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.

***

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.

'Tis himself

Sometimes I look over and I see my husband for who he is. I mean I really give him a long look-see and have a long think about that man.  It's easy to lose focus on the particulars as we're whirling on this carousel of snack packing and stuffed monkey fetching, pirouetting around the same square footage of floor space all day. I will be the first to tell you that I never thought I would get so caught up in this madness, so much that I get to the end of the day and I hear Loverpants swishing mouthwash in the bathroom and I think, Did I look him in the eye today?  Or did we carry on like comic book characters, our thoughts pinned to the air in thought bubbles, as we bent over and picked rattles off the floor and packed a school lunch for the girl grabbing one of our knees and asking for another temporary tattoo...

When I take a long look at my husband, I see glints of John 1.0, the college dude with the Nalgene carabinered to his adidas pants, walking his inimitable slow jaunt, headed somewhere with purpose but in no hurry to get there.  I hear his latenight laughter or his hoarse senior RA yell at his freshmen residents.  I can smell the faint scent of chlorine on his hoodie and the ample plate of fries he will eat at lunch in Brooks Dining Hall.

I have not forgotten who he was and moreover I have not forgotten who we were, but these days I have to work to remember that we are more than co-pilots.  We have history.  We used to eat whole disgusting trays of Country Fair nachos at 2 a.m. and walk up a brisk 1/2 mile hill laughing the entire way.  Now we say things like, "Wow, that's a medium tinkle!" and we wish we had lo-jack for Blue Eyed Baby who pulls more disappearing acts before bedtime than Houdini.

*** Sitting across from Baby Girl this afternoon at Mickey D's, she eating a small fries, drinking a berry smoothie. Little Man asleep in the stroller.

"Where's John?" asks Baby Girl.  {She bandies about his first name because she knows it.}

"At work."

"Oh."

"Do you know what Daddy's job is?"

"No."

"He's a therapist."

"Why?"

"Well, that's just what he does.  He helps people...

...

...Do you know what job you want when you grow up?"

"I'm going to become a daddy," she said.

Kid you not.