Starting something new is tough. Starting something big, starting something little, starting a new direction; starting is hard. One of the quotes I’ve heard a lot lately in celebration of Black History Month is from MLK: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Sometimes even when you don’t realize it, you may be starting something. Things falling out of place, things falling into place, shifting the pieces around to make a better fit.  It can feel very unnerving, or very – just-right. Or, you might not fully realize it until you’re underway.  But once started, you can never go back.  Change can be hard, but change can be good.

This weekend, we had two great experiences, going to see Step Afrika at Lehigh on Friday and going to the Lehigh Men’s basketball game on Sunday night. In addition, we totally overhauled two rooms in our house.  On the heels of our Adoption Day weekend in Baltimore.

During the completely incredible stepping show, near the end, one of the lead dancers made the message clear. There, in an elite university, in a room of many of the black students on campus, with the leader of the LU Step Team sitting next to my black sons, he said that if there was one thing they wanted everyone to take away, it was to “finish it.”  There was an unspoken sense of meaning in that statement. A sense of something larger than just finishing it, something that was almost palpable in how important that is.

I recorded this with my cell; it’s lousy, but you can hear Kyle cheering in the background and to me that’s so wonderful.  You can’t hear Owen because he’s on the other side of Kyle with his arm around Latoya, the leader of the LU Step team….heartbreaker.

For this white father of black boys, this is what is means when nine elite black college students start and finish it:

At the end of it all though, starting and finishing is just a moment of time. It’s what comes in between the starting and the finishing that is who we are and what our lives are about. And once you grab on to something, there is a lot of rope to pull through before you reach the end.  There is daily work, that takes time and sometimes, lots and lots of energy.

We all know this of course, but it’s the least glamorous, most gritty, gnarly part of going through life.  It’s what we do with the laundry, or the cooking, or getting up and going to work (or looking for work)…again. It’s taking the kids to the doctor for yet another cold, or paying another bill, or figuring out what to do this weekend – do we go grocery shopping, clean, make something for dinner, or make an amazing experience.

I believe there is nobody who knows this better than Heather. She makes starting, finishing and pulling rope one single thing that happens every moment of every day. It’s in her constant effort to create, manage, enjoy and make the most of change for everyone she touches that is such a powerful force.   It is for our family.

We get so much from it, and it certainly takes a toll on her.  But I hope, that this picture is what makes it all worthwhile. Thank you Heather for all you do for our family.

On Monday LU’s Finest (Lehigh’s Step Team) performed at United Friends School (Kyle and Owen’s School). It was awesome! We’ve always celebrated our Adoption Day as a family with something experiential (i.e., an experience, but no material gifts). But this year, Kyle and Owen’s fabulous new teacher at their fabulous new school wanted to bring their Adoption Day into school too. She wanted to treat it as she’d treat a birthday in her class… and we were all (K & O especially) so happy about this idea (and especially about her initiating it! Wow!). And so she asked us what we’d like to do. I knew I didn’t want to bring in cupcakes (the norm, it seems, for 6-year-old school birthdays), and instead do something experiential. What I really wanted was to bring a piece of the essence of K & O into their school. I came up with the idea of bringing LU’s Finest for a performance – as a celebration of K & O’s Adoption Day and as a Kick-Off for African-American History Month. I got the go-ahead from their school, and then I went to work to arrange for our favorite Step Team to come perform at UFS on Monday, January 31 (K & O’s Adoption Day, and also the day before the start of African-American History Month). Lucky for us, I have some connections with the team (!), and they agreed to do it. UFS was so excited about this that they planned an all-school assembly on Monday afternoon so that everyone could get in on the Stepping. LU’s Finest went above and beyond my wildest expectations, and came up with an entire program designed especially for the school. They did many awesome Stepping routines, spoke to the kids about the history and significance of Stepping, did an interactive Stepping lesson/workshop, and then they sat on the stage and did a great Q&A session with the kids. The kids loved it! When LU’s Finest would ask for volunteers to come up on stage, so many kids would want to do it that the stage would be overflowing and teachers would have to pull kids back down to the audience in order to avoid total chaos. It was loud! it was rhythmic! it was alive! it was stomping and clapping and slapping and slamming! it was shouting and smiling! it was full-on-energy-and-energizing! it was completely-interactive! it was fun! You could literally feel the Lehigh kids connecting with the United Friends School kids. It was dynamic and wild and over-the-top! There was lots of laughing and lots of high-fiving. It brought a piece of the essence of K & O into their school. It was the perfect in-school celebration of K & O’s Adoption Day. And the icing on the cake?!~~ about five minutes into the show, who shows up, as a total surprise, standing at the back of the room?!… none other than our old babysitter (and previous Captain of LU’s Finest), our beloved Jessica Jean (click)! It literally took my breath away when I looked up and saw her standing there with her new baby and her man (her baby just happens to be one of the cutest babies I’ve ever seen, and her man just happens to be one of my old students too)! They had come all the way from NYC to be there for the show. It was the best Adoption Day ever!

I could write a novel about today… seriously… but I’m too exhausted to even figure out a clever way to write this blog post. I surely will not be able to do this day justice, but hopefully this will jog my memory enough in the future so that the whole thing will come flooding right back to me. At this point it is hard to fathom that I’ll ever not remember every vivid detail. Seriously. It was one heck of a day.

It started with the dreaded 5:30 a.m. wake-up call: “School Cancelled.” Braydon looked out the window and clicked on the news: “Wintery Mix.” The t.v. stayed on, listing all the cancellations, while we all fell into a haze of semi-sleep and semi-Sesame-Street-viewing. Margie called at 7:30 to inform us that she was not willing to come given the weather conditions. (Today was supposed to be Margie’s first day back.) O.k. This scenario is not always entirely bad, except that today was the first day of spring semester classes at Lehigh. And, of course, Lehigh is never closed. And so, no matter what, I absolutely had to be there for the first day of class. And, at the same time, Braydon absolutely had to be in New Jersey for a big work event that he absolutely could not miss. Every dual-career-couple-without-extended-family-anywhere-in-their-vicinity has been there: that loathsome, dreaded, nightmare of a place: The Snow Day With No Coverage. You look at each other in sheer panic, and you just know that no matter what, it is going to be one heck of a day.

I took one for the team today. I mean, I seriously took a huge one for the team today. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and said the words I never in a million years would have ever thought I’d hear myself say: “I’m going to have to take them to class with me.”

I deserve some sort of prize for even offering up this crazily-selfless-and-above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty-of-a-possibility. But then, folks, I actually ended up doing it: I took all three of my kids to class with me on the first day of class. I deserve some sort of medal, or trophy, or ten pomegranate martinis, or some kind of spectacular prize for having done this. Seriously. Is there anyone out there who gets what I’m saying??? I TOOK THEM TO CLASS WITH ME ON THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS.

First, I loaded them into the car and set out on the icy, slushy, half-plowed, half-salted roads. It was, indeed, a “wintery mix” – snow/rain/sleet/hail/freezing-rain all coming down at once. The roads were a mess. I was white knuckled as I drove 20 miles per hour the entire way with “Toddler Tunes” blaring in the backseat.

We got there and I trekked them across campus, slip-sliding away in the icy mess, to find the building. And then we entered, all four of us, into the classroom… to 30 sets of undergraduate eyes staring up at me in total disbelief. Yes, today I was that professor: the one who brought her kids to class on the first day of class.

And you know what happened? My three bambinos – two of which I don’t trust fully anywhere anytime for all the obvious reasons, and the third of which WHO IS ONLY TWO YEARS OLD – my three bambinos did their mama proud. They were shockingly, unbelievably, glistening-gold-absolutely-perfectly-PERFECT the entire 1-hour-and-fifteen-minute class. I kept waiting for disaster to hit. And it never did. They sat there quietly and completely non-disruptively the entire time. I was shocked. And of course the students loved having them there.

When we left class I was ecstatic. I mean, ecstatic. I could not believe how well they had done. It was also noon, and they were very hungry, and sheets of sleet were falling from the sky, and they said: “Mama, can we please eat lunch on campus?”… and at that moment, honestly, I probably would have done absolutely anything they had asked. And so, against my better judgment I went out on a limb and I said: “Sure!” And I took them where they wanted to go (K & O had eaten there once before): The Faculty Dining Room. Call me crazy. It was a crazy idea: me, alone, with all three of the, in The Faculty Dining Room.

And you know what happened? My three bambinos – two of which I don’t trust fully anywhere anytime for all the obvious reasons, and the third of which WHO IS ONLY TWO YEARS OLD (yes, I know I already said that, but it needs to be repeated) – they once again made their mama proud. They were on their best behavior, charming all the waitresses, and pulling out all the shots to be uber-polite and well-mannered. Again, I was shocked (and ecstatic). They also ate a ton (I mean, a ton), and had the time of their lives. They couldn’t stop talking about how it was all “so fancy” that “even Fancy Nancy would love this place!” (and she would… it is super-duper-old-school-fancy).

Toward the end of the lunch, while the three of them feasted on huge platefuls of coconut-cream-cake and chocolate pie, I sat there practically in a state of shock over how all of this had been going, and this was my one and only thought: ‘After all these years of the constant-daily-vigilant-all-over-them-tight-reigned-exhausting-discipline that is required of raising rambunctious-off-the-charts-energetic-spirited–twin-boys… (not to mention the day-to-day-hard-work-of-caring-for-a-two-year-old)… after all this… today, right then and there, I could see, feel, hear (and practically taste and smell) it paying off. Paying off in a big, big way. Because, as it turns out, when push came to shove, when they needed to, they did right by me. And that, my friends, is enough to make this mama uber-proud (and shocked, yes! but also uber-proud).

After lunch we trekked it back across campus to our car. They wanted to stomp through the icy snow this time, avoiding the pathways, and I didn’t even care. Fine! No problem! They could do anything!

We got back in the car for the icy drive home. We stopped at the video store on the way— they could pick anything they wanted to rent— it was their prize for a job well done (and mine— I needed that video-induced-downtime). They chose Cinderella. No problem. I paid the $1 for the 48 hour rental, and didn’t even make any remarks about the ridiculousness that is the Disney Princesses. I just let them love that I was renting it for them. And they were thrilled, and thrilled with themselves. And then we were back in the car again, driving 20 miles per hour the entire time home, but this time I could appreciate the unbelievable beauty of the crystallized trees.

It was one heck of a day.

MLK should be a big deal for everyone in the US; it most definitely is for us. It’s also a big deal at the boys’ school – we’re going to an all school assembly today in celebration and we’re really excited about it.

Happy MLK day everyone!