Monaloca

We don’t always celebrate Easter with extended family, but this year my sister and I decided to join forces with our parents, and also to link the festivities to Ella, Nalani, and German’s birthdays. (Ok, really Ella and Nalani’s, but since German now shares his with his youngest child, we really must raise a cheer to his, er, barely-40-something years.)

To make it even more of an extendo-family event, my mom invited our cousins Aaron and Anne-Marie to dinner on Saturday. Only Aaron was able to make it, but we had fun catching up and reminiscing, and bachelor Aaron seemed to get a kick out of watching our five young ‘uns run themselves ragged in endlessly energetic circles. (He also got a kick out of getting to go home without them.)

As for the kids, they had a blast. Ella and Nalani followed each other around like personal homing pigeons, and Nalani asked to play with Ella again as soon as we arrived home. All five of them took turns climbing Grandpa’s ladder to pick oranges from his tree. Nalani watched the older kids climb over the course of the weekend, and you could almost see her taking notes, 2-year-old style. About an hour before we left, she walked over and straight up to the second-to-top rung. Grandpa helped her pull down two oranges.

We literally had to pry Melina away from cousin Lucas and the wonders of Grandma and Grandpa’s backyard. On the way home, she said “We can play at our house next time instead of Grandma and Grandpa’s, as long as we get a deck and that part that drops down [into a strip of plants between the deck and the back wall].” They were making leaf and flower soup at the time, in the same spot against the back wall (there was no deck then) where Stacie and I made countless mud pies during our own childhood.

Earlier, when we strolled over to Kirk Park (formerly Kirk School), I held Nalani’s hand as she walked along the same three brick walls I would balance on to and from school, nearly every weekday from kindergarten through fourth grade. And while the kids swung on colorful monkey bars and slid down recycled plastic slides instead of the stark metal ones from my youth, I looked at the backdrop of my old third-grade-classroom-turned-rec-room and the field that now sports several BBQs and a picnic grounds in one corner, and wondered how all those trees in the middle got so tall in the short time it’s been since I left and the school was converted into a city rec center. Then I realized that “short time” is probably close to 30 years, and wow, I really am getting old.

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