Mountain View Weekend

It’s been an idyllic California weekend, though Lucia has the lovely souvenir of a black eye. There is nothing more awful-looking than a baby with a black eye, and she looks distinctly like she’s been in a bar fight. Other parents of toddlers, however, will surely understand that her bar-fight foe was actually a sudden loss of balance while cruising and an unfortunately placed coffee table.

Friday night we drove to Redwood City for dinner at the home of one of Andrew’s co-workers and his wife. Their house was just beautiful, with an amazing backyard that featured a Balinese daybed. Their house was stunningly decorated, full of statuary, textiles, masks, and other paraphernalia from the co-worker’s extensive work-related travels through South America. Needless to say, this couple does not yet have children. Everything was breakable, and stone, and heavy. Nothing was covered in yogurt-fingerprints. Toys were not underfoot. I had to watch Lucia with a hawk’s-eye…and yet I still could not stop her from taking her violent tumble. Poor baby. She recovered quickly, though, but her eye looks just horrendous. Fortunately the fall didn’t break the skin, but she hit just the right spot on her cheekbone to turn the whole area black-and-blue.

Saturday, the Clarks continued their own California exploration by coming to see us in Mountain View. Just like old times, we descended on a restaurant with our unruly group—eight now, requiring a very large table and two high chairs and a lot of extra get-settled time. We chose a Mediterranean restaurant with a mix of Greek and Turkish food, which had a beautiful garden—we ate outside on a gorgeous, sunny afternoon, surrounded by greenery and flowers and a tiled fountain. Lucia and Rowan chattered together for a while and even briefly held hands. Then we all went to our playground for a while and played with the astonishingly large leaves covering the grass at our apartment complex.

And today Andrew, Lucia, and I went to the farmer’s market—it’s nearly 70 degrees, sunny and beautiful, and the trees are all changing color; the market is, we confirmed today, likely the best one we’ve been to; I spotted some climbing vines on the way home with tiny, tiny leaves in brilliant red and orange; Lucia munched on a sample slice of organic Gala apple; and it’s terribly, terribly hard to figure out where we most want to be.

It is almost impossible to complain about Mountain View. This is a really nice place. And though it looks like we might be flying back East on Saturday as we’d originally planned, able to spend Thanksgiving with Andrew’s family and get back to NYC in time for holiday markets and other fun things, there’s a lot to argue for simply staying on here until his project is fully complete. Black eyes notwithstanding, Mountain View wouldn’t be a bad place to spend a couple more weeks.