Fighting it

I passed the following note to my classmate last night: Dear Nemat, I'm sorry you have to sit next to me tonight. I haven't showered today.

I punctuated it with a frown face. He took his pen and turned it into a smiling face.

***

We assessed Baby Girl's hesitation to walk as part psychological and part efficiency. She does not want to let go of our finger when doing her walk (which, by the way, is very stiff and slow and she looks like she is a character on stilts in a parade). She obviously wants and deeply needs to get to that tube of Nystatin ointment faster than the speed of light in order to shove it down her throat, and crawling totally beats walking with a stick, yo.

So we tried on some heavy Big Girl shoes in the hopes that she'd be striding right.

This is how thrilled she was with the big kicks:

The first few times we put them on her, her face warped into the angry mushroom head, ahh those srunched up eyes, that quivering lower lip, the anguish of those round, red little cheeks. She looked at us as if to say, Why must you wrestle my innocence right out of my little chubby digits? Why must you replace it with the cruel reality of girlhood? I said I WASN'T READY.

But the next day she accepted her fate as a member of the hard-soled shoe rocking club...

...and she has already found a pair that she fancies.

Baby Cons as purchased by Lovey Loverpants before we had even met Baby Girl.

Indent. New paragraph

Baby Girl is writing a new chapter in her second year of life. The words are "Daddy" and "Bopple" repeated over and over, and they, along with screeches and rejected scraps of food and scrunched up faces, form long sentences that stretch for whole afternoons. The sentences are punctuated with sweet moments. The sweet moments are the commas, semi-colons, exclamation marks. I realize that in every great book, though, there are difficult chapters to read. There are chapters that make us feel uncomfortable and on edge but we know we have to get through them, we're bracing ourselves to read faster so that we can get through them to the part where all is resolved or the denouement casts light on what was murky for so long. Both Lovey Loverpants and I are trying to get through this chapter and are trying not to rush ourselves through it, but it is a rocky one that we are reading and writing right along with Baby Girl.

A friend asked me recently if I still felt exhausted and I said that the physical exhaustion has given way to an emotional exhaustion. Sometimes, when it's clear that both the girl and I have just grown bored of one another and we are biding our time until Daddy gets home, I just kind of want to sit back and read a book or watch "Oprah" or give myself a manicure. But I don't. I sit and nod for the eleventieth time that yes, that is a bottle of lotion, and yes, let's read Gossie and Friends just to see if they still find Oliver at the end SPOILERS, and just as the blood vessel behind my left eye is just about to pop from the tedium, Daddy gets home or saves the day, or Little Miss Sunshine emerges with a gratuitous hug for her mother, along with a sloppy licky-kiss and a pinch of my earlobe and I know that I must have just been stuck on a paragraph; I just needed to turn the page was all.

***

God's little darling

An old adage of one of my old pals goes like this: I always feel like God's little darling when I look around at my friends.

I have felt this grateful cup runneth over just-gotta-crow feeling before. But lately, I just feel it ALL the time. I mean, I almost wake up expecting to be amazed by how wonderful my friends are. They are all so precious to me. For the last few years, though, they've all felt so far away from me. And not that I mind logging the airmiles, but life is so much better when your favorite people are just a T ride away.

So this is where I am downright spoiled. Not only are my faraway friends just generally so good about reaching out, but I have also been so blessed, especially in the last six months to have gotten to know - I mean see their kids tantrumming pantsless getting to know - a group of seriously phenomenal families that live right in my neighborhood! As a few of us were headed out of Itsy Bitsy Yoga last week and discussing if we'd be meeting up after, in the shuffle of putting on boots and leaving wayward mittens behind, one of my friends Sierra said, "Oh yeah, we'll be there for Friday Pancakes. I've been looking forward to Friday Pancakes." I felt so relieved that she said that because I had been feeling the same way. Not only because we'd be celebrating Baby Girl's birthday with all of her pals at Friday Pancakes at our neighborhood cafe, but because I have come to look forward to Friday Pancakes as this sweet little cabbage patch dance in the endzone of a long week.

And maybe she only meant that she was looking forward to actually eating pancakes, but I know for me that feeling like God's darling tastes like maple syrup.

Itsy Bitsy Yoga:

Friday Pancakes, and the pancaking of Baby Girl to the couch:

These are the cupcakes I made for Baby Girl's first birthday to share with the churchies. I finished the last batch at midnight. The stars were not looking as good by that point. Le sigh.

I think they still tasted all right, though.