Olympic Fiasco

Another month rolls by and more adventures and misadventures to share. The latter category is always more interesting, so I'll start there. During the Olympics, Ryan and I fell into the habit of staying up late to see whatever sports drama was unfolding that night. It's a painful habit when you have little ones that are relentless early birds, but somehow the Olympics suck us in every time. The morning after one of these late nights, Ryan says he has to tell me something that happened after I had gone to bed and "not to freak out." The last time he prefaced a story with directions "not to freak out" was when his school had gone on lock down after it was discovered that one of his students had brought a sawed-off shotgun to school--and it was in his classroom! Obviously, I'm immediately nervous. He begins to tell me how he had fallen asleep on the floor with the TV and lights on, and was awoken when he heard what sounded like someone trying to open the door on the front porch. Since it was a nice night, we had left the main door open and locked the security screen door. He went to the door and turned on the outside light and a black man (I only mention the race because it matters later in the story) was standing on our porch and had been looking in at Ryan. Ryan asked what he was doing there, and the man told him he was a neighbor and kept asking (in what Ryan later described as a syrupy sweet voice) "Don't you remember me, man?" Since Ryan had never seen him before and the guy wasn't answering Ryan's questions, Ryan told him to leave and that he was calling the police. The guy waited a few moments and then left. Of course, the seeming randomness of this whole incident left us feeling like maybe our little "up-and-coming" neighborhood wasn't the best choice and that maybe we should look for another place. The next day when we mentioned the incident to our neighbor she just chuckled. She explained that the previous tenant, a gay man, had sometimes trolled the neighborhood looking for a fling. Our late-night visitor had probably just been one of those flings. We had never met the previous tenant, so I asked our neighbor if Ryan looked like him. Her response was that all white people look the same to black people. :) Anyway, the pieces all seemed to fit--a late weekend night, a drunk guy talking in a sweet voice not wanting to be overt about his purpose, his dejection when Ryan told him to leave. It was no longer so random or alarming. Fortunately, we haven't had any other late night visitors since.

In the adventures category, every week we're checking off a few of the places on our to-do list and adding names to our celebrity sightings list. Two weeks ago we were at a children's park in Beverly Hills pushing Kieran in a swing next to Molly Shannon. A week before that Ryan had seen the big guy from Everybody Loves Raymond at another children's park near our home. If my job search doesn't produce some results soon, I may have to become a part-time paparazzo.



In other milestone news, Haven officially began crawling today. She had perfected the commando crawl over the past month and 4 days before her 6-month birthday decided she would evolve to the next level. Today we took her and Kieran to the L.A. temple in Santa Monica and let them play on the sprawling lawn there. Surprisingly, she loves playing in the grass, and her chubby knees and onesie were covered in grass stains. Kieran ran endlessly and quickly fell asleep in the car on the way home, which was the main purpose of our trip. He's begun asking lots of questions. My favorite is "What doing, mom?" He only asks that about 100 times a day. He's also taken up growling any time he's embarrased or doesn't know what to say. It's cute now, but I'm hoping he finds another coping mechanism before his teenage years.

Below are some pictures from over the past month:

1) The kids and I making modern art at The Getty

2) Kieran surrounded by all those things he loves

3) Ryan, Haven, Kieran & George (the monkey--or "tether" as my dad calls him) at the L.A. Zoo