Death by Logistics

Well, so much for blossoms and butterflies.

Yesterday was gray, rainy, and unseasonably cold.  Thisbe had a playdate in the morning but it was clear (to me, at least) that we needed a game plan for the afternoon, too.  I, for one, did not want to sit inside the house for two hours until the possibility of further diversion (via another playdate) arrived.

"Look," I said to your father, thrusting my laptop in his direction.  "It's an indoor park.  Trish says it's good."
Your father sighed and glanced briefly at the screen; then he returned to reading Redbreast, a disturbingly-named Swedish thriller.
"Should I take Thisbe and you stay home with Matteus or should we all go?"
Your father put the book down on his chest and raised his eyebrows at me. "Well," he said, "I don't really want to go.  And I don't really want to stay with Matteus."
"Do you have a better idea?" I asked, rather archly.
"Well, if we're being honest, I'd rather just have you take both of them."
(Expletives followed)

Two hours later, we were on our way home from the ironically named "Good Times Park."  We'd stopped at Leann Chin's for dinner and let your sister consume only an egg roll and fortune cookie for sustenance.  You are at the lovely stage where you pick up pieces of food and then clench them to bits in your fist before trying to deposit them in your mouth.  There were smashed bits of sweet potato smeared on your face, in your hair, and on the cleaned-only-bi-annually high chair.  The lime green, cherry, and tangerine walls combined with the MSG in the noodles and the still echoing shrieks from the indoor park worked collectively toward inspiring a mild seasickness in my gut.

Our conversation in the car turned to logistics.  Yes, the epic battle of whether it's fair to take the older child away for the weekend leaving the other parent with the baby and the duty of distributing name tags at church on her own.  Thisbe sang made up songs to you and you gurgled contemplatively, your own desire to shriek apparently diminished by your parents' ability to fill in the gaps with similar decibel levels of pissed-off.  We finally reached the Sophie's Choice of logistics in which your father asked, in a raised and steely voice, "Well, what do YOU think is more important, me taking my grandmother to a doctor's appointment or you spending time with your good friend you haven't seen for a year?"  His tone suggested that this was a rhetorical question.  I didn't take it that way.  It was quiet for a long time.

Later we hugged and talked and fell asleep by 9:30.

Today is Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit comes as wind and fire and the disciples are a cacophony of different languages, their incomprehensible uproar enough to make those outside think that they're drunk.

Oddly, our pastor told a story about a congregation he knew that had lost members because the congregation had decided to reach out to a marginalized group that the departing members didn't feel comfortable co-habitating with.  Our Pastor's point was ultimately that congregations filled with conflict and distress were bad and that congregations filled with harmony and trust were good.  And obviously, there is truth to this.

But Carroll Hinderlie, former director of Holden Village, said that the Gospel lives through controversy.  And I believe that too.  It felt strange, on a day when we celebrate the disciples' inability to understand one another, on a day we believe the Holy Spirit is possessed with tongues of fire, that we would think fondly of harmony.

Or maybe I don't want to think fondly of harmony today because sometimes marriage feels like being tiny sailboats on a wide gray sea, on good days anchored and bobbing close and on bad days drifting further apart, visible swells and invisible depths between you.

I don't mean to suggest that your father and I are on rocky ground.  (Really, we're not).  I just mean to say that today I was glad to be reminded that sometimes the Holy Spirit is a whirlwind, a tempest, a deluge, a flood. 

Pentecost is the longest season in the church year.  The other two seasons, Christmas and Easter, are intense.  Glittery and joyful and stricken and bare, filled with babies and death, angels and ghosts.  Maybe Pentecost is the longest season because it's the season of the rest of life, the parts where we have to learn to live together and talk to each other, the parts where we're commissioned with hard work, where we're expected to extend love and grace in the middle of the staid gray sea of the everyday.

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. 

Mother's Day 2014: The Taste of Stolen Chicken

1. Waking up at 5:00am to your shrieks and finding, as I nursed you in the dark, the entire upper right side of your body wet from urine.  In the half chambers between sleeping and waking, trying to determine how loose your diaper was and at what bizarre angle your little penis must have been at to have achieved wetness in that location.

2. Waking at 8:00, glad to stretch and roll to my side and think at least two or three thoughts before descending into the fray.

3.  The pride on Thisbe's face as she stood in her brown fleece sleeper pajamas, gesturing with outstretched hand to the three different cards she'd made for me.  Spirals of flourescent glitter on one, a hand print on another, and a drawing of her "when she is old enough to go out on her own" looking fancy in flowing hair and crown.

4. A stainless steel mug filled with a Dunn Bros. latte that Daddy arrived with at 8:15.  The way the latte stayed warm all morning.

5. Watching you take little butt scoots across Gak and Ampa's hardwood floor.  Tracking your movement by the number of floorboards you crossed.  Three.

6. Your sister, nestled into my lap (while you slept), her pointer finger (smudged with black marker) tracking below the words as she read them: "Look, Sally, look!" or "Spot can jump. Spot can jump down."

7. Daddy entering at 10:45 with roses and words of praise about uncle John's sermon (sneaking into the State Fair, something about how Jesus is the gate, how we have to be sheep that help one another)

8. Sitting at the table with Gak and Ampa and Greg and Agnes and Michael, Big Bowl take out in front of all of us, realizing that no one had actually paid for the food (Peter thought Ricki paid over the phone--she had not).

9. The taste of stolen yellow curry chicken.

10.  A walk below the warm gray sky.  Your coos and hums floating up, the breeze catching puffs from your stroller tray and sending them flying.

11.  Gak claiming that she would NOT cook today and then setting out a fruit salad with canteloupe and pineapple and blueberries and raspberries, a coffee cake that she "just wanted" to bake three days ago, a green salad, mimosas, and bread.  In addition to the stolen food from Big Bowl.

12. A beeswax candle, violets pressed to the smooth yellow side.

13. Yehwah, Agnes's friend who Gak invited to lunch because she didn't have a mother to be with.

14. Playing with you and your sister in the late afternoon at Way park.  74 degrees and sunny skies.  Your father off buying sandwiches.  I pushed you in the swing while Thisbe jumped off the side of the slide, then the jungle gym, then the stone wall.

15. And then Thisbe said, "I'm going to ride my bike without training wheels now" so Daddy took them off.  And where, two weeks ago, she had been wobbly, certain she'd fall--today she simply got onto the bike and rode, steadily, as though something inside her had righted itself.

It is such a gift, to be a Mama to you both.  This quieter truth sometimes gets drowned out by the louder truths of exhaustion and explosive poops and whining and frustration and dirty carpets and sticky refrigerators and impatient shrieks.  Mamahood is a gift.

This weekend, we had a baby shower for Auntie Martha.  In a little book we made for her, of lullabies and blessings, I wrote for her the lyrics to the song Dumbo's Mama sings to baby Dumbo.  The song comes when the Mama has been put into elephant jail and Dumbo is feeling horribly alone.  So she sneaks her trunk though the bars of the prison and rocks him against her wrinkled grey skin.

All through the summer of 2009 and again in the summer of 2013, I sang that song to your sister and to you as I walked and walked, ("Baby mine, don't you cry / Baby mine, dry your eyes") through the heat and the waiting, ("Rest your head close to my heart") so full of desire to meet you and for our time together to begin ("Never to part / Baby of mine")

September 3rd, 2009

July 31st, 2013

The Problem with Desire

Spring has been lazy and surly this week, draping us with clouds and drizzle, scattershot snow and pane-rattling wind.  The end of the semester is in sight and we're itchy to be there.  We imagine it will be a place of sun and loosening, of gin and tonics on the back porch while Thisbe collects pine cones and weeds in a wicker basket.  Our first attempt at welcoming spring was not particularly attractive.  In my head I saw my baby giggling on the green grass while my daughter drew flowers with sidewalk chalk.  Instead I got matted brown grass, a seasonally uninspired blanket, a grumpy baby, and a daughter whose high heels and leggings made her look vaguely like a cheap hooker.  Why is she trying to balance on a rake?  I don't know.  I only know that the pictures everyone else was posting of spring on Facebook looked decidedly more attractive than our best attempts.

The best part of spring so far has been your abrupt change in personality.  You've gone from solemn to salubrious, from whiny to winsome.  You giggle and smile and sing to yourself happily for at least twenty minutes every morning.  After you go to bed at night, Daddy and I often have the kind of conversations that parents of a child can only have with one another, because they are so boring and treacly that can't be shared with others.

Me: Isn't Matteus just SO cute?
Daddy:  He is.  He's adorable.
Me: Don't you just want to gobble him up?  Don't you want to INHALE him?
Daddy: I do.  I do.

We both take sips of wine and stare into the distance and I try to convince Daddy to watch another episode of "The Good Wife."

Then yesterday we took you to your nine month appointment.

You are 18 pounds, 10 ounces; 29 inches; and in possession of a ridiculously large head.  This makes your percentiles 30%, 75%, and 92% respectively.  We were feeling particularly proud because you finally mastered rolling over this week.  You're very proud of this as well.  You sit up like a champ and are well on your way toward mastering the pincer grasp.  Also, you smile and we want to eat you up.

But as the nurse and then Doctor Amy asked us questions about your development, it became increasingly clear that you're running decidedly far behind the average on a number of counts.  You don't creep or crawl.  You don't clap.  You don't say "ma" or "ba" or "da." You don't recognize the word "no" (likely because we never tell you "no" since you can't move).  You don't clap.  The doctor thought that perhaps if you're not moving more substantially in a month we might consider taking you to a physical therapist.

It is tricky when you know in your gut that your baby is healthy, lovely, and normal but there are many outward signs that point to the contrary.  It is particularly tricky when, in your secret heart of hearts, you consider the word "average" to actually mean "primate" and "below average" to mean "protozoan."

So, rationally I know that you're doing things in your own time, that babies develop at their own rates, and that I better get over my baggage so my anxiety doesn't stunt your confidence.  But actually, as per usual, I'm freaking out a little.

Not because I'm worried that you'll never crawl.  Maybe you won't.  Who cares.  Not because I'm worried you'll never walk or talk.  You will.  No doubt.  I think my real worry stems from the fact that the reason you haven't done these things doesn't have anything to do with capability but with desire.

Your sister has no issues with desire.  Sometimes I think she is ONLY desire, covered with a thin sheen of skin and Hello Kitty paraphernalia.  Your father and I, as different as we are, both have a keen sense of our own desires (professional, personal, spiritual, sexual).  But I fear that you, sweet boy, as the only second born in our family, might not be built in the same way.  You have been more content to watch than to act, to sit than to creep, to coo than to talk.

One of the cardinal sins of writing fiction is creating a protagonist who doesn't want anything.  Someone who observes but is impotent about action.  Prufrock for 500 pages.  As parents, we can teach you a great many things: how to brush your teeth and how to practice an instrument until your fingers bleed, the language needed for an apology and the tools needed to change an electrical socket.  We can model a strong work ethic and abundant compassion.  But I'm not certain that we can make you WANT.  I'm not sure that one person can put desire in another person's heart (unless one person is the smoking hot romantic ideal of the other).

I know that an over-abundance of desire can lead to unsavory things; it's not that I want you to be just like us.  It's that I hope you find things in your life, even if they're few and far between, to want so much that you're willing to work, HARD, to obtain those things.  Maybe pulling yourself over six inches of carpet or the articulation of consonant sounds or the slapping of your hands together are not particularly worthy goals.  But I pray that there will be things--ideas or people, problems or images, words or stories that fill you with desire, that will turn the engine of your heart over and over until you have no choice but to go.

Holy Fervor

It was difficult not to believe in resurrection today.  The temperature soared into the 70's and every Christian child in Minnesota with a new Easter outfit actually got to wear it (sans leggings, sweaters, and boots).  There was no snow.  There was soft rain last night and damp fog this morning.  There was green grass and black dirt.  There were buds on the trees and there were  birds shaking the bushes indignantly when Thisbe came stomping with her Easter basket in hand.  There were gold letters splayed across the banners at church and brass instruments braying the familiar hymns and even the most harried mothers sporting heels and dresses with waistlines. 

And new life quakes through your small body at an alarming rate.  You still can't really move in an orderly fashion but your desire to crawl or walk or do SOMETHING causes you to spasm and twist and and bend and crane.  At church your father and I tried to hold you steady but you would not sit still.  You wanted to be lifted and jostled.  You wanted to flirt with the old lady behind us and squeal at the offering plate.  You bend and straighten, bend and straighten, the entirety of your body shouting "life, life, life."

Your sister, too, has become almost manic with the sun.  She bounced on her trampoline today with holy fervor, crowed triumphant at every egg discovered, and when we asked her, after the Gospel reading, if she'd heard the ending of the story, she held up the picture of the yak she'd been coloring and said "well maybe but look at THIS."

After church, per your sister's request, we spread a blanket in the backyard and had a picnic of hard boiled eggs and baby oranges and bacon-scallion-cream-cheese-smeared Triscuits and almonds.  You ate peach yogurt and plucked at the puffs we placed on the blanket beside you.  In the late afternoon we walked to the park; you leaned forward and clutched the front of the stroller, perhaps for the view.  Perhaps to feel the vibrations of the pavement in your forearms.  Carol and Alvin came for dinner and we ate pulled pork sandwiches and cole slaw and asparagus and sweet potato fries.  All the doors were open and the light kept sliding through the room, even after we put you to bed, even as we savored a second glass of wine.

A few weeks ago a man in our town who had recently gone off his anti-depression medications left his house on a Saturday morning and hasn't returned since.  A wonderful friend of ours lost his father last weekend to a massive heart attack.  There are dear people in our lives who are living with cancer or who are learning to cope with other illnesses.  And we said good-bye to people we loved this year, Matteus.  We lost Jennifer and Graham and as we sang "And I will raise you up" today I thought of John Paul, and was so sad that you will never meet him.  For people who are close to death or to what it means to live inside death right now, I can't imagine that Easter really feels like a "win."  There are people we have lost and there are parts of our lives and ways of living that cannot be resurrected.  Death may not have the last word, but death does have some words--and those words are powerful and life changing.  We all hear those words eventually.

"The light shines in the darkness," we say.  "And the darkness has not overcome it."  We do not say that the light dispels the darkness entirely.  We say that it shines, bravely and unabashedly, in the middle of it.

This year the light of our Easter celebration was only smudged, peripherally, by darkness.  But that will not always be the case.  I am grateful for this day.  It was beautiful.  Not even death can change that.

I like this one because you're clutching a handful of your sister's hair.

I like this one because we're all kind of a mess but your gaze is captured perfectly.

My Inner Sadducee

Spring has sprung.  Blades of grass spearing the matted brown muck, ducks waddling in our yard at twilight, leaf tornadoes swirling through the heart of campus.  You can balance on your hands and knees for a few minutes if we position you just right and you're rolling front to back consistently (and you could roll back to front if you cared to).  Last weekend I got to escape to Stillwater with a few lovely female friends while Daddy attempted to feed you bottles of breast milk and formula (attempted being the key word).  This week was a blur for me--call committee meeting on Monday, Little Mermaid with Thisbe and Gak on Tuesday, a homily at St. John's on Wednesday, and a stint on Northfield's Art Zany radio show on Friday (with you in tow).  Daddy did a lot of double bedtime duty (hurrah, Daddy!).

Because I don't have a lot of blogging energy today I'm posting instead the homily I gave at St. John's and a few recent pics.  And I'm feeling grateful this busyness--though tiring--is the result of wonderful gifts in our lives--friends and relatives and art and church and community.

Matthew 22:23-33

The same day some Sadducees came to him, saying there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said ‘If a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married, and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. The second did the same, so also the third, down to the seventh.  Last of all, the woman herself died. In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her.”

            Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.  And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is God not of the dead but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it they were astonished at his teaching.

I know that here at St. John’s your focus this Lenten season has been on Grounding.  When Pastor Pam asked me to speak, she mentioned that because I write a lot about parenting, about the mess and dirtiness of that particular world, that I might talk about the relationship between grounding and parenting.

And indeed, the world of my children is a world that does not generally permit me the airy, writerly musings in which I dwelled before my lovely offspring entered the landscape.  A few nights ago for example, my rambunctious four-year-old daughter chucked a throw pillow at the living room window as hard as she could.  She narrowly missed my laptop but managed to bring down the curtains and the curtain rod in a cataclysmic-sounding clatter.  Rather than apologizing, my daughter accused me of hurting her feelings with my “mad face” and then stormed upstairs with Dog Do, her unfortunately-named stuffed companion. Meanwhile, my 8-month-old has regressed in his sleeping habits, refuses to roll over, and has developed some kind of rash on his face. He enjoys screaming while I feed him and pooping in the bathtub. This is my ground, my dirt, my patch of earth.

And if a parenting guru, someone I knew was TRULY all knowing in the behavior of children, descended from the clouds, my questions would begin like this: Do you think we’re paying too much attention to Thisbe or not enough attention?  Should I try to address how she feels or am I coddling her too much?  Should I have let the curtain rod incident go?  Is it OK to have a mad face? Should I let Matteus cry it out? Should I have him tested for allergies?  Which Northfield kindergarten do you think is the best fit for Thisbe? Is screen time OK? How much?  Which shows?

I could go on like this for days.  Decades, maybe.   I can’t go on Facebook or open an Atlantic magazine without someone telling me how certain kinds of parents, certain parenting techniques are failing our kids.  We’re too protective.  We compliment too often.  We’re too involved.  The accusations come fast from all angles and so, for a type-A but not naturally gifted parent who tends toward anxiety and fears too often the opinions of others—well, I spend a lot of time obsessing about something over which I ultimately don’t have that much control.

And so you see, I’m actually a Sadducee at heart.  In today’s Gospel, the Sadducees ask a question that entirely misses the point. The passage begins with the Sadducees coming to Jesus and declaring that there is no resurrection.  They then ask their rather superfluous question about marriage and heaven-wives. Though some would probably say that they’re using the detail-oriented question to catch Jesus in the act of being wrong about the whole resurrection issue, I see the situation slightly differently.  I see the Sadducees using quibbly questions to cover up their anxiety about the bigger matters, about resurrection and life.

I think we do this all the time.  At least I do.  I do it with parenting but also with my marriage.  I do it at work, with my comparisons to colleagues.  I do it with friends and siblings and neighbors.  I obsess over the small questions and concerns.  I do this for two reasons:

1. Because thinking about the little questions means that I don’t have to think about the big questions.  The truth is that these quibbly questions about parenting veil bigger questions about parenting and love and what it means to be human. My real questions as a parent don’t really have to do with sleep schedules or tantrum prevention.  They go more like this: Do I know how to love? Do my children love me? Am I worthy of their love? Of God’s love? How do I make sure my children know they are always worthy of love? Will God truly care for them if and when I can’t? If I die, will they know I love them?

2. So I ask little questions to cover up my anxiety about the big questions.  I also obsess about the little questions because the answers to quibbly questions offer clear direction about what exactly to DO.  If I want to give my baby a good life I should feed him organic sweet potatoes or nurse him until he’s twelve; if I want my daughter to be a strong person I should use the word “leader” instead of “bossy” and let her watch Disney on Tuesdays—but only if we discuss the inherent misogyny afterward.  I’m addicted to parenting articles because they provide a clear action plan.  I like a clear action plan.

When Jesus finally gets around to answering the Sadducees question he says, “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.”  The Sadducees offer an either/or proposition and Jesus says, “neither.”  The kind of answer the Sadducees are looking for misses the point.

The whole difficulty with Jesus is that he offers the deep answers but he doesn’t usually provide us with specific details about how to enact these answers ourselves.  Jesus says that we are worthy of love no matter what. That we are forgiven.  That we are called, always, towards life abundant and that we are charged with offering signs of that abundant life to one another.

But unfortunately, we are called to decipher the answers to the specific questions ourselves.  Today’s Gospel lesson reminds me, as a type-A Mama trying to figure out the messy details, that these truths, about resurrection and unconditional love and life abundant must always be the answers behind my other answers.  That as I make my way through the messy terrain of parenting and marriage, through friendship and citizenship and even academia, that the source of any answer I offer should be grounded in God’s abiding and eternal love.  This should be the first ground I teach my children to walk upon.  This should be the earth from which their sweet complicated beings grow and bloom.

Dot came for a visit!

With Gak before the Little Mermaid.  Your sister is fully costumed.

These are good women to know.

I want to gobble you up on an almost hourly basis.

Coming Out of the Gray

In Northfield, the temperature is finally veering toward the abnormally warm today.  For one day.  But for this one day the coffee shop is a-bustle.  Students bend over notebooks, sporting Birkenstocks and newly pedicured toenails; families shuffle in with mud clinging to boots and shoes, the kiddos pressing their faces to the glass refrigerator door, pointing out Oranginas and fruity sodas.  Your father wants to put in paving stones this afternoon while the earth is pliable.  I'm on my way to a meeting at church, a mock interview to prepare us for how to really interview potential new pastor candidates.

We have been to Florida and back.  Thisbe was the happiest of all of us I think.  She swam in a heated pool with a waterfall, made sandcastle after sandcastle on the beach (and then pressed the plastic figures of Anna and Elsa and Ariel into the impressionable walls), played mini-golf, rode on the shoulders of uncles and almost-uncles, fed giraffes, played dress-up at the Naples Children's museum, watched Frozen for the fourth time, laid out her clothing carefully in her room that was actually a closet, collected bits of dried coral and gingerly toed dead sea slugs, and just generally had a grand time. 

Somewhere over Georgia

"Look, Mom!  A hat without ear flaps!"

Watching "Frozen" with Auntie Agnes and Greg

You, on the other hand, became steadily less pleased with the world as the week progressed.  Maybe it was teething, maybe it was exhaustion or a growth spurt or over-stimulation, maybe it was too many people or the absence of familiar objects or the desire to move and the inability to do so--who the hell knows.  But by the end of the week you needed to be held almost constantly in order to stem the tide of shrieks.  You woke more and more often at night and were less easily pacified.  Letting you cry it out is one thing back at home...it's slightly different when there are a band of relatives to disturb in addition to your parents.  On Thursday, when you woke at 5:45 and wouldn't go back to sleep, I bundled you into the stroller, cap on your head and pink striped beach towel cocooned around you, and set off in the pitch black 55 degree air.  I ate a cinnamon roll and drank a latte at the cafe while you sucked on an indestructible baby book and attempted to nurse the nose of Mr. Bear.  You've been slightly better since our return but you are still prone to flapping your arms like a tethered pigeon and shrieking for no apparent reason.  You still don't roll, still don't utter consonant sounds, still prefer an expression of stoicism to one of glee.  When placed on your belly you fuss and raise your butt in a half-hearted Jane Fonda exercise move.

Refusing to roll down the Rolling Hill at the Children's Museum

After you and you sister wake up from your afternoon naps, we'll go outside.  I'll push you in the stroller and we'll gulp in the warm air.  Thisbe will wear her rubber frog boots and experiment with the tonalities of mud stomping and slurping.  Dada will putter with paving stones or dead branches or the broken car window.  We'll eat an unimpressive meal from the crockpot (something involving frozen stew vegetables and chicken and a gravy packet) and if I remember we'll attempt to make a Lenten centerpiece with felt and burlap and a candle holder from church. 

The weather in Florida was lovely, but it was a kind of boozy happiness: imbibed quickly and resulting in warm and fuzzy feelings for a limited amount of time.  Today is happiness for real, the happiness that comes after you have waded through grief or cold or loneliness.  The kind that feels earned rather than bought. In Naples you could see, on the skin of the tanned and weathered crowd, how the days there just keep unfolding into nests of predictable warmth and ease, a permanent blur of sun and shimmer.  Here we know spring as tempestuous and fickle.  Sun and then snow and then warm and then ice again. 

Oh Spring, you changeable vixen!  You equivocating ingenue!  You budding sociopath!  Your strip tease is endless but we will wait.  Wait and wait. Until the gray fades into a distant point. Until green burns our eyelids down.