Ugh.
It’s my constant companion when out and about. It’s been in our lives since Apple-Apple was an infant; that’s longer than we’ve had our car or our house. I fill it with children, school bags, groceries, library books, cookie crumbs. It goes uphill and down, through rain and snow and sun, and requires nothing more than a jolly stride to operate. Someone took it off of our front porch in broad daylight this evening. It feels like someone’s stolen a part of our family’s history. That sounds silly … but those were our fresh cookie crumbs someone walked off with, and they won’t mean a thing to whoever’s taken it and is hawking it online right about now.Thanks to our friends for their instant offers of stroller loans, especially to one who walked over a stroller less than an hour after we discovered ours was missing. I’m getting a little teary right now.
The Upside to Construction
Weekends the noise stops, and the digging, and the beep-beep-beeping, and the dust settles, and all is quiet at our little corner of urbanity. Time to hang the clothes on the line. Time to get out the wheeled devices. Time to fly.
Buying Club
Friday is now buying club day. I found myself looking forward to it like it was a holiday. This afternoon a group of moms teamed up in the nearby little park, to watch each other’s children and take turns “shopping.” Apple-Apple got to work at the treat table, but the other children stayed at the park and played. I’ve yet to get a really good photo from the club itself, or the loaded stroller. Maybe next time. This is an amazing weekly experience. We’re about to tuck into nitrate-free local hot dogs, a glorious-looking salad, and more steamed asparagus.Streetscape
Imagine, if you will, trying to keep your little fellow in the house with THIS going on mere feet away. Imagine the noise this machine is creating. Imagine beep-beep-beep starting at six in the morning, continuing till after supper. Imagine an aboveground sewer pipe blocking your driveway. Imagine summer, windows open, heat. Imagine having to shout at your children not because you’re in a bad mood, and not occasionally, but because otherwise THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO HEAR YOU. Imagine yourself saying to your husband, “Uh, how soon can I lose my patience with this situation?” “Better not. Not yet.”Deep breathing, deep breathing, cough, cough, cough.
Climb. Stand. Eat.
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.”