Sometime around the end of January, I decided it was time to take my daughter to her first art museum.

My decision was aided by the fact that for one day each year, art museums around the city offer free admission, which was enough motivation for me to plan a trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  I had never been there and had always wanted to go, so my excitement when I first broached the subject with Ashley was matched only by her phone distracted apathy.



Me (to Ashley): How would you like to go to LACMA on the 25th?

Ashley (staring at phone): What's LACMA?

Me: It's the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  It's free that day.

Ashley (still staring at phone): What do you do at a museum?

Me: Look at paintings and sculptures and stuff. 

Ashley (looks up skeptically from phone)

If you have ever gotten the side eye from a kid when trying to convince them to do something that will separate them from their beloved technology for more than a few minutes, you will know that the next sentence in this exchange is CRUCIAL: it will mean the difference between an affirmative cultural experience with your child, or another Saturday spent watching her watch a screen.

Me: We can have lunch while we are there, and make a day of it.

Ashley (shugs, then goes back to the phone): OK, I guess.

We got up early on a Saturday morning, and started the cross town journey to the museum on the bus.  My normally talkative and observant daughter was engrossed by the games on her phone during the long ride, and I quietly wondered if she was going to get anything out of this experience.  I didn't get into art until I was a senior in high school, and Impressionism was one of the subjects I had to study for Academic Decathlon.  Up until that point, I was aware of paintings and sculpture, but only in a peripheral way.  I knew it was there, and I knew what it was, but that was about it.  I didn't understand beauty or expression, or point of view until much later.  I was determined to remedy that lack of knowledge with my son, and took him to the Getty Museum twice, so that at the very least, he could say that he had been exposed to fine art.

When we finally got off the bus in front of the museum, my daughter was immediately charmed by the hugeness of the structure.  To my surprise, she decided to use the phone on her camera to take pictures of whatever we saw on our walk through the museum.  We got in line to get whatever free tickets, passes and maps we needed for the day, and started our walk in the gallery closest to the ticket boot which featured a display of Chinese and Japanese art and artifacts.  After warnings not to get to close to anything, and definitely not to touch anything, and encouraging her to read the small letter board displays at each piece, I allowed her to lead the way as we explored the first exhibit.  She just looked at paintings and took pictures for a couple of minutes, until she stopped and pondered a wooden sculpture of a horse decked out in fine livery.  She stared for a full two minutes, before I asked her what she was thinking.  

"This looks like the horse from "Mulan".

A couple near us heard her, and gave me the pressed lip smile that let me know that they thought it was funny, but they didn't want to discourage her.  I smiled back.  You gotta start somewhere.

We finished that particular exhibit in about 30 minutes, and by then, she was ready for lunch.  While we were eating, Ashley took the map from me, and started looking at the names and description of the other exhibits, and talking about what SHE wanted to see that day.  I was happy to let her lead.  This day was about her, and exposing her to something she might not otherwise see, so I fell back, and let her pick what sounded interesting to her.

We next went to a Latin Art exhibit, where she saw paintings by Diego Rivera for the first time, as did I.  We also got to see some of the early film work of a pioneering Latin filmmaker, which started freaking her out a bit because of the early 20th century special effects, so we had to move on.  As we were exiting the Latin art exhibit and about to make our way into the next pavilion, we came across what looked to me like giant spaghetti, drying on a rack:

This was one of the many outdoor art installations that invited visitors to experience art through play.   It made me dizzy, but she thoroughly enjoyed twirling herself around in the long strings.  She was having a great time with other kids in the long spaghetti, but we eventually moved into the next pavilion where we settled, after looking at four entire floors worth of choices, on European art.  When we walked into the room where the impressionist paintings and sculptures were, and she immediately looked for a bench and sat down.  I asked her if she was starting to get tired.  We had been there for two and a half hours, and in all honesty, I was up to my ears in culture by now.

"Well yeah.  And all this stuff is starting to get a little inappropriate."

She pointed behind me, to the sculpture Eternal Spring by Auguste Rodin.  She had this same reaction to other partial nude paintings in other parts of the gallery.  I had forgotten to explain to her that artists throughout history have viewed the human body as a work of art, and painted and sculpted it regularly.  The only way she is used to seeing the human body portrayed is on television or in movies, and then only in a sexual way, so what else would she think?  Even as I explained about the human body as the subject of art work, I could see her really starting to consider the human body as more than a sexual object.  Maybe this visit was paying off in ways I hadn't thought about...

Our last exhibit for the day was a room with art from Southeast Asia and India.  Ashley was quickly burning out, and spent as much time looking for someplace to sit as she did looking at the stunning art pieces.  While I was fascinated looking at the hindu gods and goddesses, Ashley mostly looked at doors and archways:

Occasionally, I can take a hint.  We made our way out of the pavilion, down into the sculpture garden, into a beautiful light installation, then out into the street.  Ashley asked me right away when we could come back to see the rest of it.  She figured we already saw part of it, we might as well see the rest.  A small part of me thinks she was also more than a little fascinated by being exposed to something outside of her everyday experience, and eager to continue the adventure.  I asked her if maybe next time we could go to the Getty instead.  I immediately threw in the fact that they had beautiful outdoor gardens, and we could have lunch there as well.  She asked if she could bring her phone.  Just to take pictures of course.

I'll be planning that trip for later in the spring.

I have avoided talking about New Year's resolutions because I am terrible at sticking to them.  Oh, I generally do okay with food resolutions.  If I can hold out on whatever I am doing until Ash Wednesday, it generally carries over into Lent, by which time I've already either defeated whatever bad food habit I had been trying to break (chocolate, rather than dealing with negativity), or developed some good habit I really thought that I needed (eating fish at least once a week).  Where I fall down, literally, every year, is exercise.

Exercise is the bane of my existence.  Not that I don't enjoy physical activity, because I do, it's just that for people like me, for whom hand-eye coordination is a myth, and accidents are par for the course, the key thing becomes not making an ass out of yourself in public.  If you've ever tried jogging, as I did once or twice, and tripped over the sidewalk, falling on your hands and knees in front of a large group of people, you know what I mean.  I am the only person I know that has ever pulled a muscle while stretching before exercising.  I try to get it right; I just don't succeed very often.

I didn't have a driver's license until I was 32 years old.  Prior to that I rode the bus everywhere I needed to go.  A side benefit of being transit dependent is that you walk a lot.  Until my late 20's, that was my primary form of exercise.  As I got older, and the pounds started to creep on, I started to realize that the residual walking you do when riding the bus was no longer enough to keep the weight off.  So I started adding other things to the routine.

One of the first things I tried was buying home exercise DVDs.  I bought them; working out to them was a whole 'nother issue.  I am generally pretty good at following along with people, but I would get completely lost when trying to follow along with the videos.  Not to mention exercising at home came with an audience that found my attempts at fitness live comedy of the best sort.  It occurred to me that maybe I needed to do some sort of exercise that had an instructor or someone that I could follow along with.  Me being a natural introvert, I would have to stay around the back of the class or group so as not to be noticed.

Given that thought, I can only say I started with my son's martial arts class because I was feeling particularly optimistic that day.  Or maybe I was hoping that the instructors' and other students enthusiasm would rub off on me.  Most likely it was because one of my neighbors smoked a lot of weed, and I had a small contact high. Whatever the reason I decided to try capoeira, I will say that it is the one thing I stuck with for the longest, despite it being the thing I was the worst at.

Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art developed by slaves in Brazil so that they could train to fight without being detected by their masters.   In order for the training to remain a secret, they trained inside a circle, which is still how training is conducted to this day. Although most of the warm ups and drills were done as a large group, so for the most part my clumsiness could go unnoticed, whenever we had to partner up to practice a drill, or to "play" (practicing fighting) inside the circle, my shortcomings would come into full focus.  I have to say, I gave it the old college try (During one partnered drill, one of the more advanced students demonstrated a combination of movements that I was to repeat. Completely perplexed, all I could do was stare at him and ask "What the hell did you just do?", cracking up both the advanced student, and everybody behind us in line.), but I was thoroughly out of my depth.  The lead instructors: Courtney, Tracey and Ellis, God love 'em, stuck with us for about six years,and through many challenges: my obvious lack of ability (and uncanny knack for pulling and twisting muscles I didn't know I had), my son's growing apathy, and my daughter's 15 second attention span for any activity that costs money to pursue.  It was a great experience for all of us, in that we made friends that we still have to this day, my son learned in some ways to focus his energies, my daughter got the gist of group activities and working with others, and I learned to push my physical boundaries (I hated the thought of not finishing a drill or exercise as I despised looking like a quitter) and I expanded my comfort zone (exercising in front of other people doesn't suck THAT much).  Time, money, distance and growing interest in other things ended our adventure in martial arts, but I still needed to exercise, so like so many other folks, one January, I decided I would head back to the gym.

The first place I tried was Curves, a women only, circuit training facility.  It was walking distance from my house (BONUS since I didn't own a car.), was supposed to be a quick, but effective workout, and wasn't terribly expensive.  It worked for all of about two months.  My issue?  It got boring.  Rapidly. And my kids had a strange way of developing some kind of emergency  EVERY SINGLE TIME I left the house to go to the gym.  Who needs to run when a panicked phone call about one sibling yelling at the other, and could you please come home right now, can get your heart racing? Not to mention my church activities started moving around, throwing my preferred workout schedule into disarray.  What I decided I needed after that was a facility where I could go whenever I had a free minute, and someplace I could take my daughter with if I had to.

I guess I thought I was being smart when I signed up for 24 Hour Fitness in December a couple of years ago.  I thought if I started in December, signed up with a personal trainer, and started working out early, I could beat the January crush, and I might even stick to it.  They even offered child care!  I have to admit that I did enjoy it for a little while.  The trainer, Scott, was a hoot, and it was nice to know what I was doing in the gym.  My daughter hated the child care, as she was often the oldest kid there, and had nothing to do.  She went back to being watched by my son (when he felt like it), prompting more panicked "Where are you" phone calls, and more activity moving with the church, butchering my workout schedule.  It was the gym rats that killed me though.  These are people that hang around the gym in their bathing suits, oops, I mean "workout attire", scoffing at the bigger people like myself, and sitting on the equipment, talking to their friends, in between sets of five or ten reps at a low enough weight so they can look like they are working out without actually working up a sweat.  Sweat being unattractive, you see.

So I am back to squares one and two: working out at home while getting in all of the residual walking from being on the bus.  Now that my son has a PlayStation 3 with two versions of the popular game Just Dance, working out at home is a lot more fun, and my critics occasionally cheer me on, since they benefit in points and trophys when I get a high enough score.  Like all home workout enthusiasts, every time I try it, I add to the home equipment.  

I have good intentions, even if my follow-through isn't great.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh often wonders what the hell I'm doing.  I know I'll get the exercise thing right, eventually, but like everything else in my life, I just need to start small and build up.  Like walking, it's a matter of taking one step at a time.



As much as I make jokes about it, and frankly as much as I sucked at it, capoeira is definitely worth your fitness consideration.  Omulu Capoeira Los Angeles, under the leadership of Mestre Preguica, put up with the kids and I for a good long while, and we learned a lot while we were there.  Look them up, and give them a try:   http://omulula.org/

My daughter used to love my days off. 

On every other Friday, she could sleep a little later than her usual 5:30am wake up time, and I would walk her to school.  Those were times when she and I could talk candidly without the input of her older brother.  Since the loss of our car  a little over a week ago,  what was once a bi-weekly ritual is now a daily necessity, as now my daughter and I are back where we were three years ago: walking down the street in the pre-dawn hours in order to get the bus to her daycare so I can go to work.  Now, we also walk to her gymnastics class at a local park.  Yesterday, we walked just under a mile in the waning heat of early fall in the late afternoon in Southern California.  I don't know if she was tired, or if maybe the heat was getting to her, but there was a different feeling I got from her as we made our way quickly over to the park.

Although there are times when she is quite conversational, lately she has been quiet and seems to be more introspective.  Never make the mistake of thinking that kids don't have thoughts that have little to do with what you think they are concerned about.  Especially around this transitional age of 9-12.  Children are far more perceptive and intelligent than adults give them credit for, and I think if given a glimpse inside the mind of my daughter yesterday afternoon, I would have heard something like this:

My name is Ashley, and I'm 9 years old.


I have a lot of Hello Kitty stuff that Mommy and other people get me, and I like to watch Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

"Are we still going to have a sleepover for my birthday?"

I have a few friends, but I spend a lot of time by myself.  I get upset a lot and scream sometimes, and grownups and kids don't understand it, so I just play by myself, or play with the babies at daycare or watch tv when I'm at home.  And then sometimes I feel like running around for no reason, and I start thinking a lot of stuff at once, and I just start talking all at the same time.  Teachers don't like that.  That's why I put my patch on in the morning.  I calm down, and I don't get in as much trouble.  That's also why Mommy won't let me eat candy a lot.

"Can we get water from AM/PM before we get to the park?  I'm HOT!"

We haven't done this much walking in a long time.  It's cold in the morning, hot in the afternoon and I really miss riding in a car.  My backpack is heavy in the morning, and I see Mommy looking at it, but I told her I don't want a backpack with wheels.  Too big and not cool.  I'm glad we went home first and dropped it off.  She keeps saying that it won't be like this for long, and I keep telling her that it's okay, but I hope we don't have to keep doing this.

"How much you wanna bet he changed the tv already?"

I love my brother but he is kinda annoying.  He got mad because he was watching TV when we got back from school, and Mommy wanted the tv off so I could to do my homework before we left again.  He started saying stuff, and Mommy almost got mad back at him.  She told him to go in his room or do something else.  He got on the computer and started playing music HE liked.   He hogs EVERYTHING, including Mommy's attention.  I wish he would get his act together, whatever that means.  That's what Mommy keeps telling him, and maybe they wouldn't argue so much.  I get tired of getting sent in Mommy's room so they can talk.

"Those people in front of us are walking sloooooowwwww."

Mommy laughed a little when I said that.  YAY!  I like her laugh, even the little ones.  She thinks we don't see her making sad faces and mad faces when she talks about money with Auntie and Nana.  When she goes in her room to talk on the phone, we turn down the TV so we can hear.  We want to know what she's talking about.  Mommy told my aunt that she doesn't like surprises.  We don't either.  I like it when she tells me that something is going to happen, or not gonna happen.  I feel better when I know, and I don't get all upset, and then Mommy doesn't get all upset with me.  That's why I try not to ask her for stuff.  I know we don't have money, she says it all the time, but sometimes I ask for little stuff anyway.  And sometimes I actually get it!

"Can I play around a little bit, or do I have to go straight to class?"

The other class is still there, so me and Mommy are sitting at a table, waiting.  I'm hungry and I don't want to tell her because she told me to eat something before we left home, and I only ate a little bit.  Maybe I can get something on the way home?  I'm feeling a little bouncy, and Mommy is starting to get that worried look she gets when I start feeling bouncy, and now she is looking at the door to the room where I do gymnastics.  Now she is gonna be watching me like that the whole time.  She thinks I play around too much, but teachers have only said that a couple of times.  OK.  The little kids are out.  Time for class.

I did stop and get her a snack on the walk back from the park.  I am not completely oblivious to her needs.  Preoccupied, definitely, but I can catch a hint when I listen hard enough. Today, I did.