(no subject)
May 29, 2009
Dear Marie,
You are 28 months old, and you love: drawing with markers,
other people's toothbrushes, silly animal videos on youtube, going through our friends' diaper bags, laboriously positioning your stepstool so that you can "go on the big potty",
opening the fridge all by yourself, tending the garden,
helping with the recycling, garage sailing, telling me to open and close the car windows until I finally roll them all up and turn on the AC, Liam,
trying on your friends' diapers, puzzles, books that are relevant to your life, running shrieking up and down the sidewalk with Sylvia,
being hung upside-down, dancing (esp. to live music), chocolate & pineapples & organic apples & yogurt-covered raisins & all of the blueberries out of my bowl of oatmeal, postage stamps (forbidden stickers), helping clean the windows, the garden hose and subsequent backyard mud hole,
the library, wearing Mama's high heels (the strange impractical relics of my past), fellowship (the UUFT where Mama works in the nursery on Sundays), watching your father pee, & milk, a fierce love of nursing that will sometimes not be redirected for anything. Anything!
You are 28 months old, and you detest: having your teeth brushed, being rushed as you take 6 minutes to walk three feet from the car to the house at dusk while mosquitoes eat us alive, having shampoo rinsed from your hair, leaving Grace's house, when Papa starts down the driveway before ALL of your carseat buckles are buckled, the moments before our friends arrive for playgroup when your play horror-film footage in your head of other toddlers playing with your toys, uncooked spinach, when I show you a Mary Poppins song instead of a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song (Dick Van Dyke is Dick Van Dyke, honey.), taking naps, waking up from naps (you cranky cranky thing), when your popsicle falls apart, being verbally or physically manipulated to go down the slide, running out of bananas, waking up in the night without my boob in your mouth, being made to go pee before we leave for hours into a land of no bathrooms, the suggestion that you might pee outside, leaving the park because you have to poop, when packages arrive and they are not for you, when Papa enters your space bubble without permission, being helped when you DO NOT WANT HELP (apparently I am supposed to watch appreciatively as your head becomes lodged in the sleeve of your shirt and you shriek), wearing something that I have just sewed for you, throwing yourself into a pile of laundry that I'm folding only to discover that it isn't piping hot.
We don't take pictures of these moments because it is all chaos.
& Here are some words I hope you never pronounce correctly: babana, baffume (bathroom), bakset (basket), pork (fork. You have no idea what pork is), veggie-terry (vegetarian), mooster (booster), blinkin (Lincoln), lellow, missala (Melissa), helifopter.
I love you. And not just because you are so excited about your own bed that you sleep in it all by yourself across the room from Mama and Papa and don't wake up until morning when you climb into bed with me to nurse. But it helps.
Mama