Stuff from February, 2016
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2016.
Warm in the Store
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2016.
When Mykala was just three months pregnant with Ess, one of the challenges I anticipated was a sick kid at home. How difficult it must be to watch your little one run down by aches, a runny nose, a tight cough and tired lungs. It has been about two years since that thought, and through a combination of luck and hand sanitizer, our family has threaded the contagion needle through birthday parties, sick relatives, and an entire cold and flu season. Then there was last week. Ess was down, down, down. The primary prodrome was her tendency to sit on our laps for extended periods, paging through a book, resting her head on our encircling arms. Kid must be fighting something, we guessed.
“No!” Essie said with an upward lilt in her inflection, meaning she was saying her word for snow, that she saw it falling and wanted to tell me the huge flakes were settling on her face, transforming into tiny little water droplets as the warmth of her skin transformed them.
“Dada, hi!” and then a pause. “Dada… hi.” Essie had just turned to see what I was doing at the edge of the bedroom, and while she has been uttering expressive morphemes in response to me and my actions for a while, her greeting marked one of her first definite sentences at me. The thrill! Burbles and gurgles of infancy have so quickly become expressions of thought and opinion and frustration and love.
I’ve had this file, 20111229_fa_02.mp3 sitting on my desktop for a while. It’s Terry Gross’s final interview with Maurice Sendak, on the occasion of the publication of his book, Bumble-Ardy. I knew that, in 2011, it made me think when I heard it, but I had forgotten what it was: a creative human, successful in his time, looking back with his hand lightly brushing old scars and lamenting the accretion of new cuts as he watches, unable to affect the marching-on of time:
I took this before we went in to the RV show at the Minnneaplis Convention Center. Ess is holding what she calls ‘mama’: a hot pink Under Armour shirt of Mykala’s that Ess, out of the blue, began to use as a security blanket of sorts. In fact, she’s holding it as she sleeps right now. Anyway, we needed a way for Ess to be able to hold the blanket as we strolled around; Mykala thought to tuck it into the straps.
Ess loves to put food out for George and watch him eat. It has taken a while to get her to leave him enough space to eat; before, she was scaring him away trying to show him so much affection while he was trying to eat. They’re figuring it out.
This book has six pages—it’s one of those indestructible, untearable books, which is a good thing considering that Ess carries it with her wherever she goes. It came from Nannie’s, and Ess currently has it out on loan. It goes in the car with her, she plays with it during the day, she shares it with George, but she can’t take it in the store anymore because she isn’t great at holding on to it for long periods of time and the last thing we want is to lose it.
Dancing and eating. Eating and dancing.
Reading Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia.