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Yesterday was a glorious day, it was cool but sunny and warming. After lunch, it was too beautiful to pass up and it was Tin’s birthday after all, so I took him and Margarete (his nanny) to the zoo and I conducted my business from an outdoor table and chair while they looked at monkeys, elephants and camels. We were late getting home for his nap and had his party to rest up for, but after almost an hour and it being his next feeding time, I crept in his room, gave him his bottle and tucked him back in and he slept gloriously for over an hour!

He woke to see people in the house and a party about to start in his honor. He was a little bewildered, but rested nonetheless.

Then began Tin’s first birthday party. Neighbors and friends, Evan Christopher and John Rankin, set up and played to the delight of all of us. Tin got to meet Evan for the first time in person as he has been grooving to his clarinet on our iPod for the last three months. I think if Tin could talk right now he would definitely say, wow, after seeing Evan play up close and personal and a special happy birthday just for him. What better way to approach your second year of life than with great music, friends, pleasant weather, and a huge cake?

Earlier in the morning Evan had been to a funeral for a friend in the neighborhood, a beautiful man cut down in his prime by a rare form of cancer. Again it was life in the balance swinging between birth and death, between celebration and mourning, between rest and fest. New Orleans has been called The City That Care Forgot, but that is the opposite of what we are, we care about the middle part – the part called life, tucked between the beginning and the end, that is why we are dancing to our graves.

I love my neighborhood and community and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the entire world or universe, but…

Steps off Esplanade, an elderly gentlemen was packing up his car when a derelict grabbed the man from behind and threw him down. The man was from out of town and was here visiting his son, Welcome to New Orleans … for godsakes we forget when we look out at the bayou and talk to our neighbors and hang out on our porches that shadowy figures lurk everywhere and are never really far away.

Thankfully, the man was scraped but okay, but awareness has no respite in our world.

Today is Tin’s birthday and last night when were were reading him his book he mimicked us and said, “Oink oink oink” and then puckered up and blew kisses. He’s a genius we’ve decided. And this morning when I woke him up, it felt like a special day because the sun was shining and it was warmer and it just felt like Tin’s first special birthday.

Tonight we’re having a little party for him – the baby books say to keep it simple, don’t overdecorate, that babies are intimidated at this age. But it’s HIS birthday, our little Prince, so we’re having some local musicians play some tunes for him and have invited others to come wish him well. The only thing we did by the book was get him a carrot cake but we got him a delicious one from Sucre.

Happy Birthday Tin!

I used to announce the California State Lottery in Spanish as a side gig when I was living in San Francisco. I worked with some characters, one of which was a guy who firmly believed in the Chupa Cabra myth. We would argue about this – yes, I know, why? but we did. He brought me a VHS tape to watch and in it was someone dangling a light fixture and he said it was a ship. Right. Anyway, it’s a beautiful day outside and I was sweeping the porch this morning and my neighbors were already in full gear for the Italian day parade (which is, ahem, tomorrow) and we were looking up at the beautiful pale blue sky and there were two giant white puff streaks going in opposite directions (we had both just heard jets overhead). He said his cousin says they are chemtrails. Apparently she is convinced the government is trying to keep us down, keep us from reproducing, and keep us drugged. He told her that the government needs taxes so why would they want us to stop reproducing and she countered, “Why did they put fluoride in the water, same reason, to sterilize us.”  Whatyagonnado?

If people can mistreat their pets, like this article Wednesday in the Times Picayune about a German Shepherd who was starved by a guy who has been arrested before for animal abuse, then what do you think people are doing to animals that are raised for food. Horrific.

I’ve been sleeping so deeply lately that I am actually having dreams of sleeping deeply. Now that’s deep. But last night I dreamt that I was headed somewhere with a friend and said let’s just fly and then I was flying, so easily and gracefully. It was a great feeling. I read that dreams of flight are considered lucid dreams, dreams where you know you are dreaming but are enjoying the dream. And dreams of flight mean you have reached some new plateau in your life where you feel like you are in control of a situation or a new level you have reached.

It’s interesting because tonight I was having this conversation with someone and said that very thing – you can only control things in your own life, and not even most of the things, but if there is one thing I am sure about you absolutely cannot control anything else or anyone else. So why bother?

In yoga today we talked about how there is a time for saying yes and a time for saying no. And discernment is the key to balancing the two. I remember when we were first starting down the path of adoption, we had at one point an opportunity to adopt simultaneously twins and one other baby and that would have meant that we would have entered chaos and never ever had a chance to reflect on it. As it is, one baby is enough to make two mommies go to bed early and try to keep up.

When I went to Whole Foods tonight to get stuff for Tin’s birthday tomorrow, I ran into a few mommies that had multiple children, and the conversations were amazingly interesting as they were monosyllabic soundbytes between the three or more entities. I felt a sense of steadiness that I was going home to one dog, one cat, one son, one partner. Good grief.

There is also a warning sign that goes off in my head when I feel that I am saying yes too much, when I’m letting outside interest in and having other people’s opinions rattling my brain. There is also a time when I feel like I’ve said no too much, no to seeing my friends, no to going out, no to my vices. Discernment is the key. Know what to leave in, and what to leave out. But timing is also essential in fine tuning discernment. Knowing when to and when not to.

I used to have this large color Sunday comic called Bizarro hanging up in my kitchen when I lived in North Beach in San Francisco – it was William Shakespeare at home for Thanksgiving and he was being pulled aside by one family member who was telling him that instead of the play he was writing, he should think about writing this idea, and another family member was standing off in the background talking to another saying that he really didn’t like anything that Will had written, and on and on. Very funny.

Social Security, FDIC and the WPA – what do all of these things have in common – big government. What is big government? It is you and me helping those less fortunate than ourselves. We are the one of the richest nations – do you think it is right that in this country some children are shut out of a good education, good health care, a decent meal? I hope not. This will only take a minute – but it will show that you care about pushing through health care reform:

Take one of the actions below right now to double your impact in just a couple minutes.

1. Call Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid right now and ask him to agree to the Bennet Public Option letter.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: 202-224-3542

2. If you have a Facebook account, update your status with your action: “I’m a co-signer of Sen. Bennet’s Public Option letter. So are 119 House Democrats and 24 Senators. Join us: http://bit.ly/acjcK1”

3. If you have a Twitter account, tweet this to your followers: “119 House Democrats, 24 Senators and I all support passing a public option using reconciliation. Join us: http://bit.ly/acjcK1 @DFAaction”

Today seemed like every conversation veered back to my mother and each time I tried to have that conversation about her from banal to not, I was fighting back the tears. We had a friend over this evening and were discussing the latest rants and musings and our friend said that in life when people, family, behave like a unit it is out of a need to clearly define who is core and who is peripheral and therefore who could be cut out to keep the unit humming.

We talked about friends and about how we abide by our difficult ones because in the end we have meaningful relationships and we talked about how family and friend relationships can be so fragile – so fragile that some snap at the least provocation.

And as I came upstairs to turn off my computer after our friend had left, and to get my list for Tin’s birthday on Friday of things I need to pick up at the store, I read a chilling entry from a cyber friend that her biopsy came back with a not good diagnosis. It has given me pause. My friend who left here just minutes ago had her mother in from out of the country, three weeks after the cancer she was diagnosed with, which looked to be very negative, was removed completely – she was one in 3% of the people who have been able to overcome the diagnosis of this particular kind.

I’m going to sleep tonight to hope for a miracle and good things for my cyber friend. We need more miracles in our lives.