We have a new child in the house, and I’m barely updating. I could make excuses.
We’re too busy taking walks:
Backyard twirling sessions have taken up all of our time:
Testing new snorkeling equipment has eaten into our time:
We’ve been busy jumping into the water:
We’ve been learning to drive a stick:
Lots of excuses; none of them convincing.
The professor was terribly kind to give me a job as her assistant on her great exploratory backyard safari.
We had an important mission, a mission of discovery in lands of danger.
First up, the incredibly rare Knockout Rose. The professor discovered that it was possible to determine where old blossoms had been.
It was an important scientific development, but not nearly as important as the realization that “roses provide bees.” So important was this new scientific understanding that the professor decided to make a short note of it in her special notebook.
Yet nature is full of surprises, like sleeping lightening bugs,
and mushrooms growing under a stand of Leyland Cypresses.
My job was simple: do whatever the professor required. I held the sample case and made a record of each location the professor took a sample.
What was best was all the free lectures I received. The professor is a generous teacher, and she explained many mysteries as we wandered about our backyard and the neighbor’s.
Throughout the day, the professor also conducted experiments. Finding a seed pod from a sweet gum tree, she made a most scientific declaration. “My hypothesis is that it won’t float,” she declared, marching over to the small stream that forms our lower property line.
She tossed it in, watched it bob about, then summarized the experiment with true scientific objectivity: “My hypothesis was wrong.”
“That provides water from the toilet.”
But some of the time, the professor simply observed.
“What about pay?” I asked, knowing I’d already been paid many times over by just being present with her.
“Well, we can pick some berries,” she replied.
There’s high maintenance and low maintenance. The Girl has always been the former. From birth, with her digestion problems and sleeping difficulties, she drew a constant flow of energy from anyone caring for her. Being an only child for so long only prolonged this.
Enter: the Boy. Decidedly low maintenance.
The Girl feels she’s been playing second fiddle for the last two weeks. She never says it, but it’s clear. Add to it the frustration she must feel to hear “No, not now” to her constant requests to hold the Boy and it’s fairly clear that we needed a night like tonight.
Recital night — the evening L has been talking about constantly for a week or more now. “Wednesday is my rehearsal,” she began saying last week, “and Thursday is my recital.” She told friends; she told teachers; she told strangers in the checkout line.
“We’ve got to make her feel truly special,” K said, and so we bought two bouquets and a box of her favorite chocolates — just what every ballerina needs.
And she got the added bonus of staying up well past her bedtime, a fact which impressed and pleased her enough that she repeated it several times on the way back to the car. Of course the evening photo session made everything a touch later, too.
The Girl was born in December: to go outside was a major project requiring actual planning and considerable logistics in the form of layers of protection. The Boy, on the other hand, is a spring baby.
This means that he and the berries are ripening together.
It’s probably a good thing that newborns need to be held constantly, because if they hoped to do anything else, those dreams would soon shatter.
Who can resist the fresh scent and bobbing head of a newborn? Who can see a gurgling newborn and not hold his arms out? They are out there, but I’ve never understood them.
We are reminded of what true innocence is, of what it means to be totally trusted, of what softness and sweetness really are.
Note: The photo of me under the deck with the Boy is the work of the Girl. It appears this is a post in which she’s absent, but she’s moving to the other side of the shutter.
The Girl has been the center of a small cluster of orbiting adults for her entire life. Mama, Tata, Nana, Papa, Babcia, Dziadek — all circle around her in their own cycles and epicycles, drifting into apogee, out of perigee, but always circling.
It’s been all about her dance rehearsal, her play dates, her mini photography sessions, her wants and needs.
As she has spun, so we have rotated around her.
But now there’s competition. “The boy” has become a newly frequent tag for posts here, and the Girl is likely beginning to wonder just how many pictures of a baby sleeping we can possibly take. And she’s beginning to wonder just how much one little caterpillar can cry.
It’s a learning experience in countless ways. The Girl is learning she’s no longer the center; we’re learning now to make her realize that it’s now simply an elliptical orbit, with two foci.
A wise web visitor — as well as others — once pointed out that we’ll need to work on the sibling relationship as well. It’s a little trickier, because making the Girl realize she’s not suddenly an outsider is something within my control: I can take positive steps to affect that, like spending the afternoon with her riding bikes as we did today. The sibling relationship seems at first blush more like a “lead a horse to water” situation
Yet there is an initiative from the Girl herself. Irritation about crying has been transformed into self-appointed pacifier duty: “When he spits it out, I’ll get it!” she proclaims.
And of course she’s just dying to hold him.
Once upon a time there was a princess that had a castle. The castle had a queen. She was beautiful.
Once upon a time there was a queen and a king and a princess. She had five cats and one dog.
Once there was a dog. he went to the park.
The cat went the forest to catch field mice.
Warm weather means water.
“Oh, L!” is a common refrain.
Little hands are good at threading little beads onto little strings.
And with a young lady who sometimes has little patience, that’s no small feat.
The creative process has its demands, though, and if the motivation is there, the persistence and patience are not far behind.
Little hands are also good at opening big letters — big in their size and their significance.
“L, you have mail!” I call out as I enter. It seems her friend from school has written back.
We don’t want to be draconian with our rules, but television certainly must have certain limitations.
Thirty minutes a day.
It was sometime during second or third grade, I believe, that I first realized I wasn’t seeing the same things my classmates were seeing. I’d somehow discovered that if I pulled on the corners of my eyes, I could see better. The teachers noticed, said something to my parents, and shortly after that, I had my first pair of glasses.
The Girl, it turns out, has the opposite problem: she’s far-sighted.
The optometrist tells us it’s something she could outgrow in a few years.
There are some things, however, she’s likely to retrain for several years to come.
The first video that was entirely the Girl’s idea.
Wants and needs are easily confused. Birds, for example, need water like all creatures. They don’t need berries, but their sweet flavor and high water content makes berries particularly attractive. Our recently-installed netting, however, frustrates our flying friends from fulfilling both wants and needs (though it does little for alliterative flourishes).
Flowers need attention, as do little girls (and, I would imagine, little boys, though we won’t be collecting anecdotal evidence for a few more weeks yet). And the best attention is often so seemingly slight: a pat, a hug, a kind word.
Spring is a time of expectation and rebirth. Or simply birth. With four weeks remaining until the Boy’s due date, it’s time to complete the final preparations: clothes need washing, cribs need assembling,
and final days as an only child need enjoying. We’re all bursting at the prospect of a new member of the family, but I suspect that it won’t take long for the Girl to start remembering how peaceful a Saturday afternoon could be when she was flying solo.
But there will be things only she can help with for several more years: her place as the special helper is secure for the foreseeable future.
So is mine.
When your medium is chalk, the world is your canvas.
When your family includes a rambunctious five-year-old, escape is your standard.
