Liza is now walking. She stiff-legged it into the kitchen from the living room tonight and was all, “O Hai! I jus walking.”

Better news: I’m now officially announcing that her sleep problems are over. We’ve gone for around a month with multiple nights in a row of uninterrupted sleep. We’ve had a few nights of waking, but those were due to travel or sickness, so I’m not counting those. Most nights she sleeps from 7:30 until 6:30. It is a thing of beauty to sleep through.

Best news: Eli is reading. We’ve been checking out books from the library that are first readers and tonight he sat down on the couch beside me and read a book to me that I’d never read to him before. Very cool.

For the first time in over a year, everybody at my house ate the same thing for dinner. I never thought I’d be this excited about a frozen pizza.

It’s been a serious week for us, so in case it’s been serious for you as well, let’s have some fun. And when I say “fun”, I mean “YouTube links to prog rock”. And when I say “prog rock”, I can only mean one band: YES.

I’m a fan of the band, but even I laugh at their spacey lyrics and 70s-tastic costuming. Here, take a gander at a performance of their song “Roundabout” from 1973.

Rick Wakeman’s wearing his sequined cape, Chris Squire has turquoise wings, and the lyrics! “In and around the lake / mountains come out of the sky / and they STAND THERE”! “The muses dance and sing / They make the children really ring”!

And this awesomeness goes on for over eight minutes.

Pick just about any Yes song and prepare to be bowled over by the lyrics. Don’t believe me? Here, try 1978’s “Don’t Kill the Whale”. It weighs in at barely over 3 minutes long, an aberration for a band better known for eight-to-thirty-minute epics.

“If time will allow / We will judge all who came / In the wake of our new age / to stand for the frail / DON’T KILL THE WHALE / dig it dig it”.

A good chunk of the fun is trying to chart the band’s lineup over thirty-five years. They had so many lineups and personnel changes that the allmusic biography page for the band is the longest I’ve ever seen.

This lineup, Anderson Squire, Howe, Wakeman, and Bruford, which actually only lasted for one year, from August of 1971 until August of 1972, is generally considered the best of all the Yes configurations, and the strongest incarnation of the band.

How can you not love a band whose best lineup lasted for less than a year? That’s less than 3% of the band’s life!

Speaking of that lineup, the apotheosis of the band wasn’t actually called Yes, it was called Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. The bassist Chris Squire had the rights to the name Yes, so when the other four members of the “strongest incarnation of the band” got together in the late 1980s they couldn’t use the name. But they certainly could use the same approach to writing music and lyrics!

Every time I hear Jon Anderson plaintively wailing, “Nothing can come between us, you’re a sister of time” I smile, and wonder why the new Doctor Who didn’t use this as their theme song. Who wouldn’t want ten minutes worth of intro credits?

There’s more where that came from, and that’s ignoring their turn as a 1980s pop band.

And if that doesn’t brighten your Friday, then there’s no hope for you.

I wrote this in the car this past Monday. We are home now and glad to be back in our own place.

Stephen and I are driving on this bright beautiful May day. It reminds me of summer days spent at my dad’s parents’ house.

In my mind’s eye I can see so clearly the enclosed front porch of their house: windows on three sides and every window filled with shelves of my Granny’s bright glass bottles. There was a tall iron-framed bed at the far end where I would take naps or just lie there and gaze at the hanging plants fluttering in the breeze.

There were always puppies or kittens or piglets or rabbits or ducks to play with, and once a week while I was there, I helped her run laundry through the ringer washing machine and then hang it on the line to dry. When chores were finished, we’d make cookies.

At night I slept in the tiny bedroom off the kitchen with two photographs of my long-gone great, great grandparents on the wall over the bed. I nursed a secret, much-loved fear of the photographs since it seemed their flat painted eyes followed me around the room. That peachy pink room housed me womb-like in the center of the house. My grandmother greeted me every morning with many loud smacking kisses and declarations that “Granny loves you,” just in case I’d forgotten with the passage of the night.

As I got older I quit doing the grand tour of my grandparents’ houses in the summer and my visits with them dwindled to once a year at Christmas.

When my parents divorced, his parents decided that their divorce was so wrong they felt they had to cut him off completely. My own relationship with my father was so strained, I barely noticed that loss on top of all the others in my family.

While I was in college, my dad and I attended their 50th wedding anniversary party. I remember dressing on purpose to appear as bizarre as possible to their tiny town. They were so glad to see me that my ultra-short white blond hair with the weird thread braid hanging down and my hippy clothes didn’t faze them. And while the rift between them and my father wasn’t healed, there was at least an uneasy truce.

The next time I saw them was after my son was born. Through a serendipitous turn of events, they were visiting my dad while we were in Little Rock to attend a funeral. They were so excited to see three month old Eli. My granny squealed and rubbed his baby fine hair. She held his cheeks and insisted that, “Granny loved him.”

Two years ago at Christmas, we visited with them and I noticed she repeated her stories often. She confused me with my mom and couldn’t remember Eli’s name from conversation to conversation.

Two weeks ago, Dad called with the news that she had had a massive stroke and that time was short.

Stephen and I are driving from Little Rock to Thayer, Missouri today for her funeral. It feels like winding the hands back on the clock. In two generations my family has gone from farmers to city dwellers. The gaps that separate my dad’s family and my own seem so much more than the standard generational ones.

One of my second cousins performed the service for my Granny today. He opened it with his memories of her. I was both astonished and gladdened that some of the memories that he listed where the same as some of the ones I listed above. I came away feeling blessed that I had those times with her when I was a child and happy for those others whose lives she touched.

Today was much harder than I anticipated but for different reasons. It was hard to watch my dad deal with the loss of his mother. His unexpected grief was tougher than I ever dreamed. I saw some of the small town mentality (both good and bad) that he’s dealt with his whole life. I met family that I had forgotten I had and realized that, while my life has gone on, so has theirs. That the emotional distance is the dividend of physical distance, if you let it be. Stephen got to meet some of my family for the first time. Sometimes funerals are the best family reunions.

After we finished at the cemetery we stopped at Mammoth Spring, AR, so named for the very mammoth spring some 50 feet from the side of the road. The water is just as beautiful and clear and cold as I remember. The geese gather at the edges, waiting for bread offerings from tourists. I wonder if my Granny got to visit there often. It seemed her sort of place with beautiful trees and animals all around.

This trip has turned into our summer tour of AR, a bit early. We had dinner with my Dad and my step-mom Linda. We’re headed home now to see Eli and Liza. In the morning, we’re going to meet Dad and Linda for breakfast so that they can see the kids. Then we’re headed to spend the day and night with Stephen’s folks. After having the past week with my mom, this bonus time with almost all of our immediate family seems comforting after the fullness of the day.

Mumsy bought Eli Hungry, Hungry Hippos while she was visiting this last week because he said he wanted that game specifically. After I assembled it and played a couple of rounds with him, I took a break and Mumsy took my place.

“Is that all there is to this game?!?!” she asked after she played.

“Yep, that’s it. That’s four-year-old game play for you.”

A few days pass.

More hippos are hungry and are frenetically fed.

One afternoon Eli’s door is accidentally left open. Liza zips in and when Mom and I find her she is clutching hippo marbles in both hands. She takes one from her mouth and passes it happily to Mom.

We are one marble short from the full 20.

The next two hours are full of us dumping out every bucket in Eli’s room. Every item is picked up and shaken. Every container is opened and peered into. Every cover is shaken out. Eli is questioned and questioned again about the possible location of the missing marble.

I looked up object swallowing on the internet. I felt better after I read that once the object is down, if it’s down, then you should only worry if it’s pointed or acidic, like a battery.

Mumsy was frantically tossing Eli’s room like a burglar looking for jewelry. I took pity on her and called the doctor so she could hear that there was nothing to do for now but wait.

The next morning found us sifting through Liza’s diapers looking for the missing marble. Too bad I haven’t been able to provide as much attention to posting here lately as I’ve given to looking through Liza’s diaper for that marble.

Sometime after lunch the next day, Eli pulls out his scooper truck to play with. I hear his shout of discovery from three rooms away:

“Mumsy! I found the marble!!”

This is the part of the story where I hang my head in shame since tiny things have been “lost” in the scooper before and I forgot to check there when we were going over Eli’s room with the proverbial fine-tooth comb the day before.

For once the giant sigh of relief came from someone besides Stephen or me. Mumsy collapsed on the couch and declared it Happy Hour.

And tomorrow, and the day after, and, in fact, yesterday, too, so instead of content, have a link to Michelle Sagara talking about how being a mother is like being a writer.

It turns out I’m not the only one who thought of George Wallace when Hillary Clinton made her “hard-working Americans, white Americans” comment.

Happy birthday, Liza!

I ranted about politics a lot yesterday. Let’s balance that with some science!

(Say it with me: Science!)

Did you know the Earth might once have had multiple moons? The theory is that, when the Moon was created by the Earth being hit by something the size of Mars, a bunch of other chunks got blasted off, like blood spatter from a GTA4 pedestrian. Some of those chunks could have ended up in the Earth-Moon Lagrange points, areas where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Moon are balanced. Some Lagrange points are stable — think of a marble inside a bowl. Small perturbations won’t knock the marble out of the bowl. The same goes for Earth chunks that might have ended up in some of the Lagrange points.

If that’s too abstract for you, here, have a Flash app that shows the Solar System. You can see the planets and large asteroids orbiting the sun, and the moons that are orbiting various planets. For fun, take a look at Jupiter and its umpty-ump moons. It’s hypnotic.

Dear Hillary Clinton,

I’ve had a lot of sympathy for you. You had name recognition and a commanding lead in the polls before actual voting and caucusing began, and were making history as the first woman to run for President on a major party ticket, and yet you were never able to deliver the knock-out punch you and your gifted chief strategist were hoping for. The presidential nomination that you thought was yours moved ever further away from you.

You were the first student to give the commencement speech during your graduation from Wellesley and were a graduate of Yale Law, working-class roots that are so solid I was surprised to see you drinking beer and taking a shot of whiskey to play up those roots. I winced as your husband blundered about like a Bill in a china shop, afraid that his antics would damage your reputation.

But it wasn’t until you started playing up your gas tax holiday plan — or, rather, your echo of John McCain’s plan — that I started losing that sympathy. “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists”? Really? The economists’ analysis of your gas tax holiday plan is an example of “elitist opinion”? Color me stupid, but I’d like the President to take advice from people who know what the hell they’re talking about instead of going with their gut.

But now? Now you’ve squandered any sympathy I might have had for you.

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she went on to say. No kidding. That pattern is you and your campaign moving slowly from insinuating that Obama is just a black candidate to decrying his playing the “race card” to out-and-out saying that whites won’t vote for him because he’s black.

It turns out that when you were running on your establishment credentials against Obama’s message of change, you were hearkening back to the 48th governor of my state.