Thursday, June 5, 2014

Take That, Hallmark.

It's been far too long since I've written, sweet boy.  Unfortunately, I haven't written because May was such a crazy month...which means, of course, that there is much to tell.

Summer has fully arrived.  School is done, our grades our in, and the President of Estonia has come and gone (for the Olaf graduation).  We went bowling for Dada's 20th college reunion and Thisbe learned about the slippery joy of bowling shoes and the drama and glory that black lights can offer a four-year-old.  Dada and I got to dine with a group of lovely friends in honor of a book I edited and an equally large group of family members gathered to watch your sister's first dance recital.  We had our first meal of the year at the Pizza Farm and Grandma Gail introduced you to the joy of the piano (and introduced Mommy and Daddy to the names of the plants in our backyard).  Friends from Slovakia came to visit and Nanny Barb officially said good-bye (to being your weekly caretaker, at least).

Then, to top it all off, Auntie Martha gave birth to gorgeous Naomi Dorothy, a beautiful pink-skinned, dark-haired darling whose features are tiny, perfect.  Deliberately and finely drawn.  And on the day Naomi was born, the caterpillars we'd been tending for Nanny Barb hatched from their cocoons and started fanning their marvelous wings...

It is an odd feeling when the truth seems so close to a treacly Hallmark card.  But it has been this way, a little.  For a week our yard was covered in pink blossoms.  It is impossible to think in January that the day will come when the path to your car will be carpeted in petals, when your child's safety belt will click easily into place (without the burden of fifty thousand layers) and when you will go for weeks at a time without wiping a nose or sponging vomit off the floor (KNOCK ON WOOD).

And you, sweet one, you are finally learning to inch your way across the floor on your belly.  Tonight the rest of us stood in Thisbe's room and cheered you as you inch-wormed across the carpet, stopping occasionally to smile grandly.  You still don't make consonant sounds or clap, but we had a person from the Northfield public schools come out to assess you (since it was free and, it being summer and all, we had some time to kill) and it turns out you're perfectly, blissfully normal.  You've also taken to spitting your baby food back in our faces and only devouring solids that you can pick up on your own--the majority of which you then manage to drop on your lap or down the sides of your high chair where it somehow finds a way to brown and rot.  Unfortunately, you still love to shriek and still feel most comfortable clinging to your mother.

You're sleeping now.  The fan is whirring in your stuffy room and your sister is singing "Wheels on the Bus," her garage sale Princess nightgown bunched around her thighs, Dog Do her ever-patient audience.  Your father is at a Twins game with some friends.  It's the bottom of the fifth and the Twins are up, 4 to 3.  And I'm in the living room where I can see the pale sky dimming.  The cool night air is floating in the window and a few birds are still conversing. 

I know this won't last.  Not the weather or the health of ourselves and those we love, not even the good health of the earth we're living on.  I have friends who are on the other side of beauty right now, who are living through places of grief and pain, who are moving day by day because imagining an endless unfolding of time is simply too painful.  We will be there too.

But tonight I am simply full of gratitude.  Seeing tiny Naomi, as she was weighed and measured, shaking her tiny, perfectly formed appendages in the new air of our world I was reminded of you and your sister, how when Thisbe was born I wept because she was so perfect and all I could possibly do was to somehow mar that perfection with all of my failings. 

When I saw Naomi, though, I wept not out of terror for what we might do to her but out of gratitude for the gift of what she will do, what she has already done, for us. 











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