For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is – to live dangerously. - Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science, section 283.)

(From the Photographosophy files.)

… the kids will just end up in the backyard in diapers and bathing suits, faces unwashed, playing with sundry bits of Goodwill-bound baby equipment and also a skateboard.

We knew that Jasper was going to be Jasper for months before he was born. From the moment that we found out that he – hitherto referred to as Sprout – was going to be a he, he was Jasper. Jasper. It was a name for eccentric old English uncles, for suspender-wearing artists pottering about in skylit attics, for crusty old men with beards restoring boats and smoking pipes on pebble-strewn beaches, for boys in knee-britches chasing rabbits in heather fields. Jasper. I loved the name. I knew that it was his name with as much certainty as I’ve ever known anything.

My mother hated it. Oh, honey, she said when I told her. Oh, honey, really?

The lesson, don’t tell anyone what you’re planning on naming your child, hadn’t sunk in from my first pregnancy, when she pulled an oh honey no on Emilia’s original name, Theo. Really, Mom. And it’s not up for discussion.

But what will you call him for short?

– What does that matter, Mom? We’ll call him what we call him. Which, I thought, was a perfectly sensible response. After all, we couldn’t have guessed in advance that we’d refer to Emilia as Budge (my mother calls her Milly, Jasper calls her Maya, but she is and will always be, to her father and me, Budge or Budgie. And no, we do not know why. She just is Budge.) How could we know what we would call Jasper? That would sort itself out after he arrived.

Or not. (continue reading…)

Ain't no heart tug like a sick baby heart tug.

There comes a moment in every parent’s life when all the contrary forces of the universe collide – you are scheduled to make an appearance on a television program, say, and are rushing for the train to make it to the studio, and you haven’t yet had coffee because getting the kids to school and daycare was a frantic exercise in wrangling rabid badgers and just as you’re about to hop on that train your phone rings and it’s the daycare and your toddler has spiked a scary fever and is very sick and you need to come get him NOW and so you reverse course and hop in a cab and abandon all other obligations in favor of getting to your baby IMMEDIATELY – and, although you experience that collision as stressful, you kind of just roll with it, because you have to, and you know it, and you’re okay with it, and that, you realize, is maybe what being a grown up is all about.

Maybe. Ask me again after I’ve gone another day without coffee.

He blows kisses, and my heart, it stops.

Jasper is two years old today. Two years old. It doesn’t seem possible that so much time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that so little time has passed since he was born. It doesn’t seem possible that this baby…

… this sweet-faced cherub with the heart-crunchingly dimpled cheeks… (continue reading…)

It’s wonderful, of course, that Jasper’s daycare goes to the trouble of helping the toddlers make personalized Mother’s Day gifts, but one wonders whether they aren’t also trying to send us a vaguely threatening message. Or maybe it’s a cry for help. I’m not sure:

Something along the lines of: every day after you drop off your child he turns into a huge arachno-lepidoptera and consumes the ECE assistants. Lo their bloody fingerprints! Or perhaps it’s a warning: if you do not potty train your child within the next month we will turn him into a gigantic octofly and your bloody fingerprints will be the mark of his wrath! Or something. I’m bad at coded messages.

Seriously, though: what is that?

(Hey, buddy. Why don’t you go ask your mom for some chocolate? Or cookies. Yeah. Go get some cookies, would you? Don’t make me roar. You don’t want me to roar.)

Jasper is much more blase about scary things than am I. There’s a lesson for me there, I think.

Whatever that lesson is, however, it is a lesson that I am not up for thinking about right now. Maybe tomorrow.