I Resolve to Blip

In honor of Alice Munro, who used nap time to perfect her genius at the short story, I'm going to use your nap time in order to write a blog post every day this month.  Not in order to perfect my genius at the blog post, but because you only sleep for 45 minutes at a pop which isn't really enough time to write a syllabus or correct page proofs or write anything substantial or, you know, "good."

So my writing this January will be blips.  Brief moments and images pulled out of the froth of the day, likely without any introspection, reflection, or rationale to accompany them.  Because it is a law of God that right around the time you begin to reflect on something or to grow a new idea, the baby knows and the baby wakes and the baby screams.

Today during your first nap Thisbe and I played Sequence, laying red and blue plastic chips onto pictures of penguin and zebra and moose and camel.  You and I dropped her off at school at 10:00am but by 12:00 I'd gotten a call from Teacher Sarah that Thisbe was languishing below her Hello Kitty blanket, complaining about leg pain.  I thought perhaps she was simply being dramatic but it turns out she had a 101 degree fever.  So I unzipped you from your Christmas sleeper bag and we drove back to get her.  Then, while you slept in your carseat upstairs, she and I ate chicken soup side by side in the breakfast nook.  Sun skittering scross the snow and into our eyes.  Toast brown but still a little too soft in the middle, the way it tastes when it comes from the freezer.  Thisbe put a blanket over our knees and snuggled against me and said how this was the perfect lunch, the best one she'd ever had.

After an explosive poop and a bath in the sink, you watched a little bit of Cinderella with your sister while she nibbled on cinnamon-honey toast.  The baby-zombie expression on your face explains why you're not supposed to watch Cinderella with your sister until you're two years old.

Then your sister watched Peter Pan and you took another nap and Daddy came home and I made kale and sausage and tortellini soup for dinner.  And then, big grown-up boy, you ate almost an entire jar or organic sweet potato puree!  We'd tried it a number of times but you spit it out every time, globs of orange goop (or ivory goop or puse goop) on the front of the bib and you making a face like a herd of cows had shat a moat of cow pies around your high chair.  But tonight, you figured it out.  Your mouth opened again and again for the purple-plastic coated spoon.  And your sister, cheeks flushed, in the room next door watched Arthur pull the sword from the stone.