Milestone wake-ups and the magic of slumber

As I lie in the semi dark with my son waiting for his breath to settle into the rhythm of sleep, I wonder about the bigness of his small self. So much more than the tiny bundle of limbs, soft and warm curled in the nook of my arm. One look into his big beautiful eyes and I find myself swimming in the wide pools of his spirit.

It amazes me that something as vital and natural as sleep is something we have to learn. Of course, there are the times when exhaustion overcomes him and he sinks, sack-like into a deep sleep wherever he is. But on a nightly basis letting go of his body---surrendering to the tide of sleep is not something he knows---I must teach him how to still his active little body. Find a rhythm. Breath in sleep.

Each time his body works itself through a sleep cycle, the neurons in his brain send him the busy active messages his body is reading all day: stand, stand, stand, they say. Reach. Climb. Walk. Before I come to bed he sleeps in his crib, and usually I hear him cry out at least once. I come to find him awake in the dark, standing. Then I nurse him, hold him close, allowing the tide of my breath to wash over him, carrying him back to the world of sleep.

Sometimes in these long moments with him in the dark I realize that I am at the cusp of one of the mysteries of being human. Wonder saturates me each time he awakens, trailing the stardust of dreams, a smile blooming at the corners of his eyes.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 4

This is me doing my long lanky leg thing in the dual mirrors in my inlaw's bathroom. I've always been told I'm a bit of a gorilla because my legs and arms seem to be disproportionately long in comparison to my body. And to capture a reflection of myself, in a reflection of myself, I had to do a fair amount of contorting. Like trying to write using a mirror, I kept bumping into walls expecting my body to be going in the direction of my reflection. Sometimes I feel a bit like this, especially after not having a minute to myself in a house full of second generation Italians, a first generation Korean and a baby—-as though the different pieces of me bump up against themselves, and at the end of a day all that’s left are a few disembodied thoughts that don’t quite sum me up, but almost do.

Other self portrait bloggers are here

Sunday Mosaic # 5: Christmas Day

Awake with the first light of morning spreading its way through the opaque curtains. Bean in his red footie snowman pajamas nestles into the nook of my neck for one final snuggle before announcing his desire to roust the world and investigate every corner of it.

DH and I pass him of to his grandmother and take a shower like we used to in college, together, bumping elbows, kissing, grinning. We join the others in the kitchen with damp hair and pour cups of coffee. I make scones, crumbling the butter with the flour until it feels like wet sand. A sprinkle of cream and raw sugar on the top of each will make them sweet and brown in the oven.

Later everyone is on the couch opening presents almost simultaneously. It is a blur of red and patterned paper. Bean gets a little Radio Flyer wagon and his grin couldn’t be wider when he figures out how it works. He spends the rest of the morning as a battering ram, pushing the cart around the room at a careening pace, grinning from ear to ear. All the unwrapping leaves me breathless, and Bean exhausted. By 9:30 we curl up in bed again. He naps, and I look out the window, watching blackbirds and wondering about the remarkable warp and weft that makes family.

In the late afternoon DH calmly descends upon the kitchen and pulls together an exquisite meal almost single handedly: turkey breast stuffed with prosciutto, sage, apples and rosemary; garlic mashed potatoes, sautéed asparagus, cran-rasberry sauce, and sausage stuffing. I put some funky French street-performance inspired music on the stereo, dance with the baby, and make a salad with red leaf lettuce, pomegranate, asiago cheese and apples.

There are of course the moments of raised eyebrows when the siblings-in-law act the way they always do: condescending and critical. But we leave it at that, diluting the tension with the fact that we are together. This is family.

By dinner Bean is in the throws of teething agony—his second top tooth is cutting through. During dinner he sits in my lap and bangs his spoon on his highchair which he refuses to sit in. I gulp my food, feeling guilty. A late dinner has put us past his normal bedtime. I run the bath, but forget to stop the drain so all the hot water runs out. I remember in time to get two inches of luke warm water in the bottom of the tub, but Bean doesn’t seem to notice—- he’s too obsessed with the full length mirror along the wall of the tub and kisses his reflection.

By the time he finally is asleep my throat hurts and I make tea. Days like this fill my heart to bursting with the ups and downs of being a part of the small group of people that make me whole. With the tug of longing for my own family: my sisters, my mom. With the wonder at my small boy who suddenly has four teeth and is almost walking. With wide love I have for DH, who can still after seven Christmases make me giddy for this holiday just by association.

Merry Christmas!

The years fold on top of each other like the pages in an accordion book, each one nearly obscuring the last. Tonight we decorated the tree with ornaments from DH’s childhood. Bean’s eyes were wide with wonder, and he tried pulling on the strings of lights. We spent the evening watching old home movies from when DH was small and eager, hoisting his parents out of bed before the first morning light to unwrap heaps of presents. Crazy how his parents have the same voices twenty years later. How they say the same things. How some things never change. And then we wonder: is this how we’ll still be?

I try to remember my own Christmases growing up. I see snapshots. Glass bells and red balls. Real candles on the tree. Christmas morning pancakes. Taking turns to open just a few presents, and then saving more for the remaining days of Christmas. Singing carols around the tree in the semi dark of dancing candle light.

I try to remember my parents, and gather only scraps. The warmth of my father’s chest as I sat curled up against him singing carols. His eyes like bluebirds in flight as he guessed the content of each present. My mother making gingerbread, her hands holding the wooden rolling pin. Her eyes tearing up at a certain German carol that reminded her of her own childhood traditions.

DH and I imagine making Christmas next year in our new house. Snow on the ground. Good food. We laugh trying to imagine how Bean will remember us after years there. What will we look like to ourselves when we look back on the blurry video footage of NOW?

The clock is about to chime bringing tomorrow. Another Christmas with some small nook of my heart still filled with wonder at that bright Christmas star that led shepherds and wisemen to the birth of an incredible being. But it is also filled with a flood of love—for the people I am with, and for those I’m missing across the country.

Merry Christmas to all of you wonderful blogging folk who have filled my life with so much humor and brilliance and beauty and snarkiness and joy!

Tree pictures

Another 7 hour car trip to New Jersey survived. Forty degree weather, and scads of starlings whirling through the air like synchronized swimmers. Sun over brown fields of cut corn stalks or new subdivisions. Traffic thicker than a swarm of bees. We are here, with family. Bean's doting grandma has already snuck him at least half of his presents. DH and I got to sleep in until ten. And yesterday we picked out a tall tree, haggled for the price and hauled it home on the roof of our car. As usual, I brought my camera. Happy Christmas Eve!

Flocks of wild birds.

Empty greenhouse.

The xmas tree bailer.

Paulo loads the tree onto the car.

At home Zeus brings me a stick.

Illustration Friday: Imagine

Sometimes painting is like this: moments of clear, vivid emptiness where imagination takes hold and wanders. Then, it is about allowing something that already exists to be. About being open.

I know all things are like this: parenting, writing, making love, communicating. And I know that most of the time I make it more complicated than it is. I convolute things by adding clarifiers, making preemptive sketches, planning in advance.

It is hard to trust the possibilities of imagination. Harder still to trust that what I imagine is possible.

Go Vote

The Best of Blogs is doing their second annual awards soon. I'm doing lots of nominating. Check out the categories & vote. It's fun.

Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 3

I posted a different spt last night, but this morning, fickle as I am, I liked this one better. The artist in me is somehow unused to the fixed dynamic of a photo. I want to keep coming back and changing things, like I can with a brush.

When I woke up this morning, the fork and spoon reflections seemed brittle compared with this surreal image. I love the color of it, and the blur---how only the corner of the label is in focus, and my finger is pointing to some blue angle of light picked up by the lens, as though gesturing to a dream. I like how the reflection shows mostly my hand reaching, and then my dark silhouette. Somehow this is a truer self portrait: there I am, reaching for the things that can hardly be defined.

See other reflective surface self portrates here.

Nourishment

I make a promise: two poems every day. One for eating, the words from the pages of a book like the pomegranate fruit: fire inside a leathery skin. And one for pouring out from the parched place in me: (that waits for perfect sentence, the witty one, the just-so observation, the clean narration, but needs the messiness of each stained seed, just as it is)

words cupped in the bowl of the poem; a mouthful of red juice.

Mischief

It seemed a little too quiet. I was in the dining room (which serves double duty as my office) and Bean was in the living room---within earshot, but just out of sight. For five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, only silence. An occasional grunt or rustle let me know he was still alive---but there were no shrieks, no customary giggles or roars. And you know---it's probably terrible that I didn't jump up immediately, and instead thought "I wonder how much I can get done before he starts making noise." Yes, I imagined the possibilities. Even the worst, when weighed against fifteen minutes of undivided (quiet) time to finish writing xmas cards, print pictures, and wrap presents, was just not terrible enough.

Finally I heard a giggle, and then the fwapity-fwap sounds of him crawling away from the scene of the crime. This is what I found. I didn't have time to adjust the iso so the pictures came out all blurry. But they probably would have come out blurry anyway. I couldn't stop laughing. He STUFFED THE TISSUES UP THE FRONT OF HIS SWEATER, people. All by himself. How funny is that? And the wreckage of the tissue box (and my living room)? It was TOTALLY WORTH IT.

A list of beautiful things

...that have caught my eye or gave me reason to pause:

This necklace.

This photo.

The chai tea from this place. (I also love the fact that on the wall by the counter hangs a hammer. Below it is a note that reads, In case of emergency, smash anything.)

This found art.

This church.

This t-shirt.

These classes.

These sheets.

This project.

…and this online zine.

10 Months

Dear Bean,You are starting to have a will of your own and it is amazing to watch you attempt to express yourself—your joy, your contentment, your frustration. You’ve started showing both compassion towards others and determination to do things your own way. You love to share now. You also love to go where you are not allowed. You smile wide, wide, wide when we dance, and at night when we lie down together, you sing with me as I lull you to sleep.

This month you’re doing big-kid things like sitting and looking through board books for ten or fifteen minutes all on your own, with quiet interest. You’re eating macaroni and cheese, reaching for each noodle with your perfect pincer grasp, and drinking water from a cup. You sing for milk when you want to nurse, and wave “hi” when we do. Suddenly, your babbling has increased ten-fold. Each day you explore new sounds. And you can point to things you know: spoon, book, your Daddy, the cats. (You love the cats and pester them mercilessly. One day, they’ll expect payback. Remember this.)

I watch you now and swallow hard—your first year is almost finished. Never before has time gone by so quickly for me: months wash by in the span of a giggle. And yet, never before has time gone so slowly: when you’re fighting sleep and I haven’t had enough, those moments stretch out forever, rubbing every nerve, and I can’t wait for them to be over.

So now you’re ten months old and almost walking—balancing recklessly in the middle of the room for brief moments. Today with your little friend Bella, you kept picking up your toys and handing them to her. You smiled at each other in wonder that you are both small people, and were amazingly tolerant of the fact that each of you has about as much muscle control as a stroke victim, and as much eagerness as a Labrador retriever.

Being your mama is everything like I imagined, and nothing like it. I came from a family of women who have made hard choices about the timing of their children: either choosing to have them, or choosing not to, and before you came I struggled with these choices too. Around me my peers were trying to shape the building blocks of their careers, and it was often said in passing: to have a baby would be the end of independence. Before I had you, I believed that. Even during my pregnancy I wondered, worried. I was reluctant to become a mother. I worked up until the last minute, and then, all of a sudden after twenty four hours of labor, you were there and you fit. Perfectly.

I want you to know that after we sigh with relief having put you to bed at the end of a long day, your Daddy and I then spend another ten minutes talking about how amazing, and silly, and wonderful you are. Tonight, for example, you went to bed early because you missed part of both of your naps and were literally falling apart at the seams. After I finally got your little body to unwind, shushing you a hundred times, I tiptoed out and told Daddy what you did to the slice of orange I gave you earlier.

It was too cold, so when you bit into it, it surprised you and you made an awful face and your whole body shuddered. Then you threw it on the floor, and ROARED at it. You kicked it and roared some more. Then you picked it up, and threw it down again, and roared a little more.

You can count on us laughing about the silly and ridiculous things you do for a good long while. But you can also count on us to be proud. So proud. Like when you put the wooden puzzle pieces into the correct slots tonight after Daddy showed you how. Each time you slipped the piece into it’s place, we clapped, and grinned at each other above your head in wonderment and glee. We think you're pretty darn incredible, kiddo.

Love, Mama

Looking for the right words

Tonight at the writing workshop I try to untangle a little more of the story I am attempting to put down in ink. The people I write with are an mismatched, well read, easily humored crowd who all have day jobs. We sit around eating pretzels, discussing the virtues of present tense. They ask me about my dad. I try to explain how my relationship with my father, who died nearly four years ago, has been evolving in a one-sided way since then. Sometimes it’s hard to locate him in my memory, except in freeze frame images. Snapshots. Mostly, I can’t help looking through the lens of the present: dissecting who he was, his beliefs and flaws. I know that then, when we were in our relationship, I couldn’t see outside of it. I know I didn’t analyze his beliefs in the way I do now, measuring them against my own. The seam between my thoughts and his was often blurry. I loved his way of thinking. His persistent, disciplined way of examining the spiritual world through meditation and questioning. I loved how he could apply logic to the fixing of a broken radio, or the cutting of a fallen tree.

After he died, for weeks, months, the first year even, I could call to mind his face, his smile, his fierceness, and our love was very present. Now, I spend hours hunched at the computer, my body mirroring his posture, writing about the ways I’ve been shaped by him. It’s a strange shedding process that is taking place. I’m slipping out of the skin of my childhood as his daughter and fitting into my own. I am gathering myself up—finding abundance in one hand, loss in the other.

Looking for harvest

I beg for you now, your absence is an ache like a sadness at new moon. A craving for touch, a shock when I look at familiar photos and know those bones and skin, are not around the corner.

I do not know my feelings now. Cannot grasp onto any understanding of moments or metaphors. You hang like a crescent moon in my heart a sliver, a sickle, a tool of harvest.

Yet I do not know the fields where I can go walking to find your abundance. I know not where to find the round fruits of your love.

So I wait. Polish the scythe. Hold on to my heart.

pieces of my soul

I spend the late afternoon as darkness falls with headphones in my ears. The upstairs neighbor’s music makes me restless. The incessant beat raps a staccato in my head. I long for the quiet of open winter fields. For wind. Bean is finally napping with DH after crying for awhile, tired enough to protest the nap but too tired to skip it. I find solace in Stan Getz on my iPod, and follow the random branching network of links answering my search: “tips for keeping chickens in winter.”

I know it will take years to evolve from my greenhorn self into someone who knows what to do to keep the frost from killing sleeping bees or roosting chickens. It will require trial and error, and lots of talk with locals, to understand the true art of the perennial garden, or to know which animals leave tracks along the snowy paths in the woods.

It’s not that I want to suddenly slip onto a farmstead and never return. I’m to much of a girly-girl with a penchant for expensive jeans to want to be far from the city forever. Yet this much is also true: I am someone who is most centered when I am connected to the land on which I live.

I’m not waxing bucolic. I’ve just always had a profound love for nature. I think I must have gotten this from my mother, who always notices the most exquisite little things on walks we take: a newt on a log, orange and wet, or the feather of a wild turkey stuck in some briers. I have a deep sense of self when I connect to a place. The outline of my position in the universe, small and unique, is most apparent when I am able to see how I am connected to my immediate surroundings. I like to see the fields being used; like knowing where my food comes from---and I take some sort of satisfaction when it comes from a local farm rather than from Argentina or Brazil or trekked across the country in a big rig.

I am far too much of a voluptuary to uproot entirely and live ruggedly off the grid. It was my mother’s story and not mine to boil cloth diapers in a pot and then line dry them in the middle of January in the Rocky Mountains, until they hung stiff and frozen like boards. I’m too academic, too soft around the edges to be that wholesome or self-sacrificing. I like my frothy chai from the local café. I have a penchant for expensive outdoor gear. I love the ease of eating out, the pleasure of savoring food without the preparation or washing up. But I am also someone who strives to live consciously, aware of my impact on this earth.

Everyone struggles, I think, with these things. It is the side effect of living in our world today, with technology folding in around the edges, media pushing it’s way through the chinks of our souls. I think each of us must experience this push---pull: heart and mind narrating different stories. I want to know, what scattered pieces make you whole?

Self Portrait Tuesday: Reflective Surface # 2

There we are, a whirl of color captured in a shop window. This is what we do every day: walk, bundled up, to get coffee. Snowflakes kissing our cheeks, the wool of our hats pulled close against our ears. This is me: the one who takes note of small things. The one who documents with words and images; the topography of our little family.

See other self portrait bloggers here.

Sunday Mosaic # 4: family

We bundle up in our red jackets, and put Bean in the running stroller which is wind proof and warm, and walk two miles to a gormet market, stopping to get hot chocolate along the way. Inside it has the most wonderful little café, tucked in among isles stocked with wine and marzipan, biscotti, and maple butter. The walk made us hungry, and we order big fluffy slices of cinnamon raisin French toast, omelets, and fruit. The girl who waits on us has a lip ring and a punk hairdo and a beaming sunny smile. She tells, "careful, the maple syrup is really full.’"

I watch Bean sitting in his highchair, picking up slices of fresh strawberries and eating them as though he has always done this. His little thumb and forefinger working together perfectly to grasp each piece and bring it to his mouth. It takes my breath away to watch him and I feel tears smarting up in the corners of my eyes. He catches me looking at him and bursts into a huge grin, his two brand new teeth poking up from his bottom gum. Then he reaches out his hand and offers me his gnawed on strawberry half.

Walking back we peer in the windows at the architectural salvage warehouse, at claw foot bathtubs and old doors we imagine maybe using during renovation. When we open the door at home the smell of the garlands we hung yesterday hits us: piney and warm. We nap, three to a bed, and as my two guys sleep I can’t help lying awake staring in wonderment at their faces.

When I wake up it is already 3pm and the afternoon light is pale and weak out the window. I dress for a run—the first in two weeks since I injured my knee. It's my first run since it’s been snowy, and I thrill to feel my body fall back naturally into the rhythm of it. I run a new route, on sidewalks through the hill section of town and then up past the University where the gibbous moon hangs fat and solemn in the blue sky above the red brick buildings. I can see all the way to the lake, a thin blue ribbon at the feet of the mountains. Ice has formed where the air and water kiss the rocks and sticks along the shore.

We eat dinner with friends in a small Italian restaurant, where we watch a family celebrate their grandmother’s birthday. She coos at her granddaughter saying too loudly, “Isabella say cheese,” and they all say, “don’t talk so loudly.” I can’t help smiling. Later I talk to my mother on the phone as I finish making linzer cookies. We are trying to learn how to reword our communication so that it’s clear and present, not painted with the lacquer of childhood miscommunications, and our conversation is full of love.

exhaling

The morning light was flecked with falling snow, and few inches of powder already covered roofs and sidewalks when we woke up. I’ve been waiting for snow, and felt like I could finally exhale, my breath lingering whitely in the air. After a long week of fun-house ups and downs, things felt mostly even today. Bean is has gone and started doing adorable things like waving, and offering me his crackers or orange slices, and my heart starts flapping about all wild and goofy when I watch him trying to stand on his own. I catch myself trying to pin point the exact moment he's gone and gotten older, but I can't quite. It's just a blur of almost toothy grins, as he boogies to the music or chases the cats around.

Finally DH and I had a few moments together too, that didn't involve discussing future house projects, our finances, or our son. We sat around covered in icing and listening to Sinatra’s Christmas classics, decorating gingerbread cookies for the people in our lives with kids in theirs, for the better part of yesterday evening.

Today we bought garlands of balsam and spruce to string up around the apartment, and a wreath for the door, and spontaneously, on our way to pick up the greenery, drove out to the house. The road looked like a storybook, with white frosted trees leaning in on each side and lights gleaming from under a layer of snow, on eaves and barns and tall evergreens. It felt good to just drive by and look. To imagine next year, but to be happy right now, with our car load of greens and our drooly, grinning boy.

self portrait in the car

at the christmas tree lot

on the way to our house

my juicy little guy

gingerbread

lights

Check out more pictures from our day here

looking inside

It is starting to be long john weather here. The red line on the thermometer never crept past 30 degees today, and the air bites at exposed cheeks. The light at dusk strikes the buildings with sharpness. There is no depth to it like in the summer, or even in the autumn when the rays seem to fall in long angles. Now, the light is filterless and bright; shadows spilling onto the streets in dark contrast. Winter has a way of making me look at my life starkly, as though I were seeing my soul in series of x-rays. Like the fields of corn stalks tilled into frozen soil or the rocky hilltops exposed below the silhouettes of trunks and branches, when I look in on myself I see mostly skeletons. I go back over the writing I have done in years past, and am stunned at my own depth, yet feel incapable of duplicating it. The voice of my shadow that always whispers “failure,” harps louder now.

I have new canvasses and the longing to paint, but a terror to pick up the brush. Everything I make might be ugly. Words stalk me at indecent times when I have no notebook, no means of record. But when I sit at the computer with an hour of quiet stolen from other tasks, nothing comes except mouthfuls of hesitation.

Natalie Goldberg says it doesn’t matter. She says “One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive.” I try to come back to this. To simply write. To get out my paints and follow the movement of my hand. To trust that I will once again feel the divine moving through the branches of my soul like wind.

But like the flock of startled crows I saw today, whirling black specks against the grey sky above the rooftops, I become easily scattered. I know this is to be expected in this time: this collision of moments when we are making choices about our future happen now. Buying this house isn’t just buying a house for me. It’s about fulfilling a dream that has been a part of my mental geography for as long as I can remember.

I am like that. When I loose myself in my thoughts, I am lost in a specific geography. I have always been someone who has felt closely tied to the land. I have worked on farms, milked cows, grown gardens, and I know that these things provide a rich soil for my creative life. I long to put down roots in this place. Keep bees, learn to ride horses.

So I am here in the midst of making something I’ve always imagined a reality, and it feels awkward like I’m trying to help hatch a baby bird. They are so fragile and ugly and gawky when they first peck their way out of the shell they’ve lived inside for weeks. Then they just sit there in the nest, all beak, squawking.

It’s cold out. The mud is frozen solid and our apartment is too small. I can’t help squawking, doubting that flight will ever be possible. The pessimist in me chokes at the stir-crazy feeling I know I’ll have we finally close the deal after the new year and start to rip down walls. It will take months of effort before anything resembles anything I imagine. This process should be familiar. It is the one I face every day when I come to the blank screen or the empty canvass and struggle with a mess of words or lines. I should know. The good stuff only happens when I’m patient.

You'd better watch out, you'd better not cry...

'Cause I was there today.

The antedote to all my idyllic posts

Tonight I can't help wishing I had hired cleaning help, a clawfoot bathtub, a bar of chocolate, and a nice glass of merlot. Instead... when the bath drains the toilet makes gurgling noises. We ran out of toilet paper ENTIRELY. Of course I was ON the toilet when I discoverd this. And our house needs so badly Bean managed to eat an entire second dinner off the floor under the table.

***I wanted to write all sorts of brilliant and reflective things in response to hanging out for four days straight with my friend Willow whom I’ve known since fifth grade. But instead I spent the night single parenting and ate cereal for dinner, so all insight has been shelved for some later date.

I have no idea other mamas pull it off with any grace at all. After just a couple of hours every surface in our tiny apartment is strewn with toys, or objects being rendered as toys (think spatulas, bowls). Actually that is an understatment. What I mean is our apartment went suddenly from livable to kick-it-when-you-try to-walk messy. The laundry is in a heap at the top of the basement stairs, and every counter top is covered with dishes.

In an effort to turn things around I washed dishes for so long my fingers pruned. In the past I’ve tried to be very zen about having to wash dishes by hand: it brings you into the moment, yada, yada, yada. But it doesn’t really. It’s less sanitary and a total waste of time that could otherwise be spent reading Bean a book. You can bet we already have a dishwasher picked out for our new kitchen.

The real trouble though is that DH has the stomach flu, and truly there is nothing nastier. It is so hard for me to take care of someone who is vomiting. I think of all the times as a kid when my mom held the bowl for me to puke into, and I shudder with awe, realizing the lengths mothers go. I suppose I would do the same for Bean in a heartbeat—but I can’t quite feel the same empathy for DH.

I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for myself as he lay on the couch with a low-grade fever clutching his stomach, and I went through the motions of making dinner for Bean, feeding him, cleaning up. To my credit I did manage this more or less to myself, and instead of turning into a total harpie, I proffered ice water and a cool hand. All the while Bean was trying to stand hands free, narrating his progress with a series of high-pitched shreeks, and I kept wondering hell she does it with two little rascals.

There were no catastrophes, really, other than a solid stone rolling pin landing on my foot (clean up from gingerbread cookies I made earlier), but I couldn’t help feeling like I was flailing about in a rising tide. After such lovely days with an extra set of hands, and lots of laughter, it felt really off tonight to be down to just me and Bean. Now everyone’s tucked into bed and for some reason, though it’s earlier than I usually call it quits, I’m totally exhausted.