Copasetic Flow

 Fatherhood is hard! Wait, no it isn’t: I’m literally drafting this missive while quaffing a beer in downtown San Francisco (the Mission actually), waiting for the kid to finish up a class. *Thinks back* Wait. maybe fatherhood is hard? So, “What the hell am I even talking about,” you ask? Here’s an example. It starts with car seats. Car seats are a nightmare! They especially were for one of the kids. I’d plop her in the car seat and she’d start to scream. She hated it! She’d continue to scream until we reached our destination. So, ok, that was hard. Here’s the thing though. In the middle of that we moved to a city with phenomenal public transit, and I quit driving. After that, I just had to hop on the bus with the kid in a wrap. She loved it! I loved it! Except… Some bus rides are forty-five minutes long. And, sometimes? Sometimes the kid wanted to be bounced through the entire ride. That was hard. But other times? On the same ride. The kid abided. The kid snuggled into her wrap up aga

 Daize, the 11 year-old, swam from the beach to the end of a pier in the San Francisco Bay today! She can now officially swim in the ocean, and since she was not the one kid that got to take swimming lessons pre-pandemic, that also means that she can officially swim at all! The whole swimming thing has been a very incremental, very unschooling sort of process. Before the pandemic struck, we were able to cycle one kid through swimming class, the now nine year-old Mota. Meanwhile, because of the one adult per kid requirement, the other two kids, Daize and Tawnse, had to wait—and then pandemic. And that meant, thanks to my lungs, we quit going inside swimming pools. But, all was not lost. Now imagine you're a kid whose dad developed pulmonary embolisms after catching something that looked a lot like SARS-CoV1, then, years later, lost two feet of his intestine because clotting; who also has a grandmother and aunt who had/have Type 1 diabetes. https://t.co/gUoSOqcJ6A — antigrav_kids (@

 Daize and Tawnse made apple pie! It was delicious! But wait! When they started, they didn’t have flour or sugar. Did they come to me to ask if they had the requisite materials, and could I get them? Nope.  The first I caught any wind of this pie business at all was this morning when Tawnse appeared in the doorway to ask where one might find shortening. I replied that rather than looking for shortening one should simply use butter. As she walked away, I heard Tawnse holler to Daise—across the house—”Daize! Can you use butter?” Later, as my partner and I were planning what to do about various things in jobs, with kids, and for dinner, Daize, Tawnse, and Mota appeared again stating that they’d planned their day. I commented that kids-plan-adventure-day was actually scheduled for Thursday mornings.  They stared at me blankly—I haven’t told them about that part of our new schedule yet, but the blank stare gave me the moment I needed to collect my thoughts, realize that my partner and I had