Jasper’s getting so big. There are moments when – in just the right light, with just the right angle – he looks like a little boy. Which he is, I suppose. He’s almost seventeen months old. He’s a toddler. He’s still not saying much, but he is a force of energy who spends every waking minute – and even some unwoken minutes – asserting his presence in the world. He runs, he jumps, he shrieks and hoots and giggles and siezes each and every single day by the cookies.

And then he stops for a moment and pauses and his boyish stillness takes my breath away.

I still haven’t cut his hair. Oh, I’ve snipped at his bangs a little – I did this at my Dad’s house, actually, and I let the wisps of baby hair fall into the cedar bushes surrounding his front steps, where, I imagined, they’d bind, however intangibly, this moment in Jasper’s babyhood to my father’s history – but I’ve otherwise let his fluffy yellow curls just tumble into a baby-mullet, the better to preserve his babyness, the babyness that I’m so loathe to let go of.

(’Of which I’m so loathe to let go’? Lack of sleep is interfering with my grammar. It is also interfering with my ability to think clearly, which is why this post is turning into a sort of stream-of-consciousness revery.)

(On my list of books to re-read, if I ever regain clarity of mind and a spare half-hour in any given day: Rousseau’s Reveries Of A Solitary Walker. I reappropriated the copy that I’d given my Dad. I’ve not yet flipped through to see if he made notes in the margins, which was his habit, as it is mine. I hope, fervently, that he did, although I have moments of hoping, equally as fervently, that he did not, so that I might revisit that book without being haunted.)

(I’ve asked before whether it is odd to wish both to be haunted and to not be haunted. I still have not settled upon an answer.)

(Did I mention? STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Also, HAVE NOT SLEPT.)

Today is one of those days – and don’t such days always seem to occur in autumn? – when times seems to be passing both too quickly and too slowly. The leaves on the trees are turning and dying and falling and for every moment that seems to take an eternity – a leaf floats to the ground while we wait for the school bell to ring – there’s another – that same leaf is snatched up by a wee bemittened hand and stuffed in a pocket – that passes in an instant.

All of these moments – the still moments, the rushed moments, the moments that have passed and those that have yet to pass – are precious. I’m taking time to remember that. I’m taking time to practice being still, myself. I’m taking time.

I hope that there’s a lot of it left.

So I was feeling unwell – which is to say, really, really vomitously sick – this weekend, and at some point I wandered off to have a nap, leaving the husband and the girl to the task of tidying the living room. ‘Please put away your toys,’ I said to Emilia as I dragged my pathetic self out of the room, tripping over the random dismembered doll parts and stray bits of crafting materials that she keeps in untidy piles throughout the house, ‘otherwise I’ll have to ask Daddy to throw it all away.’

‘It’s my ART,’ she replied, crossing her arms over her chest.

‘Fine. Put away your ART.’

‘I’m using it for DECORATING.’

‘Fine, okay. Just decorate NEATLY, like, by putting it on the shelves or something.’ If I’d had a cold compress, I’d have pressed it against my forehead dramatically as I left the room in a sick huff, but I didn’t, so I just lurched a little as I headed for the stairs.The vacuum cleaner roared to life behind me, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t wish that maybe, just maybe, some of Emilia’s ‘art’ got sucked into the Dyson’s Vortex of Nothingness.

As it happened, that wish did not get fulfilled. Indeed, it seems that Emilia’s ‘art’ took on a life of its own while I was napping and took it upon itself to arrange itself as – as Emilia likes to describe it – ‘decoration:’

I swear on all that is holy that the above-photographed arrangement is exactly as I found it when I wandered downstairs after my nap. When asked about it, Emilia will only say, ‘that’s a dolly. She’s ART.’ She adds that the teeth ‘are Jasper’s,’ and that the book ‘is for you to read, Mommy.’ I can only hope and assume that ‘the book’ to which she refers is the Seuss, and that she doesn’t intend for me to brush up on my post-structuralism while contemplating the decapitated dolly with its bottle-figure, which I assume is some sort of commentary on body image in an age of environmental degradation, and not a Barthesian statement on the figurative absurd of the body imagined as plaything in childhood.

The teeth, I’m hoping, have nothing to do with anything, and were just randomly deposited there by a baby tired of novelty pacifiers. Otherwise the scene takes on a disturbing Blair Witch-ian subtext that I just haven’t the fortitude to decode.

I’m still taking very seriously the possibility that I never did wake up, and that the installation on my living room side-table is some sort of virally-induced nightmare. In which case, Freud has some explaining to do, but still. Nightmares are one thing, parenting a three-year old Cindy Sherman is quite another. I think.

(I think that her installation-slash-decapitated-baby-on-plastic sculpture needs a title. Any suggestions?)