Our little family took a trip last weekend. Essie’s longest road trip thus far, to Wisconsin Dells, to the Kalahari Resort. Mykala had dance competition obligations, but since the hotel was connected to the convention center where the competition was held, we got to see her on each one of her breaks, and got to see Ess go to a waterpark for the first time. We expected a reaction from our nearly-two-year-old when she got in a giant kiddie pool full of swings, a miniature lazy river, giraffe sculptures, baby elephants squirting water out of their trunks, and colorful slides with water running down them. Ok, we thought, this could go one of two ways: she’s going to let loose and splash everywhere, analogous to her at home when she goes “run run run!” and then just runs around. Or, in contrast, she’d get really chatty, like she does when she’s sitting on the front of Mykala’s bike and watching the world go by. Hidden option C: Ess did neither of the things we guessed, instead going into some kind of Zen state of total focus and relaxation. Just staring out, happy but not gleeful, calm but not sad. We were taken aback. Then, Mykala took her down a slide. Did she like it? “MOEMOE” she said, and when I picked her up “NO-MAMA”, her favorite way to specify whom she would rather do the thing at hand with her. I think Ess had fun.
We slept Ess in the same room as us, but the pull-out couch squeaked every single time we moved. It was a series of naps strung together, which is what they say the first night you sleep somewhere new (something about how only half your brain sleeps at a time the first night in a new place). However, Ess made it all the way through the night, probably owing to her extremely short nap in the car on the way. We’re thinking Ess could come with us to Chicago sometime soon. This is exciting.
So, anyway, we got home and now it is time for Essie’s second birthday party very soon. We left to find a patio umbrella recently, and I got to sit in the back of the car next to Ess on the way home. She sometimes demands this, and there’s nothing like being greeted by an excited toddler when you get into the back of a car. Typically, she quickly goes back to what she was doing before I got in the car, and I get to see up close the way her mind is turning over and fitting and re-fitting pieces of the world together. She’s combining thoughts and experiences and colors and numbers and injecting the mix with her own creativity. She thinks sometimes we should call her “wiggleworm” so we do. She thinks every stuffed animal needs a nap and/or a potty-break diaper-change, so we tuck-in and ‘clean-up’. She thinks pats are very important to help you fall asleep, so we pat. She thinks her mother goose should have a salad of Ikea stuffed vegetables, so we put a bib on her and lay out a meal. And when you are doing something right or just-so or aren’t coming quickly enough to see something, Ess can get pretty upset. Then you find yourself feeling exasperated, like, I’m trying her kiddo, give me a second! And then she tucks herself in and you say ‘you can close your eyes’ and you watch as she squints them shut, still learning how to get them to hold closed, and she holds them this way for a moment or two until she cries ‘wake up!’ and she sits bolt upright and runs off to do more stuff.
Just finished giving Ess a bath and putting her to bed. Her adorable, beautiful pink cheeks were sweating a bit at the playground this evening, as it is in the 80s and quite humid. Not much wind. She ran and ran and we walked behind her, steering her out of harms way and keeping her from the things for which she wasn’t yet ready. Now, the sun is setting on this summer evening, one of the longest of the year, and I sit out on the patio, watching the sun set, next to our tomato plants, herbs, and kale. Everything around me is growing and alive and I love moments like this because I can actually convince myself that all the trouble of maintaining all of our stuff and our finances, all that stuff I trouble myself with isn’t what is important. This perspective above the forest doesn’t last long until I fall back to be blinded by the trees. Weekdays seem to be more foresty, weekends more elevated.
It’s a tightly knit community in the dental world, so it wasn’t long until I found out that one of the orthodontists to whom I refer, the one who treated my bite when I was younger, one of those adults who was present, though just in the periphery, of both my adolescence and early adulthood, suddenly passed away. He was 59. Pancreatic cancer. And these things come in clumps: Mykala just buried her grandma Irene. And I loaded up Daring Fireball and right there, pancreatic cancer took someone’s wife. She was 36.
I don’t know, I just can’t make any sense of any of it. Free will. Do we have it? Do we exist in any way after we die? What am I doing here? Religion just utterly falls down for me with these questions. Everyone standing around at Irene’s funerary service saying she’s in a better place. It’s too simple, too sure, too clear-cut, too… dismissive of this huge, impossible mystery. What if it is Occam’s Razor? That the simplest explanation… that all my memories, all my life, all my hopes, everything that makes me me, disappears when I stop breathing, what if that’s it? Then what the hell am I doing each day? Paying back loans? So I can do what? A blink-and-you-miss-it existence. I see those folks, two generations behind me, feeling like their years are dragging on, ready to be done. To me, life feels like it stretches ahead so far, AND it feels like nothing at all. It is nothing at all. Billions of years of the universe and then another little blip of a human. Sitting there, hopelessly occupied by minutia, distracted by entertainment, troubling with trifles, while the galaxy expands, the stars turn, and the indifferent universe carries on.
We were out on a family bike ride, and I was explaining to Ess that when the three of us are together, no matter where that is, that is home. Ess listened closely, and now whenever she sees the bikes in the garage, she says “home.” I didn’t mean to teach her the wrong word for going on a bike ride, but it is too sweet for me to correct.
Ever since seeing (and maybe slightly before this) hours-old Canadian geese goslings on a walk, Ess has associated walking with bird watching. She calls all birds “ducks” which we’re working on, but in the meantime, there’s no surer way to settle her down than to talk about a walk in her near future, and seeing ducks. When we’re walking out to the pond, there’s a certain point, about a quarter mile away, that Ess gets really excited anticipating ducks. The other day she goes DUCKS! YAHHHH-DUCKS while sticking her little fists straight out from herself in rigid-body excitement. On the way home, we always make sure to stop and see a stone lawn-decoration duck family Ess calls the tone ducks.
Ess spends her last ten minutes with us precisely the same every night, and the last thing I get to do is carry her to her room, lie her down in her crib, and say “I love you. Goodnight.” Most times she waves and says “buh bye” to mama on her way to her room, sometimes she’s a little weepy, sometimes she’s so tired I hold her head up with my shoulder as I carry her. But the other night, we had changed one little thing to make way for the roofers: we removed a glass-covered picture from the wall so it wouldn’t break during roofing. When I put Ess down, she immediately said “moon moon” and pointed to the empty spot on the wall. Her attention to detail is remarkable. I have no idea if all toddlers are like this, but Ess likes things to happen a certain way and lets us know. I scampered to the desk in the hall, got her moon picture, and hung it back up.
Ess doesn’t have her T sounds yet, so when she says “pink water bottle” it comes out “pink wahgle boggle.” She loves that water bottle, so we get to hear this a lot.
They’re re-roofing the house today. Ess was transfixed by the trucks coming and going and cranes lifting. She stood at the window and watched, the stillest I’ve seen her be while awake and healthy. “Beep beep” went the truck, “bach-up, bach-up” went Ess, shuffling backwards away from the window.
Mother’s Day: today, the last thing Ess did before we took her upstairs for bed was carefully remove each Winnie the Pooh character from her wooden puzzle and tuck them in under the couch pillow. Pooh, Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Tigger, Rabbit, Owl.