Rinse...repeat...
Did you ever have those mornings where you just wanted to loll about in bed, snuzzling your pillow or mate, drinking in the violet predawn morning? I had one of those mornings. But, Baby Jack had a different agenda: FOOD. Clean diaper. A bit of playtime. And now he’s back snoozing in his crib.
And I’m upstairs, writing away about how I want to be downstairs luxuriating in my sheets. But I am grateful…for if it were not for that wee babe, I’d have to use an alarm clock to get up for morning writing. We actually don’t own an alarm clock. Unless you count Baby Jack.
As far as I can tell, babies really have no concept of time...
They don’t obsess about potential futures or wax nostalgic over the past. They don’t decline their needs being met because deep down inside they don’t feel like they deserve it. Everything is so immediate and pure. Their needs are simple: Sleep, Eat, Comfort, Play. Rinse, repeat as needed. And when they are in any one of those zones, the rest is immaterial. What happens to us? How do we go from being so in the Now, to giving up the present in favor of revisiting history or, more often in my case, projecting into a given future?
Babies embrace their pain and express it with wild abandon-in the moment-but they don’t nurse wounds, emotional or physical, or harbor hidden resentments about how it happened, who was responsible or what any of that possibly means about their identity or place in the grand scheme of life. When the pain is gone, they are up and about, playing as though that moment never existed, even though the bump on the head does. Not that they are aware of that bump. We should be more like babies.
My baby was such a good baby yesterday, even without a nap. We hung out with Prickly & Pants over at their house, ostensibly to watch the Daytona 500. We couldn’t stay for the whole thing because Tim had to bring back RVs from the show for work. By five-thirty, I had hunkered down in pajamas and put the non-napping baby down for the night.
The whole time we were over at P&P’s, I think I maybe witnessed one lap? But I ate like there was no tomorrow. Food, both its preparation and partaking, dominated the day, with sausage bread, rotisserized chicken wings, guacamole (spicy!) and spinach-artichoke dip with breadsticks. In case we had not consumed sufficient carbs, calories and fat, we also had the triple-chocolate-chunk brownies I brought and Prickly’s mom’s chocolate chip cookie bars. And I washed all that down with a couple Corona’s (with lime).
I’m caught between writing “if we move” and “when we move” for this next sentence. So I’ll just cut to the chase: Basically, I can tell I’m already getting a bit maudlin over leaving our best couple friends. I know they are, too. When we do that, we’re so not in the Now.
We should just Eat.
Sleep.
Play.
And be comfortable.