To Where Does Cool Move?

My friend Stef is putting her condo up for sale which she did not consult me about, rendering me embittered, sulky, and tying a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS around her building so no one will want to buy her unit and she and her adorable fam will have to be my neighbor forever. But I'm happy for her, especially because I know she's moving to a more junior town for all the right reasons. "We're not saving anything living here," she said, "And it would be so cool to be able to be saving, to be able to explore Montessori [for her daughter Mbel]."

It really would be cool. Would it be cooler than cool?

As I look around our place with the spiral staircase which Baby Girl is inevitably going to take a skate down since I myself who has mastered steps over 28 years have already skated down...As I consider the attributes of our home's location: Close to the T, within walking distance to everything you could want, a 10 minute drive to the airport, I begin to consider all those attributes as part of our Cool Urban Life. I love the life we have cultivated here, but the priorities are shifting, sometimes rapidly, sometimes as slow but large glaciers roving over the peninsulas of my twentysomething desires.

We have no plans to move any time soon, but I feel its imminence in a way, and I'm okay with it, I have to be okay with it. I've got a cool girl to be providing for, and she's worth the sacrifice of a spiral staircase.

Even if she is not a genius...

she's a cute little Easter egg, isn't she?

These Teens

My daughter is now 14. Months. The past month has been a very helpful one, both in my relationship with her and in my understanding of her in a more global sense. Intimately, I feel as though we have our own cues, our own little games and that only I, the maven of all games that include expired credit cards and crevices of couches, get.

On a more macro level, I feel that I am starting to grasp what it is I am supposed to be doing in her character development. I see what areas need attention, improvement.

For example, Big Girl was really FAILING with a capital EFF at the notion of "gentle hands." I care for another little boy with outrageously gorgeous curly hair one day a week. This little boy has suffered week after week from the clutches of Baby Girl. She has been absolutely incorrigible to master gentle hands. She would see those luscious locks and instantaneously become one of those arcade games with the revolving claw that grabs busted looking stuffed bunnies that you finally scored after inputting $7 worth of tokens. She could not unlearn grabby hands.

Until yesterday when she was just almost completely reproved of it. She stroked those angel tresses with the gentleness of a caterpillar sneezing. I was so proud of her, and we all had a much happier day. It sounds strange that a 14 month-old would finally be disabused of a habit that causes harm to one of her peers, but I am just so proud to say Mama ain't raising no dummy.

***

The 14 month-old flex

You can almost hear it, can't you? What are you doing in there, Baby Girl?

...NOTHING....

Madiganecdote

Saturday, during potluck after church, Baby Girl sidled over to a boy who is easily a head taller than she, and certainly a year older. Compelled by an inner voice that shouted giddily, "It's Girl Scout cookie time!", she reached for the Thin Mint in the boy's hand and wrestled it right out of his clutches. Then she looked up at him as if to say, Seriously? You didn't even fight me for it, chump.

The boy's face immediately scrunched up, the mouth opened wide to bear his full set of 2 year-old teeth, the arms shot straight down along his hips like straws shaking in anger. A little cry crescendoed so that soon everyone in the room looked over to see the little boy falling apart and Baby Girl still standing with the Thin Mint, wondering if it was time yet to take a bite or was she going to have to inevitably give it back.

The boy's mother rushed over, reminding him there was no need to be bullied by a pipsqueak over a cookie.

Baby Girl stood still as though waiting for further instruction.

And I sat at a potluck table, powerless to rebuke or intercede as the tears streamed out of my eyes in a bellyaching fit of laughter.  I had become that parent.

***

To think she was still resisting tummy time one year ago.