Day +883: Street fair!

Exactly two years and five months since transplant day. Still looking forward to that three-year anniversary, but thankful that Mina is doing so well. She's getting to be such a big girl, very mature. There are only three four-year old girls and Mina's school this year, and she's never really been friends with one of them. Anika is her best friend now, but they only go to school together on Fridays. Mina has mostly been playing with herself on the other days, and was complaining about it a bit to Keri. Keri suggested that she ask if some of the younger girls would play with her. Mina thought that was a great idea, so now she's saying that she has some new friends at school. She said she never thought of that before.

Anika was able to come to school on Thursday this week because one of the other kids was sick, and Mina ended up going to her house for a playdate after school. She said they played dressup and princess and baby all afternoon. Isaac was sad that he didn't get to go, but he came home and built the train track almost all by himself (Keri helped him a little), and sat happily in the middle of it for an hour making his trains go around and around. Keri said Mina and Isaac were very excited to see each other when Mina got home. Mina ran right over to Isaac and asked him what he'd been doing all afternoon. He said "Nothing" and then proceeded to tell her about the trains.

Mina and Isaac were talking at breakfast the other day about their houses. Isaac said his house is far away from ours. But we can came to visit him and he will come to visit us. And we can stay for a week when we come to visit. Mina said her house is close to ours. It's so close we can walk. Knowing both of their personalities, I was thinking that this was probably a pretty accurate preview of how things will end up. I'll be curious to look back at this in 30 years and see if things really turn out that way. Isaac is also at that age where he is asking the funniest questions. The other day he asked me "Why do I have a head?" He's also been asking what would happen if he didn't have a head.

Isaac's birthday is coming up on Monday. Hard to believe he'll be three. Mina's third birthday was such a huge event, kind of a "coming out" party with the big extended family at Teri and Brent's. For Isaac, we're going to Train Town in Sonoma with Rich and Olgica. We're also taking along Bliss and Austin, Melissa's kids. Isaac doesn't care about having a big party, but I think the trains will be a big hit. I feel I've been more connected to him lately, and more able to focus on the both of them. Mina still does demand a lot of my attention, but the gender thing will be an increasingly important factor over the years. Isaac loves to watch baseball and football on TV, and he's always asking questions about it. "Why does the pitcher pitch the ball?" "Why does that man try to catch the ball?" "What does the umpire do?" He's still very into the garbage man. When Uncle Brent was here, he scooped up Isaac and ran outside while the garbage man was there so Isaac could talk to him. One day Isaac said he wanted to get in the garbage truck and drive away with the garbage man, and then we wouldn't have two kids anymore. But when I looked sad, he said that's OK, he would come back at the end of the day and be our son again. He's still filling up paper bags or plastic bags `with blocks and other "garbage" and heaving them onto our bed, which is his garbage truck.

Isaac has been getting lots of guitar time lately. His blue guitar pretty much broke down over the summer, so Keri bought him a new one a few weeks ago. He was very happy to have it, because he'd been missing his old guitar. Keri asked if we should get him a new one for his birthday, but I thought since he got the old for Christmas, we should just replace it and get him something else for his birthday. His new one is quite nice, much sturdier and with strings that can actually hold their tuning for more than a few minutes. It's a guitar you could actually play, though it would be pretty small for a grownup. He's way into other instruments too, and he loves doing the cello motion. He holds his left hand up in the hair and wiggles his fingers, then moves his right hand back and forth across his chest and says "What's this?" "It's a cello." Sometimes he says he wants a cello for his birthday. He tells Keri, "It's an IN-strument." He has also been saying he wants a fire truck for his birthday. Preferably one that he can ride on. That's actually been his most common request. But lately he's been asking for a banjo. (He's actually getting the fire truck, a wooden one with two firemen and a movable hook and ladder, but not one he can ride).

The banjo has been on his mind a lot because we went to the "Heart of Cole" street fair last Sunday! It's a one-day event held on two blocks of Cole Street, just a couple of blocks from our house. There were a couple of food booths, and lots of arts and crafts. Lots and lots of handmade jewelry, high-end but somewhat funky. Very San Francisco. The best part about it was the music. They had several excellent performers, and we listened to a lot of music. Rich and Olgica came into the city with Niko and Baby Lenka. I took Mina and Isaac down while Keri got some stuff done at the house. Then Keri picked up Mina to go to Bliss's 5th birthday party in the mid-afternoon, so I just had Isaac to watch. We had a ball. The first thing we did was sit down on the street right in front of a guitarist playing really excellent Delta blues. Isaac noticed right away that he was wearing finger picks and was picking his guitar rather than strumming it. Isaac asked several times "Why is he not going like this?" while doing a strumming motion, and "What is he wearing on his fingers?". He also was playing slide guitar -- pressing the strings with a little round plastic device on his left hand and sliding it up and down the frets rather than making chords -- so of course Isaac was asking about that. Later on we saw a big bluegrass band complete with fiddle, banjo and upright bass, and a three-man band with guitar, fiddle and banjo. The best part of all of it was that the performers were standing right there on the street, so we could literally watch them from a few feet away. At one point later in the afternoon the adults had decided that we would head for the playground, but on our way out, we saw the three-man band and stopped to watch them for a while. I decided I didn't want to rush Isaac to the playground if he was happier watching the music, so I just asked him what he preferred to do. He said he wanted to stay there and watch the music, so I was happy to oblige. I don't want to force the music on him if he wants to do something else, but I figured he can go to the playground any old day, but he can only watch live bluegrass on Cole Street once a year. Niko was happy watching the band too, and in fact he fell asleep on Rich's lap, so it all worked out.

So today I took Isaac down to the music shop on Haight street and got him some finger picks. I'm not sure how well they will work on his little fingers, but he's very excited about them and he spent half an hour or so after we got home picking his guitar. It will be a long time before he really figures it out, but he had already learned how to make a good strumming sound using the thumb pick.