It’s one of the ironies we seem never really to pay attention to, but we’re always aiming at perfection. Granted, the apathetic eighth-grader’s bar is significantly lower than many adults’, but there exists for even the most uninspired a standard, despite his protests to the contrary.

Perhaps there’s even an element of national identity in this. I know from experience that the average Pole’s definition of “perfectly clean” is several steps above my own. And my own definition is several degrees more severe than the Girl’s, whose idea of cleaning up consists of stacking everything that was on the floor into piles on the two tables — one ostensibly for drawing and reading, the other for playing — in her room. And so yesterday, we began our first nudges to the perfection implicit in Wigilia (the traditional Polish Christmas Eve meal) by cleaning the Girl’s room.

The Boy, in the meantime, cooed and cackled as he played with one of L’s old toys, oblivious to the Girl’s struggle, yet to be completed, against chaos. His standard for perfection is at the most elementary level: clean diaper, rested soul, full belly. Any one of those three perfections drop out of alignment and we all know about it. It’s really very simple, though. There’s no guessing, no games. No misleading. No implication. He cries and we do two things: sniff and look at the clock.

It’s all about the little steps to perfection, the little steps that often leave a bit of a mess. Like in the Girl’s mouth.

“Tata, my new tooth still hasn’t begun to grow,” she bemoaned yesterday. It takes time, like any perfecting, but what can I tell her? I don’t remember how long it took for my own teeth to grow back, and since she’s the oldest in the family, there’s no familial metric. Still, reassurances were in order.

“It will take time,” was about the only thing one could say. Not nearly as much time as the other things in life you’ll try to perfect: your temper (still working on mine); your restlessness when bored (ditto); your frustration when things don’t work as you think they should (hey, did you inherit all my flaws?).

“Certainly my impatience costs me,” I thought to myself leaving L to more cleaning. Just the other day, I’d rushed to mulch the leaves in the lower portion of our backyard before going through and checking for hazards. The result was mind- and blade-bending. And so today, before I could really even begin much of anything on my list, I went to a big box hardware to get a replacement.

The girls, though, had other duties. It seems the twenty-second is baking day in our house. It was, at least, last year — to the day — and it was probably the same day the year before and the year before that. I was just probably too lazy to write about it. Or perhaps, looking for perfection, I wanted to write about something new. “Who wants to write about the same thing every year?” I might have muttered. But those cycles are, themselves, somehow signals of perfection, concentric circles that bear down on perhaps the perfect sugar cookie.

The Girl’s skills, certainly, are improving. Coupled with her imagination, she often creates things that leave me astounded. Her cookies today, for instance, are portraits.

“That’s me,” she says, pointing to the smiling cookie with chocolate hair. “That’s H,” she says, pointing to the cooking with dirty-walnut blond hair, referring to the daughter of our sitter. “And that’s W,” she says of the little boy cookie with a tuft of blond nuts.

The Boy, meanwhile, spent the evening working on perfecting locomotion. At twenty-five pounds, he’s a very heavy seven-month-old, and we’ve wondered if his arms will be up to the challenge of holding up that amount of weight. Tonight, he improvised a bit of locomotion, pushing with his toes and wiggling his body as he supported as much of himself as possible on his elbows. Nudges toward crawling. Nudges toward walking. Nudges toward independence. It starts so early, and before I know it, he too will be informing me of things that are inappropriate, as the Girl likes to do; suggesting that hisideas are really, in fact, better than mine, as the Girl is beginning to do.

Still, for now, I’m boss. When I say, “time for bed,” it is. I still make reality with my words. For now.

I end my evening with its own little bit of perfection, including Zimmerman’s performance of Chopin’s four ballades, but most especially his “Ballade No. 2.”

Perfection, and due to the fact that Zimmerman can play this again and again, without missing a single not, without a flaw of any kind, it is true perfection, not just some euphemism for “very, very good.”