Sunset
Currently sitting next to Mykala, listening to “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in my headphones, finalizing the video transcoding additions I’ve made to the site. She’s watching a little light television, eating popcorn. Our first round of Christmas decorations is lending a soft light to the living room as candles flicker. George is waiting to eat some popcorn, sitting on the Christmas plaid wool blanket on the footstool. Essie is upstairs, sleeping soundly after an evening of joyfully running around. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow.
Called Mykala today over my lunch hour and the phone picked up, but instead of Mykala, I got: “bahbuhdee BAH… buhdee… Dada. DAHDAH.” My heart felt like it was going to melt.
To translate: Ess has a book that she reads with Nannie about hedgehogs, and they go to the playground. On one page the hedgehogs go swinging, they go back and forth. Nannie rocks Essie back and forth for this page, and Ess loves it so much that she has begun to do it on her own and when something, anything resembling a pendulum, is swinging, she says BAH buhdee. I’ll try to catch a video of it. Try.
Essie just started her own game of peek-a-boo with me; she is standing behind her highchair and peeking out at me with a huge smile. So so sweet. Some of her current abilities and habits to record right now:
52° and time for a walk with mama.
I don’t know if my beliefs about material possessions are innate or learned, but I do know that I believe one of the best ways to honor the incredible material wealth we have is to meticulously clean and maintain our objects. I suppose I may be trying to back out some profound explanation or justification for the amount of time I spend maintaining the things around me, but either way, I abhor the thought of disorganization or disarray or disrepair.
Here’s a favorite of Essie’s right now: “up-up-up” or sometimes just “pah-pah-pah” is all you hear. She does this while sitting on the ground, possibly looking up at you, with her arms above her head. Hasn’t failed her yet: someone is going to pick her up. She has us well-trained.
A startling, yet simple realization this morning: someday, somewhere, someone is going to be mean, or condescending, or hateful to our Ess. I don’t know, can’t know, can’t guard against when; and the circumstances around such a thing are impossible to anticipate, infinite in variety. And what’s more, apprehension and concern from me are neither beneficial nor constructive. So that will be tucked away. My job, then, is to love Ess into being, to (someday sooner than I want to admit) rest my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eye and tell her I’ll see her at home again, before she travels places I can not follow and takes risks from which I can not protect her.
There is so much I have experienced but haven’t written down since I last posted here. Let’s get to it.
Ess had four shots (one in each limb) and we confirmed at her regularly scheduled doctor visit that she is a healthy young lady.
She took her first step on September 12, but still prefers crawling. She loves the letter “B” and when we change her she finds the two big “B”s on the wall of her room (they spell BABY) and says “buh.” She finds our belly buttons. She honks my nose and I say “hoooonk” like a fog horn. Then she honks her own. She knows “moon” and says “mooOOon” with the ‘n’ on the end dropped to near silence. She’s getting so much better at sitting in her high chair at meals and eating with us. She saw the beginning of the very rare super moon total solar eclipse! The next one will be when she is 19 years old. 19! I can’t even imagine. Ess still loves planes: she never misses the chance to search for and point at one when she hears it in the sky. As such, when she and Mykala came to visit me over lunch at Eagan today, she marveled at the veritable stream of airplanes lifting off from MSP into the air over our blanket in the park. She dances. She hugs the cat and rests her head on him, delighted to catch him before he trots off.
Out for a walk today during one of my all-time favorite times of year and day (summer, at sunset) with Essie in the Björn, when an approaching biker slowed as he approached: “My son is old enough to carry me now, but how I wish he was that age again.” Then, just as quickly as he’d approached, the biker glided off again.
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