly, as if he's not sure what to do with him. This is not because Mason is unsure of himself with kids--he's a professional babysitter, among other things. It is because Kiernan is soaking wet, a hallmark of him being outside for more than two minutes.

Actually, the two-minute rule is true when we're in California; he makes a beeline for the hose and his water bottles and goes to work. When we were in Virginia the two-minute rule for getting soaked was changed to the anytime-when-he-was-awake rule. I'm not saying it was humid there, but I couldn't tell the difference between when we were in the swimming pool and when we weren't.

Which was fine with Kiernan. Regardless of what the weather is doing, he wants to be outside.

Later in the week Kiernan got to see my sister, Hope (Kiernan codename: Hope). I absolutely love this picture, because Hope is reading to Kiernan and I just love that.

Kiernan and I--and later Wendy--stayed in the guest room at Mom's house. The guest room used to be Hope's bedroom, and before that it was mine. The bookcase in front of which Hope and Kiernan are sitting still holds a number of Hope's books. As I unpacked our things, Hope and Kiernan just ran around the room playing. Kiernan saw the books and started to pull them off the shelf, asking Hope to read to him. One that he pulled off was a story I had not thought about in years, but one which immediately stirred warm memories in me.

The book: The Monster at the End of this Book.

Hope read the book to him a couple of times, I think, and he was just nuts about it, as you can tell from the picture. He gets such joy out of books. I cannot tell you how happy that makes me.