Why eat off your tray while sitting in your high chair when you can eat off your tray while standing on the arm of your high chair? You’ll scream your lungs out if someone tells you not to, too.

It’s funny, but almost as soon as I entertained the notion of babysitting this coming year, the opportunity evaporated; and I don’t think I’ll seek out others. If it happens, it happens, and it feels like perhaps life is pointing elsewhere instead. Really, I operate within this ephemeral combinaton of action and acceptance. Chasing the most vital dreams, opening myself to the unexpected, trying to embrace where I’m actually at. Can I confess that it feels harder, now, to be mothering an adventurous 14-month-old, than it felt when Albus and Apple-Apple were similarly aged, and I was still in my twenties? I gave myself over to that role wholly; but am experiencing more ambivalence now, itching to re-emerge into my own individual self; but don’t want to cheat this sweet young man of whatever intensity of mothering he needs.

Interesting times.

The laundry calls. As do the “little kids.”