If I hadn’t been present at Jasper’s birth, and very personally involved in that birth, I’d swear that there was some kind of ‘separated at’ thing going on here:

I’m not even going to remark on the ears. Those ears. THOSE EARS.

We would start calling him Happy, after the Rankin/Bass character that he so resembles, except that he’s not, strictly speaking, always happy, and also we just prefer calling him names like Jibby, Jibbler, Jazzburger, Joey, and, when we’re feeling edgy, Jasser Arafat. So. An opportunity for a new nickname, but one that we, sadly, cannot take.

What I would like to take: that whole part of the story, from ‘Rudolph’s Shiny New Year,’ wherein Father Time explains that it is possible to stop the clock and to freeze time and have it be perpetually now. Because although I am so, so excited for the upcoming year, and although I love watching my children get bigger and older and faster, it all just feels, sometimes, like it’s happening so fast. I wouldn’t mind stopping time for a little while. A day or two or twenty or more, just so that I could stop, and enjoy it all for a little longer.

Of course, if it means banishing an infant to the Archipelago Of Last Years, I can probably live without this. Probably.

When I said, as I did the other day, that I cannot imagine telling the story of my family’s life or narrating my experience of motherhood without the use of photographs and video, this is the kind of thing that I had in mind. This is what I can’t imagine doing without. Videos like the one above tell you more about Jasper, more efficiently, in images than I could ever tell you in words. I think.

I mean, I could describe to you, in words, his popped collar and his deck shoes and the fact that he reminds one, a little, of Kevin Bacon in Footloose, if Kevin Bacon were three feet tall and Footloose had been filmed in the ladies’ restroom at an East Side Marios. I could find some pretty good adjectives to describe his peculiar little hip-shimmy and his clever little foot shuffle, and I could probably describe, decently well, the way that music – ‘Say It Isn’t So,’ by Hall & Oates, which, really, is a diabolically ear-wormy little tune – bounced off the bathroom tiles and echoed throughout the room and made me feel as though I was hiding out from my junior prom, if I’d attended my junior prom with a dancing three year old in tow.

But I don’t need to describe those things to you, because you can just click on that little arrow in the video above, and see and hear it all for yourself. Note, too, that this video serves to demonstrate – in a manner than I know I could not accomplish in mere words – that I am, in fact, the sort of mother who videotapes her children dancing in public restrooms.

My mom sent me this email yesterday, for my birthday. It caused me to miss her, badly, and also to spend a solid twenty minutes ruminating on the singular unattractiveness of my toes.

Hi Sweetheart

Today, I woke up thinking about you and, as always, remembering this day as it happened 41 years ago.  It seems like yesterday that I was counting your toes twice because they were so long that I thought you had more than ten.  I love you and will be eternally grateful for the wonderful gift of you.

Happy, happy birthday.

xxxooo

Mom

This reminder about my prehensile toes unnerved me, and so I counted them again, just to make sure. Then I checked my numbers against Jasper’s feet, and was reassured: I only have ten toes. Jasper, however, seems to have twelve, and, apparently, Sasquatch DNA.

Which means, I suppose, that I will one day send a similar email to him:

It seems like yesterday that I was checking you for fur, because your feet were so gigantic that I figured you must carry the genetic code from a long lost family line of Sasquatches or Yeti.  I love you and will be eternally grateful for the wonderful gift of you. Please don’t feel badly about your feet.

Happy, happy birthday.

Love,

Mom

The family that worries about their feet together, stays together. Or something.

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.” – Henry Miller

Unless you’re a small child, in which case all growth is a leap into the sunshine, a spontaneous and unpremeditated act without benefit of experience that is undertaken with the full and unwavering knowledge that wherever you leap, there are arms waiting to catch you.

It’s Jasper birthday today. He’s three. Don’t tell him that, though.

Me, this morning: “Is it your birthday today, Jasper? Happy birthday!”

Jasper: “No, Mommy, not my birthday. YOUR birthday.” He’s close: my birthday is just a couple of days away. Still, you’d think that the child would be kinda pleased about having a birthday. Birthdays are awesome when you’re a kid. Less so once you’re a grown-up, but still.

Me: “No, baby. It’s YOUR birthday. You’re three! Happy birthday!”

Jasper: “NO, Mommy, I NOT. IS NOT MY BIRTHDAY.”

Okay, then.

I’m fine with it if he wants to deny his birthday. I want to deny his birthday. I would be perfectly happy if he stayed 35 and a half months old indefinitely. I’m still in love with his babyhood, with his fat-thighed, round-bottomed, chubby-cheeked toddlerness, with his adorable littleness, with his ineffable small. I’m not ready to say goodbye to the Jasper who is my baby, even though, yes, I know that he will in all the important respects always be my baby, because I am still clinging to him as my actual baby, my neck-clinging, Mommy-needing, tucked-against-my-chest-always-always baby.

This has much to do with the fact that we will not have more babies – there’s a whole other set of thoughts to unpack – and I know that it is selfish and I know that I should just celebrate the journey that is his life and rejoice at the him who he is at every moment, the past Jaspers and the now Jaspers and the future Jaspers, but still, but still.

I want to hold him here, and keep him. Just like this, just like now.

As long as I possibly can. Until I no longer can. Which might be now, which probably is now, because it’s every moment, because with every moment I lose something of the old Jasper, and even though the new is wonderful, is amazing, still, still, I mourn and cling to the old.

Is that so wrong?

… they keep their boots on.

… he rested.

… that kid was fast as lightning / in fact it was a little bit fright’ning / because he was packing a fully loaded pull-up, although, really, it could be argued that that’s the mark of a true ninja: the ability to deliver a flying roundhouse kick even when your center of gravity is thrown off balance by freshly shitted pants.

(Best appreciated with musical accompaniment.)

(Further to yesterday’s reflections on the divine…) If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better state this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. — Aristotle, Metaphysics (XII.1072b24) (emphasis mine)

(Also…) Philosophy, is the talk on a cereal box / Religion, is a smile on a dog / I’m not aware of too many things / I know what I know if you know what I mean (do ya?) — Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians, “What I Am.”

(Photographosophy, I’m Not Aware Of Too Many Things Edition.)

No, Emilia is not dressed as Jesus. That would have been pretty funny, but I still have enough of a hangover from years of being raised Catholic that I would worry about being smited (smote?) (smitten?) for impiety. She was a cave girl, via Jasper’s Bam Bam costume, which he rejected in favor of last year’s ill-fitting fireman costume accessorized with his sister’s bright pink ankle socks, a choice that we didn’t understand until we witnessed him devote two-thirds of his trick-or-treating schedule to systematic jack-o-lantern safety inspections at every house in the neighborhood (“ooh, Mommy,” he’d say, kneeling by a particularly brightly lit gourd, “PUMPKIN. TOO HOT.” Then he’d try to blow it out.) Clearly, he had a mission, and so he wasn’t so much donning a costume as he was putting on a uniform and pursuing a vocation. We never did figure out the pink socks, but I think that that choice is best left unexamined.

Anyway, yeah: Emilia went as a cave girl, but ended up looking more like a very tiny Jesus with blunt-cut bangs and a leftover steak bone shoved in his robe belt, which is, I imagine, exactly how Jesus rolled. But you didn’t hear that from me.

/looks anxiously at the heavens.

(I dressed up as the ladies of the YummyMummyClub dressed up as me, because, you know, what’s not awesome about meta-costuming?)

(I also dressed up liked this for the Blissdom Canada costume/karaoke party. I’m thinking about adopting it as my regular look, because, seriously, I think that it’s just ME.)