Time for sleep

Even now, after a year, sleep isn’t the same. Maybe it will never be like it was pre-baby: eight hours without a single moment of semi-consciousness. Now night is a blur of dreams, wide awake moments flushed with hormonal heat, moments yanked from sleep yet again, moments still nursing.

As a result some days my moods are like salmon migrating upstream. Often, they storm the turbines of my heart. Up, then down. Flailing. Inevitably.

Today, after a weekend of sun, fun, extroversion, and no naps, I woke up exhausted, with mastitis. Again. The cumulative lack of deep sleep has caught up. Things feel tangential and disconnected.

Most weeks I stay up late into the evening. These nighttime hours are my time for painting and writing; for locating the fragile connective tissue that holds my days together. This only works if I get a nap in with Bean in the morning, though.

We curl like puppies, a tangle of limbs under the down comforter. His bare feet pressed into my belly. We sleep like this for an hour at least. Sometimes two, and everything is okay. But last week there were no naps. Days of go, go, go. Days of longer sunlight. More to do. Friends visiting. Deadlines. It’s easy for me to try to live on credit with myself. To take out debt after debt in the sleep department.

I’m trying to learn how to listen to my body. To heed the warning signs. But it’s hard when most days I feel like I accomplish so little. A handful of sentences written maybe. Possibly a load of laundry. (And of course caring for Bean.) It’s hard to allow this to be enough. I’m so goal driven, so pushy, and impatient. It’s hard to bring myself back to the present and wait for the well to fill again.

Weekend mosaic: sugar on snow & framing walls

We wake up baffled about the time. As usual, the three of us are a tangle of limbs, warm skin against skin. Bean has taken to nuzzling into the nook between my chin and shoulder when he wakes up, and today he snuggles in and starts humming a little ditty that is tuneless and dreamy. Unlike us, he’s ready to start the day when the first sun rays poke through the shades. He scoots off the bed before we can catch him and runs to greet our houseguest.

We head to Starbucks for coffee this morning with our guest, and then to the little bakery kiosk for warm croissants with ham and swiss cheese. We take the paper sacks to of goodies to the park, where Bean runs after pigeons and tries to climb everything in sight. We take turns eating mouthfuls of flakey pastry and running after him as he goes after his fancy: up the courthouse stairs, after the dog he sees at the other side of the park, or towards the gulls that have gathered for handouts. “Buh, buh, buh” he says pointing at the birds.

After our friend leaves in a flurry of waved goodbyes (waving being Bean’s newest fascination), DH and I slip away to a sugar on snow party at our neighbor’s house while Bean and the babysitter head to the park. At our house we walk hand in hand down through the field with the gnarled apple trees and stalky grasses to the neighbor’s drive. Their dog lopes down to greet us, her ears as soft as rabbit’s fur.

We meet other neighbors over bowls of snow (saved in a cooler from the last snowfall a few weeks ago) with hot syrup poured on top. The syrup turns to taffy and is sticky sweet. Everyone we meet is kind, down-to-earth and genuine: the doctor who keeps sheep, the family down the road with teenage girls dying for baby sitting jobs, the stone mason, the carpenter who also is an avid cyclist. This is what home is like.

After hours of banter we make our way back up the hill, finding time to kiss in the sunny, sawdust filled dining room before embarking on the task of framing yet another wall. It’s hours of measuring, cutting, re-cutting, laughing, kissing, hammering two-by-fours into place, with a stop for Italian sodas and a trip to the general store. Like out of an old movie, it sells everything: ice cream, panty hose, hunting rifles, sandpaper, milk, wine, fishing lures, twinkies, steaks. A good place to know about when the roads are bad.

By six it’s still light out and I pull into the driveway to find Bean digging in the dirt in the front yard. He is so absorbed in his project I barely get a hello. For dinner we share a bowl of chicken soup, Bean using his very own spoon, and somehow the stars are already out.

Feeling giddy

What a difference a day makes. Not that yesterday was really so bad—it’s just that more than twelve hours of non-stop one year old can lead to moments of well, that picture said it so much better than words ever will. But the weather has been the perfect antidote to the stir-crazies, and today we went on our first bike ride of the season—just a lazy jaunt down to the waterfront & along the bike path to the beach.

Everyone everywhere is suddenly out and about, baring skin, kissing, or lying face up to blue glazed bowl of sky that was perfectly empty of clouds today. There was a certain aliveness in the air today. Everything is getting busy. Literally and figuratively.

With the onset of warmer days, drenched with hours of sun, everything is suddenly sensuous after a winter of comparative deprivation. The college kids are everywhere, in throngs, performing intricate mating rituals, much like the pigeons in the park and the wild circling gulls at the beach.

It was Bean’s first experience of sand—he went last summer to the beach but was so small then. A tiny, barely crawling big eyed boy who stayed on mama’s lap. So much changes in a half a year. He was running every where, willy nilly down the hill. Falling, stumbling, rolling, laughing. And then he came to the sand and stopped. And sat. And promptly fell in love.

Thankfully he seems to be past the stage of eating it. Instead he fingered it, looking in utter amazement at his disappearing and reappearing toes. He stuck sticks in it and stirred it, and scooped handfuls and stirred some more.

DH and I played with him on the beach, feeling the same wild spring fever as every other creature in sight, and managed to steal a handful of moments just us, after we got back. I’m still smiling.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Time # 4--A sense of humor is about timing and possibly furniture

Ikea furniture is always packaged flat—for easier transport, and because it requires less packaging this way. It is up to you to haul your boxes of furniture home, usually tied to the roof of your too-small car or shoved precariously in the back, with the trunk open, and when you arrive, you stumble inside with the long cardboard rectangles containing what will be your bed or nightstand, and begin the hours-long process of assembling things. It takes a lot of patience, and with any luck, your techniques improve as you go along.

You take a heap of flat boards, pegs, an allen wrench, and follow the schematics that, if they have words at all, are printed in fifteen different languages. You are aware that what you’re doing is a little bit like magic. You are turning the nearly two-dimensional stack of wood and particle board, glass and wicker, into something three dimensional and useful.

You build a wicker backed chair, after putting the legs in place wrong twice. Your cat will later love to sharpen her claws on its rattan and soon it will no longer be presentable, but when you first put it together, all you see are its clean lines and lovely promise. You imagine dinner parties, and sunny mornings over coffee.

Or you put together a glass-topped table that will for years, show every condensation ring but you still can’t be bothered to buy coasters. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make sense of the arrows and dotted lines: connect region B with point C using tool A. It might not be fine furniture, but it’s a start, and though you dream of owning REAL furniture, the kind you see in the windows of the home wares store you walk by every day, you’re happy with these flat-package creations for the time being.

This is pretty much exactly what the process of acquiring a sense of humor is like.

If you’re me, that is, and you were raised in a home with two of the most earnest, somber parents on the face of the earth. My home was also devoid of TV which contributed to a) the blossoming of my wild and vivid imagination an b) the utter absence of pop-culture sensibilities and all the accoutrements of humor that come with this terrain.

For me, sarcasm, silliness, wit, and comic timing did not come preassembled: an already functional part of my personality from day one. In fact, for years I was almost entirely lacking of anything that could possibly pass as an acceptable sense of humor.

Unfortunately sarcasm is still mostly lost on me. And, though you can slay me with a good play-on-words (my father, in all his etymological neerdieness would, on a cheery day, toss out one after another at the dinner table, and you’d have to be well versed in homophones and double-entendres to find them laugh-worthy, which I was), no amount of hanging out with boys has helped me to understand why it’s SO FUNNY to repeat one liners over and over again.

But I am gradually starting to get the hang of funny. It’s taken years for me to assemble, but I'm finally starting to get that it’s okay to JUST TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY sometimes. To NOT be serious every single minute. Years for me to finally understand that having a sense of humor, first and foremost, means having fun. It means giving yourself permission to make a fool out of yourself—to jump into things, arms and legs akimbo, laughing all the while.

And Bean is like the schematics that come with the furniture. He makes being silly easy. At 13 months, he watches everything I do, and then replicates it, often with unbelievably comic effects. He’ll take a sip of water and then let out this delightful, over-exaggerated sigh, and everybody just dies laughing. Or he’ll hear music and start wiggling his booty around with complete uninhibitedness. Finally, I'm starting to see that this is what humor is all about: over-exaggerated uninhibition. Gusto. Glee.

So we make time for this every day: we sit on the floor, roll around some, and act silly. I’m hoping that by the time he’s big, both of us will have a rip-roaring sense of humor.

Weekend sweetness

Syrup making in an outdoor evaporator, old iron spiles, sap dripping into galvanized buckets with lids to keep the squirrels out. Standing around with people we barely know (our neighbors to the west) it feels so easy to be ourselves. To laugh, to throw the slimy tennis ball for their spaniel, and lick syrup from a paper cup, still hot, unselfconsciously. We share conversation the way two friends might a sandwich, snatching juicy bits here and there while Bean crawls about on the wood pile and gets licked by the dog.

“Doggy,” he says, over and over again. “Doggy.” And we can’t help but laugh with wonder and scoop him up. He’s starting to talk!

All weekend a friend has been visiting, and our house is full of the quiet harmony that occurs when someone you love is around. An extra set of hands. Dishes done. She laughs at all my husband’s jokes and and Bean adores her. Between us we've probably had six bars of chocolate. And in the moments in between everything else, we’ve been sorting out our souls over cups of tea or red wine , talking until we’ve gathered many bright words like handfuls sea glass.

Hair cuts today (I got bangs—see above), and playing in the late evening sunlight at the waterfront, chasing Bean about the lawn and drinking up the light.

Growing

The sun made me happy today. Bean & I went to the park and I think he felt it too: that glorious springtime light splashing our cheeks and making shadows look like blue cut-outs in a collage. We squinted and laughed and climbed the jungle gym and then went for a latte and a vanilla milk.

He’s becoming his own little self. Thoughtful, interested, pointing out everything. It seems like this past week all of a sudden he’s started to notice the most minute details in things. He points to airplanes in the sky---and last night we came home late and I cradled him in my arms so he could see the big night sky and he pointed up at the stars and started babbling excitedly, turning his head as we walked up the steps to the porch, so that he could get one last glimpse before we came inside.

Snowy day

We woke up to snow---powdery inch upon inch making everything sparkling and white. When the sidewalks were plowed, the snow came up to my knees on either side, and all day fat dreamy flakes drifted down.

Sometime in the past month Bean has connected the word "snow" with snow, and today when I said "do you see it snowing?" he ran to the window to look out, still in his jammies.

After a breakfast of waffles and eggs we put on our jackets and went out on the porch. This was the first time he's ever REALLY played in snow---the first time touching it, bare handed; the first time he made the connection that the stuff on the porch was the same stuff coming down from the sky---and he'd point to snowflakes falling and say "uh, uh, uh!"

He ran out the door and knelt in it eagerly, but then sat back and stared at it for a good long minute, as if frozen in amazment. After his initial shock that it's REALLY COLD, he started to play, picking up handfuls, and watching as each little flake dissolved in the heat of his palm.

Little delight

My silly boy. He LOVES to slurp noodles.

I didn't necessarily get anything more accomplished today, but I feel less worried about it. Things have a way of working out, especially when I allow myself to return to the moment.

I made plans with DH so that I can have some solid hours of writing later this week, and today under bright blue skys Bean and I took a walk.

I was eating an apple---something I rarely do, and Bean watched me in wonder for a bit and then wanted a bite himself. And so we walked: one bite for me, one for him, a couple of steps, repeat. We looked at all the snow, still powdery and white along the edges of the sidewalk. We kicked lumps of frozen snow---his little feet following the intention of his brain with surprising accuracy. We pulled at dried grasses and picked up sticks.

It took us about twenty minutes to walk the length of our block, and I felt lighthearted and glad to be outdoors holding his little hand. Moment by moment, things have a way of working out.

What does it take?

Sometimes it feels so impossible to do this well: to be a mother and be all that that requires and still do other things. To have days like today when Bean was restless and fussy and probably teething (when he would cry and achieve spectacular meltdowns when I denied him things like the phone or a full pitcher of water) and to keep intact some sense of purpose outside of mothering.

I can’t help feeling anxious: a writing deadline for a workshop I want to take this summer is rapidly approaching. I want it so much my heart aches, and yet, immediately the chorus of doubt starts warming up.

On days like this I lie in the dark of the bedroom nursing Bean for what feels like the umpteenth time, and to grasp at the wisps of images that linger at my mind’s periphery. A new idea for a painting. A handful of possibilities for the manuscript I must write. But when I finally settle down after the laundry has been done, the dishes washed, I am able to locate only tiny fragments.

I try to remember to breathe, to let the hurdy gurdy of my heart play easy music, even when there is hubbub all around, the room strewn with a hundred small things: shoes and toys, books, little snippets.

I try to remember to pause, to let the kite of my soul lift off the ground even when the day brings complication: so many things that are not either/or, that are not simple, that are instead sticky with doubt and exhaustion.

I try to remember to let words be more than the little pieces: linking contents with ingredient, newsprint with the days events, even when I am empty like the broken glass I swept into the dustpan from the kitchen floor.

I try to remember to be patient, to stitch together moments into a mosaic of things that matter: tea & crumb cake with Bean at Barnes & Noble in the morning; buying 79 cent Dagoba chocolate samples and raspberry licorice, fresh naval oranges, milk in a glass jug, and squash & maple ravioli. A half hour to myself (the only time all day) when he finally napped in the afternoon: just me and the cat and more tea on the couch, eyeing Annie Liebovitz's pics in Vanity Fair. And later, reading essays from this collection at the gym.

WEEeeeeee!

Bean recieved this for his birthday. Being airborn = sheer and utter delight.

Back to the usual mess making

Last night before I put Bean to bed I took out the new finger paints I'd bought and put paper down on the bathroom floor. Bean was so excited: alternately squealing with glee and furrowing his brows in concentration. He made it a full body experience, of course---and then I plunked him straight into a warm bath. What could be better?

Synchronicity – events that seem related but are not obviously caused by one another

A week ago I saw a flyer advertising baby sitting and took down the number. DH and I had been talking about how we’re finally ready to start letting someone take care of Bean for a couple hours during the week while we work together on the house, so we called. She was wonderful, and tonight she came and spent an hour with Bean while DH and I walked down town together like teenagers—just us, holding hands.

We stopped for chai (for me) and espresso (for him) and a chocolate filled pastry (to share, licking the chocolate off our fingers), and then went to the bookstore where I devoured (on a mini artist date) the glossy spreads in design magazinesand DH wandered off to the fantasy section.

When we left the bookstore it is snowing gently. Back home, Bean was happy and the babysitter was happy (which made me unbelievably happy, and terribly relieved). After she left, friends stopped by and we had an impromptu takeout dinner—pad thai, dumplings, tofu, spicy noodles. Then I took over the table with my boxes of scraps, paints, gel, glue sticks, brushes.

I've booked three art showings in cafes this week, and I'm unbelievably excited. (One thing I have done as a result of the Artist’s Way has been to acknowledge and set the ball in motion on some of the things that I've had on my dream list for way too long. Cafe art showings has been one of those things.) For the first time since I was a kid, I’m finally allowing myself to say it regularly. I am an artist.

My monkey boy

Since he has started walking he has become a BIG KID over night. One who can eat a banana all by himself. If it weren't for the fact that he's started waking me up in the morning by stroking my cheeks and hair, an cooing loving little songs in my ear, I think my heart might not be able manage his independence.

Words that fill me up

Blue Poppy calls it molting, and the gawky, awkward, half-feathered stage of creative flux is a bit like that, I think. This week I’ve begun to realize just how easily I allow myself to loose sight of the deeper currents in my life. How I smear over them with surface stuff, act overwhelmed, or antsy or angry, when really my inner self is asking to be heard. I’ve started to stop, when I hear myself take on a certain impatient snippy tone—and doing a little check in: asking myself what I really need, what I’m really feeling anxious or antsy about.

I’ve discovered I have a torrent of irrational worries running just below the surface. Many of these worries revolve around my son: the pedantic little whispers of guilt and anxiety I think every new parent must hear. But there are also other voices that whisper the narratives of my unvoiced fear of failure—or success, depending which way that coin is tossed.

This week’s challenge in The Artist’s Way, was not to read anything. And, as Cameron predicted I balked at this, but not for the reasons she laid out anticipating my resistance. Since my son’s birth, I don’t have the chunks of time commuting back and forth on the train that I used to have to sink my teeth into a book, and the leisure of reading over a bowl of cereal has gone out the window (along with sleeping in, or being able go to the bathroom unattended). Overall I have read much less this year than in any year prior, and this week I realized that there is a great hunger in my being for good stories and true words.

So instead of NOT reading this week, I decided to bring new attention to my reading life—and to make conscious choices about reading, or not.

Instead of reading my favorite blogs, tonight I did art. For hours. And it was exhilarating to sit with a big pot of tea—talking on the phone with one of my beloved friends, and paint. But it was also exhilarating this morning to make the choice TO read, consciously and deeply from The Answers Are Inside the Mountains by William Stafford.

His words about writing, about poetry, and about creating are food for my soul. His sentences are saturated with intent observations about being human in this world, and his writing conveys and a deep sense of gratitude. This resonates with me, and I feel satisfied when I take the time to read his words.

I continue to watch myself teeter back and forth on a tightrope of annoyance and gratitude at having begun The Artist’s Way. I do not find Cameron’s writing to be rich with original thought or nourishing for my soul in the way that Stafford’s poems are, and often I resent her presumptions about audience (I do not feel in recovery, nor I do not feel stifled creatively.) But much fruit has come from responding to her questioning and pushing. I am growing as a result. Molting even, and I’ll welcome a new set of wings.

So for the rest of the week I will continue to read, but to be alert to it. Each time my eyes are pulled to the page I will take note. I want to try to understand this hunger I have for words—and I want to be clear about the times when I use them as escape. Like eating well, my intent is to read well.

(The above image is from a series of small pieces I'm doing for a postcard swap.)

First steps

Bean started WALKING today. For the past couple weeks he’s been doing these graceful nearly-running transitions between pieces of furniture, hands free, and we’ve been able to coax him to let go of something and sort of stumble-tumble towards us for a few steps for the past week or so. But today he really walked.

I saw the exact moment when it clicked for him—when he realized “I’M STANDING, AND I’M NOT FALLING, AND NOW I’M MOVING FORWARD.” He was holding onto a chair and then let go and took a step towards me, and I started clapping and he stopped moving and just stood still. All on his own. In the middle of the room.

It was as if a lightening bolt of recognition shot through him. He started beaming this wide, pleased grin. And then he took steps towards me. Determined little steps, one after the next, all by himself.

Since that moment he’s walked nearly all the way across the living room, his lower lip sucked in with concentration. Like quicksilver, the neurons in his brain are sending a thousand instantaneous messages urging him to try it again, and again, and again. Out into the middle of the room, away from the peripheries, the furniture, the safety net of mama’s legs—and into the wide expanse of open floor. Suddenly bipedal. Upright.

These steps are his first independent steps towards me, and yet his first steps away from me, as his own person.

This leaves me breathless with wonder and love and terror all at once. There are mornings like this morning—and nights like last night, where everything is awry and he pushes every button and I am left feeling frantic and angry at the end of wrestling him to sleep, or calming him down. He has become so clear about what he wants—and so frustrated and mad when his desires are not met. When he can’t have my cell phone to play with, or worse--when he wants to MUNCH on me while nursing, and I pull away with a fierce yelp, he dissolves in tears. First of remorse, then of fury.

Something has definitely shifted for him. He is aware of himself differently—and aware of his own needs differently. He has preferences. He longs for me intensely when I’m gone and wraps his arms around my neck tightly when I return. He looks up for approval when he tries something new—or stops, just before he does something dastardly, to check in and see if he’s allowed. He has begun to understand that there is an order to things. That there are boundaries. And with each boundary, he pushes to find just how far he can go before he finds it.

It amazes me that this deepening awareness coincides with the beginning of upright independent mobility. Just as he is beginning to discover that there are both obvious boundaries (he no longer crawls headlong towards the edge of the bed without stopping) and implied boundaries (he looks to me, with a wily grin, just before he reaches out to pull CDs off the shelf, because he knows I’ll stop him), he has suddenly gained an entirely different perspective on the world. This is the beginning of doing it his own self.

Already he wants to drink from a cup, his own self. He wants to eat, his own self. He wants to claim this world for his own self. I can only pray I’ll have the patience to navigate this new terrain. Already he has learned how to shake his head “no” and when he wants to do something himself that I am trying to do for him, he shakes his head, “no, no, no.” I nod my head, “yes, yes, yes.”

Now begins the challenge of being consistent. Of remaining steadfast like a buoy, providing him with the security of limits. But also, this is the beginning of a new dance. One where he leads sometimes, and I follow after.

Tomorrow, 28

Tomorrow is my birthday, and today my mother sent me a box full of calla lilies. Each waxy bloom perfect, it’s yellow pistil caked with pollen.

She has never sent me flowers before—every delicate stem wrapped in cellophane---and receiving the long lovely box at the door and putting the long-necked blooms into water made me profoundly happy. It is funny that flowers can do this. So much is contained in the gesture of giving them. These flowers were saying: safety, unending love, openness.

This year I became a mother, and as a result, began to see my mother in an entirely different way. Since my father died, my mother and I have been navigating new terrain in our relationship, and it has not been without land mines. So much lies buried in the geography of our shared lives. So much love and wonder and hurt in our souls is brought to the surface when we talk, and sometimes stumbling upon each other’s every weakness—clumsily, hurtfully, without grace. But gradually we are learning to keep some things: to keep safety, to keep openness, to keep love steadfast even when we come up against these jagged edges.

So with my birthday coming tomorrow, I find myself contemplating how this day is wholly mine, and yet wholly hers as well. My birth marked a turning point in her life—that changed everything for her. I understand this now with new wonder and appreciation. I realize the sacrifice, the worry, the frustration of motherhood that she felt—and see myself in her, just as I also see how much I am her opposite.

This is the gift and the challenge of being a parent: to shepherd a little person into adulthood and then let them go to be anyone they want to be—entirely unique unto themselves. My son is already, even before he can talk, totally his own person—and I can’t help but wonder how he’ll see me throughout his life. First just as his mama, but maybe later hopefully as a source of inspiration—-and maybe as the writer, the artist, the teacher and dreamer that I am. And I wonder too what he will be like throughout his life, and how I will see him—-as a child first, and then later as his own person, and a source of inspiration.

Last year on my birthday I was immensely pregnant, right on the cusp of the unknown. I couldn’t fathom how my life would be, and my days were heavy with a certain anxiety—not to mention actual the actual heaviness of my belly. Then blink, and a year has passed, and here I am, beginning training for a marathon, in the midst of renovations on a new home, and the mother to a small boy who has started taking steps (!) towards me, eyes twinkling and arms outstretched.

Like each beautiful lily drawing drinking water from the jar, the moments of this year have been sweet and good.

Napping

Bean and I just awoke from a nap. I’m still recovering from being sick so I gratefully accepted the opportunity to nap this morning. He’s so funny when he wakes. His eyes open, and then boing! he’s up, his body still rocking with the velocity of his sudden movement.

His eyes are always wide. His cheeks flushed with the roses of sleep. Then a grin spreads out to the corners of his face and he clambers over my body to look out the window. He drags his monkey with him, and then starts playing the peek-a-boo game I showed him: where we put the monkey’s paw over his eyes and then Bean removes it and I say “PEEK-A-BOO” and then I make the monkey dance. Bean giggles then, and starts dancing too, his little bootie bopping about amongst the pillows.

I love our moments together in bed, still drenched with sleep. While he tumbles about, I sift through my blurry sleep-scented thoughts, gathering the fragments of my dreams like a beachcomber picking shells. It is time where everything is present: before the lists crowd in, before I am scattered back over the surface of the day.

Someone said, "batten down the hatches"

Is this what they were refering to?

Bean did the standing thing several more times today for 10-15 seconds at a go. AND he started taking bold and daring risks---moving between cruising surfaces without hands, or, as pictured here, CLIMBING WILLY NILLY onto surfaces previously entirely off his radar screen. DH took this picture when he came running after hearing low moans and squeals of delight coming simultaneously from the direction of my office. I'm starting to understand that this is the beginning of all things terrifying and wonderful and that my life is officially over as I know it. Isn't it?

Noticing right now

Tonight Bean stood. STOOD. On his how two little feet. For long enough that DH could come through the door from the kitchen into my office and see him standing, not aware of his own miraculous feat—or feet! Stood long enough for us both to stare at him and gasp. Longer than any previous wobbly attempts. And then finally he realized he wasn’t holding on, and quickly reached out for me, grinning.

I am not sure how to explain how this made me feel. The constant rushing forward of time leaves me breathless. His GROWING leaves me breathless. I remember as a kid waiting for what felt like FOREVER for my birthday to come. A year felt like as long as my whole life. One weekend to the next stretched on indefinitely. Don’t you remember that? That blurry sense of time? As an adult I experience it so differently, and especially now watching my son, whose inner and outer growth is so immediate and exponential.

The amazing thing about him standing was that he was so concentrated on the new container I’d given him to look at—so wholly absorbed in observation—that he was completely unaware of his body. His little muscles, his skeleton, and his cerebellum took over. Auto pilot. For the first time.

As adults we do so much on auto pilot. Walking is something most of us are rarely aware of. We eat, drive, make dinner, take a crap, have entire conversations, even---all with our minds elsewhere. Of course there is a certain necessity to all this absentmindedness—multitasking makes the world run (any woman can attest to this). And there is definitely something to be said for being able to read the entire issue of People cover to cover while completing one’s business on the loo. But watching Bean in those freeze-frame slow-motion seconds of time when his body took over and his mind was wholly somewhere else made me contemplate the what it means to be truly present.

Walking downtown tonight crystalline snow was falling around us. Each snowflake individuated and big enough for you to see it’s magnificent hexagonal construction. Bean kept looking up at them swirling in the light of the street lamps, and then he’d look over at me and smile these huge brand-new tooth smiles that said more about his happiness and wonder than words ever will, and a part of me wanted to slow time down again to that dreamy pace of childhood—when everything is NOW and FOREVER both at the same time.

Of green beans and vacuum love

This kid is cracking me up lately. He’s starting to be his own little person, and often puts on a silly show just for our benifit. Witness the green bean pictures. He took great joy in alternately blowing loud raspberries and then making funny sucking noises, holding the green bean in place hands free. And, clearly delighted that he was making us giggle, he sweetly offered his Daddy a drag.

He also has an obsessive love for any and all vacuums. (I used to vacuum with him in a sling when he was very small and wouldn’t stop crying. The loud constant noise and the rocking works wonders. Usually he’d be asleep in minutes. This may be the cause of his undying devotion.) The minute the vacuum comes out he scampers over as fast as one can scamper on all fours (which is a heck of a lot faster than you’d think.) He helps me push the vacuum from room to room, trundling after it with increasingly confident steps. Then he thrills to help me push the cord retractor, grinning so wide you can see his spanking new teeth all in a gleaming row. Other times I leave the vacuum out for a while just for his amusment, and he lovingly lies atop it, humming a litttle tune to himself.

But the best was Bean's encounter with the vacuum at the grandparents house, which STANDS UP rather than rolls. He was in AWE, and promptly began worshipping it.