Snow Days

I got my first snow day (snow evening) the other night for the first time since maybe the mid-'90s when I was busy overachieving in high school and was probably BUMMED that school was canceled since I am sure I had stayed up all night working on End Hunger posters and gah! now I won't be able to hand in my Beowulf essay or hang up the posters OR put up my new pro-life bumper stickers on my locker FOR THE LOVE OF PETE. But best believe I was enjoying this snow night, even if we had been a little cagey all couped up inside for the past few. Baby Girl and I made our own fun and beheld the winter wonder of Boston when it tries to capacitate 8 inches of snow with a colonial sewage system. Oosh.

Hallways and Snowdays are for obstacle courses.

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.

***