Brilliant Innovation

One of the residual effects of attending an all-girls high school is that I have had to spend the rest of my life trying to learn What Everyone Else Learned in High School About Eye Make-up when I was busy Not Looking Presentable and Wearing Messy Buns Wrapped in Scrunchies in Public. As if that weren't punishment enough, I now must attempt to apply make-up while trying to buffer the wee one from falling down the drain while choking on packing peanuts.

Tell you my latest for keeping her in my peripheral.

Hey there, Baby Girl. I see ya peekin' over that there tub...

Staying so fresh and so clean clean while playing in your empty bathtub while Mama puts on mascara?  Awesome.

Something Specific

Remember the part in "Saving Private Ryan" where Tom Hanks tells Matt Damon to remember home, but that you can't just remember home as a generic, you have to remember something specific? Hanks says he remembers his wife tending the roses in an old pair of his work gloves. Damon remembers his brother getting busy with Alice Jardin in the barn.... ***

If I were soldier today, dispatched to a remote part of the world, trying to will myself to fall asleep against the din of fighter jets, I wonder if I could find comfort in the somethings specific from home. If I could warm myself by the light of their vivid memory, or if they would just flash like distant air raids across my mind...

*** Hearing the crescendo of bleating cries from Baby Girl in the morning as the first light of dawn warms the magnolia walls of her room. I see that little expectant bobblehead peaking through the slats of her crib, and then there's that half-awake smile that reminds me every morning of who I am to this world.

Or my husband's voice reading a Sandra Boynton book in the voice of Sean Connery to Baby Girl for the 83rd time this weekend.

Or voicemails from my brother which take up half the bandwidth of my voicemail capacity, which completely recap everything that we would otherwise phone chat about, but which always end with, "Okay, well, talk to ya -"

Or asking Lovey Loverpants if he wants milk to drink with dinner, to which he sometimes responds, "No, thanks. I'll pass on grass." Which doesn't make sense but which makes me double over, and incapable of pouring my milk into the cup.

Or Baby Girl deciding half-way through her diaper change that lying on her back is overrated and then taking to her knees and scooting away without a care about the moose tracks she is leaving on the bed.... ***

Poetic

So in the future life trajectory where I get to choose my own adventure? I want to pick the door marked Much Adored Traveling Poet. I want to ride in an eco-bus around the country, wearing fetching scarfs and reading my poems to a small indie crop of beloved fans who ask me to dedicate my books in hot pink ink, all the while homeschooling Baby Girl in truck stops with transfatless cherry pie and coffee shops with wifi (and yes, the previous rhyme did not elude me), and flying Lovey Loverpants out for weekend junkets where we all go hiking in the Rockies or sidewalk chalking in San Francisco. But of course life on the road would get old so I'd only want to do this during the school year. The summers I'd like to be a camp director at a camp called something like Camp Shamrock where the object of every obstacle course is not to win but to help the fat kid get over the wall and where the food is so good you never get homesick. Ask me what I'm doing to make this adventure a reality.

I'm practicing for the poet part.

At the Bigfoot Research Institute, at a party hosted by Yelp.

I've already got the best fans in the whole freaking world.