Absence, Pneumonia, George Bailey, Rainstorms

Have you ever just not shown up? For your own life?

Just kind of kept hitting snooze and hoped your own reality would understand?

I do this, often.  I just get all busy about being busy and then I burn out and then I can't be bothered with my actual LIFE life portion of the program.

In college?  I pretended to be sick for MAKE A DIFFERENCE DAY.  Who skips out on Make a Difference Day?  That's like saying, "I do not want to make a difference.  I want world hunger to persist and I want my part in remedying it to remain unspoiled.  It is more important for me to catch up on my napping because I am a college student and I do not nap nearly enough three times a day to interrupt naptime for a couple hours of service to my community for which I will receive a free t-shirt and many donut holes." I apparently skip out on Make a Difference Day.  I pretended to Not Hear the voicemails from all of my earnest friends telling me they'd wait another 15 minutes for me...maybe I was still in the shower...or maybe I got the meeting place wrong or...

Maybe I just was an epic fail of a person at showing up for her own life.

In my home, you would not believe how often I fail to show up.  Um, hallo. Clearly too busy here watching "House Hunters" and "Design on a Dime" to swiff the floor right now!  Or paint a cream-colored wall covered in finger prints that I ruefully stare at every day wondering why I have lived here 3 years and still expect Kool-Aid man to come bursting through the wall and give me an excuse to give that wall some attention.

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This week, the following happened:

Lovey Loverpants got pneumonia.

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This week, I started showing up for my own life.

I did dishes and laundry and spent time cleaning a home in which the mess was not mine, all of which I have failed to show up to do for months and months and months.

I went grocery shopping with Little Man at 7 a.m.

I bathed Little Man at midnight o'clock, and then rocked him while singing to Baby Girl at dead tired o'clock.

I learned to redirect Baby Girl's petulant behavior. I schlepped Baby Girl to daycare even though she just started falling to pieces about going.

I prayed and I prayed and I prayed.  For strength. ***

The strength came.  It came from the recesses of places in my mind and heart that had grown dim and moldy from inattention.  You know the part in "It's a Wonderful Life" when George Bailey scampers around the house just loving on his old dilapidated home with the drafts and shifty staircase?  That's how I felt this week.  I felt delirious from the exhaustion, but also delirious from the reminder that, Ahh, this life is just a mess, a great complicated mess, but how lucky I am with this gorgeously messy family to care for and this simple purpose:  just to make sure there are bananas and cereal and clean cloth diapers and the crumby floors get picked up so that there are no ant picnics indoors.

Oh, this messy, simple, loud and gorgeous life!!!!! ***

Loverpants, please get better soon, though.  I would make an awful single parent, and we know you are suffering and we miss you so.

***

Here is Baby Girl looking up at me.  We are playing a game called "On your marks..."  It is a very complicated game we invented, no one could possibly have come up with it other than we, especially since we made it up in a rainstorm.

Little Man.  Love.

Emptying Nest

This might be slightly premature, but I've been liquidating several tupperware bins of frilly pinky frocks that are meant to fit a little girl (all gender bending aside) that is no longer so little.  In so doing, I have been watching my heart quiver, inflate, burst and then fall limply into a million kabillion pieces. It's pure melodrama, but this is a terrible task.  I cannot believe I will never have the pleasure of playing dress up with my little dolly again.

Oh, but I guess she is still only two.

And I have a whole 'nother newbie baby to dress.

But I was telling Big Pops how hard it was to look at all of those sweet little scottie cloaks and cupcake onesies and to realize that as I prepared them for consignment or the charity box, that time had passed.  You don't get "a lot of mileage" out of kids clothes.  All you get are a few months, maybe a full season of wear.

You remember the first time you put the little blueberry muffin ensemble on your little dolly--and, unwittingly, that first was also the last because she was grown out of it the following week. Baby firsts do not stay minty fresh but for a moment.

And though I didn't want to go back, per se, I don't want to rewind, I also don't want to be left behind!!! I don't want to be saddled by the sentimental so much that I can't move forward.  I don't want to be an Empty Nester, wearing my slippers all day, pawing for some kind of hobby, taking my reading list from Oprah, thinking about how the best years of my life had passed me by and wondering if my babies will remember to wash their dorm sheets on the regular, like I taught them.

Big Pops told me that it's not about getting the mileage out of baby clothes.  It's about appreciating those clothes as tokens of memories.  He said he remembers TP and me wearing our little Parisian berets to have lunch with him when we were 8 and 10, and maybe we would never wear them again, but they are part of the imprint of the memory.

Can you tell I am still totally flushing out these crazy hormones???

Let's get to the picture portion of our program, shall we?

***

Had our last day of "music cwass" this past week.  Have taken two sessions and will now take the summer off after this last session of tambourines was completely rigorous and completely exhausting.  We are seriously burned out.  Here's the pack of gal pals that made music together.

We went to World's End in Hingham, MA today which is a great place if you are a dog.  If you are not a dog, it's kind of rugged and not as beachy as we I had hoped.

But it is a good place to lay (lie?) on your back "bobcat" shaped "cwouds."

We were getting ready for a funny face picture.  Look how Little Man jumped the gun.

3 weeks in...

I saw the figure emerge in my peripheral vision.  We were asking the clerk about the merits of various double strollers when I saw a penguin of a girl slink out from behind one of the merchandise shelves with her pants slipped down to her knees. She had to go potty.

Only, when I brought her to the public restroom in the store, she declined.  She wanted to use one of the colorful Baby Bjorn chairs stacked in the nursing aisle.  Who could blame her?  Baby Girl was conducting important consumer research.  How many of us would bypass the chance to test-drive a throne so cute?  Of course, most of us would likely possess the social cues not to pull down our drawers in public, nor expect to actually test the limits of the bowl, but I had to give it to Baby Girl for taking the initiative.

*** I have learned to do something new in the last week.  It is is not a totally new learning, it is a learning that has taken on a new form in a new context for me this week, and it has made a huge elephant footprint of a difference.

I decided earlier this week that I was not going to lose my temper with my toddler.  If I had any self control at all, and if God had any power over that self control, I was just not going to let the ignite the coals of my anger.  So I didn't.  I just...chose not to escalate any situation.  I'm not saying I handled every altercation well, but given the fact that Big Pops and Nana Jake thought it prudent to gift my tot with a set of porcelain pug salt and pepper shakers (totes appropos for 2 y.o.) and given the fact that my toddler chose to gift me with a banging of my funnybone with one of said pug pepper shakers, I have to say that I did well, praises be.

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As mentioned, my dad and stepmama visited earlier this week, which was 10,000 laughs and chicken parmesan and a trip to the zoo and hanging out on our primitive patio, blowing bubbles.  I missed them before they came and now I miss them more because I bear Baby Girl's missing them and so it's a camel back of missing people who live far far away.

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Little Man is still the smooshiest, sleepiest member of our family.  I am watching the cheeks of his sister thin out by the day, so I am working extra hard to plump his up to balance the cheek chubbery around here.

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One more thing.  I was home yesterday tending to both children by myself.  I allowed Baby Girl to fingerpaint.  In the house.  For the first time ever.  And we didn't have to call poison control!!  We had fun!!  Masterpieces were made!!  I am the mother of two children!!!

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Nana J and Pampa