In a few hours, it’ll be three years since Ess was born. For the first two years, there was kind of a catching of the breath after each stage: after she began sleeping more reliably, after she stopped needing to be burped, after she could sit through a meal out at a restaurant. Beginning with this birthday, it is a less of a catching of the breath and more this sense of taking a memory (“hope I don’t fall down” whenever she climbed the stairs) or a mis-pronunciation (dooDAHNdaht for banana) and reverently setting it on the shelf, leaving it behind.
Four of us were busily chatting in the kitchen the other day, and Ess came in to tell us all something. We were very engaged talking to one another, and Ess could tell and she started to get this little hitch-stutter-filler in her speech, uncertainly stretching out words, aware that nobody was listening, wondering whether to continue. Essie’s experience lasted a brief moment, but the profound pain I felt in response, my daughter here, talking, no one listening, startled me. Here’s the flip side of that:
Ess loves this shirt so much that we’ve had to explain washing to her because it isn’t clean every single day. It still hasn’t gotten a hole in it, but we’re concerned about the day it does.
I haven’t been yet, but I hear Ess goes for explores with Mykala in the pocket of trees on the trail near our house. She insists on picking up all of the leaves and branches off of the path.
In this picture, she’s wearing her turtle backpack, which she packed with a crew of animals, figures, stuffed vegetables, and other supplies she felt necessary.
Mykala and Ess are a great painting team. I love this exchange:
“Here you go rock, there you go rock, gonna paint you rock. Rock live on paint. Paint live on rock. The rock cannot see you.”
“No? Why?”
“‘Cause the rock is hiding in the paint!”
This is Toonie’s house. Essie’s gesticulations and speech have changed so dramatically in the past six months—I love when she corrects me when I’m not being precise enough or, in this case, when one of us may be imagining something differently than she.
