Interior Design

I heard it in Loverpants' voice. That warbling chuckle that he was trying to mask with stern rebuke. "Did you do this?"

"Yes," said Baby Girl, so earnestly.

"Oh, Madi, we don't color on doors. We only color on paper...What is it?"

"This is mommy and this is me!"

I walk back and there it is. Like a fresco diptych in a Renaissance cathedral: two figures, the two bobble heads with the accompanying stick figure bodies, each with its own panel on the white door. Perfectly drawn to scale. In blue crayon.

"That's a good circle, Madi," says Loverpants, unable to help himself.

"Ganks," she says.

"Don't tell her that!" I whisper, trying to conceal my beaming pride.

***

Edavillia!

Here is a cranberry bog not far from the entrance to Edaville, quite close in fact to the parking lot where you will happily park for free and pay no mind as to where exactly you parked.

Here we are after arriving at Edaville where we parked the car in a vast parking lot that had no distinctive markers as to which section or row to remember where one parked the SUV in a sea of SUVs.

This is the gargantuan Santa who can probably see as far to the parking lot and bears witness to all of the hassled park-goers doing the Where Did I Park Again shuffle every night in the dark.

This is a mouse but Baby Girl thought he looked more like Roo from Winnie the Pooh. He is smiling because he didn't have to drive and park at Edaville.

This is Baby Girl mocking Humpty Dumpty who parked himself outside the gift shop. Smart move since he'll never get lost or shattered by parking himself there.

This is Little Man asking Santa for a mother who doesn't lose her car in the parking lot at Edaville.

This is a quaint little light display representative of a time in the 1800s when people never lost their means of transport because they were attached to horses that nayed and brayed in the dark so you could easily find them.

Here are Baby Girl and her BFF, blissfully unaware that the sun is going down, rendering it nearly impossible to...yeah...you know the deal.

Riding the train, scoping out the lights, blissfully unaware of the parking fiasco.

About twenty minutes before I lost the car.

Overheard twenty minutes later: "Mommy, what seems to be the problem? You wost our car?"

Hope there's good climbing in...

Chattanooga, TN. Since that will be our home at this time next year.

I didn't get to witness firsthand the maiden voyage of Baby Girl on the rock wall. Little Man had four shots the day before Thanksgiving and subsequently woke up with a fevahhh of 102, bless his little bruised legs and feverish noggin. So I was hangin' with my febral little butterball while Loverpants and Baby Girl clipped in and rigged up and belayed on the wall. Fortunately Auntie Eunis took these pictures. When I saw these pics, my heart inflated and took flight like a hot air balloon, soaring over craggy rock walls. I know they say you cannot be in two places at once, but in that moment I saw our future and I saw our past. I saw distant tomorrows as a family of climbers, something I've always wanted, since growing up my family didn't really have a shared activity, unless you count eating together a gluttonous amount of ice cream. I also rewound the memory tape, back to Loverpants' and my first year of marriage and how we made weekly dates with Auntie Eunis to climb. I learned so much about our marriage from those climbs, about being a reliable anchor and a communicative climber and a good cheerleader. I haven't been on a wall since before I got pregnant with Little Man and I miss it so much, but these pictures raise my hopes that a return to the top of the mock mountain is in the cards very soon.