20
Jun
After four days of being confined to bed, feeling as though one’s lungs are collapsing under the weight of a thousand stepdancing leprechauns who, when their legs get tired, relax by stabbing one in the ears with the pointy end of the rainbow, it’s hard to avoid feeling glumly reflective and moodily obsessive about, say, what many things have I failed to accomplished, lo these long years? and what will be my legacy, whensoever I am dragged from this bed, a bedraggled, lung-crushed heap? and shouldn’t I have a better mattress at this stage in my life? and why are there cracker crumbs in this bed? and why won’t anyone bring me tea in a nice china pot, with biscuits and sugar lumps on the side?
I grow old, I grow old.
I am consoled, only, with this, the knowledge that my children may someday find their place in the firmament that is Awkward Family Photos:
Something that I learned today: if you collapse into a fit of sobbing while you have a severe upper respiratory infection, you might start choking, which is uncomfortable, and also frightens cats.
Still, reading this...
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I'm sick. Really sick. The kind of sick where your head aches so much that you can't lift your head off the pillow and even though the toddler is bouncing on your chest with...
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10
Jun
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.
Parenting Tip Of The Week: if you feel an overwhelming need to sneak into your four year old's bedroom in the night for a soul-rejuvenating snuggle, consider not doing it on a night in...
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7
Jun
A few weeks after I gave birth to Jasper, I wrote this:
I do it every night now. When it’s dark, when the rest of the house is asleep, or almost, I untangle my tiny newborn...
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Emilia is not a morning person. I am also not a morning person, but as an adult I recognize that I don’t have any choice in the matter of whether or not I get out of bed, and also I have coffee. Emilia is a child, and she doesn’t drink coffee, so she’s oftentimes – and read ‘oftentimes’ as ‘pretty much almost always’ – cranky in the morning. I would be sympathetic about this – as I said, I’m not a morning person myself, so I get it – except that her way of coping with mornings is to whine like a banshee. A sugar-jacked freak-banshee with no off button.
Mommmmeeee! I want toast! But no butter! NO BUTTER MOMMY! NO BUTTER! And don’t make it warm! It’s TOO WARM MOMMMEEEE! IT’S TOO WARRMMMM! OOOOH! WHY DO I NEVER GET TOAST THE WAY I LIKE IT?!?
She whimpers, heartbroken by the lack of unwarm, unbuttered toast in our house. WHYYYY, MOMMY? WHYYYY? I grip the counter and resist tossing the bread in the sink and/or hollering something about starving children in Africa.