I think I am at the apex of my park decade.

Sometimes I think I’m losing my hearing.

Like an old lady. Like a little girl who’d selectively like to hear things other than her mother’s voice. Like I went to too many loud grunge metal shows during the spirit-filled hardcore stage in my life.

Yes, I really do think I experienced a little hearing loss from not wearing earplugs (I would have heard just fine through them) and standing too close to the speakers and the stage (it isn’t as if I could have understood what they were saying anyway); and, maybe, just possibly, I got clocked in the side of the head being only one of a couple girls who would brave a mosh pit back in 1991.

Yikes, that got really personal really quick.

But even if my hearing is a little damaged (not so much that it impairs, but enough that sometimes I blame in on Chad and tell him he is mumbling), I seem to have perfect hearing when it comes to my kids.

I can hear a Cheerio drop on the kitchen tile from the third floor of my house. I can distinguish between a squeal of actual pain and the all too similar squeal of frustration from someone taking someone else’s scooter in the back yard. I can hear a quiet “Mama” at 1 am from a little-girl bedroom down the hall.

And I can hear every single tiny cheese cracker tumble from the ziplock bag as Naomi turns it over in my (once-a-year) clean car.

And I can hear the pain in her voice when my six-year-old looks tells me about injured feelings. I can hear the hurt in her eyes. It’s loud and distinct. I can distinguish the fatigue in my toddler and all she knows how to do at 7:30 at night after a big day is scream at me or her sister. I can hear her tell me she needs to sleep.

I hope that I will still be able to hear them as I grow older. I’ll have to listen between the words and mumbles coming from teenaged-mouths someday. There will be much more important things to hear than a request for water in the middle of the night. I want to be there to hear the big things, with my hearing (hopefully) undamaged.

Mr. Rogers once said,

The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.

I believe that. Honesty is easy and free but might be the most valuable thing on the planet. Like time, or integrity, or honor…it doesn’t cost much to tell the truth. In this dipping economy, when the price of oil and corn and bread is skyrocketing and our homes are plummeting, something free is refreshing. Honesty.

How hard but how simple.

I had to be painfully honest this morning with an amazing friend. Not painful for her, but for me. The kind of honest that only left me out in the open, exposed and ready to be plundered. But she was beautiful about it and, she said, respects me more for my honesty.

I am hoping that this strengthened our friendship.

And when the price of gas reaches 10 dollars a gallon someday, at least there will still be a few cost-free things, like time and friendship and an “honest self.”

Mr. Rogers is simply rewording an overused cliche, “The best things in life are free.”

Yesterday, Hope got an award.

I think it is seeing someone how they want to be seen.

She’s broke.

And even though her father and I have created a bank account in her name that will slowly gain financial ground as she grows, she still doesn’t own this either. I still hold all the rights to this money.

Weeding. Purging. Downsizing. Filtering….

I have stuff. Lots of it. I often have a difficult time knowing what to get rid of and what to keep.

There are complete seminars on what to keep, what to file, what to shred, when to sell something, when to give it away, and I am sure an organizing company would have a blast in my garage.

But I am not talking about old mortgage bills.

What about watercolor paintings,
and dried up flowers picked from the garden;
the crayon scribbles of a 2 year old who is growing quicker than I can bear,
a little dress they both wore too briefly,
first attempts at name-writing,
Kindergarten awards and ribbons,
a sea shell chosen specially for me and presented with sandy fingers,
a world made of construction paper and tape,
and a play-dough horse.

I have piles and boxes of child-created treasures, and non-valuables that have become valuable because of the little-girl giver.

And I’ve only been a mother for six and a half years.

She runs up to me two days ago as we are packing up to leave from our vacation with a flower in her hand. She’s picked it from the bed in front of the house we’ve made our home for a week. We might never come back here and here she is, this little-girl giver, with a piece of beauty in her hand for me. Her mother. She says something in her full-fledged, child-unfiltered emotion…

You are the best Mama in the world.

I still have this little beach bloom. It is shriveled and dead and it reminds me of the ocean, and my daughter and her open heart.

How long do I keep it before it is dust?

So many memories are tied to physical things, like newborn dresses and tiny shoes, and faded crayon drawings.

So how do I weed through it all, the piles of reminders of my babies, now so tall and big and summer-tanned. My memories fade so quickly and I forget so much.

I’ll keep some of it, I imagine, and discard the rest. And someday, when these little-girl givers are women, I’ll befriend them as adults and keep the baby-memories that are only mine.

I am learning that my discipline (or laziness) as a mother profoundly affects my girls.

When I am having a productive day (i.e. clothes are getting folded and finding homes in drawers, dishes are clean and counters are wiped), my girls seem to be more relaxed in their play and they seem more willing to help in their daily chores.

When I am having a less disciplined day, it seems like all hope is lost for each of us. The girls argue over toys in a messy living room, they can’t find the floors beneath the piles in their bedrooms and I am simply frustrated. I sit down and read a magazine. Or lock myself in the bathroom to escape the screaming.

Summer by nature breeds a lazier attitude. If it is difficult for me to be focused, I can hardly blame my six-year-old for not wanting to do her vacation workbooks.

I found a Kindergarten-First Grade bridge workbook divided into 8 weeks of activities. If she does two pages each day Monday through Friday, she will finish by the end of the summer. She also must write one sentence every day and learn two spelling words each week. But doing anything every day is difficult for even a mother.

How often do I want to put off unloading the dishwasher, or exercising when I am less than motivated? How often do I let papers pile at the edge of the kitchen, waiting for some child to run by quickly and knock them to the tile?

I’ve even given her a mid-book incentive as well as a end-of-book reward as well. She doesn’t fight me when I ask her to do it; in fact, she is excited to complete something. But, I forget and then she has to make up 2 or 3 days worth of work that I have neglected to remind her to do.

At the age my kids are at, the responsibility falls only on me. I know that they will grow and take more and more ownership of their own work. But right now, any lack of discipline that I might have affects my girls.

I am learning to be consistent and understand (even at my late age of 33) that there are just some things that must be done each day. Make my bed so I don’t go crazy. Do the dinner dishes. Run or workout so I don’t lose my mind (is insanity a theme here?).

And even though I am so far less than perfect, I am trying to impart that to my girls. It doesn’t always work. But I guess we are all learning. Even in the summer.

It was one of those things that I hadn’t realized that it was a last until a week after it a had happened. So I missed it. I didn’t cherish it. I didn’t mourn it.

You know, lasts. Some are welcomed (last diaper change, last jar of baby food). Some are regretted (last time I can pick her up, last push in the stroller, last moment of nursing a baby).

This one flew by me without me noticing.

Up until now Naomi has been in her baby crib. She hasn’t attempted an escape yet even though she is able, and truly, it has been easier with her in a crib. When we left for vacation nearly 10 days ago, I brought a toddler cot for her. In a room that she shared with her big sister, she slept on this cot in a sleeping bag.

She was free! No crib bars. Nothing keeping her in or caged.

I was sure she’d get up in the middle of the night or have to be forced to take a nap during the day. Not at all. She took her naps willfully and went down most evenings without a peep.

Was it this easy? Transitioning her out of a crib?

Yesterday, when we got home, I begged my exhausted husband to assemble Hope’s old toddler bed for Naomi. She’d been successfully out of a crib for over a week; I wasn’t going to jump backwards and put her back in. By eight o’clock he had the little bed frame finished and her crib disassembled.

As I made up her “big girl bed”, and Chad took the crib out of the room, I realized that I would never lay my baby down in her baby crib again. Never. She was done with the “babyness” of it and she was excited about being a big girl.

Her last night of sleeping safely cocooned in a crib was over and gone and I didn’t even know it had happened. A week ago Friday, to be exact.

I was a little sad as I tucked her in, with a new pillow, and her quilts all around her. But she was happy. With the elation of her new bed, she seemed to have forgotten about her binkys as well. She didn’t even call out for them last night. That might have been a last too.

She slept all night last night without getting up. And she took a nap this afternoon too. No crib. No binkys.

Maybe I should have been more aware of the lasts as they were happening. Right now her two-year-old life is full of both lasts and firsts. Its hard to keep track of them all.

Or maybe I should just keep pace with her and be as excited as she is about the firsts.

Bear with me. I am not Cindy Beall (thanks for upping the ante), or Mandy Thompson (the whiz at amateur film-crafting) or Annie Downs (the funniest girl I know…”I’m Dyin’ Here!).

But I did try my first EVER video blog. My last day of vacation and my first video blog.

Watch for it…a bug really did fly up my nose on my first video blog.

Moss Landing from Sarah Markley on Vimeo.

Don’t worry. There won’t be many more of these. I am really not good at it. I am much better with a keyboard in front of me.

As you are watching this, I will be leaving the coast and driving down the middle of California. Through Salinas (can I get a shout-out for John Steinbeck), then Paso Robles (where I had the best dinner ever with my great friend Lisa), down through San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and then on to the sprawling city we call home.

I am not a born-swimmer. My husband is.

My earliest memories of swimming swirl around the trauma of being forced to jump off of the high dive in summer lessons. Its part of a recurring nightmare I have. I did learn how to swim, however.

Even though my husband really hasn’t worked out since 2003, all he has to do is jump in a pool, and it all floats back to him. Like riding a bike. He can swim 20 laps, no labored breathing, perfect kick-turns, and longer arm strokes than you’ve ever seen. He’s got the endurance of an albatross and he doesn’t have to work at it.

I haven’t swum for exercise in about 5 years (at which time I was going through a brief sprint-triathlon phase) and when I did, it took me several months to build up endurance. For a very short time, I was good (not great) at it, but after nearly drowning in a 1/4 mile swim at the top of a mini-tri at Hermosa Beach, I gave it up (think: murky freezing water, a hundred other people splashing and kicking and a medic on a jet-ski floating nearby so that no one REALLY drowned).

I run almost daily, but swimming is different. It takes vastly different muscle groups and….its just different. The breathing is different, the concentration is different, and the burning in my shoulders is much different. I’m not born for it.

There is a pool here in the condo complex that is heated to about 80 degrees (a must since most of the week the air has been in the 50s). Chad has been taking Hope swimming every morning that we have been here in Monterey. He came back the first day eyes gleaming and proclaiming how he’d begun to swim again. There was no one in the pool so he just did a few laps! His arms and shoulders were tight, but it felt good. He was going to do it again tomorrow.

And he did. Like I said, he hasn’t worked out regularly for a long time, but he’s swum laps in the pool every day this week. I’m proud of him.

Yesterday, when I decided to brave the pool with the rest of the group, I thought I might swim a few. How hard could it be? I run and lift weights a bit. I haven’t been eating that well lately, but really? I could do this.

The form came back instantly, but the endurance didn’t. By the end of lap no. 2, I was breathing heavy and my between-breath strokes were becoming more and more difficult. Two laps!! This isn’t even a regulation pool with who-knows how many meters between edges. Regardless, I squeezed out 10 more laps with several breaks to catch my breath. I felt like I had just sprinted down the beach in a full-speed run.

I was adequately humbled and at the same time incredibly impressed with my swimmer-husband.

I did another 12 laps again this morning. Just 12. In a pool that isn’t laned for lap-swimming, I had to dodge an obstacle course of 4 year olds with water-wings, my own goggle-faced daughter, and the elderly ladies who floated around the pool like buoyant grey-haired Tinkerbells around a fairy ring. Every time I turned around to do another lap, it seemed like everyone had switched places.

Even so, I finished. I wonder if I’ve gotten too used to running; if swimming once a week wouldn’t do me some good.

I do know that I am impressed with my husband, with his ape-length arms built for a freestyle stroke. And I know that if he can work out in the pool (at our gym of course without the hazards of a community pool), then I can jump in once in awhile too.